So, we are now several days past the execution of Saddam Hussein. Where are all the massive reprisals promised by the terrorists? Why haven't the islamic extremists abandoned their differences and rallied together to avenge the death of Hussein? Shouldn't America be on their knees begging for mercy by now because of the vicious attacks from these brutal and fearsome Islamic warriors?
Attacks will come, you can be sure. You can also be sure those attacks would have come anyway. These people are cowards who only strike where we are weakest and when they have a minimal chance of being caught. The execution of Hussein reinforces the fact we WILL come after them if we can prove they are responsible for any future attacks. Extremist groups are certain to be moving cautiously right now, regardless of the promised revenge for this execution.
Americans and our allies need to wake up and realize this war is not going away anytime soon. I don't mean the war in Iraq, I mean the war on terrorism around the globe. We have become so conditioned to Hollywood happy endings that we can't conceive of this war continuing. So, people begin to delude themselves into believing they can just walk away and maybe the terrorists will go home. Fat chance! These people want us dead! They want America destroyed. The attack on 9/11 and previous attacks such as the bombing of the USS Cole (have you forgotten about that?) are the tip of the ice berg. Left unchecked, islamic extremists would happily reign death, chaos and destruction on America and her allies every chance they got. They are NOT going away! They believe in what they are doing so much they are willing to die in these attacks. What do we believe in? What do Americans believe in strongly enough to die for? About half of the population doesn't even care enough to vote, much less be willing to die for anything!
And so, we fight the battle abroad, in the hopes we won't have to fight it within our own borders. And, for a short time at least, we have given the leaders of these radical movements pause, because they now know not ALL Americans are weak and impotent. If they stick their head up too far, at least one of us will be happy to shoot it off, or put it in a noose.
Wednesday, January 3, 2007
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
15 comments:
Oh yeah, it's all over....well...except for Bush's plan to send a "surge" of troops in a last ditch effort to keep the whole country from flying apart at the seams. Still time to enlist and participate in this wonderful CF.
lol. No, it is not over by a long shot (see my previous post on how long we will need to be there). However, many americans have allowed themselves to be cowed into inaction due to threats of retaliation from terrorist extremists. The point of my post is that even after the execution of Hussein, the threats from the terrorists of retaliation have proven to be empty. The terrorists fight a war of words and we have got to stop listening to them. They are largely impotent to pull off large scale attacks of significance and the more we hunt them down and keep them on the run, the more impotent they are. It is only when we ignore them and placate them that they have time to organize large scale attacks such as the one that occurred on 9/11.
Just browsing, very interesting. http://freddielsirmanssr.blogspot.com/
Just browsing, very interesting.
Just browsing the internet, interesting website.
Just browsing the internet, interesting website.
Just browsing the internet, very interesting website.
Congratulations, Wikipedia links to you. Not in a good way, though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
I Got What America Needs Right Here
By Jimmy Carter
January 9, 2008 |
The Onion Issue 44•02
Sometimes I'm a little stupid, maybe, a little slow in the head, so I'm wondering if you can help me get something straight. Maybe you can help me understand one fucking thing right now, America, and explain to me what in the Christ is going on here. 'Cause, unless I'm missing something, this country is in the middle of a motherfucking shitstorm, and I have no fucking idea what you're gonna do to get out of it. I mean, are you seriously considering voting for one of these shitbags you got here in '08? Fat fucking chance.
Way I see it, America needs a president who's gonna somehow un-royally screw up the Middle East, do some serious cleaning up after you dropped your pants and took a steaming dump all over the fucking environment, and—boom!—restore dignity, honor, and all that shit to these United States.
See, I got solutions to all your problems—I got 'em right here in my big, hairy ballsack.
You better get down on your hands and knees and kiss Jimmy Carter's rosy-red Georgia-peach-picking ass and beg me to run your fucking country again, because there's no way I'm ever gonna come to you fuck-knobs and politely ask you if I might please be a presidential candidate in your precious fuckin' election. So you can just bite my cock. I've had it with you jerkoffs and your jerkoff candidates.
You actually seem to think one a' these assholes is gonna prance in and wave a magic wand and make everything all nice again. Look at you, sitting there like a common fucking schnook and eating all their bull about bi-fucking-partisanship, and how they have all the goddamn answers. Let me tell you something: These fags are dogshit compared to Jimmy fucking Carter, all right? I was arbitrating Mideast crises when this bunch was still sucking on their mamas' titties.
