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Nate
: ?It's not the design of these Sunday-drive posts to simply be a litany of the worldwide march of Google Street View, but it does seem to turn out that way. This week I coincidentally started Keri Hulme's novel (and winner of the 1985 Booker Prize) The Bone People and discovered that GSV had finally reached the Antipodes, and I was thus able to get some sense of the novel's setting—and the town where the author lives—on the remote Westland coast of New Zealand's South Island. There I found this bit of local culture, an austere but well-labeled general store. The roadside forest outside town, meanwhile, is as ferny and wild-looking as one would hope and expect.?Nate
: ?Google Maps launched Street View coverage for Australia and Japan today. Let the cross-cultural-exploration begin! (I should note that it took a good 20min of clicking around Tokyo's streets before I found some funny English to link to. Nearly all the words I came upon were, contrary to stereotype, quite correct.)?Nate
: ?I have to admit half the fun in the article are a couple of easy-for-Americans misreads that (erroneously) place the action in the late 19th century. But it's also pleasing to see the old debunked medical "superstitions" rebunked now and again.?Kate Benson in the Sydney Morning Herald:
When Mehdi Jaffari was told his left carotid artery was so severely blocked he faced the risk of an imminent stroke, he turned the clock back to medieval times.
The 52-year-old counsellor, from Chatswood, bought more than 35 leeches from a Victorian farmer and applied them to his body daily. Within five days, a CT angiogram showed the artery had cleared, stunning staff at Royal North Shore Hospital and his family.
Leech therapy, first documented in Greece more than 4000 years ago, is not new in Sydney. More than 50 Richardsonianus australis leeches are kept in a tank at Liverpool Hospital for use on patients who have had skin grafts or severed digits because their saliva contains hirudin, a chemical that acts as a powerful anticoagulant and vasodilator.
More here. [Thanks to Susan Anthony.]
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: ?The Pacific Islands affinity for processed, canned meats dates, in large part, to World War II, which brought Spam and Marines to the region, though bio-anthropologists suggest that cultures built around long ocean voyages favor those with genetic predisposition to building ample fat reserves.?While the report said Australia had overtaken the United States as the fattest nation on the planet, recent U.S. studies show around 34 percent of Americans are overweight or obese.
And small Pacific nations top World Health Organization lists, with 94.5 percent of people in tiny Nauru classed as overweight, leading to chronic diabetes problems on the island.
The Federated States of Micronesia (91.1 percent), the Cook Islands (90.9 percent), Tonga (90.8 percent) and Niue (81.7 percent) rounded out the WHO top five, while the United States came in at number nine, with 74.1 percent overweight or obese.