Hard to stomach, I know so imagine how he feels.  Apparently MSNBC was enamored with the Baltimore Examiner’s article and with a slight tweak they spread the news far and wide.  The doctor who did the questionable stapling is in court defending his end of the proceedings.

Read on for the original article.

BALTIMORE – A man alleging a Maryland doctor stapled his rectum shut during an operation — causing him to go without defecating for 17 days — took his federal lawsuit to trial Monday in Baltimore.

Ronald Watkins, 64, of West Virginia, is suing Manuel Casiano, a doctor in Frederick County, for allegedly botching a 2004 surgery that left Watkins with permanent bowel problems.

“The reason for suing Dr. Casiano is very simple: His rectum was stapled shut,” said Julia Lodowski, who with attorney Emily Malarkey is representing Watkins and his wife, Brenda.

Lodowski told jurors in U.S. District Court that Watkins now experiences “rectal discharge” and needs to wipe himself between 12 and 15 times a day.

He’s also had to have four “unnecessary surgeries” because of Casiano’s actions, Lodowski said.

The doctor’s attorney, Conrad Varner, said Watkins’ bowels merely became “swollen shut” because of medical problems — not because of stapling.

Varner said Watkins’ habitual smoking — two packs a day — contributed to his bowel problems, because nicotine constricts blood vessels.

Watkins underwent surgery Sept. 8, 2004, for a newly diagnosed rectal tumor, during which Casiano made the mistake, according to his lawsuit against the Foris Surgical Group.

Watkins then complained of increasing rectal pressure, and an inability to pass gas, his lawsuit states.

In a subsequent surgery, Casiano found that Watkins’ rectum was closed because of staples, according to the lawsuit.
“He couldn’t get past the staple line,” Lodowski told jurors.

“How else do we know that his rectum was stapled shut? Most importantly, Dr. Casiano said so.”

A graduate of New York School of Medicine who works at Frederick Memorial Hospital, Casiano has no record of any disciplinary actions, according to the Maryland Board of Physicians.

Watkins’ lawsuit does not seek a specific amount of damages.

The trial is expected to continue for four days.

Hopefully there will be a happy ending.

Technorati Tags: butt, ouch, staple, medical problems

Here’s a guy who claims he is channeling aliens via an energy beam directly to his hairy, slightly repugnant sweaty chest.  The very same chest he then makes an interviewer feel to confirm the alien-beam sweat.

The worst part is, the aliens sound like something out of a 1930’s serial featuring slightly evil aliens with German accents and horrible pronounciation.

As a bonus, the sweaty indivudual being interviewed even includes static as if to signify he’s connecting up with the alien power hour.

Technorati Tags: aliens, sweat, bear-man-chest, sf, fantasy, video, did I mention sweaty chest

Remember in grade school there was this kid who could make fart noises with his armpit? How cool that was? You wanted to be able to do that too, but never seemed to be able to pull it off. And remember how in high school, the same kid was still making fart noises with his armpit? But now you thought it was gross (You never admitted to anyone you still tried to make it work alone in your room).

Have you ever wondered what happened to that guy?

Well, you’ll be happy to know he’s alive and well. And he’s still making fart noises (though he’s since traded armpit farts for hand farts, less rashes I guess).

Meet Gerry (Jerry) Phillips. Gerry calls himself a manualist. A manualist is someone who plays music with their hands and no other instruments.

Sounds easy? Try it.

Gerry has a real talent. He’s got over a hundred videos posted on YouTube. And they are all amazing. He handfarts his way through all sorts of old favorites (Bohemian Raphsody, Killer Queen, Mario Bros. Theme) and makes some songs better than they’ve ever been (Hit Me Baby, One More Time, The Final Countdown).  Here’s Peter Frampton:

I highly suggest you check him out if you’re looking to waste some time, get a good laugh and be totally amazed. Here’s a link to his YouTube page:

http://www.youtube.com/user/gunecologist

Technorati Tags: geek, manualist, handfart, music, classic rock, super mario bros.