But who comes to me, huh? Fucking nobody. Why ask old Jimmy anything? What the fuck could he know about peace in the Middle East? It's not like he fucking won the Nobel Peace Prize for that shit. You myopic pricks. Back in '79, I sat Sadat and Begin right down and made those two dicklicks shake hands. It was beautiful—I had all the pieces lined up and I smiled and waved in my best fucking suit and tie right there on TV. And what do you do, you pieces of shit? You screw the whole goddamn pooch.
Cocksuckers.
Oh, what's that I hear? The weather's all screwy? You got a global warming problem? Boo-fucking-hoo! I was telling you morons to turn off your lights and unplug all your shit at night to conserve energy in 19-fuckin'-75, for chrissake. Gee, I wonder what woulda happened if we'd all switched to solar power like I fucking did back when we had a fucking chance to do something about it. Think we'd still be sucking Saudi Arabia's dick like a five-dollar whore? I sure as fuck didn't get no fancy Oscar for that little spiel, though, did I? No. But Al Gore, that cum-sucking pig, steals the shit from me and now he's the greatest thing since Jesus Christ made a fucking sandwich.
Well, he can lick my asshole right after George W. Bush, that fuck.
You want compassion? Somebody who's looking out for the little guy? Why don't you take a look at Jimmy Carter, 'cause unlike, oh, every motherfucking candidate out there, he spent the last fucking quarter-century building houses for the homeless. And what does he get for it? A fucking hernia. Some fucking gratitude, you selfish twats. You talk to me about compassion? I'll shove a crucifix so far up the Democrats' asses they'll be asking me to buy them dinner and kiss them good night.
Funny thing about me: I actually fucking know shit! Not like these goombas trying to weasel their way into the White House. I practically wrote the book on collapsing bridges, inflation, and the working poor, fuck-o. I even got a degree in nuclear engineering or some shit. You know how easy I could swoop down right now like a guardian angel and solve all your fucking problems? Snap. Bam. Do it in my fucking sleep. Just fucking try me.
So you want me to run for president again? Yeah, sure, absolutely, I'll do it. I'd be honored to do it—with my fucking dick in your mouth, you worthless scumbags.
You had your chance with Jimmy Carter, and you fucking blew it. So get fucked. Fucking country.
A Letter of Introduction from T. Herman Zweibel
By T. Herman Zweibel
Publisher Emeritus (photo circa 1911)
The Onion
January 21, 2008 | Issue 44•03
The school-educated busy-bodies who manage my media properties inform me that it is almost time to appoint a new President. I almost cannot believe it is time for the suet-brained populace of this flagging Republic to be once again herded into the voting-booths to allegedly choose precisely which bloody-handed butcher will crack their bones and suck the marrow over the next few years. Futility, I say, rank and base futility! Does the grist choose the mill, the rabbit the hawk, the innocent 12-year-old Atlantic City orphan girl the lusty mob of beefy, drunk, vacationing coal-oil sales-men? They do not, and neither do the Citizens choose their Leaders. However, if The Onion news-paper can further the illusion that an individual vote has more potential to change the world than a lamb's last bubbling bleat in a crowded slaughter-house—and furthermore, if we may turn a hand-some profit by doing so—than let The Onion be the Judas goat to the milling herd of democratic cattle!
I am told that our new War of the White House section will contain the vetted and censored life stories of each candidate; white-washed and simplified versions of their heinous plans to drain the life and wealth of each and every tax-payer; a schedule denoting the appearances of every aspirant, so that one may go and be covered in unspeakable fulminating lies in person instead of hearing them over the crystal-set. I should God damned well hope that there will also be prettily-colored pictures, or else the average American citizen will not be able to keep his eye on it for more than a few heart-beats, and it would be better yet if there were accompanying photos of ample heaving bosoms. Sadly, the man in the street becomes affronted whenever he feels his supposed dignity is being besmirched. Why is this? The man in the street is, for all his puffery, standing there in the God damned street!
In any case, there will also be a section on how our Democracy works, despite even the simplest boor suspecting in his secret heart of hearts that it is a sham. Which it is. I have not voted since becoming a wealthy industrialist, having figured out some time ago that it is much wiser to employ the organ grinder than vote for the monkey. Still, I hope this special section is of some amusement to all. I understand that one of the candidates is campaigning in a dress this year, and yet another in a minstrel's blackface, which I must say was unexpected; but as long as there are no Catholics on the ballot, I see no reason to summon the marksmen.
Now get back to work!
Area Senior Remembers A Simpler Time When His Anus Didn't Leak
The Onion February 2, 2008 |2008 | Issue 44•05
CARSON CITY, NV—Looking out his window as the cars zoom by and a jet plane rumbles overhead, 87-year-old Hank Fletcher sees a world far different from the one in which he grew up. In his day, the retired factory worker says, life was simpler. The streets were quieter, people were more polite, neighbors all knew one another, and his anus did not emit oily discharges of liquid stool.
