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}

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}

Nach Uh-Oh

A salmonella strain found in fresh jalapenos has made 1,251 people sick, 229 of whom had to be hospitalized.

Agricola Zaragosa, a Texan agricultural distribution facility, has been implicated in the contaminated peppers; however, the peppers originated in Mexico, and now public health officials on both sides of the border are engaged in Richards/Sheen-y yes-you-did no-I-didn't silliness.

Salmonella-induced illness—which includes diarrhea, fever, and cramps—likely occurring from pepper snacking has been identified in 43 states. According to the Food and Drug Administration, which tracked down the source of the infection, and is consequently so proud of itself that it's taken a shine to the third person:

"FDA is also asking consumers to avoid eating raw jalapeno peppers or foods made from raw jalapeno peppers until further notice in order to prevent additional cases of illness. ... FDA is continuing to advise that people in high risk populations, such as elderly persons, infants and people with impaired immune systems, avoid eating raw serrano peppers or food made from raw serrano peppers until further notice."

Serrano? Apparently the dumb 'nillas have added peppers to the list of things they can't tell apart.

Pickled jalapenos are fine, by the way. Just not the La Morena brand—whether or not Amazon wants to call them "gourmet food"—as they are profoundly fucking foul.

{from Reuters UK, in what Lunar Weight suspects must be some British culinary response to the Zimmerman telegram}

Son of a Pitch

"They just grow up and blow their elbows out so fast these days." The American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine released a report today detailing a surprising increase in the rates of ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) replacement surgery. Fully a third of all these "Tommy John" surgeries—which replace a ligament that is almost exclusively torn by throwing a baseball—were performed on kids high-school age or younger, an increase of over 20% in the last ten years.

In unrelated news, the American Association for Overbearing, Narcissistic Fathers Who Can Only Quash Their Feeling of Failure and Ennui by Living Vicariously Through Their Spawn reports that membership is up over 20% in the last ten years.

{from the American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine}