Surprisingly, everyone appears to have missed the subtle nuance in a chapter of comedian Denis Leary's book entitled "Autism, Schmautism." Go figure. Controversy arose after the Post excerpted a paragraph from Leary's Why We All Suck reading, in part, "I don't give a [bleep] what these crackerjack whack jobs tell you - yer kid is NOT autistic." Last night Leary appeared on the Daily Show to explain that he was quoted out of context, and in reality was taking a sophisticated stand on the scientific mystery of surging autism cases:

Important item: Has billionaire Lazard chairman Bruce Wasserstein, the owner of New York magazine, had some plastic surgery? Cityfile thinks so, after examining a current photo vs. one from two years ago. Then again, two years ago Wasserstein was rumored to be seriously ill. So maybe he just got over that? And is it really worth spending all that money to get plastic surgery when you're already 60 and married and not prowling the clubs for hot young things? I guess if you're a billionaire, you can do what you like, thank you. Click to enlarge the pic. [via Cityfile]

Patrick Swayze, like other media and entertainment personalities, opted to work through his treatment for pancreatic cancer. The Times got the first interview with Swayze since his diagnosis, and reported he's working 12-hour days on his TV show, has restored some healthy bulk to his physique and missed less than two days work. But it also indicates Swayze's doctors are still battling his disease, which kills 95 percent of patients within five years. The actor couldn't help but sound a contradictory note amid the Times' reverentially upbeat story:

Teen pregnancy just isn't the Oscar-nominated, tabloid-cover romp Hollywood makes it out to be, according to a new report released today in Chicago. Amid the gloomy data noting 400,000 such births per year (at a public cost of $7.6 billion), experts cited increasing cultural influence among girls who look to Jamie-Lynn Spears, Bristol Palin and even Juno as models of upstanding teenage motherhood. Alas, as you probably could have guessed, the experts at a subsequent panel discussion begged to differ:

The New York Times had its resident medical doctor reporter examine all the available medical records of all the candidates for president and vice president. The only problem is that none of the campaigns would turn over any records! But, you know, Barack Obama seems healthy enough, besides the smoking. And Sarah Palin didn't release any records at all, not even about her crazy "giving birth en route from Texas to Alaska" thing, but they only devote like one paragraph to that. Because the point of the story is to let you know that John McCain is an old, sick man. He has all the cancers, everywhere, all over his face. Breaking! Ok, sure, McCain's doctors say he's pretty much recovered from his skin cancer, and the chance of it recurring during his first term, say, is like 10%. But they are maybe not letting us know how serious the last bout of melanoma was!

Doctors — or dermatologists, are those doctors too? — in London have made a connection between people with unexplained face and ear rashes and cell-phone usage. They're calling it "mobile phone dermatitis," an allergic reaction caused by prolonged exposure to the phones' nickel-metal surfaces. Suggested remedy? Buy a Bluetooth headset, or just stop talking so much. [Yahoo/Reuters]

Let's face it: As well-intentioned celebrity spats go, Jenny McCarthy vs. Amanda Peet was a total disappointment in its attempt to bring awareness to the cause and treatment of autism. What it needed was less born-again book-tour proselytizing and more substantive debate about nature, nurture and science itself. In other words, it needed the radical authority of a medical professional like Denis Leary, who, in his own new book, tastefully settles the problem of autism once and for all:

For some reason Denis Leary, who is actually an accomplished TV and movie star and halfway-decent comedian, has joined with reliable moron and talk-radio screamer Michael Savage and misguided trashy-TV host Jenny McCarthy in spreading scientifically-dubious pap about autism. The charitable explanation is that Leary was rushing to meet the deadline for his book, Why We Suck, or, as all-too-many comedians do, filling it with unfiltered, subliterate transcriptions of experimental new stand-up comedy material when he wrote, "there is a huge boom in autism... because inattentive mothers and competitive dads want an explanation for why their dumb-ass kids can't compete academically." The Autism Society is obviously thrilled. More, via Page Six:

Blink 182 drummer Travis Barker took to MySpace to let fans know how his recovery is going less than a month after he and DJ AM survived a plane crash that killed four—including his personal assistant Chris Baker, and security guard Charles "Che" Still—in South Carolina on Sept. 19. Barker, who was recently transferred from a Georgia hospital to an L.A. burn center says, among other things, that he's given up vegetarianism to aid in his recovery.

While some shell-shocked banking douches are selling blow-jobs as a way to cope with the economic meltdown, others are turning to more pedestrian methods to ease their stress. Namely, they're smoking their lungs out. Now that their hopes and dreams are dead, there's not much point to looking after their health, and they can be found puffing away all over the financial district like metalheads behind the high school bleachers. "Before the turmoil, says [Erick] Giliberti, a manager at Deloitte who works with mortgage-backed securities, I was maybe a pack a week.' Now? 'Probably double that...I can't stare at my computer screen anymore and watch the market collapse in front of me—I just want to get away from it.'"

