Tuesday, March 25, 2003

Pelvic potpourri postscript

After I did my women's pelvises post earlier, Susanna commented that I had neglected men's pelvises. That's OK with me - although I may be resisting cultural trends, I'll unabashedly note my prejudice in favor of the distaff variety. I could compromise and write of my own, but that would be even duller than it sounds. But since then I've encountered a few items on the general topic that I'll share here.

I already published the Moron's Guide to a Larger Penis here. I've always been amused by the ones who offered enlargement "prosthetically". No, I've never tried it (nor needed to, dammit). I'd think keeping it attached would be a challenge. Surely you couldn't fool anyone with it. And then there's that tiny little problem with the lack of nerve endings - if they ever figure out how to make that little interface work the implications are staggering, and not just for the terminally horny.

The blood supply to the penis is complex - both erections and flaccidity are necessary to keep blood flowing as needed. Everybody has heard of impotence, in which erections are rare if not impossible. The flip side of this is priapism, and believe it or not it is worse.

Anybody for spotted dick?

Medpundit offers us this about men who train doctors in prostate exams by submitting to them time after time. I'm happy to hear that there are no visual skills involved. One major concern is to avoid startling the patient, and to avoid anything that even remotely could be construed as erotic (this link also from MedPundit).

One might hope that such a process would escape exploitation in the entertainment business. One would be wrong, for as H. L. Mencken once allegedly wrote, no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people. One choice scene was from Tom Hanks' movie "Bachelor Party", in which Hanks' sister is a proctologist. If I remember right, he wanders into the examining room while she is in mid exam with an old man in all fours - she introduces the two and tries to hug him as he tries to keep her at bay.

Oh yeah, I think Mad TV did it once too. This time the victim was a fat guy laying on his side as a bunch of viewers watched his colonoscopy. He was subjected to untold indignities. Then they decided to take a group picture, so they just gave the probe a yank and used it to take the shot. Yow.

The spring 2003 American Heritage of Invention and Technology magazine has an item on America's best collegiate inventors. One of the candidates, Carlo Traverso, invested a non-invasive colon-cancer test that has potential of eliminating many colonoscopies. He gets innumerable comments of course, but the worst part is that he gets unsolicited offers of stool samples from strangers.

I'm gonna quit while I'm behind. We'll try to return to my usual standards (?!) later...

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