Die for Wal-Mart: Christmas Spirit in Suburban New York

Yesterday was Black Friday, the most important day of the year for retailers in the United States. Millions of Americans get the day after Thanksgiving of from work and most of them go shopping. The stores start opening at ridiculously early hours and shoppers begin lining up at midnight in some places.

This year, the economy being as bad as it is, Wal-Mart is doing a booming business. So booming, in fact, that the Damour family has a whole new reason to call yesterday "Black Friday." It's the day when Jdimytai Damour, a temporary worker charged with opening the doors at a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, NY, was trampled to death by a horde of shoppers who thought that getting first dibs on that new George Foreman grill was more important than safety or civility.

Worker dies, patrons injured in stampede at Wal-Mart

By Joseph Mallia & Matthew Chayes

A stampede of shoppers in a Valley Stream Wal-Mart on Friday morning left one worker dead and at least three patrons injured after an impatient crowd broke down the store doors and trampled the seasonal employee, Nassau police said.

Jdimytai Damour of Jamaica, Queens, was pushed to the ground by the 2,000-plus crowd just before 5 a.m. as management was preparing to open the store, which is located across from the main Green Acres Mall building. Hundreds stepped over, around and on the 34-year-old worker as they rushed into the store...

During the fracas, first-responders struggled to reach Damour to tend to him, witnesses said. Even the first police officers on the scene were jostled around, police said...

Amid the chaos in Valley Stream, shoppers were asked to leave by other store workers, said Cribbs. Others ignored the pleas that they stop shopping, move to the front of the store and exit, she said...

Frightened employees initially used the doors as makeshift shields to defend against the onslaught of shoppers, she said.

At that point, lots of people were on the ground, she said, not just Damour.

Authorities said Damour, who was pronounced dead at Franklin Hospital Medical Center in Valley Stream, was working at the store through an employment agency that contracts with the retail giant...

People have lost their minds. A person died, and died horribly, because too many people needed some new toy at a discount more than they needed to stop and think about the well-being of a fellow human. Even when people were on the ground, even when police were trying to help an injured, bleeding person lying on the ground and not moving, the shoppers kept on coming. Nothing was more significant to them than an Incredible Hulk DVD or a sweater or who knows what other insignificant junk that would have been available some other day, if for a few more dollars. There was no reason for this to happen; Damour's death is meaningless and horrible. He was treated worse than we treat animals.

What possesses people to do a thing like this? If you see a crowd of thousands waiting outside a store, go home. Just go shopping some other day... or don't bother. Order online. How could one of these rabid shoppers even give a gift purchased while someone was trampled at the store where they got the thing? "Enjoy your new nose hair trimmer, Uncle Steve! Jdimytai Damour died for it."

If anyone had any doubts about the meaning of Christmas, rejoice. Your query has been answered. It's the most menacing time of the year.

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NY Woman Eats the Wrong Mushroom and Dies Horribly

Readers who follow my mushroom-related entries have probably noticed by now that whenever my collections include any species of Amanita I include a warning about not eating them. More generally, I try to dissuade anyone from eating any wild mushroom based on my photos and descriptions unless they've had the specimen identified by an expert.

Unfortunately, Zoila Tapia of White Plains, New York took it upon herself to become a cautionary example of why I include such disclaimers. The 61 year old ate some mushrooms she found at a rest stop on Interstate 684 in Bedford. They were something close to Amanita bisporigera. She went through the full nightmare of amatoxin poisoning and died in exactly three days, a textbook case if there ever was one.

Fear of mushroom toxins should never dissuade amateur mycologists from their hobby. They should only dissuade them from consuming the mushrooms they find. The Journal News has the sad story:

Woman eats wild mushrooms, dies

By Greg Clary and Rob Ryser

The woman who died after eating poisonous mushrooms helped hospital staff identify the type of fungus that eventually would kill her, after she arrived at the emergency room with intestinal pain, the Westchester medical examiner said yesterday.

Zoila Tapia, a 61-year-old White Plains resident, had eaten white mushrooms she picked July 6 and went to White Plains Hospital Center the next night.
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Dr. Millard Hyland, the Westchester County medical examiner, said by the time Tapia sought medical help, her kidney and liver function had already been compromised and her chances for survival were quickly declining.

"This is a really treacherous poison," Hyland said yesterday. "These nature poisons go right to the target tissue - the liver cells and kidney cells. When these organs start failing, then you have digestive problems. It's too late at that point."

The medical examiner used information from hospital staff and his examination of the body to determine that Tapia likely had consumed Amanita bisporigera, known as "the Destroying Angel..."

Hyland said people survive ingesting poisonous mushrooms, but they usually require a liver transplant. Tapia had been put on the list for a replacement liver during the three days she was treated after being transferred to Westchester Medical Center. She died July 10, Hyland said.

Tapia worked for a company that manages rest stops for the state Department of Transportation. She routinely cleaned and mowed the areas around the rest stop, officials said. She picked the mushrooms she saw at the Interstate 684 stop in Bedford.

Hyland estimated that the woman consumed from a collection of 10 to 15 mushrooms and that eating a large quantity played a significant role in her death...

"They usually show up in the fall," said Halling, a Yonkers resident who is curator of mycology at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. "It's early in the season for this type, but things have been strange this year."

Halling said he was confident that the sample mushroom was dangerous, without doing chemical tests to be sure.

"At this moment I'm not sure which one it is," he said after a visual inspection. "It looks like it is one of the ones that's fatal..."