Maybe Cyber Command wasn’t entirely ill-informed. Think about it; who’s always flying around in starships, fighting interstellar wars? That’s right, the Navy. Who forms the front line of defense against the insectiod alien menace? Always the Marines. If the Air Force is going to remain relevant in the Hollywood version of the 23rd century it has to start thinking about fictitious threats it could potentially defend the country against. Having already been written off by most of the science fiction genre, they had few options left to them: either they could focus on post-apocalyptic radioactive mutants or scary uber-hackers and their spam cannon equipped bot-nets. With the Cold War having so recently ended (in military years), the choice was clear: the Air Force took the red pill.

Technorati Tags: cyber command, united states air force, usaf, hackers, fearmongering, fiction, stupid

Technorati Tags: ditko, comics, spider man, geek, comic books, avenging world, bizarre

They “ewww’ed” and “gross’ed” back and forth while you heard the ‘tap tap tapping’ of web surfing. I was intrigued! I was on a new mission! I HAD to find the mutant pig boy!

My mind raced back to a Seinfeld episode where Kramer came across such a creature in the hospital. A freak of nature that we, the audience, never got to see. Ooooh but times are different now. After speeding home and picking pedestrian pieces out of my grill, I ran inside and warmed up the portal to the wwweird.

This odd looking animal could quite possibly be real if it’s not a hoax and now I can *finally* put my curiosity to rest.

Okay ladies and gentlegeeks, I present:

The monkey faced pig… (no searches came up under human faced pig- but Google primate faced pig or monkey faced pig and voila- satiated curiosity)

Found on Orange:

Curious locals flocked to the home of owner Feng Changlin after news of the piglet spread in Fengzhang village, Xiping township.

“It’s hideous. No one will be willing to buy it, and it scares the family to even look at it!” Feng told Oriental Today.

He says the piglet looks just like a monkey, with two thin lips, a small nose and two big eyes. Its rear legs are also much longer than its forelegs, causing it to jump instead of walk.

Feng’s wife said the monkey-faced piglet was one of five newborns of a sow which the family had raised for nine years.

“My God, it was so scary. I didn’t known what it was. I was really frightened,” she said.

“But our son likes to play with it, and he stopped us from getting rid of it. He even feeds it milk.”

Neighbours have suggested the couple keep the piglet to see how it looks as it matures.

I can assure this pig that will not be made into pizza toppings… ever.

While certainly looking a bit creepy, a little more digging turned up this site:  www.facelesspeople.com - which a quick whois shows belongs to the Lotus Group, PLC.  You know, those fast sporty cars that made an appearance in that movie Pretty Woman?

The domain was registered on the 13th of June - which leads me to believe that this is some sort of PR stunt which will end with trendy faceless mobs trying to sell you high end cars, and not with trendy faceless aliens attempting to enlighten the poor, faced beings of Earth.  Also, in another close up picture, you can see itty-bitty holes that the faceless folk can use to see.

Technorati Tags: aliens, faceless humans, lotus, pr, stunt, oy

Technorati Tags: trebuchet, human, japanese, cool, extreme sports

Anyone want to join me in applying for a million dollar grant to establish the link between high end gaming rigs and number of frags?

Technorati Tags: monkey business, obvious, stabby, knife wounds, primate dueling

So why the heck is it called Chicken?  Why not a nice name, like nearby Eagle.  Eagle always did better in school, was on the track team and lets face it, Mom liked Eagle better than Chicken.  And why can’t Chicken count?  17?  37?

Back in the 1800’s when Alaska was much heavier as it was full of gold, lots of people went up there to deal with this mineral obesity.   While gold is nice to spend and shiny, its pretty tough on folks trying to eat it.  So the locals turned to the (now state) bird the Ptargna. . . the patarma. . .  the Ptarmigan.  This cute fella right here.

By closely watching the habits of this plucky little birds, the miners were able to track down fresh supplies of grain, fruit and other bits of nature’s bounty thereby assuring that they were the first of Alaska’s sandal wearing, whole food eating vegan hippie residents.  Nah, just kidding.  They ate the little suckers.

Eventually 1902 rolled around and they filled the spot to capacity (somewhere between 17 and 37 people?) and had to make it into a town.  They decided on the spot to name it after their favorite foodstuff.  Problem was, no one really knew how to spell  Ptarmigan.  Hell, I can’t spell Ptarmigan and every time you see the word Ptarmigan you can rest assured that it’s a cut/paste from Wikipedia.  Fearing ridicule from the rest of the world, they put between 34 and 74 pairs of eyes to searching for a good name for the place.

