Billy Dee Versus Bed-Stuy

Public ads for booze may encourage problem drinking in black women, according to a Columbia University study. The earnest intensity with which the Columbia team unveiled the findings that advertising apparently works is somewhere between adorable and just sad.

According to coauthor Dr. Ilan Meyer in the press release:

"Advertisements may prime people for alcohol consumption, and in turn, high levels of consumption may increase the risk for abuse and dependence. ... Advertisements also may increase the likelihood of problematic drinking patterns among individuals who are already susceptible. That is, individuals who are at risk for, or already contending with, alcohol abuse or dependence may be more likely to continue this behavior in an environment where cues that promote alcohol use are prominent.”

To test this hypothesis, your reporter cornered the nearest female caucasian cokeheads (read: residents) in Williamsburg, yelled, “Cocaine!” at them, then asked if they were thinking about cocaine. Of the 23 subjects in the study, 19 confirmed they were, indeed thinking of cocaine; 3 handed your reporter their purses and ran; and 1 gave your reporter her number then passed out on the front steps of Royal Oak.

More intriguingly, lead investigator Dr. Naa Oyo Kwate posited that racially targeted advertising may be as harmful for it's overtly racial nature as for its actual content. “[T]o the extent that these advertisements are perceived as manifestations of racism, they may increase the odds of problem drinking,” he said.

Aghast at yet another rearing of the ugly head of institutional racism, your reporter uttered a thanks to the Great Pumpkin no such cynical marketing strat exist to take advantage of caucasians as he read the New York magazine piece on Chloe 81 and put back his 9th Disaronno on the rocks.

[from EurekAlert]

STDs in America: Collect 'Em All, Trade 'Em With Your Friends

STDs in America: Collect 'Em All, Trade 'Em With Your Friends

Every year has its resounding winners, and this year, the clap is the Slumdog Millionaire of burning sensations, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2007 STD Surveillance Report. But you can never rule out a cult classic, especially if it's French.

The CDC, by intensely scrutinizing everyone's funzones (Big Brother starts watching you right after Creepy Uncle stops) and pondering for a year, compiles annual reports tracking increases or decreases in particular sexually transmitted diseases (HIV is tracked separately; if you care, the number of HIV positive individuals are rising, but only because they're no longer doing bigots and denialists the courtesy of dying). While recent press panic has focused on the bump- and cancer-causing human papillomavirus as well as the timeless icon of slut-shaming herpes simplex virus-2, the 2007 report skims past these incurables.

Instead, it highlights our old friends, the bacteria. Chlamydia—the clap— and syphilis—the French Pox, have taken our penicillin and yet kept on penis illin'. And in a way, this is a beautiful thing; with retro being all but a national dogma, why not return to the simpler infections of yesteryear? As a nation of enterprising health educators may have succeeded in at least getting young people to play a little preliminary doctor and make sure there's no weeping sores, we can regress to a more innocent time when it merely hurts when you pee and then makes you infertile and possibly insane.

Of course, there's some sobering sociological findings, namely that the number of infected patients and the rates of increase in new cases are often markedly higher in certain racial groups (blacks have it worse), and that women tend to have it worse than men. From both public health and social justice perspectives, these are troubling findings. But for those willing to regard the urine sample cup as being half-full, we can be all but assured that no targetted action will be taken. After all, classism, racism, and sexism are the Volvo station wagon of American culture, and denial the warm blanket in its back seat, under which we can bang the stuffing out of each other, secure in the knowledge that we're not the kind of person who gets a disease.

Your Momma Likes Big Butts and She Cannot Lie

Your mom, she likes you. She's a big fan. She thinks you're awfully sharp and a real hoot at the dinner table. And she'll keep thinking this even as the patio swing snaps its chains and plummets through the veranda. Because parents just don't understand that their kids might be fat, (or, for that matter, sort of dumb, or complete assholes) according to findings just presented at the American College of Gastroenterology's shebang in Orlando (yeah, Orlando. There are levels of irony here that boggle the noggin)

Researchers at the University of Washington mailed surveys to parents whose children were, to use a sort-of-postive you-might-be-a-winner phrasing, in the top 30% of BMI (short for body mass index; it's not just a rapacious music publishing conglomerate). According to the press release,

[E]ven though all of the children had elevated BMI, less than 13 percent of the parents of overweight kids reported their child as currently overweight. Fewer than one-third perceived that their child's risk for adult obesity was above average or very high.

