Archive for April 18th, 2012

A blade to the brain.

Wednesday, April 18th, 2012

This story is too amazing not to blog.

Officer Eder Loor of the NYPD was called out on Tuesday to escort an emotionally disturbed individual to the hospital. During the process of escorting the gentleman, he became upset and attacked Officer Loor with a 3″ knife which

...sliced through the officer’s temple and into the temporal lobe and a major vein.
It passed less than half an inch from structures that control vision and speech, touched the nerves that give sensation to the face and nicked the surface of, but did not penetrate, a major artery.

Officer Loor pulled the knife out of his head and was taken to the hospital, where doctors found he was bleeding into his brain.

They found that the knife, which entered just behind the officer’s eye, went “deep into the temporal lobe and all the way down to the skull base.”
“The temporal lobe in this area does not have major function,” Dr. Bederson said. “About half an inch away, it controls speech. About a half an inch above all his motor function.”
The knife also cut through the Sylvian fissure, the deepest and most prominent of the cortical fissures of the brain, containing major blood vessels. “It cut the major vein of the Sylvian fissure,” he said, “and almost like a paper cut, it just nicked the surface of the artery but did not cut it.” The artery supplies blood for the entire left hemisphere of the brain, Dr. Bederson said.

Doctors stopped the bleeding. Officer Loor has some residual numbness in his face, which is probably due to the fact that the tip of the knife ended up pressing against his trigeminal nerve. Doctors expect the numbness to go away, and expect Officer Loor to recover fully.

Random notes: April 18, 2012.

Wednesday, April 18th, 2012

Invasive species are good eating.

Frankly, yeah, I can see eating tiger shrimp. The Asian Carp…well, it makes me think of the old joke about how to prepare carp. (Nail it to a board, prop it in front of a fire until one side turns black, turn the board over and wait until the other side turns black, then throw the fish away and eat the board.) I’m not a big chili fan, but nutria bourguignon could be interesting. And as for feral hogs, let me just say two words: feral bacon.

This one goes out to Andrew: how to replace a bridge in a weekend, instead of months.

Oh, look! Greg “Three Cups of Tea” Mortenson is being sued for fraud!

The lawsuit is asking a judge to order that everybody who bought the books be refunded. Whatever money is left over would go to a humanitarian organization selected by the plaintiffs’ attorneys and approved by the court.

Would it shock you to learn that one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs was also involved in the James Frey lawsuit?