Nate Edel's blog
Fisher Island millionaire Bruce McMahan loved his daughter so much, he married her.
Published: September 28, 2006A secret sexual relationship with his daughter was not enough.
There had to be a wedding.
It gets worse from there. Much worse, and funny as hell (for us safely uninvolved 3rd parties.)
AIDS group to sue Pfizer over Viagra ads
Mon Jan 22, 2007 10:02am ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A major U.S. AIDS treatment group plans to file a lawsuit on Monday that accuses drug giant Pfizer Inc. of illegally promoting recreational use of its blockbuster impotence pill Viagra.
The AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) told Reuters it wants Pfizer to be barred from marketing Viagra as a lifestyle or sexual enhancement drug. The nonprofit organization said Pfizer’s actions had led to risky behavior by men and an increase in HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.
“Pfizer has created and contributed to the perception of Viagra as a safe, sexy, lifestyle, recreational drug, to be frequently used regardless of the degree, or even existence of” erectile dysfunction, the group said in draft legal documents.
While I sympathize about AIDS treatment costs, the case – at least as made in the news article (which is very much worth a full read) – is tenuous. Then again, I haven’t seen the ads in question.
Should the federales be suing Pfizer for welfare checks because of unintended pregnancies that might not have happened but for Viagra? It’s similar logic, though I doubt at $9/pill retail (and higher through the online vendors who cater to the recreational use market) that it’s making a lot of inroads among the very poor.
And why just Viagra? The other PDE-5 inhibitors (Levitra and Cialis) are essentially the same; indeed, both of the others for various reasons are better choices for a purely recreational user.
And yes, in one sense they’re right – Viagra is used as a recreational drug, especially heavily if you count people with real but intermittent ED. So what? It still require’s a doctor’s prescription, and the few risks a healthy individual (or otherwise-healthy individual with ED) takes in using it are theirs alone and relatively minor. The risks of STDs faced by someone using it are no higher than those by someone without ED, and indeed given the occasional complaints guys have about losing their erections when using condoms, one could argue that with Viagra may encourage safer-sex practices.
(I’m locking this one “no comments” because mentioning the big V will probably attract extra spambots. If you really want to comment, do so on Bah Humbug Part 2, to be posted shortly.)
Woman Survives Being Locked Up in Barrel and Thrown Into Sea by Jealous Husband
A Russian banker sealed his wife in a barrel and threw her into the sea when the couple were on vacation on Crimea Peninsula in Ukraine, the Pervaya Krymskaya newspaper reports.
See also Kenya (via DailyKos)
Scientist Fights Church Effort to Hide Museum’s Pre-Human Fossils
Leaders of Kenya’s Pentecostal congregation, with six million adherents, want the human fossils de-emphasized.
“The Christian community here is very uncomfortable that Leakey and his group want their theories presented as fact,” said Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, head of the largest Pentecostal church in Kenya, the Christ is the Answer Ministries.
This all makes me wonder… now that the Iron Curtain is a memory, are there still any active Lysenkoists in Russia?
A tale from my Alma Mater, via DBA:
De-Sanitizing the Police Blotter
The police did not determine her error through close and careful questioning of the jogger, which would have established that she was observing 4 Valley Road, whereas she lived farther down Valley Road at another number. The police did not determine her error by noticing the absence of evidence supporting the hypothesis that this was a burglary in progress — there was no getaway car, no damage to windows or doors and no suspicious activity occurring within the house. The police did not determine her error through the application of inductive knowledge which would indicate the unlikelihood that a burglary would be in progress on a Sunday morning in a small, college town in rural New Hampshire. The police did not even establish her error by a combination of these factors. The police “quickly established” her error by laying an unannounced, intimidatory siege to our house, accompanied by screams telling me to come to the door with my hands up. They then proceeded to draw a gun on me that was menacingly pointed at my chest as I stood there in cargo shorts, t-shirt and bare feet! After further screaming and questioning, the police finally realized their mistake — 10 minutes later the officer who pulled the gun came over and apologized.
Sometimes I get reminded that being in a fraternity in college was not just about having a supportive bunch of guys around to look after me when I was drinking, and a nice spot to crash on the couch and watch a very large TV set.
Sometimes, like Peter’s wedding, it involves genuinely being reminded of the strength of the friendships I developed there. And sometimes, it involves REALLY funny emails that I’d never have gotten if I’d just hung out with other geeks and Comp. Sci. majors.
I got forwarded a series of emails which apparantly are the legal community’s next answer to Craig Shergold. And apparantly, they’re real.:
The email that roared
The strange tale of a much-forwarded email chain describing “Lawyers behaving badly.”
By David L. Yas
Sadly, when Abdala typed those three syllables of gibberish, she made an electronic record of her own impetuousness, a record that may haunt her for quite some time.
How do I know? Because I was one of roughly seven zillion people who received a copy of the email this week. Thanks to an unstoppable phalanx of forwarders, the brief exchange has made its way to a countless number of attorneys after Korman shared it with a friend and allowed him to share it with a few others.
Fueled by attorneys’ curiosity that a young attorney would fire away at a would-be employee with so much vigor, the email chain made its way from firm to firm with the speed and recklessness of Apolo Ohno after six caffe lattes. It went to Rindler Morgan and Gadsby Hannah, to Mintz Levin and Sally & Fitch, to Nixon Peabody and Wilmer Hale.
It’s been across the state and out of state. And to Europe. Seriously.
And now to my house alumni mailing list, and likely heading to an inbox near you.
I have no idea if it’s legitimate to repost the email forward in its entirety, and to be on the safe side I’m not going to do so here. I am surprised to see that it’s NOT readily available on google yet. Suffice it to say that once someone DOES put it on the web, you’ve got all the keywords you need to find it in the Mass law article. And it’s funny as heck, and funnier still with the context the article provides.
Not that techies are immune to our own brand of idiocy, but I do like to think that the BOFH is fiction.
Leading online matchmaker sued for bogus dating scam
Sat Nov 19, 6:24 PM ET
NEW YORK (AFP) – Match.com, one of the top Internet dating websites, has been accused of hiring people as “date bait” to date some of their one million customers to encourage them to keep paying for the service.
Sorry, no attribution on this news story that I can repeat. I’m glad I met Marie back when the internet was still mostly college students and geeks.
Finish the line, and you’ll describe these guys: “Sith” Fans Maimed in Lightsaber Mishap
The Force–let alone common sense–was definitely not with them.
Two British Star Wars fans sustained critical injuries after constructing their own lightsabers from fluorescent light tubes filled with liquid fuel.