Some shadowy nonprofit is running ads accusing John McCain of having cancer. Which is true and actually maybe relevant (the fact that John McCain will be America's oldest president ever is certainly more relevant than Obama's house party with Mr. Ayers). The groups behind the ads are apparently run by nutty lefty filmmaker Robert Greenwald and Howard Dean's brother, and the ads feature doctors (with stethoscopes and stuff) saying that cancer is really bad and might kill John McCain. As an underhanded dirty smear, it at least has the advantage of being, you know, 100% demonstrably true! But still. The ads fail, miserably, by not pointing out explicitly that should McCain die in office, he'd be replaced by Sarah Palin. That is the scary thing here! No one would care if old man McCain died and was replaced by someone with half a fucking brain. Anyway, controversy!!

In his first post to his new blog, Google founder Sergey Brin wrote that his genetic makeup includes a mutation called LRRK2, which means he has an increased chance of contracting Parkinson's. “Why would he disclose that?” medical experts asked the New York Times's Miguel Helft when he sought comment. Helft's theory — based on fellow Times journalist Allen Salkin's recent interview with the Google founder — is that Brin wants to turn the problem of solving his own DNA riddles into an open source project:

The slide which introduced Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the company's "Let's Rock" announcement. Ah, gallows humor. I, for one, am laughing to keep from crying. (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

Pfizer went through a huge hassle earlier this year when some touchy public health types pointed out that the company's main spokesman for the cholesterol drug Lipitor—artificial heart inventor and Skeletor look-alike Robert Jarvik—was not actually a doctor, although the whole $250 million ad campaign was premised on him touting his medical expertise. So the company has regrouped and come up with a dynamic new spokesman: a regular guy, just like you! Which goes to show how unnecessary the Jarvik fiasco was. If the company had gone with either "regular guy" or "actual doctor" in the first place, it could have saved itself millions in marketing costs and months of downtime in this multibillion-dollar fight for worldwide drug supremacy. But why not live on the edge? After the jump, soak in the misleading-ness of an old ad featuring the non-practicing Dr. Jarvik:

Though MTV spent the earlier part of this week teaching men how to emotionally manipulate their girlfriends, it's got plenty of advice to dole out to women, too. Why, just have a gander at the casting call for the network's upcoming entry in the crowded "model reality" genre! In what could be a first for the network, they're looking to cast the show solely with overweight women, but there's a catch: those women will be expected to lose up to 80 pounds in just 12 dangerous weeks. Says ABC News:

News of the worsening condition of Senator Ted Kennedy-currently suffering from a malignant brain tumor-made the front page of The Globe, one of the trashiest of the trashy tabloids. But in the respectable press, all we hear is that a lavish celebration of Kennedy's life is being prepared for the upcoming Democratic National Convention. The reader is asked to read between the lines and figure out that Kennedy is perhaps near death. Anyone who purchases The Globe, though, is always kept well-informed as to which old famous person is closest to death's door. It's a macabre little niche that they've been allowed to dominate thanks to the squeamishness of the rest of the press in covering celebrity health. Recently, the tabloids have led the MSM in covering the illnesses of Kennedy, Liz Taylor, and Paul Newman-though how reliable their coverage has been is called into question by the continuing survival of all of those people. Then again, when the mainstream press waded into the fray with their alarmist reports of the imminent death of Patrick Swayze, Swayze seemingly underwent a miracle recovery. So the reader is almost completely without reliable information. It does seem newsworthy, in this case, to ask precisely how bad Kennedy's doing. Does he actually have two weeks to live? Wasn't he just recently showing up to work at the Senate? But much as the press only ever hinted at how far gone Reagan or Strom Thurmond were (until they were done with public service), notions of privacy and respect lead editors to gloss over the uncomfortable details. Not so in England, where tabloid media is often indistinguishable from the "real" press. The Daily Mail, Mirror, and Sun all keep running tabs on the mortality of Britain's famous. Decrepitude and mortality sell papers! Who knew? Not American editors, yet.

Last week, conservative columnist Bob Novak ran his car into an 86-year-old homeless man and then drove off, apparently oblivious. Now the 77-year-old journalist has been hospitalized with a brain tumor. Sheesh! Bad week! Anyway no one knows how bad it is yet, though he can still talk and issue statements and so on. And no one knows either whether the tumor caused his bizarre accident, because really it was bound to happen anyway with the way he drives. [Sun-Times]

When the Times got a call from Steve Jobs, the hands-on CEO of personal computer maker Apple, it had already been investigating the former pancreatic cancer victim's health for several days. Following a Monday report in the Post that some Jobs associates were "troubled by his thin appearance," the Times on Wednesday revealed Jobs underwent some sort of surgical procedure earlier this year. By Thursday afternoon, Times columnist Joe Nocera was preparing to report that Jobs was losing weight due to "ongoing digestive difficulty" and, possibly, due to a recent infection. That's when Jobs phoned to give a peace of his mind. But with a liberal interpretation of the term "off the record," Nocera would go on to finagle a scoop out of the confrontational call:

The rumors about Apple CEO Steve Jobs's health are a big concern for shareholders. And one would think Apple's head of PR would actively push to clear the air and fight the rumors with a clear statement. But instead of doing her job properly, Katie Cotton has been actively deceiving the public about the state of her indispensable boss's body.

Buried in a report from the New York Times on Apple CEO Steve Jobs's health scare is this revelation: