Huh? Part Deux

"In a news story Friday (”Spectrum holds Condom Olympics to educate on safe sex,” page 3), it was incorrectly stated due to a reporting error that health and wellness educator Beth Grampetro and Tim Hegan, an ORL area director, said Fruit Roll-Ups are adequate protection against STDs. No health officials said or advocated this use at the Condom Olympics. The Daily Free Press apologizes for the confusion."

Link here.

Steroid Report

So I'm finding myself unable to get into any kind of uproar over the Mitchell steroid report. Granted, a lot of this report refers to users who are now out of baseball, so there really are only two "sexy" names named: Clemens and Petitte. Now, I think Clemens is a d-bag of the nth degree, and Petitte seems like an overrated mercenary to me, but I don't find the revelation that they used steroids as particularly offensive. Perhaps this is because part of me wants to say, "well, duh."

However, I think I'm just not bothered by the steroid "scandal" because I don't see it as being fundamentally any different from a host of legal medical techniques that are used to prolong seasons and careers. The issue with steroids (or HGH) is that it is performance-enhancing. How do they enhance performance? By repairing muscle at a faster rate than one would achieve without them. So when you work out, you rebuild muscle faster. When you are injured, you rebuild faster. What these drugs do is make your body capable of something that it would not naturally be capable of.

How does this differ from Tommy John surgery? When Kerry Wood blew out his elbow, it meant that he was not naturally capable of throwing curveballs at 90 miles an hour. Should he have quit? No, he had surgery to put a cadaver's tendon into his elbow, and a year later he could pitch again. This is not "natural". He's got a dead guy's tendon in his elbow - not his own. His body basically said, "I can't do this", and he used modern medical innovations to override this signal. Isn't this what steroids are for? Overriding your body's natural signals?

I just can't get up any anger at guys using steroids. They're going to die young, probably with massive complications and a scrotum the size of a Peanut M&M. But that's their problem, not mine.

(And don't give me this "bad example for the kids" crap. If my kids are taking cues from professional athletes on what is right and wrong, then I failed as a parent a long time ago.)

Huh?

This made my head hurt. From the Guardian:

"We misspelled the word misspelled twice, as mispelled, in the Corrections and clarifications column on September 26, page 30."

My Kids are Mutants

Seriously:

"Ten thousand years ago, no one on planet Earth had blue eyes," Hawks notes, because that gene—OCA2—had not yet developed. "We are different from people who lived only 400 generations ago in ways that are very obvious; that you can see with your eyes."

According to these guys, the pace of evolutionary change has accelerated over the last 10,000 years since the agricultural revolution. We're acquiring mutations (like blue eyes) faster than we did previously - a lot faster. Between 10 and 100 times faster.

I'm pretty excited to see if my grandkids have four legs. Sweet.

Amazon Humor

So you thought I had lots of free time on my hands. These are comments left on Amazon for "Tuscan Whole Milk" - there are 97 total pages of comments!

Sample:
"Horrible service, I bought my milk and went with the 7-9 day super saver shipping method and it arrived warm and curdled. What the hell?"

"One should not be intimidated by Tuscan Whole Milk. Nor should one prejudge, despite the fact that Tuscan is non-vintage and comes in such large containers. Do not be fooled: this is not a jug milk. I always find it important to taste milk using high-quality stemware -- this is milk deserving of something better than a Flintstones plastic tumbler. One should pour just a small dollop and swirl it in the glass -- note the coating and look for clots or discoloration. And the color -- it should be opaque, and very, very white. "

"This milk worked well when I first got it, but within a few days it wouldn't hold a charge. I called their customer service department and, I don't know if it's in Bangalor or Ireland, but I couldn't understand a word that they said and they began to scream at me. Finally, though, they sent me another one - but that wouldn't hold a charge, either. I'm beginning to wonder if this is truly meant to be a portable product. I still haven't been able to retreive my email and the video is murky. "

" Has anyone else tried pouring this stuff over dry cereal? A-W-E-S-O-M-E!"

"On the nose this milk is exceptionally elegant. Dominant floral notes (mint and white flowers) mingle with hints of fresh fruit (citrus fruits, fresh almonds). As it undergoes aeration, riper notes of vanilla and nougat come to the fore, giving a pleasant roundness to the milk. At this stage a typical whole milk characteristic, crisp elegance, clearly prevails over aromatic strength."

These comments are for "Bic Pens":
"Upon receiving my order, I carefully opened the box and dug through the packing peanuts in order to get to the pen contained therein. 'Beautiful!', I thought, and promptly opened up my moleskine notebook to jot down to myself some notes. My previous pen had ran out of ink four weeks prior and I didn't want to splurge on expensive shipping, which meant I had a lot of notes to catch up on writing."

"And I can conclusively declare that these pens are the PERFECT (the ***PERFECT***) thing to use for spooling cooked linguini for storage purposes."

"Very good if you need to write on paper"

No-Good Teenager Cute

Abby and Maddie hanging outside of Kinko's with some friends, looking to bum cigarettes. Deadbeats.

Academic Angst

I recently received a "revise and resubmit" from The Review of Economic Studies for a paper that is authored with my grad school advisor and another economist. It's a great journal, and I'm quite happy to be close to publishing in it. However, this is now the 3rd round of revisions requested by said journal. A brief scan of my hard drive shows drafts of this paper with the following dates:

6/6/2003
11/11/2003
9/8/2004
4/10/2005
4/27/2006
5/8/2006
11/9/2006
3/13/2007
5/11/2007
12/10/2007

So that's three and a half years of drafts for those of you scoring at home. I started working on this project in grad school, just as my fourth year had ended. One year of grad school, and now two and half years at UH, and I'm STILL revising this f$*#(-ing paper.

If this ever gets published I may have a bonfire party and burn that part of my hard drive.