Posted by admin on Feb 7, 2008 in
Falls,
Forteana Oh Willie after a stroke you KNEW you ought not be on a roof. Get well soon. This is the second fall and impalement of a man in his 40′s reported in Florida yesterday. Mr Robinson near Tampa, the other near Miami. Click here for the other guys story.
Man Impaled On Fence Was ‘Just Trying To Help Out’
www2.tbo.com | By Chris Echegaray | February 6, 2008
TAMPA – Willie Robinson – the man who had his left leg impaled after falling on a spiked fence – wasn’t supposed to be on his cousin’s roof.
He’d had a stroke years ago that hampered his right leg, he said. But Robinson offered to help around the house because he had been living there after he lost his apartment.
A misstep caused him to stumble, slip and fall, the 46-year-old said from his hospital bed at Tampa General Hospital on Wednesday.
“I put my foot down and it happened so fast,” Robinson said. “I was off the roof and on the pole. Every time I moved blood came out.”
Robinson was painting his cousin’s house. He had finished one side and was going to do the other. He slipped on the paint and fell, then was impaled on a fence.
The accident occurred just before 6 p.m. Jan. 31 at 3101 E McBerry St.
When paramedics arrived, they saw Robinson straddling the fence. They soon realized 6 inches of metal was lodged in his leg.
A week later, Robinson is still recovering. He said doctors are making sure the wound doesn’t get infected. He’ll need physical therapy.
“It’s still sore,” he said.
Paramedics who treated Robinson during the accident were at the hospital. Tampa Fire Rescue Lt. Natalie Brown said it’s a rare occurrence when a person falls from a roof, gets impaled and lives. The paramedics gave a card with a pin of an angel to Robinson.
“You must’ve had an angel by your side when you fell,” Brown said.
Once they saw the injury, Eric Stokes, a Tampa Fire Rescue paramedic, cut through the chain-link fence while paramedic Dennis Ponce sawed through the pole lodged in Robinson’s leg.
Ponce said it took him five to eight minutes to saw through the fence.
“I didn’t think he’d be able to tolerate me cutting the pole,” he said. “I was halfway through and he was not complaining.”
Robinson, a father of five, moved in to his cousin’s house about three years ago after he lost his job. He said he worked in construction cleanup and he’s now self-employed. Robinson said he had a stroke nearly 10 years ago and should’ve known better than to be on a roof.
“I was just trying to help out,” he said. “That won’t be happening again.”
Posted by admin on Feb 5, 2008 in
Forteana The happy face, smiley face or acid house face seen on Mars has recently been dredged up in the news, a little digging has found the story has been around for some time. Click here for the European Space Agency’s comprehensive article with scads of photos and a map while the link lasts. These photos are from several sources.
Click here for more Martian simulacra on MissFidget.com.
‘Happy face’ crater on Mars
10 April 2006 | www.esa.int
These images, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, show the Galle Crater, an impact crater located on the eastern rim of the Argyre Planitia impact basin on Mars.
The HRSC obtained these images during orbits 445, 2383, 2438, 2460 and 2493 with a ground resolution ranging between 10-20 metres per pixel, depending on location within the image strip.
The images show Crater Galle lying to the east of the Argyre Planitia impact basin and south west of the Wirtz and Helmholtz craters, at 51° South and 329° East.
The images of the 230 km diameter impact crater are mosaics created from five individual HRSC nadir and colour strips, each tens of kilometres wide.
A large stack of layered sediments forms an outcrop in the southern part of the crater. Several parallel gullies, possible evidence for liquid water on the Martian surface, originate at the inner crater walls of the southern rim.
Crater Galle, named after the German astronomer J.G. Galle (1812-1910), is informally known as the ‘happy face’ crater.
The ‘face’ was first pointed out in images taken during NASA’s Viking Orbiter 1 mission.
Its interior shows a surface which is shaped by ‘aeolian’ (wind-caused) activity as seen in numerous dunes and dark dust devil tracks which removed the bright dusty surface coating.
The colour scenes, false-colour and near true-colour, have been derived from three HRSC colour and nadir channels gathered during five overlapping orbits. The perspective views have been calculated from a mosaic of digital terrain models derived from the stereo channels.
The black-and-white high-resolution image mosaic was derived from the nadir channel which provides the highest detail of all channels. The resolution has been decreased for use on the Internet, to around 50 m per pixel.
Posted by admin on Feb 4, 2008 in
fatu·ous·ness 
It’s wonderful to have a sports story where the cheaters DONT win. At this year’s Super Bowl the New York Giants ended the New England Patriots bid for a perfect season by beating them 17-14.
Patriot’s coach Belichick displayed some of the most un-sportsmanlike behavior EVER by walking off the field with the game clock still ticking. It’s not over til it’s over dear Mr. Overpaid Team Leader. How much more fatuous can you be?
The eyes of America were on the sore loser as the February 3 broadcast was the most watched Super Bowl EVER. Only the series finale of M*A*S*H had more viewers. The final episode of M*A*S*H to film as opposed to broadcast, was the time capsule episode where the tears in the eyes of the cast were real, especially when handling a teddy bear and fishing cap.
