The rapper has a Ph.D. “Let’s take a look at the resume of Henry Biggs, aspiring rap
music artist:

Assistant dean of arts and sciences at Washington
University. Attended high school at Country Day. A doctorate
in romance linguistics with an emphasis on French and
Italian. Graduated cum laude from Harvard after studying
ancient Greek and Latin. Chaired the foreign languages
department at tiny Houghton College. Has been in the Big
Brother program for 17 years. Completed the Boston and
New York marathons and an Ironman triathlon. Swam the
English Channel.” StL Today

Politically Correct and the Arts “Those of us who believe there is a value difference between
playing a Brahms sonata and banging a dustbin lid should be acutely aware that such views are no
longer educationally acceptable.”

There’s lots to moan about nowadays so where have all the
protest singers gone? “The Falklands gave us Elvis Costello’s Shipbuilding and Billy
Bragg’s Island of No Return. But the Kosovo conflict has
produced nary a B-side.” The Times of London

Pay for play “Why does radio
suck? Because most
stations play only
the songs the record
companies pay them
to. And things are
going to get worse.” Salon

Online Ads to Get Bigger: “Renewing their bid for the eyes and minds of consumers, a
panel representing the beleaguered online advertising
industry announced new guidelines Monday for bigger,
bolder ads on the World Wide Web. The new ad formats, supplementing the widespread and oft-criticized
banner ads appearing atop many Web sites, call for advertisements in
seven new shapes and sizes.” E&P Online

“Mothers still bear responsibility for most
of the world’s childcare, but when it
comes to bedtime stories they are simply not as well equipped as fathers.” Guardian-Observer

We’re all Irish now “What
is happening on 17 March: a multiethnic karaoke night? …
Don’t be an eejit. This isn’t your traditional St Patrick’s Day, a
day for Irish people to get all misty-eyed about all things Irish.
This is St Who’s Day, a day for everybody to ‘go Irish’ and give
it some praise, thanks and welly down the local pub.

Haven’t you heard? We’re all Irish now.” spiked-life

Weeds in disturbed areas may be source of more medically important compounds than plants in tropical rainforests. ‘The idea that tropical rainforests may hold the key to new medicines that can solve everything from AIDS to cancer has been around for some
time. Indeed, one study found that of the 95 plant species now used for prescription drugs, 39 originate in and around tropical forests.

Stepp, however, began to ask a simple question during his doctoral field work in the Mexican state of Chiapas and research with North American
tribes: Why would indigenous people walk miles to find medicinal plants if the plants were available on a roadside a few houses down? Working
with the Maya in Chiapas, Stepp found that, in fact, nearly all the medically important plants being used grow as weeds in disturbed areas not
far from their houses or villages.

“What we found is that people use what they have nearby, except on rare occasions,” said Stepp.’ [Although it predated my interest in ethnopharmacology, I did fieldworkwith the Highland Maya in Chiapas in the early ’70’s myself.]

Despite Sub Probe, Military Quietly Revives VIP Tours: “Five weeks after a U.S. submarine struck and sank a
Japanese trawler off Hawaii, the presence of 16 civilian VIPs on the craft remains a
point of controversy and a focus of an official Navy investigation.
But on Monday, a group of freshmen lawmakers from the U.S. House will
climb aboard a sub in Florida’s Port Everglades for eight hours of instruction and
excitement–just the sort of thing that had been planned for visitors on the sub
Greeneville before its deadly Feb. 9 collision.
The Distinguished Visitors Program has quietly come back because–bad
publicity or no–it’s simply too important to the military to give up.” LA Times

A Counterpunch essay on Freud, Zionism and Vienna by Palestinian-American academic Edward Said is, to start with, interesting because we get to hear his explanation of the famous news photo of him as a “rock-throwing terrorist.” I blinked to this photograph when it appeared in July, 2000. (The direct link to the photo is expired now.) Said was invited by the director of the Freud Institute and Museum in Vienna to deliver the renowned annual Freud lecture there in May 2001. He has a longstanding interest in Freud, who was an early anti-Zionist, Said explains, although advocated a Jewish state as European anti-Semitism grew with Hitler’s rise. Said planned to discuss non-European influences on and applicability of Freud’s basically Eurocentric views. But Said’s invitation was rescinded “because of the situation in the Middle East”. Requests by Said for further explanation went unanswered but the Institute director told the New York Times, as Said construes it, that the rock-throwing incident was the reason.

From J I M W I C h, tragic news that loggers in Michoacan, Mexico may have deliberately massacred up to 22 million monarch butterflies in their overwintering grounds, in order to regain access to the protected land. Links to news of the event, and background on the butterflies and their momentous annual migration, surely one of the miracles of nature. For those of you who are impatient for just the facts, here‘s CNN’s news article.

Who’s Feeling No Pain? “The latest trendy drugs are old-fashioned painkillers. They’re chic,
mellowing and way addictive.” Time I’m not a big fan of what passes for in-depth analysis at Time, which is sounding more and more like People, but they’re talking about a legitimate issue here. On the front lines I see that the degree of abuse of hydrocodone (Vicodin) and oxycodone (Percocet, Percodan, Oxycontin and others) has skyrocketed. While I believe firmly in adequate pain medicine prescribing, the range of chronic pain complaints for which physicians are doling out these “synthetic morphines” is astounding.

Controversy over ‘non-heart beating’ organ donors: “The possibility of a new source of organs for transplant is appealing
because it might alleviate a small part of the shortage of donor organs…. But the emergence of a form of organ donation where the donor’s
heartbeat and breathing have stopped but he is not brain dead unsettles
some ethicists and philosophers, and it has made the procedure
vulnerable to bad publicity.

Sometimes, families permit the patient to be whisked, still alive and still on
the ventilator, to the operating room for organ recovery. Only in the OR is
the ventilator removed, the heart and lungs stop, and the patient can be
declared dead. That borders on ‘ritualized surgical savagery,’ contends George Annas,
professor of health law at the Boston University School of Public Health.” Boston Globe

From J I M W I C h, tragic news that loggers in Michoacan, Mexico may have deliberately massacred up to 22 million monarch butterflies in their overwintering grounds, in order to regain access to the protected land. Links to news of the event, and background on the butterflies and their momentous annual migration, surely one of the miracles of nature. For those of you who are impatient for just the facts, here‘s CNN’s news article.