Open your mouth and say , “Aaaah”
Do physicians even DO that any more? Well, according to an item in the Akron Beacon-Journal, you should not hand over your money before the doc sticks anything in your mouth. That’s because some researchers at New York University have discovered an absolutely stunning collection of bacteria, viruses (Or viri? Nope, virus has no plural in Latin), fungi (Now there’s a plural!) and plant pathogens on dollar bills… not to mention traces of anthrax and diphtheria. YUK! They uncovered—so to speak—all of this by using high-speed gene sequencing and computerized data-base analysis on about 80 $1 bills from a Manhattan bank. That George Washington you’re carrying around may have more than 3000 kinds of bacteria, your gateway to skin infections, stomach ulcers and other assorted afflictions of the flesh. They found some 1.2 billion (Yes, that’s Billion) segments of DNA, about half traceable to humans. Of the remaining material, about 20% could be identified. O.K., that leaves 30%, give or take, not attributable to anything in particular. Are we seeing ALIENS panhandling on the corners here? Yetis? Abominable whatevers? We’re talkin’ DIRTY money.
And in that same vein…you should pardon the expression… the latest news in competition sports is the Tough Mudders. One description of the “sport” goes like this : “Tough Mudders are hardcore 10-12 mile(18-20 km) obstacle course challenges designed to test strength, stamina, mental grit and camaraderie—probably the toughest event on the planet.” Oy!
A couple of guys founded the whole thing in 2010, got about 4500 nutjobs to participate and it’s grown from there. A rough estimate of the number of crazies having taken part so far hovers in the neighborhood of 1.3 million. In 2013 the number of players reached somewhere around 700,000. The company (What, you thought it was just a bunch of guys—it’s always guys, right?—who get together to get “down & dirty” crawling through mud and ice water?) which organizes and officially sanctions events is worth $70 million and has classified the competitions as Arena, Backwoods, Open Range, Off-road, , Mountain and Muscle.
The twenty to twenty-five different obstacles are presented as challenges to some of humans’ greatest fears—fire, water, electricity, height. About seventy-eight per cent of competitors finish the course. Depending upon the course, a player can be facing dangling live electric wires, vats of ice chunks, water and other substances you don’t want to know about, greased monkey bars over ice pits, walls to scale, pipes to crawl through, planks to walk. Oh, it’s a lot of fun!
Both individual and team competitions are part of the deal; male and female “Tough Mudders” get into the thing but the predominance goes, of course, goes to the guys(Female “mudders” are already tough). There are sponsors sometimes—Under Armor, Degree (Wouldn’t you know a deodorant would get into it?), Bic (What? To take notes?), Wheaties (These pictures will NOT make the front of the cereal box), Dos Equis, Clif Bar—and usually some kind of a charity affiliation, often military-related. Prizes are popping up occasionally.
And how’s all of this like the money? All good clean fun, right?
Well, there seems to have been an outbreak, O.K. maybe more than one outbreak, of some really, really ugly intestinal disorders, caused by norovirus, for one. This may have something to do with the fact that at least one of the competitions was WAY too close to an agricultural installation and the mud involved was, shall we say, enhanced by unplanned substances. Then, of course, you never know what that dude suffering next to you was infected with before the two of you were submerged in ice water. DO NOT swallow the mud!
And, lastly, on the medical front– SPOILER ALERT for Prince Charming—it is now possible to get what some podiatrists and orthopedic surgeons are calling “Cinderella surgery”. “If the shoe fits, wear it,” has gone to a whole new level.
Women—wealthy ones, anyway– are having surgeries to make their feet fit their shoes, not the other way around. Manolo Blahnik, Nicholas Kirkwood, Christian Louboutin, all high-end shoe designers, have opened economic horizons for the medical profession by designing shoes that women cannot wear without either pain or reshaping of their feet. Got “high heel foot”, “hitchhiker toe”, “toebesity”? This can be dealt with by getting a Perfect 10 (toe shortening), a Model T (toe lengthening) or a foot tuck(fat pad augmentation). Don’t EVEN call it a bunionectomy any more. It’s a “facelift for your feet” so you can fit into heels. Don’t go for toe liposuction or pinky toe removal, those are stepping pretty close to unethical. The originator of these procedures, Dr. Ali Sadrieh, says that it’s about a lifestyle choice and projecting confidence; a hallux valgus correction with osteotomy and screw fixation means that one can put on and wear a shoe that did not fit comfortably before. What IS a stiletto after all, but a knife?
Ugly stepsisters, here’s your chance!
