Wednesday Woody

WENTZ POKES FUN AT PENIS SCANDAL

FALL OUT BOY star PETE WENTZ pokes fun at his penis-baring internet scandal in the group's new video THIS AIN'T A SCENE, IT'S AN ARMS RACE by recreating the moment he let it all hang out.
The rocker almost quit the group and turned his back on fame after an embarrassing photograph of him semi-naked, holding his erect penis was launched into cyberspace earlier this year (06).
The bassist emailed the candid mobile phone photo to a girlfriend and the saucy shot was intercepted by a third party and put on the internet.
But now Wentz, who is dating ASHLEE SIMPSON, can see the funny side of the incident - and he's having a little fun with the scandal in the new promo.
He even had director ALAN FERGUSON recreate the bathroom at his parents' house - where he first flashed his manhood.
Wentz says, "It's so bizarre. Part of me wanted to call my mom up and be like, 'Our bathroom wall's in this...' More people have seen that picture than have bought our record, which is a very bizarre statistic to think about." In the scene, a twisted photographer persuades Wentz to unzip his jeans and show him his manhood. The video then cuts to shocked fans who download the photo of the bassist baring all.



Severed penis sewn back

A rare surgical procedure has helped a castrated man regain a normal life after his severed penis was reattached in a seven-hour long operation in a private hospital.

This, according to the hospital, is the first case of successful re-plantation of an amputated penis in the capital.

The patient, Munna (name changed), came to the city six hours after being "bobbittised". "I was beaten up by my enemies and they chopped my penis off. When I went to a local hospital, the doctor told me to go back to the place where I was attacked and get the severed part. He then referred me to Delhi," he said.

Munna reached Sir Ganga Ram Hospital (SRGH) and was immediately transferred to the operation theatre for microsurgical reattachment of the amputated penis. "The patient came to us six hours after being amputated, the severed part was preserved in a ice bag. Sutures were made in the stumped and severed part and both were sewn together. Since the blood vessels and nerves are very small, the surgery is complex and its success depends heavily of the doctors' accuracy. It took us seven hours to complete the surgery and the patient can have a normal life," said Dr RK Khazanchi, head of the hospital’s plastic surgery department.

Doctors maintain that successful reattachment of amputated parts can only take place when severed parts are properly preserved and brought to the doctors. "In accidents or in case of assault, if a body part gets severed, it should be immediately put in a plastic bag and the bag placed in an ice bag. The storage should be such that the severed part does not come in direct contact with the ice. In 90 per cent cases, amputated parts can be successfully replanted if they are properly stored," said Dr Aditya Aggarwal, who was a part of the team that operated on Munna.



Early treatment can halt testicular cancer
Though uncommon, testicular cancer is the most common type in young males. But it's almost always treatable.

Young men often believe they are invincible, impervious to injury and disease. So when cancer strikes someone like 19-year-old former Gopher hockey player Phil Kessel, it somehow seems more shocking than when it happens to someone older and less physically fit. Kessel, now with the Boston Bruins, has been surgically treated for testicular cancer.

Although one of the most uncommon of all cancers, testicular cancer is the most common type in males between ages 15 and 34, according to the National Cancer Institute. It's diagnosed in about 8,000 American men each year, and about 390 die from it. And for reasons that no one understands, the rate among white men has doubled in the past 40 years. Among the most notable survivors of this type of cancer is cyclist Lance Armstrong.

But if discovered early it can almost always be cured with radiation, chemotherapy or surgery, said Dr. Joel Slaton, associate professor of urologic surgery at the University of Minnesota. "That's because it grows so quickly and cells that grow quickly are easier to kill," he said. He recently provided some basic information on testicular cancer.

In most men the cancer is confined to one testicle.

It can sometimes be felt as a lump. And treatment involves surgically removing the testicle, but not the scrotum, before it spreads to lymph glands in the abdominal cavity. Usually, men are still fertile after such surgeries because the treatment does not affect sperm production in the other testicle. Most men are provided a prosthetic that is placed inside the skin of the scrotum so it looks normal after surgery. "When they are that young, they tend to accept it," Slaton said.

If the cancer spreads, its first stop is usually abdominal lymph glands.

