Dramatic Medicine

We know immediately cooling the brain after a stroke can help preserve neurological function by reducing swelling.  Making the brain chilly is also effective in saving lives and brain capabilities after heart attacks and after infant oxygen deprivation.  Products like Kool-Kit are already on the market to strategically lower the temperature of important parts of the body.

The Olympic Gold medal for the worst TV series of 2010 goes to Jerry Seinfeld's horror of a new show, "The Marriage Ref."  How did such a cruel and nasty show make it out of production and on broadcast television?

I am always surprised when I read about the discovery of the latest talents of those in a medically verified coma.  I'm not surprised the coma artist turns out to be a fake in the end, because they always are -- I am surprised how the media are so readily eager to be fooled by charlatans who use the comatose for gain in the fame game.  If we can't have genuine Savants, we'll invent them instead from a hospital bed!

At my favorite deli -- where I get my fix for homemade beans and rice -- one of the female workers always tells me the latest woes of her life as she scoops the beans over piles of rice.  I love listening to her stories because, even though they are filled with horrors and heartache, she relays the truth of her station with such strength and magnificence that you cannot help but be drawn into her plight and root for her.

Last Friday, I did my yearly social duty and visited my CPA in Manhattan to do the dreaded taxes deed, and to assuage my aching heart and walloped wallet, I always first visit Circuit City on the corner of 14th Street and 4th Avenue in Union Square to put my hands on all the latest technology.  Unfortunately, Circuit City is now kaput -- but I was pleasantly pleased to see a Best Buy store in the same Circuit City spot.

People sit down to eat lunch and it's really not anything of consequence. Most people don't notice when people sit down in diners, restaurants, etcetera as it is so commonplace. One would therefore think that it would not have been a big to-do when David Leinhail Richmond, Joseph Alfred McNeil, Franklin Eugene McCain, and Ezell A. Blair Jr. sat down in a Greensboro Woolworth's to eat lunch. This was not the case, of course -- it was 1960 and the segregation ran rampant in these United States -- clearly not so united at the time.

Yesterday's announcement of the iPad left me feeling disappointed.  There's no built-in camera at all -- let alone a forward-facing one for doing live iChats -- and the thing doesn't do voice and it doesn't multitask and it doesn't have a lot of storage.  "An iPlop in the toilet bowl," was my first thought in the flushing.