Though in clear danger of becoming an Ananova referral service, Vital Liquor would nonetheless like to salute the editors of that venerable news service for delving beneath the surface of everyday events- indeed, often dredging the very bottom:
A Syndey woman, Tracey Newton, said her home was so infested with cockroaches that "the walls were literally moving" despite 18 fumigations in six years.
But it wasn't until the mother-of-three woke one morning to find a cockroach in her ear that her family moved out of their Ashcroft home.
"I just woke up and thought I had a blocked ear and then I had a cockroach, I panicked, went to the doctors and had it removed.
"They were dropping from the ceiling ... the whole house was flooded with them."
Ms Newton, who lived in the house from 1992 to 1998, said the cockroaches had made her feel "dirty" and ruined her life, making her a different person.
A Chicago woman who woke up early Tuesday to fix breakfast for her husband found a man stuck in her kitchen window, dead from asphyxiation, authorities said.
The suspected burglar, identified by police as Craig M. Petropoulos, 36, apparently had crawled headfirst through the first-floor window.
But he had a "large build," Elgin police said, and got stuck at the waist.
Petropoulos, of Gilberts, weighed about 250 pounds. An autopsy ruled he died from "positional asphyxiation," police said.
His legs were dangling off the ground outside when officers arrived.
A 69-year-old Mexican woman is reportedly pregnant with her dead husband's baby after undergoing IVF treatment.
Former actress and senator Irma Serrano was impregnated with Alejo Peralta's semen that was left frozen in a US fertility clinic after his death in 1997.
Mrs Serrano said: "Everything will be fine, but if anything goes wrong with me my niece is also pregnant with our child. She has volunteered to be a surrogate mother and I want both pregnancies to succeed."
"A great plague of swollen blisters consumed the people by a loathsome rot so that their limbs were loosened and fell off before death." Thus one 9th century writer described an outbreak of "St. Anthony's Fire", or ergotism, caused by ingesting toxic amounts of the alkaloids produced by Claviceps purpurea, a fungus that infests rye. Gangrene with burning pain in the extremities was one of two common presentations of ergot poisoning, which could also produce convulsions, hallucinations, severe psychosis, and death. St. Anthony was the patron saint of those stricken, and the Order of St. Anthony provided care for these patients. Outbreaks of "dancing mania" that occurred between the 13th and 16th centuries have sometimes been attributed to ergotism, and one appealing, if unprovable, theory proposes that the women accused of witchcraft in the Salem trials of 1692 were suffering from ergot-induced psychosis and convulsions.
The last reported outbreak, which caused more than 200 cases and 4 deaths, occurred in 1951 in Pont St. Esprit, France.
A German research team has unraveled the mystery of how the ancient Egyptians mummified their dead, using sophisticated science to track the preservative to an extract of the cedar tree.
Chemists from the University of Tübingen and the Munich-based Doerner-Institut replicated an ancient treatment of cedar wood and found it contained a preservative chemical called guaiacol.
The team tested the chemicals found in the cedar derivative on fresh pig ribs. They found it had an extremely high antibacterial effect without damaging body tissue.
The team extracted the cedar oil using a method mentioned in a work by Pliny the Elder, a Roman encyclopedist who wrote of an embalming ointment called “cedrium.”
Crucial to the team’s research was finding unused embalming material that had been laid down next to the superbly preserved 2,500-year-old mummy of Saankh-kare. This allowed them to carry out chemical analysis of tar unaffected by contact with body tissues.
A man has gone over Niagara Falls completely unaided and has survived. He is the first.
"He walked over to where we were standing and he jumped and slid down on his backside and went over the brink," she said. "It was really freaky, actually. He was smiling."
The man, whose name has not yet been released, pulled himself out of the water after the 150 ft. plunge and was quickly arrested.
