Writing Saddam, Addicted Men, Timed Syracuse, Shitty Brandon, and Close-to-Death Preston

Have Hussein in the palm of your hand.

1. Who knew Harry Potter's JK Rowling and Saddam Hussein would ever be in competition? Well, they are in Japan, where both of their novels hit the stands this week. The Half-Blood Prince will meet Saddam's ancient tribal warfare story, Get Out of Here, Curse You, which Japanese journalist and the book's translator Itsuko Hirata says "should be really made into a musical" and "should play in the heart of his enemy's country, on Broadway." Hm, the two books might have more in common than ever realized. (Reuters)

2. Howard Stern comments on Brandon Davis yesterday, "He's a big, fat, tubby piece of shit... Just pure evil coming out of this guy's mouth." This from the shock jock --ouch. (Entertainmentwise)

3. Today's NYT's travel section, Escapes, decides to cover "36 hours" in the strange, exotic land of, um, Syracuse, "birthplace of the serrated knife and the dental chair," without any sense of irony period. If we wanted to go to Dinosaur BBQ (that is, Must-Do Item #6), couldn't we just hop the train to Harlem?

4. After all the easy jokes and headlines, Britney Spears probably really regrets her ever singing "Oops, I Did It Again," and, oh yeah, for doing it with Kevin Federline. She was seen crying at a restaurant after nearly dropping baby Sean Preston outside of FAO Schwartz in front of the paparazzi. Though baby Sean's head was shown snapping back, he was fine, though how many lives he has left is unknown as he is not a cat. It probably doesn't make him feel any better hearing Mommy muttering, "This is why I need a gun," though in all fairness, Spears was probably referring to the crowd in her way. (IMDB)

5. Men and women's being hardly equal at least can be argued when it comes to addiction levels. New research is showing that meth use release three times the amount of dopamine, aka the pleasure hormone, in males than females, which holds significance to treating any diseases or explaining addictions according to gender. Neuroendocrinologists at Johns Hopkins decided to study this further:

"[They] recruited 28 men and 15 women who didn't take drugs and were psychologically normal. They got a baseline reading of available dopamine receptors in their brains by injecting subjects with saline mixed with a radioactive chemical that binds to dopamine receptors and found no difference in available receptors between men and women. Then the subjects got a taste of speed. After being injected with a dose of amphetamine comparable to what an illicit user might take, males had a larger dopamine release in three of four regions of the striatum."

Firstly, this is legal? Secondly, Johns Hopkins? Thirdly, I am in the wrong side of academia. (Science)