evolution

Alternate title: “There’s a bad kind of crazy in the air”.

BALTIMORE – At one of the nation’s top trauma hospitals, a nurse circles a patient’s bed, humming and waving her arms as if shooing evil spirits. Another woman rubs a quartz bowl with a wand, making tunes that mix with the beeping monitors and hissing respirator keeping the man alive.

They are doing Reiki therapy, which claims to heal through invisible energy fields. The anesthesia chief, Dr. Richard Dutton, calls it “mystical mumbo jumbo.” Still, he’s a fan.

“It’s self-hypnosis” that can help patients relax, he said. “If you tell yourself you have less pain, you actually do have less pain.”

Alternative medicine has become mainstream. It is finding wider acceptance by doctors, insurers and hospitals like the shock trauma center at the University of Maryland Medical Center. Consumer spending on it in some cases rivals that of traditional health care.

O what a time to be alive…

Warms your heart, doesn’t it?

Is there any lifelong Kansas resident out there who wants to bet against my feeling that of all the stories about Kansas that may be out there in the next two days, this is the one that is going to get picked up by AP, CNN, et al.?

I guess Thomas Murray is hoping to get Paula Martin and the prosecutorial B-team this time. Hopefully he gets smarter this time if he gets the new trial — jurors said last time that he and his people presented not a shred of evidence that wasn’t contradicted by the evidence.

See ya in 25, pal.

Sydney art fuses surf with Islam:

An Australian artist has produced a range of Islamic surfboards in an attempt to create a greater understanding between East and West.

Phillip George was inspired by his trips to the Middle East and by riots in 2005 when Lebanese Australians were targeted on a beach in Sydney.

He has called the range the Inshallah – or God Willing – surfboards and has put them on exhibition in Sydney.

There are 30 surfboards in all, each adorned with intricate Islamic motifs.

Mr George hopes that the Inshallah surfboards can help bridge cultural and religious misunderstandings within Australia.

Kansas City can do what it wants, and since most of it lies in Missouri, I don’t really give a crap what happens there anyway.

But I gotta ask: what trailer park did they dig up these Mark Funkhouser and Gloria Squitiro characters from? Can you not imagine a bigger pair of morons to hand the keys to a major Midwestern city to?

What I find the most humorous about them is not really them but all of the people who voted for them, most of whom swallowed the same lines they spoke when the lines were coming from Barack Obama.

But then I realize that all of the people who voted for them live in Missouri, and as such, not worth a further waste of my time.