Give a Man a Quarter and He Can Play One Game, Teach Him to Write in Basic and He Can Feed a Village (Really), They Don’t Make Video Games the Way They Used To (and Get Off My Lawn!), Russ Can’t Help Falling In Love…Again…, Is This the Text That Launched a Thousand Ships?, How Rabbits From Certain Places Can Help You Recover Your Voice, How Many Meppers Does It Take to Get One Mepper a Date, Angry Pictures are Angry, and Chemistry = Not Fat.

Download Mep Report #126

Several things baffle me about panics like this. Firstly, people are now hoarding hundreds of packets of ‘anti nuclear-pills’ that have absolutely zero possibility of helping them, or preventing any sort of radiation poisoning. It seems as long as something can be taken in a pill form, it is pre-approved and justified for American consumption, regardless of whether it actually does anything or not. Remind me later to open up the first PlaceboTown Superstore.

But secondly, and even more stupefying, is that these very same people who are worried about trace amounts of radiation traveling halfway across the globe, are seemingly totally fine with drinking arsenic in their tap water. They are hunky-dory with eating PCBs and Bisphenol-A, and excreted hormones from hundreds of millions of ingested prophylactics. They have absolutely no objection to a multi-faceted poisoning from their daily routine, so long as these poisons are American-made. So throw me a pack of Marlboro’s and a fifth of Jack Daniels, and lets take the rest of the Jimmy Dean bacon-wrapped corndogs down into the nucular shelter to chase down our cache of potassium-iodide pills. That’ll show them Japanese particles whose boss.

Originally posted on Technorati.

Greg Runs the Gauntlet of the Spa Castle, Uniforms Vs. Au Natural: Fight!, To Every Horde, Turn, Turn, Turn, The Horror of Red Bumperman, The Joy of Having One’s Skin Ripped Off, and Zombie Kings.

Download Mep Report #125

For further reading on Transactional Analysis, I recommend going to the source author, Eric Berne. In doing so, however, prepare to have your mind rent asunder. Fair warning.

Recent research shows that coffee addiction is more like our addiction to water or oxygen than our addiction to alcohol or tobacco.

While I have long touted coffee as the only viable migraine medicine I’ve found to date (when taken in regular daily doses as a prophylactic), much popular “wisdom” has lambasted caffeine and coffee generally as some sort of health risk.

It should be noted, of course, that the only discernible negative health impact anyone seems able to cite (even in the above article) are issues with sleeping. Which, uh, look at the poster. Sleep would be best if eliminated altogether and has certainly never done me any favors.

It must also be said that while I like the results of this particular study, the practice of trying to isolate particular foods and beverages for their health impacts in scientific studies is probably best categorized alongside reading tea leaves or ancient runes. After all, most research tends to bob back and forth between “red wine will kill you by the time you turn 35″ and “red wine will guarantee that you live to 100″.

The underlying reality is that everything one ingests involves trade-offs, which pertains to medicines as much as it does to food. And coming to understand these trade-offs is interesting, but probably very hard to universalize. Individual bodies are remarkably different and we will all always be our best diagnostician, if we’re paying attention and staying informed. After all, coffee causes migraines for some people and my grandmother smoked a pack to three a day from age 16 to 91.

Your homework: figure out how much 1-3 packs a day for 75 years costs in 2010 dollars.

You may be familiar with Airborne, the sure fire cold remedy that, as the corporate branding tells us, was invented by a second grade teacher. Well, as it turns out, Airborne only operates on a second grade level — that is, it fights colds with the power of imagination.

As reported by ABC News, the only actual cited piece of evidence that Airborne effectively fights or prevents colds came from a study conducted by “GNG Pharmaceutical Services.” As it happens, GNG Pharmaceutical Services has about as much ability to test commercial products as the man with the exploding banana face (see yesterday’s post) GNG Pharmaceuticals in completely fabricated. It is a figment. And so millions of people have staked their cold-catching chances on this figment for years. Oops. Whatever will the oblivious public turn to next?

For those interested in more than mere amusement, here’s another segment of the same lecture on the subjects of continuity and discontinuity. You should probably have your quantum mechanics textbooks handy for this one…

Facebook Is Kind. Facebook Is Good. All Hail Facebook. When Even Foresight Should Have Been 20/20; Just War Vs. Just a War; Gilligan’s Island As Metaphor for War; Clea and Facebook are BFF; Storey Still Hates Privacy; How the Internet Saved and Destroyed the World At the Same Time; and It’s All Fun And Games Until Someone Loses a Thought.

