For your listening pleasure (?)

OK. When you search for the Coz cat for your friend the Atomic Editor, occasionally you'll end up with nothing. Not the case this time. While I didn't find the photo (Merujo, happy hunting!), I managed to come across some seriously messed up stuff at Frank's Vinyl Museum.

You'll need RealPlayer to hear these.

First, we start with a little Bill Cosby. Have a listen as Coz puts his imprint on "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." Mmmmmm....

Next, we have ABBA singing phonetically again, but this time it's in Spanish. A little "Reina Danzante," anyone?

One of my favorite finds at Frank's site was "Monsters Go Disco," where loser monsters Count Chocula, Frankenberry, and Boo Berry agonize over what to do on a boring Saturday evening. You see where this is going. (It was nice to see Boo Berry with a gig, since he was apparently the weak link in the cereal monster chain. Damn you, General Mills.)

A slightly more serious track was the original "Mission: Impossible" theme. Done in it's inimitable 5/4 time, this particular version is longer than the 30 seconds the TV show allowed, so you get to hear the bridge and the rest of the song as it was originally written. Good stuff.

No list of completely bizarre tuneage would be complete without a visit from Muhammand Ali and His Gang as they take on Mr. Tooth Decay. Howard Cosell provides the play-by-play. I swear I didn't make that up.

Finally, especially for Merujo and her friend April, I include one of the most insidious Saturday-morning songs of all time. Enjoy!

"Choose your own adventure" gone bad...

This is hilarious, but nowhere near family-friendly. You have been warned. My favorite is "The Miracle Worker." Draw your own conclusions.

The Mütter Museum

For those of you following the exploits of Merujo, you know that we made a sojourn to Philadelphia this past Friday to visit the Mütter Museum and hear Michael Penn play (which he did not do at the museum). Given that MapQuest has it in for us, we were a bit late in getting to the museum, which is not in the best of Philly neighborhoods, but by far not in the worst, either. Who says you can't have a Physicians' College just around the corner from an adult bookstore? Works for me, I guess.

I have wanted to visit this museum for a very long time, and I'm surprised that Merujo and I didn't make the trip sooner. (Actually, we did once not too long ago, but I got sick. My bad.) The Mütter Museum is decidedly old school, which I appreciate beyond measure. Lots of dark wood, brass, and glass. It makes you work, rather than spoonfeeding the information to you—no interactivity whatsoever. While there's a temporary exhibit at the beginning (right now they're covering the Lewis and Clark Expedition), the really good stuff lies just beyond. The permanent collection on display is fairly small—it's a not-very-big room on two floors, with a central staircase.

You start out on the top floor with a presentation on conjoined twins throughout history (more on them in a bit). Behind you is a set of 19th-century wax models of skin diseases. Some of them look disturbingly real. (There are several wax representations of disease throughout the entire collection, really. For me, this is a winning combination—wax museums and medical stuff. Life is really good sometimes.) At the top of the stairs is the Soap Lady, a woman whose body turned to adipocere (use caution before visiting this link) some time in the 1830s or 1840s. I was unexpectedly very touched by this display, and made a special trip back to see it just before the museum closed. As Merujo put it the next day, she "didn't look at rest." After the Soap Lady, you work your way around to the wall of skulls. Past the skulls, you work your way toward a study on early forensics (or the lack thereof), and learn how, despite evidence in the form of a skull with a huge hunk out of it, an axe murderer escaped justice. Once you've had your fill of the top floor, the lower gallery beckons.

The lower gallery consists of four main subject areas: Normal and Abnormal Fetal Development, Internal Medicine, Disorders of the Skeletal System, and Neurology. However, amidst the various and sundry wax models of hernias, baby spines, and ovarian cysts the size of basketballs, I only really want to focus on two things (okay, it could be three if you want to be technical about it): a massive colon and a plaster cast of Chang and Eng Bunker (the original Siamese Twins).

First, the colon. This thing was most likely around six feet long, and at its widest around 12-14" thick. The poor guy who had it went to see a doctor about it in 1892. Our poor wretch was told it was something minor and was sent home. He died within a few weeks. There are two photos of this guy, and he looks like he's overly pregnant. According to the display, the colon held (and you may want to skip this bit if you're faint of heart) "two and a half buckets" of waste, or nearly 40 pounds. And this is a minor problem? Uff da. The condition is now called Hirschprung's disease.

Then we come to Chang and Eng. Everyone thought (in 1874) that they shared a heart, and so once they died an autopsy was performed. It turned out that they only shared a liver (which is conveniently on display below the plaster cast—the liver's in formaldehyde and is bleached completely white). I bought a t-shirt. Is that tasteless?

