Thoughts Out Of Season

Former Capo di tutti Capo of Hip-Hop Surge Knight was shot in LA during a pre-VMA party. Reports are that Mr.Knight walked from the club and into a police car to await paramedics despite 6 gunshot wounds to his upper torso. He is now in critical but stable condition at a local hospital following surgery. I asked Dr. Hackenbush, noted trauma criminologist about the proclivity of someone being shot that many times and surviving. Mr.Hackenbush: " Our team did a study of 217,000 shootings over the past 3 years in several American cities and found that anyone loosely defined as a perpetrator ( someone actually convicted or suspected of committing a variety of crimes) had a 917% better  chance of surviving an attack than another not named as or thought to be a perpetrator. Some examples include: The rapper 50 Cent shot 9 times and survives while on the same day a police officer dies after a bullet fragment hit his big right toe causing an infection that eventually caused his death; ...

The Hajj has ended and now millions of observant Muslims will return to their homes all around the world after making the pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Of concern right now is the possibility that some may have contracted the ultra-deadly MERS-CoV virus which has been striking down people within Saudi Arabia since 2012. This disease is new on the medical horizon, never before seen in humans much like the SARS virus that rampaged through China a decade ago infecting over 8000 people killing over 700. MERS-CoV presents even more of a concerning picture due the facts that it's mortality rate is 3-4 times that of SARS and that the incubation period, the time between becoming infected and showing symptoms, could be as long as 2 weeks. This constitutes a serious problem, especially as it concerns the Hajj in that those that are infected could return to their countries and appear perfectly normal thus escaping detection by border personnel on the lookout for anyone exhibiti...