Download Mep Report #117

Wondering what to be thankful for this Thanksgiving? How about being grateful you’re not this guy.

I’ve recently been working my way through the legendary TV series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” on Netflix’s instant streaming video feature. In one of the early first season episodes, a man lives through about 18 hours of unimaginable torture when he is paralyzed after a car crash and unable to convey to anyone that he is alive or conscious.

It’s probably the scariest episode I’ve seen yet, and it’s about 1/10,000th of the horror (in terms of literal time) experienced by the man who lived for 23 years while fully conscious but attributed to being in a fully vegetative coma. Granted, some of the horror of the episode includes the belief that he will be killed, while after a couple years, the Belgian coma man had to start believing he would just go on forever in that state.

But I’d argue that might be worse. With no one believing that you’re conscious, all you have is your own thoughts. No communication or contact with the outside world and, much more importantly, no one making any sort of effort to stimulate or entertain you. The greatest blessing you would get to interrupt this unending boredom would be scraps of overheard conversation that no one believed you could fathom.

If I ever fall into something diagnosed as a vegetative state, please get a second opinion. And leave the TV on in my room all the time, just in case.

On second thought, given the state of our modern media, better make it a series of books on tape. Whatever will be going on the next 23 years might be more torture than I want to witness.

The interview touches on many health-related Mep-centric themes, including not taking the word of doctors as gospel (see the 85% theory), seeking outside of the box treatments, and trusting yourself to be your own best advocate. It’s worth a listen. Below, you’ll find the trailer to the recently-released documentary.

Some shamed former steroid users are taking drastic measures to return to a home life free of hecklers.

At a Las Vegas media event this weekend, disgraced baseball slugger Sammy Sosa revealed his intention to live out the rest of his years as a Caucasian Playboy/Baccarat Master known as Johnny Faro.

“Johnny Faro don’t need no home run records,” Sosa remarked. Johnny Faro’s got a speedboat, and, and James Bond’s watch. Johnny Faro is waterproof to 300 meters! Johnny Faro is a swinger! Johnny Faro drives in all the runs on the Baccarat table. Johnny Faro hit goes 4 for 4 with seven RBIs in the casino. Johnny crush tape measure blasts on his schooner. F-you, I’m Johnny Faro!”

Some have speculated that Sosa’s drastic change in appearance was due to past drug abuse, and not an intentional identity change.

This theory might be corroborated by another former slugger and steroid user Barry Bonds, who now works nights at a local San Francicso strip bar as a dancer who calls herself, Barry Bonds.

There is also the strange case of disgraced slugger Mark McGwire, who lives out his days as a torso-less Laotian cripple, now known as Pog Mog.

It will be left to the sporting media and fans to decide whether these bizarre physiological changes were caused by the massive levels of horse testosterone and human growth hormones that these athletes bravely ingested, or whether these characters simply wanted to shrink from the limelight and leave their old identities, pigmentation, and genitalia behind.

This is a pretty simple and obvious reality. The fact on the ground is that, despite dire warnings of mandatory vaccines from one group of Internet crazies and overpromises from the typical government perspective, there is a shortage of swine flu vaccines. And given that they just created the thing, there will be all year.

In fact, they’ve pretty much never had enough flu vaccines to go around in history, seasonal or otherwise. This year, because of the demand for H1N1, they’re actually close to having enough regular flu shots.

At the point at which not everyone can get an H1N1 vaccine, then if you’re happy and healthy and between a certain age range (let’s say 20-50), you’re taking the vaccine out of someone else’s arm and into yours and chances are that other person is more vulnerable than you are. You may actually be contributing to their death.

Sure, I guess if you work with such vulnerable populations there’s a chance that you’ll get it and be contagious, so you could make a mitigative argument there. Although the solution may actually just be for you to stop being a workaholic and stay home when you feel even slightly sick.

This reality may change when either (A) there are 300 million doses of swine flu vaccine available domestically, perfectly distributed throughout the states, and/or (B) people who are 20-50 with good immune systems start dying of this thing. Until then, chill out and let the people who could actually be impacted get in line first.

I sure hope this clears up the pandemic panic.

For those of you who enjoy living vicariously through your computers, Burger King Japan has announced the limited release of the Windows 7 Whopper.