But times have changed.
"When I was a young man, there was no uncertainty in the world—dinner was at 5:30 sharp, people who got married stayed that way, and my anus didn't leak," Fletcher says. "I can still remember playing stickball till the sun dipped below the trees. Why, I'd round the bases pretending I was Rogers Hornsby without ever having to think about a viscous brown liquid trickling down my leg. The future seemed so bright."
Hank Fletcher sits on his fifth couch in as many months and reminisces about the good old days of dry pants.
As time marches on, Fletcher remains one of the last direct links to a bygone era of American life when people passed their evenings relaxing by the fireside or listening to Hopalong Cassidy on the radio. Mothers and fathers would sit on couches free from protective plastic covers, and children would play games in the corner, oblivious to the crime, famine, and warm streams of fluid seeping out of their anal cavities that seem so commonplace today.
"How I loved to stroll down the promenade arm in arm with my best gal, Dorothy," Fletcher says, shifting in his chair as he pages wistfully through a faded old scrapbook. "We'd talk and laugh, unconstrained by bulky plastic sacks tied to our waists, and go into all the shops—never to buy anything, of course, just to look and to dream. We'd wander along the boardwalk all evening, she with her blue Gainsborough hat and I with my clean underpants, all the while holding hands and not ejecting fecal matter from our anuses."
"But Dorothy's been gone for many a year now," he adds as he closes the scrapbook, "and as for my anus, well, as I said before, it leaks constantly."
Seated on a rocking chair covered in a blue tarpaulin to protect the wood from foul-smelling stains, Fletcher chuckled to recall how tiny and hard to come by TV sets were in those days. His family had only one car, he could see a movie for a quarter, soda pop only cost a nickel, and his sphincter was strong enough to expand and contract when he intended instead of hanging permanently open like an unlatched floodgate.
"Back then, the days were as cool and sweet as a sip of lemonade, and the night sky was filled to the brim with bright shiny stars," Fletcher says. "Now there's so much noise and pollution that you can't even hear yourself think. People are always screaming and shouting for no good reason, zipping around from place to place, and the hustle and the bustle and my anus leaks, and it's all computers."
"Glenn Miller, jalopy rides, Lucky Lindy, my non-leaking anus," Fletcher adds. "Those were the days."
Indeed, this octogenarian lived most his life in a time that made him proud to be an American and during which he did not have to change his pants five times a day. He can recall as if it were yesterday seeing the troops come home after Normandy, when the nation was riding high and his feces were satisfyingly firm cylinders that easily held their shape in water; and watching two men land on the moon just moments after he expelled the contents of his bowels all at once in the bathroom rather than in dribs and drabs over the course of an afternoon. Then, on Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists flew two hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and Fletcher's anus leaked, and he knew the world had changed forever.
"Things ain't how they used to be," he says, shaking his head. "Especially in regards to my anus."
Despite it all, Fletcher admits that today's youth have it harder than ever. Amid fears of war, global warming, and political instability, Fletcher leaves the younger generations with a simple word of advice from a man who has seen it all.
"Every once in a while, take a moment to appreciate everything you have in this life," Fletcher says, "because before you know it, the world will pass you by, and also your underpants will be moist with shit."
As A Working Mom, It's Hard To Find Time To Masturbate
By Sheryl Marie Vos
August 15, 2007 | Issue 43•33
As A Working Mom, It's Hard To Find Time To Masturbate
As a single mother of three with a full-time career, I've got a lot on my plate. Between making the children's breakfast in the morning and making sure they brush their teeth at night, I hardly have any time to take care of myself. Sometimes, I just get so darn busy that I'll realize it's 6 p.m. and I haven't even eaten yet! Can you imagine? Not that I'm complaining, though. I love being a mom. But I'll tell you what—sometimes I find it just about impossible to find a spare moment to stimulate my clitoris until I reach glorious climax.
From the moment I wake up, I'm always worrying about someone else. I've got to make the kids' lunches, get them on the bus—no easy task when it comes to Melanie—and then race around to get the house straightened up so I can leave for work. And after a grueling eight-hour day, I've got to turn around and go grocery shopping, stop at the bank, and pick up the kids after their extracurricular activities. I'm telling you, sometimes it feels like I barely have a second to breathe, let alone 20 minutes to writhe beneath my bedspread with the passionate thoughts of sensuous lovemaking until I gasp with the force of my full-body orgasm.
