Saturday, November 18, 2017

My Favorite Urban Legend [WARNING: OFF-COLOR TOPIC]

A husband and wife go on a day trip early one morning, leaving the dog at home alone.

When they return, they find their dog dead on the floor, lying in a large pool of urine, beneath a hole in the roof and ceiling above the dog.

The couple call police and report "a very strange break-in." They tell police, "It is as though a burglar took an axe, cut his way into the house through the roof, climbed into the house, killed the dog, peed on the dog, and then left through the hole in the roof without taking anything! It is so wierd!"

When the police do a DNA check on the urine, they call the couple and say, "Listen, we have some interesting news about your burglary. Apparently, an analysis of the urine on your floor indicates that about 200 people contributed to the puddle. So, apparently 200 people climbed through that hole in your roof and peed on the dead dog!"

"What??????????!!!!!!!!!!" the husband and wife respond, "That's crazy!!!!!!!!!!"

Then, someone figured it out.

Apparently, one of the passenger jets landing at the nearby airport emptied its toilet to the ground just before landing. Because the jet had been flying so high, at 33,000 feet, the air around the plane had been extremely cold, freezing the urine solid, so that a large chunk of ice made of frozen pee had fallen out of the plane, crash through the roof, struck and killed the dog and then melted.

Thursday, November 16, 2017

YOU'RE THE JUDGE: HOW WOULD YOU HANDLE THE BOOB CASES?:

[WARNING:  SEXUAL  CONTENT]

This  is  a  reprint  of  a  non-fictional  piece  I  published  7  years  ago.  In  light  of  the  extent  to  which  political  correctness  has  changed  our  cultural  perceptions,  it  seems  important  to  republish  the  piece.



Years ago, before "sexual predator" became Political Correctness Bad Guy Number One, I bumped into a series of cases connected with young men emigrating to America from the Punjab region northwest of Delhi, India.

In the first case, an unmarried young man who had recently emigrated from the Punjab to southern New Jersey was pumping gas on the midnight shift when a very pretty 18 year old girl in a snug-fitting tube top drove into the station around 2:00 a.m. for a tank of gas.

The young man was very lonely, and much impressed with her comely appearance.

The girl thought to herself, "What a pleasant guy!" and looked at him and smiled at him in an ordinary American way as she told him that she wanted "regular."

Instead, she got something a little more "high octane" -- the young man reached into her car window and began fondling her breasts through her tube top!

The girl freaked-out, screamed, and drove with wheels screeching out of the gas station, to the local police station, and filed charges for sexual assault.

Bail was set at $5,000. The gas station owner was a cousin, and so he posted bail. I was retained as the young man's attorney. When I sat down with him with my translator, a woman from the Indian embassy in Washington, I asked him, "What happened? Why did you do it?" He answered, "She looked at me."

I asked, "Okay, then what happened?"

He responded, "She looked at me," with a tone suggesting, "What's the matter. Don't you get it?"

I persisted, "No, no, what I mean is, What happened so that you felt entitled to reach into the window and grab this girl on the breasts?"

Suddenly the translator, who was a Punjabi emigrant who came to America with her parents as a child, said, "Oh! I think I understand! Let me speak to him in our language!"

They went back and forth for a few minutes in the Punjabi dialect. Occasionally the translator inserted American colloquialisms like, "You idiot!" which he understood, and he looked very sheepish in response as she continued with a scold in Punjabi.

The translator then explained, "I only know of this. I never experienced it, because I grew up here in America. Do Punjabi girls stare at you, when you see them in stores?"

I said, "Yes. It looks like they are flirting with me."

The translator explained, "What is happening is that where he comes from, the girls must always look down when speaking to a man, because looking him the eyes is a signal which says, 'I am interested in you, sexually.' The Punjabi girls stare like that at you, because for them being able to stare at the men without inviting sex is a novel thing. American girls look at men when they talk to them, because here just looking at a man in the eyes does not mean, 'I want to have sex with you.' These lonely young men from northwest India forget where they are. When a girl drives in and looks him in the eye and asks for gas, he thinks, "Va-va-voom! She's looking at me! She is interested in sex!"

I burst out laughing. When the matter came to court, I asked the judge for an opportunity to conference the matter in the judge's chambers with the prosecutor, the victim and her family, the translator, my client and myself, and the judge present.