With this mountain of fried chuck, you can personally simulate the experience of installing an unstable, under-tested operating system on your own biological BIOS. While I can’t reliably translate the Japanese slogan, I think it roughly says: “Windows 7: Kill Computer; Kill Self.”

Update: Just found the video of Windows 7′s first victim:

Professional skeptic and media rabblerouser, Bill Maher, willfully engaged the taboo this week when he expressed his doubts about the Swine Flu vaccine. Not surprisingly, his panelists reacted as if he suggested they eat a small child, live on set.

This is an especially courageous stance for Maher to take given the greater medical community’s open disdain for anyone who would question their products. Never mind that there is a body of evidence mounting that most currently cited vaccine efficacy studies are heavily biased and, no double-blind vaccine testing (against a placebo group) have ever been effectively demonstrated.

Never mind that in both 1968 and 1977, when flu vaccines were completely mismatched to corresponding seasonal outbreaks, the flu mortality rate didn’t rise a single point. Never mind that even though we immunize 50% more elderly people than we did 20 years ago, the death rate has increased nearly twofold.

Never mind that (as Maher cites) a typical flu vaccine contains mercury, chicken embryos and formaldehyde. Nope, there certainly isn’t a credible debate to be had on whether we should be injecting millions of people with that. Certainly not. Right Canadians?

Even the usually infallible Jon Stewart completely dropped the ball on this debate. Instead, he used shlubby Glen Beck as a strawman to avoid the real arguments completely.

The moral of the story is, never believe the glowing screen — especially when it tells you that you’d be a fool to question it. Do your own research and find your own answers. Either that, or willfully accept your intravenous chicken fetus.

For too long babies who had plagiocephaly were the only ones who had to wear headgear.  They were “special” babies who needed to have a little help to make sure their head shape turned out normal as they grew.

Now, thanks to a new product on the market, “special” parents can put their babies in headgear too.  The Thudguard ensures that their babies will not lose brain cells bumping their heads against furniture like everyone elses babies; in a sense leveling the future playing field one fall at a time.

Well, they’ve done it.  Bach, the makers of “Rescue Remedy,” have solved the problem of kids’ fear of failure.  Meet “Confidence Remedy”

the new addition to the Bach Kids line.  It can give your kids that “natural boost to aid in overcoming frustrating obstacles of self-doubt.”

So, to all those parents afraid of following in your parent’s footsteps by verbally abusing your child and shattering their self-esteem…Worry No More!  Just add a drop of this alcohol-free formula to their morning cereal and you’re good to go!

Also available, “Daydream Remedy,” for those neglected children who spend their whole day dreaming of what it would be like to have a caring, supportive family with whom they could spend quality time.

Looking for a way to perk up your work week? Why not update yourself on the impending enviropocalypse?

According to an exhaustive study by the Global Footprint Network, September 25th was the day that the planet used all of the available planetary resources that it could replenish in a year (otherwise known as Earth Overshoot Day). For the rest of the year, we’ll be culling, reaping, and utilizing that which won’t grow back.

Ever the optimist, I like to look at the impending death of our home planet as an opportunity to try out other levels of existence. Farming, fishing, manufacturing, and reproducing can get quite monotonous after a few hundred generations. So, as I see it, here are our options:

The first option is to figure out a way to exist in bio-friendly hibernation pods, as the new movie Surrogates seems to suggest. Now, this may be with the help of Matrix-like robotic overlords, or it may be as autonomous dwellers in an expanded Internet or Multiverse. Incidentally, Surrogates seems to pull heavily from Snow Crash, a novel whose characters spend most of their free time on a fully-immersive giant virtual reality internet. The environmental benefits to this type of lifestyle are clear, with the added bonus of living life in a giant video game. I have high hopes for this potential reality.

Our second option is to dispose of our planet like a used diaper and seek out life on another potential dumping ground elsewhere in the galaxy. For those ingrained into the deficit spending culture, this may be the only satisfying solution. Many sci-fi tales, including Robert Heinlein’s, Farmer in the Sky set the scene for human colonization of other worlds. These are tales of future explorers homesteading on nearby habitable planets. While playing Galactic Oregon Trail sounds like a real hoot, it doesn’t come without its own share of problems. Firstly, this reality sticks us with the farming, fishing, and reproduction toils that we were trying to get out of. And secondly, this future path assumes that humans will have the smarts to build things, grow things, and live without electricity while we break in our new environment. Not bloody likely.