Halling said the deadly types are prevalent throughout the Northeast...

"One cannot assume that because all mushrooms are 'natural,' they are therefore all edible," said Dianna Smith, vice president of the Connecticut-Westchester Mycological Association. "A relatively few mushrooms will kill a person, but those are the ones we should know best. They include the Destroying Angel and the Death Cap - both beautiful, but deadly. We should also learn to distinguish them from any look-alikes. When in doubt - throw it out..."

Anyone who collects wild mushrooms for any reason, or who has even considered consuming what they've found, please repeat that lifesaving couplet uttered by Dianne Smith right now. Repeat it until it's burned into your brain. The first lesson any mushroom enthusiast should learn is precisely that. Eating a mushroom without certainty of its identity is a lot like diving headfirst into a pit filled with live snakes without knowing if there's a cobra in there.

Amatoxin poisoning is a horrible way to die. My heart goes out to the people who knew and loved Zoila Tapia. I hope that her suffering will at least prevent someone else from making the same sort of terrible mistake that claimed her life.

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Artifact

As much as I've moved around in my life and as much stuff as I've acquired and subsequently gotten rid of over the years, there are a very few things I would never consider disposing of. This is one of them:


I bought this at the Broome County Arena in Binghamton, New York in 1983 when Talking Heads played there in support of their album, Speaking in Tongues. I was a freshman in college for the first time and had just begun dating a woman named Emma. The show, in fact, was our very first date, if I recall correctly. It's been awhile. I do have one other reminder of Emma, though — a deformed left collarbone that resulted from its having been broken when I rolled off the hood of her car at 30 mph. We'd had a fight, I didn't want her to leave angry, I was young and rash, and I thought that if I sat on the hood of her car that she wouldn't drive away with me on it. I was very, very wrong.

I had already seen Talking Heads several times before this tour, but nothing I'd seen previously of them was comparable to the amazing production of that concert.

I have worn this shirt all of a half dozen times in the 25 years I've owned it. It has traveled with me from New York to Pennsylvania to California to Florida to Massachusetts. I'm sure it doesn't fit anymore; the 17-year old who bought it is now a 42-year old and, to put it kindly, my body has been through a few changes since I shelled out the $10 to buy this. It's so old and the fabric so thin and cheaply made that I wouldn't even venture to try wearing it now. I'd be too concerned that it would disintegrate and I could never replace it.

Unless that happens, I'll be holding onto this souvenir until I myself disintegrate.

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What is Killing the Bats of the American Northeast?

In yet another one of the apparent ecological catastrophes that are becoming more and more prevalent of late, a disease of some sort is causing massive die-offs among populations of several bat species in the northeastern US. The disease, labeled "white-nose syndrome," is symptomized by the proliferation of a Fusarium fungus around the animals' noses. Bats with the disease are waking up too early from hibernation, are emaciated, and are leaving their winter shelters in a desperate search for food. The end result is that they freeze to death. Nobody knows yet what actually causes this syndrome. Fusarium can be a pathogen, of course, but in this case it appears to be a secondary infection and a symptom rather than a cause. The Hartford Courant is reporting today that the disease, already known in Massachusetts, New York and Vermont, has now appeared in Connecticut as well.

The presence of the fungal infection may be a dead giveaway as to the mechanism that's causing the bats to become emaciated, though. I have a hypothesis that I admit is based in part on my ignorance of what specific investigations have already ruled out. As I don't know, though, I'll advance a possible cause. First, though, a little bit of today's Hartford Courant article.

Epidemic Strikes Bats
White-Nose Syndrome Spreads To Connecticut

A mysterious condition that is already decimating bat populations in New York, Massachusetts and Vermont has spread to Connecticut, with vast implications not only for bats but for the vital role they play in controlling mosquito populations.

Jenny Dickson, a wildlife biologist with the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection who entered a major bat hibernaculum (or bat cave) in Litchfield County on Thursday, has confirmed the presence of the usually fatal "white-nose syndrome" on numerous hibernating bats.

The syndrome, first detected in New York state caves in the winter of 2006-07, is so named for the white fungus that coats the noses, legs and wings of afflicted bats. The condition generally causes death before the bats emerge from their winter hibernation. In New York state, more than 80 percent of the bats in affected caves have died over the past two winters...

"Bats are our single largest predator of night-flying insects and provide an important form of natural insect control. Any significant depletion in their numbers will also result in a significant effect in other parts of our ecosystem," she said...

The bat plague was first noticed about a year ago, when hikers and cave enthusiasts in New York state observed bats that were still supposed to be hibernating congregating near cave entrances. Some were even flying out in frigid daytime temperatures to die on the snow. Responding to these reports, wildlife biologists entered known bat caves — as many as 250,000 bats can hibernate in a single large cave — and began documenting the telltale white-nose fungus on the sleeping bats, many of whom also showed signs of emaciation.

An impromptu network of federal and state agencies, and teams of veterinary pathologists — from the University of Connecticut, Cornell and the University of Wisconsin — have been meeting all winter via teleconferences to share information and the results of necropsies of affected bats. But so far they have not been able to determine the cause of the syndrome. The scientists mostly agree, however, that the fungus found on the bodies of infected bats is probably a symptom and not a cause of the condition.

"We just don't know yet what the cause of [white-nose syndrome] is — whether a virus, a bacteria or a toxin," said Dr. Randall Nelson, Connecticut's public health veterinarian...

