I don't feel that way anymore. This I blame on several people, including Gary Erickson, an investigator at the Marin County, Calif., coroner's office, where bodies pulled from the water below the Golden Gate Bridge are taken; Richard Snyder, author of a research paper titled "Fatal Injuries Resulting From Extreme Water Impact"; and Herb Lopez, a Golden Gate Bridge safety patrol sergeant.

Continue Reading...

If anyone needed help relaxing, it was Joaquim Chissano. For years, guerrilla warfare had consumed his country, flattening tourism and every other industry that had managed to take root in the preceding decades. It was a country of guns and politics, and seemingly little else. Though the civil strife was technically over, the nation was still in shock. It lay like a downed prizefighter, dazed and bleeding. The infrastructure in the capital had long ago been given up on. Power outages happened nightly, leaving cars and pedestrians to navigate the shelled-out streets by moonlight.

Continue Reading...

But all is not good with the world. In maybe a third of the stalls in women's rest rooms these days (according to my desultory research), the toilet seat is liberally puddled with piss. Somewhere along the line, germ-phobic women began crouching above the toilet seat rather than sitting on a paper seat cover. Women have begun peeing like men, but they lack the courtesy to put up the seat. And since women cannot aim like men -- they have nothing to aim with -- a good many of them end up hosing urine on the seat. Very few, it would seem, bother to wipe it up.

Now when the rest of us come along and want to use this toilet, a seat cover is no longer an option, for it will soak through, forcing us to sit down on paper sopped in someone else's excretions. So we are forced to either wipe up said excretions, or stand ourselves.

Continue Reading...

Apparently the CrossAction isn't just any toothbrush. It isn't, in the same way the Mach 3 wasn't just any razor. Both were developed by Gillette (Gillette owns Oral-B), a company with a flair for extravagant, costly research into everyday toiletry items.

I asked CrossAction development team member Dave Weber why a company would spend three years and $72 million reinventing the humble toothbrush. He said, "We believe that being leaders in daily oral hygiene care and physical plaque removal really takes understanding the science and going beyond what's been traditionally thought of in terms of toothbrush design." This is what a man who spends 11 months in a room working on a toothbrush sounds like. It sounds to me like the company should have let him out to go to the movies every now and then, but who am I to argue with a leader in daily oral hygiene care and physical plaque removal.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Having spent last Friday morning acting the part of a sarin nerve gas victim at the Henry J. Kaiser Arena in Oakland, Calif., I am here to tell you that should such a heinous thing ever occur, the citizens of Oakland are in a bit of trouble. It was called a disaster-preparedness exercise, but as far as most of us could tell, it was the exercise that was a disaster, minus most of the preparedness.

Disaster-preparedness drills happen all the time -- earthquake, terrorist attack, plane crash, biological weapons; you name it, they prepare for it. The American Red Cross sets up a lot of them. If you, too, would like to be a victim/actor, they'd love to hear from you. They usually have to badger their own volunteers into action. Student paramedics and high school kids also get pressed into duty a lot. I seemed to be the only one there for the fun of it, and now I know why.

Continue Reading...

"Stump" is not a derogatory term among these amputees. "Residual limb" is the p.c. term, but everyone here today says stump. As in, "Your stump will change size if you gain or lose weight" or "My daughter-in-law's Dalmatian is fascinated by his stump." In case you are wondering what they call us, we're TABs, which stands for totally able-bodied. "Or, less optimistically," quips one amputee, "temporarily able-bodied."

Continue Reading...

Unpigmented white spots on forearms. Compared with those little red, raised blobs on your chest and upper arms, these white spots are hardly noticeable. By the way, I'm guessing they're not only on your arms. Have you examined the fronts of your shins lately?

Red blobs on chest. These are barely visible from across a large, poorly lit room. Try to associate with people with limited vision.

Receding gums. What you are failing to realize is that the enamel underneath your gums has been protected from unsightly coffee and cigarette stains for the past 30 years and is as white and perfect as your toilet bowl above the waterline. Also, many of you have the problem of unflattering gummy smiles, and this will be alleviated by the gradual disappearance of your gums.

Continue Reading...

That was my experience one afternoon inside a glass-walled smoking room at the Continental terminal of San Francisco International Airport. As with most places I can't imagine going to, I felt a little uncomfortable walking in. But no one paid me any mind. Oddly, pathetically, being taken for a smoker made me feel kind of cool. (Why do I admit these things to anyone?)

