Category: Uncategorised

Chantix

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w-XrQaNqkM]

This isn’t the exact ad that plays in my market, but the concept is all there, including the mid-commercial warning. I remember the day’s when the anal leakage warning on Lay’s chips was a big deal – the first time I saw this commercial I almost thought it was some sort of clever campaign for something like The Crazies.

When are the symptoms going to outweigh the convenience? Maybe after you’ve murdered your family in a chemical haze.

Titanic vs. Lusitania: Get Rich Or Die Tryin'

I’m almost tempted to print out this TIME article in broadsheet format, just so I can read it while wearing a monocle and puffing at a comically large pipe – feasibly while fiddling with an extravagantly well greased moustache.

From mid-article:

The results told a revealing tale. Aboard the Titanic, children under 16 years old were nearly 31% likelier than the reference group to have survived, but those on the Lusitania were 0.7% less likely. Males ages 16 to 35 on the Titanic had a 6.5% poorer survival rate than the reference group but did 7.9% better on the Lusitania. For females in the 16-to-35 group, the gap was more dramatic: those on the Titanic enjoyed a whopping 48.3% edge; on the Lusitania it was a smaller but still significant 10.4%. The most striking survival disparity — no surprise, given the era — was determined by class. The Titanic‘s first-class passengers had a 43.9% greater chance of making it off the ship and into a lifeboat than the reference group; the Lusitania‘s, remarkably, were 11.5% less likely. – TIME

The discussion later in the article about polite behaviour  vs fight-or- flight self centered action is interesting, but I can’t help but notice that ‘polite behaviour’ basically saves rich ladies, a category I will likely never be counted in.

Olympics

Dear NBC,

Thank you for helping to cover up how bad a nosedive the Olympic closing ceremonies took after Neil Young. (Who, frankly, put all the projectors and dance numbers and ridiculous inflatables to shame with his acoustic guitar.) Your greed has saved a lot of Canadian embarrassment.

Thanks again,
54º 40′ and Surroundings

Diff'rent Strokes & The Bicycle Man

As far as I know, Diff’rent Strokes was really the show that began the trend of Very Special Episodes – which arguably peaked and receded during the final season of Blossom.

A lot of things can be ‘Very Special’ however, and Diff’rent Strokes liked to cast a wide net. Have you ever heard of The Bicycle Man?

Gordon Jump, (the boss from WKRP in Cincinnati & The Lonely Maytag Repairman,) played a bicycle shop owner who was quite interested in cutting Arnold a deal – in exchange for his pants. It’s surprising, for an early ’80s sitcom, how far they went with this Child-Molester warning.

It might have been a little more effective without the laugh track though.

Here’s the crux, but you can find both episodes dealing with the subject on youtube:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlkoxsEpODo]

Wow.

I’m flat-out stealing this from the venerable AnyCheese, [well, her buzz feed anyhow] but this story exploded my thinker.

A 42-year-old HIV patient with leukemia appears to have no detectable HIV in his blood and no symptoms after a stem cell transplant from a donor carrying a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to the virus that causes AIDS, according to a report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“The patient is fine,” said Dr. Gero Hutter of Charite Universitatsmedizin Berlin in Germany. “Today, two years after his transplantation, he is still without any signs of HIV disease and without antiretroviral medication.” – More from CNN

They do point out later in the article that the process is prohibitively dangerous to use in all but the most extreme of situations, and that the process itself kills one in three patients. My thoughts are that the skeptics can tell it to Christiaan Barnard.

I’m not arguing for a technocracy, but when are we going to get The R&D Candidate?