Whoa. Dude.

"Klebsiella pneumoniae is one such bacterium. It has resided in the human gastrointestinal tract for as long as we have been able to identify microbes. Each time someone is treated for strep throat, syphilis, Lyme disease, or any other bacterial illness, it learns a little more about our medical arsenal. In 1996, doctors identified a strain of Klebsiella that produced an enzyme called KPC, which has the ability to destroy virtually all modern antibiotics.

"The mutant Klebsiella is harmless in the G.I. tract, but if it escapes to another part of the body—because of poor hygiene or any number of other minor slip-ups—it can turn a routine urinary-tract infection into a life-and-death struggle. To make matters worse, Klebsiella has transferred the genetic recipe for KPC to other—sometimes more dangerous—pathogens. Doctors are now seeing strains of E. coli and Pseudomonas that can produce KPC. To combat the bugs, doctors can either throw a cocktail of antibiotics at the infection or dig up classes of antibiotics that were abandoned decades ago because of their intolerable toxicity.

"Mutant Klebsiella is now spreading around the world, jumping from person to person. It is a particular problem in New York City, where hospital studies have shown that as many as 60 percent of Klebsiella cells can produce KPC. When these bacteria cause an infection, more than one-third of the victims die."

Why Iran is crossed off my post-bar travel list

Maziar Bahari was imprisoned in Iran for 118 days on charges of espionage. What did he do? He gave an interview to The Daily Show's Jason Jones, who was pretending to be a spy. Clearly the Ayatollah didn't get the joke.

What follows is a snippet from his Daily Show interview with Jon Stewart last night.

Maziar Bahari: I thought that maybe they'd cancel my press card or maybe they put me in prison for 2-3 days, maybe a week, and then they let me go, but charging me with espionage because of an interview with Jason, it was beyond my wildest dreams.

Jon Stewart: You know, we hear so much about the banality of evil, but so little about the stupidity of evil.

MB: It's--evil is stupid, you know. Whenever you take anything to the extremes, you see the humor in it and you see the stupidity in it. And I think what the Iranian government did, and what my interrogator as the representative of the Iranian government was doing to me, it was stupid and it was funny at the same time. It was not funny while I was in the interrogation room, blindfolded, in a dark room, and being beaten, you know, that was not funny. But when I was going back to my cell, I had to laugh. I mean, that was my defense mechanism.

JS: Well they say comedy is imprisonment plus time.

MB: Exactly, yeah. And you know, my interrogator, for some reason after a while he became my muse. And I never told him, but he gave me ideas. You know, he was so exaggerated in whatever he did, that he just gave me ideas. And I just, I just laughed at him.

JS: It's all so Dostoevsky--or this crazy existentialist nightmare that you entered into, but--he was obsessed with the idea that you had been to New Jersey.

MB: Yes.

JS: This is--this is true!

MB: You know, to him, New Jersey sounded like the most American place that you could be. And he thought that New Jersey is paradise on Earth. And, you know, he thought that New Jersey is a place where people drink all the time, they have sex all the time, and where there are no Jews.

JS: I'm apparently the exception to the rule, I didn't get to do any of that stuff.

MB: I never told him about you, yes.

JS: It's funny and tragic and horrible because this is a man invested with a great deal of power. He is in the Revolutionary Guard in Iran.

MB: He was a Revolutionary Guard and he was in charge of my life, you know. I had to be very respectful of him, I had to be very deferential, you know, I always had to call him "Sir," and whenever I wanted to answer back I was always saying that, "I beg to differ, but you're stupid." I never said that, but you know, I always had to respect him. And he had a lot of power. I mean, he--you know, one thing that was very smart was that I was not confronting the system, I was not confronting the government. They made him in charge of my life. So it was as if that he had a personal grudge against me, not that I was, you know, tried or imprisoned by the Iranian government. They made it more personal. He came to arrest me. He was my interrogator. And on the last day, just the night before I left Iran, he told me that "We can arrest you wherever you are, we can always bring you back in a bag."

The Flaming Lips

Saw them recently at the Treasure Island Music Festival. Apparently it's perfectly routine for the lead singer to come out on stage in a bubble and roll over the crowd. Made for a fun video; check it out.

Epilepsy warning: may induce seizure. View at your own risk.

Another ad I like

Have you seen the Southwest Airlines "bags fly free" series? Worth pausing your DVR fast-forwarding.

I go on vacation and leave you a dinosaur

"I'm so tired of all my actions having consequences! OH MY GOD, is there SERIOUSLY no room on this planet for a dude who loves actions but hates their consequences??"

Bye kids. I'll be back when all that's left of the turkeys is bones.

Flaubert's "The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas"

Lawyers. Too many in Parliament. Their judgment is warped. Of a lawyer who is a poor speaker, say: 'Yes, but he knows his books.'

Typical father-daughter convo

"Why can't attorneys be more like normal people?"

Dad, I wish I knew.

What any author's website biography should aspire to be

"Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida, where he still lives with his incredibly tolerant family and numerous personal demons.

"A graduate of the University of Florida, at age 23 he joined The Miami Herald as a general assignment reporter and went on to work for the paper's weekly magazine and later its prize-winning investigations team. Since 1985 Hiaasen has been writing a regular column, which at one time or another has pissed off just about everybody in South Florida, including his own bosses. He has outlasted almost all of them, and his column still appears on most Sundays in The Herald's opinion-and-editorial section. It may be viewed online at www.miamiherald.com or in the actual printed edition of the newspaper, which, miraculously, is still being published. . . .

"Together, Hiaasen's novels have been published in 34 languages, which is 33 more than he is able to read or write. Still, he has reason to believe that all the foreign translations are brilliantly faithful to the original work. The London Observer has called him "America's finest satirical novelist," while Janet Maslin of the New York Times has compared him to Preston Sturges, Woody Allen and S.J. Perelman. Hiaasen re-reads those particular reviews no more than eight or nine times a day. . . .

"One of Hiaasen's previous novels, Strip Tease, became a major motion-picture in 1996 starring Demi Moore, and directed by Andrew Bergman. Despite what some critics said, Hiaasen continues to insist that the scene featuring Burt Reynolds slathered from his neck to his toes with Vaseline is one of the high points in modern American cinema."

I thoroughly enjoy this guy's books, in large part because they remind me of the real Florida. (It doesn't hurt that the books are just super-fun to read, too.) As Hiaasen says, "Nothing that happens in my books, no matter how twisted, transcends the reality of South Florida."

You and I are complicated but we're made of elements!

Catchy. Lyrics in comments in case you're a science geek like me.

Hope is touching, and sad

"In 1992, Arkansas convict Ricky Ray Rector, who had brain damage from shooting himself in the head after killing a police officer, ate a final meal of steak, fried chicken, and cherry Kool-Aid, but famously said he wanted to save his pecan pie for later."