Episode 222 – The One Where We Have A Glut Of Good News & Worms!

In This Week’s Show, episode 222, something something superbowl, something fuck you maroon 5, something something Tom Brady sucks.

Episode 222 – The One Where We Have A Glut Of Good News & Worms!
Episode 222 – The One Where We Have A Glut Of Good News & Worms!

In This Week’s Show, episode 222, something something Superbowl, something fuck you maroon 5, something something Tom Brady sucks.

Now, grab a beer and help us test the god hypothesis — because, while Mimir (the Aesir of wisdom for the Norse) hasn’t struck us down yet, we are trying his patience!

Shea’s Life Lesson

This week I learned that the W in Islam stands for women’s rights. And Aaron learned that Bud Light doesn’t have corn syrup in their shitty rice beer.

Jenn’s Actual Lesson

Did you know that many of the Norse supernatural gang became too dependent and/or informed on Mimir’s wise advice for Odin’s liking? To combat this issue the Allfather had him beheaded, smeared it with preservation herbs, gave it the ability to speak and kept Mimir’s secrets and council all to himself.

But before we get to all that, let’s have a beer!

This Week’s Beer

Half Pipe Sour Pale Ale by Tallgrass Brewing Co.

Donated By: Steve E for Shea

  • UT Link: http://bit.ly/2Bej1Iv
  • UnTapped Rating: 3.57
  • Style: Sour Pale Ale
  • ABV: 5%
  • Aaron: 8
  • Jenn: 3
  • Shea: 9
  • Steve: 7

This Week’s Show

Round Table Discussion

New Patrons! Jason and Paige.

Voicemail: Follow up from Amanda – we’re glad everything more or less worked out!

Voicemail from Travis

Headlines Hotshots

HL1 – Measles Headline from 221

Disease of the stupid

http://bit.ly/2WOo4IY

Finally, to round out my good news headlines with more dumbassery. Washington state officials declared a public health emergency due to an outbreak of measles in an anti-vax hot spot. Clark County, which is just across the Columbia River from Portland, OR, has now recorded 31 confirmed cases of the easily preventable disease. Shockingly, at least 20 of those infected were not vaccinated. This area has an estimated 7% of students with exemptions from compulsory vaccinations due to personal or religious reasons.

This is a topic that I continually rail about since it is based on nothing but willful ignorance and stupid beliefs (see my earlier story). As recently as the year 2000, measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. after there was no continuous transmission of it for over a year. Now, fuck wits are bringing it back and risking the lives of people who cannot be vaccinated due to actual medical issues.

As bad as it is in Oregon and Washington, they’re not alone. New York is also dealing with at least 182 cases with the outbreak almost exclusively among the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. Last year, there were 349 cases across 26 states which is the highest number since 2000. There have been 667 cases since 2014.

Measles is so nasty, that 90% of people who are not immune who just are near an infected person will become infected. This is no joke. It’s nasty, it’s virulent, and most importantly, easily prevented. Don’t be a dipshit. Vaccinate.

 

HL2 – It’s Story Time Kids!

http://bit.ly/2SD9zZ2

James “Doc” according to … probably himself… Greene was arrested this week at the Houston Library. James is banned from the Library for filming kids, being an asshole, and oh yeah, carrying a gun into the Library. He has a conceal-carry of course, but it’s a no go at the Library, especially during a children’s even like Drag Queen Story Time.

Greene flashed a badge in an attempt to claim that he’s a member of the media – because that’s now media-stuff works. “We have a bunch of homosexuals that are molesting children,” he says. “They are doing it with your help.”

When we refused to GTFO, the cops arrested him and, after he complained of chest pain, took him to the Hospital. He was discharged and no charges were filed.

“While his intention might have been to ruin the day for everyone involved, it completely failed,” Regina Blake-DuBois said. “Library management and HPD kept him away from the kids, and we had no knowledge it even happened until we were done.”

After the incident, he donned a MAGA hat and did an interview an explained he was arrested for being a white Christian… with a backdrop of cardboard Trump and Regan cutouts. He also accused one of the library folks of being a “satanist.” As if that mattered…

HL3 – Polar Vortex Shmortext, at least your beer is cold…

http://bit.ly/2WOo63y

While Chicago slowly recovers from what was a moderately- worse-than-our-average storm, I assume pulling double-dog dared tongues from frozen glory holes, Australia has been fucking cooking!