The third option is much less fun, as it involves heeding the constant whinings of our scientific community. Cutting down on global consumption just feels wrong. It would be the equivalent of declaring defeat in the War Against Nature, which we know our political leaders could never bear. And I for one, don’t like losing to an unconscious pile of dirt and brine. Doesn’t sentience count for anything anymore? So, no, I refuse to lay out the potential of slowly weening ourselves off of our highly consumptive habits. It’s just wrong. Surely there must be a more extravagant, American way to go about doing this. Perhaps we can keep our day-to-day abuses intact and simply jettison some of our more extravagant behaviors.

I bet that putting an end to NASCAR and Entourage would roll us back to a level of existence short of Earth Overshoot. And if that doesn’t work, we can always choose some toothless, symbolic action that represents our commitment to fixing our leaky planet when we decide to get around to it. In that vein, I propose that we recycle Tyra Banks into organic mulch. At least this would make our dying planet an infinitely more palatable place to live.

Hey, Hey, The Gang’s All Here, Krull and Kelp Kollide, Russ Goes Back to School, Immortality Is/Is Not Overrated, Baby Sea Cucumbers, Rack-O is Whack-O, Cash for Coal, and NAFTA Bartenders.

Download Mep Report #116

Mep Report 116 – Limb Regeneration in Infants from Laserfalcon on Vimeo.

As the nation’s health care debate/debacle (debatecle?) crescendos into to a high-pitched whine, one champion’s advances threaten to trump all the efforts of the medical community, pharmaceutical industry, and lobbying covens. And this champion, this potential savior, is an unlabeled, off-brand, non-invasive, patent-free, discount store sugar pill.

According to Wired magazine, placebo effects have dramatically increased over the past few years, making it monumentally tough to get new drugs approved by the FDA.

While the newfound effectiveness of placebos continues to baffle doctors and drug researchers, it comes as much less of a shock to this Mepper. Firstly, as cited in the Wired article, placebos seems to be wildly effective when treating depression and other mental ‘disorders’. How is it surprising that a purely mental treatment (a pretend pill) is the most effective medicine to treat a purely mental disorder? Isn’t this a much more direct form of treatment than a chemical approach? As we are beginning to learn, when it comes to altering molecular structures, chemists still can’t hold a candle to the power of the human psyche.

It also bears mentioning that pharmaceutical companies probably have themselves to blame for placebo’s rise to power. Here is an industry that spends billions of dollars in advertising and marketing inventing new and ever more vague disorders (i.e. Restless Leg Syndrome) while simultaneously convincing people that a new slew of wonder drugs are going to solve their problems. Pfizer, Merck, and Glaxo have won the battle for the hearts and minds of America. Virtually everyone now believes that pills can fix their problems. This campaign has been so incredibly effective, now it doesn’t even matter which pills patients take. Whether it’s derived from sugar, fairy dust, or unicorn turds, it will fix what ails ya.

However, in the Golden Age of Placebo, medical applications are just the tip of the iceberg.

Our current President ran on what was predominantly a placebo campaign. Yes, he had a great deal of policy expertise and wonkiness at his disposal, but the overriding message of the Obama campaign wasn’t any policy proposal or platform plank. It was simply that of “Hope.” Similarly, when our economy tanked (our mostly theoretical economy that no single human fully understands), our government attempted to spur the most important economic indicator of all — “consumer confidence.” If only there were a pill for that. Perhaps one day soon, there will be.

It seems that, for Americans, marketing is a far, far more important thing than producing. We don’t produce much of value any more, but we sure can craft a perfect 30 second spot to tout the amazingness of our nothing much. In a country where blowing smoke up people’s asses is a cottage industry, placebos should continue to be the most highly effective medicine.

Link via Wonkette.

Download Mep Report #114

Finally willing to be intellectually honest about its product, Pizza Hut is changing its name to “The Hut.”

While the company claims that this is a branding move to keep in touch with the “texting” (read as “illiterate”) generation, it does afford several advantages to the franchise:

First of all, no more pizza complaints. If “The Hut” is going to attempt to vend its novel “marinara-cheese-discs”, a revolted public won’t have the proper language to complain.