Experts also agree that the affected bats have extremely low fat levels in their bodies...

Dr. Richard A. French, a veterinary pathologist at UConn who has supervised the necropsies of bats with the fungus, points to another difficulty that is likely to delay a rapid solution to discovering the cause of the syndrome.

"We've never done a comprehensive study on hibernating bats, so we don't have a lot of norms to start with," said French.

"We have found on the bats we've examined so far, for instance, significant amounts of parasites. But we don't even know if that's normal or not. It's possible this could take years of study to understand..."

I don't know if investigators have already examined the gut bacterial flora in these bats, but from the little bit I've been reading about white-nose syndrome it would seem a crucial possibility that there may be a change there.

As readers may know, one of the things I've been researching myself is the role of chitinases in nature. In my research, I ran across a paper a few months back in which it was demonstrated that bats harbor several chitinase-producing bacteria in their intestines:

Whitaker JO, Dannelly HK and Prentice DA. 2004. Chitinase in Insectivorous Bats. Journal of Mammalogy 85:15–18. DOI: 10.1644/1545-1542(2004)085<0015:CIIB>2.0.CO;2

In the study, nine bat species were found to harbor a diversity of at least ten different chitinase-producing bacteria. It was also shown that as bats feed during the warm season, they build up residual insect chitin in their gut. During hibernation, the chitinase-producing bacteria proliferate and break the chitin down into carbohydrates. Mammals can't normally digest chitin; it requires the presence of symbionts that manufacture chitinase for them to use the normally indigestible material as a source of carbohydrates. Mammals do produce lysozymes, another group of enzymes that possess a binding domain much like the active sites in chitinases, but these are not nearly as efficient at slicing up chitin polymers. They just break them into chunks and are involved with preventing fungal infection by preventing cell wall coherency in a potential pathogen. If you're going to derive nutritional benefit from leftover chitin, you've got to have chitinases in your intestine. It's the same principle we see in symbioses such as that in the gut flora of termites; remove the lignase-producing microflora from termite guts and you wind up with termites that can no longer digest wood. They starve to death no matter how much they eat.

If insectivorous bats somehow lost their intestinal symbionts, a similar thing would happen. During their active season, the bats might be just fine because they don't rely on the digestion of chitin for nutrients. However, when they stopped actively feeding and went into hibernation, some other bacterium might proliferate in the gut. The chitin "store" that provides energy during the winter would no longer be accessible. The bats would starve in their sleep, essentially. That's exactly what is being observed in white-nose syndrome.

I find the presence of the Fusarium interesting in light of this. It may be that the bats' immune system is being compromised by lack of nutrition, but it could also be the case that the loss of the chitinase-producers means that the organisms that are responsible for keeping fungi from infecting the bats aren't around to digest the pathogen. Bacteria the dwell in the digestive tract could easily have a role in this. Chitin is chitin for the most part; the same organism that produces chitinase responsible for breaking down insect chitin is very likely to be producing chitinase that breaks down fungal chitin. It's very typical that a given organism that digests chitin produces multiple chitinases, each of which is a variant on the basic theme of family 18 glucosyl hydrolase.

As I've admitted, I don't have a clue as to what white-nose investigators have examined, and for all I know the loss or replacement of bacterial flora may have already been discarded as the cause of the bat die-off. If it hasn't been, however, I hope it will be. I doubt that we have the luxury of years in figuring out how to stop this die-off. Without bats to control insect populations, there could be serious human health consequences due to the proliferation of mosquitoes carrying diseases such as West Nile and Eastern Equine Encephalitis. Besides, bats are amazingly cool creatures and it would be a pity to lose them. I hate to think of the suffering; these are social, relatively intelligent animals. For that reason alone, investigators must find a way to stop this disease.

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Birthday Weekend in New York

I'm back from a wonderful weekend in New York City courtesy of LL. This birthday turned out to be perhaps the best ever, though I've had enough of them now that it's beginning to get hard to remember them all. Still, returning to the city of my birth and places I (mis)spent my youth for the first time in so long was the best anyone could ask for. I made it a point not to spend any time online, so those who left comments will understand the delay in getting them posted and regular readers will forgive the lack of updates since Friday. This one entry will make up for all of that, though.

I'll break it all down by day for ease of writing, because there's a lot to cover.

Friday, Feb. 29
We arrived at our hotel, the Diplomat Motor Inn in Rockville Centre, at about 1:30 PM. After checking in and dropping off our stuff, we headed straight back out the door and drove to All American Burger in Massapequa. Back in my days as a teenage burnout on Long Island, I spent a lot of inebriated hours hanging out in the parking lot of this place scarfing down ridiculous numbers of their so-bad-they're-amazing hamburgers. My poison-of-choice was the double-double, which is what a double cheeseburger is called by the locals, contrary to the menu on the website. LL and I each got one and they were exactly as I remembered. LL was somewhat less than impressed, and I guess it's an acquired taste. Imagine an oversized White Castle burger and you've got the idea. For me, anyhow, this was an absolutely necessary bit of nostalgia. For LL, it was an experience akin to a root canal, I think.

When we were done eating, we headed to the neighborhood in which I lived. First, we headed over to the high school from which I graduated. It hasn't changed much, at least not from the outside. The kids still look the same, right down to a sprinkling of those who seem reluctant to let go of the heavy metal look I remember from the 80's. Yes, the big hair is still there. We next cruised past my parents' house which is now covered by bright yellow aluminum siding and entirely devoid of trees. A large silver SUV was parked in the driveway; I've no idea who lives there now. Our last stop in Massapequa was Pine Street Park, where I was once knocked unconscious with a beer bottle to the back of my head by a well-meaning friend who was trying to help me meet a girl we who was hanging out with us in the park that night. The knocking-out part worked fine, but I never did get a date with her. Ah, memories and the blank bits between them.

