In an average week you come across at least one news story which either makes little sense, or leaves too many unanswered questions.
This week I could not make head or tail of the story which predicted a human head transplant would soon be attempted.
It would occur in some brave corner of the globe which obviously has a surplus of cryogenically preserved heads, and a glut of ghoulish surgeons.
Apart from the unspeakably grotesque nature of this neural nip and tuck, I couldn’t see why it was called a head transplant, and not a body transplant. I’m sure the above-mentioned dome, once in situ, will come out claiming he had a body transplant, rather than the reverse.
After all, the body part of the deal will be mute and therefore unable to mount a rebuttal, save a few resentful upper cuts to the boastful bust. And that might not be good for either side of the stitches.
The second story I felt perplexed by announced that cryogenically suspended blood and urine samples from the Beijing Olympics had been retested to reveal 31 dopers from 12 nations and six sports.
This was hardly perplexing of itself since it has long been known that re-testing would now be part of the global sport anti-doping regimen. Especially since testing technology lags behind the evil boffins who perpetually tweak the molecular codes dictated by stealthy dopers.
The part I couldn’t understand was that even though these guilty 31 would now be ineligible to compete at Rio, nothing was said about the legitimacy of their Beijing achievements.
For example, would medals be stripped, records be removed, asterisks added? But I guess such statements might have been letting the cat out of the bag.
(Even for dirty dopers, there are painstaking protocols required to protect anonymity until the right moment.)
Yet did no journalist quiz the IOC over this? Or perhaps the IOC issued a strict embargo on further elaboration until the total disclosure. If so, it would have been helpful to know.
Instead, we get an AAP story in which Australian IOC officials claim to have no knowledge of Australians being among the positives. Well, if the IOC has shut up shop on the yarn, of course we won’t know.
This was surely one of those stories about not having a story, while being unable to admit it: just one more thing I don’t understand.
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