My client, the young man, looked terrified, and his hands shook very badly during the conference. This reaction only reinforced the impression that he lacked criminal intent.

When I gently explained what had happened on the night in question, and the translator very eloquently substantiated my explanation, the judge and the prosecutor were swayed, and discussed the matter with the family outside our presence.

The family consented to a "Dismissal Without Prejudice." What that means is that the case remained open, and that charges from this case would be added to charges from any new case if he got in trouble again, and he would be prosecuted in both cases -- a reasonable response to the circumstances.

To drive the point home, the judge screamed at him -- and I mean screamed -- in open court in a crowded courtroom, while the Defendant, shaking, cried.

But, he survived.

The next case occurred in a town only a short distance "up the Pike." Similar circumstances. Gas jockey, pretty girl, midnight shift. But this guy held out for weeks before he concluded, "She is looking at me! She loves me!" and then "turned amorous." One night the girl, very pretty but mechanically adept, opened the hood of her car and bent over and used a heavy pair of channel locks to remove a part from her engine to show him how the engine worked better without it. He walked up behind her and leaned his front against her behind, and reached around and grabbed her chest. She freaked out and pushed him away and slammed him in the face with the steel channel locks, and a policeman who had seen him lean against her that way and her reaction arrested the injured young man for sexual assault.

When the same Punjabi translator came up from Washington, D.C. for the case, she was puzzled at a second case so very much like the first. Because the girl had left the young man with a deep permanent scar from his forehead across his eye to his cheek, when we explained that the girl had been accidentally giving him Punjabi "go signs" for weeks she forgave him and asked that the charges be dismissed.

The third case was the worst. The girl was very pretty, very personable, and -- thank God -- very understanding. But she was married to a policeman! And, she was eight months pregnant at the time of the incident!

The girl and her police officer husband lived next to the gas station. She regularly went into the gas station mini-mart, and purchased household needs -- bread and milk and such -- and engaged the young man, whose wife was still back in the Punjab, in pleasant conversation. She said, "I was much taken with that guy's innocence! He seemed like such a good man!" She was well-endowed and otherwise very beautiful before becoming pregnant. After she became pregnant, she was even more "well-endowed."

She flew home to her mother's house in the Midwest for her baby shower. On her return, her husband picked her up at the airport after he finished working the second shift in his town as a patrolman. When they arrived back at the house next to the gas station and mini-mart, the eight-months-pregnant wife walked over to the mini-mart for some OJ. As she smiled pleasantly at her Punjabi gas jockey friend behind the cash register, he was feeling particularly lonely that night. His libido finally gave way. He thought, "SHE LOOKS AT ME SO MUCH! SHE MUST LOVE ME!" As she turned to go home, he reached over the counter, grabbed her boobs from behind, pulled the shocked girl over the counter and began kissing her madly on the lips as she flailed wildly.

From the driveway her husband saw his pregnant wife's flailing legs, thought, "Wha-a-a-at!" and ran over to the store with his gun drawn. He exploded through the door, screaming, "YOU BASTARD! GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY WIFE!"

He pulled his wife away from the shocked Punjabi, punched him very hard in the face, threw him to the floor, sat on him, and shoved the barrel of his his .45 into his mouth while he called on his cell phone for back-up.

I invited the wife and her police officer husband to the arraignment hearing -- the hearing where the indictment is read to the accused. When the translator came up from the embassy in Washington, and she realized that it was another "boob case," despite the seriousness of the charge she burst out laughing. She said, "We are going to have to do something about this, Mr. Dawson!"

The prosecutor knew me well, understood why I invited the victim and her husband to the arraignment, and agreed to let me and the translator speak to them alone in an empty courtroom. When I went over the facts with the translator, she said, "You are right. This is another one of those cases." The husband "wanted blood," but he listened carefully, with his wife, as the translator explained to  the  wife  how cultural differences led to the man being enticed by the woman. "When they come over here to this county," she said, "They work 16 hours a day and send money back home to their families. That's it. That's all there is to their lives. They have no time to learn about this country and its culture and the language. They stay 100% Punjabi. When you were kind enough to talk to him, you innocently looked him in the eyes as you talked to him, the way we all do in America, and by that means you accidentally behaved in a way that in his part of India means, 'I may be pregnant, but I may be interested in having sex with you!'" I added, "Listen, it really was just circumstances, and your husband's response, based on what he saw, was 100% appropriate! But it was all really just a cultural misunderstanding. It really was. When cultures mix, it's 'oil and water.' The mix doesn't work out, and generates bizarre results."

