ok, he's "vertically challenged and has an adipose tissue accumulation disorder"

Here's one about Pierre dü Fromage, the irritable morbidly obese midget:
"When Pierre found out he had a benign tumor on his pituitary gland that prevented the secretion of human growth hormone, he was only 8 years old and had barely reached the lofty height of three feet, six inches. As he matured, he became depressed because everyone in school was almost three feet taller than him, and he waxed irritable. Pierre also did not speak a lick of English, and being in Fall River, Massachusetts with all the Portuguese kids further complicated the situation. When he walked down the hallways of the school, people would point and laugh at the tiny man. Pierre would kick them in the shins and bite them on the buttocks until they stopped teasing him. He felt ostracized from the rest of society, and since there was no circus in Fall River, he secluded himself in his room and solaced himself with food. Pierre found he did not like people too much, and would complain about them every chance he got."

More: "One morning, Pierre awoke and found himself sleeping on a bench in a subway. He wondered how he had woken up yet still found himself sleeping, but he chalked it up to the alcohol. .... He started screaming obscenities in French and struggling against the swarm of people, but he knew if he bit anyone's buttocks, they'd have him lynched."

 
adventures in journalism

I found my writing journal from last semester's terribly dull writing class (which I failed, consequently, because I did not go too often). Here's a page.
Prompt: "Raphael walks out of the Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., with a 2 million year old phalanx in his pocket."
Me: "Raphael is a not-so-notorious drug smuggler from Colombia. His latest 'shipment,' which happened to be 30 tons of pure, unadulterated cocaine, also happened to get on a different flight than Raphael, and was lost somewhere in the vicinity of Hoboken, New Jersey. Raphael was lost somewhere in the vicinity of the Washington Monument. So Raphael is wandering around downtown D.C. with a smile on his weatherbeaten caramel face and a sack of the aforementioned cocaine in a strategic location. He strolled nonchalantly past the ticket counter at the Museum of Natural History and found himself in the primate exhibit listening to some vapid young woman ask where a phalanx was located.* He stared vacantly at the Ardipithecus and Australopithecus specimens, and as he bent to read the placard, he noticed a small, short bone just past the security bar. He picked it up and walked out, completely unaware of what he had just done. At least that's what he told the police."

* This vapid young woman was my teacher, who, in addition to spelling the word "phalange," also asked me where it was.

 
although you are nude, i will not write your biography

I don't know what the hell is going on.

 
sweet, sweet nedstat...

Haha. On the NedStat site-tracking deal at the bottom of the 'ol blog here, it says

Forecast for today
	On average 7 percent of the daily visits are made before 11:48. Based on the number of visitors of 3 today so far, today your site may have 41 page views (+/- 22).

Forty-one pages views? That'd be the day. I like how it also says "+/- 22," that makes me feel very optimistic and frankly euphoric about the relative popularity of this blog. Ah, shut up. I hope they don't hit me for stealing that chunk of code there. Hey, I don't see a copyright or anything.. maybe it's intellectual property... but then again, anyone could have come up with the code, so it's not really theirs to begin with. It really belongs to the W3C, because they made the code. Or maybe it belongs to Algore. Or that guy who "created the internet" to share his papers with colleagues. So it's his. Sorry bub, it's mine now. I'd make the world's worst lawyer.

 
dear sweet jesus

ME? Yeah right! ME Britney Spears!? *maniacal laughter*

Now you do it. Take the"which pop sensation are you" quiz, Elton.

 
why i don't survey much

Ugh. Those losers at NPD treat me like I'm a teenager. Here's an excerpt from the last survey I did:
Them: Duh, tell us any thoughts you have about money!
Me: The city in which I live is filled with money-hungry, God-fearing, white Scandinavian imports. I am a poor atheist Italian. And they say there is no class system in America! What a lie! There is as much class division as there was in 18th century France. The chasm between rich and poor grows larger every day: once you become destitute you stay there; rarely do we encounter an affluent who has fallen from grace (except perhaps in the Enron debacle, but I won't go there).
Har har har.

 
tragedy

My brother's friend Richard died last night from a stroke. I didn't even know the guy and I cried when I heard of his passing. It all seems so surreal; I'd always heard so much about him and I met him once at the Target where he worked, and to think his short life had suddenly been extinguished by a clump of fibrinogen is heart-breaking. I wish I could have gotten to know the fragile young man Richard....
I don't feel quite up to posting anything humorous right now.

 
heathens!