When that failed, I’m sure someone half-jokingly said “let’s just call the damned place Chicken and get back to rolling in our gold.”  And that is how Chicken, Alaska came to be a town.

You can visit it today.  In fact, if you’re driving from say. . .  Hell’s Kitchen in New York to Chicken, Alaska - a trip of 4,099 miles, you can use these directions as provided by Google maps.  They’ve got a cafe, a salmon bake and of course, a bar.

Despite my earlier mental picture of the place, the streets ain’t paved with gold.  Or Ptarmigan bones, but rather packed gravel.  And you’ll have to bring your own phones, electricity, internet and bathrooms as Chicken Alaska has none of these things.

Chicken has been thrust squarely into the modern age however, as they have their own website, hosted out side of the town, of course.   Just how squarely into the modern age have they thrusted?  Well, they seem to have landed somewhere between Lynx and the Animated Gif era.  Regardless, I’ve officially added Chicken, Alaska to my list of places I’d like to see before I die.

Technorati Tags: chicken, Alaska, tidbit, factoid, facts, strange, drumsticks

Technorati Tags: aliens, mars, rovers, proof, mars monkeys

Those aren’t your childhood memories?  Well I’ll bet you have the ATF to thank for that!  The Bureau of Alchohol, Tobacco Firearms and now, Explosives (ATFE) has launched their kids page!  Enjoy pictures of old time ATF agents and  the POISON that was popular long before guys were growing their hair out and smearing makeup on themselves.

Technorati Tags: atf, kids, firearms, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, wholesome family fun

Charles Manson reaches behind bars and into your iPod with his new album (semi-new, new to me… apparently out since around 2005): “One Mind” via licensing through Creative Commons. I’m in disbelief that he’s able to do this. Notorious for brainwashing- it’s okay for HIM to make music?? I seriously can’t believe he’s allowed *that* kind of freedom.

Manson loose on the internet? That explains SO much. This was found here at LimeWire Music Blog.

Anyway, you’re adults with the freedom to listen or not and then blog away at the analogy of giving a serial killer a loaded gun and pointing to a crowd full of people. This is also the part where I ask those who have kids or are responsible for children, “Are you paying attention to what they’re downloading?”

I did post the YouTube of the music and opted to take it down. This is *not* cool, this is not something I believe should be made available to the public and I imagine a bunch of little emo’s jumping all over this. If you’re unfamiliar with the creepiest man of the latter part of the 20th Century and now the 21st Century, the following is from Wikipedia:

Charles Milles Manson (November 12, 1934) is a convict who led the “Manson Family,” a quasi-commune that arose in the U.S. state of California in the later 1960s. He was found guilty of conspiracy to commit the Tate-LaBianca murders, which members of the group carried out at his instruction. Through the joint-responsibility rule of conspiracy, he was convicted of the murders themselves.

Manson is forever associated with “Helter Skelter”, the term he took from the Beatles song of that name and construed as a race-based conflict that the crimes were intended to precipitate. This connection with rock music linked him, from the beginning of his notoriety, with pop culture, in which he became an emblem of transgression, rebellion, evil, ghoulishness, bloody violence, homicidal psychosis, and the macabre. Ultimately, the term was used as the title of the book that prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi wrote about the Manson murders.

At the time the Family began to form, Manson was an unemployed ex-convict, who had spent half his life in correctional institutions for a variety of offenses. In the period before the murders, he was a distant fringe member of the Los Angeles music industry, chiefly via a chance association with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. After Manson was charged with the crimes, recordings of songs written and performed by him were released commercially; a number of artists have covered his songs in the decades since.

Manson’s death sentence was automatically reduced to life imprisonment when a decision by the Supreme Court of California temporarily eliminated the state’s death penalty. California’s eventual reestablishment of capital punishment did not affect Manson, who is an inmate at Corcoran State Prison.

