">My Big World Of Crap

And no, its not because I was watching porn.

An episode of the ABC TV show “Hungry Beast” generated a bit of controversy this week with a story about the (soft) porn industry’s airbrushing of female genitalia, which gave an unrealistic image of what was “normal”.   Soft porn magazine publishers claimed they were forced to airbrush pictures due to classification rules which deemed explicit depictions of female genitalia to be inappropriate.  So all they tend to show in their pictures is a neat crease – nothing with any poking out or dangly bits.

It is claimed that this in turn influences women who are concerned that their vagina is not “normal”, and the increase in the number of women having plastic surgery on their genitals is largely due to this – labiaplasty is a growth business for cosmetic surgeons, apparently.  Personally I think you’d have to be incredibly vain, insecure or have too much money and time on your hands to want to get this done – no doubt it goes with another useless procedure, anal bleaching.

The show attracted some complaints, although not large numbers.  This could be a product of Australian TV viewers being less prudish than our American counterparts, or maybe simply that hardly anyone actually watches the show.  It could also be that there was plenty of warning before they showed the story.

“Certainly, it contained strong scenes. However, viewers were given clear warnings about the content – one before the show began, and one before the actual segment – and so had ample opportunity to avoid the segment if they felt it might make them uncomfortable.”

said an ABC spokesperson.

Now, I know a lot of my readers come here in search of pussy – so click on the “Hungry Beast” link above for today’s treat.  Don’t say I don’t deliver to my readers.

Now, for something a bit different, but related in a roundabout way, and to highlight the prudishness of Americans in particular, check this out.

A woman in New Jersey made a snow figure based on the famous Venus de Milo statue which is kept at the Louvre in Paris.  However the nude rendition of a female torso, including (shock! horror! oh my god the children might see it!) boobs, was too much for someone.  Said the lady who made the snowman:

"We had a visit from the local police who told us that a neighbour had complained about the statue and we needed to cover it up or knock it down,"

"We didn’t want to have any problem with the police so we covered it up."

Hence, what you see above.

This is the sort of thing you think has got to be a joke, surely it couldn’t happen in real life?

Doctors in Peru amputated the healthy leg of an 86-year-old man, then amputated the other leg when they realised their mistake.  He went in to have his right leg removed as it had an ulcer, but the doctors cut off his left leg, then upon realising it was the wrong one, cut off the right one too.

The Alberto Sabogal Hospital in the coastal district of Callao just north of Lima said it had suspended the doctors involved in the botched surgery for a life-threatening ulcer, pending an investigation.

I wonder what the doctors said when they realised their error – I’m betting “oh shit” would have been the first thing that went through their minds.  Definitely one of those “oh shit” moments!

I knew it, but there’s now scientific evidence to back it up.   Tests have revealed that men who drink beer may reduce their chances of developing prostate cancer.  Experiments have shown that xanthohumol, a compound derived from the hops in beer, blocks a chemical reaction that can lead to the development of cancer.

Study leader Dr Clarissa Gerhausa, from the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg, said:

"We hope that one day we can demonstrate that xanthohumol prevents prostate cancer development, first in animal models and then in humans, but we are just at the beginning."

It was previously suggested that the compound could reduce the chances of females getting breast cancer. 

Cheers, I’m off to the fridge to get a nice healthy beer.  A James Squire Sundown Lager to be precise.

Well not in this case.  A patient in the Hobart Private Hospital noticed some bleeding from a wound drain after some surgery he’d had.  He rang the call bell to get some assistance.  After 10 minutes and no response, he rang his wife who rang the nurses’ station.  Again, no response.  He then rang 000 seeking help.  The hospital’s night duty supervisor then went to the ward and arrived at the same time as two nurses.  Lucky they did, otherwise it would have been a very short ambulance ride … from his hospital bed, to, his hospital bed.

Matthew Millington was a British soldier who developed an incurable lung condition while serving in Iraq.  A year later he was told he would die in two years unless he had a transplant.

So he had the lung transplant.

And died later of lung cancer.  It turned out the organs donated to him came from someone who smoked 30 to 50 cigarettes a day.  Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, which performed the transplant, said early X-rays did not find any sign of cancer in Mr Millington’s lungs.  Drugs given to Mr Millington to help his body accept the new organs sped up the spread of a tumour, which had been missed in the screening of the transplanted lungs.  The hospital defended its use of smokers’ lungs in transplants and said all organs were screened rigorously.

Shit some people are unlucky.

A pig farm in central NSW has its pigs in quarantine, with swine flu.  It is believed that they caught it from workers at the farm. I see a delicious irony in pigs catching swine flu from humans.

Veterinarians and emergency disease response specialists are at the Dunedoo piggery tracing the movements of people, animals, and equipment on and off the property.  The pigs started coughing late last week and vets were called to the property early this week. 

Poor piggies!

I just saw this story of British man, Gary Reinbach, who died aged 22 of liver failure, caused by severe cirrhosis of the liver.  Gee, I thought, that would have taken some serious drinking to get to the point of killing him at such a young age.

