Nebula-75 - Episode One (A New For 2020 Supermarionation Drama)

Posted By: Paul - Wed Apr 29, 2020 - Comments (1)
Category: Puppets and Automatons, Homages, Pastiches, Tributes and Borrowings, Science Fiction, 1960s, Twenty-first Century

Follies of the Madmen #473

Posted By: Paul - Thu Apr 16, 2020 - Comments (0)
Category: Anthropomorphism, Business, Advertising, Food, Stop-motion Animation, Twenty-first Century

Odor-based Alarms

Posted By: Paul - Tue Mar 31, 2020 - Comments (4)
Category: Annoying Things, Inventions, Twenty-first Century, Smells and Odors

Just Can’t Put My Finger On It

DOCTOR MAKES A DRAMATIC RESCUE
Karen Dillon
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Dr. Wendy Marshall was jolted awake at 5 a.m. by an urgent phone message: Doctors at a Joliet hospital were using nothing but their fingers to plug two bullet holes in a man`s heart in a last-ditch effort to save his life.

The doctors at Silver Cross Hospital ''said they had their fingers in the holes and couldn`t stop the bleeding,'' Marshall recounted Thursday.

In an age when sophisticated medical equipment can keep patients alive for months, this most basic technique ultimately saved the life of Tommy Lee

''Tony'' Hairston, of Joliet.

Before the night was over, Marshall, a cardiac surgeon and director of the Loyola University Medical Center`s Trauma Center and the Air Medical Service, would be flown to Joliet and use her own fingers to dike the holes. At the same time, Marshall squeezed the 29-year-old man`s heart to force it to pump when it stopped three times for a total of eight minutes.

Eventually, Hairston was taken by helicopter to Loyola where open heart surgery was performed. Thursday night he was listed in critical condition, but was expected to recover.

The drama began Wednesday night when Hairston, a landscaper shot after an argument with a neighbor over missing property, was taken to Silver Cross Hospital in Joliet.

Silver Cross physicians immediately operated on Hairston, but did not open up the victim`s heart. ''The surgeon found blood in the chest and a couple holes around the heart. At that time, he didn`t open up the heart,''

said Dr. Robert Freeark, chief of surgery at Loyola.

But then after surgery, Hairston started bleeding again. ''This time the surgeon opened Hairston up and and found two holes in his heart . . . and he couldn`t stop the bleeding,'' Freeark said.

The physicians did the only thing they could-stick their fingers into the holes in Hairston`s heart.

Marshall arose, dressed and was taken by helicopter to Silver Cross, accompanied by a paramedic, Kent Adams, and Laurie Dudek, a flight nurse. They arrived 23 minutes after the call.

At Silver Cross, Marshall found a hole in the front of the heart and one in the back. The location of the one in the back was in an area where it couldn`t be repaired without stopping the heart, she said, and Silver Cross didn`t have the equipment for such specialized treatment.

So it meant transporting Hairston to Loyola Medical Center-with Marshall`s fingers in the holes.

Before the night was over, Marshall, as her fingers plugged the holes, squeezed Hairston`s heart to force it to pump when it stopped three times for a total of eight minutes.

Marshall said she used the first two fingers of her right hand to plug the back hole and her right thumb to stop up the front hole. ''When the heart stopped, I kept my fingers in the holes and squeezed my left hand against the right.''

During the flight, Adams, the paramedic, forced Hairston to breathe by squeezing a bag attached to a tube that was shoved down his trachea.

Four intravenous tubes were attached to Hairston, feeding medicine to stimulate his heart beat-one into a large vein near his left collar bone, two to his left arm and one in his right arm.

When the team finally arrived at Loyola, cardiac surgeon Henry Sullivan had been alerted. The patient was placed on a machine that circulated his blood while the heartbeat was halted and the organ repaired, Freeark said.

Adams shook his head in wonder Thursday afternoon. ''It was dramatic,''

he said.

Adams said Marshall was steady as a rock during the flight. ''She was so calm. She just let us know what was happening, and then we did our part.''

Hairston allegedly was shot by Robert Knox, of Joliet, after an argument over some items reported missing from Hairston`s apartment, Joliet police said. Knox was charged with attempted murder, armed violence and unlawful use of a weapon, police said.

By Thursday afternoon, Hairston had awakened a few times, which is considered a positive sign, Marshall said.

Hairston ''is lucky to be alive today,'' she said. ''When the heart stops, most people are basically brain dead within three to four minutes.''

Freeark and another Loyola heart physician, Dr. Bruce Lewis, said that saving Hairston`s life by plugging the holes in his heart was amazing.

''To my knowlege it was totally unprecedented,'' Freeark said. ''Nobody has ever been transferred with a finger better.''

''Very, very amazing, and very rare to see someone survive after that . . . especially with the size of the hole (in the back of the heart),'' Lewis said.