Those cases may require radiation or chemotherapy in addition to surgery, Slaton said, depending on the type of cancer. If so, then fertility might be a problem later in life, and men are often encouraged to store sperm in a sperm bank before treatment. They are also at some risk for something called retrograde ejaculation -- which can affect fertility -- in which the sperm moves toward the bladder instead of the penis through the epididymis, the tube at the back of the scrotum.

The cause of this cancer is unknown.

But there are common risk factors. The most common is undescended testicles at birth. "Even when you [surgically] bring them down into the scrotum in infants, they are still at higher risk," Slaton said. But the longer they remain undescended the higher the risk, he said. Men who have a family history of testicular cancer or who are born with other abnormalities of the genitals are also at elevated risk.



Strongest Evidence Yet That Circumcision Lowers Men's HIV Risk

AIDS researchers had important news last week. Two studies in Africa confirmed that men who are circumcised greatly reduce their risk of infection with HIV during sex with women.

The United States National Institutes of Health announced an early end to the studies because the results were clear. In Kisumu, Kenya, it said, men who underwent circumcision were fifty-three percent less likely to become infected than uncircumcised men.

The other study in Rakai, Uganda, showed a reduction of forty-eight percent.

HIV rates are generally lower in areas of the world where the removal of the foreskin from the penis is common in babies or young boys.

Many studies have suggested that male circumcision might help protect against infection with the AIDS virus. But Doctor Anthony Fauci noted that the new findings come from large, carefully controlled studies. Doctor Fauci is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

He says adult male circumcision could also lead to fewer infections in women in areas where HIV is spread mainly through heterosexual sex.

Experts say the findings offer hope especially for countries in Africa south of the Sahara. The United Nations estimates that sub-Saharan Africa had close to three million new HIV infections this year. That was about two-thirds of all new infections worldwide.

Health experts involved in the studies say they hope circumcision will become one of the basic tools to fight HIV and AIDS. But they expect some barriers.

It may be difficult to get men to have the operation, especially if it conflicts with cultural beliefs. Cost is another issue. And it may be difficult to find high-quality medical care so the operation is performed safely.

Some people have also expressed concern that circumcision will be given too much weight in the fight against AIDS. They say men might think they can forget about other ways to prevent infection.

The National Institutes of Health and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research paid for the studies. Five thousand men took part in Uganda and almost three thousand in Kenya.

The studies were supposed to continue through the middle of next year. Instead, the researchers are now offering circumcisions to the men in the uncircumcised groups in those studies.



Fore ShameDid the Vatican steal Jesus' foreskin so people would shut up about the savior's penis?
By David Farley

In 1983, as the residents of Calcata, a small town 30 miles north of Rome, prepared for their annual procession honoring a holy relic, a shocking announcement from the parish priest put a damper on festivities. "This year, the holy relic will not be exposed to the devotion of the faithful. It has vanished. Sacrilegious thieves have taken it from my home." Not since the Middle Ages, when lopped-off body parts of divine do-gooders were bought, sold, and traded, has relic theft been big news. But the mysterious disappearance of Calcata's beloved curio is different.

This wasn't just the residuum of any holy human—nor was it just any body part. It was the foreskin of Jesus Christ, the snipped-off tip of the savior's penis, the only piece of his body he supposedly left on earth.

Just what the holy foreskin was doing in the priest's house—in a shoebox at the back of his wardrobe, no less—and why and how it disappeared has been debated ever since the relic vanished. Some suspect the village priest sold it for a heavenly sum; others say it was stolen by thieves and ended up on the relics black market; some even suggest Satanists or neo-Nazis are responsible. But the most likely culprit is an unlikely one: the Vatican.




And why not? Protestant doubt ("They couldn't let Christ's body go without keeping a piece," John Calvin quipped) and the scientific revolution, which changed our thinking from superstitious to skeptical, have taken their toll on a relic that once rested high atop the pious pecking order of blessed body parts. It's understandable that the 20th-century church began feeling a bit bashful about the idea of its flock fawning over the 2,000-year-old tip of the redeemer's manhood. Still, when I arrived in Calcata six months ago, the idea of a Vatican theft of Jesus' foreskin sounded more like a ganja-induced brainstorming session with Dan Brown and Danielle Steele. But some transplanted bohemians, a deathbed confession, and a little historical context have convinced me otherwise.