The wife, to her credit, understood and relented. Over her husband's objections, she agreed to a plea to a greatly reduced charge, 5 years probation, and a $5,000 fine.

After that, the embassy caused the Indian government to require émigrés from the suspect sections of India to sit through lectures on American culture and American sexuality, to control the problem -- in effect, "IF AMERICAN GIRLS LOOK AT YOU AND SMILE, IT DOESN'T MEAN, 'I WANT SEX.'"

I haven't heard of any more cases of this sort in our area.


Saturday, November 11, 2017

CELLULITIS / MRSA

Because it continues to spread among people we know, here, again, are my recommendations for coping with MRSA. 

MRSA is one of the boil-causing staph bacteria turned into a highly-contagious, extremely-drug-resistant super bug capable of turning into a subcutaneous ("beneath-the-skin") infection in which it dissolves the flesh. The variety I had -- called the "Camden County Jail strain" by one epidemiologist -- has a 16% death rate. 

Health care professionals and writers are fond of repeating the tired old shibboleth, "Everybody carries MRSA somewhere on their body." But who cares!!! I wish they would stop saying that!!! 

The question is, Do you have an infectious and communicable MRSA / cellulitis  presence anywhere on your body? 

You should assume that you have an infectious and communicable presence of MRSA on your body if you or a member of the family living with you have boils, if you or a member of the family living with you have cellulitis, if you or a member of the family living with you have been diagnosed with MRSA, or if you or a member of the family living with you have to engage in special measures to keep from reinfecting yourself with MRSA and to keep from spreading it to others. 

If you are a MRSA carrier -- meaning you carry an infectious and communicable presence on your body -- you are carrying it in one or all of the following ways. 

Assume all. 

(1) In your boil or boils. 

(2) In your subcutaneously-infected flesh. 

(3) In a colonized area inside your body. 

(4) As an invisible sheath on your skin. 

(5) In your anus and in your defecation (your poop). 

(6) In your nostrils. 

Everybody in our society wants to pop pills to solve their problems. "Doctor, give me some pills to make my MRSA go away." But MRSA is different. Even if you stop the current infection, there is a good chance that you will carry it for years, and that you will repeatedly reinfect yourself and others, unless you do something about your infectious and communicable MRSA presence. 

MRSA is so hard to beat, and it is so communicable, that I believe that ultimately every human being will get it. It is really depressing, and it is very, very, very dangerous. 

So, learn about it. 

How did I get MRSA? My wife brought it home. Someone carrying it in his bowels went to the bathroom where she worked, did not wash his hands thoroughly enough afterwards, shook my wife's hand, and she scratched an itch, injecting herself. 

When she developed boils, we did not know that this meant that she was carrying a wildly communicable presence on her skin. Every time she sat on the toilet seat at home, she left an invisible sheath of MRSA bacteria behind on the toilet seat. Our sons, sitting on the toilet seat after her, all got it. 

For some reason -- probably because of natural resistance -- I got it last of all. 

It began as a giant boil "orbited" by a set of smaller "mini-boils" on the right cheek of my butt. They were extremely painful until they popped. When they popped they were extremely bloody -- MRSA is a "flesh-dissolving" bacterium. Antibiotics did not work well. 

Later, in subsequent reinfections, I got the disease on my fingers, twice on my scrotum, once in one of my testicles, on my arms, thighs, knees, neck and scalp. 

In one of my scrotum infections, it "turned cellulitic," and began to infect my entrails, and probably came within a day-or-so of killing me, except that the variety I carried was subject to the antibiotic Vancomycin. Not all are. 

The following are the measures we developed for dealing with MRSA in our house. They work. Learn them, and use them. 

(1) GETTING RID OF THE INFECTIOUS AND COMMUNICABLE PRESENCE ON YOUR SKIN AND IN YOUR NOSTRILS. In effect, we are talking about a numbers game, here. If you have an infectious and communicable MRSA presence on your skin, then showering once a day is not enough. 

