“Whilst ‘off the shelf’ new livers are clearly still a long way off, this work gives a glimmer of hope that this is no longer just the stuff of science fiction.”
 — Dr. Mark Wright, from Southampton University, reacting to news that a team of scientists from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center had grown a tiny version of a human liver from stem cells introduced into a three-demensional collagen framework. In the future, we’ll be able to drink to our biomedically enhanced hearts’ content. This is even better than self-regenerating livers! The first sign of cirrhosis, we’ll just pop in a new one like we’re changing the Brita filter.

So I saw my first bed bug in New York City this weekend and, thank god, it was not in my apartment. It was in a pretty bad place, though. On a bus, the M9, on the sleeve of the windbreaker of a man sitting right next to me and my kid and my kid’s friend. We were with my kid’s friend’s mom, too, heading to their house to have lunch after karate class. (The kids are in the class, not us adults. Still, though, I’ve been watching. So don’t fuck with me.)

There is no doubt that it was a bed bug. It looked just like the pictures: like a small, flat, reddish-brown ladybug, with the striated abdomen. It was a foot and a half away from me. I looked at it for a good minute before getting the attention of my kid’s friend’s mom, who saw me staring at something, but was too far away to know what it was. “It’s a bed bug,” I said, mouthing the words, so no one could else hear.

Her eyes widened. “Eww!”

I agreed. “Eww.”

“Should we get up and move?” she whispered.

This was a good idea, I thought. “Let’s go guys,” I said to my kid and his friend. “We’re getting off soon.” I helped them up, and very carefully herded them past the man, who was sitting there with two kids of his own. I made sure to push them as far away from the disgusting vermin in our presence, and shuffled them quickly down the aisle.

Standing up toward the front of the bus, I felt kind of bad, looking back at the man and his kids. Had it been obvious what we were doing? That I suddenly decided to move as far away from them as possible? He surely hadn’t seen the insect on his arm. Should have I told him it was there? I thought about the horror of what they must be going through at home. And what a bummer it would be to be stigmatized. They didn’t look much different from us, these people. Their clothes were clean, other than the one horrible, blood-sucking parasite clearly visible on the man’s nylon coat. And then I thought of an even worse possibility: that it hadn’t even come on the bus with him. Maybe his apartment is not infested. What if this single specimen that had just hopped on to him recently, moments before I spotted it, perhaps? Maybe it was the bus that was infested. Maybe the things are dropping down from the ceiling onto passengers. Like six-legged, sharp-penised life-ruining rain.

“I am totally freaking out,” I told my kid’s friend’s mom. “My skin is crawling.”

“Me too,” she said. “Should we get off at the next stop?”

We did. And after a not-possibly-thorough-enough search of our clothes and the kids’ clothes, walked the next five blocks to her place.

Well, I mean, really, how do you top this? “Silvio Berlusconi has been accused of suffering from an “uncontrollable sickness” in his relations with women, as the Moroccan teenage belly dancer at the heart of Italy’s latest sex scandal said she is writing a book about the affair.”

by Jeff Johnson

Dear New England Patriots,

Thanks for ruining my kid’s Halloween. Given a choice of either trick-or-treating or seeing the Vikings vs. the Patriots, my 6 year-old chose to endure a four-hour car ride and attend his first ever NFL game. What he got in return was a swift kick in the pumpkins when you made him turn in his “dangerous” costume before he could enter Gillette Stadium. Truth be told, he didn’t even care about wearing his costume to the game, but I guess we were emboldened and delighted by YOUR statement to fans and the media.

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — During his press conference on Friday, Patriots Head Coach Bill Belichick said it best: “What could be a better holiday than costumes and candy? How can you go wrong?”

To celebrate the occasion, the Patriots are encouraging fans of all ages to wear their Halloween costumes, and the first 1,000 children ages 12 and under to enter the stadium will receive a free bag of candy.

“We recognize many of our younger fans will be foregoing trick or treating to attend the game,” said Patriots spokesperson Stacey James. “We hope they still wear their costumes. If so, they may find themselves on a 164-foot HD video board.”

So we went for it! Only my kid never made it on your malfunctioning HD board, because some overfed walrus from your flunkie security vendor TeamOps thought the plastic horns from my little boy’s faux 8th-century Viking helmet were too “hard” and could, presumably, be used as a weapon inside of the stadium. After a few pleas for common sense (none prevailed), we opted not to walk 25 minutes through gale force winds back to parking lot P11 (a.k.a. Little Altamont) where we’d just dropped $40 for parking, and so the TeamOps guy gleefully took the treacherous toy helmet into his possession.