Now, Lunar Weight was a helluva chubster at one point in our physical development, and really only slimmed down thanks to an intensive regimen of not making any money, so we can understand the role that "hope" plays here. But considering the fact that obesity puts you at increased risk for diabetes, cardiovascular disease, having to play catcher in tee-ball, and, according to a recent study in Neurology, eventually becoming a drooling idiot, you'd think some sort of alarm bells would go off in between pinching those nummy apple cheeks.

Yeah, no. That 13% figure indicates a serious lack of actually looking around to see if maybe, just maybe, there's something different about your own lil' fry. A nice hypothesis to our mind is the good old evolutionary psychological one (Now with 87% Less Replicability!), namely that to a parent, it's far more important that your child look like it might have the calorie stores to survive famine, flu, or mom and dad getting strangled in their sleep by gibbons. Stents and thrombolytics and those little snack wafers the diabetic kids got that LW was always jealous about don't enter into it at all.

On the shallow front (in which we are, okay fine, the shock troops), we're likewise less apt to heavily weight our spawn's future ability to snag their own supertasty vehicle for future genetic commingling. Heck, Lunar Weight doubts most poeple are particularly well programmed to think sanely about their kids post-menarche naughty bits at all, with some exceptions.

Still, an ounce of perspective is worth a pound of cure.

No, not a poundcake of cure. Are you even listening?

Fine, fuck it, your kid's a Rockwell painting. Hey, how's your health insurance looking these days?

{from the Thighmasters who constitute the American College of Gastroenterology}

Thus Explaining Why, Last Time Lunar Weight Was Dumped, We Got Really Into Tangrams

Pattern-forming behaviors are a response to perceived lack of control, according to a study in the new issue of Science. One could argue that pattern-forming behavior as a consequence of lack of control causes pattern-forming behavior in scientists, but one might run the risk of appearing pedantic. Or worse, of being meta, a label which doubtless will get applied to poor LW by the legions of schemers and manipulators that work towards our downfall.

That wasn't exaggeration for the sake of topical humor. We really are that fucking paranoid monomaniacal. We blame the meds, and also the enormous burden of being such transcendent examples of a human animal.

But back to the matter at hand. According to the press release, "researchers showed that individuals who lacked control were more likely to see images that did not exist, perceive conspiracies, and develop superstitions."

The research, performed on bunnies bunny-like undergrads, employed six different tests to see how perceptions changed in response to lack of control—generally speaking, a carefully planned activity meant to frustrate (though, in the universal case of undergrads, the researchers coulda just searched students' bags before the kids left the dining hall). The frustrated subjects were more likely to see identifiable objects in pictures of static, ascribe success or failure to supernatural or ritual causes, and assume that there are things going on behind their back.

In other words, a bunch of Psych 100 students were fried by a damp preteen, but not before they posted some crap about having a secret crush to their MySpace and told everyone to pass it on or no one would ever have sex again and kitten Jesus would cry and then finished with their woman 'cause she couldn't help them with their mind.

And how was news of this finding reported? With, naturally, endlessly referring to the economy.

Except the Chicago Tribune, which naturally referenced baseball, proving once and for all LW's hypothesis that Harry Caray is L. Ron Hubbard.

(for further details, check out the .PDF transcript of an interview with the study's lead author, Jennifer Whitson, from Science's homepage. It's great reading, except for the crap bit where she talks about "pitchers and batters being very superstitious ... . But you didn't see outfielders being that superstitious." Jenny, love, if you were told in Little League that you were an outfielder but not a batter, it was a grievous insult.)

{from the Type A's at ScienceNOW}

Doctors Launch Courageous Assault on Big Q-Tip

America cried for a savior, and the American Academy of Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery Foundation (AAO-HNSF) heard these pleas for an official set of guidelines on the diagnosis and treatment of earwax buildup.