Of course, I can't blame that entirely on the kids. Sure, there are times when I'm picking up dinner, and I think about how easy it would be to sneak off to the restroom and rub off a quickie. But then a special on that cereal the kids like distracts me, or I happen to run into a chatty neighbor, or I'm just too pooped out from work to take that special "me time." And that's really no one's fault but my own. I just keep telling myself, "That's okay, Sheryl. Tomorrow you can take the afternoon off and run a bath, light some candles, and tease your engorged vulva to thoughts of that carpenter who put in our basement molding. Tomorrow."
But I never do.
I'm not usually one to whine about such things, but my work isn't doing me any favors either. All day long I'm in meetings or filling out expense reports or trying to fix the work that that damn Carol didn't do right the first time. Even if I do take my lunch break to slip off into the handicapped stall, hike up my skirt, and start pleasuring my body with two, three, sometimes four fingers at a time, inevitably my cell phone will ring or someone will walk in and distract me, and eventually I just give up and go back to my desk having never shuddered uncontrollably with the powerful release only my dexterous hands can provide.
No one tells you when you're young, but having kids just upends your whole life. One minute, you're more than willing to lie on the couch for two or more hours, rubbing massage oil over your breasts and inner thighs until your primed body is aching for that last gentle stroke that will send it over the edge. And then the next minute you have a few children and all of the sudden the only thing that gets you excited is not finding another cavity at the dentist's office. It's all about priorities. And, until the kids go off to good colleges and I save up enough vacation days to make it worthwhile, I guess getting down on all fours in front of the full-length mirror and slowly working my trusty purple vibrator in and out of my dripping love canal with increasing speed and intensity will just have to wait.
I only wish I still had a husband to take some of this work off my hands. If I had a man around the house, I bet I could find all sorts of opportunities to masturbate.
Ah, well. No rest for the weary, I suppose. I'm certainly not going to win any points with the feminists by saying so, but maybe we women simply can't have it all. Maybe we have to make the choice between being a working woman who occasionally coaxes her pussy into such a lather that her hands are slicked with love juices, or a mother who spontaneously pulls over to the side of the road on the way to pick up the kids from day camp and swirls her fingers over her love button over and over and again and again, faster and faster until she's screaming, "Yes! Yes!" and slamming her fists on the car horn.
Because sometimes when you try to have it all, you end up losing what's most important to you: earth-shattering, toe-curling multiple orgasms.
Hello!
Your blog has been added to the mylinkmaps.com blog map at
http://mylinkmaps.com/map/worldblogs
Feel free to create a link so every one can see or add your friends blogs with the Add link
at the top of the map. Your blog description can be edited at
http://mylinkmaps.com/link/6874
Thanks,
Joe
Larry Flynt Has Sex With Own Mother In Outhouse
February 5, 1997 | Issue 31•04
KNOB CREEK, KY—In an incident that has shocked and repulsed even the most fervent free-expression advocates, controversial Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt had sexual intercourse with his own mother in an outhouse Monday.
Enlarge Image
Larry Flynt, seen here attending the premiere of The People Vs. Larry Flynt, recently had an outhouse liaison with his own mother (inset). Flynt has vowed to fight himself in court over the sex act, which he called "unconscionable and sick."
According to reports, not only did Flynt place his mother "face-first in an outhouse shit-hole" near Flynt's poverty-stricken, white trash, backwoods place of birth before "taking her from behind like a dog," but he was also surrounded by pigs, sheep, convicted felons, born-again evangelists, Mafia-linked magazine distributors, and a huge-phallused caricature of Santa Claus at the time.
Particularly nauseating, sources say, was the fact that during the incestuous act, Flynt's colostomy bag exploded violently, covering Flynt, his mother, and all onlookers in a torrential shower of his own feces. Flynt, who is described by close friends and colleagues as a "perverted bastard," does not possess control over his own bowels.
The liaison, which is said to have been possibly the single most obscene and degrading act in human history, has left everyone from right-wing Christian leaders to ACLU lawyers to Larry Flynt himself condemning the sickening, depraved display.
"I cannot in good conscience allow myself to continue this sick, hideous abomination against all that is decent," Flynt said shortly after completion of the sexual liaison. "Our nation's children must be protected from filth like myself!"
Flynt added that videos of the event are available for $29.95 from Larry Flynt Publications, Inc.
Though confined to a wheelchair after being paralyzed by an assailant's bullet during a Georgia obscenity trial in 1978, Flynt, who can feel no sensation beneath the waist, was able to achieve erection and sexually penetrate his 81-year-old mother, Dolores Flynt. His success was largely due to a special penile implant that allows him to partially imitate the mechanics of sexual intercourse in a grotesque parody of the act of human love.
