Updates
■ Regulatory filings revealed in August that AOL still has 2.3 million dial-up subscribers (down 21 million from a decade ago) paying, on average, about $20 monthly. Industry analysts, far from rolling on the floor laughing at the company’s continued success with 20th-century technology, estimate that AOL’s dial-up business constitutes a hefty portion of its quarterly “operating profit” of about $122 million.
■ Commentators have had fun with the new system of medical diagnostic codes (denominated in from four to 10 digits each) scheduled to take effect in October 2015, and the “Healthcare Dive” blog had its laughs in a July post. The codes for “problems in relationship with in-laws” and “bizarre personal appearance” are quixotic enough, but the most “absurd” codes are “subsequent encounters” (that is, at least the second time the same thing happened to a patient) for events like walking into a lamppost, or getting sucked into a jet engine or receiving burns from on-fire water skis, or having contact with a cow beyond being bitten or kicked (since those contacts have separate codes). Also notable was “S10.87XA: Other superficial bite of other specified part of neck, initial encounter,” which seems to describe a “hickey.”
Recurring Themes
■ More Drivers Who Ran Over Themselves: In June, Robert Pullar, 30, of Minot, N.D., subsequently charged with DUI, fell out of his car and was run over by it. In July, Joseph Karl, 48, jumped out of his truck to confront another driver in a road rage incident in Gainesville, Fla., but as he pounded on that driver’s window, his own truck (negligently left in gear) crept up and ran him over. Pullar and Karl were not seriously injured, but in July, a 54-year-old St. Petersburg, Fla., man was hurt badly when, attempting to climb onto the street sweeper that he operates for the city, he fell off, and the machine ran over his upper body.
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■ For patients who are musicians, deep brain stimulation (open-brain) surgery can provide entertainment for operating-room doctors as they correct neurological conditions such as hand tremors. In September, the concert violinist Naomi Elishuv, who has performed with the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra, played for surgeons at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center so they could locate the exact spot in the brain for inserting the pacemaker to control the hand trembling that had wrecked her career. (In fact, last week’s winner of the annual Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass, Eddie Adcock, 76, had finger-picked some tunes in the operating room several years ago for his own deep brain surgery.)
■ Buddhists continue to believe in the wholesale “mercy release” of living creatures, with smaller and less consequential animals making even stronger statements of reverence, according to a July New York Times dispatch from Yushu, China, describing the freeing of river shrimp the size of a fingernail clipping. These specks of life, an advocate told the Times, “could very well be the reincarnated souls of relatives” who perished in the 2010 earthquake that demolished the local area. “We” workers, said another, “have the same feelings as the fish,” alluding to his own occupation of “digging in the mud.”
■ Previous reports of obsessively vengeful ex-lovers seem concentrated in Japan, where some heartbroken girlfriends have relentlessly harassed their exes with thousands of phone calls for months after the breakup. However, in a September report from Rhone, France, a 33-year-old man was sentenced to prison for 10 months for harassing his ex-girlfriend with a total of 21,807 phone calls and texts over the 10 months following the split (an average of 73 a day). The man insisted that he only wanted the woman to thank him for the carpentry work he had done on her apartment.
Least Competent Criminals
Clues at the Scene: Alfred J. Shropshire III was charged in June with burglarizing a home in Lakewood, Wash., identified by his having accidentally dropped at the scene a plaque from a local Mazda dealer naming Alfred J. Shropshire III Salesperson of the Month.
© 2014 CHUCK SHEPHERD