We took a drive around town past the former homes of people I used to know and then were done with Massapequa. On the way out of town, we stopped off at the Sunrise Mall (now Westfield Sunrise) to pick up a few things we needed, including a new hat for me. The mall no longer contains a movie theater, though there is a full-sized Wal-Mart there. Wal-Mart is everywhere.

A side trip to Amityville was necessary, too, so that LL could say she's seen the house upon which The Amityville Horror is based. People still live there (without any voices telling them to get out, I might add), and they've had a lot of trouble with trespassers taking photos of the place in the past, so I didn't do it myself. We just drove by. The address of the house has been changed and the distinctive Dutch windows removed to help discourage tourists such as myself, but being a local I still know which house it is. No, I'm not going to tell.

A little more driving around ensued and then we headed back to the hotel to get ready for dinner. LL tried to find someplace using her laptop, but we discovered that our room didn't have a wireless connection. The only rooms that have wireless at the Diplomat, it turns out, are those right next to the lobby, so management offered us a deluxe room with a jacuzzi and we decided to take it. It was right above the lobby and came with a complimentary bottle of Sambuca di Amore and two shotglasses. How could we say no? We were completely exhausted by this point, so we decided to have dinner at the TGI Friday next to the hotel. I had a large and potent scotch and soda while we waited for our table. Needless to say I was ready for bed by the time we'd finished, and that was it for Friday night.

Saturday, March 1
We set out early for Brooklyn. The plan was to take the Long Island Railroad from Baldwin to Jamaica, then change to the subway and get to Flatbush and DeKalb for breakfast at Junior's. That didn't work; someone had either jumped or been pushed in front of a train at Jamaica. Either way, the train we needed wasn't going to be running for hours to come. We turned around and got the car and drove to Junior's instead. It was 11:30 by the time we got there, having been lucky enough to not only survive driving on the Belt Parkway but to find a parking spot right within a few yards of the door as well. If you've ever tried to find a parking spot near Junior's on a Saturday morning, you know how close to miraculous this was.

The last time I had breakfast at Junior's, I was with my long-deceased grandfather. I haven't been back since he died, but I still remember the place vividly. It was a tradition; whenever I was at my grandparents' place on a Saturday, we had breakfast a Junior's. It hasn't changed a bit, even though the place caught fire in 1991. I ordered Scotch kippers with eggs and onions and LL had corned beef hash with poached eggs. Someone told me a couple of years ago that breakfast no longer came with an assortment of mini-danishes and rolls. They were wrong; that still happens. I bit into a Junior's prune danish for the first time in a generation and it was every bit as good as I remembered it. That taste brought back so many memories of my grandfather that it was all I could do not to start crying right there in the middle of a busy restaurant. Who would have thought that a prune danish could do that? It did, though. All of breakfast was that good and that memory-laden. Junior's was also the last place, and still the only place, I'd ever had kippers.

I needed to pick up some mints after breakfast; few things make for horrible breath moreso than kippers and onions. I crossed the street to one of those literal hole-in-the-wall newsstands that dot New York while LL picked out souvenirs (I got a Junior's t-shirt and a sweatshirt, too!) It brings up a point; everyone knows the myth that New Yorkers aren't friendly, but it isn't true. I wound up in a conversation with the guy in line in front of me and then in a second one with the leathery-looking Korean woman who runs the stand. See, it isn't New Yorkers who aren't friendly... it's the people who commute into the city from Nassau County. It was true back when I lived in Brooklyn and then in Nassau County and it's still true now; New Yorkers have a tendency to be outgoing. They live with crowds and often in close quarters. Folks from Long Island bedroom communities, on the other hand, never have to develop the interpersonal skill set that makes life in the Big City not only possible but enjoyable. That's a generalization, of course, but it's a pretty good rule of thumb.

After Junior's, we drove out to Coney Island. This was one of the two big stops for me on this trip. I hadn't set foot in Coney Island for many years and I was dying to see the place again. They say that Coney Islanders get sand in their shoes and never get it out again, and that's true. Sooner or later, we all have to go back there and see what's become of the place. The Boardwalk (and let's face it, folks, there's only one true Boardwalk and lots of imitators) is our Mecca to which we must make a reverential pilgrimage at least once in our lives should we ever leave it. More than a few of us go through some life-changing experience on the Boardwalk. We might have our first funnel cake our ride our first roller coaster or even lose our virginity there (ahem), but there's always something that anchors us to that place, and so we're like spawning salmon that swim upstream to get back to the place of our birth.

Of course, when we get there we have to complain at least a little bit about how it's changed and how much it's decayed since we last saw it and why hasn't anyone fixed the place and saved our favorite landmark of youth. For me, that mostly came as the result of a trip to the "Original" Nathan's. Those quote marks are intentional, because the hot dogs served at the site where the real Nathan's once stood are now the same ones you can buy at any supermarket or food court. They're cooked in the same way they're cooked anywhere else; gone is the open grill where they once singed perfectly over fire. That grill is where the cash registers are lined up now. I got a hot dog there and you know what? It sucked. I could barely digest the thing and was sick that night because of it. There's not much point to going back there again for me, aside from maybe taking a picture of the outside of the place. It's just a fast food chain store now, no better than a McDonald's. Sad to say, Nathan's finally betrayed Coney Island.

