Public Health Timeline

Here is a timeline, as best as I can recall without doing any pesky research, of public health advice from the Media:

1950: Meat, starch and dairy will keep you healthy.

1962: Make your kids drink juice. It has vitamins.

1965: Mercury is good for your teeth. Fill your cavities with it.

1969: Eat wheat germ to be groovy.

1973: Bread is a wonder food. Replace all meals with bread.

Are Rock Lyrics Sexist?

I’ve always despised the sexist lyrics of Simon & Garfunkel’s Homeward Bound, which includes the despicable lines:

Home where my love lies waiting
Silently for me.

What a great role for a woman: to lie in bed silently until her man, who’s out on the road seeking public adoration, bestows his presence once again upon her. Is she allowed to eat during her bed-waiting time? Is she allowed to speak once he has returned? We may never know. But it got me thinking:

Are Rock Lyrics Generally Sexist? Here’s an easy way to find out: Reverse the pronouns! Let’s try it with a few popular songs from throughout the decades:

• From the hit Elvis song, Baby, Let’s Play House:

(This song reached #5 on Billboard’s Country Singles chart in 1955)

Well, you may go to college,
You may go to school.
You may have a pink cadillac,
But don’t you be nobody’s fool…

Now listen to me, baby
Try to understand.
I’d rather see you dead, little boy,
Than to be with another woman.

How to Build a Treadmill Desk – the Series

I made an educational video called How to Build a Treadmill Desk. It has received over 20,000 views, which may not be viral, but maybe it qualifies as some sort of minor infection. Perhaps a blister. It’s gone blisterous. I followed the video with two more pieces that delve into the complex and rewarding world of making treadmill desks. Here are links to all three!

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Click the daisy for something completely different:

Words we need to make it through the next year

 

Junioring: The act of claiming innocence by stupidity

Internyet: Russian use of the internet to veto an election 

Fakicity: Obvious artificiality and fakeness presented by people pretending to be authority figures

Flerp: To pass on a brain activity due to media overload. Example: In response to a question about the Trump-Russia conspiracy,  “I flerp on that,” “I flerp,” or simply, “flerp.”

Stray Thoughts

I don’t have anyone to talk to. Pathetic, I know. So, instead, I am sharing some random things on my mind with the 5 or so people who will accidentally stumble across this post! That’s not pathetic at all!

1. Julian Assange’s personal vendetta against Hillary Clinton dovetailed with Vladimir Putin’s, and Wikileaks became a partisan political tool used by actors in one powerful corrupt state against actors in a rival state. This is a blow to all of us out of power who had once seen Wikileaks as a great leveler, who’s enemy was state secrecy and abuse of state power.
2.  I’m Jewish, but I can’t stand this BS reasoning from some of my Jewish friends and relatives that Israel belongs to the Jews because it was their biblical home. I mean, to hear this from someone living in North America where the indigenous people lived for tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of years before Europeans colonized the continent is just a bit inconsistent to say the least. Plus, come on – this whole tribalism is belied by the genetic reality that we are all mixes of many different peoples from many different lands. At the very least, Jews in Israel who think they were the first inhabitants should do some research to find out if any of the descendants of the people they conquered 2,500 years ago to occupy what is now Israel are still around – I would think those people should get first dibs on that piece of real estate.
3. You know what would be really funny? Spend more money on your military than the next 8 nations combined, drop a couple of nuclear bombs on civilian populations, become the biggest arms exported the world has ever known, invade more countries than any other nation in history, conduct joint military exercises with the arch rival of a tiny dictatorship, right off the shores of that dictatorship, demonstrating your ability to invade and occupy that dictatorship, base your soldiers in the territory of that same arch rival, bordering the little dictatorship, enforce world wide sanctions against the dictatorship to strangle its economy, install a missile defense system in that border ally that would make a first strike more feasible, and then threaten to bomb the poor, tiny dictatorship for having the gall to test their own missile! That would be funny.
4. I think the time is right to start the “Mike Pence, please don’t pardon Donald Trump” petitions. Events move quickly.

10 Things the Media Should Stop Saying

1. Stop saying “Small d democratic.” We’re not morons. We know the difference between the Democratic Party and democratic institutions. I even heard Rachel Maddow go so far as to say, “Small d democracy,” which makes no sense whatsoever.
2. Stop confusing anarchy with chaos. Anarchy is an social system without leaders; it is not necessarily synonymous with chaos.
3. Stop confusing fascism & xenophobia with populism. Marine Le Pen is not a populist. Pandering to and stoking of people’s bassist fears is not populism.
4. Stop saying,”Both sides do it,” when you’re talking about something terrible one side has done. You don’t have to protect yourself from accusations of partisanship by flimsy attempts at false equivalency.
5. Stop calling the country the Homeland when reporting on national security. It sounds quasi-fascist and it sprang from the Bush Administration’s attempt to delegitimize domestic dissent after September 11, 2001. Call it, “the nation,” or “the country,” like we did for the first 230 years.
6. Stop calling ISIS, “the so-called Islamic State.” It’s not your job to editorialize about enemies of our state. Just call them whatever they call themselves.
7. Stop calling famous entertainers “legends.” They are not.
8. Stop stating national statistics as if they were world statistics. If 8,500 Americans died of something in 2016, don’t just say, “8,500 people died.” There are people outside our country.
9. Stop using adjectives that refer to women in the news by their social roles. If a 70 year old woman is arrested for possession, don’t say, “70 year old grandmother arrested.”
10. Stop assuming that you and every poll in the country were wrong about the election. Sometimes there’s just fraud.

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And now this (click flower):