Hogwash? Not the best wash, apparently.

I, like many of you readers, am often disappointed by much of what gets reported in The New York Times. Many are the mornings when, after reading some new trend piece (on the "significant" number of Americans who are building sound-proof snoring chambers or enrolling their fetuses in uterine college-prep courses), I declare I will cancel my subscription. But then Tuesday's Science Times rolls around and the paper wins my heart all over again.

The Science Times is not nerdy or technologically sophisticated. It features cute animals, quirky physicists, and fun medical facts, tempered with the occasional global warming wrist slap or exotic disease caveat. Yet more often than not, buried within the saccharine mire is a really neat article.

Today's subject, "A Medical Mystery unfolds in Minnesota," has a cute alliterative quality to the title, and yet I almost skipped over it in favor of "Quantum Teleporting, Yes; the Rest is Movie Magic." Imagine, Hollywood is trying to fool us again with those tricky CGI thingamabobs. Luckily we have the Times to set us straight.

But I digress. Let's get to the meat of the matter! You see, a significant number of people (specifically, a dozen) got sick in Austin, MN. And they all worked at the same factory, Quality Pork Processors ( a supplier of and direct next door neighbor to Hormel, maker of Spam). After a few people came down with severe symptoms of an unknown neurological disorder,

“We put our heads together and said, ‘Something is out of sorts,’ ” said Carole Bower, the department head.

But it turns out that heads were exactly what the problem was! The processing plant's "head table," to be exact.

As each head reached the end of the table, a worker would insert a metal hose into the foramen magnum, the opening that the spinal cord passes through. High-pressure blasts of compressed air then turned the brain into a slurry that squirted out through the same hole in the skull, often spraying brain tissue around and splattering the hose operator in the process.

I really don't want to ruin the article for you, but I'll give you a hint about the cause of the disease: it MAY have something to do with the fact that each person who got sick spent every working day of their lives with hog brains splattered over their bare arms and faces, even "swallowing or inhaling the mist of brain tissue!" Luckily, the man in charge had a good head on his shoulders:

Dr. Lynfield asked Mr. Wadding, “Kelly, what do you think is going on?”
The plant owner watched for a while and said, “Let’s stop harvesting brains.”

The factory has since changed their brain harvesting technique, and all the people who were sick have gotten better. No one died (except for a shitload of hogs). But this article has left me a little confused. I can't figure out if learning about what the goes on at Quality Pork Processing is comforting: isn't it nice to know that pockets of our nation still have robust blue collar manufacturing opportunities? Or is it horrifying: good god, why haven't they invented machines to do this shit yet? I mean, shouldn't somebody get on that?

In any case, it has been another fascinating Tuesday, spent filling my brain with completely useless knowledge gleaned from the Science Times. More to come next week!