Jan 26, 2012

"My Favorite Museum Exhibit": The Bishop's Rectum

Earlier this week, I challenged readers to send me photos of their favorite museum exhibits and specimens, preferably from museums that might go overlooked in the tourism pantheon. Over the next few days, I'll be posting some of these submissions, under the heading, "My Favorite Museum Exhibit". Want to see them all? Check the "Previously" links at the bottom of this post.

It's "My Favorite Museum Exhibit"—celebrity edition. Marc Abrahams is the editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, the journal that awards the annual Ig-Nobel Prizes. He sent me this: An actual rectum cut from the corpse of the Bishop of Durham. It resides in London's Hunterian Museum.
Here's the museum's description of Object RCSHC/P 192, as quoted by Abrahams in a 2010 Guardian column:

A rectum showing the effects of both haemorrhoids and bowel cancer. The patient in this case was Thomas Thurlow (1737-1791), the Bishop of Durham. Thurlow had suffered from some time from a bowel complaint, which he initially thought was the result of piles. He consulted John Hunter after a number of other physicians and surgeons had failed to provide him with a satisfactory diagnosis. Hunter successfully identified the tumour through rectal examination, but recognised that it was incurable. Thurlow died 10 months later.

more gingrich esoterica....

Among all of the surreal events that have occurred so far in the 2012 election, we haven't seen Jon Stewart
get quite as worked up as he did on Monday night's "Daily Show" over something Newt Gingrich said at last Thursday's debate in South Carolina.

When CNN moderator John King began the debate by asking Gingrich about his second wife's accusations that he wanted an open marriage, Gingrich responded with an attack on the moderator himself. He said King's decision to ask a Presidential candidate about such matters was, "as close to despicable as anything [he] can imagine."

"I think you've got a pretty good imagination, 'despicability' wise," Stewart responded, in reference to the presidential candidate's well-documented past of leaving sick wives. At this point, Stewart was exasperated over Gingrich's audacious response as well as John King's failure to call him out on it. Stewart explained, quite hysterically, why it made him as frustrated as it did:

"All [King] has to do is point out the hypocrisy of a family values crusader who presided over Congress at the time of the Republicans' 'Clinton penis scavenger hunt' suddenly finding that kind of questioning of a Presidential candidate unseemly! Point out that [Gingrich] insists that gay people would sully the sanctity of marriage -- whilst being a career marriage sully-er!"

Stewart's blood pressure didn't exactly drop for the rest of the segment, appropriately dubbed "How The Newt Gingrich Stole South Carolina," especially after he moved on to talk about Gingrich's claims of being a "Washington Outsider" despite being a former Speaker of the House and Freddie Mac consultant -- not to mention a wealthy D.C. resident.
"When Washington gets its prostate checked, it tickles you!" Stewart joked.
Watch the full segment above.

the stupid mans idea of a smart man vs. the guy who looks just like the guy who fired you

New CNN Florida Poll Finds Mitt Romney And Newt Gingrich Neck And Neck

WASHINGTON -- A new poll from CNN/ORC International confirms that Newt Gingrich has surged in Florida, but unlike some of the other polls released earlier in the week, it finds the former speaker now running neck and neck with Mitt Romney and suggests that Gingrich's Florida tide may be ebbing.

The latest CNN survey, conducted entirely after Gingrich's victory in South Carolina on Saturday using live interviewers, shows likely Republican primary voters in Florida divided between Romney (at 36 percent) and Gingrich (34 percent), with Rick Santorum and Ron Paul running far behind (with 11 percent and 9 percent respectively) and 7 percent undecided.
Although the full CNN/ORC sample is small -- just 369 likely Republican primary voters -- additional subgroup data shows that on Sunday night, Gingrich led by six percentage points (38 to 32 percent), but on Monday and Tuesday nights, Romney led by nine percentage points (38 to 29 percent). CNN's analysts conclude that Gingrich's momentum "appears to be quickly cooling off" after an initial boost following his victory on Saturday.

Those findings paint a somewhat different picture of the Florida trend than the Quinnipiac University poll released earlier on Wednesday, which showed Gingrich running six points ahead (40 to 34 percent) on interviews conducted after the South Carolina primary on Sunday and Monday.

Another live interviewer survey conducted on Monday and Tuesday nights by the American Research Group shows Romney leading by seven points (41 to 34 percent). Taken together with the results of a series of automated, recorded-voice surveys conducted earlier in the week, these results suggest that although Gingrich has clearly surged following the South Carolina primary, Romney may have rebounded over the last 48 hours.

Combining data from all the available public polls and calculating an aggregated trend line, as we do on the HuffPost Pollster chart shown below, shows a razor-thin margin, with Gingrich at 35.5 percent and Romney at 33.7 percent.

Whether the differences among the polls this week are based on real shifts among the voters or artifacts of differences in polling methodology, the wide variation in recent results is further evidence of the continuing volatility roiling the Republican presidential race. Like the Quinnipiac University survey released earlier, the CNN/ORC found about a third of likely voters saying they might still change their minds about the candidate they are supporting (25 percent) or are completely undecided (7 percent).

So don't be surprised if the polling snapshot at the end of the week looks different than it does right

Obama as The Incredible Hulk by Ron English

via

US slumps in press freedom rankings

In this year's Reporters Without Borders international press freedom index, the U.S. slumped to 47th place, a fall of 27 places, largely due to arrests of journalists covering protests. The full report is available in PDF format. [RSF]

Shrooms may open the doors of perception, seriously (duh)

Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.

New research suggests that taking psilocybin, the hallucinogen in magic mushrooms, may actually lead to a decrease in the amount of blood flow in certain parts of your brain. Scientists at Imperial College London injected subjects with psilocybin and scanned their brains. Turns out, they observed a reduction in neuronal activity and blood flow in core regions of the brain like the thalamus and cingulate cortex. From Science News:

“Decreasing the activity in certain hubs in the network may allow for a more unconstrained conscious experience,” says Matthew Johnson, an experimental psychologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore who studies psilocybin and other hallucinogens. “These drugs may lift the filters that are at play in terms of limiting our perception of reality.”