"Smelly Hair Syndrome."

What does syndromically smelly hair smell like?

Some describe it as "... stinks like a diaper." Others have compared the smell to "sour milk, wet dog, moldy hay, potatoes, an old shoe or dirty socks, a jacket that's never been to the dry cleaner, and an oily smell mixed with vomit." The most unusual description we've heard was "... sort of a cross between Dorito's Bold BBQ chips and cinnamon (and not a sweet smell, actually kinda foul) and maybe a hint of cheese." And, finally, one unfortunate reader told us that "my hair is so smelly that sometimes flies buzz around my head."

A sex therapist on CNN attributes Anthony Weiner's troubles to "high levels of testosterone."

Not long after Weiner's news conference yesterday, at about 5:20, Wolf Blitzer interviewed Dr. Laura Berman, who said (my transcription):

[Weiner is] known for being very aggressive, for being very volatile. He clearly — even his hairline and his jawbone — he clearly is a man who has a tremendous amount of testosterone. That's not an excuse, but if you look at him, if you look at Arnold Schwarzenegger, if you look at most of these high power men, who are highly aggressive men, and they get into all this sexual trouble. It's often hand in hand with high levels of testosterone, which means that he has an extremely high libido.

His hairline and his jawbone, eh?

Interestingly, Berman's website calls her "America's leading expert in female sexual health." She has a show on the Oprah Winfrey Network called "In the Bedroom with Dr. Laura Berman."

Watch as this New York Times best-selling author and a Sirius XM radio host makes house calls to help couples confront their intimacy issues head on.

House calls, eh? That's so Dame Edna's Neighborhood Watch.

Anyway. Speaking of Dame Edna and high testosterone, here's Dame Edna interviewing Charlton Heston (in 1987):



By the way, Heston talks about his gray velour g-string. "What a practical color, Chuck — gray! — isn't it?"  Not to be confused with Weiner's gray panties.

"Porexia."

A newly coined word for people who've gone all obsessive about the size of their pores.  And speaking of words...

High-definition television has arguably upped the ante. Consider the celebrity with glistening teeth and yogic arms, but a jarringly pock-marked nose in close-ups. Viewers think, “If her pores look like that, what do mine look like?” said Dr. Mary Lupo, a clinical professor of dermatology at Tulane University School of Medicine.

... somebody needs to tell the New York Times that pock marks are not pores.

And maybe somebody needs to show these porexic whiners what real skin damage looks like.

"A Curious Case Of Foreign Accent Syndrome."

Hmm.

ADDED: Listen to the audio so you can hear the accent — some British-Scottish-Irish concoction. The woman likes the new accent and says it's made her "more outgoing." Compare it to the case of the Norwegian woman during WWII who acquired a German accent and was ostracized.

"Adults who make love first thing in the morning apparently not only feel more upbeat for the rest of the day, but also benefit from a stronger immune system."

"Research suggests that adults who begin their day this way are healthier and happier than those who simply opt for a cup of tea and some toast before heading out of the door."

What do you think of this news about sex in the morning?
	It's really unsexy! Sex isn't a health treatment.
	It confirms my experience. I attribute my good health and mood to my sex-in-the-morning regime.
	Good propaganda for getting my partner to go along with quickies.
	It's depressing to hear one more reason why I'm feeling so bad.
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: I think people are misunderstanding response #1, which I think is the best answer. "It" doesn't refer to sex in the morning. It refers to the news (that sex in the morning is good for your health). Let's have sex in the morning because it's a good heath treatment — that's unsexy. Ah! The aggravation I get for being subtle!

"In 1970, only one N.F.L. player weighed as much as 300 pounds..." and today there are over 500.

Hmm.

What do you think of all these 300 pound football players?
	Impressive! I love Raji and those other big guys.
	Huge mass is one way to do well in football, not the most impressive way, but... whatever works.
	Sports should be a display of athletic prowess and ideal bodies, so this is not good.
	The NFL flaunts its disregard for the health of the players.
pollcode.com free polls

"I could use one of those special helmets that Aaron Rodgers has to protect his head."

"My post Tuesday questioning whether our star quarterback might have suffered another concussion Sunday (and wondering why nobody was talking about that possibility given what a big deal concussions have been in national news lately) took some pretty nasty hits from outraged readers."

"When I was younger, I drank a quart of blood a day for about six weeks."

