Attention, Stupid People! There Are Too Damn Many Of You! Buy Condoms!

Brilliant Doctors In Action, part 11,032

After an investigation, the California Department of Health Services found that on January 13, CHOC surgeons opened the wrong side of a child’s skull during an operation to remove a brain tumor. The agency’s report noted that the doctors involved failed to observe the “time out” before the surgery and failed to mark the operation site on the child’s head.

So, what you're saying is, you can't tell your left from your right? And you're a BRAIN SURGEON?!?

Oh, yes, it goes downhill from here.

The agency concluded that the mistake may have been the result of a doctor moving the operating table in order to make room for an assistant surgeon. This may have caused the operating team to become disoriented. Although the child was under the care of CHOC doctors, the incident occurred at nearby St. Joseph Hospital, where CHOC contracts for additional operating space.

Which means, of course, that the doctor got confused because the table was moved. If you're that easily confused, chief, how did you pass the part of medical school where you OPERATE ON PEOPLE'S FRIGGIN BRAINS?!? Get a real job, as a carwash attendant. You'll be better liked by your coworkers.
Well, maybe not.

In breaking news, activists believe porn is bad for you. In fact, they think it causes brain damage.

Harmer is part of a cadre of anti-porn activists seeking new tactics to fight an unprecedented deluge of porn which they see as wrecking countless marriages and warping human sexuality. They are urging federal prosecutors to pursue more obscenity cases and raising funds for high-tech brain research that they hope will fuel lawsuits against porn magnates.

Which all means, of course, that we're going to see more and more rich lawyers, who watch porn. Greeeeeeat. There's more to this than appears on the surface, though: although I'm sure porn can be habit-forming, I find it somewhat unlikely that looking at naked people causes brain damage. Unless it's William Hung. Or Tipper Gore. But those two aside, I find it difficult at best to believe that any sort of physical harm results from watching people do things that you, yourself, if you were honest, might like to try if you could get a partner who'd try it. So what this will really mean is three waves of lawsuits: the first, when the research inevitably finds an undeniable link between porn and Dain Bramage; the second, when they are found to have falsified the research and the porn companies sue to overthrow the previous lawsuits; and the third, when the porn companies sue for damages for business lost while people thought their product killed brain cells.
Who am I kidding? Porn websites outnumber regular, non-porn ones about 1,000 to 1. The likelihood of them losing any business, even if research was published by someone reputable claiming that watching porn made you kill puppies, is tiny indeed. Instead, you'd get an explosion in home-based "puppy relocation" businesses.

CNN has been for quite a long time a respected name in news, if not the biggest. However, since you're reading a blog, that means you're aware to some degree of the blogosphere. You may not be aware of how huge an impact it's had on the mainstream media; despite Dan Rather getting fired when a story of his got fact-checked by a blogger, the MSM has dismissed that as a kind of freakish, one-shot deal. Sadly, CNN had to prove them wrong. In a fairly direct role-reversal, CNN posted photos on its webpage that were not only stolen from a blog - they still had the blog's logo on them. The blog, predictably, caught them at it, and made it their front-page story - and attracted the attention of the millions and millions of people who read Fark.com, a news aggregation site.
Now, I'm not saying that the news channels are behind the times, a bit, but I had a coworker tell me on Saturday that she had seen an item on the TV news about the authentication of the Gospel of Judas - which I had told her about quite some time ago. You may recall me mentioning it, actually. On April 6th.

Everybody's favorite New Mafia group, the RIAA, is so arrogant it defies belief. They 've been suing university students, we all know that, but they actually told this girl to drop out of school and use her tuition money for the settlement. Yeah. From MIT. I don't know about you, but this seems incredibly shortsighted. Not only for the public opinion damage, but also - MIT grads make waaaaaaaaaay more than dropouts. Why not hold off a bit until she graduates, and THEN twist her arm? I mean, at least then she'll be able to afford it. Now you'll never get the money - I seriously doubt if Sallie Mae will make payments to a trade organization with no legal standing.