Showering twice a day may not be enough. 

To get rid of MRSA, take a soapy shower three times a day -- early in the morning, in the evening after work, and at night just before bed. 

The logic is this. When you shower, the shower washes off about 90% of the bacteria on your body. NOT "all" of the bacteria "from 90% of your body," but rather "90% of the bacteria from all parts of your body." In other words, all parts of your body still have 10% of the infectious and communicable MRSA presence. In one day -- maybe even in less than one day -- the MRSA can fully repopulate your skin with an infectious and communicable MRSA presence. 

As you increase the number of showers per day, you decrease the post-shower percentage to such a low point that it takes longer than one day to regenerate an infectious and communicable MRSA presence. 

The effect of that is that every time you take one of your multiple daily showers, the infectious and communicable MRSA presence becomes smaller and smaller until it vanishes. 

You don't need some kind of "magical soap" to shower with. Some think that pHisohex prescribed by a doctor is necessary. It's not. Anti-bacterial soap isn't necessary. But, soap is. Ordinary, cheap Ivory Soap is fine. 

When you shower, use one of those shower heads on a hose, so that you can very thoroughly clean out "the dark places" -- you anal and crotch areas. 

Also, use the power setting on the shower head to fire lukewarm water up your nostrils. Do this with every shower. It will hurt, but you will get used to it. It will help to wipe-out the MRSA presence in your nose. 

(2) GETTING RID OF THE MRSA BACTERIA IN YOUR FLESH -- INFECTIONS AND COLONIES. One of the infectious disease specialists we consulted explained that MRSA has one great goal -- it wants to eat the iron in your hemoglobin in your blood. 

So, it occurred to me that I might be able to upset the MRSA's eating habits by oxygenating my blood. 

So, I began to walk one hour every morning and one hour every night, day-in and day-out, day after day. 

I walked at a forced-march rate -- 4 mph -- so that I was breathing heavily and so really oxygenating my blood. 

It worked! 

Within 24 hours, my giant MRSA boil began to vanish. 

Within I week, they were gone completely. 

Doing this every day for a year seemed to finally kill the colony in my testicular region. I could finally have unprotected sex with my wife without reinfecting her. 

Suppose the infected person is a baby, or disabled. How can they walk at 4 mph twice a day? They can't. So, I suggested hyperbaric (high pressure) oxygen to one doctor for his infant patient.

THE MRSA PRESENCE IN MY BOWELS. The infectious and communicable MRSA presence in my bowels was the biggest problem. Proving that it was still there is easy. If I skipped taking showers on a weekend, pretty soon I started getting this very sweet-smelling scent inside my underpants -- the MRSA odor. Clearly, MRSA from my anal aperture were repopulating the skin oil and sweat in my personal region. 

But then I remembered something I had heard in the hospital -- MRSA and other bacteria don't like a high (alkaline) pH. They want a low (acetic) pH environment. 

So, on a particular Friday, I got up at 6:00 a.m., and once every half-hour, on the half hour, I took one Tum, and washed it down with Metamucil in water (to keep things loose -- just Tums might have turned my bowels into hopelessly constipating "concrete.") By midnight, I had taken 37 Tums in one day! 

I got very, very, very sick. I was in agonizing pain all night. 

But, I believe that poisoning myself in this way eliminated the MRSA bacteria in my bowels -- I'm not getting the sweet smell in my undies anymore. 

OTHER MEASURES: THE TOILET. If you have that infectious and communicable MRSA presence, you are dangerous to your family. You could literally kill them. This is not an insignificant thing. 

And MRSA is most easily communicated via the toilet seat. The infectious and communicable MRSA presence on your skin, and breaking wind into the toilet, leave a terrible infectious and communicable MRSA presence behind of the toilet seat. If someone else sits on it after the infected person's use, they are going to get MRSA, guaranteed. 

So, adopt a rule in the house that if even one person has the infectious and communicable MRSA presence, EVERYBODY in the house has to clean the TOP AND BOTTOM of the toilet seat with any NON-AMMONIA cleaner BEFORE AND AFTER each toilet use. 