I thought I was finished with my overview, but I can't leave you without quickly touching on the collection of foreign bodies. A doctor in the early 20th century developed tools to pull things out of the "broncho-esophageal" area. And, apparently, once he pulled them out, he saved them. Over 2,000 things pulled out of people's throats are completely cataloged and available for viewing in a set of drawers just past the massive colon. Who knew that people swallowed so many safety pins in the 1920s?

All in all, it was an excellent museum. I reveled in it's antique-ness, and would love to go again in the near future. Next time we'll know where to leave the car, thus saving us the agony of paying $23 for two hours' parking.

At least he wasn't wearing a plaid skirt (as far as we know)

Who knew that Louis Armstrong was this far ahead of his time?

And they called him Mr. Itchy Lungs

Although more accurately it should be "Mr. Itchy Trachea", but that just doesn't scan as well. I returned from Spain (a country that is, for all intents and purposes, just one big smoking section) this past weekend, only to be waylaid by bronchitis. So I went to the doctor yesterday, and apparently my trachea still hasn't healed completely since my bout with whooping cough earlier this year. (On a side note, this means that I'm a statistic. Should I be impressed with myself about this?) As a result of the still-traumatized state of my windpipe, I don't have the robust, manly cough I think I should possess (or, frankly, that I deserve). Rather, I sound like a rubber chew toy under assault by a fairly excited dachshund. Hopefully the Zithromax will work its magic quickly and I can return to the land of the living soon.

This is just so wrong (WARNING: contains adult, if not just plain unnecessary, content)

Sphincter bleaching (yep, it's what you think it is) is not something I'd ever really given a lot of thought to, and I will do my level best to continue this trend. However, after reading this, I think I'm scarred for life.

Tom DeLay, amnesiac (he has forgotten the face of his father)

I've been watching Tom DeLay juke around ethics charges for the last couple of years. Now comes along an issue he can really relate to: Terri Schiavo. Not so much as a person, but as an object. She died today, despite Congressional interference. While I'm not glad she's dead, I am glad she's no longer suffering. I will not go into the whole "she wasn't suffering" debate right now. I will say that she didn't exactly seem to be thriving, or even improving for that matter. This particular discussion is not so much about her condition as it is about Tom DeLay's.

This past Monday I read with great interest an article by William Saletan on Slate.com that outlined Tom's response to a family tragedy that paralleled the Schiavo case in several ways. To get to the point: in 1988 his dad suffered catastrophic brain damage and went into a coma. Tom and family decided to pull the plug, despite the fact that Dad reacted when his son entered the room. Apparently there was no overarching "culture of life" in 1988 that required the attention of Congress and the president. At least not a noticeable one, or one that had any impact, as far as Tom was concerned. (I will avoid the obvious temptation here to make some sort of bad-taste allusion to Tom's being a former exterminator. But it's tempting. Boy is it.)

So he and his family made the decision to unplug his father because, as the article states, "they inferred, without written evidence, that Charles [dad] wouldn't have wanted" to go on living in "this condition." So I found it rather interesting (in the Midwestern sense of the word) that although Michael Schiavo had decided the same thing (although purportedly with Terri's prior verbal consent), it was wrong, wrong, wrong. I can feel my blood pressure begin to soar as I reflect on this bald-faced hypocrisy.

I won't dive into the ramifications of Congressional intervention on behalf of a single citizen. However, I will dive into the hypocrisy evinced by Tom DeLay. Surely it was agonizing for Michael Schiavo to have to see his wife in a terminal vegetative state. It was agonizing for all of America to see her like that. We'll never know if Terri Schiavo explicitly told Michael that she was not to be kept alive by artificial means. We have to give him the benefit of the doubt. People will tell a spouse lots of things they will never tell a parent, which is why these types of medical decisions are made by spouses (generally). This didn't matter to Tom, even though his family went through much the same thing. Do as I say, not as I did.

All of the bloviating Tom DeLay has done in the supposed service of Terri Schiavo has only done one thing, really: driven home the fact that not only is he ethically challenged (see here, here, and here), but he is also a raging hypocrite who will hopefully eventually get a major comeuppance. Saletan talks about the slippery slope that begins to form when you approach tragedy as a politician and not as a family member. It makes it easy to impose standards that would have had you breaking the law when you made a similar decision 16 years ago. You see the sick individual more as an object than a human being, one worthy of love and respect, even if that love and respect results in her demise (presumably desired by her). Congress already meddles too much in the lives of Americans, and in this case, they ought to have left well enough alone. At least they should have thought about Terri Schiavo more as a human being and less as a "cause." The woman deserved that at the very least.

Rest in peace, Terri Schiavo.