4 posts tagged “humor”

British 6-month-old learns to walk

LONDON, March 5 (UPI) — A mother in the British town of Harlow got an unexpected surprise last month when her 6-month-old son got up and started walking around their home.

Connie Robinson told The Sun that she was shocked when her son, Reuben, engaged in the infant milestone at such an early age.

“He just got up and started walking round the front room,” the 38-year-old said. “I couldn’t believe it. He’s so young. It looks very funny.”

While her previous two children were also early walkers, Robinson said she was driven to find out if little Reuben had broken a world record.

“I contacted the ‘Guinness Book of Records’ who said they didn’t have a record for it but they hadn’t heard of any babies learning to walk at a younger age,” she told The Sun of such efforts.

While area health officials maintain that such an early milestone was unheard of, the mother of three told the paper that such physical advancement does have a price, The Sun said.

“He is getting up to so much now he can walk,” she said. “He pulls the phone cord and tries to eat the houseplants.”

Those feisty Brits!! Children learning to walk at such an early age; what is next, pulling up at four months? Potty Training at 9 months?

My daughter (E) actually walked at 7 1/2 months, which did look kind of strange. We did not, however, think of calling Guinness. I am actually concerned about the idea of Guinness tracking such milestones. Parents may become desperate to have a famous child and start “development camps” where children are hounded by drill-mommies from the crack of dawn.

Another shocking development heightens my fear:

Bird-brained Chinese scientists learn to fly pigeons

Tue Feb 27, 7:52 AM ET

Scientists in eastern China say they have succeeded in controlling the flight of pigeons with micro electrodes planted in their brains, state media reported on Tuesday.

Scientists at the Robot Engineering Technology Research Centre at Shandong University of Science and Technology said ther electrodes could command them to fly right or left or up or down, Xinhua news agency said.

“The implants stimulate different areas of the pigeon’s brain according to signals sent by the scientists via computer, and force the bird to comply with their commands,” Xinhua said.

“It’s the first such successful experiment on a pigeon in the world,” Xinhua quoted the centre’s chief scientist, Su Xuecheng, as saying.

Su and his colleagues, who Xinhua said had had similar success with mice in 2005, were improving the devices used in the experiment and hoped that the technology could be put into practical use in future.

The report did not specify what practical uses the scientists saw for the remote-controlled pigeons

As in previous posts, I have to apologize for the lack of editorial oversight in the news agency that let that headline slip by.

This whole “Robo-Pigeon” gives me the willies a little. It does not seem to be at the pinnacle of scientific priority to gain mind-control over pigeons, so I suspect government pressure. In the future, dissident mobs will be swarmed by pigeon cronies and pelted with guano. As much fun as you can make with the story, actually, there are some scary possibilities.

So do you see the connection between the two stories. Do you see a Brave New World in which parents have micro electrodes implanted in the brains of their children to ensure a new Guinness record? Perhaps infants will one day be swarming dissident mobs and pelting them with…never mind.

The payment system in the US is complex. There are multiple payers, uninsured patients, concierge care, CMS, e/m coding, CPT, ICD-9 (soon to be 10), EMR, CPOE, and a multitude of other nuances that make the alphabet soup of American medicine. Confused by it all? You are not alone. It seems that solutions to the current mess just make the situation more of a mess.

Perhaps the hottets topic in medicine is Pay for performance (P4P). While P4P has gotten lots of attention, as well as taking much fire from critics, it is not the only way to pay physicians. To help you through the quagmire I have set up a table of some of the more common forms of payment:

Do you have more? I would like to hear other payment criteria I have missed.

This is a test. I changed my blog last night and suddenly my traffic is down near zero. As I assess things, the possibilities are:

1. Everybody is mad because I changed my blog
2. Everyone feels like I don’t write that well on the current template
3. I lost all of my “random questions” traffic when I changed my blog.
4. The rapture has occurred and I missed the boat…Clark, are you out there??
5. This new layout has a distinctive odor that people are offended by.
6. My post regarding Switzerland has alienated my vast Swiss readership.
7. All of my readers live in Liechtenstein and are cowering in their homes.
8. People liked me better with my gallbladder.
9. Renaming the website “Cheney 2008″ was a mistake.
10. My blog has been moved to a seedier side of the web (as witnessed by the “Terrorists R Us” site just next door).

If you know why I am now the most hated man on the planet (next to Bob Saget), please let me know.

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One of the rock solid things in life has always been the neutrality of Switzerland. I go to bed much easier at night knowing that at least there is one place where war is not the solution to problems.

This has changed in a very saddening way:

Swiss accidentally invade Liechtenstein

Fri Mar 2, 10:01 PM ET

What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.

According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered just over a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.

A spokesman for the Swiss army confirmed the story but said that there were unlikely to be any serious repercussions for the mistaken invasion.

“We’ve spoken to the authorities in Liechtenstein and it’s not a problem,” Daniel Reist told The Associated Press.

Officials in Liechtenstein also played down the incident.

Interior ministry spokesman Markus Amman said nobody in Liechtenstein had even noticed the soldiers, who were carrying assault rifles but no ammunition. “It’s not like they stormed over here with attack helicopters or something,” he said.

Liechtenstein, which has about 34,000 inhabitants and is slightly smaller than Washington DC, doesn’t have an army.

Now, I understand that it is not a huge step to invade a country with a name that sounds like you have a phlegm problem, but the underlying implications of this cannot be understated. This seems to be the first step away from neutrality.

Sure, the Liechtensteiners are playing the whole thing down. They are probably too shocked to thing straight. Here they had a neighbor that did not even take sides during World War II. They have always felt safe. Did they protect their borders? No need to. Did they have barbed-wire fences and German Shepherds (Liechtenstein actually uses a different breed called Lichtensteinian Car Salesmen)? Well, I think they are regrouping and figuring out ways to cope with the troublesome Swiss.

It is comforting, however, that the only real accomplishment of the Swiss Army is to produce a tool to file your nails and pick your teeth should you ever get lost in the wilderness. If the army should attack Liechtenstein with these knives, they may simply leave the country with better fingernails and cleaner teeth. I have it on good authority, however, that the Swiss army has moved away from only carrying Swiss Army Knives and is now carrying more dangerous cutlery. There are even rumors that they have started carrying electric knives!

I have seen no formal reaction out of Washington. Bush seems too focused with smaller issues, such as the War on Terror, the economy, and learning to properly say the word: nuclear. I suspect the Democrat challengers will take advantage of this slip and make addressing the increasing Swiss threat in the world a major issue in the upcoming election. Howard Dean has been recently heard screaming insanely: the Swiss must die!

Hopefully this is just, as they suggested in the article, an honest error. It would be a shame to think that the country that brought us Swiss Cheese, Swiss Steak, Swiss Miss, Yodeling, and Heidi would end up becoming a partner in the Axis of Evil.