Still, the Boardwalk itself was much as I remembered it, though Astroland has now closed down and is never to reopen. Soon, it will vanish and a casino will rise in its place. I'm of two minds about that. On the one hand, I wish that Coney Island could be what it used to be — amusement park, beach, low-brow grunge, burlesque shows, the Coney Island that started out sometime early last century and was still clinging to life when my parents lived there, and which was still at least on life support when I grew up there. On the other hand, maybe a casino is just a natural evolution. There's no way a Coney Island amusement park could ever hope to compete with a Six Flags, and would that be any better, anyhow? Who knows; maybe a casino can revitalize whatever else is left on the Boardwalk. As it stands right now, we could only find one gift shop there — and it didn't even have postcards.

Because it's still winter, everything was closed. It was still amazing to be back, though, and I took lots of photos:

1-3: Shots along the boardwalk showing LL and I and the parachute jump. I could see the jump from my bedroom window when I was a kid in Coney; it's in much better shape now than it was back then. The parachute jump is to Coney Island, and maybe to New York, what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.

4-6: Some close-up shots of the parachute jump. The last one is taken from the base of the jump toward Astroland and the Wonder Wheel.

7-9: The Wonder Wheel itself; shot #9 is in the same park as the Wonder Wheel, Deno's Wonder Wheel Park (warning: the web page is kind of a pain in the neck). I don't know if it's going to stay open when the new casino comes in or not.

10-12: A shot from the Boardwalk toward the "Original" Nathan's, the Cyclone from the New York Aquarium parking lot, and another Boardwalk shot.

13-15: Three shots of the ruins of the old public bath. I think. I'm actually not sure what this old building is. It's a beautiful bit of decay there on the Boardwalk, though, and if anyone can tell me what it used to be with certainty I'd appreciate the info.

16-18: Two shots of a very friendly walrus and a not-so-friendly electric eel at the New York Aquarium. The aquarium is almost certainly the most successful thing still standing on the Boardwalk. I used to go there a lot as a kid; I think that electric eel might be the same one I remember from when I was about 10.

There are a few more Coney Island pictures in this album if you still haven't had enough.

After our visit to the Boardwalk, I took a shot at seeing the house I lived in as a kid in Seagate, just a bit more than a mile from the Boardwalk. Back when I lived there, the "gate" consisted of a security guard in a sort of toll booth. Now it's a major piece of wrought iron with razor wire at the top and high fences going all the way around the community. There was no way even to walk in, let alone drive, so I didn't get to see the old house. Considering what an armed compound the place looks like now, I probably never will, as much as I'd like to.

After a day in Brooklyn, we headed back to Long Island and got a bit of rest back at the hotel. We ventured out again for dinner at a Thai restaurant in Valley Stream called Seeda. I was in the mood for Thai and there aren't too many Thai places in Nassau, which is probably good for Seeda. The food was adequate and the service was bad — slow, curt and inattentive. The place was crowded and noisy and even though it was small, getting the attention of the wait staff was nearly impossible. I wouldn't bother with it again. Seeda bills itself as the best Thai food on Long Island, but I have a hunch that's as meaningful a title as being the smartest person at a Bush family reunion.

Sunday, March 2
At 9:25 AM, the precise time at which I turned 42, I was standing on a platform at Penn Station and waiting for the uptown A train to take LL and I to the American Museum of Natural History. The Museum is a pivotal place in my life; it's probably the single entity most responsible for getting me interested in science, particularly in biology. I wonder how many kids it has had that effect upon over the years. I couldn't wait to get back there again after all these years.

We met up with my sister and her family there; my niece even made me a birthday card on purple construction paper:

In case you find that writing hard to read, it says:

Moo Poop Moo Poop
Moo Poop Moo Poop
Moo Poop Moo
Poop Moo Poop
Moo Poop Moo!

I mean, you'd think a 15 year old could do better than that. Then again, she's only 4 now, and in fouryearoldese I'm pretty sure that means "Happy birthday." Either that or she thought the whole thing was a bunch of bullshit. Could be either one...

We didn't get to spend much time with my sister's family, though. My niece got overtired and overstimulated and completely crashed, so they had to take her to one of the quiet parts of the museum while LL and I forged on. The displays have changed a lot since I was a kid and the whole place has largely been modernized, but it's still that same old wonderfully dusty old museum I'll always love. We stuck mainly to the biology-oriented sections, but we'll do more of the anthropology-related parts next time we go which, now that we're within easy travel distance, certainly won't take another twenty years.

Again, there are lots of photos in this album. Here are some highlights. Readers can figure out for themselves what's being shown here or ask. It's pretty self-explanatory, really.

We spent the whole glorious day in the museum, almost from opening until closing. After that, we bid our goodbyes to my sister and family and headed back out to Long Island for dinner at the Nautilus Cafe in Freeport.

The Nautilus was terrific. The food was just excellent; we started with raw oysters on the half shell and Asian calamari. The latter was perfect; spicy and sweet and enough to make me want to dive face-first onto the plate which, come to think of it, I practically did. We both got seafood combination plates with lobster tails, scallops and shrimp stuffed with crab meat for an entrée and split an order of asparagus hollandaise for a side. For dessert, I had key lime dream and LL had an almond "cake" which, as far as I could tell, contained nothing like flour and was pure, sweet amaretto with almond frosting and several other almond-flavored things. The service was flawless and friendly. The wine list wasn't bad, either. I had a couple of glasses of Italian Pinot Grigio with dinner and LL had a tawny port with dessert. Everything was solid from start to finish, and Nautilus Café turned out to be the perfect place for my birthday dinner. I really couldn't have asked for more.