"If the Constitution will protect me, then it will protect all of you, because I'm the worst," Flynt said.
Bush Vows To Make It Up To Country Somehow
The Onion February 27, 2008 | Issue 44•09
WASHINGTON—Amid allegations that his thoughtless and insensitive decisions have damaged his relationship with the nation, President George W. Bush vowed Monday that he would, starting now, "make everything better."
"This time I'm serious," Bush said. "I am ready to make a fresh start if we can just put the past behind us. I promise."
Enlarge Image
Bush swears that this time he's really going to pay attention to all 280 million U.S. citizens, and try to do right by them for once.
An estimated 35 million citizens listened to the president's televised remarks while silently crying behind locked bathroom doors.
Though Bush told all Americans they owed it to him to give him one more chance, he admitted that there was no excuse for his mishandling of national affairs.
"Things have just been so crazy at work lately," he said.
During the 14-minute address Bush acknowledged that he and the country had drifted apart. He accepted some of the blame, but stressed that it was partly the American people's fault, and went on to chide them for not giving him an opportunity to explain, not standing behind him, and failing to understand his "very real" need for unchecked executive authority.
"My job is stressful," Bush said. "Trust me, things will calm down in a few months once I don't have to deal with it anymore."
George W. Bush
The president, whose approval ratings have dropped steadily in recent years, said he had no idea how bad things had gotten until he found out that an overwhelming percentage of Americans didn't even bother responding to an opinion poll this month about his recent $3.1 trillion budget proposal.
Bush has since taken steps towards reconciliation with the American people, including promoting a promise to help alleviate the fiscal woes the U.S. has faced in recent months. Bush said he knew that the $300 he intended to give to every citizen "couldn't possibly make up for how [he has] governed," but nevertheless asked the nation to have faith in him.
"I know it's not much, but it's a start, right?" Bush said. "And it hasn't always been bad. Doesn't this remind you of that other $300 rebate I gave you in 2003? You always forget all the times I'm a really great president. We have really had some wonderful moments."
"Cut me some slack here, for Christ's sake," Bush continued. "I'm trying. I really am."
In addition to providing economic relief, Bush said he has taken other measures to strengthen his bond with the nation. According to the president, his newly proposed warrantless-wiretapping bill will greatly broaden the reach of his personal attention to the American people's needs and put him in a position to be more directly involved in their lives.
The president concluded by imploring the nation to help him rectify the situation, stressing that he always has America's best interests at heart but cannot be expected to improve things all by himself.
"You have to realize that everything I do, I do for you," Bush said. "Do you think I like denying health care to underprivileged children, or plunging the country deeper and deeper into debt? Well, I don't, and I hope someday you'll understand that. In the meantime, I'm asking the American people to try to meet me halfway on this."
Despite Bush's seemingly conciliatory stance, public response to Bush's promises has been frosty at best. Cato Institute policy scholar Brian Whitaker echoed the sentiments of many Americans, calling Bush's recent overtures "too little, too late."
"We want to believe that he's finally going to be the president we always wanted, but we've given him so many chances," Whitaker said. "I don't think we can handle another disappointment. Maybe it's time to realize that President Bush will never be the head of state we need him to be."
"Then again, maybe our expectations are unfair," Whitaker added. "He seemed so sincere this time. He wouldn't abuse his executive powers if he didn't care about us, right?"
Whitaker predicted that the nation will likely move forward and try to forget Bush, though it may be difficult for Americans to ever trust a president again. He said the current crop of presidential contenders offers little in the way of an alternative to Bush, but maintained that "at least Barack Obama listens to us."
13 WORST SCIENCE JOBS
(Popular Science, best of 2003-7)
1. ELEPHANT VASECTOMIST
What’s one foot across and sits behind two inches of skin, four inches of fat and 10 inches of muscle? That’s right: an elephant’s testicle. Which means veterinarian Mark Stetter’s newest invention—a four-foot-long fiber-optic laparoscope attached to a video monitor—has to be a heavy-duty piece of equipment to sterilize a randy bull pachyderm. Stetter, the head doc at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Florida, created the device to help control elephants in African wildlife parks, where the jumbos have been breeding too quickly and eating up more than their share of the surrounding habitat. The snipping began last summer when Stetter and his team field-tested the device on four unsuspecting bulls at the Welgevonden Private Game Reserve in South Africa. After a pachyderm was sedated with a dart from a helicopter, the team used a crane truck to pull the sleeping beast upright. Four-inch incisions were made, and the laparoscope was inserted into the abdomen near the reproductive organs (an elephant’s testicles are on the inside, like ovaries). When he located the centimeter-thick vas deferens—the tube that carries semen from the testicles to the penis—Stetter inserted a long pair of scissors through the scope and cut out a two- or three-inch section. So far, the method seems to be working. The first four test subjects survived the ordeal with no complications (except the possibility of bruised pride). If things go the way Stetter plans, elephants throughout southern Africa will soon be crossing their legs in fear: He has begun training other field vets to perform the procedure, and hopes to have multinational trials up and running soon.
2. ORANGUTAN-PEE COLLECTOR
Their work is noninvasive—for the apes, that is . . . "Have I been pissed on? Yes," says anthropologist Cheryl Knott of Harvard University. Knott is a pioneer of "noninvasive monitoring of steroids through urine sampling." Translation: Look out below! For the past 11 years, Knott and her colleagues have trekked into Gunung Palung National Park in Borneo, Indonesia, in search of the endangered primates. Once a subject is spotted, they deploy plastic sheets like a firemen's rescue trampoline and wait for the tree-swinging apes to go see a man about a mule. For more pee-catching precision, they attach bags to poles and follow beneath the animals. "It's kind of gross when you get hit, but this is the best way to figure out what's going on in their bodies," Knott says.
3. ANAL-WART RESEARCHER
“I see about 15 butts a day, and a third of them have warts,” says nurse practitioner Naomi Jay of the University of California at San Francisco. Jay and infectious-disease doc Joel Palefsky were the first to run extensive clinical studies on the sexually transmitted diseases that afflict the anus. “He’s the tushie king, and I’m the tushie queen,” Jay boasts. Each of us has about a 10 percent lifetime risk of contracting anal warts, the worst variety of which—enemy number one storming the battlements of Jay’s royal domain—is human papillomavirus. This same STD that can cause cervical cancer in women also causes anal cancer in both genders. And the only way to detect this rare but deadly disease is to ask a highly trained nurse like Jay to scrutinize your derrière. “A giant anal wart can be a couple inches large and blocking the anal opening,” Jay says with her customary vigor. The bright side? “In 13 years I’ve only been pooped on twice, and that’s not bad.”
4. SEMEN WASHERS
It's a job that separates the boys from the men, OK, OK, their real job title is usually something like "cryobiologist" or "laboratory technician," but at sperm banks around the country, they are known as semen washers. "Every time I interview someone I make sure I ask them, 'Do you know you'll be working with semen?' " says Diana Schillinger, the Los Angeles lab manager at the country's largest sperm bank, California Cryobank. Let's start at the beginning. Laboriously prescreened "donors" emerge from a so-called collection room that is stocked with girlie mags and triple-X DVDs. They hand over their deposit, get their $75, and leave. The semen washers take the seminal goo and place a sample under the microscope for a sperm count. Next comes the washing. The techs spin the sample in a centrifuge to separate the "plasma" from the motile cells. Then they add a preservative, and it's off to the freezer, where it can stay for 20 years. Or not. Thanks to semen washers (and in vitro fertilization), more than 250,000 babies have been delivered in the U.S. since 1995.
"The hardest part is explaining it to friends," Schillinger says. "But we do have stories." Like what? "Like the donor who was in the room for the longest time. We had a big discussion about who was going to check on him. Turns out he thought he had to fill up the entire specimen cup."
5. WHALE FECES RESEARCHER
They scoop up whale dung, then dig through it for clues
“Brown stain ahoy!” is not the cry most mariners long to hear, but for Rosalind Rolland, a senior researcher at the New England Aquarium in Boston, it’s a siren song. Rolland, along with a few lucky research assistants, combs Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy looking for endangered North Atlantic right whales. Actually, she’s not really looking for the whales—just their poo. “It surprised even me how much you can learn about a whale through its feces.”
Rolland pioneered whale-feces research in 1999. By 2003, she was frustrated by the small number of samples her poo patrol was collecting by blindly chasing whales on the open ocean. So she began taking along sniffer dogs that can detect whale droppings from as far as a mile away. When they bark, she points her research vessel in the direction of the brown gold, and as the boat approaches the feces—the excrement usually stays afloat for an hour after the deed is done and can be bright orange and oily depending on the type of plankton the whale feeds on—Rolland and her crew begin scooping up as much matter as they can using custom-designed nets. Samples are then placed in plastic jars and packed in ice (the largest chunks are just over a pound) to be shared with other researchers across North America. “We’ve literally been in fields of right-whale poop,” she marvels.
