Prayer vs Pancreatitis.

Seth Johnson. Credit: youcaring.

Seth Johnson. Credit: youcaring.

Guess which one won? Yeah. I’ve had acute pancreatitis. To say it is excruciating is very close to an understatement. I made it a day and a half before gratefully surrendering to the hospital, and the most blessed relief of morphine, which is about all that can bring relief from pain that makes death look pretty damn good. The long trip to the hospital, I had a bowl, and was vomiting the whole way, faced washed with tears that wouldn’t stop leaking, bent double, unable to straighten up, couldn’t walk. My chest felt like it was going to explode, and I could barely breathe. It’s beyond unconscionable that adults allowed a child to endure this until death.

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – A mother and a father in the west metro are facing child neglect charges following the March death of their 7-year-old son, whom officials say died of pancreatitis without medical attention because his parents had “issues going to doctors.”

Timothy and Sarah Johnson, of Plymouth, were charged by summons last week with one count of child neglect resulting in substantial bodily harm, a gross misdemeanor, in the death of their adopted son, Seth.

According to criminal complaints, the boy died on March 30, covered in bruises, after being found unresponsive on a vomit-covered mattress. An autopsy showed the child’s cause of death was acute pancreatitis and possible sepsis.

[…]

In the days before Seth’s death, his parents were out of town for a wedding, leaving their son in the care of an older sibling. The night they returned, the Johnsons found their son hardly moving and said he didn’t react when they “prayed for his health.”

The parents said the boy was barely able to eat two small bites of pizza. They decided to consider in the morning whether or not their son needed to see a doctor.

When the parents woke up, they found Seth unresponsive and called 911. The boy was pronounced dead a short time later.

I certainly hope Seth’s siblings have been removed, and neglect is not a serious enough charge for these disgusting assholes. Full story here.

Dinosaurs: Embryonic Tooth Age.

A hatchling Protoceratops andrewsi fossil from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. Credit M. Ellison/American Museum of Natural History.

A hatchling Protoceratops andrewsi fossil from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. Credit M. Ellison/American Museum of Natural History.

Exciting new information about the reproductive life of nonavian dinosaurs.

For decades now, the drumbeat of dinosaur news has been their similarity to birds. They were warmblooded! They had feathers! And they’re still around, because birds are actually dinosaurs.

All true, but those that were nonavian dinosaurs, as they are now called, were not all beak and tweet. They were closely related to other living reptiles like crocodiles, and new findings about how long their eggs took to hatch bring that point home.

Scientists reported on Monday that by using a new technique on exceedingly rare fossils of unhatched dinosaur embryos, they determined that those embryos took twice as long to hatch as bird eggs of a similar size. The embryo of a large duck-billed dinosaur took at least six months to hatch, and the eggs of larger dinosaurs may have taken even longer.

The long incubation times complicate thinking about dinosaur behavior. While some kinds of dinosaurs may have tended their eggs and young, for others the difficulty of hanging around for most of a year to watch buried eggs would have been too much.

The NY Times has the full story. The PNAS abstract is here.

Facebook, Oh Facebook XV.

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A days-old argument between two groups of people that escalated on Facebook led to a shooting Allen Tuesday night.

The Allen Police Department said that disagreement was between nine people from South Dallas and seven from Allen.

Sergeant John Felty said the Dallas group drove to a home on Hawthorne Drive near South Jupiter Road in Allen for a confrontation. He said it was about to end peacefully when someone fired shots.

“Well I can’t imagine what would be so important that it would end like this. It is a tragedy,” he said.

Four people were shot and taken to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries. Officers detained eight of the nine from Dallas and the other, who police believe fired the shots, is in custody.

“The good news is… if there is any good news in this… is that the people that are responsible for this are detained or in custody,” he said.

The fact that the shooting stemmed from a Facebook argument was not lost on authorities.

“We’ve had social media disagreements for quite some time but never to this degree where it turns into a shooting,” said Fenty.

Oh good. Great Americans are going to drag their guns out over FB arguments now. If this shit continues, there won’t be all that many people left to worry about, will there? I know how infuriating people can be, who doesn’t know that? Even so, grabbing a gun is not a good idea because someone on the internet pissed you off. If we start killing people on that basis, there really won’t be anyone left.

Via WBAP.

Word Wednesday.

Minatory

adjective.

1: menacing; threatening.

1525-35; from Late Latin minātōrius, from Latin minārī to threaten. “Expressing a threat, 1530s, from Middle French minatoire, from Late Latin

minatorius, from minat-, stem of minari “to threaten”.

“Now Molly put an arm about its neck, and she kissed it again, this time on the long flat cheek, and yet again, on the heavy supraorbital bone, and she looked up and past it, and into Yattuy’s face, and her expression slowly changed from the utmost tenderness that she had shown to the Beast, to a grim minatory glare; gone was the fond lover, and in her place was this stern and vengeful queen.” – Throne of Darkness by Douglas Nicholas.

A Most Colourful Labour of Love.

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In Afghanistan, several men are at work in a smoke-blackened room. They sit between buckets of thick grey paint, working on benches made of dark grey stone. Lonely beams of white light shine through skylights in the vaulted ceiling onto stacks of clay tiles coated with a fine layer of grey dust. Monochromatic as the scene may seem, these men have one of the most colourful jobs in the world: making tiles for Herat’s Jama Masjid (Great Mosque).

This is an amazing story, and an astonishing labour of love and art, and the saving of living history. You can read and see much more at BBC.

Looking for Lunch.

A male Sharp-shinned Hawk flew by the front windows in pursuit of a sparrow, and missed, so retreated back to the pine. I got one bad shot, standing up on the shelf in front of the windows, then he took off in pursuit once more. Saw him flying a couple more times, then couldn’t see him anymore. I waited a while, and the sparrows weren’t coming back. The chickadees were messaging, but not willing to come down to the deck. Waited some more. A couple of chickadees made the mad dash, grabbed a seed and took off. A couple of sparrows landed high in the side pine. Two Downy woodpeckers showed, and slowly, more birds were coming back. Then the Downy made a panic move, and froze. Absolutely still. Minutes ticked by, not a movement. I kept scanning the side pine, but couldn’t see anything. By the time four minutes had gone by, I knew that hawk was there, because that’s an extremely long time for a bird to stay absolutely still. I opened the window, not so much as a tremor from the Downy. I climbed onto the windowsill, and finally spotted the hawk. Half crouched on the window frame, in subzero temps, I’m trying to shoot the damn thing. In the 5th photo is where you can see that I finally got his attention, and in spite of the fact I’m much larger than he is, that’s creepier than fuck. Click for full size.

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© C. Ford.