Secondly, “The Hut” can now literally sell anything one can find in a hut. This includes sunglasses, computer software, and garden supplies. I, for one, look forward to frequenting The Hut, as I’m in need of some new leaf pruning shears.

Thirdly, “The Hut” can now make up completely new rules on “marinara-cheese-disk” pricing options. For instance, “pizza toppings” will be replaced with “MCdisk add-ons,” a very exciting new innovation. For only five dollars each, the Hut’s MCdisk artists can add-on other food items to your MCdisk. Though a highly complex and lengthy process, Hut customers will surely enjoy their custom-created disks. Just one of many new features available at this cutting-edge corporation.

For those of us caught up in the day to day world of drug politics, it can be easy to forget just how new the concept of ‘illegal drugs’ really is. Pharmacy blog, Pill Talk, provided a big dose of historical perspective this week in releasing a collection of old posters and billboards hocking all manner of substances that no upstanding company would affiliate itself with in today’s whitewashed corporate culture.

Most stemming from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the ads feature some truly amazing concoctions.

Miss Winslow’s Soothing Syrup was designed to quiet restless babies especially at the time of teething. Little did babies and their mothers know that the syrup’s secret ingredient was morphine. Those babies were soothed alright. There’s even a terrific vintage testimonial in the New York Times archive lauding the syrup’s ability to quiet entire households of screaming rugrats.

Bayer, the long-time drug manufacturer, experimented with several substances before focusing on wonder drug, aspirin. One such substance was heroin, which, not surprisingly, turned out to be a terrific cough suppressant. As it happens, it also tended to suppress just about everything else, except for the desire to buy more Bayer Heroin, of course.

And finally, there’s the soft drink of lore, Coca Cola. As urban legend (and PillTalk) tells us, the name came from the fact that the drink used to be a simple mix of wine and cocaine. I fail to see how corn syrup and phosphoric acid could ever hope to compete with their far more stimulating predecessors.

Originally Posted on The Fresh Scent

Download Mep Report #113

Gerontologist Aubrey de Grey is at it again. In an article from the Daily Galaxy, de Grey claims that, “…most people now 40 years or younger can expect to live for centuries…” and ““The first person to live to be 1,000 years old is certainly alive today..”

1,000 years? Hold your horses there, Methuselah. Laserfalcon only claims to be on his way to 400 years of life. If many of us have got ten centuries of existence to plan for, we’re going to have to really start working on our leisure time skills. I mean, yes, I’ve played over 1000 games of MVP 2005, but that barely got me through three months of total existence.

It’s time to really push the envelope. We’ve got to develop more efficient ways of wasting time, and fast. And, when it comes to questions such as these, I often look to the Japanese. They rarely disappoint.

And so, we have immortal leisure activity #1, Human Tetris:

This could occupy societies for a few decades, perhaps. But eventually, someone would figure out that you can smash through the styrofoam with reckless abandon and never be eliminated…

So, let’s see what else the Japanese have for us:

Yes. Yes… Mmmmhmm. I find this appealing.

…
…

Ehhh, what?

Ah… my supervisory staff has informed me that I’ve spent the last 16 hours acting out various Ronald MacDonald-fueled hallucinations. They found me head-butting a barber-shop pole while throwing very large shoes at passers by. I need to shake this off and ponder immortality another time.

Well played, Japanese pop culture. Well played.

So if you kids out there want to live to 400, like your buddy Laserfalcon, you’d better start smoking the ganja and drinking in moderation.

Here we go again. Alex Rodriguez admits to substance abuse back in 2003, and the Cadre of Crusading Baby Boomer Moralist Sportswriters are again denouncing the current crop of MLB players (and the records they hold) as “tainted.” They are crying to the Baseball Heavens,

“Oh Mercy, Lawd! Take us back! Take us back to a time when baseball was played by the honorable and when records made sense! A time of purity! A time of nobility! We can’t stand the awful sight of these players who have no respect for basic rules and decency! Deliver us, Lawd!”

Let me now disabuse you of the notion that baseball (and its hallowed records) has ever been “pure.”

Exhibit A: The Negro League Era.

Let’s forget, for a moment, that some Hall of Famers like Cap Anson were so virulently racist that they refused to play with colored players. The more important point here is that for 60-odd years of baseball (1880-1947), there were no non-white players in the Majors. Do you think this might potentially skew ALL Major League records from this particular era? I certainly do. World class players like Satchel Paige (who reportedly threw over 50 no-hitters in the Negro Leagues) and Josh Gibson barely got a chance to put a dent in the history of MLB.

