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Of sporks and stats

By TIMES WIRES
Published September 24, 2006

Some perspective on a few news notes:

Swedes have reinvented the spork - a spoon with stubby forklike tines that is celebrated on Web sites (Spork.org) and in haikus ("The spork, true beauty/the tines, the bowl, the long stem/life now is complete").

The Swedish solution is to separate the fork from the spoon, place full-fledged tines on the utensil's opposite end, and add a cutting edge to one of the tines. The $3 spork is popular with lunch-packing office workers.

The stress of farming in India drove 17,107 farmers to suicide in 2003. Think of that sheer scale next time contaminated spinach and its apparent toll comes up: One person dead from E. coli sickness and roughly 150 taken ill. Tiny amounts of the strain of E. coli in question can sicken people, as few as 10 or 20 cells, which is why bagged spinach has been tossed. A single speck of manure might contain a million E. coli cells.

The coup in Thailand was the 10th uprising in the last 35 years. In a TV address, the military plotters' spokesman apologized to the public for any inconvenience the coup may have caused.

Chinese doctors performed the world's first documented penis transplant. An unexplained accident left the patient with a "small stump." Doctors gave him the penis of a brain-dead man. Despite how shocking the operation sounds, it involves standard microsurgery techniques. But after two weeks, a medical journal reports, "because of the wife's psychological rejection as well as the swollen shape of the transplanted penis," the organ "regretfully had to be cut off."

During the U.N. rant of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's president, you know, where he called President Bush "the devil," he held up Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance and suggested Americans read it instead of "watching Superman and Batman." Amazon.com reports the book shot up its chart from No. 20,664 to No. 4. Amazon discerned no significant changes in rank for Superman or Batman DVDs. (By the way, Chomsky is very alive at 77, despite Chavez's saying he regretted not having met the leftie icon before he died.)

Wait a minute, isn't the pope supposed to be infallible, despite the Muslim controversy? Only when making a solemn decree ex cathedra ("from the chair") on a matter of faith or morals is that so. Only one papal decree has invoked this specific kind of infallibility since it was first officially defined in 1870. In 1950, Pius XII declared the Assumption of Mary (i.e., the quick passage of her body and soul into heaven) as a dogma of the church.

The United States is sure to get its 300-millionth resident within the next week or two. According to the Christian Science Monitor, odds are that person is just as likely to fly in from China (or wade across the Rio Grande from Mexico) as he or she is to be born here. Every 31 seconds another person from abroad is added to the U.S. population roll.

[Last modified September 24, 2006, 09:39:23]