Australian publican (not a typo) Stephen Firth finally had to make good on a years-old election promise – free beer!.. if the temps top 45C, which they did. Some weather app screenshots tweeted at the Beer-o-metre Promotion showed temps of 47.1C, which is 116.5 in real heat. So, he set up shop at the Red Lion Hotel and Bar, which it sounds like he owns but ABC was sparse on those details. Of expecting to have to make good Stephen said “Not during Winter [laughs]. I’ve run it since last March and we got away with it quite well through there but yeah, we have to pay the piper today, unfortunately.” When asked if he would do the event again, he politicianed “Look now that we’ve seen what happens we’ll probably gonna have to modify the rules a little bit if we’re gonna keep it up.”
As to regretting his promise he said, “look, we always knew it was probably gonna happen. We don’t mind delivering. I love buying people beer — I got into this industry so I could buy people beer, you know, it’s the nicest thing you can do, I think…It’s a good feeling around the place.” As for the thirsty, scorched, Aussies, I’m glad they’re getting cold-while-it’s-in-the-shade beers and not just dropping dead from heat exhaustion like all their horses and roos.

Also, I learned a new word – publican is a person who owns a pub. He may be a politician as well, but I’m gonna be honest, the article was like 2 paragraphs long and I didn’t google…

~ Aaron

This Week’s Stories

Patreon Story

No, it’s not bullshit to call bullshit, bullshit.

http://bit.ly/2WOo6k4

So Microsoft Edge for Android and iOS got an interesting new update. My usual techie-news mentioned that Microsoft has licensed and incorporated the plugin NewsGuard. The plugin is, in a nutshell, the product of a collective of journalists and newsgroups to set a minimum standard for horseshit. The plugin, which is available for most browsers and can now be turned on as part of Edge, gives sites a color code rating not unlike the terror traffic light. Green means a site “Generally maintains basic standards of accuracy and accountability” based on their 9 qualifiers:

  • A site doesn’t repeatedly publish false content – there’s some leeway in case you get tricked…
  • Gathers and presents information responsibly, which essentially means the person who writes the thing cites credible sources, shows an attempt at research, and is produced by a writer, journalist, videographer, etc and not just some jackass.
  • Regularly corrects or clarifies errors. Will they admit to having fucked up?
  • Avoids Deceptive Headlines – so not the Daily Mail, which we’ll get to.
  • Does the site disclose financing and ownership?
  • Does it clearly label ads and sponsored content
  • Disclose editorial & executive staff as well as possible conflicts of interest.
  • provides authors names, contact info, and cred.

All in all, not a terrible list.

Depending on a site’s score they’ll get green, orange, grey, or red icons and notices in your browser letting you know in overly diplomatic language if the site is full of shit.

The Dailymail, for example, was outraged to learn that they “generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability.” The Mail replied “we have only very recently become aware of the NewsGuard startup and are in discussions with them to have this egregiously erroneous classification resolved as soon as possible,” said a person who repeatedly used redundant language, over and again, to vociferously deny the veracity of the claims as smartly-wordy as possible.

They have since been upgraded from pure shit to only kinda shit. FOX, however, gets a green badge. Apparently, they’re really only shooting for the loosest of credibilities, which somehow FOX slithers over. Crazy person sites like sputniknews, for example, get red lights, so at least there’s that.

While Edge is a piece of stupid shit that only a fraction of the internet uses, Microsofts willingness to include this filtering by default is a big signal that browser makers are taking the fake news pandemic at least a bit more seriously. The app is available for all major browsers as a plugin and apparently, Facebook is either using this tool or a tool like it to at least stem the torrent of fuckery that lives in their feeds – and it is their feed, you don’t own any of that content.

So will this help people be safer? Probably not a lot of them. If the sites you think are news get flagged there’s a pretty high likelihood that you’re just going to blame Jeff Bezos or something and toss your obviously-now-infected-by-the-deep-state

lizard-puter out the window. If you’re a sane person you might appreciate a little insight, and if you’re someone’s grandma, it might, just might, even stop you from falling down the rabbit hole.

Also, Google just released Be Internet Awesome, a gamified course for kids on internet literacy and safety: http://bit.ly/2WOo6AA

Second Half: You can never be too rich or too thin, right?

Now that we’re solidly into February, here’s some unsurprising bad news: Studies show that 80% of New Year’s resolutions made in January have now failed, so it’s back to being fat smokers laying on the couch. Whoo!