Exhibit B: The Black Sox Scandal

In 1919, the Chicago White Sox, considered easily the strongest team in the league, intentionally threw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. This story has been well preserved in the media through movies like Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams. This incident was a huge stain on the reputation of the league, and rightfully so. The greater point here, is that this was simply the most famous case of gambling affecting the outcome of an MLB game. Imagine how many dozens, if not hundreds of other games were controlled by the gambling elite and never reported on. This could call into question the results of decades worth of seasons.

Exhibit C: Wacky Stadium Design

It has always been part of the character of the national pastime that every city designs its own park to give it an extra degree of home field advantage. You’ve got the ivy walls in Wrigley Park, the short right field porch in the old Yankee Stadium, the Green Monster in Fenway, the cramped and acoustically weird Metrodome (I once described it as like watching eighteen guys play baseball in a living room). Now, I like that teams do this, and it certainly adds to the flavor of games, but it should cause you can throw stat uniformity right out the window.

Wade Boggs was a .354 career hitter at home (predominantly in hitter-friendly Fenway) and a .302 hitter on the road. So, is he a Hall of Famer, or simply just above-average? Depends on what field you’ve seen him play on.

Exhibit D: The Asterisk

On the final day of the 1961 season, Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s single season home run record, belting his 61st home run into the seats at Yankee Stadium. Baseball purists complained that since Babe Ruth had hit 60 in 154 games, and Maris hit 61 in 162 games, it wasn’t truly a new record. Well regardless of who you side with here, this does sort of pose a consistency problem for all records pre and post 1961 (the first year of the season expansion). Should we add five percent to all of the accumulated statistics of pre 1961 players?

So, I think we’ve established how ridiculous it is to talk about numerical consistency in any two disparate baseball eras. Let’s discuss “performance enhancers” for a bit:

Exhibit E: Maple Bats

For the majority of major league history, most bats were cut from ash trees with the rare exception of a hickory or bamboo selected by a player. Robert Redford crafted Wonderboy from a lightning-struck oak tree in the movie, The Natural.

Barry Bonds broke Maris’s home run record in 2001 with a specialty maple wood bat. Now maple bats are all the rage and comprise perhaps up to 60% of the bats used in the league. Players believe that the maple bats (which tend to be drier than ash bats) can make the ball travel farther. And, Major League Baseball seems content to allow this stat-enhancing change in equipment.

Exhibit F: Tommy John Surgery

Beginning in 1974, doctors found that they could replace a frayed or torn elbow ligament (the ulnar collateral) with another ligament from a knee, foot, or hamstring. Named after the first pitcher to undergo the surgery (who pitched to the age of 46), it has now become commonplace. Most players recovery from the surgery in under a year and can actually become stronger and throw harder after rehabilitation.

What I want to know, is where is the Baseball Purist objection to this? Anyone who believes that a player should get by on his God-given ability, without mechanical, chemical, or scientific help, should object to this procedure. Can you imagine how powerful someone could throw a ball with knee-strength ligaments in their throwing arms?

A Wikipedia article on this procedure reports that an increasing number of parents are requesting the surgery on their uninjured children in the hopes of increasing their performance. If someone can make a moral distinction between steroids and Tommy John surgery (other than that the rulebook allows one and bans the other), I would love to hear it.

Conclusion

And surgery is just the tip of the iceberg, folks. The upcoming revolution in sports science and genetics will create a new breed of professional athlete. Players will grow larger, faster, stronger, and play later into their lives. This trend is inevitable. Are we going to hem and haw every time someone breaks a record because they grew up in a world technologically different from the previous generation’s record holder? Are we going to demand that players subsist on a diet of liquor and hot dogs because that’s all Babe Ruth ate during his epic career? Where do you draw the line?

The point here, Baseball Crusaders, is that there is no line. Any comparison of two generations will be apples and oranges. Circumstances were different, morals were different, nutrition was different, environmental effects were different, ballparks were different, equipment was different, medicine was different. There is no consistency. There is only the ever growing, developing, and evolving game of baseball. It is a great game now and it will be a great game when it is played on the moon.

