Brain dead does not mean dead!

Please note the following article:
Man declared dead, says he feels 'pretty good'
And after you've digested that, check out this article from New Scientist a couple of years ago:
Not brain-dead, but ripe for transplant

So in spite of the fact "brain dead" patients sometimes come "back to life" (ie, they were never dead in the first place), they are even contemplating making it easier to declare someone dead just to "increase the pool" of available organs.
My favorite quote from that article:

"Doctors are very pragmatic," says Christopher Doig, a critical care specialist at Canada's Foothills Hospital in Calgary, Alberta. "But there is something inherently bothersome about changing the way we are going to determine death so that we can increase the numbers of organs for donation."

Isn' t that inspiring? At least Mr. Doig feels it is "bothersome" to murder people to harvest their organs.

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Thought for the Day: Pizza, Uncrustables, and Stuff -- What Bracha?

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My granddaughter came home with a list the girls and phone numbers in her first grade class. It was cute because they had made it an arts and crafts project by pasting the list to piece of construction paper cut out to look like an old desk phone and a receiver attached by a pipe cleaner. I realized, though, that the cuteness was entirely lost on her. She, of course, has never seen a desk phone with a receiver. When they pretend to talk on the phone, it is on any relatively flat, rectangular object they find. (In fact, her 18 month old brother turns every relatively flat, rectangular object into a phone and walks around babbling into it. Not much different than the rest of us, except his train of thought is not interrupted by someone else babbling into his ear.) I was reminded of that when my chavrusa (who has children my grandchildrens age) and I were learning about אוושא מילתא. It came up because of a quote from the Shulchan Aru...

Michael el Chayil

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