Reinbach began binge drinking when he was just 13.  He began by drinking bottles of cheap cider with his mates while skipping school.  When he left school aged 17 he began drinking up to eight cans of beer plus a bottle of vodka or half a bottle of whisky and cans of cider. (One has to wonder how he paid for all this – let me hazard a guess, social welfare.) 

He was admitted to a London hospital in May but died after doctors refused to give him a liver transplant amid fears he would not stay sober for six months after the operation.  His mother Madeline Reinbach said her son had been in great pain and scared before his life support machine was turned off on Sunday.

You won’t be surprised also to find out he was a smoker – that was something he had given up earlier on doctors’ advice, as it was contributing to his health problems.

Sad story, but wholly brought upon himself.

Got this from someone at work today – I love it.

Poor Piglet!

Poor Ian, too … I’ve developed a raging attack of the sniffles since last night to go with my jet lag from my trip to New York.  I trust its not swine flu, just a result of going from cold to hot to cold and wet in a week and a bit.

Beer goggles – the tendency of finding people more attractive as you get more drunk, has been debunked, at least somewhat, in a UK research study.

British forensic psychologist Vincent Egan took to venues in Scotland to test the beer goggle theory.  Dr Egan said:

“We got 240 people out in the field in bars and cafes. We saw 120 who were sober and 120 who had been drinking and we’ve asked them to do two things: firstly, to say how attractive the face was; and secondly to say how old they thought the face was,”

“The girls were originally 17 years old and they were morphed to look like they were 15 up to 19. So from being girlish to being womanly,”

“We found that alcohol basically didn’t influence things as much as you might have thought. We found alcohol consumption did inflate attractiveness ratings but the greater alcohol consumption didn’t lead to the overestimation of age.”

He says there was no difference in age estimates between the drinkers and those abstaining.

Dr Egan argues that his findings suggest men who have sex with underage girls should not be able to use alcohol as a defence.

However, there is still hope for ugly folk going out and hoping to score.  Just don’t lie about your age.

Professor James Murray, a maths expert at Oxford University, and his team, have developed a model whereby they can calculate whether a relationship will succeed. 

In a study of 700 couples, it predicted the divorce rate with 94 per cent accuracy.  The calculations were based on 15-minute conversations between couples who were asked to sit opposite each other in a room on their own and talk about a contentious issue, such as money, sex or relations with their in-laws. Professor Murray and his colleagues recorded the conversations and awarded each husband and wife positive or negative points depending on what was said.  Partners who showed affection, humour or happiness as they talked were given the maximum points, while those who displayed contempt or belligerence received the minimum.

Professor Murray said:

"I am still absolutely amazed that human emotions can be put into a mathematical model and that a prediction can be made,"

"What astonished me was that a discussion, sometimes highly charged and emotional, could so easily and usefully be encapsulated.

"It is trying to assess and quantify how a couple interact by giving them a scoring system … If either the husband or the wife is consistently negative, then they are going to get a divorce."

The forecast of who would get divorced in his study of 700 couples over 12 years was 100 per cent correct, what reduced the accuracy of the predictions was those couples who we thought would stay married and actually ended up getting divorced.

Call me cynical, but I have a feeling that the scoring of the conversations by the researchers would have been quite subjective and heavily influenced the results.

We all know that divorce is often an expensive and messy business.  A friend argues that if you ever think of cheating on your wife, ask yourself  “is she worth a house?” because thats what it will cost you.

People often say their divorce cost them an arm and a leg.  Well, there’s a case in New York now where the couple are arguing over a kidney.

Richard Batista, a surgeon from Long Island in New York, gave his kidney to his wife Dawnell after two previous transplants failed.  He now wants it back because she cheated on him and has filed for divorce.  He has claimed either the kidney back or $US1.5m compensation.

Dr Batista told New York Daily News there is “no value you can put on an organ when it saves someone’s life. There is no greater feeling on this planet”.  He says he is only suing Dawnell to get to her act reasonably in the divorce case, claiming she is restricting access to their children, aged 8, 11 and 14.

However, it seems unlikely he will get either the kidney back or money from his wife. 

Medical ethicist Robert Veatch from Georgetown University told News Day it’s illegal for an organ to be exchanged for anything of value. He said organ donation is a gift which means you can’t legally get it back.

"It’s her kidney now and taking the kidney out would mean she would have to go on dialysis or it would kill her,”

he said.   Also he argued no reputable surgeon would do it and no court could compel someone to undergo an operation.

I’m not talking just about me, but the world in general.  As of now, the world has not been sucked into a black hole, created by the CERN experiment that commenced operations in Switzerland a few days ago.  One of the fears held by some people was that the experiments using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which basically fires beams of atoms around in opposite directions and smashes them into each other with the aim being to see what comes out of the atomic particles when they are smashed, would generate so much energy that mini black holes would be formed which might suck the Earth into them.

Well, that hasn’t happened so far.  But that didn’t help a girl in India who apparently committed suicide due to fears about the world ending.  She jumped the gun, so to speak …. should have waited to see what happened first.  Also, as posed by this article, why would she choose to die painfully by drinking pesticide, versus being painlessly vapourised in a black hole.

As for what the LHC is, and what it is supposed to prove for its price tag of $10 billion, here is a useful summary.