Early life

Childhood
First known as “no name Maddox,” Manson was born to unmarried, sixteen-year-old Kathleen Maddox in Cincinnati General Hospital, Cincinnati, Ohio; no more than three weeks after his birth, he was Charles Milles Maddox. For a period, after her son’s birth, Kathleen Maddox was married to a laborer named William Manson, whose last name the boy was given. Charles Manson’s biological father appears to have been a “Colonel Scott”, against whom Maddox filed a bastardy suit that resulted in an agreed judgment in 1937. Possibly, Charles never really knew him.

Young Manson’s mother, allegedly a drinker, once sold him for a pitcher of beer to a childless waitress, from whom his uncle retrieved him some days later. When his mother and her brother were sentenced to five years imprisonment for robbing a Charleston, West Virginia, service station in 1939, Manson was placed in the McMechen, West Virginia, home of an aunt and uncle who grew very religious. Upon his mother’s 1942 parole, Manson was retrieved by his mother and lived with her in run-down hotel rooms. He would one day characterize her physical embrace of him on the day she returned from prison as his sole childhood joy.

In 1947, Kathleen Maddox tried to have her son placed in a foster home but failed because no such home was available. The court placed Manson in Gibault School for Boys, in Terre Haute, Indiana. After ten months, he fled from there to his mother, who rejected him.
First offenses
By burgling a grocery store, Manson obtained cash that enabled him to rent a room. A string of burglaries of other stores, from one of which he stole a bicycle, ended when he was caught in the act and sent to an Indianapolis juvenile center. His escape after one day led to his recapture and his placement in Boys Town, from which he escaped with another boy four days after his arrival. The pair committed two armed robberies on their way to the home of the other boy’s uncle.

Caught during the second of two subsequent break-ins of grocery stores, Manson was sent, at age thirteen, to the Indiana School for Boys, where, he would later claim, he was brutalized sexually and otherwise. After many failed attempts, he escaped with two other boys in 1951.

In Utah, having burgled gas stations all along the way, the three were caught driving to California in cars they had stolen. For the federal crime of taking a stolen car across a state line, Manson was sent to the Washington, D.C., National Training School for Boys. Despite four years of schooling and an average IQ of 109 (later tested at 121), he was illiterate. A caseworker concluded he was aggressively antisocial.
First imprisonment
Less than a month before a scheduled February 1952 parole hearing at Natural Bridge Honor Camp, a minimum security institution to which he had been transferred the previous October on a psychiatrist’s recommendation, Manson “took a razor blade and held it against another boy’s throat while he sodomized him.” He was transferred to the Federal Reformatory, Petersburg, Virginia, where he was considered “dangerous.” In September 1952, a number of other serious disciplinary offenses resulted in his transfer to the Federal Reformatory at Chillicothe, Ohio, a more secure institution. About a month after the transfer, he became almost a model resident. Good work habits and a rise in his educational level from the lower fourth to the upper seventh grade won him a May 1954 parole.

After temporarily honoring a parole condition that he live with his aunt and uncle in West Virginia, Manson moved in with his mother in that same state. In January 1955, he married Rosalie Jean Willis, a hospital waitress, with whom, by his own account, he found genuine, if short-lived, marital happiness, and whom he supported via smalltime jobs and auto theft.

Around October, about three months after he and his pregnant wife arrived in Los Angeles in a car he had stolen in Ohio, Manson was again charged with a federal crime for taking the vehicle interstate; after a psychiatric evaluation, he was given five years’ probation. His subsequent failure to appear at a Los Angeles hearing on an identical charge filed in Florida resulted in his March 1956 arrest in Indianapolis. His probation was revoked; he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment at Terminal Island, San Pedro, California.

Charles Manson Jr., Manson’s son by Rosalie, was born while Manson was in prison. During his first year at Terminal Island, Manson received visits from his wife and mother, who were now living together in Los Angeles; but in March 1957, when the visits from his wife ceased, his mother informed him Rosalie was living with another man. Caught trying to escape by stealing a car less than two weeks before a scheduled parole hearing, Manson was given five years’ probation; his parole was denied.
Second imprisonment
Manson received five years parole in September 1958, the same year in which Rosalie received a decree of divorce. By November, he was pimping a sixteen-year-old girl and was receiving additional support from a girl with wealthy parents. Pleading guilty in September 1959 to a charge of attempting to cash a forged U.S. Treasury check, he received a ten-year suspended sentence and probation after a young woman with an arrest record for prostitution tearfully told the court she and Manson were in love and would marry if Manson were freed. The woman, whose name was Leona and who, as a prostitute, had used the name Candy Stevens, did, in fact, marry Manson before the year’s end, possibly so testimony against him would not be required of her.

