As of November 1, 2020 in the state of Washington you can compost human bodies rather than having them cremated or buried. Of course there’s already a company, called Recompose, offering that service. Details here.
If you're considering cosmetic surgery you may want to steer clear of some procedures involving the use of stem cells:
Wu could see that something was wrong: Her eyelid drooped stubbornly, and the area around her eye was somewhat swollen. Six and a half hours of surgery later, he and his colleagues had dug out small chunks of bone from the woman's eyelid and tissue surrounding her eye, which was scratched but largely intact. The clicks she heard were the bone fragments grinding against one another.
About three months earlier the woman had opted for a relatively new kind of cosmetic procedure at a different clinic in Beverly Hills—a face-lift that made use of her ownadult stem cells. First, cosmetic surgeons had removed some the woman's abdominal fat with liposuction and isolated the adult stem cells within—a family of cells that can make many copies of themselves in an immature state and can develop into several different kinds of mature tissue. In this case the doctors extracted mesenchymal stem cells—which can turn into bone, cartilage or fat, among other tissues—and injected those cells back into her face, especially around her eyes. The procedure cost her more than $20,000, Wu recollects. Such face-lifts supposedly rejuvenate the skin because stem cells turn into brand-new tissue and release chemicals that help heal aging cells and stimulate nearby cells to proliferate.
This kind of puts the potential risks of botox to shame doesn't it?
Sometimes a news story will truly have you scratching your head. This story about a man in Burlington who disappeared in early May but was just discovered in his shed this week is one of those:
The death of the 57-year-old man is being investigated, but police say it appears to be a suicide. He was found in the shed, where he apparently hanged himself. The shed is located in the middle of a dog lot, said Burlington Police Assistant Chief Chris Verdeck…
The man's wife reported her husband missing to police May 4. She last saw him around 1:45 p.m. on April 29 at their home.
"He had a history of being gone for weeks on end. I guess she figured he was gone and was going to come back," said Verdeck, explaining the wife's delay in reporting her husband missing.
A patrol officer who took the initial report searched the house, including the basement, but he didn't search the shed in the back yard. The detective who followed up also didn't search the shed. A detective went back to the home Tuesday after the wife went to the police department to talk about the case. During the conversation, she mentioned that she didn't think anyone had looked in the storage shed, said Burlington police Capt. Steve Smith.
Police went back out to the property and found the man's body in the shed. It appears he had been dead for awhile. The medical examiner was contacted and the man's body was taken to the state Medical Examiner's office in Chapel Hill for an autopsy, Verdeck said.
Later in the story we learn that the shed is part of a dog lot and that the police had to call animal control to handle the dog so they could search the shed. Apparently the wife fed the dog all this time, but otherwise didn't deal with it and thus didn't go into the shed herself to look for her husband.
One of my recurring bad dreams is that I am injured/stranded in some way and no one notices. The idea that my wife wouldn't find a way to search all of our property for me, even before calling the police, just gives me the creeps.
It appears that I'm going to have to ease up on teasing Florida for all the whacky news it produces. Apparently we here in North Carolina have our fair share of weird news too, and sometimes residents of our state even team up with residents of Florida to create unique news event. Exhibit A would be the folks from Hickory, NC who tried to bury a loved one at sea off the coast of Florida and it just didn't work out right:
They chartered a local fishing boat, the Mary B III, and Lasky's widow, Sharon, her pastor and other family members, along with the boat's captain and crew, motored four miles offshore from Port Everglades. They tendered their final goodbyes and consigned Lasky to the deep. Family members then fished for a spell in his memory…
But the sea proved no resting place. Though weighted down, Lasky's body resurfaced Saturday. About 9:30 that morning, a fisherman reported a man's body floating about four miles offshore. Its wrappings had come undone. Sheriff's marine deputies raced to the scene, along with the Coast Guard. Homicide detectives waited onshore…
Collins said his office usually handles three to four sea burials a year, most off the shores of Florida or North Carolina, whose Outer Banks are a popular area.
Who knew?
The "Gum Wall" in Seattle has to be one of the grossest things I've heard of, on a par with haggis. From the website:
Located in Post Alley, under Park Place Market, the Gum Wall has its beginning in the early 1990s, when people, irritated that they had to wait in line to get tickets to the theater, stuck chewing gum on the wall. At first, they would use the gum to stick small coins to the wall, but in time, the tradition of the coins disappeared, and the gum remained.
Theater attendants scraped the Gum Wall twice, but gave up in 1999, when it became a certified tourist attractionof Seattle. Now it is filled with thousands of pieces of chewing gum, of any color imaginable. And, as the wall grows, the chewing gum art becomes more sophisticated. You’ll find names written with pieces of gum, and symbols like hearts or the peace sign.
This pic says it all.
I do love a good introductory sentence and thanks to Lex I've found another great one:
A German student created a major traffic jam in Bavaria when he 'mooned' a group of Hell's Angels, hurled a puppy at them and then escaped on a bulldozer.
Someone's come up with the concept of a billboard that emits a smell. With the possible exception of the french fry smell coming from a McDonalds I've found that smells that you would assume to be great, like the smell from a BBQ restaurant, usually morph into a rather unpleasant odor that would appear to be emanating from a car passenger's backside.
As someone who spent many a year commuting on the DC Metro I have to say I'm surprised that you don't hear stories like this more often.
A man who boarded a Metro subway train in Montgomery County on Monday morning was found dead in the same train five hours later, the transit system said.
Metro said in a statement that the death was probably the result of natural causes, but no detailed information on a cause could be learned. It was also unclear when the man might have died during a period in which the train traveled much of the Red Line in both directions.
Did you know that in North Carolina you can sue the other woman (or man) if your spouse is cheating on you? Believe it or not you can, and it can even work. A woman just won a $9 million verdict against the younger woman with whom her husband was fooling around. From the story:
On Tuesday , a jury awarded Cynthia Shackelford money for alienation of affections, criminal conversation (legal speak for adultery) and intentionally or recklessly causing severe emotional distress.
North Carolina remains one of a few states that allow someone to sue the person who interferes in a marriage — called alienation of affection. More than 200 such cases are filed statewide in an average year, according to the Rosen law firm in Raleigh.
Shackelford, 60 , now of Raleigh , sued Lundquist in 2007 , charging that the younger woman’s affair with her husband ruined their marriage.
One of the more disturbing news stories you'll see:
A man with two wives who has fathered 14 children is on trial in Caldwell County on charges he circumcised his two sons with a utility knife…According to the Caldwell County Sheriff's Office, Marlowe doesn't like hospitals and denied the women prenatal care in both cases, then circumcised the boys when they were 8 days old.
Befuddled 