And here be it submitted that apparently going to corroborate the doctrine of man's Fall, a doctrine now popularly ignored, it is observable that where certain virtues pristine and unadulterate peculiarly characterize anybody in the external uniform of civilization, they will upon scrutiny seem not to be derived from custom or convention, but rather to be out of keeping with these, as if indeed exceptionally transmitted from a period prior to Cain's city and citified man. The character marked by such qualities has to an unvitiated taste an untampered-with flavor like that of berries, while the man thoroughly civilized, even in a fair specimen of the breed, has to the same moral palate a questionable smack as of a compounded wine.
A medical and musical collaboration by Dr Peter Isaacs, Philip Parr and Jane Wildgoose
October 29th
Royal Institution of Great Britain, 21 Albemarle Street, London, W1S 4BS
In 1725 Marin Marais published Le Tableau de l'Opération de la Taille, a short musical composition with accompanying text describing bladder stone surgery without anaesthetic, which begins: "Viewing the Instruments; shuddering at the sight..."
Will it be any good? Heaven knows. How often, though, does one get to see music theatre about 18th Century surgery? Performances are also scheduled for Trinity College of Music in London (October 22nd), Nottingham (November 3rd), Leeds (November 6th), Blackpool (November 12th), and Cambridge (November 27th). More information can be obtained from info@viewingtheinstruments.co.uk
. . . we try to cry for help but cannot emit a sound: the dream can only vent our fear in a choked, interior hoarseness. Distressed over the consequences of the technological growth of nations, all we can squeeze out are faint sounds that none can hear. Even if many of us were to shout, all together, we would not produce a universal cry that could be heard by humankind as it sleepwalks toward the fire. We are crying out in our sleep.
Why do they exaggerate everything? Why do they love blood so much? Because they belong to the evening, and they rub the day's events into the diseased back of the Night. Some of the impending darkness enters the print shop and guides the hand that sets the headlines. After a quick perusal, the evening papers are thrown away with a certain revulsion.
How else can one describe giving a vampire life in prison?
Allan Menzies, the Scottish would-be revenant, has been given a life sentence for the murder of Thomas McKendrick. Menzies also drank his victim's blood and ate part of his head, believing it would make him immortal. It remains to be seen if this is so, but given the sentence, an answer should be forthcoming.
We artists.- When we love a woman, we easily conceive a hatred for nature on account of all the repulsive natural functions to which every woman is subject. We prefer not to think of all this; but when our soul touches on these matters for once, it shrugs as it were and looks contemptuously at nature: we feel insulted; nature seems to encroach on our possessions, and with the profanest hands at that. Then we refuse to pay any heed to physiology and decree secretly: "I want to hear nothing about the fact that a human being is something more than soul and form." "The human being under the skin" is for all lovers a horror and unthinkable, a blasphemy against God and love.
This most industrious of all ages- ours- does not know how to make anything of all its industriousness and money, except always still more money and still more industriousness; for it requires more genius to spend than to acquire. -Well, we shall have our "grandchildren"!
Please consider this a gentle reminder that the Medicine Man exhibition at the British Museum continues until the 16th of November. If you are favored enough by fortune to be in London before that date, you would be well advised to attend. The collections of Victorian philanthropist and entrepreneur Henry Wellcome have been thoroughly combed, and only the very cream of his heart-felt and bizarre assemblage is represented. It would be difficult to say when such a ghastly menagerie will again be on display before common folk.
Whilst in the vicinity of the Museum, take time to visit the Wellcome Library at 183 Euston Road, no more than a 15 minute walk at a brisk pace. You may there join the Library at no cost to yourself and gain access to one of the world's best resources on the history of medicine. The wise listen, while the foolhardy man turns his back to the call of Knowledge!
An orgy involving 400 Japanese tourists and 500 Chinese prostitutes is said to have caused much anger between the two countries.
The incident is said to have taken place at the five-star International Convention Centre Hotel in Zhuhai, in the southern province of Guangdong.
Prostitution is technically illegal in China but it has become a growth industry. However, the scale and the involvement of the Japanese is said to have inflamed feelings between the two countries.
According to reports, the group's visit was arranged by the hotel's marketing department. When one local asked a Japanese man why he was there, he was told: "We came to play with Chinese girls."