Earwax, clinically known as cerumen, long stood as the Cinderella of bodily fluids. Not ostentatiously gross enough for puerility, but not associated with enough naughty fun for mystique, cerumen fascination long remained an area for children, politicians, and, of course, otolaryngologists (aka ear, nose, and throat doctors).

Which hasn't stopped the occasional—okay, to be fair, omnipresent—whacko from making a killing at things like ear candling and... cotton swabs?

According to the press release accompanying the newly released guidelines, "Inappropriate or harmful interventions are cotton-tipped swabs, oral jet irrigators, and ear candling." The middle one—which seems to be just another instance of the human frailty known as "give me an orifice and I'll find something interesting to stick in it"—Lunar Weight can understand. But really? Cotton swabs? Isn't that what those things are for?

Nope. Not only does Q-Tip itself not list cleaning one's ears as a use for swabs (though, apparently, "clean[ing] around your newborn's umbilical cord" is one more niche heroically filled), but, according to the AAO-HNSF guidelines:

Expert opinion recommends against the use of cotton-tip swabs to remove cerumen from the ear canal ... . The cotton buds at the end of cotton-tip applicators may separate, requiring removal as a foreign body. Although only a case report, fatal otogenic meningitis and brain abscess due to retained cotton tips has been reported.

Ear candling, on the other hand, all but stands to reason as subject to nixing. If this photo doesn't look ridiculous to you, stop reading now. For those still with us, we'll just point out that, if our limbic system has taught us anything, it's to keep shit that's on fire away from our heads.

Some questions still remain, however. Like:

• Was it necessary for the press release to include the phrase "greater than one-third of the elderly and cognitively impaired"? Despite her predilection for Franklin Mint crap and her insistence on all but flashing Jimmy Rollins every time she goes to a game, we're reasonably sure Gramma LW's still a step ahead of Corky.


• Aural sex: is it safe? Well, someone does seem to be tackling this issue. And when it comes to hepatitis C, the answer is yes. Merciful news for those Iggy Pops out there who've had it in the ear before.


• And lastly...?

{from the AAO-HNSF website, which still doesn't have any advice on how to get rid of a hickey}

Agassi Couldn't Clone a Sheep, Could Probably Still Beat Us Up

What is it about science and coolness that just can't seem to coagulate? Like oil and water, the two have been diametrically opposed seemingly since the beginning of time. Historically speaking, I think the rift developed somewhere around the time the church shunned scientists and general "thinkers" for positing that the universe wasn't earth centric. As we evolve and change, the same battle remains, albeit with less pyrotechnic penalties for losing. Where it once manifested as the Ionian philosophers challenging the clergy, it now takes a fresh form, as a new girl at tennis camp struggling to fit in with the hip, hard-edged, rough-ridin' American tennis players.

NOVA recently introduced us to Yoky Matsuoka, a girl who once labeled herself an airhead to fit in but went on to become one of the world's most preeminent neurobiologists. The story centers on Yoky, her incredible achievements, and especially her plight to become culturally accepted.

I found this to be a struggle I can identify with in many respects. I'm a former tennis zealot and once-closeted science geek who shunned an engineering major in favor of a much more swanky art studio title. Sure, I got the look down. My DIY shirts are one of a kind [possibly because you did them yourself —ed] and I'm quite sure my pants have faded to reflect a perfect shade of trendy indifference. But as the sun sets and I lay my vinyl to rest, I don the glasses of ridicule to watch Cosmos and drift into dreams of the Library of Athens.

I have a profound respect for science, scientists, logic and experimentation, but I can't help but wonder why, in all this battle to uncover the secrets of the universe and the harmony of the spheres, the hard sciences have failed to attempt to alter the harmony of the social spheres. Yoky is making great advances building the perfect robotic hand, and other scientists are planting electrodes into the brains of monkeys so robotic limbs can be controlled purely by monkey thought (I can see the headlines now: "Amputee Monkeys Able to Fling Poop Once Again" and "Indefatigable Monkey Arms Work Typewriter but End Up Writing MacBeth"). Aren't we coming one step closer to controlling someone else's thoughts? And if so, will we use it to our advantage?

