Cutting-edge action on prostate cancer: Doctors at the Ballarat-Austin
Radiation Oncology Centre in Australia have begun inserting three rice-sized
grains of 24-karat gold against patients’ prostates. The pellets (cost: about
$300 each) graft permanently onto the gland and help doctors aim the radiation
with more precision. And in December, in Vancouver, British Columbia, local
TV stations said they were reluctant to air a public service announcement provided
by the Prostate Center at Vancouver General Hospital because it featured a prostate-examining
doctor reaching inside his patient and pulling out a ticking time bomb (to dramatize
the urgency for men to be examined).
Scenes of the surreal: 1) In November, mind reader the Amazing Kreskin
wrote to the acting governor of his home state of New Jersey that he wanted
to help the state shed its image of unethical deals and thus volunteered to
sit in government meetings and identify which officials are secretly up to no
good. 2) Stephen J. Marks, 47, was driving in morning traffic Nov. 3 near Nashville,
wearing a ski mask and gloves, though the temperature was in the 60s, and an
alarmed citizen called police. However, Marks demonstrated that he has a medical
condition that necessitates his wearing a ski mask except when the temperature
is above 80.
Questionable judgments: Citing a police press release, the German news
organization Deutsche Welle (DW-World) reported in November that the reason
motorist Julia Bauer of Bochum, Germany, lost control and smashed into a parked
car and a lamppost was that she was preparing cereal and milk on the passenger
seat while driving to work and tried to catch her bowl as it was falling to
the floor. The cost of her breakfast (in damages) turned out to be about $27,000.
Cultural diversity: Sex despondency among women is apparently such a
problem in Japan that business is booming for counselor Kim Myong Gan’s 4-year-old
company of trained male professionals who invigorate them, according to a November
Agence France-Presse dispatch from Tokyo. Kim charges the equivalent of $190
for the initial consultation and scheduling, and his men provide hands-on assurance
to the clients of their attractiveness and desirability. Most clients are either
middle-aged virgins or wives whose husbands have grown to treat them as their
sisters.Zimbabwe, facing a severe food shortage, is considering an unlikely
program to bring rich foreign visitors to the country, according to a government
announcement in November. The information minister proposed an “obesity tourism
strategy,” in which overweight visitors (especially Americans) would be encouraged
to “vacation” in Zimbabwe and “provide labor for [government-confiscated] farms
in the hope of shedding weight.” Americans, the proposal noted, spend $6 billion
a year on “useless” dieting aids and could be encouraged to work off pounds
and then flaunt “their slim bodies on a sun-downer cruise on the Zambezi [River].”
Latest religious messages: In November, a Hindu seer in India’s Orissa
state drew large crowds, inspired by his calmness in the face of his announced,
spiritually induced death, which was to come before noon Nov. 17. At noon, however,
he was still alive, and, according to Asian Age newspaper, the crowd
of 15,000 suddenly turned ugly, berating him for not dying, and police had to
intervene. The man, who is chief cleric of Srignuru Ashram, told reporters,
“I wanted to leave my mortal body, but I could not. Please forgive me.”
People with issues: Mount Lee Lacy, 21, was arrested for animal cruelty
after his girlfriend’s mother sent police to his apartment in Gainesville, Fla.
Lacy’s aggressive mastiff kept the officers at bay momentarily, but once inside,
police noticed another dog, a Jack Russell terrier, that had a bloody paw, and
eventually Lacy cheerfully told them that he routinely bit the dog. According
to a police sergeant: “[Lacy] said that biting the dog was good punishment and
that’s how you train them, that dogs bite, so that’s what they understand.”
2004 CHUCK SHEPHERD
This article appears in Jan 5-11, 2005.
