Legendary banjo player

publication date: Oct 25, 2008

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author/source: Chuck Shepherd

Legendary banjo player Eddie Adcock, age 70 and suffering hand tremors that failed to respond to medication, volunteered for a revolutionary neurosurgery in August in which he finger-picked tunes while his brain was exposed, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center surgeons tried to locate the defective area. In “deep brain stimulation,” doctors find a poorly responding site and use electrodes to arouse it properly. As Adcock, conscious but pain-free, picked out melodies, doctors probed until suddenly Adcock's playing became disjointed, and electrodes were assigned to that spot. By October, according to an ABC News report, Adcock, with a button-activated chest pacemaker wired to his head, was back on stage, as quick-fingered as ever.

Fat Is Good
(1) Clair Robinson, 23, told an interviewer in September that she believes the only reason she survived a deadly flesh-eating infection recently was because she had too much weight for the bacteria to consume. “Being big saved my life,” she told Australia's “Medical Emergency” TV show. (2) Though Mayra Rosales, 27, stands charged with capital murder in Hidalgo County, Texas, she was not ordered to jail pending trial but was allowed home detention because of her obesity. At about 1,000 pounds, Rosales requires special transportation and facilities and was ruled by a judge in August certainly to be no “flight risk.”

The Litigious Society
• Murderers in the Money: (1) Reggie Townsend, 29, serving 23 years in a Wisconsin prison for reckless homicide against an 11-year-old girl, won $295,000 from a jury in September as compensation for a two-month confinement with only a “wet, moldy and foul smelling” mattress to sleep on (about $4,900 per unpleasant night). (2) Muri Chilton (a.k.a. Murray Gartton), serving a life sentence for the rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl, was awarded $2,500 by a Canadian Federal Court judge in September as compensation solely for feeling “utterly humiliated” in 2000 when guards roared with laughter after he mangled his thumb in a prison workshop accident.

• Brian Hopkins, 25, severely burned in 2006 after climbing onto the roof of an empty train at Boston's South Station at 2 a.m., filed a lawsuit in August against Amtrak. Though admitting that he was trespassing at the station when he was zapped by 27,500 volts of overhead wire, Hopkins said Amtrak ought to have known that people trespass and climb on top of trains, and therefore should have parked its train in a less-accessible place.

Equal Rights for All
• Roy Hollander filed a civil rights lawsuit against Columbia University in New York City in August, claiming that its “women's studies” curriculum teaches a religion-like philosophy that oppresses men by blaming them for nearly all social problems. (When interviewed by the New York Daily News, Hollander declined to give his age, saying such a revelation would crimp his pickup success with young women: Frequently, he said, women “think I'm younger than I am, so I don't want to disillusion them.”)

What Goes Around, Comes Around
Neighbors in the previously quiet New York City neighborhood of Nolita complain about the raucous, late-night trance music and crowds at the recently opened Delicatessen, according to an August New York Post story, but with little success. However, 10 of the apartments next door happen to look directly down upon the club's architectural signature, a see-through ceiling, and at least one resident has taken to relieving himself out his window, splattering the roof. (Another of the residents, though, said that when the man misfires, it ruins his air-conditioning unit.)

People Different From Us
Christina Downs, 24, of Portsmouth, N.H., mounted a full-blown defense to the speeding ticket (44 mph in a 25 mph zone) she received in 2007 (even though the officer said Downs had arrogantly sped off again immediately afterward and had to be stopped a second time). Acting as her own lawyer, Downs filed motions and at a trial, put the officer through a meticulous, 96-point cross-examination about such matters as work schedule, training, engineering studies of road speeds, radar technology, weather conditions, traffic flow, and the use of a tuning fork to calibrate the radar device. The judge ruled against her, and in October 2008, the state Supreme Court ordered her to pay the $100 ticket.