- Switched at birth stories are always bizarre, but rarely
this depressing. The wrong baby occasionally goes home with the wrong family,
but this is the first time that baby goes almost 60 years without knowing who
his real parents are and is awarded about $371,000 in damages. That’s the tale of an unidentified
Japanese man who was born to wealthy parents but was accidentally being
switched with another baby and spent decades living in poverty. Nearly six
decades passed before a DNA test revealed the life-changing mistake by a
hospital worker who had bathed the newborns and returned them to the wrong
mothers. The two babies grew up and spent decades living drastically divergent
lives: one man living off welfare checks before working as a truck driver, the
other enjoying a private education and now running his own real-estate
business. "I feel ... regret and also anger," poorer of the two men
said at a press conference were his identity was withheld. The man was filmed
from the neck down to protect his requested anonymity and shared his feelings
after learning the truth. "I heard that I was being sought after because
of a mix-up. When I heard that, my initial feeling was, 'Is such a thing
possible?' I didn't think it was possible that a hospital could make such a
mistake. I want them to turn back the clock,” he said, clearly ignorant of the
inherent talent hospitals have for screwing up on so many levels. Tokyo's
San-Ikukai Hospital was on Tuesday ordered by a court to pay the man 38 million
yen ($371,233) in damages, which seems like a solid amount until you know that
the man was seeking 250 million
yen ($2.5 million). His story of living off welfare checks and growing up in a
small apartment which had no electrical appliances after his “father” died when
the boy was just two. His switched-at-birth brother from another mother grew up
as the eldest of four siblings in a well-off family, received private tutoring
and went to university. The error was finally realized (slow learners) one of
the four brothers did not share their likeness and requested a DNA test. A
search of the hospital’s records unearthed the truth and the case slogged ahead
from that point to this week’s resolution………
-Sometimes, science even surprises itself. For example, Eduardo Eizirik of
Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and a few of
his lab-coated pals have discovered a previously unknown Brazilian cat that was
right under their noses. The animal they identified is a new species of the tigrinas
of Brazil. Previously, scientists believed that Brazilian tigrinas were all of
one kind, but it turns out that those in the northern part of the vast nation
are significantly different than their pals to the south. “We demonstrate that two seemingly continuous
Brazilian tigrina populations show no evidence of ongoing gene flow between
them, leading us to support their formal recognition as distinct species,
namely L. tigrinus in the northeast and L. guttulus in the south,”
Eizirik and his colleagues wrote in their findings. "Our study
highlights the need for urgent attention focused on the Brazilian northeastern
tigrinas, which are virtually unknown with respect to most aspects of their biology.”
One of the other researchers who worked on the study, Tatiane Trigo of
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, explained that the finding
underscores the need to understand as much as possible regarding the
differences between the two families of cats in terms of genetics, ecology and
evolution. Such knowledge would aid the quest for conservation stratgies to
protect the limited number of the animals living in the wild, a number that is
shrinking over time and is approaching dangerous lows……..
- The college basketball season is barely underway, but
two coaches at major programs are throwing ill-intentioned haymakers at one
another like it’s late February. UTEP coach Tim Floyd and USC coach Andy
Enfield nearly threw done following a verbal altercation at a pretournament
reception at the Battle 4 Atlantis in the Bahamas on Wednesday and the strife
between the two apparently goes back several months. The drama began in April, with Floyd calling Enfield because
he thought USC was tampering with UTEP recruit Isaac Hamilton. Hamilton sought a release from his letter of intent in
July and Floyd initially denied the release while accusing Enfield and USC of
tampering. Hamilton eventually left UTEP and made his way to Los Angeles,
although he enrolled at UCLA, where he will sit during the 2013-14 season after
his waiver request was denied by the NCAA. Enfield fired back at Floyd in an
interview released late last week, when he slammed both his rival and the town
where Floyd works. "Tim Floyd shows up every day at work and realizes he
lives in El Paso, Texas," Enfield sniped. “And he's pissed off that he
didn't get the USC job two months ago.” Floyd predictably took offense over the
insulting of the town where his grandparents were born and his father once
played. That anger boiled over Wednesday night after Enfield allegedly
reached out to Floyd, who coached USC from 2005 to 2009, to apologize. The
altercation ensued – with Enfield former swimsuit model wife by his side – and
afterward, Floyd didn’t sound like a man who would accept an apology any time
soon. "I don't see any reason why
we'd talk [in the future]," he said. "It's over with, that's for
sure." Enfield expressed regret for the incident, apologizing to USC
fans….but not to much of anyone else. One can only hope these two end up meeting
on the court when March rolls around………
- Do NOT feed the animals when visiting Palm
Beach County’s John Prince Park in Lake Worth, Fla. – and by animals, read that
to mean the indigent people living in the park because they have nowhere else
to go. That lesson was driven home the hard way by park rangers when church
members from Acts 2 Worship Center in nearby Loxahatchee decided to spend their
Thanksgiving thinking of others and followign the Bible’s commands by
delivering food to homeless folks living in the park. Park residents such as
Steven Griffin gladly received the food and everyone was happy, right up to the
point a park ranger stepped in and stopped the good times. After a dozen church
members showed up with packaged Thanksgiving meals, park officials decided that
no good deed should go uninterrupted. "We do a lot of mission trips and
helping the homeless and stuff like that,” church member and indigent-feeding
offender Tereza Del Rio said. “I do whatever I can.” A Palm Beach County park
ranger approached the church group and ordered them to cease, desist and exit
the premises. When another group of church members visited the park and tried
to pass out more packages of food, a local television station sent a camera to
follow them. Once again, a park ranger put a stop to the good deeds and refused
to comment when asked about his actions. The ranger explained that that park’s
administration was the only place to ask questions about the policy. Park
personnel claimed that
feeding the homeless is not a permitted activity by a
large group, but did not cite the specific law that makes it so………
- Maybe it’s time for pop hack Lady Gaga to head back to the
butcher and buy enough sides of beef to make herself a new meat dress because
people don’t seem to be paying much attention to her this week. Well, at least
when it comes to her Thanksgiving
special with The Muppets on Turkey Day, very few actually gave a damn. The
Gag-ster’s “Lady Gaga & The Muppets Holiday Spectacular” managed a mere 3.6 million viewers
and a 0.9 rating among adults 18-49 at 9:30 p.m. and had its network ratings
ass kicked by 40-year-old holiday special “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving”
(5.3 million, 1.6 in demo). Gaga’s 90-minute special did next to nothing to
move the needle and rated considerably lower than her previous ABC holiday
effort, “A Very Gaga Thanksgiving,” which had a 78 percent higher rating
(5.4 million total viewers, 1.6 rating). The numbers look even worse when
stacked up with programming that didn’t suck colossally, namely NBC’s coverage
of the NFL’s lone game of the evening, featuring the Pittsburgh Steelers and
Baltimore Ravens in a thriller than went down to the final possession. “Lady
Gaga & The Muppets Holiday Spectacular” likewise failed to beat out the reality karaoke crap of Fox’s “X
Factor Karaoke,” which banked 3.8 million viewers and a 1.0 rating, and it
barely edged out a repeat of “Glee” (2.8 million, 0.9). Maybe if the
Gag-ster has secured a better supporting cast than the motley crew of Elton
John, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ru Paul that appeared in the show, it wouldn’t
have been such a colossal snooze-fest………