Shockingly, the “no horns” policy was not exactly protocol across the stadium, even though Captain Walrus said it was. Once inside, we saw a few different adult Viking fans wearing helmets with hard plastic (not foam, as a different TeamOps specialist later tried to convince me) horns, others in oversized hard plastic sunglasses, and several inebriated adults wearing hard plastic football helmets that could have conceivably been used as battering rams, by TeamOps logic.

That was the saddest part. That the people you put in charge of security failed to embrace your festive attitude. Their mission statement: “To provide peace of mind through innovative security solutions,” apparently could be interpreted as meaning, “We’re paranoid of what a six year-old fan, accompanied by his sober parent, might do at the game, with his Halloween costume — which the people who hired us ASKED fans to wear.” Or was the fear that the helmet would be stolen from my kid by some career felon (from our vantage point in Section 304, that wasn’t a stretch, actually) and the horns feverishly turned into shivs in the men’s room? That’s the true spirit of innovation, right there.

Is America such a lawsuit-happy, wussified collection of crybabies, willing to shout “gotcha” or worse on a series of costume technicalities that this sort of logic prevails as common sense? Is your security inside the stadium so horrifically bad that it’s not worth rolling the dice on a kid in a problematic Halloween costume? Do you plan on giving anyone at your games in December who playfully dresses as Santa Claus a body cavity search?

On the way out, there was now a female supervisor at the gate who didn’t care to help us, and discouraged us from rummaging through the dumpsters of confiscated items from the gate. Then we got to wait 95 minutes to drive out of the unpaved P11, where all neon-wearing the parking attendants had long vanished and there were 46 different streams of exit traffic converging into a frenzied, snarled mess. I half expected to find one of the members of Canned Heat taking a dump on the hood of my car. You’ve won like nine of the last twelve Super Bowls, and that’s what you call a parking lot? Jesus. At least the out-of-control bonfire that drunken Pats fans were leaping through was in the lot next to us. Apparently the TeamOps tough love doesn’t extend out beyond the gates.

Anyway, this is a lot of words to say: Don’t pretend to celebrate the holiday if the rent-a-cops you employ are too thick to play along with it. Absent the helmet, my kid’s Viking costume now resembles wardrobe from Riverdance. And that may be the greatest indignity of all.

Sincerely,
Jeff Johnson

Jeff Johnson, who spends a lot of time yakkin’ about football, tweets here. He is also responsible for doing weird things with old sportscards here and here.

Soon only the rich will be able to fuck: “The cost of tyres, gloves and condoms is set to rise following a 65 per cent jump in the price of natural rubber in the past year.”

by Natasha Vargas-Cooper

Posted inside all the phonebank cubbies at Sharron Angle’s Las Vegas headquarters, there’s a sheet that instructs her volunteers how to deal with anyone who has questions regarding Sharron Angle’s relationship to the Mormon Church. This is because Angle’s pastor has denounced the LDS Church — of which her opponent, Harry Reid, is a member — as a “cult.” So concerned people are to be given the number of a “well known leader” and “Friend.” I called to speak with this former bishop of the LDS church.

The Former Bishop is congenial and eager to chat about the race. It’s as though I dropped in during a professor’s office hours, wanting discuss a recently published academic article.

“I tell people to remove the person from the equation,” the Bishop said. “Think about how they will vote on the Senate floor. We all think Harry is a good guy, but how is he going to vote on legislation? How is Sharon going to vote?”

According to The Former Bishop, Reid has proven that he may pray like a Mormon but he does not vote like one. The first major fissure between Reid and the church, according to The Former Bishop, came in 2004, when Reid, then Senate Minority Leader, voted against having a debate on a same sex marriage ban. Two years later, when Republicans resurfaced the resolution during the summer before mid-term elections, Reid condemned their efforts. This cuts right to The Former Bishop’s primary grievance with Reid.

“His vote on the gay marriage bill sent a clear message: he does not believe, as we do, that the Constitution is a divine document.” The Former Bishop explained that “marriage is a holy institution and it says clearly in the Bible that it’s between a man and a woman. The government should never have the right to change that.”

