In looking into that rabies post from earlier today, I came across a table a table of rabies cases in the US. This part of the table stuck out to me, so I looked into it further:
May 3, 2004 AR Bite (organ donor) Bat, Tb
June 7, 2004 OK Liver transplant recipient Bat, Tb
June 9, 2004 TX Kidney transplant recipient Bat, Tb
June 10, 2004 TX Arterial transplant recipient Bat, Tb
June 21, 2004 TX Kidney transplant recipient Bat, Tb
[The surgeons] thought he had suffered a fatal crack-cocaine overdose, which can produce symptoms similar to those of rabies. "We had an explanation for his condition," says Dr. Goran Klintmalm, a surgeon who oversees transplantation at Baylor University Medical Center, where the transplants occurred. "He'd recently smoked crack cocaine. He'd hemorrhaged around the brain. He'd died. That was all we needed to know."
In February 2005, three German patients in Mainz and Heidelberg were diagnosed with rabies after receiving various organs and cornea transplants from a female donor. Two of the infected people died. Three other patients who received organs from the woman have not yet shown rabies symptoms. The 26 year old donor had died of heart failure in December 2004 after consuming cocaine and ecstasy. In October 2004, she had visited India, one of the countries worst affected by rabies worldwide.
Organ donors aren't often tested for rabies because there's only a short window of time between when the donor dies and when the transplants must begin.
Firstshowing.net recently interviewed David Fincher where he talked about why he made a couple of his movies. The ones he didn't talk about, they filled in from past interviews resulting in a group of quotes about why Fincher made each of his movies. Pretty neat.
The Game 1997: 'The Game was a movie that I liked the idea of this gigantic Twilight Zone episode that became The Stunt Man. That you could sit down and look at the bill and go, 'Oh, really? So you had divers when I was in the cab. That's nice to hear now. But at the time I really thought I was drowning.' So you know, there's different reasons for [choosing] everything.
In trying to clear out my tabs to reach the nirvana of Tab Bar Zero, I came to Daniel Norris's reimagined Die Hard poster. I'd meant to post it months ago. He's got a bunch of really good movie posters, but I love Die Hard.
This reminded me of Olly Moss's Die Hard poster from a couple years ago. And then I got curious about whether there were any other Die Hard posters out there, and, oh man, let me tell you there are a couple, and these are all of them that I could find. Which one is your favorite? Did I miss any?
Around the time Louis C.K. started selling his latest comedy special direct to fans as a download from his website, I figured I'd write something about it. I've always loved new models for people selling stuff. The last couple years are full of examples of entertainers, writers, media peeps, musicians, etc, creating their own platforms and distribution channels. Usually this results in a closer connection with fans, more advocacy for their work, and a lack of getting fucked with by established platforms and channels like record labels. So obviously this experiment by Louis would get a note here. And then day after day there were new links/points I wanted to include and it became a bigger thing and then I got sick and well, whatever. Here's your Louis post. (Louis's website doesn't have permalinks on the news updates, so this is a bit tricky, but there are only 2 updates, so it's not that tricky.
So the experiment worked. In about 12 days, Louis C.K. - Live at the Beacon Theater, has sold 200,000 copies and Louis has a million dollars. One of the compelling things about this whole thing is the transparency with which Louis is going about it. He feels a responsibility to the 200K people who gave him $5 to explain where the money is going: $250K is going toward the cost of the special, $250K is going to his staff as a bonus, and $280K is going to various charities. He's keeping $220K for himself. As people keep buying and he makes another million, he'll give more of it away.
David Carr talks to Louis a couple days after the launch.
O.K., so NBC is this huge company and they have all these studios and these satellites to beam stuff out, but on the Web, both NBC.com and LouisCK.com have the same amount of bandwidth. We are equals and there are things you can do with that. This has been a fun little experiment.
Frank Chimero says Louis is funny because he talks about shame.
All the greats had their focus: Richard Pryor and Chris Rock had race, George Carlin had absurdity, and I think Louis has hit on some sort of subterranean undercurrent of emotion that I didn’t realize might be swelling until I listened more closely: shame.
Republicans in the Senate are refusing to extend a payroll tax holiday that would be paid for with a small surcharge on incomes over $1 million. Their excuse is that it will hurt job creators. NPR asked to speak to some of these job creators who would stop hiring if their marginal income tax rate was raised.
Felix Salmon discusses Hugo Chavez's plan to transport 211 tons of gold ($12 billion) from Europe to Venezuela. I don't know about you, but this has Die Hard 5 written all over it. Or maybe Lethal Weapon...
But here’s one last idea: why doesn’t Chávez crowdsource the problem? He could simply open a gold window at the Banco Central de Venezuela, where anybody at all could deliver standard gold bars. In return, the central bank would transfer to that person an equal number of gold bars in the custody of the Bank of England, plus a modest bounty of say 2% — that’s over $15,000 per 400-ounce bar, at current rates.
Square is hiring all the best Silicon Valley talent, not Twitter, Zynga, or Facebook. This is good because I hope they put the companies that manage credit card transactions out of business. I actually did laugh out loud at the reaction.
Our recruiter does not give Square perfect grades for its recruiting, however. She insists the company is making a big mistake hiring so many Ruby on Rails developers, who tend to be 'hipsters with neckbeards.' We asked a source close to Square for his reaction to this concern, and he said, 'LOL.'
In the Esquire article about Roger Ebert a few weeks back, Ebert mentioned his interview interview with Lee Marvin as one of his favorites, and now they've republished it online.
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