“An Indian businessman born with two penises wants one of them removed surgically as he wants to marry and lead a normal sexual life, a newspaper report said Saturday.

The 24-year-old man from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh admitted himself to a New Delhi hospital this week with an extremely rare medical condition called penile duplication or diphallus, the Times of India said. ‘Two fully functional penes is unheard of even in medical literature. In the more common form of diphallus, one organ is rudimentary,’ the newspaper quoted a surgeon as saying.” (Yahoo! News)

“A UCSF researcher has determined that a key reason for the epidemic of pediatric obesity, now the most commonly diagnosed childhood ailment, is that high-calorie, low-fiber Western diets promote hormonal imbalances that encourage children to overeat.

In a comprehensive review of obesity research published in the August edition of the journal Nature Clinical Practice Endocrinology & Metabolism, Robert Lustig, MD, professor of clinical pediatrics at UCSF Children’s Hospital, says that food manufacturing practices have created a ‘toxic environment’ that dooms children to being overweight.” (ScienceDaily)

Adam Cohen: “The ruling that stopped the Florida recount and handed the presidency to George W. Bush is disappearing down the legal world’s version of the memory hole, the slot where, in George Orwell’s “1984,” government workers disposed of politically inconvenient records. The Supreme Court has not cited it once since it was decided, and when Justice Antonin Scalia, who loves to hold forth on court precedents, was asked about it at a forum earlier this year, he snapped, “Come on, get over it.”” (New York Times op-ed)

New York Times editorial: “…[W]ith a careful, thoroughly grounded opinion, one judge in Michigan has done what 535 members of Congress have so abysmally failed to do. She has reasserted the rule of law over a lawless administration and shown why issues of this kind belong within the constitutional process created more than two centuries ago to handle them.”

NZ: where the streets have no shame: “Maori living in a number of New Zealand towns have – not to put too fine a point on it – been living in Shit Street for years.

Their road name signs actually read Kaka Street and, having been erected by predominantly English-speaking local councils, are supposed to be the name of a native parrot.

But Maori say kaka in their language means excrement, while the parrot that councils are trying to honour is either spelled ‘Kaakaa’ or should have two macrons to indicate the vowels are long.” (Sydney Morning Herald)

Rebecca Saxe reviews Encounters with Wild Children by Adriana S. Benzaquén. “What can we learn from the wild child? In every generation, the idea of a child growing up in isolation from society provokes deep and persistent questions about what it means to be human. . . . Wild children intrigue and enthrall because they seem to offer a morally permissible version of the forbidden experiment, one whose initial conditions are created not by cruel scientists but by cruel parents or cruel accident.” (Boston Review)

“Concluding centuries of speculation about extraterrestrial intelligence, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats has discovered that a radio signal detected by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico contains artwork broadcast from deep space. Initially dismissed by researchers as meaningless, the transmission — which originated between the constellations Aries and Pisces thousands of years ago — is now claimed to be the most significant addition to the artistic canon since the Mona Lisa, or even the Venus of Willendorf.

Painstakingly decoded and transferred onto canvas by Keats, the artwork will be unveiled to the public at the Magnes on July 30, 2006. ‘This is the ultimate outsider art,’ notes Keats. ‘Historically our culture has ignored extraterrestrial artistic expression. Exhibited at the Magnes, the art becomes accessible to everyone.'” (ReVisions)