Tierheim

Analogic kinship

James Elkins //Representations//, No. 40, Special Issue: Seeing Science (Autumn, 1992), pp. 33-56
 * [|On Visual Desperation and the Bodies of Protozoa]**

Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan 2002 Basic Books
 * [|Acquirung Genomes]**


 * When organ transplant takes place on the surface of your tube.

http://www.manilastandardtoday.com/?page=news07_dec07_2005AS
 * Face transplant OK with Catholic Church**

FAR as the Catholic Church is concerned face transplant is okay, especially if the materials used are derived from placenta. This is according to Malolos Bishop Jose Oliveros, chairman of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines office on bioethics, during the second day of the International Congress on Bioethics, an event jointly sponsored by Vatican City’s Pontifical Academy for Life and the University of Sto. Tomas. Oliveros said face transplant is now being practiced in advance countries and the first transplant recipient was a woman in France. The prelate said bioethics scientists were able to develop a procedure wherein the placenta — an organ in uterus of the pregnant woman where the supply of food and oxygen develop and subsequently supplied to the fetus through the umbilical cord — could be transformed into a skin. “Experts were able to find ways to use skin taken from placenta as filling materials to the damaged portion of the face. And scientists are still looking for practical uses of placenta,” Oliveros said. Asked if the use of placenta is morally acceptable to the Church, the prelate answered in affirmative, saying it is being allowed so long as it does not harm another person where the placenta was taken. “It is morally acceptable because the procedure does not destroy the fetus in the process. In fact, the placenta is touched days after it was released by the mother,” he said. Hospitals and maternity clinics usually keep in freezer the placenta released by mothers after they gave birth. Philippine barrio folk in practice usually bury the placenta in their backyards. However, the first reported face transplant did not use placenta but tissue taken from a brain-dead person. The first face transplant, a woman recipient, lost her nose, lips and chin after being savaged by a dog. In the controversial operation, tissues, muscles, arteries and veins were taken from a brain-dead donor and attached to the patient’s lower face. Doctors said the woman will not look like her donor, but nor will she look like she did before the attack — instead she will have a “hybrid” face. Apparently, the brain-dead donor was alive when the tissue was taken, which is just plain creepy, not to mention ethically challenging. That may explain why it occurred in France. Doctors said they would have to wait to evaluate whether she would be able to look down her new nose at others as well as other French people do. Bioethics is a science, which drew serious attention of the Catholic Church. It tackles issues like suicide, euthanasia, cloning and medical-based stem-cell treatment, among others. No less than the late Pope John Paul II became cautious that these new scientific breakthrough would intervene in the creation process of God — a thinking that pose questions on morality and ethics, thereby making it a subject with religious implications. In fact, JP II founded the Pontifical Academy for Life, an office in Vatican tasked to guide bioethics researchers, in 1964. The following year, the Polish Pontiff released his landmark Evangelium Vitae (Gospel of Life) with one singular aim to remind the faithful that human life is a gift of God, redeemed by Christ and can either enter eternal bliss or eternal damnation. **Jaime Pilapil**


 * How do we decide which bodyparts are alive?

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE1DD163AF937A25754C0A9629C8B63
 * A Religious Tangle Over the Hair of Pious Hindus**

