Evidence grows for safety of mobile phones. Although they do not fully put the issue to risk because of the need for surveillance for longer induction periods, two new studies that together encompass more than 1250 patients with brain tumors and an equal number of healthy individuals found “no increased risk of cancers among those who used the devices more frequently.” British Medical Journal

My friend Jim Higgins, the journalist I first met when he profiled FmH in a July, 2000 Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel feature and who shares with me being an adoptive father, sent me several blinks about Cambodia that might be of interest. His son is from Cambodia:

“Closer to Trial: Cambodia’s National Assembly approved guidelines to set up a tribunal to try the leaders of the Khmer Rouge movement. AsiaSource sums up the latest news and provides extensive links to related articles, opinion pieces and Cambodian-related Web sites, including the excellent Cambodia Genocide Program at Yale University.

“The Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia from 1975 until their overthrow by Vietnam in 1979. During that time, an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians died from starvation, execution, overwork and disease. In April 1998, Pol Pot, the group’s leader, died under Khmer Rouge house arrest in the Cambodian jungle. Most of the other leaders defected to the government between 1995 and 1998 in exchange for an informal amnesty.

“My colleague Catherine Fitzpatrick interviewed Loung Ung, a child survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide, when she was visiting Milwaukee on a book tour. Today she is national spokeswoman for the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World, sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans of America in Washington, D.C.” Thank you, Jim. [I added the blink (above) to an outpouring of feeling I had upon learning of Pol Pot’s death, which persists on the web in an archive of the defunct Fringeware mailing list to which I contributed in the old days before weblogging.]

Electricians Less Suicidal Than Thought. “Electricians are less suicidal than other
men in Sweden, according to a study launched after U.S. reports that power-line workers
exposed to strong electromagnetic fields were at higher risk of suicide.” [When I read the headline, I thought it was referring to the habit, which every electrician I’ve ever had in to do work in my house has demonstrated, of declining to shut off the power before they work on the wiring.]

‘Mad Deer Disease’ No Threat Yet to U.S. – Panel. There’s a prion disease which causes a spongiform encephalopathy in Western U.S. populations of deer and elk; but is it a “transmissible spongiform encephalopathy” (TSE)? i.e. transmissible to humans, as is ‘Mad Cow Disease’ (bovine spongiform encephalopathy [BSE], the human expression of which causes a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease [CJD]). Do you think you should risk eating any elk meat or venison until we know for sure? Reuters

Instinctive sleeping and resting postures: an anthropological
and zoological approach to treatment of low back and joint
pain. “If you are a medical professional and have been trained in a “civilised” country you probably
know next to nothing about the primate Homo sapiens and how they survive in the wild. You
probably do not know that nature has provided an automatic manipulator to correct most spinal
and peripheral joint lesions in primates. In common with millions of other so called civilised
people you suffer unnecessarily from musculoskeletal problems and are discouraged about how to treat the exponential rise in low back
pain throughout the developed world. Humans are one of 200 species of primates. All primates suffer from musculoskeletal problems;
nature, recognising this fact, has given primates a way to correct them.” British Medical Journal

“President Clinton admitted Friday for the first time
that he made false statements in the Monica Lewinsky case and entered
into a deal with prosecutors to avert an indictment. He surrendered his
law license for five years….Clinton will have immunity from further prosecution under the deal with (the) Independent Counsel…” AP

A poetry-free presidency: “The lack of a poet at Bush’s Inauguration is a bleak omen of his
administration’s attitude toward culture — but then again, what
poet would agree to appear?” Salon Laura Bush, on the other hand, seems determined to establish her credibility as a lover of books. CNN

Why You Should Watch The Superbowl

Empathy with the devil: “The
Adversary is not just an account of a murder in the ‘true crime’
genre. Carrère had initially planned to write it like that, to
construct his own In Cold Blood out of this minor news item. But
he found that to ‘erase’ himself from the narrative as Truman
Capote had done was ‘dishonest’. He had to deal with his
obsession with the murder, and give an account, as he puts it,
‘of my relationship to this story – my impressions, my
hypotheses, my doubts, my anxieties’. In order to be truly
honest, in other words, he had to implicate himself.

‘On the morning of Saturday January 9,
1993,’ the book begins, ‘while Jean-Claude Romand was killing
his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher
meeting at the school attended by Gabriel, our eldest son. He
was five years old, the same age as Antoine Romand. Then we
went to have lunch with my parents, as Jean-Claude Romand
did with his, whom he killed after the meal.’ ” Guardian/Observer booksunlimited

Beat Poet Gregory Corso Dies at 70. Crusty, irreverent friend of Allen Ginsberg, discovered by Ginsberg through his prison writings. Some selections from Corso’s poetry may be found here, and this tribute page includes one of my favorite of his pieces:

…Like the jester who blew out candles

tip-toeing in toe-bell feet

that his master dream victories

–so I creep and blow

that the cat and canary sleep.

I’ve no plumed helmet, no blue-white raiment;

and no jester of-old comes wish me on.

I myself am my own happy fool…

“Clown”

From my continuing coverage of the “underground”: Tunnel Vision: Using Sociological Radar to Snare a Seat — everyday applications of ethnic savvy in subway hand-to-hand combat. Next, the extraordinary portrait of the impostor subway motorman, a favorite of the Spike Report. New York Times And online and underground: “Thanks to the Web, the sport of
infiltration — creeping through
abandoned buildings and unused
subway tunnels — is thriving as
never before.” Salon This article points to the entertaining Infiltration site, “the zine about going places you’re not supposed to go”: utility and subway tunnels, drains and catacombs, abandoned buildings and other edifices and institutions. Here‘s a list of the sites in the Urban Exploration webring. “We don’t break locks or
bolts or climb over fences; what we’re really overcoming is
imaginary barriers that are just understood but barely
questioned.” And this, from Salon as well, on Subway Love: “With much of its crime and grime
wiped clean, or at least swept into the corners, the subway has
become a blank slate for our sexual fantasies. It has become a
place for flirtation, self-invention, play.”

Bay Area Bug Eating Society: “No one can resist the toe tappin’, hand clappin’, exoskeleton snappin’ satisfaction of Entomophagy.” With anecdotes, pictures, recipes, frequently asked questions, and links to other bug-eating sites.

The virginity hoax: ‘Toss out words like “sexual behavior of teenagers,”
“virginity” and “highly effective” and the parents of adolescents
claw their way to newsstand and keyboard in a panicky search
for enlightenment, looking, always, for relief from the kind of
angst they heaped on their own elders just long enough ago not
to remember.

So what did they — we — learn from the study of “virginity
pledges” by the National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development?’ That they don’t work, in short. When pledgers break their vows (and they do) they tend to have unsafe sex. As the study points out, it’s hard to imagine how someone could both pledge chastity until marriage and carry a condom whle unmarried. Furthermore, they tend not to think of anal or oral sex as violating their commitment to chastity. Salon