"I'd get it at the slaughterhouse. I'd heard about those Masais, you know, those seven-foot African guys; they'd drink cattle blood for strength. Then one day a little clot got stuck in my throat and that was it for me."

"The average person thinks... this body is made of cigarettes and coffees and cakes and pies and doughnuts and french fries."

Jack LaLanne. The Good Lord Above has taken his wonderful body back, after 96 years of trying to talk us into get in shape.

“People thought I was a charlatan and a nut,” he remembered. “The doctors were against me — they said that working out with weights would give people heart attacks and they would lose their sex drive.”

Lots more Jack LaLanne video here. Here's one you probably don't need. And here he is with his dog Happy ("Right in the mouth with the foot he's putting"):

"The iconography of the hamburger is crucial to fitness magazines..."

"... with grotesque double-patty pile-ups and surreal towers of lettuce leaves variously signing repulsion and signifying obsession. In this month's Shape, a male model is jamming one sloppy sandwich into himself whole, without chewing or even swallowing, for the sake of promoting a story titled 'Sex, Beer, and Burgers: Why Guys Are Healthier Than You Think.' This is one of those numbers about embracing male desires: Eat a bigger lunch. Drink bottled beer as a matter of portion control. Masturbate more frequently in order to release "feel-good hormones including endorphins and oxytocin," they quote an Ivy League gynecologist, the science classing up the matter."

A paragraph in an article about various fitness magazines forced me to copy it and paste it here.

The National Enquirer says that Obama is "scary skinny" because he's "secretly battling stomach parasites."

Sorry. It's slimy even to link to this. But I'm linking to debunk it.

The pencil-thin president caught the parasites on a trip last year to Hawaii, where he and his family also vacationed over Christmas, according to top political insiders.

If that were really true, people would be flocking to Hawaii to get the parasites so they could lose weight. Oh? You think that's absurd? People wouldn't do that? They get surgery on their stomachs— surgery that could kill them — and that only makes them lose weight because they eat less. If there were parasites that made you ultra-thin, people would buy them and swallow them whole. We'd be seeing ads on the internet.



You've heard of tapeworm dieting, haven't you?

Did anybody honest to God think this would work? Answer: Evidently. A few seconds with Google turns up an authentic-looking advertisement for "sanitized tapeworms" ("friends for a fair form") that appears to date from the turn of the last century. A hoax? Maybe, but it convinced at least one medical expert, endocrinologist Zachary Bloomgarden, who in a 2000 article in Diabetes Care wrote, "Approaches to decreasing nutrient absorption date from the early 1900s, when diet treatment with 'sanitized tapeworms' was widely advertised."

It's a terrible idea, I hasten to add:

An adult tapeworm can grow up to 50 feet long and live up to 20 years. Tapeworm eggs are even worse, as the larvae that emerge from them are prone to burrow out of your intestines and find homes elsewhere in your body. For example, the pork tapeworm can cause neurocysticercosis, in which the larvae migrate through the stomach or intestinal lining and up into your brain. There they form destructive cysts, triggering immune responses that can lead to epileptic seizures or worse. The cysts formed by sheep tapeworm larvae may reach the size of grapefruit; they can rupture blood vessels when they break, resulting in shock and death.

Death, schmeath, you say: will I lose weight?...

That is the way people think. I say if the National Enquirer were right about the President's parasites, somebody would be selling Presidential Parasites on the internet.

And, seriously, I hope the President is okay. And if he's healthy-skinny, he ought to give us some diet tips along with the usual inspiration.

Hans Rosling's "200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes."

"A now-retracted British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines was an 'elaborate fraud'..."

CNN reports:

An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study's author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study -- and that there was "no doubt" Wakefield was responsible.

"It's one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors," Fiona Godlee, BMJ's editor-in-chief, told CNN. "But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data."

What psychological suffering this man caused in so many vulnerable parents of little children! For a scientist to subvert science — why don't we have a much more intense feeling of horror about that? How dare those trained in science to misuse it and undermine the enterprise of science? Our shared interest in science is so strong – our need to rely on experts so great — that we should severely punish those who betray it. But we can't, really, can we? If we tried, we might only exacerbate the pressures on scientists to toe the line and give us the answers we want, lest we target them for destruction.

