DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

As a counterpoint to yesterday’s piece about living forever, here’s one about dying young.

The Golden Gate Bridge is a popular tourist destination. But as is true with lots of landmarks that offer dramatic downward views, more people come to see it than go home to tell their friends afterwards.

Not everybody who jumps dies, although most do. And it’s not a pretty way to go:

Jumpers … hit the water … at about seventy-five miles an hour and with a force of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. Eighty-five per cent of them suffer broken ribs, which rip inward and tear through the spleen, the lungs, and the heart. Vertebrae snap, and the liver often ruptures.

The fall broke both of [the man’s] ankles and three of his ribs and collapsed his lungs, but he lived — becoming one of only twenty-six people to survive the plunge from the Golden Gate.

There’s nothing funny about suicide, but I laughed when I read that some of the people who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, presumably with a vision of dropping gracefully into the water to disappear below the waves in a sort of romantic farewell, instead hit the southern tip of Sausalito.

From the pictures, Sausalito looks like a pretty easy thing to miss, but from a pedestrian’s point of view there is a long span of something that looks like the bridge that isn’t anywhere near the water. (Photo courtesy Ken Adelman’s wondrous californiacoastline.org.)

In January, the Chron ran a story about Eric Steel, a documentary filmmaker who filmed the bridge constantly for a year. Steel recorded about 20 jumpers, and plans to make a full-length documentary about the bridge suicides. The Chronicle published his comments in January, in an article called Film captures suicides on Golden Gate Bridge:

My crew and I spent an entire year looking very carefully at the Golden Gate Bridge, running cameras for almost every daylight minute… We observed and filmed most of the two dozen or so suicides and a great many of the unrealized attempts.

[O]n several occasions during the year, my crew and I were the first callers to the bridge patrol offices when we saw these events begin to unfold.

Bridge spokeswoman Mary Currie tells a related story. While accompanying a foot patrol, she encountered a man who seemed like a jump risk:

[H]er group stopped to assess a handsome middle-aged man who’d been at the south tower for two hours. “He said he was just taking a walk. But we all had a feeling,” Currie said. “Still, you can’t gang-tackle a guy for taking a walk. Five minutes after our last contact with him, he walked to the mid-span and looked back. We all took off after him; I was only twenty feet away when he went over. We saw him go in, feet first.

“The other guys felt they’d followed procedure, done what they had to do, didn’t get him, and they’ve moved on. But I had nightmares for a week.”

The Chronicle Magazine ran an interesting article about Cynthia Kenyon, a biochemist at UCSF working in the area of lifespan research. Or more specifically, lifespan extension.

By suppressing a single gene, her team has extended the life span of a particular variety of worm by a factor of six. If she could perform the same trick on me, I’d live to be 400, which would be a good thing. (For example, I’d have more time to update this website.)

Tiny, transparent worms are not genetically similar to humans, except for a few ex-roommates I could mention. But there is good news for any of you who happen to be mammalian vertebrates:

Other researchers have conducted versions of Kenyon’s age-bending experiments to increase the life spans of flies and yeast — and, far more significantly for humans, of mice. Conducted by Martin Holzenberger of the French Biomedical Research Agency and independently by Ron Kahn at the Harvard Medical School, the mouse tests genetically coaxed mice to live 33 percent longer than normal.

Here’s the full article: Finding the Fountain of Youth

The SF Chronicle reports:

San Francisco city officials are investigating a popular exhibition of plasticized corpses and body parts at the Masonic Center, including whether the bodies pose a public health problem and were improperly obtained.

The immediate issue is that some of the corpses — which have been injected with plastic and dissected to reveal muscles, bone and nerves — are leaking.
…
The fluid leaking out of the bodies could be either polymer or body fat, said Dr. Robert Henry, a professor of anatomy at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Leaking can occur if not enough of the lipid, or fat, is removed from the body before injection with the polymer.

The process of removing the fat “can take a real long time — two to four months, depending on what is used,” said Henry, treasurer of the International Society for Plastination. “If that wasn’t done long enough, and these people seem to be novices at it, a larger percentage of the fat is left in the body than is ideal, so it’s going to leak out.”

(Previous plastination news and photos.)

… it is possible to express the concept “vegan” in German.

We were at Dusseldorf Airport when Raphael spit up all over my leg: a hand-sized puddle of used breast milk, all curdled and lumpy. We’d barely begun our 17-hour journey home and already I needed a change of clothes.

We had a couple minutes before preboarding — not that Lufthansa actually does preboarding; they just “welcome” everyone all at once, and a crowd of between 200 and 600 irate travellers stand up and press in a mob toward the gate, where they’re reduced to single-file impatience, and while I’m on the topic WFT is up with that?! — so I mopped most of the nastiness from my pants leg with the bib (which ironically was spotless) and hurried to the nearest rest room.

The first thing I noticed was the lack of a hot-air hand dryer. I muttered “Crap!” to no one in particular, although in Germany that’s probably something you can order at the Imbiß, which might explain the funny stares. I got more stares, none of which could honestly be described as “funny,” when I took my pants off and began washing them in the sink.

Yes, I had to wash out the spit-up. I was not willing to breathe sour milk for 17 hours. Although had I known then that the elderly Gypsy woman in the baseball cap who would be sitting four seats away on the long flight to SFO would not have bathed any time in recent memory and would be exuding a rich body odor redolant with aromas of garlic, fermented grains, and feet, I might have opted for the sour milk smell after all.

The wet spot wasn’t huge, but by the time I’d washed it out, my pants were soaked from knee to crotch. I had to improvise drying solutions, lest I navigate the boarding line with an enormous, fresh wet stain on my pants. “Sorry, had to piss,” I imagined saying to people with a cheery wave and a British accent, for no reason I can adequately explain.

So I wrung out the pants, squeezed the wet areas with paper towels and finally resorted to flapping my hand inside the pants leg. I was leaving sweaty sock-prints on the tile floor from the stress and exertion. But it more or less worked: my pants were damp but not obviously so. And I hadn’t missed the first (only) boarding call.

An hour later, at the Munich airport, Raphael’s diaper overflowed and seeped through two layers of cloth to stain my other pants leg. (He doesn’t always manage his own secretions.)

I’d actually anticipated this to some degree, so I caught the problem before it became the sort of thing they refuse to let people get on airplanes for.

“What’s next?!” I cried to no one in particular, although since we were still in Germany it’s likely everybody within earshot assumed I was asking for a sausage.

On the next flight, I fully expected the stewardess to spill orange juice on me, but in fact she did not. Instead, a recalcitrant container of salad dressing squirted a half-ounce of vinegar, oil, and some damn Krauter herb blend six inches up the sleeve of my shirt.

(Previous vomit stories.)