In other news, this is why your FedEx package was late as hell and looked like Tom Hanks' volleyball in Castaway.

In a classic Older Vs. Younger, there are two bills moving forward in the Florida state legislature: one to change the driver's license requirements for people over 80 - sponsored by teens - and one to require high school students to declare a major. Heh.

Microsoft, always a hero in the anti-malware wars, has a history of doing stupid things when confronted with devious programmers' latest tricks. Things like releasing patches weeks after the new virus is due to activate, or waiting months for a patch that causes something else to break, and the list goes on. However, I don't think I've ever heard an admission of this nature:

"When you're dealing with rootkits and some advanced spyware programs, the only solution is to rebuild from scratch," said Mike Danseglio, a program manager in the Security Solutions group at Microsoft. "In some cases, there really is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit."

Now, in all honesty, I've run into things of this nature before, which is why I keep a pretty good set of backups on hand - if there's something that I can't root out with a manual registry edit and then a reboot in DOS mode to remove the files from the system, then I'll just do exactly what Mike recommends, because I've reinstalled XP so many times at this point that it only takes me a couple of hours to be back online and posting complaints about it. I have to say, though, that it's weird in the extreme to hear a manager from Microsoft admitting that they suck, and are rampantly pwned by the leet haxxorz. Wild stuff, I tell you.

While I'm talking about Microsoft, you should know that Internet Exploder 7 is a download that, at least for the immediate future, you may not want.

Don't wait until Microsoft releases IE7 to begin testing your applications. Based on what I've seen so far, unless you're using pretty much pure HTML on static pages, your application is going to break in some way.

Oh, how very, very reassuring.

Finally, I get to offer you a news story of an unusual type: a SMART crook. Two, to be exact. They were burgling a pub in Amstetten, Austria, when an obviously drunken Hermann Bendt staggered in, collapsed onto a barstool, and asked for a beer. The two then served him until he passed out - and THEN robbed the place and left. Bendt was too bent to notice, and slept it off until the police arrived and woke him up. Helpfully, he was able to tell police that it was

one big bloke and one smaller one

that did the dirty deed.

Carmen Electra is in trouble with Max Factor cosmetics, and in fact may lose her contract, because she went on the Howard Stern show and tried out a sex toy, on-air. Ok, I know you're not into that sort of thing, there, Max, but you DID know she got her celebrity from being in PLAYBOY, right? Not from "a modelling portfolio?" I mean, she got famous in the first place by showing her naked ass to the world. This is not really a big deal. My only complaint: no video, so I didn't get to watch her do it. Damn it! Life is just not fair. Anyway, *WARNING: NSFW* here's the toy in question. Ok, I'm a guy, so that thing wouldn't do much for me, but I can just look at it and understand why chicks dig it. Max Factor, if you're going to hire Playboy models, get used to the idea that they like / have had / talk about sex. Because they're likely to.

School Boards Are Stupid, Part MCMXCLXVIII: Pearl River, Mississippi, where the local school board has ruled that Leah Lott, 18, cannot bring her boyfriend, a Marine, to her senior prom - despite his scheduling his pre-deployment to Iraq leave to coincide with her prom - because he's 21. This one just doesn't really need a lot of commentary: school boards are fucking stupid.

Germans are bored: you can tell, when one of them sues the Easter Bunny. No, I'm serious. Stop laughing. Karl-Friedrich Lentze, from Berlin, claims that the Easter Bunny addicted him to chocolate, causing him to get fat and stuff. Come on, chief, it's not CRACK. But anyway, he said:

The Easter Bunny is a sadistic and unscrupulous offender who preys on people's sweet tooth.

"Find this evil bunny, handcuff his paws and remove him from shops in time for Easter.

And since it's easter, I guess they failed, didn't they.


Happy Easter, everybody, and goodnight.