The Patriots were nailed for cheating earlier this year. There are even allegations that the Patriot’s 2002 defeat of the Eagles in the Super Bowl is suspicious and Senator Arlen Spector is getting involved in the matter.
If one were to use Diane Chambers, (fictional waitress on tv’s CHEERS) laws of football, the game went as planned. In Miss Chambers laws imagine the teams are actually their names. Hence very tall, extra large men (Giants) would surely beat political zealots or (Patriots.)
Posted by admin on Feb 4, 2008 in
Forteana This is one of those articles that makes carnivores cringe and adds yet another profession to the list of jobs I’m glad I don’t have.
Investigators name slaughterhouse illness
February 4, 2008
MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (AP) — Investigators are closer to understanding a mysterious illness reported by pork plant workers in Minnesota and Indiana and now have pinned a name on it, officials said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a report Thursday summarizing the investigation so far that gives the condition a name — progressive inflammatory neuropathy.
Minnesota officials said they were broadening their investigation to thousands of former employees at the Quality Pork Processors Inc. plant in Austin, going back a decade to when a powerful compressed air system was installed to remove brain tissue from pig heads.
Investigators have been trying to determine whether pig brain tissue, sprayed into the air as droplets during removal by the compressed air system, was inhaled by workers and made them sick.
If further investigation proves their theories true, they will have identified a rare, new condition that could shed light on a whole family of poorly understood disorders in which the body’s immune system attacks the nerves or the sheath that surrounds them, the Star Tribune reported.
This “could have far-reaching applications in terms of our understanding of the mechanism of disease,” said Ruth Lynfield, Minnesota’s state epidemiologist, who is heading the investigation here.
Since December, 12 meatpackers in Austin, Minnesota, and two at a plant in Indiana have reported fatigue, numbness and tingling in their arms and legs. A few are severely disabled; others have returned to work.
Indiana health officials have declined to discuss the conditions of the affected workers there or say where they were employed, citing patient privacy laws.
All 14 employees worked near powerful compressed air systems that blow brains out of pig heads at what is known as the head table. Both plants have stopped using the process.
Lynfield said investigators are now looking for anyone who has worked near Quality Pork’s head table since 1997. That’s difficult because the plant employs about 1,200 workers, many of them immigrants, and turnover is high.
“But we feel it’s important to look for prior cases,” she said.
Investigators say they’ve ruled out toxins as a cause, and viruses or bacteria are unlikely because none of the affected workers reported infectious disease symptoms, such as fever, before the onset of their neurological symptoms. That would leave the brain tissue itself.
Experts said the foreign pig tissue may have triggered the workers’ immune system, which then attacked their own neural tissue.
Imaging tests show that many of the affected workers have inflammation in the nerve roots in the bottom half of their spinal cords, said Dr. Daniel Lachance, the Mayo Clinic neurologist who first recognized the cluster of unusual cases.
Experts at the Mayo Clinic and New York’s Columbia University are now trying to devise ways to test pig brain tissue against the immune cells of the sick workers, Lynfield said. It could be months before results are in, she said.
Posted by admin on Feb 3, 2008 in
fatu·ous·ness 
Whoops-bit of a mistake! If you didn’t know, Lolita was a novel about and older man who engages in a sexual relationship with his 14 year old step daughter, actions that are illegal and taboo in the western world. There were several films made based on the novel, the best of which is a b&w one by Kubrick. According to contemporaries dictionaries, Lolita also means: A seductive adolescent girl and a sexually precocious young girl.
See also Woody Allen, the vibrating Harry Potter Broom and the pretty pink stripper pole toy also sold to UK girls and withdrawn from sale after protest. Well, at least the bed wasn’t cheap.
Woolworths drops Lolita bed for girls
Feb 01 2008 | www.itn.co.uk/news/
Woolworths has withdrawn bedroom furniture for young girls with the brand name Lolita after pressure from parents.
They forced the move after spotting the £395 Lolita Midsleeper Combi being advertised on the company’s website.
Lolita, the title of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel about a 12-year-old temptress, has become a byword for a sexually precocious young girl.
A Woolworths spokeswoman said: “Now this has been brought to our attention, the product has been removed from sale with immediate effect.
“We will be talking to the supplier with regard to how the branding came about.”
She said the product was from a company that advertises its products on Woolworths’ website and then delivers them direct to customers.
A protest had been launched on the www.raisingkids.co.uk website which branded the name as being in “unbelievably bad taste”.
Complaints flooded in and the website’s editor Catherine Hanly contacted Woolworths.
She said a press officer later told her the staff running the Woolworths’ website “had no idea about that word”.
The press officer told her: “They’d never heard of the word and in fact, neither had I. I had to go on to Wikipedia to find out the meaning of the word.”
Posted by admin on Feb 1, 2008 in
Fashion La Petite Sirene was the main character in the Wednesday afternoon runway show of the Jean Paul Gaultier couture spring 2008 collection in Paris.
Sea shanties and Edith Piaf blared as the sea theme show rolled on. Always fun.