It's my understanding scientists are a generally passive breed. Eddie Izzard does a nice bit about an evil giraffe, and the concept of an evil herbivore in general and I find the same sense of absurdity attached to the term "evil scientist". Other than the mad scientists of lore, buried deep in a basement bedazzling that the final rhinestone on their robots brow of hatred I get the sense that science is a pretty friendly community. But is it a unity created only by a mutual lack of belonging to the "other," or rather a mutual understanding about the eventual domination of the scientist breed? Perhaps it's more sinister than I ever imagined. Sure, common folk currently know Angelina Jolie's babies' names without ever having seen the Phoenix spacecraft photos, but when scientists are the puppet masters, will happenings in Second Life make headline news, and Spore consistently outsell Grand Theft Auto?

Perhaps this is all hulaballoo and we're all much too smart to go about changing a social order, and (almost) everyone knows that. At this point, it'd probably be easier to create a race than to alter the existing one anyway so let's say fuck it and assimilate, knowing that we've got a winning hand. [Get it? 'Cause Matsuoka does prosthetic limbs? It works on two levels! —ed] And let's elect a scientist to office while we're at it. There a stretch for ya. A campaign based entirely on algorithms, and all the Bionic Fundraising Monkeys you could dream of.

{from NOVA, like it ain't no thang}

Children with Autism Revealed as Fakers, Apologize, Write That Sestina They've Been Withholding Out of Spite

Michael Savage, right-wing radio host, recently decreed that the majority children on the autism spectrum are not afflicted, impaired beings, but simply "screaming brats." To claim that "there is no autism epidemic" not only wholly undermines the feisty and heartfelt-savvy activism to which celebrities like Jenny McCarthy and Toni Braxton sort-of-sometimes-not-really contribute, but derails what little attention this disorder grabs from anybody. How much coverage did that "Hero"-ic pixie Hayden Panettiere get for rallying to save a few whales? Compare that to how often you see an advert for autism awareness, hell, see a child with autism in public at all. Parents are embarrassed of and terrified for their children and Savage feeds into these constricting emotions with his radical exaggeration that "99 percent of the cases [are] fraudulent." A child who cognitively chooses to whine or screech in order to communicate should never be compared to a child who may not ever emit a communicative sound—and if she does, tone or volume should not be the focus of such a breakthrough.

Savage further disregards a disorder that has existed for hundreds of years, a disorder that was, until recently, considered to be hopeless in terms of progress. Would he prefer to incarcerate any person who exhibits tantrum-like or "moronic" behavior? Or, would be prefer mechanical and chemical restraint on a child so progress would never be an option? Let Savage attempt to diagnose and implement a behavior plan for why a child head-bangs until he gets rug burns on his forehead, why he is terrified of scissors, or why he does not bathe without crying. Possibly then the true moron will be identified.

Perhaps as sickening as a man who glibly insults damaged children is a country that doesn't object: Savage is still the third-most listened-to radio host in America. Protests have risen in major cities, and there is a movement to fire the man. Participation in the latter would not only relieve some of our communal nausea but alert our nation to the true devastation of developmental disabilities.

[Weiner—Savage's real name is Weiner, folks! Ha! Mock him! Mock him fast! Mock him now!—sort-of-somewhat-not-really withdrew his statement. Which, in LW's eyes, in no way recuses him from the discussion, since the job of a talkshow host has, for a decade at least, been to mirror the ugliest desires, convictions, and superstitions of his/her/Odo's listenership. Add in the fact that he actually has a fucking doctorate in something vaguely health-related, and you have to imagine that, essentially, he is either the worst doctor ever (apologies to Drs. Mengele and Moreau), or else has trained himself to not actually possess any true opinions beyond what sells ad time. Either way, apologies and retractions work (badly) when the problem derives from a moral failing; this was a deliberate dissemination of false information. As long as there is any confusion in the public sphere, this shitbag deserves no grace. —Ed.]

{from Gawker, because there's two kinds of asshole in the world, and only the good kind doesn't have kids who peddle sugar-spiked caffeinated nail-polish remover to children}