***

Our shared interest in the rule of law is equivalent, yet how could we punish the lawyers and judges who push the law beyond what is truly legal? We'd only end up with worse legal arguments, and our "rule of law" would lose the qualities that made us value it in the first place. Nevertheless, science is different. The scientific method is more agreed-upon. But scientists, like lawyers and judges, go looking for the answers they want. Something non-neutral pulls them along. And yet we expect them — like judges (if not lawyers) — to conduct their search within a professional methodology. We'd like to be able to trust them, and yet we'd be fools to trust them. But we need to trust them, and we trust them all the time....

I'm shocked, shocked to learn that semi-clad models are writhing in the law library!

"... Brooklyn Law School officials rented Diesel its library expecting a tasteful photo shoot for a jeans ad -- but what they got was a steamy display of writhing young models in skimpy lingerie grinding against books and computers."

Wait. Why did they expect a tasteful photo shoot?

"It's gross. I work on those computers every day!" fumed a female student, referring to a shot showing two bra- and panty-clad women climbing over the machines toward an open-mouthed man....

The frisky photos, shot last spring, show off the hot bodies of male and female models as they prowl around the library's floors, tables and bookshelves -- while wearing tight-fitting panties bearing various seductive messages.

If the law school — I emphasize law school — did not impose restrictions when it took Diesel's money then it has nothing to complain about.

"We are as shocked and mortified as you must be by these photographs," interim dean Michael Gerber wrote in an e-mail yesterday to students, faculty and staff.

"When the school gave its permission to do the shoot, the school was assured that the photos would be in good taste. They are not."

"Assured" "good taste" — that's not specific enough to make me believe Diesel violated a contractual term. The school took Diesel's money and had to know that any advertising for clothing for young adults is likely to involve some display of sexuality. Especially if the scene is a library. That's what I'd expect.

What exactly was the school assured of? The models aren't naked. They've got on underwear. And what is even so gross and shocking about this? Man, Diesel is getting way more great publicity than its stupid underpants deserve. Where did this controversy really start? I'm inclined to suspect that the administration is only shocked* after the fact and only because some students have managed to create the impression that the school might be accused of contributing to a "hostile environment" form of sexual harassment.

As for the young woman who is grossed out that a model in panties writhed in the vicinity of a computer she uses... do you realize how many people type on those things with hands they didn't wash after they went to the bathroom?

----------------------------------------------

*Shocked!

"The first generation of children born with H.I.V. are now entering adulthood."

"What is it like to be a child with H.I.V.? How does it affect your relationships and your outlook?"

"Are You Sexually Fit? Lifestyle Changes for Better Sex."

Oh, good lord, this presentation of sex as a component of a healthy lifestyle is just so completely and annoyingly unsexy.

Your Homework for Today:
As you go through your day, think about how each daily activity affects your sexual health and whether it fundamentally helps you or hurts you. Take notes as you go along. For example:

• Walked halfway to work before getting on the subway and walked all the way home. (Helped)
• Brought a healthy lunch instead of going to the cafeteria. (Helped)
• Skipped afternoon cigarette break. (Helped)
• Grabbed a handful of candy sitting by the copy machine. (Hurt)
• Drank too much coffee. (Hurt)
• Canceled a squeezed-in social obligation to make her day less hectic. (Helped)
• Shut off computer and went to sleep at a reasonable hour, ignoring work e-mails that could wait until the next day, and slept for eight blessed hours. (Helped)

Once you've gone through your day, take a good look at your list and flesh it out. Are there more hurts than helps? What else could you do that would help? Are there behaviors that could be altered to move them from the hurt to the help category? Tomorrow, do your best to improve the ratio of helps to hurts. 

Jeez. How long will it be before some First Lady adopts Good Sex as her pet issue? 

Link via Instapundit, who doesn't seem to have found the article ludicrous.

"It's not only the high quality of drugs I had that I attribute my survival to."

"I was very meticulous about how much I took. I'd never put more in to get a little higher. That's where most people f**k up on drugs."

ADDED: To buy the book.

"Because I go barefoot so much, people think I’m an extremist."

"From my perspective, people who wear shoes all everywhere they go, seven days a week, every year of your life, that’s extreme. . . I’m being an extremist. You’re being an extremist. Let’s find a nice, healthy middle ground."

Professor Daniel Howell, the crusader for barefootedness.

"My experience with that show is like herpes. It never goes away, and it itches and sometimes flares up."

Yeah, you should see what dumbness and the inability to perceive humor does to your herpes.

Lose weight...

Drink 2 glasses of water before each meal.