Must Be a Record

Here's an item you may have missed this week. I've always heard the "land of sky blue waters" has "the water best for brewing," but never knew it meant brewing babies.

La Crosse Doctor Delivers Four Sets Of Twins In 24 Hours

Physician Delivered Nine Babies During Shift

UPDATED: 12:08 pm CST November 27, 2007

LA CROSSE, Wis. -- You can excuse Dr. Kenneth Merkitch if he's seeing double these days.

Merkitch has been an obstetrician-gynecologist at Gundersen Lutheran Medical Center in La Crosse for 19 years, but he's never experienced a 24-hour on-call period like the one he put in over the Thanksgiving weekend when he delivered four sets of twins on Friday and Saturday.

Merkitch said that he probably has never delivered two sets of twins during an on-call day before. He said the odds of it happening are astronomical.

He also delivered another baby during his shift. He can't recall ever delivering nine babies on a similar shift.

Another set of twins also was born at the medical center on Thanksgiving Day.

Surreality

Working away at preparing a newscast and the phone won't stop ringing. Most of the calls are directed toward the sports department with high school scores. Based on the number of them I know I need to allow some extra time for sports.

Then a phone call is answered by someone else in the newsroom...and I pause upon hearing one side of the conversation.

"No, ma'am, I don't know how the voting works on 'Dancing With the Stars.'"
"I'm sure they're aware of the problem, but you could call ABC."
"Well, I hope you'll keep trying. I'm sure it will be OK."

The things people will call the news department about, I think to myself.

A few minutes later, another phone call. This time I get both sides of the conversation.

"I've been trying to vote on 'Dancing With the Stars' all night and all I get is a busy signal."

"I'm sorry to hear about that, ma'am. I guess a lot of people must be voting tonight."

"I've never had this much trouble getting through before and I've been calling all night and only get a busy signal. There must be something wrong. Or have they turned off the voting early?"

"I don't know ma'am, I'm not aware of any problems. I'm sure the system must just be overloaded. But that's ABC, not a local program."

"Well, I've been trying to vote all night and just get a busy signal and they're going to cut off the voting here in just a few minutes and something seems to be wrong with the voting."

"I'm sorry you've been having difficulties, ma'am. I'm sure there are many people trying to vote and the system is overloaded."

"Well on other weeks I haven't been able to get all my votes in. You're supposed to get up to three votes from a single phone number, and I've got three different phones with different numbers and I never get more than five votes before they cut me off, and I'm not getting all the votes I'm supposed to get."

"I'm very sorry, but I don't really have any information on how the voting works. It's an ABC program and you will need to contact ABC."

"Well, I thought you'd want to know because you run the program on your station and there's something wrong with the voting on that show and people need to know about it."

"Yes, ma'am. And I'll pass along your concerns to our program director, but we really have no control over that show. You really should call ABC. Would you like their number?"

"No, I just think there's something wrong with the voting on that show and people need to know because I've been trying to call all night and can't get through and I'm not getting the votes I'm supposed to get."

"Yes, ma'am, I'm sorry about that. I'll pass the information along to our program director."

"OK, but I really think you should investigate because I don't think the voting is correct on that show."

Millions are unemployed. Millions are homeless. Millions are hungry. Millions are uninsured. There is turmoil in many parts of the world. But for this caller, the most important news story of the day is that voting on "Dancing With the Stars" may be corrupt.

Just When You Thought It Was Safe ...

to go back in the water:

PHOENIX - It sounds like science fiction but it's true: A killer amoeba living in lakes enters the body through the nose and attacks the brain where it feeds until you die.

Even though encounters with the microscopic bug are extraordinarily rare, it's killed six boys and young men this year. The spike in cases has health officials concerned, and they are predicting more cases in the future.

"This is definitely something we need to track," said Michael Beach, a specialist in recreational waterborne illnesses for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"This is a heat-loving amoeba. As water temperatures go up, it does better," Beach said. "In future decades, as temperatures rise, we'd expect to see more cases."

According to the CDC, the amoeba called Naegleria fowleri (nuh-GLEER-ee-uh FOWL'-erh-eye) killed 23 people in the United States, from 1995 to 2004. This year health officials noticed a spike with six cases — three in Florida, two in Texas and one in Arizona. The CDC knows of only several hundred cases worldwide since its discovery in Australia in the 1960s.

[snip]

Though infections tend to be found in southern states, Naegleria lives almost everywhere in lakes, hot springs, even dirty swimming pools, grazing off algae and bacteria in the sediment.

Beach said people become infected when they wade through shallow water and stir up the bottom. If someone allows water to shoot up the nose — say, by doing a somersault in chest-deep water — the amoeba can latch onto the olfactory nerve.