Marshall took the praise in stride. ''Anyone who has got a blood pressure can be saved. So you go for it.''

Heroic military veterans and police officers put their training to use during the deadly mass shooting at a Las Vegas music concert — even “plugging bullet holes with their fingers,” according to a report.

“You saw a lot of ex-military just jump into gear,” witness Russell Bleck told the “Today” show on NBC. “I saw guys plugging bullet holes with their fingers.”

“While everyone else was crouching, police officers (were) standing up at targets, just trying to direct people, tell them where to go,” he added. “The amount of bravery I saw there, words can’t describe what it was like.”

The practice of plugging gunshot wounds helps to kick in the body’s defense mechanisms that prevent rapid blood loss, according to a Wired report.

Severe wounds, especially on the carotid arteries of the neck, must be quickly plugged with the fingers or packed to temporarily stop the hemorrhaging, according to Gould and Pyle’s Pocket Cyclopedia of Medicine and Surgery.

Posted By: Paul - Mon Mar 09, 2020 - Comments (2)
Category: Body, Blood, Death, Guns, Medicine, Superheroes, 1980s, Twenty-first Century

The Dangerous Sports Club at the Golden Gate Bridge

Posted By: Paul - Tue Feb 18, 2020 - Comments (1)
Category: Antisocial Activities, Architecture, Crime, Daredevils, Stuntpeople and Thrillseekers, Twentieth Century, Twenty-first Century

Becoming Leslie

Posted By: Paul - Tue Feb 11, 2020 - Comments (0)
Category: Eccentrics, Bohemians, Beatniks, Hippies and Slackers, Regionalism, Documentaries, Twentieth Century, Twenty-first Century

Gaddafi: A Living Myth

Speaking before the September premiere of his new commission, Gaddafi: A Living Myth, English National Opera artistic director John Berry averred that it could "redefine opera".

The piece, written by members of Asian Dub Foundation, was billed in advance as a venture of extraordinary audacity, addressing contemporary politics in music that would set our old friend the Classical Music Establishment by its ears.

Some of us had doubts long before the premiere. In December 2005, writing in this paper about the state of affairs at English National Opera, I said: "A commissioned opera from Asian Dub Foundation has had to be put off - and it's not hard to guess why."

When it was finally unveiled, there was not much pleasure to be had from seeing this gloomy prognostication confirmed.

The critics did their worst: "Cliche and bombast ... "repetitive and incoherent ... laughably wooden" ... "as cynical as Simon Cowell" ... "embarrassingly redolent of sixth-form earnestness" ... "long stretches of jaw-dropping banality" ... "risible moments that look and sound like a Middle Eastern version of Springtime For Hitler". Worst of all, almost every review used the word "brave".

Posted By: Paul - Thu Jan 23, 2020 - Comments (0)
Category: Bombast, Bloviation and Pretentiousness, Crowds, Groups, Mobs and Other Mass Movements, Dictators, Tyrants and Other Harsh Rulers, Music, Avant Garde, Twentieth Century, Twenty-first Century, Cacophony, Dissonance, White Noise and Other Sonic Assaults

Happy New Year’s Day, 2020!

Posted By: Paul - Wed Jan 01, 2020 - Comments (3)
Category: Holidays, Twenty-first Century

VARIACIONES 1/113

In the Parque del Retiro (Retiro’s Park) in Madrid, Ines Sastre runs to meet Javier Bardem who is waiting for her with his arms wide open and they embrace one another in a passionate kiss. This only one shot which lasts one minute twenty seconds is subjected to a hundred and thirteen changes for one hour and seventeen minutes. “I wanted to exhaust the possibilities of changing a shot by changing the music, the colours, by burning it, by making some holes…” remembers Aguirre; “sometimes, the heads are not visible, or we can only see her legs, or the image seems to be scrapped off”… /… the variations of this shot are preceded by the ones of another couple taken in the beach of La Concha in San Sebastian that maybe acts as a suggestion of a merely real support for this ideal meeting. The images are accompanied by not only Borges’ voice-over but also Fernando Fernan-Gomez and Francisco Rabal’s voices-over among some not so well-known other voices …/ … disparate prints, sometimes unpredictable, that Borges’ literature proposed to moviemakers of this period and from distant cultures. It is the disparity of Javier Aguirre’s experimentation along with the contradiction that seems us so provocative.

Posted By: Paul - Fri Dec 06, 2019 - Comments (0)
Category: Annoying Things, Excess, Overkill, Hyperbole and Too Much Is Not Enough, Movies, Avant Garde, Twenty-first Century, Love & Romance

Pingu’s “The Thing”

Posted By: Paul - Fri Jul 12, 2019 - Comments (0)
Category: Aliens, Animals, Anthropomorphism, Body Modifications, Horror, Surrealism, Stop-motion Animation, Twenty-first Century