In any case, my friend Jim Sumpter (host of a nationally syndicated radio show) asked me to come on the air for a few minutes on December 9 to talk about the case (not as an expert, but as a person in the area that had been listening to news and talk radio reports on the subject).

If you’re interested in listening, you can access the file via the link below. Note: This is not an example of my best radio work ever, but it is also not my worst (if you can believe that after listening). :)

JSS-2009-12-09-segment-with-SDR.

• Foam Missile Launcher with USB interface plus two extra packs of missiles. USB may not be quite as cool as Bluetooth (according to The Big Bang Theory), but it’s pretty cool!
• A belt clip case for my cell phone.
• Volumes 1 & 2 of the James Bond Blu-ray collection (includes 6 movies, but not in order of theatrical release; weird).
  • Die Another Day
  • Dr. No
  • Live and Let Die
  • For Your Eyes Only
  • From Russia with Love
  • Thunderball
• Star Trek Blu-ray 3 disc special edition (includes bonus digital copy, on top of the already digital Blu-ray copy; seems mildly redundant).
• A four port USB travel hub.
• A jar of Baconnaise (bacon flavored mayonnaise).
• A tube of Bacon Balm (bacon flavored lip balm).
  • You do realize that bacon is meat candy, right? Right.
• The board game Risk. It appears to be a newer edition with slightly different layout and possibly different rules.
• An 8 GB memory card (microSDHC) for my cell phone, along with a USB adapter for it. Now I have 7.5 GB free instead of a mere 3.5 GB free. Though I will be filling it as quickly as possible so as to justify the need for a 16 or 32 GB card.
• Season one of Chuck on Blu-ray!
• Season two of Chuck on Blu-ray! Scheduled for delivery on or about January 5th. Just in time for the premiere of season three on January 10th!

The post went on to explain:

French corporations and government are entangled in ways that Americans might find unfamiliar.

To which I immediately thought Really?!? Maybe Americans from 2007 might find it unfamiliar. It’s all too familiar territory, and only getting worse everyday.

Screen capture of MSNBC Ayles ice shelf article scaled to 400 x 300 and lossily compressed with JPEG.

What I found amusing was the first sentence: “A giant ice shelf has snapped free from an island south of the North Pole.” An island south of the North Pole … that only describes every island on the planet! Ok, the precise position was clarified later in the article, and the title of the article narrowed it down quite a bit with “Canadian Arctic,” but it still tickled me. Why couldn’t the first sentence have read “Canadian Arctic” instead of “south of the North Pole?”

Note: The above image was scaled and saved as a jpeg. If you’d like to see the original image, click here.

The media is now reporting that she is well on the road to recovery, and have shown pictures of her in her current state:

Isabelle Dinoire at a press conference regarding her partial face transplant. (Photo: EPA)

As you can see, she’s not 100% better yet, but it is truly remarkable. Some facts I found interesting:

• The attack was by her own dog after what may have been a suicide attempt (or at least an overdose of sleeping pills).
• She felt no pain when she woke up and didn’t realize exactly what had happened until she looked in the mirror.
• She’s resumed chain smoking, a habit she’d been forced to kick for about six months prior to the surgery.
• She was able to eat normally again just a week after the surgery (before the surgery she could only open her mouth about a tenth of an inch).
• Her body tried to reject the transplant during December, but the rejection was successfully countered with immunosuppression medications.

As I was looking up information on this story to post this followup, one head line from Google News jumped out at me:

Face transplant woman improving by the fag.

She remains in hospital in Amiens, where Devauchelle said she spends her time knitting, exercising on a bicycle and smoking. “She smokes fag after fag. It’s not perhaps the best thing she could be doing – but it’s her choice,” the doctor said.

Ah, blessed double meanings… Can you say “C’est la vie?” I knew you could.

ABC News is reporting that a French woman has received a partial face transplant (the first of its kind, apparently.) While the article goes into some discussion of the ethics and the science (very shallow discussions, but discussions nonetheless), that’s not what I found really interesting…

When I clicked that very same link to view the article, there was an advertisement on the page. No big deal, that’s the way the web works. Except when I clicked on it, the ad shown was for Microsoft Office and included this picture (it’s the first thing I saw):

Screen capture of ABC News face transplant article scaled to 400 x 300 and lossily compressed with JPEG.

For ABC News, an unfortunate choice of ad placement. For me, a hilarious choice of ad placement.

Note: I captured the screen, cropped it to 800×600, scaled it to 400×300, and saved it as a jpeg; no other editing took place. If you’d like to see the losslessly compressed version (a png file), click here.