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}

Schooled Like a Fish (Bite Us)

We got the start date for Shark Week dead wrong.

From our friendly neighborhood Discovery Channel press being, possibly in an attempt to smother Lunar Weight with kindness and turn us into corporate shills (hey buddy, it'll work, trust us; the secret is schwag. We'd like a Les Stroud action figure with kung-fu grip and Real Dehydration-Induced Hallucinations™):

"I noticed you accidentally put June 27th as the start [for Shark Week] date though... it's actually July 27th (at 9PM with a Mythbusters special) which is what I'm sure you meant. Unfortunately there is no Shark Month & One Week celebration yet."

Whoops. We blame all the drugs we're not doing.

{from the minds behind Shark Week to the shitforbrains at Lunar Weight}

The Week in Sharks: ...and Other Things that Like the Taste of Seal

"In fashion, you're either in or you're oh god oh god my leg." Heidi Klum—supermodel, erstwhile fashion svengali, and all-around German person—considers scuba-diving in shark infested waters to be her bravest moment ever.

Even braver, the New York Daily News gushes, than "showing off her pregnant belly in tight outfits on Bravo's 'Project Runway,'" because fat people suck and are from space.

In her Parade Magazine interview, Klum explains how the shark schmooze helped her conquer her fears. "I'm not saying that everyone should swim with sharks," she says, "but sometimes you have to jump over your own shadow in order to learn something that you will never forget for the rest of your life." Such as, say... optics?

Klum made the dive as part of the Discovery Channel's Shark Week in 2003, which further goes to prove Lunar Weight's point.

Bollywood icon Zayed Khan also got fabulous with the cartilaginous. On a recent underwater shoot, he basically bro'd out with his toothy would-be antagonists. "They came and flapped their bodies next to us and slapped our shoulders like buddies," Khan told the Times of India. Little did he know they then turned around and put most of the contents of his trailer on eBay, since no one likes to work for scale. Or for denticle.

{from Parade and the Times of India, respectively; Lunar Weight hereby humbly threatens to bite Zooey Deschanel if it'll get her to consider hanging out with us an honor}




Or maybe Zooey'd dig us if we "sharked ourselves". As part of the Shark Week promotional run up, Discovery.com offers you the chance to morph yourself into that manic, sodden, Dunst-mouthed freak on their billboards.

Discovery's own flacks describe the e-mutilator as "totally viral." By which they presumably mean "akin to having smallpox." Since what those earnest nerdlings who haven't grown to embrace their own inherent attractiveness really need is a way to obliterate said attractiveness entirely.

Oh well. It beats blatant, unrepentant racism.

{from Discovery.com, who, to be fair, probably hate themselves as much as they hate their audience}




LW appreciates a good chomping in the name of class warfare, but it ain't gonna happen this time. A Great White sighting off the coast of Martha's Vineyard was reported, but an airborne search by what Bloomberg referred as "a fish spotter" failed to find confirmation.

The search failure may, in part, be due to the fact that people were making that shit up.

Because everyone's kinda bored right now.

Fortunately, some good came out of the silliness. The press managed to cite Jaws at every fucking opportunity, because, epistemologically speaking, nothing can be considered to possess material or temporal form unless Steven Spielberg has made an ass-ton of dough off of it.

{from the Boston Globe, and every bored hack stuck at a science desk bitterly driving staples into a Malcolm Gladwell voodoo doll}




Biologist-poet describes a whale shark on the move as "a bird as large as a bus". Though humans only ever encounter whale sharks placid and (prosaically) tail-propelled near the surface, when at depth, these largest-of-all-fish use gravity, fins, and the always-good-for-party-conversation laws of fluid dynamics to glide through the water column.

This unique method of swimming could be a means to conserve energy, or it could be an attempt to get Gerard Manley Hopkins to take that stupid windhover and shove it.

{courtesy FOX News, which claims to also have a whale shark video, but when LW clicks on the imbed, it plays lots of footage of Heath Ledger gallivanting about looking like a cross between Steven Tyler and a White Stripes groupie, then freezes}