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I'm having a difficult time finishing the last few pages of "Stiff", Mary Roach's book about cadavers. Parts of the book have been as gruesome and morbid as you might expect, given the subject matter. The chapter I'm having a hard time with deals mostly with cannibalism.

A fine name. Why not a more neutral term such as "autonutrition". A cannibal would be an autonutritionist. There were other parts of Stiff that I liked a lot better. Re-use of organs? Great. Crash test dummies? The necessary other half of the equation. Source of blood for transfusions? Not so fast, there. Interesting point of information, though, on this particular topic. Kevorkian earned the sobriquet "Dr. Death" long before he got involved with assisted suicide, by actually doing some corpse-to-human transfusions. Maybe you'd rather not think about it. I sure hope so. And as for cannibalism? Definitely some rough reading here.

And the footnotes of this book are great, as is Mary Roach's mordant wit. Who ever knew there could be a book entitled The Romance of Proctology [buy at amazon] . by Charles Elton Blanchard. And what a great researcher: she even skims the book in a (failed) attempt to find out exactly what that romance was.

In other weekend fun, we missed the always-entertaining monthly meeting of the Southern California Adobe Technology Exchange (link to schedule) which is too bad because this week it was all about a non-Adobe product, Painter. Next month it promises to be good too: someone from Adobe is scheduled to speak about (and presumably demonstrate) Acrobat version 6.0. This should be fun for all, since the ATX is a hive of Mac enthusiasts, while the new Acrobat may not be fully optimized for the Mac platform just yet.