Six percent of those questioned in a survey of 5,000 patients admitted they had resorted to self-treatment using pliers and glue, the UK’s Press Association reported.

England has a two-tier dental care system with some dentists offering publicly subsidized treatment through the National Health Service and others performing more expensive private work.

But more than three-quarters of those polled said they had been forced to pay for private treatment because they had been unable to find an NHS dentist. Almost a fifth said they had refused dental treatment because of the cost.

Here’s the story on cnn.com

1. Sin Dolor in the October 15 issue of The New Yorker (no subscription required).
2. Admiral in the October issue of Harper’s Magazine (subscription required).

Enjoy!

The longtime chairman of the Roger Williams University board admitted Monday to using the N-word during a board meeting, saying it “kind of slipped out.”

“I apologized for that,” Ralph Papitto said in an interview on WPRO-AM. “What else can I do? Kill myself?”

Papitto, 80, who stepped down earlier this month after nearly 40 years on the board, admitted he had used the racial slur at a May meeting of the school’s board of trustees.

Papitto, who has given the school at least $7 million and whose name is on the only law school in Rhode Island, said he had never used the term before.

“The first time I heard it was on television or rap music or something,” he told WPRO.

OK. Which is harder to believe: this is the first time he used the n-word or that he is a rap aficionado?

 A month or so ago, during the whole Imus brouhaha, Roker wrote this on his blog:

“I, for one, am really tired of the diatribes, the ‘humor’ at other’s expense, the cruelty that passes for ‘funny.”

On June 7th Roker said this regarding the new Olympic logo that has reportedly caused seizures in some people:

“Some folks have complained that the campaign actually sent them into epileptic seizures. Well, we asked you to weigh in on our Web site in an informal poll; those of you who could get up off the floor after shaking around were able to actually log in . . . “

I have a problem with people who express mock outrage at comments made by others and then go out and demonstate similar insensitivity with their own comments.

Al:  if you wanna talk the talk, you gotta walk the walk.

http://www.zombietime.com/gore_in_marin/

Said the boy, “”It’s a good accomplishment. I probably won’t ever kill anything else that big.”

 Note: A site dedicated to this triumph has been established at www.monsterpig.com.  Apparently traffic has been heavy- the site was down when I tried.

 Update 5/30:

Hold on a minute.  Were the pictures doctored? Stinkyjournalism.org thinks so.

Ironically, some huge names have come out against the project- and they aren’t the evil conservatives you may suspect.

 Any guesses who the hypocrites are?  Hint: one is a senior senator.

According to this story on Foxnews.com someone at Sony thought that using a freshly slaughtered goat as a prop at a video game launch party was a good idea.

In its mea culpa, Sony said: “We recognize that the use of a dead goat was in poor taste and fell below the high standards of conduct we set ourselves.

The story also mentioned that scantily clad models fed grapes to guests who:

competed to eat the most “warm entrails” — a meat soup made to look like the goat’s internal organs.

No word on whether that part of the evening was in OK taste.

Thirty-four first-year candidates for a master’s of business administration degree at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business were disciplined in the program’s largest cheating scandal. Nine students face expulsion for collaborating on a take-home test, in violation of the professor’s rules.

 What gets me is Bloomberg’s lead into the paragraph above:

The cheating episode at Duke University may cause academics to conclude the post-Enron emphasis on teaching ethics in graduate business schools is a failure.

I think the failure to instill ethics in these young men and women occurred long before they stepped into a Duke classroom. 

Who is accountable? These aren’t twelve year-olds- it’s too late to blame mommy and daddy. These students are adults, they should know better. Teaching ethics to graduate students is going to fail, its too late.  If they don’t know the difference between right and wrong by this point in their lives a semester worth of lectures isn’t going to make a difference.

The pressure to achieve at business schools pushes some students to cheat, said W. Michael Hoffman, executive director of the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Welcome to the real world.  A person’s true character is revealed under pressure- these students failed.

Just one of the joys of living in a battleground state.

Seth Godin has a post about robocalling (the recordings sent out to millions of households through automated dialing systems) which brought back the memory of last fall. Thankfully some states are trying to outlaw robocalls so there may be hope for 2008- if Ohio’s legislators join in.