When dressing up as a pirate is your day job

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One Brain at a Time - Chapter 1

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A man lies in a hospital deep in the Tanzanian bush, dying of a head wound. His only chance is if someone opens his skull and stops the bleeding, but the hospital doesn't have a bone-cutting saw. An American brain surgeon volunteering at the hospital has an idea: A villager next to the air strip is cutting a tree limb with a wire saw. That might do. He buys the wire saw for $15 and heads back to the operating room. Improvise. That's what you do when you're a doctor in one of the poorest countries on earth. This is the story of a brain surgeon from Charleston and his mission to teach Tanzanians his skills. A Doctor's Quest: Teaching brain surgery in the bush BY TONY BARTELME The Post and Courier Sunday, July 25, 2010 Open the skull, and look at the brain. It's beige with a slight tint of pink and shaped vaguely like the head of a cauliflower. Now touch it. That's what Dr. Dilan Ellegala asks his medical students t...
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Cougars in South Carolina

Here is a story I did recently for The Post and Courier in Charleston, SC, raising the question: Are cougars still in South Carolina? The elusive Carolina cougar By Tony B artelme Sunday, January 29, 2006 Got one. A man is on the phone, and he's excited. "We have our cougar," he says, and he has proof. A photo. Come out and look. And so you speed up Interstate 26 faster than you should, and 45 minutes later you're in Bill Cook's yard near Cross, holding the picture. And there it is: A cougar slinking through the woods, about to pounce on a deer. Cook says he got the photo from a neighbor who got it from another neighbor who said the shot was taken behind his property. You think, maybe you're holding the first proof in a hundred years that cougars aren't extinct in South Carolina. Maybe. But the Internet is a useful tool, and later, when you plug the words "cougar deer" into Google, up pops the same darn photo on half a dozen Web s...
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 My latest project is called Ghost Bird. It's ostensibly about a rare bird called the eastern black rail. Birders know that the black rail is incredibly difficult to find, which has made it a target. This is a story about that bird, climate change, obsession and love.   1. The sun sets over a secret spot in a South Carolina marsh, casting amber light on the grass. At this twilight angle, the sunbeams add extra green to the blades, which are as high as your shoulders. The grass sways in a breeze gentle enough for dragonflies to land. They bounce on the tips, their wings glint in the softening sun, and, for a moment, your path looks as if it’s filled with tiny mirrors. A little black bird may be here, underneath these bouncing dragonflies, somewhere in these sparkling green waves. A rare bird called the eastern black rail. A bird so difficult to see that John James Audubon never saw one in the wild. A bird so stealthy that even the most ardent birders haven’t seen one...
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