Gordon Grice's Blog, page 94

Chimpanzee attack victim gets full face transplant

Chimpanzee attack victim gets full face transplant [PHOTOS]:

"Over the next few months, she will grow more control over facial muscles and feel more, allowing her to breathe through her nose and smell things. Nash still has an optic nerve, even though the chimp attack destroyed her eyes. However, she still remains blind."
Animal attacks have figured prominently in the development of facial transplant. Earlier recipients include victims of dog and moon bear attacks. 

My Story in Chizine

My short story "Motive, Means, Eventuality" appears in the current issue of the online magazine Chiaroscuro. (It has nothing to do with wildlife.)

Red Wolf Killed in Apple Valley

Escaped Minnesota Zoo wolf killed; posed threat to visitors - TwinCities.com:

"'He had to be killed because of his proximity to people,' Lessard said. 'We don't know with any animal if they will run and hide or if they will attack.'"

The red wolf is closely related to the smaller coyote and the larger gray wolf. Scientists have been debating for years whether it should count as a separate species.

Elephant Kills One, Injures Four in Mysore

The Hindu : Front Page : Young tusker goes on the rampage in Elephant City:

"MYSORE: A young wild elephant rampaged through the heart of Mysore early on Wednesday, trampling a man to death and injuring four others. Two head of cattle also died in the elephantine fury.

Straying from its herd, the male elephant, aged between 8 and 10, entered the city along with a 12-year-old tusk-less male (a makhna). But it was the tusker which terrorised people as well as cattle in its six-hour rampage."

Further on, the article says the fatality resulted from goring rather than trampling. This footage shows one attack, which may or may not be the fatal one. This is extremely graphic footage. Please think carefully before you click play.

Death Stories: Slice, Part 2

(Continued)
There's a mythology about Jernigan's body.  Some say he was fat from twelve years of prison indolence; doubtless this myth derives from the slightly swollen image of his corpse later seen by millions.  The contradictory story is that he was buff, a jail-house weight-lifter.  Actually, he looked pretty average at the end of his life--that was part of his appeal for the scientists who converted him.  Another set of myths distorts his motives.  Some say he donated his body to the Visible Human Project so he'd gain electronic immortality.  Others say he meant for the donation to lead to a more mundane kind of immortality: a true-crime book.  Still others say his family didn't want to pay funeral expenses.  In fact, when he donated his body to science, Jernigan couldn't have known what would happen to it.
His lawyer and friend Mark Ticer said he offered his body to science to atone, in the only way left to him, for the murder that haunted him.  Ticer thinks his friend would have approved of the use his body was put to, if not the macabre fame that went with it.


Raw rib-eye steaks.  Or, better yet, butterfly pork chops, because they're symmetrical.  I was looking at cross-sections of Paul Jernigan's body on the Web, and they looked like butterfly pork chops.  They even had the sleek look of cellophane wrapping, as if they were fresh from the grocer.
In a moment of morbid curiosity, I decided to have a look at the private parts.  The cross-section of Jernigan's thighs and testicle (he'd lost one long ago in an operation) looked like an image produced by a lava lamp -- bubbles in a viscous liquid.  Though the image was still and would stay as long as I liked, it seemed evanescent; it was ready to transform into something else.  Of course, I could change it into a different body part with two clicks of the mouse.
A controversy drew my attention.  I was in a university library, and the fellow at the next terminal, a whippet-thin student in a T-shirt and baggy jeans, had been caught printing out nude photos.  The librarian chastised the pornography fan with remarks like "What made you think you could do something like this?" and "Didn't you realize we can monitor whatever you're looking at?"  I wondered if some hidden authority was monitoring my examination of a stranger's testicle.  Would such an authority see his electronic body as an abstraction, or would she recognize it as human meat?  Which would seem worse?

My depiction of the human body will be as clear to you as if you had the natural man before you; for if you wish thoroughly to know the parts of man, anatomically, you--or your eye--must see it from different aspects, considering it from below and from above and from its sides, turning it about and seeking the origin of each member. In this way the natural anatomy is sufficient for your comprehension.
--Leonardo da Vinci

To be continued.

Death Stories: Slice, Part 1

What's past has been prologue, pretty much. The next Death Story is called Slice, and parts of it first appeared in The New Yorker. That appearance was a turning point in my career, because people sent me emails that said, in effect, "Wow, I didn't know you were a real writer." I tried to see those as compliments.
Pleased as I was with getting my name in such a good magazine, I was also dissatisfied. This story was way too big to fit into an article. It needed twice the room.
It's way too long for a single blog post, too, so I'll split it up over several. We begin with a murder.