We lingered there until about 10:00, then headed back to the hotel to collapse into a very, very deep sleep.

Monday, March 3
Breakfast at Bagel Cafe III at the corner of Atlantic and Ocean in Freeport was OK; they have real bagels there. We didn't want to get caught in rush hour traffic, so we passed a couple of hours at Three Streams Preserve (officially, it's called the Massapequa Preserve, but nobody called it that when I lived in the area). There's not much to say about the place, really. It has always been a popular place for teenagers to drink beer and do other things of which their parents do not approve, so parts of it are littered with old beer cans and bottles and other places are in good shape. I know I did my share of partying in the place when I was a disaffected 16 year old, and the tradition continues.

We got on the road at about 10:30 AM and took our time getting back, so we didn't get home until about 3:30 PM, when we discovered that our cable and internet services had been accidentally disconnected when our upstairs neighbor moved out while we were away. It took until this afternoon to get that fixed, and now here I am writing the longest single blog update I will probably ever write.

Our most excellent weekend has ended now. LL is fighting a cold she probably contracted while riding the subway and my fingers are falling off. Tomorrow, it's back to the grind.

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Javona Peters Case: Nathaniel Abraham May Need a New Attorney

There's a battle shaping up in New York over the decision to remove the feeding tube from a 16 year old girl in a persistent vegetative state. It's right up David Gibbs' ally, which could mean that Gibbs will wind up taking a lot of time away from Creationist client Nathaniel Abraham's lawsuit against Woods Hole. If Abraham were smart, he'd be looking for alternative representation right now because Gibbs is almost certainly going to inject himself into the situation. If he were smart, that is.

Kin battle over daughter's life support

Sixteen-year-old Javona Peters sat up in bed at Montefiore Medical Center the morning of Oct. 17, smiling and chatting, ready for her operation...

A few hours later, Javona was without most of her brain function - forever blind, deaf, unable to move, talk, think or eat on her own.

Her heart still beats and she can breathe with assistance, but she is in a persistent vegetative state, much like Terri Schiavo or, a generation ago, Karen Ann Quinlan.

And now - like them - she is the subject of an impending court battle, one that will pit father against mother over whether to let their daughter die...

[Note: Javona's father has recently had a change of heart in his objection to removing his daughter from life support.]

It was supposed to be a routine, 90-minute procedure called a ventriculostomy. The surgeon would bore a hole in the brain to drain cerebral fluid into a cavity. This would alleviate the potentially destructive pressure of what's commonly known as water on the brain...

Then the parents learned from hospital personnel that Javona had stopped breathing during the operation.

"Her brain wasn't getting any oxygen. They said it was 'anoxia' and that destroyed her brain," Javona's mother said.

Javona's parents, who are estranged and never married, cannot agree on whether to remove the tube. Both consented to the operation; neither signed a do-not-resuscitate order.

Javona's mother wants her off life support: "I lost my only daughter, she was my life and now she's gone and I want her to go in peace..."

The matter is in Bronx Supreme Court, with Joseph's petition to be named her daughter's guardian. If granted, Joseph would have the power to ask for a judicial order to end her daughter's life support. A hearing on the case, which involves a planned medical malpractice suit, is set for Jan. 7.

"If the father chooses to fight it and the hospital refuses to honor the mother's wishes, it could become a case like Terri Schiavo's," Korek said...

Javona Peters' surgeon, Dr. James Goodrich, declined to comment. He is director of pediatric neurosurgery at Montefiore and a leader of the team that in 2003 performed a daring series of lifesaving surgeries on Carl and Clarence Aguirre, Filipino twins born joined at the head...

Joseph, who raised Javona from birth, said Javona was born prematurely. When she was 3 months old, Goodrich, then at Jacobi Medical Center, placed a shunt, or tube, in her brain to drain excess fluids, Joseph said...

Joseph, who has a detailed handwritten diary of what occurred, said Goodrich told her the relevant anesthestic agents used were vecuronium and pancuronium. Both are potent muscle relaxants, often used in concert. Pancuronium causes full muscle paralysis and is used in lethal injections in executions, according to medical dictionaries.

"I asked, if she wasn't getting enough oxygen, why didn't anyone notice with all those people and machines in the operating room," Joseph said.

Three weeks after the operation, Joseph said, Goodrich told her he thought Javona had had an allergic reaction to the anesthesia.

"He was very upset from the beginning," Joseph said...

Javona's mother is furious. "I am shocked, I am angry, I am hurt and I am devastated," she said.

Right off the bat, I wish Javona Peters' family well and can only hope that if there was the least bit of negligence on the part of those involve with this surgery that they are held fully accountable. I can't imagine what Peters' family is going through right now and I hope that neither I nor anyone else ever have to find out what it's like to have to make a terrible decision like this. Ms. Peters has every right to file a malpractice suit in this situation and have the events leading up to this sorry state of affairs investigated exhaustively. At the same time, I hope that the medical personnel in this were as responsible as their positions demand and that this was, indeed, an unfortunate accident. For that matter, I wish that Javona Peters would leap up from her bed in full health. That, unfortunately, is very unlikely to happen.