The amoeba destroys tissue as it makes its way up into the brain, where it continues the damage, "basically feeding on the brain cells," Beach said.

People who are infected tend to complain of a stiff neck, headaches and fevers. In the later stages, they'll show signs of brain damage such as hallucinations and behavioral changes, he said.

Once infected, most people have little chance of survival. Some drugs have stopped the amoeba in lab experiments, but people who have been attacked rarely survive, Beach said.

"Usually, from initial exposure it's fatal within two weeks," he said.

Researchers still have much to learn about Naegleria. They don't know why, for example, children are more likely to be infected, and boys are more often victims than girls.

[snip]

Beach cautioned that people shouldn't panic about the dangers of the brain-eating bug. Cases are still extremely rare considering the number of people swimming in lakes. The easiest way to prevent infection, Beach said, is to use nose clips when swimming or diving in fresh water.

"You'd have to have water going way up in your nose to begin with" to be infected, he said.

Duuuuuuuhhhhhhhh dun. Duuuuuuuhhhhhhhh dun. Dun duh dun duh dun duh dun duh .......

No There, There

We've all encountered individuals whom we've considered lacking something between their ears. And we all know of a place or two we think must be the absolute emptiest place on the planet. Now astronomers have discovered a "there" where there really is nothing.

Astronomers have stumbled upon a tremendous hole in the universe. That's got them scratching their heads about what's just not there. The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That's an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday.

Astronomers have known for many years that there are patches in the universe where nobody's home. In fact, one such place is practically a neighbor, a mere 2 million light years away. But what the Minnesota team discovered, using two different types of astronomical observations, is a void that's far bigger than scientists ever imagined.

"This is 1,000 times the volume of what we sort of expected to see in terms of a typical void," said Minnesota astronomy professor Lawrence Rudnick, author of the paper that will be published in Astrophysical Journal.

[snip]

"It looks like something to be taken seriously," said Brent Tully, a University of Hawaii astronomer who wasn't part of this research but studies the void closer to Earth.

Tully said astronomers may eventually find a few cosmic structures in the void, but it would still be nearly empty.

Holes in the universe probably occur when the gravity from areas with bigger mass pull matter from less dense areas, Tully said. After 13 billion years "they are losing out in the battle to where there are larger concentrations of matter," he said.

"Void" doesn't seem the best description. Perhaps a new word will need to be created to describe this "nothingness."

Memememememememememe

Having been tagged by Desdinova, Thinking Things, and Sniderman, I present 8 Things You Didn't Know About Me, the secretly fun meme going around:

1. Demographer Larry Long* found that a hypothetical cohort of 100,000 individuals would move to a new residence 10.5 times over their lifetimes. I've moved 17 times to 16 different homes in four states. Having finally purchased a mortgage, Mrs. DocLarry (who's moved nearly as often) says we're never moving again.
*Larry Long, Migration and Residential Mobility in the U.S. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988)

2. My parents live 30 miles from the University of Iowa and have been Hawkeye football fans for years. No one in my family ever attended the school, but it was Big 10 college football close to home. They and my brother regularly purchased season tickets and attended nearly every home game. All three missed my wedding-rehearsal dinner in order to attend a game. Not sure if it was fortunate our wedding wasn't on Saturday.

3. In October of 1979, Pope John Paul II officiated a mass in suburban Des Moines, Iowa. Some 300,000 people gathered at Living History Farms. Most of Des Moines closed for the weekday event. Working for a local TV station, I shot news film of the lack of vehicle traffic, among other things. I was hanging out of a helicopter in flight at the time. I was much younger and lighter then.

4. Even in the most tornado-prone parts of the U.S., the chance of a particular square mile of land being struck by a tornado of any intensity is about once in 1000 years. I've been in three locations in three states when tornadoes hit. I've seen two additional funnel clouds that did not touch down. One turned clockwise. Most tornadoes in the United States turn counterclockwise. And no, I'm not a storm chaser.

5. Harry Chapin is a favorite singer/songwriter. I met him at a fund-raiser concert for Tom Harkin in 1976. I attended two other concerts Chapin gave with his band. Chapin died July 16, 1981. I had tickets to see him in concert for the fourth time on July 19th.

6. Tony Wright holds the record for the longest period without sleep, 266 hours, 4 minutes and 8 seconds. My record is 92 hours. I was trying to make 96 hours (4 days) but I forgot what I was doing. Too many stimulants, I guess.

7. As a child adults nagged me to keep my head up not realizing the unnaturalness of doing so. I was born with two fused vertebrae in my neck, causing my head to tilt forward. It also keeps me from sleeping on my back without extra head support, which I also require in the dentist's chair.

8. I've visited 38 states and three Canadian provinces. I drove to every one of them.

And now, Duane Keys, Granny Geek, Strannix and Betty B., you're up.