Technically, this is a couple of days old, and I’m not going to reproduce it here, out of respect for the NYT‘s intellectual property rights.
But if you ever wanted to see a large photo of Thomas Harris (yes, the Hannibal guy) holding a live possum named Bruce…here you go.
I.M. Pei. He was 102, and it sounds like he led a full rich life right up to the very end.
Jim Fowler, Marlin Perkins’s sidekick on “Wild Kingdom” and later frequent late-night talk show guest.
Here’s something we hope you really like:
I live fairly near Wimberly, TX. The surrounding area is pretty nice: there’s a fair amount of undeveloped land, and a few ranches.
One of the local ranchers specializes in “exotic animals”. He brought a kangaroo down to his ranch: “This was something of a trial run by him for kangaroos.”
The trial run is not working out so well: the kangaroo has busted out and is on the run.
Helm said he and others have been going out every couple of hours to take a gander at the kangaroo as it bounds across the rural locale, munching on grass and flowers. He said the area is the perfect habitat for the animal, which is native to Australia.
“He’s not hurting anybody,” Helm said. “He’s healthy, and he’s eating good.”
The authorities would prefer that you not try to pet, capture, feed, or otherwise approach the roo:
Helm said the animal really doesn’t like humans, and won’t let anybody get closer than about 80 feet before taking off.
“You better wear a cape and an ‘S’ on your chest if you want to catch this thing,” Helm said. He said it will likely take someone with a tranquilizer dart and dogs to be able to capture the animal. Even after being sedated, Helm said the kangaroo could probably cover a couple of miles in a matter of minutes. “I’m afraid if anyone even got close enough to put a rope on it, they’re going to end up in the emergency room real fast.”
I seem to remember having kangaroo meat once, at a restaurant on the Riverwalk in San Antonio. Oddly, I don’t remember the name of the place, and it’s probably gone by now anyway.
After the jump, subject line hattip and musical interlude.
Autopsy: Man died of meth overdose before being eaten by bear at national park
Drugs are bad, kids. Mm’kay?
I’m not a huge fan of bull riding (though I do think it is much more interesting than soccer), and I don’t care much for “People” magazine.
But, as an amateur medical geek, when I see a phrase like “first person to survive the procedure at the hospital this century”, it kind of makes me take notice.
Wyatt Bruesch was competing in an Idaho rodeo when the bull he was riding bucked him off and trampled him fatally.
The emergency department decided on a hail mary pass: an “emergency department thoracotomy.”
Here’s the Trauma.org page on the subject (it’s also linked in the article itself).
Emergency department thoracotomy is a life-saving procedure in a select group of patients. Exactly who these patients are is a matter of some controversy in the trauma literature. There is a significant amount of published data on the indications for and outcomes of resuscitative thoracotomy. However the results of interventions varies widely, as does each unit’s experience, puclished data ranging for 11 patients in 10 years to 950 patients in 23 years…
Overall survival of patients undergoing emergency thoracotomy is between 4 and 33% depending on the protocols used in individual departments. The main determinants for survivability of an emergency thoracotomy are the mechanism of injury (stab, gunshot or blunt), location of injury and the presence or absence of vital signs.
Anyway:
Acting quickly, trauma surgeon Jorge Amorim cut Wyatt’s chest open and massaged his heart by hand to get it beating again.
“He basically saved his life,” McRoberts said. “He also did something else. Dr. Amorim reached into the chest cavity and squeezed and held the hilum of the lung where the great vessels come into the lung. He continued to squeeze for 15 minutes, which stopped the bleeding as Wyatt was rushed to an operating room.”
Mr. Bruesch is at home, recovering. In addition to the injuries that required an emergency thoracotomy, he also broke three ribs and eight vertebrae. In spite of this, he says he’s going to continue bull riding.
Meanwhile, in Pocatello, there’s a trauma surgeon shopping for a wheelbarrow to carry his giant brass testicles.
I know we are inexorably drawing closer and closer to Christmas. I hope most, if not all, of you have your Christmas shopping done.
For the record, if you do not have your Christmas shopping done, and if you are, for reasons I cannot fathom, looking for a Christmas present for your humble blogger: please do not purchase this book for me. Thank you.
(If you do have someone in your life who is not cat allergic and likes spirituous liquor, Amazon does have this available with Prime shipping, so you can get it before Christmas. And there is even a Kindle edition, if you need to fill a gap on Christmas Day.)
I have no joke here. I just wanted to say:
Tell us about the rabbits, United!
(United Airlines: the Lennie of aviation.)
I think I’m going to wait until tomorrow to try to pull together the Carrie Fisher obits. Not that it was entirely unexpected (though I think we were all hoping for the best for her), but I feel better letting things sit for a day.
By way of Lawrence: Richard “Watership Down” Adams. A couple of pithy quotes:
…
“If I saw a rabbit in my garden I’d shoot it,” he once said.
By way of my beloved sister-in-law: Vera Rubin, noted female astronomer.
Rex and Rob Ryan both OUT in Buffalo.
…
Babou (either one), call your office, please.
Meanwhile, the BBC reports that the cheetah is “rapidly heading towards extinction”. While sad, this comes as no great shock to us…because, as we all know, cheetahs never win.
This is kind of cool, at least to me: a homebrew short-range transmitter that sends out time signals on the WWVB 60 KHz frequency. Why would you want to do this, other than for the challenge?
I’ll post another reminder after Thanksgiving, but remember: clicking on Amazon links, or using the search box, gives us a small kickback on your purchases, and allows us to indulge our penchant for small electronics, knives, books, and movies from the 16 page list, “A partial and incomplete list of movies we might want to watch or have talked about watching (with annotations)”.
(I maintain that as a Google Doc which is shared with a few friends. I’m not sure I want to share it here, and if I did, it would be read-only. But if you ask directly, I might think about it…)
(Speaking of the Amazon search box, is anyone having trouble with it? It seems to be working okay for me, and I thought I replaced that when Amazon end-of-lifed the old version, but Lawrence made a comment to me the other night about it not working…)
I don’t expect gifts: the thoughtful and pleasant people who hang out here are more than enough of a gift for me. However, as an administrative note: if you are someone who feels inclined to purchase a gift for me, please do not purchase this book. Thank you.
(However, I wouldn’t object to a book on goat raising. Especially those Nigerian dwarf goats. I have been trying to persuade my mother that she needs a dwarf goat, or some dwarf cattle, to keep the Corgi company and give it something to do besides park itself under the bed.)
(Via. The funny thing is, I’d actually heard of this guy, or at least his toaster project. I would be more interested in the toaster, though it strikes me as an inferior version of “I, Pencil”.)