On the Famous Name Recognition Test, by the same people who brought you the Personality Disorder Test below, only 27% of the people who participated knew who Søren Kierkegaard was! More people knew who Bronson Pinchot is.... and more people were familiar with Walt Disney than with Jesus. Shades of the pack-rat dinner party, I tells ya.
NEW: Me whining about that other 73%.
Also, D. Anthony Storm's website devoted to Kierkegaard, in case you are part of that other 73%.

 
they call me "paranoid schizoavoidodependent compulsive"

Just as Tiger Woods coined the term "Cablinasian" to describe his ethnicity, I have the above to describe my mental status.
Here is the results of a test I took a little while ago:

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid:	High
Schizoid:	High
Schizotypal:	Moderate
Antisocial:	Moderate
Borderline:	Moderate
Histrionic:	Low
Narcissistic:	Moderate
Avoidant:	High
Dependent:	High
Obsessive-Compulsive:	High

Think you're crazy too? Then click your butt over to the Personality Disorder Test and we can compare results. And switch medications.

 
more uteri

So, I got my uterus the other day, and I still can't figure out what its purpose is. Click here to take a look. If you have any idea what the heck this is used for, e-mail me at napkintosh@TOMSUX.yahoo.com (deleting the TOMSUX, of course.. this is to deter bots).

 
no one cares

My politics teacher today compared Dukakis and Reagan to Mutt and Jeff. NO ONE UNDER THE AGE OF 60 KNOWS WHO MUTT AND JEFF ARE, NOR DO THEY CARE. *cough* Thank you.

 
what's that fishy smell?

Uhhhhhhhh. I went to the Asian market downtown this afternoon, and the entire store smelled like an overturned Biffy. I also went to Bill's Stale Store and bought, among other things, a can of squid. Yeah yeah yeah, a can of squid... I just wanted to try it. When I got home I rinsed the putrid grey slime off the squid (for about 20 minutes, and my hands still have a sardine-like odor and texture), cut up the tube-part (the head?), and sauteed it. Mixed it with some pasta and tomatoes.. drizzled some Balsamic vinegar on top.. crumbled some Bulgarian feta over it... mmmm... I CAN'T BELIEVE I ATE SQUID

 
*gutteral sound*

Ohh yeah, woo woo woo: on the Site Statistics page for the 'ol blog here, under "top web addresses viewed before coming to your page," 0.06% of all 20 unique visitors came from http://www.leoville.com/mt/archives/000280.shtml! Woo woo woo! (that's not a train noise, shut up)

 
more on rubber uterus disks

I ordered one today. It will be sent out "no later than March 18, 2002," so expect some pictures soon. I think the uterus disk is a diaphragm for demonstrations (e.g. 10th grade health class), but I was really hoping for a coaster or something. That'd be cool.
Anyway.. I've got strep throat again. What the hell is wrong with me? Argh.

 
just a thought...

Why is eugenics such a bad idea? We keep people alive just for the sake of having them there - take, for example, the young couple who learns their son has a condition largely incompatible with life, say, hypoplastic left heart syndrome. The left ventricle is underdeveloped, so the right one takes over. Since the ductus arteriosus doesn't close for a few days after birth, everything looks a-ok. Even with surgery, only about half of all affected infants survive. Assuming the kid does live, what would be the point of keeping him alive until he is of reproductive age and able to pass on his faulty genes, when he should have died anyway? I do not mean

Look at the genetic diversity here, isn't it astounding? Pretend for example people with genotypes AA and Aa are homozygous dominant and heterozygous, respectively, for bright red hair; people who are homozygous recessive, aa, have lackluster white hair. BB and Bb represent a definitive height of six feet; bb represents a height of 3 feet. These traits obviously could not be expressed for real, but they are here for sake of example. I know what I'm talking about.

"should have died" in the sense of "must die"; rather, I see it as "destined to die." I don't think all mentally handicapped people should be exterminated, nor do I think only a select few should be chosen to reproduce. I wouldn't be one of them, believe you me. Having only an elite group of genetically "superior" people would destroy the genetic diversity that allows the human race to survive catastrophic events and such. The sickle cell trait, common in people of African and Mediterranean descent, is a safeguard against malaria (although not totally effective, it decreases the severity of the disease). This was a mutation that proved to be beneficial. By the time any sort of function-enhancing mutation occured in the offspring, now horribly inbred, it might be too late. Maybe eugenics is a stupid idea. Or maybe I'm just talking out of my ass.
Notice in the table above there are no individuals with white hair. For simplicity's sake the F2 generation was the same AABb person crossed with each of his sibs, and this cross produces no individuals with genotype aa_ _. Such an individual could be obtained by crossing a heterozygote (a "hybrid" for all you hybridy folks out there) Aa_ _ with another of the same genotype. The resulting cross would give 1 AA_ _, 2 Aa_ _s, and 1 aa_ _. Also note the "true-breeding" individual in the third cross for the F2 generation. If he was a lab rat you might want to hang on to him to obtain "clean" specimens, but otherwise he eliminates all diversity (i.e. if he is crossed with another AABB, all their offspring will be AABB... obviously not a good thing). Humans are much more complex than this 2 gene model, but the idea is there and that's all that matters. :P

 
free rubber uterus disk

Click here to order one of these things. What would a person need with a rubber uterus disk, anyway?

 
charlatanry and such

Hrm. If I rack up enough CME hours, do I get some sort of recognition? In Minnesota, the requirement is 75 credit hours over 3 years. I just started taking the tests last night and have 2 credit hours so far.... This is all fine, except I'm not a physician. Nor am I a nurse, anesthesiologist, pharmacist, medical student, or anything even remotely medically related. I don't even have a job.