So, since many of us who briefly cared no longer do, let’s talk about diets and how silly and useless they are. Also some crazy and potentially dangerous a few in years past were.

Weird diets are by no means ONLY a thing of the past of course. I’m not talking about the vegan lifestyle, gluten-free (whether needed or not) or the no processed/no sugar thing. Just a few current ones by people we’ve heard of: There’s the Master Cleanse (which is a diet consisting entirely of tea, lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper) used by Beyonce, Demi Moore and singer Ashanti (to name a few). Trump-buddy and Mr. Super Bowl Tom Brady created his own diet the TB12 (1 guess what the TB stands for) that peddles baseless and weird claims such as “the “right foods” are “alkalizing” and “anti-inflammatory.” Alkaline foods lower his pH level, he writes, which can help with a range of ailments, from boosting low energy to preventing bone fractures.” Which is…not true. (It’s not technically an unhealthy diet, he’s just making up shit about what it does.)

Finally, the really adorable and charming actor from Parks & Rec who was swallowed whole somewhere in another Galaxy by this new White Man(™) conservative evangelical, Chris Pratt touts the benefits of the Daniel Fast, a biblical based ‘wellness based’ program. To keep it simple, it’s a 21 day restrictive fast and 40 days overall, was developed by mega-church pastor Rick Warren, and involves lots and lots of prayer.

Ok, so now that we’ve discussed that weird diets are obviously a thing of the present, let’s discuss some of those of the past that crank up the weirdness to 11 and a half:

In the 1920’s cigarette brand Lucky Strikes created one of the most famous early advertising taglines: “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.”

“Light a Lucky Strike when you are tempted to eat between meals. They satisfy the craving for sweets and rich pastries. That’s why thousands now reducing (dieting) smoke them constantly.” – Lucky Strike ad, 1928

And don’t think this was only focused on the ladies and a slim figure only. Nope, it also promised to keep men strong, fit and athletic!

Please note health promise at the bottom the advert

So moving forward just slightly in time but probably not really in healthiness, let’s discuss the diet craze of the 40’s-early 70s: SPEED! And boy was it prevalent.

If the name Susanna McBee doesn’t ring a bell, she was an undercover journalist who helped bring to public attention to just how many mama’s had little helpers. She published a piece in 1969 that detailed exactly how easy it was to keep an amphetamine addiction going strong. From Smithsonian Magazine online: “Susanna McBee walked into the office of a doctor she’d never met before, submitted to a three-minute physical, and walked out with hundreds of colorful amphetamine pills. Then she went to another—and another—and another. At every doctor’s office, she was prescribed diet pills containing the potent stimulant, sometimes handed to her by doctors before she’d even spoken a word.”

A quick bit of history: Benzadrine, one of the most popular brands, had been used since the 30s for assorted issues just as sinus congestion (No joke, it was a cotton ball soaked in the drug and inhaled through an inhaler. You didn’t need a prescription to get a Benzedrine inhaler, and some patients soon realized that they enjoyed the inhaler’s stimulant effects more than a clear nose. They started prying open the inhaler, taking out the cotton, and either eating or injecting the drug.) and nerves, alertness and PTSD for World War II soldiers. Of course PTSD had yet to be coined as a term yet, instead it was referred to as “combat fatigue”.

The US of course weren’t the only country to hype up their soldiers and then assign goofy euphemisms. Germany gave their troops meth and called it an “alertness aid”. Japanese kamikaze pilots also juiced themselves up before their final mission.

So anyway, an unexpected side effect turned out to be a substantial decrease in appetite. So after the war ended and the men came home, their women took up the Benzadrine banner and wives had never been slimmer and kitchens had never been cleaner.

Smith, Kline & French, the company who produced Benzadrine, hired scientist Charles Ivy to determine the effects for this as a potential diet aid. Considering how Ivy was the scientist who introduced and headed the program to keep the troops supplied with the pick me ups, unsurprisingly he concluded that amphetamine was 100% safe for weight loss. SKF went on to diversify its amphetamine business, peddling the drugs for both weight loss and depression for decades.

Finally, my own personal favorite of the ye olde timey weight loss plans! It’s something of a buddy system, so that’s always more encouraging. It starts with a pill…containing a tapeworm egg! Once it hatches the idea is that it eats part of whatever the person ingests, helping you to both lose weight and not worry about pesky calorie counting.

