Jason Griffey

One of my favorite pieces of medical trivia has always been that one of the deadliest diseases on the planet was Rabies. When you actually begin to show symptoms, it’s too late, and if you haven’t been treated in some way, you’re going to die. There have been no survivors of the disease…until now.

A teenager who became the first person known to survive rabies without a vaccination went home Saturday after nearly 11 weeks in the hospital, officials said.

As a part of her treatment, the doctors induced a coma. Knowing how deadly this actually is in practice, the inventiveness and treatment given by these doctors is nothing short of truly amazing.

If this rumor turns out to be true, sign me up…I’ll order one as quickly as I can! Even with the sure-to-be-sub-par architecture, hopefully it will be at least RAM upgradable…as long as I can throw 512-1024 Meg in it, and the HD is over 40 Gig, I’ll be all over this like a hobo on a ham sammich.

Taking a tip from another blog that I frequent, I was going to look back at my blog post from Dec 31st, 2003, and see what wisdom I had preserved for the ages.

Turns out that it was utter drivel.

Ah well….my post from Jan 1, 2004 asking people to donate to the Wikipedia turns out to have been a good idea.

To all my friends out in the InterEther….Happy 2005. Some of you have big plans, and others I’m just happy that I get to keep up with you from a distance. I appreciate everyone though, especially in my physical absence.

I haven’t said much about the tragedy in the Pacific, but largely that’s because I have been spared the majority of the coverage. We were very much out of contact with media when it happened, and we’ve been under 7 year old media supervision since then, so we’ve not really kept caught up on the events as they unfolded. Most of my news has come from 30 second glances at BoingBoing’s coverage.

But I know that this is terrible, and I know that much, much money is needed to get any sort of assistance that can possibly help the people that are still alive. I’ve decided to go with the Paypal link to Americares that Kevin McDonald set up on his blog WritersCafe. Why? Mainly because Americares seems to be a solid charity donating medical supplies, and they appear to be not religiously affiliated. I’m a humanist to the bone, so that does make some kind of difference to me.

But no matter the reasons: go donate something. Even $5 will up your karma, and we all know you need it.

With a trip to Chattanooga today, we managed to include Lunch at Mellow Mushroom, trip to the Aquarium, the Children’s Discovery Museum (why is it that there are always like 10% broken exhibits at any children’s museum?), and a stop at Ben & Jerry’s on the way home.

All in all, a solid day.

After a ton of travel and time, we’re back on the homefront. But we brought with us both Betsy’s mother AND her 7 year old niece Kelsi.

So we’re definitely gonna have an interesting week. We’ve literally been back one day and so far we’ve:

Played video games on the Xbox, Playstation AND Gamecube.
Taken a walking tour of campus.
Gone to the rec center and played basketball, raquetball, tennis, and gone rock climbing.
Played school.
Used the computer.
Baked brownies.

I’m not sure what we can possibly keep doing for the next week.

Everyone has probably seen these already, but just in case: Scared of Santa photos.

Oh, and Happy Holidays to all my random readers. Nearly 50 of you a day are swinging by, which makes me very pleased. Keep coming by, and I’ll keep finding random things to say and link.

These guys got blogged by BoingBoing today, but I had to link to them here. I was nearly in the floor laughing at some of their commentary…

Crazy Asian Drinks.