IF YOU'RE ROCKING THE HOUSE

2 articles in today's NY Times caught my attention for diff reasons.

1: After Linking New Strain of Staph to Gay Men,

University Scrambles to Clarify

• In a matter of days, it jumped from a routine press release to a medical controversy. On Monday, a team of researchers led by doctors from the University of California at San Francisco announced that gay men were “many times more likely than others” to acquire a new strain of drug-resistant staphylococcus, a nasty, fast-spreading and potential lethal bacteria known as MRSA USA300. And sure enough, the study, published online in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was quickly picked up by reporters round the world and across the Internet, including a London tabloid which dubbed the disease “the new H.I.V.” But for gay men in the Castro neighborhood here, which was an early epicenter for the AIDS epidemic and a current hot spot for MRSA, the report also seemed to cast an unfair, and all too familiar, stigma on their sexuality.
  “The way they keep targeting gays as if gays alone are responsible for it, its like H.I.V./AIDS all over again,” said Colin Thurlow, 60, who is gay and lives in San Francisco. “And we’re sick and tired of it.” The report also inadvertently offered ammunition for many antigay groups, including the conservative Concerned Women for America, which issued a release on Wednesday citing the “sexual deviancy” of gay men as leading to AIDS, syphilis and gonorrhea.
  “The medical community has known for years that homosexual conduct, especially among males, creates a breeding ground for often deadly disease,” the release read.
  Another group, Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, also cited the report as a way of proving that “homosexual behavior is unhealthy.”
  “Why aren’t all schoolchildren being taught that there are special health risks associated with homosexual behavior and that they should ‘just say no’ to homosexuality?” read a released posted on the group’s Web site. STORY

This is pretty ridiculous that freaking smart people would imply such a thing and asinine of these "advocacy" groups to run with it. MRSA is deadly yes but saying that a gay person is more times likely to die of it when most of the cases reported last year alone did not indicate this. The study was conducted in '03-04. The strain has since grown more resistant and does not chose it's host. The best way for anyone to prevent MRSA is to wash wash wash! also if you go to the hospital make sure attending to you either washes their hands or you see them use antibacterial gel. Unclean hopsitals harbor MRSA.

2:

Two new devices dispense entirely with the bulky turntables and CD players of traditional D.J. equipment. Instead, the new products are so compact that aspiring jam masters can put a D.J. rig in their pocket — or at least in a backpack — and head for the party, connect to the stereo system and rock the crowd.

One of the new players, the Pacemaker (520 euros, or about $760¹), created by a small Swedish company, Tonium, reduces the basic D.J. equipment of dual players and mixer to a device the size of a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. The Pacemaker has a 120-gigabyte hard drive, fits in the palm of the hand, runs on batteries and has a built-in mixer to layer tunes seamlessly so the music never stops.

Tonium will begin shipping Pacemakers in February, said Ola Sars, sales and marketing director for the company, which is based in Stockholm. It will focus first on customers in the European Union, Japan and South Korea, and then on the United States. American consumers will be able to order through the Web site, www.pacemaker.net, in February, he said.

The Pacemaker lets the D.J. preview one track in the headphones while another song is playing for the audience through speakers. “You can select the second song, and then mix the songs together so one song goes into the next smoothly,” said Jonas Norberg, the chief executive of Tonium. “I wanted a PlayStation Portable for music,”

Another mobile D.J. device comes from Numark Inc., a longtime maker of professional D.J. equipment. Called the iDJ2 (about $600), this lightweight mixing console has been on sale since September

“People looked down their noses when D.J.’s brought in CD players and computers instead of turntables and vinyl records,” and now it is iPods that are scorned.

Slowly, though, this new stigma will fade. “If you are rocking the house,” he said, “who cares what equipment you are using?”



¹ look at how much the dollar has depreciated and the euro now king. augh the bush admin