By SARITHA RAI Published: July 14, 2004 V. Subhasri regards each pilgrimage she has made to the Hindu temple here as an act of divine deliverance. When she came to the temple three years ago, Ms. Subhasri, 35, offered her waist-length hair to the temple deity, Venkateshwara, in a sign of absolute devotion. She then prayed that her husband, Satyanarayana Raju, be cured of his acute stomach ulcers. Last week she was back, offering her hair again in thanks for the recovery of her husband, and saying a new prayer for the success of her older son, Veeraraju, 15. He has scored 490 marks out of 600 in his recent school exams and, god willing, he will be a doctor one day, Ms. Subhasri said, wiping her tears with one end of her sari. In her devotion, Ms. Subhasri was completely unaware that the hair she offered to her deity was collected along with that of thousands of others each day and eventually turned into high-priced wigs as part of India's lucrative wig industry. The hair is a significant moneymaker for the temple, Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam, and for many like it across the subcontinent. A majority of Hindus, who make up 85 percent of India's billion-plus population, have their heads shaved at least once in a lifetime as prescribed by Hindu scriptures, and much of India's hair exports, which totaled $62.5 million last year, come out of the customary Hindu tradition of offering one's hair at temples. But if most Indians who offer their hair in religious devotion are unaware that it is made into wigs that are sold abroad -- mainly in Europe and the United States -- most of those who buy the wigs are equally unaware of the religious aspect involved in the collecting of human hair for commercial use. Or at least they were until recently, when a group of Orthodox Jewish rabbis in Israel declared that wearing wigs made with even one strand of ritually tonsured hair constituted idolatry, and was thus forbidden. Among Orthodox Jewish women, who observe a code of modesty that prohibits the public display of their hair after marriage, the rabbis' ruling created an uproar. Thousands of these women, who account for significant numbers of wig sales in the United States, have publicly burned wigs costing thousands of dollars and have rushed to find wigs that are guaranteed to be made of European hair or to get synthetic hair replacements. Many have foregone wigs altogether for snoods or hats to cover their heads. Like polished diamonds and software, two of its better-known exports, human hair has become a lucrative international business for India. The hair gathered from temples and hair salons is cleaned, processed and sold and in the form of high-priced wigs, hair extensions and toupees, mostly via wig factories in China. Reaching Tirupati at the end of their pilgrimage from a small town called Kapileswarapuram in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, the Rajus -- Ms. Subhasri, her husband and two teenage sons -- joined a crush of people to descend on one of the dozens of thronged community centers in the temple complex. They stood in one of the snaking lines alongside hundreds of other pilgrims waiting their turn for a free tonsure. When her turn came, Ms. Subhasri sat on a flat, wooden platform, head bowed before one of the dozens of expert barbers. Within minutes, her wavy, black tresses were shorn, and immediately swept away by a broom-wielding temple employee. Bathing in lukewarm water after this ritual, the Rajus joined a milelong line of devotees with shining pates like theirs, and prepared to go into the innermost area of the temple to pray to the deity. The head shaving ritual is repeated every day by thousands of Indians, both male and female, in the Tirupati temple as a symbol of the surrender of a person's ego to god. The Tirupati temple is a sprawling structure which an average of 50,000 pilgrims visit daily. More than a ton of hair is collected each day from the devotees. We run through about 20,000 blades daily, said Ajeya Kallam, the temple's executive officer. He said the sale of hair brought in $6.17 million last year, adding to the already substantial earnings of India's richest religious institution. (The temple's primary income, about $333 million annually, comes from the monetary donations of its faithful and wide-ranging investments.) The controversy over Indian hair in wigs sold in the United States and Israel appears to have made no dent in the temple's earnings from selling hair. On the contrary, said Surendra Babu, the temple's marketing chief, at a recent hair auction, bidders paid 10 percent more than they had at the last auction. It takes about a year from the time the hair is cut off to its appearance as wigs in the West. Every other month, when two warehouses are piled high with stocks of some 100,000 pounds of hair, officials at the Tirupati temple call for a hair auction. The auction is a regulated process: notices appear in three newspapers, in four languages each, and on the temple's two official Web sites. The bidding at the temple hair auction is highly competitive, as Indian hair tends to be fine, lustrous and free from chemical treatments. A kilogram of hair 16 inches long sold for $166 at the recent auction, though short hair fetched as little as 50 cents a kilogram. Gray hair was auctioned at $144 per kilogram. The end product is extremely high-glamour, but the process of getting there is not, acknowledged Benjamin Cherian, managing director of Raj Impex Private Ltd., one of India's leading human hair exporters, who regularly bids at hair auctions at the Tirupati temple. Mr. Cherian dismissed the controversy over Indian temple hair being part of a ritual. What is ritualistic about humbling yourself in the most basic way? he said. In India, shaving your head equals shedding all vanity and becoming modest. Mr. Cherian said his business was not affected by the controversy at all. At his hair processing units, based in the southern Indian city ofMadras, hair is sorted into varieties, then washed, sun dried, categorized by size, bleached and stitched. The company's 100 employees do most of the work manually. Mr. Cherian sells some of his processed inventory directly to the haute salons and hair accessories retailers like Extension Plus in Los Angeles, and others in Pennsylvania and New York. The United States is the world's biggest market for human hair accessories, said Mr. Cherian, whose company earned $4.44 million from processed human hair exports last year. A major part of his sales is to Chinese hair factories, where the hair is converted into an assortment of wigs and extensions, some customized to the exact requirement of clients of high-end salons in the United States. Gupta Enterprises, also based inMadras, has dominated the Indian human hair export trade for more than a decade and its buyers regularly attend the temple hair auctions. Kishore Gupta, a business school graduate who recently inherited the business from his father, said the company had Western fashion trends to thank for its flourishing business. India's torrid climate doesn't allow for wigs, but in the West some women change their hair three or four times a week, he said. The business had humble beginnings in the village of Madepalli in Andhra Pradesh. The villagers were deft at untangling knotted hair, and the business began by employing them. Now, Gupta Enterprises exports processed human hair worth $16.88 million a year to 30 countries. Like his competitor, Mr. Gupta said the wig-burning controversy had not affected his business at all. In fact, in the recent auction, our bid prices went up, Mr. Gupta said.