The only constant is that every generation’s players will do whatever is in their power to win. They will hide emery boards in their back pockets to scuff up baseballs, they will slide with their spikes out, they will take drugs, they will have unnecessary surgeries and transplants. They will do this because there are simply too many people willing to die for the lifestyle that they are afforded. That is the nature of competition. So stop being hung up on steroids, and try to enjoy the artistry in our national pastime.

Scientists have recently discovered evidence of an immortal species of jellyfish. Apparently these little suckers revert to an adolescent phase after mating, and can do so ad infinitum. And you laughed at me when I said I was going to live to be 400!

Take heart, friends. It is now only a matter of time before we unlock the cellular secrets inside these Holy Hydrozoans and sell their special genetic heritage in an easily digestible liquid capsule that also serves as birth control while providing instant male enhancement.

By my watch, only another 65 years or so before we are all forever-living, constantly aroused quasi-squids, living in stasis tanks with wi-fi ready electrodes hooked up to each and every tentacle.

Kudos to HG Wells for figuring this out a century ago (minus the Cialis angle).

No I’m not suggesting we ban Mariah Carey’s attempt at movie making.  Nor do I mean the harmless, though annoying, glitter graphics people add to their Myspace and Friendster pages.  Finally, I’m not suggesting we waste our valuable legislative time banning Paris Hilton’s addition to the already overly saturated perfume industry.  I’m making a simple request.  Ban that stupid, little bitty, sparkly crap that they attach to greeting cards.  All other forms of fairy dust are fine by me.  After all, we Meppers hate the War on Drugs.

Let’s get down to brass tacks.  You see that card in Target and you think, “gee that’s pretty and sparkly!  I think grandma will love it!”  You don’t think of all the future negative side effects of that decision.

1) Negative health effects of secondhand glitter

To create that card and get it to the shelf of your local Target, thousands of migrant workers had to mine that glitter.*  The health effects to those workers and their families is shameful.  Additionally, every day thousands of trucks transport glitter and risk a glitter spill in the natural breeding grounds of the Gunnison Sage-Grouse.**

2) The lingering glitter effect

You give the glittery card to bring joy to grandma.  But do you really mean for the joy to keep on giving?  Coming off on her hands, getting on her face, in Snookum’s fur?  And it doesn’t stop there.  The glitter cannot be removed and multiplies, so that it shows up in new places every day.

3) Glitter Reduction

Then guess what?  Grandma’s local neighborhood’s senior van takes her to the grocery store where she touches the oranges to see if they are fresh.  GLITTER

They then take her to the library where she touches the books looking for a new one to read to her grandchildren.  GLITTER

Finally, they take her to the local petting zoo where she touches the animals…to pet them…anyway.  GLITTER

In closing I must add that despite my vehement arguments for a glitter ban, I would like to support a person’s right to glitter in private settings where the impact on other people is limited.  However, due to the inherent properties of glitter, its effects cannot be controlled– and like a parasite born on the back of a monkey, so does the glitter escape the confines of the home destined to spread.  If a ban is too extreme, please consider petitioning Meadowbrook Inventions.  There is no way that Rushman, a lowly cattle farmer turned inventor of glitter, could have foreseen the destruction and angst his creation would cause.  I think Oppenheimer said it best, “I am become death…the destroyer of worlds.”   I think it says it all that glitter and the atomic bomb were both created in the 1930′s after the Great Depression.  I only hope that our current economic downturn doesn’t lead to some new form of terror.

————————————–

*This is not true

**Neither is this

Download Mep Report #110

“The worst thing you can do for your baby is let the symptoms of WET-D go unchecked. If your baby continues to cry repeatedly, it’s a sign that more medication is required.”

(Cross-posted at StoreyTelling.)

I guess these days it would more likely go by something like the No-Shit Show, but I didn’t swear at that point in my high school career. The swearing would come later, with the jading experiences and the pathological liar and the hey-hey-hey.

So my own submission to the Bureau today is this stunning study:
Apparently, misbehaving teens may be at risk for major adulthood problems.

Really?

Why would people who tend to have trouble continue to tend to have trouble? Isn’t it more likely that their trouble would suddenly vanish for no reason? Wouldn’t their magical conversion to the age of majority instantly convey a restart of all past indiscretions?

I’m glad people spent the money it costs to track 3,500 people for 40 years to give us this scintillating information. Much better than trying to cure cancer or something inane.

Headbanging does create risk of brain damage, says study.

In related news: people who cut off one of their arms are one hundred percent more likely to have only one arm than those who don’t, scientists find.

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