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}

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}

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}