Long days

Amazing how boring jobs gives you the opportunity to listen to books on tape, but then again you get stuck with something like John Shirley's Demons that makes massacres boring. Oh maybe I'm just resentful of the fact that I would have loved the Robert Anton Wilson imitation material in another life when I weighed a lot less. But F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon was excellent - funny, nasty, witty - and unfinished. In fact once it gets to the end of his writing it tells the outline for the rest of the book and that's a lot of crap, but somehow I give Fitzgerald the benefit of the doubt and think he would have changed his mind about the melodrama. Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital has inspired me to finally watch my Kingdom tapes that I copied from IFC so long ago. The original is still better. Really, King should stop writing screenplays. I don't know how he can write such cool books and such dull plodding screenplays but he manages it.

And the SLP housing inspectors sent me a nasty letter. The kitty litter was running low. It did stink up the place. And I give in to the begging of my oldest fattest cat too often. She eats a little and let's the rest rot. So I'm cleaning. I'm already cleaning for Pesach but now I'm cleaning earlier while I'm eating all the pasta I can. Note to all future roommates - I DO clean up after myself, but I can let things go for too long. I knew that the kitty litter was running low and I was waiting for a paycheck, but I'm easy to train and eager to please (even if I am a cat person) and I do want to make all future roommate situations work and SLP is a suburban municipal group that would be fining me for not mowing the lawn if I owned the place. That's to only one of you.

But I'm having fun rearranging my furniture. There are dust bunnies that were growing for many months before I moved doors and tables. My DVD player might be breaking. This bugs me. Maybe I can get it fixed. I think it just got too much dust in it - butthis bugs me since I know it took at least 5 years for my CD player and CD-Rom drive to die. Then again I'm trying to watch a very scratched up DVD from the library.

And inspired by April Blood I bought a book called The Bad Popes. I realized that I had lost my Strunk & White so I needed to buy a new copy. I was in a bookstore. This is why I'm worried about checks getting cashed before tomorrow night. And Strunk & White actually argues on behalf of the dangling participle - mostly on the basis that it sounds odder to force it not to dangle in many cases these days. There's also a slight defense of the split infinitive - so all you Trekkie English teachers can shut up about that "To Boldly Go..." line now.

Huh?

On the news a hockey player is apologizing for attacking another hockey player. He's apologizing to the players, the fans, the kids who are watching. Isn't that like a race car driver apologizing for speeding?

Oh what the hell...this is from CNN

The last paragraph from the end is particularly funny and disturbing - just because I can't think of anyone's mother saying that she wants her body used for science.

Army blew up donated bodies
Wednesday, March 10, 2004 Posted: 8:38 PM EST (0138 GMT)

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) -- Seven cadavers donated to Tulane University's medical school were sold to the Army and blown up in land mine experiments, officials said Wednesday. Tulane said it has suspended dealings with a national distributor of donated bodies.

Tulane receives up to 150 cadavers a year from donors but needs only between 40 and 45 for classes, said Mary Bitner Anderson, co-director of the Tulane School of Medicine's Willed Body Program.

The university paid National Anatomical Service, a New York-based company that distributes bodies nationwide, less than $1,000 a body to deliver surplus cadavers, thinking they were going to medical schools in need of corpses.

The anatomical services company sold seven cadavers to the Army for between $25,000 and $30,000, said Chuck Dasey, a spokesman for the Army's Medical Research and Materiel Command in Fort Detrick, Maryland. The bodies were blown up in tests on protective footwear against land mines at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio.

Tulane said it found out about the Army's use of the bodies in January 2003. It suspended its contract with the anatomical services company this month. The company did not immediately return calls for comment.

"There is a legitimate need for medical research and cadavers are one of the models that help medical researchers find out valuable information," Dasey said. "Our position is that it is a regulated process. Obviously it makes some people uncomfortable."

Cadaver remains are routinely cremated, he added.

For years military researchers have bought cadavers to use in research involving explosive devices. In the last five years, that research has been used to help determine safe standoff distances, on how to build the best shelters, and to improve helmets, Dasey said.

Michael Meyer, a philosophy professor at Santa Clara University in California who has written about the ethics of donated bodies, said the military's use is questionable because it knows donors did not expect to end up in land mine tests.

"Imagine if your mother had said all her life that she wanted her body to be used for science, and then her body was used to test land mines. I think that is disturbing, and I think there are some moral problems with deception here," Meyers said.

The market in bodies and body parts is under scrutiny after two men, including the head of the Willed Body Program at the University of California at Los Angeles, were arrested for trafficking in stolen body parts.