Paging Dr. Obvious, paging Dr. Obvious

Sharks: the scourge of our next generation.A New England Journal of Medicine study is blowing the roof off of the house that is everything we understand about medical science.

Now that smoking rates are down, everyone should be healthier, right? That’s what we always heard.

However, the obesity rate is still rising. So, while lower smoking rates raised the average life expectancy for current 18-year-olds by 0.31 years, obesity lowered it back down 1.02 years.

So, after all that quitting, we finally learned that if (a) one thing doesn’t kill you, (b) something else will.

Also, maybe you were better off smoking?

Everyone I know is a fat, diseased libertarian, just like me

We’ve got some bad news for you health nuts who hang out with morbidly obese/ diseased people to make yourself feel better (there are some out there, right?), it turns out you aren’t what you eat, you are who you hang out with.

That goes for your political views, your weight, and–wait for it–whether you have an STD. Best of all, you don’t even have to see these people very often, you just need to interact with them in some manner, like the Internet.

The Guys want to be your friend. We’re clean. We swear.

Oh god, I’m fat

I know it was you, Popeye. You broke my heart.In my on-going series of ways that Alabama is trying to kill me, I’ve learned that I’m a no-good fat fatty-fat fat-fat.

Those of you who may know me would be surprised, considering I’ve always seemed smaller than everyone else (except Chugs). But that’s exactly how it snuck up on me.

According to Time Magazine, Alabama ranks as not only one of the poorest, but also one of the fattest states (except Mississippi). Over 30% of this state’s population is obese because of fried food, gravy and a lack of grocery stores, sidewalks, bike lanes and public transportation (gotta walk to bus stops).

Because so many people around me are obese, I didn’t even notice my weight gain. No matter how big I got, I looked “normal.” And, according to CNN, even Old Navy may have conspired against me by marking larger cloths with smaller measurements! So my waist size hasn’t really been 30 this whole time!

So, when Alabama’s tornadoes and rising STD rates missed me, it resorted to the old fashioned way: diabetes and heart disease.

Take it from Snee: Decadence is the problem

I pass at least three of these a day in my Toyota Tacoma.

You ever notice how marketers get hooked on words or spellings? Like how everything got a “2000” after it in the ’90s to make it sound futuristic? Or anything beginning with “ex” was spelled with an “X” to remind you of snowboarders skydiving into a live volcano?

If Lever 2000, which is just f##king soap, and the X-wife that took one of your testicles in your divorce taught you anything, it’s that Madison Avenue is lined with useless professionals. By “useless professional,” I mean someone who wears a tie to an office where they produce nothing but email and post-lunch dumps.

This group, more than any, causes me to look at the English language and evaluate which words have been abused and twisted to the point that they no longer have meaning. I’ve termed this, “cleaning out the language gutters,” in the same spirit that Brazilians used to burn street orphans to “end poverty.”

(I may not actually solve problems with the English language, but at least I won’t have to look at the word anymore and think, “Why? Why didn’t I do something?!”)

This week, I’m looking at the latest word to have been chewed up by some undergrad yuppie and spit into our living rooms: decadence. Continue reading Take it from Snee: Decadence is the problem

Take it from Snee: I’m thankful

Every year, Americans do what we do best: sit around a table to observe a once-meaningful holiday because we’d look funny if we didn’t.

Me: Hey, Ted from Accounting. Big four day weekend, eh?

Ted from Accounting: Yep, gonna eat turkey with the family and watch some football. You?

Me: Oh, I’m going to Aruba for the long weekend to collect orgasms.

TfA: Well, that makes too much sense. Freak.

Thanksgiving, like every other U.S.-observed holiday, has auspicious, yet bullsh-t, origins. But if you boil that bathwater past the paper headdresses, you find a story that doesn’t matter anymore today: a group of proto-Americans are starving to death, yet finally scrape up enough farming to survive … until winter starts in earnest.

They’re thankful for managing with what they’ve got to enjoy each others’ presence, which ironically helps spread the cholera.

We don’t have that problem anymore. Even if we catch childhood leukemia, we still get an awesome last wish. (That’s only because Leonard Nimoy can’t catch leukemia from his Make-A-Wish cancer kid.) And we don’t really enjoy each others’ company. If it weren’t for Thanksgiving, entire families would never see each other except to marry or bury someone.

And we definitely aren’t just scraping by. Outside of a certain percentage of poor people, the modern Thanksgiving is a modern festival of consumer distractions. The table is full of food that will go uneaten, and those who attempt to finish it off will slip into a gluttony coma on the leather sofa. This happens while everyone watches a parade full of cartoon characters selling toys, the latests must-see TV stars and the pirate of plastic productions, Santa himself. Then there’s football, which features players goosed up on the latest pharmaceuticals beating Vegas odds so the owner can sell more ball caps to guys trying to find cool new ways to cover up bald spots.

Even the idea of a feast in today’s America is ridiculous. The idea of a feast is to celebrate having plenty when you normally have little. Seen those obesity numbers lately?

So, with all that in mind, here’s my list of the things that I am thankful for this year: Continue reading Take it from Snee: I’m thankful

Tony Blair: Educator of the obese

As if it weren’t hard enough to understand English accents, problems continue with the dialog of 2006’s The Queen. As we reported over a year ago, an airline version of the movie had some excessing bleeping when the word “god” was censored, regardless of the context.

But this time, there was no singing of “Bleep Save the Queen,” instead subtitles to an outdoor screening of the movie in Australia were written by someone who appeared to have the English comprehension of an Asian electronics manual. The drama ended up being more of a comedy after the subtitles stole the show.

“When a character spoke about Mr Blair being ‘educated at Fettes’, it appeared on screen as ‘educated the fattest’. ‘Did you vote?’ flashed up as ‘Dead in a boat?’. The observation that ‘every newspaper proprietor has blood on his hands today’ became ‘every newspaper proprietor has blown in his hands today’.

Yuck.

No word yet on whether the DVD box set will include these two alternate versions SG has discussed. Stay tuned to MasterChugs Theater for updates.