Even before its disappearance, the relic had a strange history. It was discovered in Calcata in 1557, and a series of miracles soon followed (freak storms, perfumed mists engulfing the village). The church gave the finding a seal of approval by offering a 10-year indulgence to those who came to venerate. Lines of pilgrims stretched from the church doors to beyond the walls of the fortress town. Nuns and monks from nearby villages and monasteries made candlelit processions. Calcata was a must-see destination on the pilgrimage map.

That is, until 1900. Facing increasing criticism after the "rediscovery" of a holy foreskin in France, the Vatican decreed that anyone who wrote about or spoke the name of the holy foreskin would face excommunication. And 54 years later, when a monk wanted to include Calcata in a pilgrimage tour guide, Vatican officials didn't just reject the proposal (after much debate). They upped the punishment: Now, anyone uttering its name would face the harshest form of excommunication—"infamous and to be avoided"—even as they concluded that Calcata's holy foreskin was more legit than other claimants'.

But that wasn't the end of the holy foreskin. In the late 1960s, government officials, worried that crumbling cliffs and threatening earthquakes might doom the village, decided to build a new town. Hippies discovered the newly abandoned town, which was awaiting a government wrecking crew, and squatted in, then legally purchased, the vacated buildings. Some of the bohemian transplants were intrigued by Calcata's relic, which was now only shown to the public during the village's annual New Year's Day procession (even though the Vatican II reforms removed the Day of the Holy Circumcision from the church calendar). The new residents began writing about the quirky event and relic for newspapers in and around Rome, and Calcata's scandalous prepuce was isolated no more. And the church took notice.

Was this the reason Dario Magnoni, the local priest, brought the relic from the church to his home? Who knows. Magnoni refuses to speak about the relic, citing the 1954 threat of excommunication. Magnoni's predecessor, Mario Mastrocola, didn't want to talk about the relic, either, but when asked if he was surprised to hear it had been stolen, he shook his head. When pressed, he said, "The relic would not have been taken away from Calcata if I were still the priest there."

Mastrocola's ambiguous words—while not directly incriminating anyone—hinted at underhanded church dealings (interview requests with the Vatican went unanswered). And later, I found myself sitting in a wine cellar halfway up the hill between the old and new villages of Calcata. Capellone, the cellar's owner and a lifelong Calcatese, told me about his close relationship with a former local bishop, Roberto Massimiliani. Ailing in bed, the bishop told Capellone that when he was gone, so too would be the relic. Bishop Massimiliani passed away soon after, in 1975. Eight years after that, the relic disappeared. "To me, it almost felt like a confession," said Capellone. "Like he needed to tell someone before he died."

Could the "sacrilegious thieves" Magnoni mentioned in his 1983 announcement about the relic's disappearance actually have been Vatican emissaries? The thought of masked, black-clad Vatican agents on a mission to steal Jesus' foreskin does sound alluring. But for residents like Capellone, who swear the Vatican now has the relic, the thief could be Magnoni himself. Some locals claim they saw him go to Rome the day before he made the announcement, generating speculation that the Vatican asked for it and Magnoni not only failed to stand up to them, he delivered the relic himself.

Sold, stolen, or delivered to the Vatican—or even all three—the holy foreskin of Calcata is probably gone for good, even as some residents persist in the hope that it will return. And the church is certainly breathing a sigh of relief. While most of the other copies of the relic were destroyed during the Reformation and the French Revolution, Calcata's holy foreskin lived long past its expiration date, like a dinosaur surviving the meteoric blast of the scientific revolution.

But if it had survived, it would have been only a matter of time before someone wanted to clone it. And that could have given the Second Coming an entirely new meaning.



This Might Be Why They Wear Those Difficult-To-Take-Off Bodysuits


Silvan Zurbriggen, a Swiss skiier who is in Italy for a big slalom event. He was keeping himself busy, apparently; he was arrested for masturbating outdoors in front of a woman's apartment. He had a perfectly reasonable explanation.

The 25-year-old said that he was simply urinating and "did what every man would do and I shook my penis to get rid of every last drop. I'm very sorry I offended this woman and I will tell her I'm very sorry and I will also pay a fine if I have to."

We have to say, we wish we had heard of this potential excuse when we were, say, 14. You do, after all, make sure to get rid of every last drop.


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