After Manson took that same woman and another girl from California to New Mexico for purposes of prostitution before the year’s end, he was held and questioned for violation of the Mann Act. Though he was released, he evidently suspected, rightly, that the investigation had not ended. When he disappeared, in violation of his probation, a bench warrant was issued; an April 1960 indictment for violation of the Mann Act followed. Arrested in Laredo, Texas, in June, when one of his girls was arrested for prostitution, Manson was returned to Los Angeles. For violation of his probation on the check-cashing charge, he was ordered to serve his ten-year sentence.

In July 1961, after a year spent unsuccessfully appealing the revocation of his probation, Manson was transferred from the Los Angeles County Jail to the United States Penitentiary at McNeil Island, Washington. Although the Mann Act charge had been dropped, the attempt to cash the Treasury check was still a federal offense. His September 1961 annual review noted he had a “tremendous drive to call attention to himself,” an observation echoed in September 1964. In the interval, in 1963, Leona was granted a divorce, in the pursuit of which she alleged she and Manson had had a son, Charles Luther.

In June 1966, Manson was sent, for the second time in his life, to Terminal Island, in preparation for early release. By March 21, 1967, his release day, he had spent more than half of his thirty-two years in prisons and other institutions. Telling the authorities that prison had become his home, he requested, unsuccessfully, that he be permitted to stay, a fact touched on in a 1981 television interview:

Tom Snyder: Let’s go back to 1967, the time you were winding up serving a term of a number of years, ten years, and written accounts indicate that you told the authorities, “Don’t let me out, I can’t cope with the outside world.” Do you have a recollection of that? And do you –
Manson: You’re making a desperate plea out of something, man. There’s no desperate plea out of it. I said I can’t handle the maniacs outside, let me back in.
Snyder: I didn’t use the word desperate; that’s your word, Charles.
Manson: Yeah, well, your inflection and your voice tones were, uh, implications there.

Rise of the Family
On his release day, Manson requested and was granted permission to move to San Francisco, where, with the help of a prison acquaintance, he obtained an apartment in Berkeley. In prison, he had been taught to play steel guitar by 1930s bank robber Alvin Karpis; now, living mostly by panhandling, he soon got to know Mary Brunner, a twenty-three-year-old University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate working as an assistant librarian at UC Berkeley. After moving in with her, he overcame her resistance to his bringing other women in to live with them. Before long, they were sharing Brunner’s residence with eighteen other women.

Manson also established himself as a guru in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, which, during 1967’s Summer of Love, was emerging as the signature hippie locale. Expounding a philosophy that included some of the Scientology he had studied in prison, he soon had his first group of young followers, most of them female.

Before the summer was out, Manson and eight or nine of his enthusiasts piled into an old school bus they had re-wrought in hippie style, with colored rugs and pillows in place of the many seats they had removed. Hitting the road, they roamed as far north as Washington State, then southward through Los Angeles, Mexico, and the southwest. Returning to the Los Angeles area, they lived in Topanga Canyon, Malibu, and Venice — western parts of the city and county.

In an alternative account, which included no mention of the eighteen girls at Brunner’s place, Manson, apparently accompanied by Brunner, acquired Family members during some months of travels that were undertaken, in part, in a Volkswagen van; it was November when the school bus set out from San Francisco with the enlarged group.
Involvement with Wilson, Melcher, et al.
The events that would culminate in the murders were set in motion in late spring 1968, when, by some accounts, Dennis Wilson, of The Beach Boys, picked up two hitchhiking Manson girls and brought them to his Pacific Palisades house for a few hours. Returning home in the early hours of the following morning from a night recording session, Wilson was greeted in the driveway of his own residence by Manson, who emerged from the house. Uncomfortable, Wilson asked the stranger whether he intended to hurt him. Assuring him he had no such intent, Mans