I took off my coat and sat down. As I did not then light up a cigarette, but merely sat there looking around and smiling stupidly, the smokers soon began to suspect that something was up -- that they had a ding-dong in their midst, a nonsmoker who didn't realize she was sitting in a smoking room. One summer during college I walked in off the street to apply for a job at what I took to be a bar but in fact was a strip joint. I do not have the requisite equipment or general air of a stripper, and the manager must have suspected that I was a naive ding-dong but did not know exactly what to say. I was getting that same sort of look in the smoking room.

Continue Reading...

Because I did not want to stay up until midnight (9 a.m. Prague
time) to shout "Ludek Cerny?!" to faraway Czech-speaking clinic employees, I asked around among my friends. Very
soon, much sooner than I expected, I located a domestically based carrot addict.

The woman prefers to keep her identity secret, but if you ever run
into her, she will have a hard time doing this, for her palms and soles have, as she puts it, "an orangey cast," and the rest of her has a subtler yellow-orange "QT" tinge. The reason for this, according to one journal article, is that the palms and soles have a thicker "horny layer," and carotene (which gives carrots their color) has an affinity for the horny layer. This was the first I'd heard of the horny layer, and I made a mental note to locate mine and take it out for a spin some Saturday night.

Continue Reading...

It is a winsome fate, to be a nonskier in a world-class ski resort. To be in Davos without skis is like visiting L.A. without a car. People wonder what you're up to (in my case, an assignment at the avalanche research center).

It doesn't help that Switzerland is in the midst of a record-breaking snowstorm. The snow is coming down hard, in knuckle-sized rafts of flakes, big pillowy chunks that hit your glasses and explode into fluff. Roofs are mattressed with snow, a foot since last night. A car goes by with bits of white still clinging to its exterior, like a man who's gone out with shaving cream on his face. (You can tell at once who has a garage and who doesn't.)

Outside my hotel window, pedestrians steady themselves with ski poles. A pair of teenagers ski down the street and park their equipment in a rack outside the pastry shop. (They have ski racks here the way we have bicycle racks.)

Continue Reading...

You would then become sidetracked and further learn that approximately four rodent hairs are allowed in a jar of peanut butter, that an average of 60 thrips are allowed in 100 grams of frozen broccoli, that 10 grams of hops are allowed to contain 2,500 aphids and that 5 milligrams of rat excreta in a pound of sesame seeds is A-OK with the FDA.

What you would not learn is why the FDA might put a limit on insects' heads and not other parts of their anatomy, what rat excreta tastes like and what sort of person takes a job that entails searching for insect heads in fig cookie innards. To find these things out, you would have to pay a visit to one of the FDA's regional filth labs. You would, but now you don't have to because I'm doing it for you.

Continue Reading...

Benson is the author of two medical books for the preparedness culture: "Survivalist's Medicine Chest," and "Do-It-Yourself Medicine," the latter having sold more than 100,000 copies. How do recluses in backwoods Idaho procure such an item? They shop the Internet. Amazon.com is a godsend for the shack-bound but Internet-savvy retreater. Both Benson's medical books ship within 24 hours, as do his -- as he puts it -- "more strident" titles, e.g., "Survival Poaching and Man Trapping." (Ragnar's "Guide to Home and Recreational Use of High Explosives" has been pulled from distribution, owing to a law passed by Congress this October, which is too bad because I've been nosing around for a new pastime and high explosives sounded just the ticket.)

Continue Reading...

I am not the first person to have had these thoughts. The first person, so far as I am able to verify, was a Frenchman named E. Revilloid. The year was 1885. Revilloid not only had these thoughts, but undertook to answer them in a scientific manner, filling up a stomach (removed from its deceased gentilhomme owner) until it burst. The rupture threshold was determined to be 4,000 cc, or about four quarts. Six years later, a German physician by the name of Key-Aberg repeated the experiment. (The German of yesteryear was a hearty eater, a fact borne out in a ghastly 1929 Annals of Surgery article. The paper summarizes 14 cases of fatal overeating, including a 17-year-old female done in by a "large portion of sauerkraut.")

Continue Reading...

Patrick's field of study was a grisly offshoot of the automotive safety industry known as "human impact survival research." You are perhaps wondering, as I did: Why didn't they use crash-test dummies? This was the other side of the equation. A dummy could tell you how much impact a crash was unleashing on various dummy body parts, but without knowing how much impact the real body part can take, the information was useless. You first needed to know, for instance, that the maximum amount a rib cage can compress without causing injury to the soft wet things inside it is two and three-quarter inches. Or that the speed required for a human skull to penetrate a circa-1964 windshield is 12.9 mph. Things like that.

Continue Reading...

Now it is the 90s, and the growers would give great amounts of prune profits to undo what their forebears have done. "The stigma has carried over to the point where we don't even want to talk about it any more," says Jim Degen, a food and beverage marketing consultant retained by the California Prune Board to spruce up the geriatric image of Prunus domesticus. It isn't so much that the growers are embarrassed. It's this: "Most eaters" -- Degen divides the world into prune "eaters" and "noneaters" -- "are 60-plus, and they're dying off. We have to go after the younger market."

The Prune Board's first step was to move away from the ill-connoted word. Don't say prunes. Say dried plums. (Unless you are in a photo shoot. "Prunes" is what photographers tell models to say to make them have kissy-lips. Saying "dried plums" makes you look like a llama and is unlikely to advance your modeling career.)

Continue Reading...

My first Toto encounter took place in a Tokyo restroom outfitted with a Toto Washlet. A control panel next to the seat displayed pastel buttons marked with graphics, the choices appearing to be: Lying-Down 3 and Armless Lady Sitting Atop Geyser. Having visited the Old Faithful geyser and doubting my ability to remain balanced atop anything of the sort, with or without arms, I pressed the other button. The Lying-Down 3, it turns out, represents a pair of buttocks. I had unwittingly opted for a rectal washing. A pulsating spray shot up from inside the toilet bowl, causing me to leap from the seat in horror, allowing the water to jet from the toilet bowl in a graceful arc, wetting the floor and key pieces of my clothing.

I cowered in the corner waiting for the storm to pass and praying that no one would open the door in the next few minutes and catch me blow-drying my panties over the air-dry cycle.

Continue Reading...

For someone whose job is to go around encouraging talk about
prescriptions, she was pretty tight-lipped. She told me she'd mail me a press kit and got off the phone stat, as they say in medicine land.

This was OK with me, for October is a busy month. I must make sure my jumper cables are rust- and corrosion-free with no exposed wires (October is Auto Battery Safety Month), gently brush the outer tooth surfaces using a vibrating back and forth motion (October is National Dental Hygiene Month), talk openly about family planning with my stepchildren (October is National Family Sexuality Education Month), disinfect food preparation surfaces twice weekly (Oct. 17-24 is National Infection Control Week), highlight adult and adolescent immunization issues (Oct. 10-16 is National Adult Immunization Awareness Week) and practice my home fire escape plan (Oct. 3-9 is National Fire Prevention Week).

Continue Reading...

"I have no idea what the hell that means," says Richard Price, a dentist in Newton, Mass., and a spokesman for the American Dental Association.

Price personally has never given deep thought to the former head of state's salivary clarity. However, when pressed, he did admit that there are qualitative differences in patients' oral secretions -- but none that would that would either make or break a presidential election. "Some people have a very thick, a very mucousy, saliva. Ropey would be the technical term. The good stuff, if you will, is a copious flow of nice clear saliva, almost waterlike."

Continue Reading...

You see, researchers cannot study animal brains to learn about mental illness, because animals don't get mentally ill. While some animals -- cats, for example, and dogs small enough to fit into bicycle baskets -- seem to incorporate mental illness as a natural personality feature, animals are not known to have diagnosable brain disorders like Alzheimer's and schizophrenia. So researchers need to study brains of mentally ill humans and, as controls, brains of normal humans like you and me (OK, you).

My reasons for becoming a brain donor aren't very good at all. My reasons boil down to a Harvard Brain Bank donor wallet card,which enables me to say "I'm going to Harvard" and not be lying. You do not need brains to go to the Harvard Brain Bank -- only a brain.

One fine fall day, I decided to visit my final resting place. The Brain Bank is part of Harvard's McLean Hospital, which sits on a rolling estate of handsome brick buildings just outside Boston. I was directed to the third floor of the Mailman Research Building. The woman pronounced it "Melmon," so as to avoid having to answer stupid questions about what kind of research is being done on mailmen.

Continue Reading...