By such a rule, everybody is protected by two toilet cleanings between each use, and the potty seat stops becoming MRSA infection generator #1. 

OTHER MEASURES: THE WASH. The infected person should be given the job of washing and drying all of his own clothes and sheets and blankets in the washer and dryer. This is because his clothing becomes heavily infested with MRSA bacteria and bacterial spores. Just lifting them up and putting them down fills the ambient air with clouds of MRSA bacteria and spores. Let him or her breathe his or her own bacteria and spores. If anyone has at least some immunity, it will be that person, so he or she is the best candidate for doing the wash. 

OTHER MEASURES: SEX. In effect, MRSA is a venereal disease. Sex will communicate an infectious and communicable MRSA presence. 

Condoms won't help. The main problem is the MRSA on the skin and in the sexual sweat AROUND the penis and vagina, and condoms don't address that. 

If you don't want to give someone else MRSA via sex, get rid of the infectious and communicable MRSA presence, or don't have sex. Simple. You're stuck.

Sunday, November 5, 2017

It It Possible That THE TITANNIC NEVER SANK?

One  of  the  submersibles visiting  the  Titannic  in  its  watery  grave  off  Newfoundland   was  directed  to  the  bow  to  photograph  the  monster  ship's  famous  name.  The  operators  of  the  submersible  were  greatly  confused  when,  instead  of  the  word  "TITANNIC"  welded  into  the  steel,  they  saw  "MP" ...



... the  fourth  and  fifth  letters  of  "O  L  Y  M  P  I  C,"  the  name  of  the  Titannic's  sister  ship,  where  letters  of  the  word  "Titannic"  had  corroded  and  fallen  off.

So,  what  was  this  all  about?

The  truth  appears  to  be  that  the  Titannic  never  sank  because  the  owners  of  the  Titannic  substituted-in  the  Olympic,  for  the  following  reasons.

Turn-of-the-century  "jillionaire"  J.P.  Morgan  and  a  few  other  investors  decided  to  contract  for  the  construction  of  three  (3)  nearly  identical  steamships,  the  Olympic,  the  Titannic  and  the  Britannic,  to  enlarge  their  fortunes  in  the  trans-Atlantic  steamship  business.   The  Olympic  was  completed  first.  However,  the  Olympic  suffered  an  accidental  collision  with  a  British  Navy  cruiser,  the  HMS  Hawke,  which  had  a  bow  carefully  designed  to  penetrate  and  sink  the  hulls  of  enemy  ships.   The  Hawke  cut-through  the  Olympic's  hull  at  two  places,  but  the  steamship  managed  to  avoid  sinking  and  to  limp  back  to  port  for  repairs.

British  Naval  authorities  whitewashed  the  Navy's  role  in  the  mishap,  declaring  the  disaster  to  be  100%  the  fault  of  the  owners  of  the  Olympic.  The  Olympic's  insurance  carrier  seized  on  the  finding  as  grounds  for  denying  any  insurance  payout.  Suddenly  the  steamship  company's  owners  were  faced  with  bankruptcy,  insofar  as  repairs  necessary  to  render  the  Olympic  seaworthy  for  more  than  a  voyage  or  two  were  not  possible  without  paying  for  a  total  rebuild  of  the  ship.

Except ...

Except  they  had  an  idea.  The  Titannic  was  nearing  completion  and  launch  from  the  dock  where  it  was  moored  in  Belfast.  The  owners  moored  Olympic  next  to  her,  and  switched  the  names  on  the  bows  --  and  all  of  the  other  indications  of  a  scam.  There  were  minor  differences  between  the  ships  which  they  could  not  change  --  some  port  holes  and  windows  were  different.   But  construction  crews  in  the  know  were  sworn  to  secrecy  on  pain  of  incarceration.   And  all  other  indications  that  the  ship  called  "Titannic"  was  really  the  Olympic  were  changed  out.

And  then,  on  the  day  of  her  maiden  voyage,  over  2,000  people  boarded  the  Olympic,  thinking  that  it  was  Titannic.

And  the  ship  was  later  rammed  into  an  iceberg,  so  that  over  1,500  drowned.

The  owners  collected  on  the  insurance  on  the  Titannic,  and  stayed  rich..   And  the  Titannic  sailed  the  seven  seas  for  the  next  two  decades.