We have the Victorians to thank for this particular parasitic plan. They of the whalebone corsets and the ideal “perfect 16in waist”. Seeing as that is physically impossible without fashionable torture devices, it’s not surprising they turned to… let’s say unconventional methods.

This particular stradegy still exists today, at least as an IDEA. There are many legends of early Hollywood starlets using this method to keep the pesky pounds off (side note: I remember an episode of the old E channels show Hollywood Babylon discussing an early actress who, while taking a bath, was shocked to notice the worms slithering out of her into the water), but for the most part they are unable to verified or outright exaggerations. There are also persistent rumors today of Mexican clinics who, for a couple of thousand dollars, will give you a “full tapeworm treatment”. These claims are dubious at best, plus a visit to few countries with loosey-goosey water purifications and food safety laws would do pretty much the same thing.

So it turns out the tapeworm trend may have been more urban legend than actuality. And of course, the creepy little critter isn’t in your tummy just taking a few bites of your meals, it is actually absorbing necessary nutrients and other things that you actually need.

To finish this up with some fun facts, as infestations by tapeworms are actually a real thing, here are some historical methods that were used to cleanse the host. (Effectiveness not guaranteed.)Per Snopes: “Tapeworms are hard to get rid of. They had the person starve himself for days. Then they set a bowl of hot milk in front of the person. He had to keep his mouth open. After a while the tapeworm began to come up his throat ’cause he smelled the milk. They kept moving the bowl further away until the tapeworm was completely out.

Other versions of how to draw out a tapeworm include placing milk, cookies, and a hammer near the afflicted person’s anus for a few nights and letting the tapeworm gorge himself into complacency on the treats. Once this has been accomplished, the cookie is withheld. When the worm comes all the way out to demand, “Where’s my cookie?,” whoever is stuck with worm-watching duty that night bashes it with the hammer. An alternative vermifuge calls for 29 steaks and a hammer: The patient eats a steak for 29 days in row, then fasts on the 30th day. The worm becomes closely acquainted with the hammer when it emerges to demand its T-bone.”

Next Week’s Beer

Trigo by Founders Brewing Company

Donated By: RW

  • BA Link: http://bit.ly/2BavbSP
    BA Rating: 3.89/5
  • Style: American Lager
  • ABV: 6.3%

Faith In Humanity Restored

Round-Up!

Hey everyone, this week was oddly positive so I’m going to do something different. I’m not going to go past the byline so I can squeeze in all the happy-goodness. Enjoy the mini-stories and the warm and fuzzies you’ll get from the knowledge that this week’s glut of options was Faith and not Headlines.

First a little love on behalf of hateful arseface Karen Pence: 100 copies of Next Week Tonight’s epic gay-rabbit kid’s book “A Day in the life of Marlon Bundo” are being donated to Immanuel Christian School where she works. They’re likely to get trashed, but what she can’t trash is the other related story of donations being made to the fabulous Matthew Shepard Foundation in her name.

Make a donation to a great cause here: https://www.matthewshepard.org/

Long distance runner Khemjira Klongsanun paused during her local marathon to pick up a lost puppy. She carried the pupper with her for the remaining 7 miles of the race, then fed, and adopted him. See the show notes for a pic of the puppy, now named Nong Chom. https://thedo.do/2RMRnaN

As mentioned it was cold as balls in Chicago, so a then-anonymous but I guess recently nonymous lady sprang to put up some of Chicago’s homeless in a hotel during the vortex, inspiring others to do the same. Saving dozens if not hundreds of lives.

https://cnn.it/2UA8PB9

And finally, a bored 5th grader was at a nursing home with her mom, when she asked an elderly lady looking out a window why she was so fixated on the landscape. The woman replied she was hoping to see her doggie run past. Heartbroken, the girl set up a facebook page, and eventually a GoFundme, to raise more than 70k to help make the old folks happy. The money will buy snacks, comfort items, cab fair for puppies, and decent food, to name just a few things.

Find out more at the link in the show notes.

http://bit.ly/2WO26FW

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/Three-Wishes-for-Rubys-Residents-2246979765336437/

Go Fund Me: https://www.gofundme.com/three-wishes-for-ruby039s-residents

And of course, WyoAIDS.org can always use a buck or two! Tweet or whatever us to let us know you made a donation and we’ll send you free bon

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