Monthly Archives: July 2004

Free Army Plastic Surgery

From an article in the The New Yorker regarding free plastic surgery to members of the armed forces:

“Anyone wearing a uniform is eligible,” Dr. Bob Lyons, the chief of plastic surgery at Brooke Army Medical Center, said recently, in his office in San Antonio. It is true: personnel in all four branches of the military and members of their immediate families can get face-lifts, nose jobs, breast enlargements, liposuction, or any other kind of elective cosmetic alteration, at taxpayer expense.

[…]

A Defense Department spokeswoman confirmed the existence of the plastic-surgery benefit. According to the Army, between 2000 and 2003 its doctors performed four hundred and ninety-six breast enlargements and a thousand three hundred and sixty-one liposuction surgeries on soldiers and their dependents.

[…]

Mario Moncada […] said that he knows several female soldiers who have received free breast enlargements: “We’re out there risking our lives. We deserve benefits like that.”

[…]

The Army’s rationale is that, as a spokeswoman said, “the surgeons have to have someone to practice on.” “The benefit of offering elective cosmetic surgery to soldiers is more for the surgeon than for the patient,” Lyons said.

[…]

There has been talk lately among soldiers that this benefit is indeed being used as a recruiting tool, but there is no mention of it in any of the recruiting literature. “The Army does not offer elective cosmetic surgery to entice anyone,” Dr. Lyons said. “I would be disappointed with the maturity of the young women in this country if they’re joining the service with the thought of getting breast augmentations.”

I’m okay with it as a learning tool, but it seems a little excessive to me.

Xanga RSS

I always had a problem with Xanga RSS not working in NetNewsWire.

So I hacked up a solution in the form of a php file:

<pre><?
$f = escapeshellcmd($_GET["q"]);
$g = shell_exec('curl -s http://www.xanga.com/rss.aspx?user='
. $f . ' | sed -e "s/<rss version="0.91">/'
. '<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/'
. '02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns="'
. 'http://my.netscape.com/rdf/simple/0.9/">/"'
. ' | sed -e "s/</rss>/</rdf:RDF>/"');
echo $g;
?></pre>

And then I just call the script by subscribing to http://path.to/script/?q=username. It’s ugly, but functional.

A copy is also available for download.