At this point, as noted above, Peters' father is even coming to realize that his daughter's condition is unlikely to change for the better:

The father, Leonard Peters, was initially against the idea, but has said he is "85% changed my mind now, but I don't know the legality." He said that if nothing works for Javona he does not see the point now.

— Source

The question here is whether David Gibbs will be able to resist the temptation to take a public stand on this, or even file some kind of motion (sorry, I'm not up on my legalese) to get himself involved as if he were representing Javona Peters directly. Will he call Congress into session at midnight as he did in the Terri Schiavo case and attempt to contravene Peters parents in his effort to bring the laws of man into line with what he imagines as the Laws of God? This is, after all, exactly the sort of case upon which Gibbs has established his fame in religious circles. I just can't see him passing up another "opportunity" like this one. Anybody care to wager how long it will be before we hear his name in connection with this case?

If there's anything that's more of a hot button issue for folks like Gibbs than evolutionary biology, it's the "right to life." Gibbs' co-believers can always advocate for the possibility of a divine intervention (miracle) and contend that prayer can cure anything... even irreversible coma.

Nathaniel Abraham had better start looking for a new attorney. The Peters case goes before the Bronx Supreme Court on January 7. That's not a lot of time.

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Slavemasters Convicted: Sabhnanis Face Up to 40 Years

Varsha and Mahender Sabhnani, the wealthy couple who kept two Indonesian immigrant women as slaves and subjected them to some of the most vile abuses imaginable (see this entry from November 6), have been convicted on all counts. They now face 40 years in prison. That seems like a mild sentence in consideration of their crimes, but hopefully they'll have to serve all of it and rot as they deserve to.

US 'slavery' couple found guilty

...Indian-born Mahender Murlidhar Sabhnani, 51, and his wife, Varsha Mahender Sabhnani, 45, could face up to 40 years in prison.

They were found guilty on 12 charges, which included involuntary servitude, harbouring aliens and forced labour.

The couple's lawyer said he would appeal against the verdict...

The women said they had been beaten with brooms and umbrellas, slashed with knives, made to take freezing showers and climb stairs repeatedly.

One said she had been forced to eat several hot chillies and then her own vomit.

"Apparently, the jury was taken by the histrionics (of the Indonesian women)," defence lawyer Jeffrey Hoffmann told AP.

Lawyers for the accused had argued that the housekeepers practiced witchcraft and may have abused themselves...

The women, identified as Nona and Samirah, arrived in the US legally in 2002 but had their passports confiscated by the Sabhnanis, officials said...

By the way, I suppose that there are occasions in which you just might be able to tell a book by its cover. That mug you see on the right is Varsha Sabhnani. Look at it for a moment; is there the slightest hint of kindness present in that bony visage? To me, she looks like a character from a story written to dissuade children from speak to strangers. One might suspect that she has a gingerbread house containing a large, bubbling black kettle full of greasy kiddie-bones in her real estate portfolio.

This is one case where it's rather tempting to conclude that they eyes are indeed the windows to the soul.

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Thanksgiving 2007

LL and I spent Thanksgiving with my family. We started out with Thanksgiving dinner in upstate New York and then moved on to another Thanksgiving in central Pennsylvania at the Nittany Mountain KOA camp, which is owned by my sister-in-law and her partner. Yes, two Thanksgiving dinners. I don't remember the last time I ate so much. My family is rather non-traditional; aside from my sister and brother-in-law, nobody is married to one another, so we're all partners, but still family. I'm not sure what that means, if anything, but I think we've all sort of come to the same conclusions about the institution of marriage in general. It's an unusually diverse group of people, too, in terms of ethnicity and education and everything else. We're certainly not the typical 2.2-kids middle class model. We can certainly eat, though.

LL and I stayed in the cabin shown above. One of the first people we met at the camp was a nearby camper who goes by the name of Snooky. Snooky is obsessed with blowing leaves. He spends whole days, from sunrise to sunset, with his leaf blower. Things could be worse, I suppose... he could be obsessed with an axe. To say the guy is eccentric is probably an understatement. Meeting him made me wonder if Stephen King has ever written a story about a leaf blowing maniac.

Of course, there were other things to do beside blowing leaves. My niece, for instance, prefers playing miniature golf to just about anything else. She has her own rules for the game, the first of which is "I win!" When she got tired, she had the good fortune of free and unlimited access to the camp store, so she could always "sugar up" on candy and hot cocoa when she started getting tired. I've sat through hurricanes that packed less energy than that kid. For her, the long weekend consisted of miniature golf, Spongebob and sugar. Oh, and telling all the adults how to play whatever game she made up at the moment. It's too bad none of us had nearly the same energy she does.

There's a petting zoo at the camp. LL made friends with a couple of goats. My niece, for whatever reasons, wasn't generally too interested in the animals. Not all of the animals present were from the petting zoo; my brother-in-law's mother (my aunt-in-law? I still don't know the proper kinship term) brought along her pug, Zeus. Also present was a ridiculously friendly three-legged cat; he lost the fourth leg in a jaw trap some years ago and makes do with the remaining limbs as best he can. There was also a very hyperactive Maltese named CD and a few other critters lurking about.

