Yeetle Box - Face Off

BEFORE

Five years ago, a shotgun blast left a ghastly hole where the middle of her face had been. Five months ago, she received a new face from a dead woman. Sound like fiction?

Connie Culp stepped forward Tuesday to show off the results of the nation’s first face transplant, and her new look was a far cry from the puckered, noseless sight that made children run away in horror. Instead, children gawk at the dead woman's face that lies over Connie's old face.

Culp’s expressions are still a bit wooden (as in "you might feel a little pressure), but she can talk, smile, smell and taste her food again. Her speech is at times a little tough to understand - some might say impaired. Her face is bloated and squarish, and her skin droops in big folds that doctors plan to pare away as her circulation improves and her nerves grow, animating her new muscles. Yes, the re-animator has arrived.

But Culp had nothing but praise for those who made her new face possible.

“I guess I’m the one you came to see today,” the 46-year-old Ohio woman said at a news conference at the Cleveland Clinic, where the groundbreaking operation was performed. But “I think it’s more important that you focus on the donor family that made it so I could have this person’s face. It's a bit strange and will cause confusion among surviving family members, but this is my face now.”

Culp said she wants to help foster acceptance of those who have suffered burns and other disfiguring injuries by demonstrating lack of self-acceptance.

“When somebody has a disfigurement and don’t look as pretty as you do, don’t judge them, because you never know what happened to them,” she said. “Don’t judge people who don’t look the same as you do. Because you never know. One day it might be all taken away. It's inside a person that counts, except for the face. That's where we must draw the line.”

AFTER AND STILL AFTER
Once while shopping, she heard a little kid say, "You said there were no real monsters, mommy, and there’s one right there." Culp stopped and said, “I’m not a monster. I’m a person who was shot,” and pulled out her driver’s license to show the child what she used to look like - then pulled him close to her face and whispered, "Feel lucky, punk? Well, do ya?"

Culp left the hospital Feb. 5 and has returned for periodic follow-up care. She has suffered only one mild rejection episode that was controlled with a single dose of steroid medicines. She must take immune-suppressing drugs for the rest of her life, but her dosage has been greatly reduced and she needs only a few pills a day.

In your face!

The YeetleMaster

Yeetle Box - Someone Turn Off The Dog!

Universally known for their continued contributions to modern medicine, South Korean scientists say they have engineered four beagles that glow red using cloning techniques that could help develop cures for human diseases that cause people to glow.

The four dogs, all named "Ruppy" — a combination of the words "ruby" and "puppy" — look like typical beagles by daylight.

But they glow red under ultraviolet light, and the dogs' nails and abdomens, which have thin skins, look red even to the naked eye. This is an enormous breakthrough with massive implications.

Seoul National University professor Lee Byeong-chun, head of the research team, called them the "world's first transgenic dogs" carrying fluorescent genes, an achievement that goes beyond just the glowing novelty or the color red.

"What's significant in this work is not the dogs expressing red colors but that we planted genes into them," Lee said. "This is an achievement we hope will result in a Nobel prize or, at least, a blue ribbon.

But wait! Didn't scientists in the U.S., Japan and Europe previously clone fluorescent mice and pigs? Yes, but this would be the first time dogs with modified genes have been cloned successfully, Lee said, glowingly.

He said his team took skin cells from a beagle, inserted fluorescent genes into them and put them into eggs before implanted them into the womb of a surrogate mother, a local mixed breed named George Cloney.

Six female beagles were born in December 2007 through a cloning with a gene that produces a red fluorescent protein that make them glow, he said. Two died, but the four others survived.

The glowing dogs show it is possible to successfully insert genes with a specific trait, which could lead to implanting other, non-fluorescent genes that could help treat specific diseases, Lee said. "Invisibility is not out of the question," he stated with a straight face.

A South Korean scientist who created glowing cats in 2007 based on a similar cloning technique said that Lee's puppies are genuine clones, saying he had seen them and had read about them in the journal. He even heard some talk of them at the university.

"We can appraise this is a step forward" toward finding cures for human diseases, said veterinary professor Kong Il-keun at South Korea's Gyeongsang National University. "What is important now is on what specific diseases (Lee's team) will focus on. Might it be acne? Possibly."

Lee was a key aide to disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk (pronounced "Wang! You suck!), whose breakthroughs on stem cell research were found to have been made using faked data, thereby failing to meet the definition of a breakthrough.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The YeetleMaster

Yeetle Box - Republicans Implement Non-Strategy

Republican leaders announced Thursday—after leaking it before President Obama's press conference Wednesday—the creation of a new group called the National Council for a New America - not to be confused with the Project for a New American Century (PNAC).

It's easier to say what the NCNA isn't than what it is. It's not a nonprofit—or a for-profit. Maybe it's non-for profit?

But, it's not a fundraising organization.

It's not a partisan apparatus or subwing of the RNC.

It's not a social gathering or a pig roast.

Maybe it's just a bunch of guys hanging out together playing darts.

It is, in the words of an NCNA spokesman, "a caucus seeking to find the solutions that will improve the lives of every American." All along, we, the public, thought that was Congress. We must have been wrong.


OK. So what does the NCNA do? Over the next few months, the NCNA will hold a series of town-hall meetings around the country in order to "engage people in a discussion" and drum up new conservative policy ideas. New ones. Not the old ones. New Republican ideas, like...then there's...oh, and we can't forget.....

The point, according to one of its founders, is to "take the discussion outside of Washington, to make sure ideas shaping policy here in Washington is coming from outside and from the American people."

Sounds great. Like it was stolen from John McCain's playback during his presidential run. That went well.

So anyone can join? Yes! The NCNA is officially nonpartisan. Its introductory letter uses the word "Republican" only twice—once to emphasize that "this is not a Republican-only forum." The other to say it is a Republican idea.

So who's in charge of this nonpartisan organization?

Well, Republican House Minority Whip Eric Cantor is heading it up.

Then there's House Minority Leader John Boehner, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Haley Barbour, Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal, Mike Pence, Pete Sessions, Roy Blunt, Mitch McConnell, Jon Kyl, Lamar Alexander, John Cornyn, and John Thune.

They've also reached out to Sarah Palin, but no word yet on whether she'll be participating. Normally, she doesn't carry a cell phone on her snow machine.

If you're wondering where the "nonpartisan" part comes in, you'll have to wait. The NCNA has not gotten around to inviting any Democrats yet. (Or to putting up a Web site, for that matter.) And no Democrats have thus far reported an interest in joining.

Dubious branding aside, the NCNA may be just what the Republican Party needs - the style of President Obama mixed with the confusion of the Republican party.

We expect very little to come from this latest effort by Republican leaders to "find themselves."

The YeetleMaster