Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

First of all, to all of you posting it over and over ;-) please read this BabyInk link. While I realize there's someone on IAM going around telling everyone that they took their kid there (for body painting, not tattooing), it's most definitely not real!

Last night at dinner sitting across from us was some joker blabbing on about the secrets to entrepreneurial success — all just quoting from some book he'd read of course. It was incredibly annoying to hear someone spout off “the four laws of success are…” or “the six rules of customer relations are…” while the whole time saying that it was all “backed up by statistics, and if you follow these rules you will succeed!” Dude, if that's true, go out and do it! Blabbing about it in a cheap restaurant doesn't make you an entrepreneur.

The part that really got me is when he started to talk about “creativity”, of course beginning with the statement “the four laws of creativity are…” I just wanted to get up, punch him in the gut, and yell, “YOU IDIOT! THERE ARE NO RULES TO CREATIVITY! THAT'S THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT!!!!”

But meh… I guess some people go out and do things, and other people read books about doing things. It's not as if I don't have a zillion books on things I'll never do, and it's not as if I haven't talked loudly and excitedly (and maybe even ignorantly) about them — probably more so about things far removed from my day-to-day life. So in hindsight I was being an ass to have those thoughts.

Anyway, I've got a whack of new features that I'm building for you today… Finally building a complete set of gallery management tools that should make life much easier for a lot of people.

Finally, in the news, I'd like to attract attention to this story in the Washington Post, in which Rumsfeld admits that the US had no evidence of WMDs in Iraq and simply invaded because they figured 9-11 gave them an excuse. Here is the direct quote:

"The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit. We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light — through the prism of our experience on 9-11."

Not that it matters… They're saying “but it was justified because (insert reason here)“… The big question now is will the American publlic forget that they spent two years being lied to in order to achieve this goal, whether they agree with the outcome or not.

But don't worry — the defense contractors (like Cheney) are getting very rich.

And that's what matters, right?

Is it a TOS violation if you post a copyrighted image that's in fact a copyrighted image stolen from you? The American Society for Dermatologic Surgery can claim copyright all they want over the pictures they steal from BME, but I'd like to see them defend it in court. Hell, given that they're selling this image, maybe we should take them to court…

I don't know if any of you are PubMed subscribers (if you're not, don't buy this article, it's a page long, contains no real information, and isn't worth the $30), but Cheyenne pointed me toward this interesting article (PMID 12031390, also in Urology 59 (6), 2002):

In it, the doctor describes a M2F patient who can not afford the costs of a surgical suite for a full (surgical amputative) castration. The patent comes in with printouts from BME/extreme (mentioned by name) describing various home castrations which the doctor then looks into and decides that Burdizzo castration is viable.

The procedure is done in his office, with Marcaine (an injectable local anesthetic which is publicly available) being injected into the spermatic cords. The Burdizzo was clamped on each cord for 30 seconds. The patient had no problem walking home, and no secondary problems were described – not even bruising! The testicles atrophied and the procedure was a success with the doctor describing the procedure as ideal for those who “wished to avoid the pain, expense, and scar associated with the open procedure.”

(If the “home method” is just as successful, far safer, less invasive, less damaging, and less likely to interfere with follow-up SRS surgery due to an absence of scarring, I'd love to know why people are still using full on surgical orchiectomy?)

That's got to be a first — doctors copying a procedure from the cutter community, and then deciding that the cutters got it right and were doing a superior procedure! Not that it'll change their methodology any time soon — as the doctor points out in this article that far more money is spent with the surgical route.

Anyway, I'm off to the gym again this morning. I will do my best not to have a heart attack… have to make sure I'm better hydrated this time. I've also been trying to up my caloric intake, but it's hard because I'm not used to eating that much, and it's wrecking havok with my digestion to up it so much.