micro.fascistic.sex is rhizomic too (so i suggest we remain in the light of reductionism)

http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3067222.ece he's getting pretty old: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070921100332.htm or the actual article http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2007.00512.x

Warning: If you are reading this then this warning is for you. Every word you read of this useless fine print is another second off your life. Don't you have other things to do? Is your life so empty that you honestly can't think of a better way to spend these moments? Or are you so impressed with authority that you give respect and credence to all that claim it? Do you read everything you're supposed to read? Do you think every thing you're supposed to think? Buy what you're told to want? Get out of your apartment. Meet a member of the opposite sex. Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you're alive. If you don't claim your humanity you will become a statistic. You have been warned- Tyler
 * Tyler’s Warning**

The first rule of Fight Club is - you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is - you DO NOT talk about Fight Club. Third rule of Fight Club, someone yells Stop!, goes limp, taps out, the fight is over. Fourth rule, only two guys to a fight. Fifth rule, one fight at a time, fellas. Sixth rule, no shirt, no shoes. Seventh rule, fights will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule, if this is your first night at Fight Club, you have to fight.
 * Confession**


 * No Longer Human**(1948), Dazai Osamu

... It is almost impossible for me to converse with other people. What should I talk about, how should I say it? I don't know. This was how I happened to invent my clowning. It was the last quest for love I was to direct at human beings. Although I had a mortal dread of human beings I seemed quite unable to renounce their society. I managed to maintain on the surface a smile which never deserted my lips; this was the accomodation I offered to others, a most precarious achievement performed by me only at the cost of excruciating efforts within.

K I N D E R L O V E 好萊塢大導演與孔子76代孫女喜結良緣 (The seventy sixth descendent of Confucius marries a Westerner)

In a newspaper article of chinareviewnews.com, Rob Minkoff 導演明可夫 Marries 孔令華 Kung Ling Hua Also known as Crystal Kong On September 29, 2005.

Before telling a little more about what I know of Rob and 令華’s marriage, I would like to point out That we each pronounce these names in unique ways Due to our differences in oral structure For instance our teeth alignment or frenulum length Which account for our phono logical disorders.

So it would not be necessary to ask them how to say these names Over and over Or at least a couple of times In effort to get a grasp of foreign sounds As we are being introduced to this couple.

We might as well call them Hänsel und Gretel, A pair of children with silky hair and dreamy blue eyes in my mind Who bake an elderly lady with an insight for eccentric cuisine Out of kinderlove And would still be talking about Rob and 令華.

Rob is a Russian Jewish film director most famous for The Lion King(1994) and Stewart Little(1999). http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0591450/

令華 is the seventy sixth descendent of Confucius.

They met at a friend’s birthday party in 2003. At the party Rob was singing a song by Frank Sinatra Who was one of the most famous singers During the fifties and the sixties. Non of the guests knew the words Except 令華 who sang along with him. That is how their love began.

They had their wedding ceremony in Malibu CA.

There was the breaking of glass Then the groom kneeled in front of the bride’s parents and served them tea While the soundtrack of Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon was being played Live With traditional Chinese instruments.

At the wedding They also enjoyed their favorite Sinatra song As well as the title song of The Lion King soundtrack.

Reference>

http://www.chinareviewnews.com/doc/1000/4/6/4/100046479.html?coluid=23&kindid=290&docid=100046479