Slice

On July 3, 1981, Paul Jernigan returned to Navarro County, Texas, looking for houses to burgle.  It was a county of 38,000 built on cotton, wheat, and cattle, where everybody seemed to know, or at least know about, everybody else.  Jernigan, 27, had grown up poor in Navarro County, though now he lived forty-five minutes away in Waco.  He had already done time twice for theft.  Newspapers would later call him a "former mechanic," but burglary was more his line these days.
Jernigan and his acquaintance, 17-year-old Roy Lamb--they hardly knew each other well enough to be called friends--settled on a farmhouse near Dawson, on the northern edge of the county.  They had been smoking marijuana and drinking.  At first the robbery was business as usual.  They took a microwave oven, a radio.  As they drove down the dirt road toward freedom, they passed the man whose house they'd just robbed.  Edward Hale, also a mechanic, was 75, and his eyesight was failing.  It's unlikely he could have identified the burglars or their vehicle, but Jernigan didn't know that.  He turned back toward the house to eliminate the witness.
Back in the house, he pounded Hale with his fists.  The old man wouldn't stay down.  Jernigan found a pair of heavy ashtrays and bludgeoned him.  When that tactic failed, he sent Lamb to the kitchen for sharp knives.  He stabbed and wrenched, breaking off the blade of the first knife in Hale's body.  He kept stabbing and breaking off the blades.  The old man kept getting up.  By this time Lamb had found Hale's shotgun.  Jernigan grabbed it, loaded, fired.  The old man was getting up again.  Jernigan calmed himself, took his time with the second shot.  He went for the heart.  The old man was persistent.  Jernigan loaded again.  This time he went for a head shot.  That did the job.
Jernigan's next mistake was to tell his wife what he'd done.  Both husband and wife were alcoholics in full bloom; maybe that had something to do with her telling police the whole story.  In custody, Jernigan soon confessed everything.  Roy Lamb, his accomplice, was sentenced to thirty years, paroled after ten.
District Attorney Pat Batchelor, who prosecuted Jernigan, called him a "middle-of-the road killer"--a rougher character than some he'd dealt with, but not the worst.  "I've got two other guys on death row now who'd eat Jernigan up alive," he told me.
Jernigan went to death row in Huntsville.  He seemed a changed man once he was incarcerated and free of his drug problems.  He started an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter for his fellow condemned men.  He wrote thoughtful letters; he made jewelry and furniture for friends on the outside.  "I have no one but myself to blame," he said.  As his first execution date approached, he told a reporter, "I'm very scared.  I catch myself counting the days.  It's hard for me to sleep at night."  He passed that day alive as the usual appeals went on.  DA Batchelor remembers that Jernigan was always impassive in the courtroom, until his last appeal failed--then he fought his guards and had to be chained.
On August 4, 1993, Jernigan was served his last meal--two cheeseburgers, French fries, salad, iced tea.  He couldn't eat. Just after midnight on August fifth he went to the death chamber.  A needle was threaded into his forearm.  In dripped the lethal cocktail: the sedative sodium thiopental; the muscle relaxant pancuronium bromide, to collapse his lungs; potassium chloride, to stop his heart.  He offered no last words, merely nodding at his brother, who watched through a glass partition.  He was pronounced dead at 31 minutes past midnight.
His life was just beginning.

O Speculator! Concerning this machine of ours, let it not distress you that you impart knowledge of it through another's death, but rejoice that our Creator has ordained the intellect to such excellence of perception.
--Leonardo da Vinci

Great white sharks huge fans of rock band AC/DC

Great white sharks huge fans of rock band AC/DC, tour operator says:

"A cage-diving operator in South Australia has discovered that great white sharks in that region are fans of rock-and-roll music -- specifically that produced by the legendary Australian band AC/DC."

Related Posts:

The Old Man and the Sharks

World's Worst Shark Attacks

Baby narrowly escapes deer attack

Baby narrowly escapes deer attack | Ontario | News | Toronto Sun:

"KENORA, Ont. - When Courtney Van Aertselaer heard her baby daughter, Trinity, shrieking on her deck Wednesday afternoon, she ran out to see what was causing the fuss.

What she didn't expect to see was a deer raising its front hooves to trample the 13-month-old."


Related Post: White-tailed Deer Attack

The twelve most dangerous Russian animals

You know I'm a sucker for a list. This one includes some good photos. The spider pictured here is a pretty much harmless argiope, rather than a karakurt. The latter is really a kind of black widow spider. The fire remedy is not a sound method, for the bite of a karakurt or any other venomous animal.

The twelve most dangerous Russian animals | Russia Beyond The Headlines

Coyote bounty

The Canadian Press: Coyote bounty has made Nova Scotia safer, natural resources minister says:

"Coyote encounters in Nova Scotia became a sensitive issue in October 2009 after a young Toronto woman was mauled to death while hiking alone in Cape Breton Highlands National Park. Taylor Mitchell's death was the first recorded fatal coyote attack in Nova Scotia, and only the second ever in North America. The first came in 1981 when a toddler was killed in California."

Here's an earlier post about Taylor Mitchell's death.