In the past few years, other whale researchers have adopted Rolland’s methods. Nick Gales of the Australia Antarctic Division now plies the Southern Ocean looking for endangered blue-whale dung, a pursuit that in 2003 led him to a scientific first. While tailing a minke whale, Gale’s team photographed what is believed to be the first bout of whale flatulence caught on film—a large, disconcertingly pretty bubble trailing behind the whale like an enormous jellyfish. “We stayed away from the bow after taking the picture,” Gales recalls. “It does stink.”
6. TAMPON SQUEEZER
If you’re interested in researching vaginal infections, you can do scrapes or urine tests, or you can draw samples with a pipette. Or you can collect your specimens from tampons. As Australian microbiologist Suzanne Garland and her team at the Royal Women’s Hospital in Victoria discovered, tampons are best for epidemiological studies of sexually transmitted diseases in large populations, because women are more likely to cooperate with a test that is familar and self-inserted rather than one that must be administered by a doctor.
Normally, researchers would use a centrifuge to extract fluids to be tested. But this is the one way in which the tampon is not an optimal specimen-collecting tool, because its true purpose is to hold liquid in. “Optimal recovery,” Garland says, “requires manual squeezing.”
7. HAZMAT DIVER
“The worst was at a factory pig farm,” says Steven M. Barsky, the author of Diving in High-Risk Environments, the industry bible for hazardous-materials divers. “A guy had driven his truck into the waste lagoon and drowned. Not only was it full of urine and liquid pig feces, the farmer had dumped all the needles used to inject the pigs with antibiotics and hormones in there.” Someone had to recover the body, and the task fell to commercial hazmat divers.
Outfitted with fully encapsulating drysuits, these Jacques Cousteaus of the sewers swim into clouds of waste, inside nuclear reactors and through toxic spills on America’s coasts and inland waterways. When the Environmental Protection Agency identifies pollutants, it contracts with a hazmat team to clean things up. That means using giant vacuums to suck up a polluted lakebed, hoisting leaking barrels to the surface, or diving into the heart of an oil spill or into a sewer to fix a clog. It’s dangerous work—one breach in the drysuit, and a whole stew of bacteria and toxins can fill ’er up. Jesse Hutton, of Ballard Salvage and Diving in Seattle, has seen his share of close calls. “I’ve been on jobs where suits have been breached by rough steel or something sharp,” he says, pointing out that divers must keep their shots up to date.
8. MANURE INSPECTOR
The smell is just the start of the nastiness. Almost 1.5 billion tons of manure are produced annually by animals in this country—90 percent of it from cattle. That's the same weight as 14,432 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. You get the point: It's a load of crap. And it's loaded with nasty contaminants like campylobacter (the number-one cause of acute gastroenteritis in the U.S.), salmonella (the number-two cause) and E.coli 0157:H7, which can cause kidney failure in children and painful, bloody diarrhea in everybody else.
Farmers fertilize their fields with manure, but if the excrement is rife with E.coli, then so will be the vegetables. Luckily for us, researchers at the University of Georgia's Center for Food Safety are knee-deep in figuring out how to eliminate these bacteria from our animals, their poop and our food. But to develop techniques to neutralize the nasty critters, they must go to the source.
"We have to wade through a lot of poop," concedes Michael Doyle, the center's director. "If you want to get the manure, you've got to grab it. Even when you wear gloves, the fecal smell tends to get embedded in your skin." Hog poop smells the worst, Doyle says, but it's chicken poop's chokingly high ammonia content that brings tears to researchers' eyes.
9. FLATUS ODOR JUDGE
Odor judges are common in the research labs of mouthwash companies, where the halitosis-inflicted blow great gusts of breath in their faces to test product efficacy. But Minneapolis gastroenterologist Michael Levitt recently took the job to another level—or, rather, to the other end. Levitt paid two brave souls to indulge repeatedly in the odors of other people's farts. (Levitt refuses to divulge the remuneration, but it would seem safe to characterize it thusly: Not enough.) Sixteen healthy subjects volunteered to eat pinto beans and insert small plastic collection tubes into their anuses (worst-job runners-up, to be sure). After each "episode of flatulence," Levitt syringed the gas into a discrete container, rigorously maintaining fart integrity. The odor judges then sat down with at least 100 samples, opened the caps one at a time, and inhaled robustly. As their faces writhed in agony, they rated just how noxious the smell was. The samples were also chemically analyzed, and—eureka!—Levitt determined definitively the most malodorous component of the human flatus: hydrogen sulfide.
