A Million Stories

On awards and syphilis

Evan M. Lopez

Attention fornicators, adulterers, perverts and assorted sex-havers: Syphilis, that disease you once heard of in sex-ed class as yet another reason to not go diving without a wet suit — as if the clap, AIDS, chlamydia and the prospect of spawning sperm vermin weren't enough — is back. Through September, Philly reported 161 cases of this nasty STD in 2009, up from 104 in the same period the year before, a 55 percent increase. Ninety percent of this year's reported cases were men, compared to 98 percent last year, which means that the ladyfolk are increasingly at risk, not just gay men.

The numbers could mean two things, says Ron Powers, program director of the Mazzoni health center in the Gayborhood. Either the number of cases is actually rising, or the outreach efforts to get more people tested are working. (Nationally, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , the disease has steadily become more commonplace, though hardly pandemic, since 2001.) The problem, Powers says, is people think that because it's treatable, it's not a big deal: "But if it's left untreated, if people get into third-stage syphilis, it can cause insanity." That makes syphilis particularly insidious. A rash or wart might pay a visit and vanish, and later, long after you've forgotten about the unpleasantness on your willie, it works its way to your brain and turns you into Edgar Allan Poe, circa 1849.

For nurses and doctors at Philadelphia Health Care Center No. 1, the city's public STD specialists, this surge has set off a round of seemingly never-ending detective work. After treating one infectee, nurses have the onus of finding every person the infectee has slept with in the past six months, and then finding all the people those people have slept with in the past six months, calling them all in, testing them and, should those tests come back positive, shooting them up with penicillin in the smalls of their backs — which is exactly as painful as it sounds.

Moral of the story: Wrap it up, horndogs.

Stuff we like

Here we are again, that special time of year when there's nothing productive to accomplish at work because everyone else is on vacation, and you're trying to distract yourself from the fact that your insufferable Aunt Edna will soon be flying into town to spend an insufferable week nagging you and giving your kids sweaters they'll never wear. Worse, the boss blocked Facebook, so you'll have to sit there bored and stew on your own holiday dread. Most wonderful time of the year, indeed .

We're here to help. We'd like to direct your afternoon dithering to philaplace.org, the totally awesome progeny of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, which launched Dec. 9. The Web site offers a nerd-tacular multimedia look at Philadelphia's past, through a multitude of historic maps, documents, pictures and audio and visual recordings. But this site doesn't concern itself with what you already know — the founders and Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, etc.: "We want to tell the stories of neighborhoods that are not as well-known," says project director Joan Saverino.

At its outset, the site focuses on South Philly and Northern Liberties, two of the city's oldest and most culturally diverse neighborhoods, both of which have seen influxes and migrations and different immigrant populations over the last couple centuries, and both of which have interesting tales to tell. We spent a couple hours reading about the "Bible riots" between Catholics and Protestants in Kensington in 1844. There are tons of stories like that to explore; we don't have space to do them justice here, so go browse for yourself.

The Web site is interactive, so if you have your own stories or documents, you can add them to the historical record. Saverino hopes to get new neighborhoods online in coming months; Germantown is next.

You like us, you really like us

On Dec. 10, we mingled alongside the hipster elite at the Trocadero for the first-ever philebrity.com awards, to watch our very own Isaiah Thompson collect his award for General Excellence in Writing for a City Publication (he beat out a blogger, a pair of bloggers, a team of bloggers and a writer for Philly Mag, but hey).

Of course, Thompson's never done it for the fame (or so he perpetually tells us in long speeches that reference Edward R. Murrow and James Joyce), and he proved it by declining to even be in the room to accept the award he campaigned so hard to win. Irate that a friend was turned away at the door for insufficient ID, our ace reporter was perturbedly pacing outside when, on the Troc's stage, his name was called. But! Isaiah's father, Vinton Thompson, the newly minted president of Metropolitan College of New York, was on hand, and in a bit of turnabout (at Vinton's installation ceremony exactly one week earlier, we're told his son made a rousing, impromptu speech), accepted the award on his son's behalf.

All together now: Awww. Because A Million Stories was outside with Isaiah at the time, in solidarity, we asked Vinton to re-create his address, for the record. Except he couldn't remember it. So we asked Isaiah's friend Jamie, who recalls that Vinton started with a riff about how his son's not terribly reliable.