So the Former Bishop felt that it was Reid’s opposition to a federal same-sex marriage bill that ignited the Mormon church of Nevada to champion California’s Proposition 8, the amendment to that state’s constitution to ban gay-marriage. The passage of Prop 8. proved that the Mormon church of Nevada was more than willing to jump the border when it came to gay marriage, with or without a federal representative. The Bishop and his religious cohort contend that Reid openly “trampled on church leadership” and worse: he publicly stated that the millions of dollars from Nevada residents “could have been better spent.”

The relationship between the Mormon Church and Senator Reid has “diminished,” because Reid has repeatedly, according to The Former Bishop, failed to serve as a Mormon “watchdog” over Democratic policy-making: “Why should we put someone in office who doesn’t actually represent our views?”

Reid’s confirmation vote for Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court were further proof of Reid’s divergent agenda. “They are lovely women,” the Former Bishop said, “but they don’t believe in the things we believe.”

The final insult was Reid’s position on “Obamacare.”

“Mr. Obama is out there acting like a czar, encroaching on the Constitution, telling people how to spend their money on medicine and what does Harry Reid say? That he wished Mr. Obama was more ‘confrontational,’” he said. That was the moment that the Former Bishop believes that Harry Reid officially “abdicated his role as a watchdog.”

In the Nevada race, the most important issues for the LDS Church, as the Bishop sees it, are “the protection of the Constitution and of the courts,” meaning a recognition that law comes “from God, not from government,” and also keeping “illegals” out of the state, as well as “personalizing” Social Security “by letting seniors have private accounts.”

When asked how he feels about the positions Sharron Angle has taken on these issues, the Former Bishop asked: “Is Sharron Angle an extremist? Yes, I think she’s been extreme.”

“In your heart of hearts, who do you think is going to deliver for us?” he asked. “The answer is not Harry Reid.”

Natasha Vargas-Cooper is in Nevada through the election — you can reach her via Twitter.

Denise Borino-Quinn, the actress best known for playing Ginny Sacramoni on “The Sopranos,” died last week after a battle with liver cancer. “A Roseland native who lived in Bordentown, Borino-Quinn had no acting experience when she was hired in 2000 to play Ginny Sacrimoni, the Mafia wife with a weight problem. Borino-Quinn had attended the casting call mostly to support a childhood friend and was shocked when she was hired for the HBO show.” Borino-Quinn was 46.

“NY Gov. Candidate JIMMY MCMILLAN To Release Debut LP, ‘The Rent Is Too DAMN High, (Vol 1.)’ Out Nov. 2nd.” Oh yes, you can listen to it now.

Hey, it’s November. That sucks, though. Because November is the worst month of the year.

There are other crappy months, to be sure. In fact, these last couple years, they all seem pretty crappy, don’t they? August is miserably hot. And February is freezing. But August is still summer, and some people get to go on vacation. And February, while also being cursed by stupid spelling (shouldn’t we just drop the silent “r” at this point?) and the horribleness of Valentine’s Day, is blessedly short. November we get a full thirty increasingly dark days, each bursting with things to complain about.

First of all, the weather. The pleasant briskness in the air will soon turn malevolent. Biting wind will blow all the leaves that have been such pretty colors lately off the trees because they’re dead. That sweater that was fun to take out and wear a couple weeks ago won’t feel so great bundled under the big puffy coat that there’s never enough room for in any restaurant or bar or closet in the city, and you will lose two hats, two scarves and one glove of three different pairs of gloves before winter even officially begins. The rain will be cold.

There’s Halloween candy everywhere. This particularly sucks if you’re a parent of a five year-old for whom sugar has an effect not unlike that of Four Loko. (At night, after he’s asleep, you will eat most, if not all, of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in the bowl. For his sake. You don’t want him to get cavities. You know it will make you fatter, and your tri-gliceride cholesterol level is already problematically high, but you will sacrifice your own health for his.) Plus the environmentally damaging, vitamin D-leeching, gloom-inducing end of Daylight Savings Time. And of the baseball season. And election day happens — this year seemingly bound to yield the most depressing results since six years ago, when we showed the rest of the world how happy we were with our then-current administration.

The whole major bummer of a month is of course heading to Thanksgiving, when we will endure the mind-blowing frustration of the worst travel day of the year (how is Due Date different from Planes, Trains & Automobiles, by the way? It’s not different, right?) so that we can gather with our families for a meal and fighting that leads to tears.

Oh, and Wyclef comes back.