"Need for courtroom artists fades as cameras move in; Some lament the passing of an art form" by Michael Tarm | Associated Press, January 29, 2012
CHICAGO - Sketch artists have been the public’s eyes at high-profile trials for decades - a remnant of an age when drawings in broadsheet papers, school books, or travel chronicles were how people glimpsed the world beyond their own.
Today, their ranks are thinning swiftly....
Same with newspaper circulation and readership.
While the erosion of the job may not be much noticed by people reading and watching the news, Maryland-based sketch artist Art Lien says something significant is being lost.
There is less of them, too -- although I did watch Ron Paul before basketball. He was on the Candy Crowley shown on CNN. It was a fair enough interview, although Ron was once again a heretic suggesting we should talk and trade with Iran.
Video or photos can’t do what sketch artists can, he said, such as compressing hours of court action onto a single drawing that crystallizes the events....
I'm tired of other people crystallizing events and getting them wrong.
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As I am drawn in further:
"Magnets popular with youth pose big risk if swallowed" by Lena H. Sun | Washington Post, January 29, 2012
WASHINGTON - Meredith DelPrete, age 10, was playing at school one day and did something that she said is popular among kids her age: pretending to have a pierced tongue. The Fairfax County, Va., fifth-grader took two tiny magnetic balls out of her pocket and placed one on top of her tongue and the other on the underside. The magnets, the size of a BB, are extremely powerful. They made it look like she had a tongue stud. She opened her mouth to show a friend.
This is what happens when you have a culture that is immersed in and glorifies self-mutilating perversions of the human body.
That’s when the tiny silver orbs rolled off. “I could feel them in the back of my throat. I tried to get them out, but I couldn’t. So I just swallowed them,’’ she said in an interview.
That accidental swallowing led to five days at Inova Fairfax Hospital, at least 10 X-rays, three CT scans, and an endoscopy. Finally, on Jan. 20, a surgeon used a metal instrument to manipulate the magnets into her appendix, avoiding major surgery. He then removed her appendix, and the magnets, doctors said.
Hospitalized at the same time as Meredith was another 10-year-old, a boy, who had swallowed three ball-bearing magnets. He eventually passed them without incident, doctors said. A third case, involving a 9-year-old boy, was recently brought to Inova Fairfax and transferred to Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, a doctor said. The boy’s condition could not be immediately determined....
When two or more magnets are swallowed, they can attract each other internally, resulting in serious injuries, such as small holes in the stomach and intestines, intestinal blockage, blood poisoning and death, according to safety and health officials....
Although parents of younger children are generally warned about the hazards of small toys, there is less public awareness among parents - and even medical professionals - about the risk of magnets, especially when older children use them to emulate tongue or lip piercings, according to parents, doctors, and safety officials.
“The potential for serious injury and death if multiple magnets are swallowed demands that parents and medical professionals be aware of this hidden hazard,’’ said Inez Tenenbaum, commission chairman. “This is not a children’s product and should be kept away from children.’’
Three doctors who treated Meredith said they did not know children were using magnets to mimic piercings.
“I had not heard about it until that evening,’’ said Sharon Day, an emergency-room doctor on duty when Meredith and the other 10-year-old were hospitalized. Day quizzed her two high-school-age children. “I said to my kids, ‘Are you guys doing this?’ . . . They weren’t, but they had heard about it.’’
Marsha Kay, who chairs the pediatric gastroenterology department at the Cleveland Clinic’s Children’s Hospital, said magnet ingestion is increasingly being reported among children in recent years.
“They’re very popular and perceived to be safe,’’ she said.
The first reports in the United States began appearing in 2005. That year, a 20-month-old boy died after swallowing nine cylindrical magnets from an older sibling’s toy building set, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The magnets had magnetically joined across two loops of intestine, causing a twisting of the bowel that led to a fatal bloodstream infection.
I vaguely remember hearing something about that.
Since 2008, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has received more than 200 reports of children swallowing all kinds of magnets; at least 18 children required emergency surgery to remove the magnets.
At least two major toy manufacturers have issued voluntary recalls of toys with magnets since 2006; in 2010, the maker of Buckyballs and the commission issued a voluntary recall of Buckyballs magnet sets to update the labeling.
“This is a big, big problem,’’ said Ben Enav, the pediatric gastroenterologist who treated Meredith and the 10-year-old boy hospitalized at the same time. In the past year, he has had a third case, another school-age child who swallowed the same type of magnets and needed surgery because of a perforated intestine.
“I can see how an innocent bystander can think this seems all very benign and nothing to worry about, but if these things get separated and are floating through your intestine,’’ they can cause serious injury, he said.
Even urgent-care and emergency-room clinicians have assumed - incorrectly - that they can send a child who has swallowed magnets home. “They are not aware of how serious a problem this is,’’ Enav said.
Craig Zucker, chief executive for Maxfield & Oberton, the manufacturer of Buckyballs, said the company puts warning labels inside and outside the boxes. The company works closely with the safety commission to spread the message that the magnets should be kept from children.
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