10. DYSENTERY STOOL-SAMPLE ANALYZER
In the early '80s, Virginia Tech profs Tracy Wilkins and David Lyerly studied the diarrhea-causing microbe Clostridium difficile in sample after sample after sample of loose stool from the disease's victims. They became such crack dysentery docs that they launched a company, Techlab, dedicated to making stool-analysis kits. Today, Techlab employs 40 people, 19 of whom spend their working hours opening sloppy stool canisters and analyzing their contents in order to test the effectiveness of the company's kits. You'd have to have a pretty good sense of humor, right? Well, fortunately, they do. The Techlab Web site sells T-shirts with cartoons on the front (two flies hover over two blobs of dung; one says to the other, "Pardon me, is this stool taken?") and the company motto on the back: "Techlab: #1 in the #2 Business!"
11. BARNYARD MASTURBATOR
Researchers who want animal sperm —to study fertility or for artificial insemination—have a suite of attractive options: They can ram an electric probe up an animal's rectum, shove an artificial vagina onto the animal's penis, or simply do it the old-fashioned way—manual stimulation. The first option, electroejaculation, uses a priapic rectal probe to send electricity pulsing through the animal's nether regions. "All the normal excitatory signals that stimulate ejaculation, like touch, sight, sound and smell, can be replaced with the current from the probe," says Trish Berger, professor of animal science at the University of California, Davis. "It's fascinating. Of course, this is a woman talking." Electroejaculation generally requires anesthetizing the animal and is typically used on zoo dwellers. The other two methods—the artificial vagina, or AV, and the good old hand—require that animals be trained to the procedure.
The AV—a large latex tube coated with warm lubricant —is used primarily to get sperm from dairy bulls (considered the most ornery and dangerous of bovines). The bull gets randy with a steer; when he mounts the steer with his forelegs, a brave technician, AV in hand, insinuates himself between the two aroused beasts and deftly redirects the bull penis into the mock genitalia, which he must then hold tight while the bull orgasms. (Talk about bull riding!) Three additional technicians attempt to ensure this (fool)hardy soul's safety by anchoring themselves to restraining ropes attached to a ring in the bull's nose. Alas, this isn't always absolutely effective: Everyone who's wielded an AV has had at least one close call, and more than a few have been sent to the hospital. The much safer "digital pressure" is used mostly with pigs, who are trained from an early age to mount a small bench while the researcher reaches around with a gloved hand and provides appropriate pleasure—er, pressure.
12. WORM PARASITOLOGIST
Studying worm parasites isn’t nearly as bad as playing host to them. But here’s an essential distinction: The medicos who go into this line—God bless ’em—do it by choice. Supported by the World Health Organization and various international charities, they travel to the tropics to eradicate diseases that afflict millions of people. Yet although we’re regularly treated to tales of Ebola warriors, we rarely hear about the tribulations of the worm docs.
For instance . . . Ascaris lumbricoides eggs hatch in the small intestine, then migrate to the lungs; they’re coughed into the mouth and swallowed back to the gut, where each worm will grow as long as 16 inches and where each female will lay billions of eggs to be defecated forth so that a new cycle of life can begin. (The adults can exit this way too, in a large bolus that resembles a tangle of spaghetti.) The Wuchereria bancrofti worm sometimes settles in the scrotum, where it blocks the flow of lymph. This can result in elephantiasis, a wretched condition that features scrotal swelling to jack-o’-lantern proportions and an infection that reeks of death. Moving right along . . . the female Dracunculus medinensis migrates from the gut to a point just under the skin of, say, a leg, where she then commences growth to a length of as great as three feet, and where, ultimately, she lays her eggs.
When the thousands of babies make their joyous arrival, they blister the skin and pop through, leaving Mom behind. The traditional way to get rid of her is to wrap her head around a stick and twist very slowly—one turn of the stick per day—for weeks or months, depending on how long she is. (This treatment is so old that it inspired the ancient snake-and-pole aesculapius symbol of medicine.)
13. CARCASS CLEANER
Natural history museums display clean white skeletons or neatly stuffed animals, but what their field biologists drag in are carcasses flush with rotting flesh. Each museum's taxidermist has his own favorite technique for tidying things up. University of California, Berkeley, zoologist Robert Jones swears by his strain of flesh-eating buffalo-hide beetles and has no problem reaching his bare hand into a drawer to pull out a rancid shrew skeleton swarming with thousands of these quarter-inch bugs. Jeppe Møhl at the University of Copenhagen Zoological Museum deposits sperm whales and dolphins into vast empty tanks and lets nature take its course. And then there's the boiling method, useful for chemically preserved samples that bugs won't touch—an approach favored by archaeologist Sandra Olsen, who has done her own skeleton work. She recalls a particularly vivid experience boiling down hyena paws: "It felt like inhaling the gases would literally kill us." Nah. It merely gave her a lung infection.
Post a Comment