What family gathering would be complete without at least one faux pas? Ours took the form of a social misstep by my sister-in-law's partner's daughter's boyfriend (I dare anyone to give me the kinship term for that relationship!) delivering a line about how mean Arabs are while LL was sitting at the table. This was made a bit funnier by the fact that the guy is half Italian and half Jamaican himself and was meeting the family for the first time. It was all taken in stride with good humor and a quick comeback from LL resulting in a blush and an embarrassed "Oh, are you Arab?" from Alfredo, the boyfriend in question. I don't think anyone will be letting him live that one down anytime soon.

We stayed at the camp and ate ridiculously well through Saturday night, then left early on Sunday morning to begin the trip home. I decided to take a detour through Binghamton on the way to check out a few places that were part of my life about 20 years ago when I lived up there. The first stop was at 160 Conklin Avenue, a house that I lived in during my first stint at university. I lived there with five other students, including one girlfriend, in a sort of commune that resulted in the place being called Helter Shelter. There were a lot of drugs and craziness. The place is essentially the spot where my life absolutely went to pieces and I felt a need to revisit the site of the most traumatic time in my existence. It hasn't changed at all. In fact, it looks as if it hasn't seen so much as a coat of paint since I left in 1988. To me, it seems a dark, brooding, decaying place, perhaps a bit Lovecraftian in its presence. It's like a combination of fossil and historic landmark in my life. Standing there at the corner of Conklin and John was surreal; I felt as if I were dreaming, especially because LL was there with me. My room in the house was the one with the windows just above the door in this photo. The door itself was the spot where, in 1987, a guy named Jimmy Puccio drank a votive candle full of hot wax thinking it was a shot of tequila and then passed out. He's probably long forgotten about the incident, wherever he is now. If there were such a thing as ghosts, this house would certainly be haunted by the spirits of many acid trips, not to mention some devastating heartbreaks. I wouldn't want to be the poor slobs living in it now in that case. In my mind, at least, this is a place with much mojo.

After my pilgrimage to Helter Shelter, I headed to the SUNY Binghamton campus. Everything was closed and parking was no problem. We visited College-in-the-Woods, dorms I'd been tossed out of years ago after my roommate and I accidentally set a fire in Oneida Hall that got the place evacuated at 4 AM in the middle of a winter night. You see, we wanted to find out whether Bacardi 151 was really flammable, so we filled the cap of a peanut butter jar with the stuff and lit it. It ignited, of course... and then my roommate jerked his hand away and knocked over the entire bottle onto my desk. That set off the alarms and destroyed a couple of my textbooks and all of my notebooks, too. The next day, we were told that we could no longer live on campus. We wound up finding a place in Johnson City, right on Main Street. That's what's shown in the image to the right; our apartment was the top floor of the building to the right of the one with the "1892" decoration on the top. I lived there for about a year with my roommate, Duncan, as well as the son of the Fijian ambassador to the United States. After that year, I took some time off from school. By the time I got back, Duncan had graduated and I wound up living at Helter Shelter. The store with the blue awning, now a clothing store, used to be a sub shop called The Pig Out. It had the best spiedies in all of Broome County, and I'd been hoping to take LL there, but it's gone. Actually, most of the storefronts on Main Street are empty these days. Downtown Johnson City is a very sad, desolate place. Even Fat Cat Books, an institution for Triple Cities comic book and RPG fans, moved out of downtown. The building it once occupied, just across the street from my old apartment, now sits empty.

We spent some time poking around the area and then got back on the road home. Along the way, we got hungry and stopped for lunch in Cobleskill. Not wanting to hit the usual fast food places, LL chose our lunch spot, a diner on route 9 attached to the Colonial Motel — the Diner Motel. Not the Motel Diner, mind you, but the Diner Motel. Seeing that they'd gotten the name wrong on the sign, we probably should have known better than to eat there... but we went ahead and did it anyhow. I ordered grilled chicken on a pita, expecting something like a gyro. What I got was a piece of grilled chicken on a pita and nothing else. This was easily the most literal lunch I've ever eaten. It was exactly one piece of chicken breast on half of a pita with no lettuce, no tomato, no onions, no nothing. LL ordered a proper gyro, but that was bland and useless, too. After lunch, we agreed that the best thing about the food we'd just had was that it probably wouldn't make us sick.

Because our own GPS unit is in the shop for repairs, we were traveling with a loaner. Quick qord of advice here; avoid the Mio GPS like the plague. We told the thing to avoid toll roads and, as if to punish us, it took us on the most backwards, time-wasting route home possible. At one point we even wound up on a dirt road (Tory Hill Road) somewhere near Central Brunswick, NY. We were trying to avoid taking the Mass Pike, but we finally gave in and took it and paid for that mistake by getting stuck in a traffic jam that easily added close to hours to our trip. We finally got off 90 and picked up 20... but that was backed up, too. The final insult came when we got off 20 and onto Stafford Road, just a couple of miles from home. I was pulled over by a cop because I had a license plate frame. No kidding; license plate frames are technically illegal in Massachusetts, and this particular cop decided to stop me because of it. Luckily, he gave me a warning instead of a ticket. By that time, though, we'd been on the road for more than twelve hours. Ugh. We left New Columbia, PA at 6:00 AM. By the time we got back to Worcester, it was 8:30 PM. It was an awful trip. Next year, we'll do things differently. I don't know how, but I'm not doing that haul on a holiday weekend ever again.

The weekend was great, the road trip sucked, and I'm now functioning on 3.5 hours of sleep, having awakened at 1:30 this morning for no good reason I can fathom. I have to teach lab until 9:00 tonight, too. It's going to be a looooooooooooong day.

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