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POPSKrampus Runs: Harmless fun, or mysogynist assault? This year the Krampus debate intensified when a nine-year-old was set upon by three young Krampuses and so was so traumatized that she was reportedly afraid to return to school... The incident has heated the annual Krampus debate, with each camp growing increasingly shrill. One side holds that the "Krampus runs," as the random assaults are called, are good clean fun, the sort of local color that makes Salzburg charming and quaint, that Krampuses can be avoided by keeping off the streets between four and eight p.m., and that, in fact, most women enjoy being knocked around a bit by these burly beasts. The other side decries these assaults as blatantly sexist, misogynist exercises that have no place in modern society. "It is the only place in Europe where it is acceptable to beat women in public," a Salzburg women told me.
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POPSPro-Rape Republicans "embarassed" by Franken's anti-rape bill So let's recap: -Franken proposes a bill amendment that says mercenary companies fighting our wars for us can't force their female employees into rigged arbitration (rather than civil court) when they get gang-raped by their co-workers. -The pro-rape Republicans vote against it. Okay, I'll give them that they were voting for their corporate masters, but their corporate masters are interested in sweeping employee-on-employee gangrape under the rug. -The pro-rape Republicans think Franken is rude and inappropriate for forcing them to show their true colors to the public. Why not stand up and defend your votes, Repiublicans? Ten of your party sided with Franken against letting corporations sweep rapes and assaults under the rug. I think a lot of people who dismiss Franken as a clown are going to come to understand that's he's actually a very smart, well-read policy wonk who is also funny.
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POPSGeorge Washington's Hemp Crop The father of our country had painful wooden teeth. And cannabis is a potent painkiller found in traditional medical practices the world over going back thousands of years. Fiber hemp farmers don't separate the male from female plants. Marijuana farmers remove the male plants (which display their sex first) before they fertilize the females so that the females then produce lots of THC. Fertilized female plants produce very little THC, putting their energy into making seeds instead. Male plants produce almost no THC. I'm just sayin...
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POPSHarvard study: Computers don't save hospitals money More; Himmelstein said that only a handful of hospitals and clinics realized even modest savings and increased efficiency -- and those hospitals custom-built their systems after computer system architects conducted months of earch. He pointed to Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Latter Day Saints Hospital in Salt Lake City and Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis as facilities with some success in deploying efficient e-health systems. That's because they were intuitive and aimed at clinicians, not administrators. Programmers of the successful systems told Himmelstein that they didn't write manuals or offer training. "If you need a manual, then the system doesn't work. If you need training, the system doesn't work," he said.
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POPSGen X: "Hello... we're still here!" Anyone born between 1961 and 1981 needs to read 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? . We've been told since we were kids that we were a stupid, lazy, violent generation, destined to be the first not to do better than our parents. And now we're getting ignored at the workplace , while everyone worries about the aging boomers and the upcoming "entitlement generation" (Although I prefer to call them "Generation Veal"), the 13th generation to call ourselves Americans gets shunted to the side.
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POPSA couple of "SHUT THE FUCK UP"s for your Thanksgiving morning CONTINUED: Did you slaughter the turkey, cut it's throat and let it go from living animal to dead animal in front of you, drain it of blood, scoop out the shit and entrails from it's carcass,and yank all the feathers from it's dead skin? Or did you just turn on your gas-burning cage, drive to the supermarket, and pick up a plastic-wrapped ball of meat-&-bone without a face or feet? Shut the fuck up about the mela. Your hypocrisy sickens me. Enjoy your dinner. But shut the fuck up while you do it.
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POPSBarbara Ehrenreich: Our Maniacal Optimism Is Ruining the World Realists of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose by the moronic, Panglossian smile off the optimist's face, and the dour, everything-sucks, soul-sucking eyore-ism of the pessimists. I particularly like Ehrenreich's take on why the poor should feel guilty for their poverty. More Ayn Randian bullshit , and she's right to call it bullshit.
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POPSThe "Twilight" Saga: Textbook abusive relationship more: And this movie is the one that made $140 million bucks in one weekend. Bigger than Dark Knight. Maybe it's just that I'm older and (hopefully) wiser than the characters and thus out of this movie's target demographic, or maybe I'm a humorless feminist, but knowing that zillions of girls are seeing this getting the idea that a seriously unhealthy relationship is somehow the equivalent of true love -- that is profoundly disturbing. Far scarier than a werewolf.
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POPSRunning Doc: PLEASE "do the aspirin"! More: Now, it's true that one case doesn’t prove anything. The International Marathon Medical Directors Association is meeting in March 2010 to develop a multi-city, multi-country research project. It may be that all runners develop high serum myoglobins, since they clear quickly (sometime within one day) -- but they also interact in the body, creating a cascade of other inflammatory elevations that may be markers of risk and may help us to get a better handle on SCD. As Dr. Siegel says: “Like the runner herein, these SCD victims during races can be saved. But wouldn't it make even more sense to try to prevent the SCD's in the first place? Taking aspirin may just do the trick." You can help us make this research project "smarter." If you happen to visit your doctor within 24 hours after finishing a full or half-marathon, please bring a copy of this post with you, record the information below, then e-mail the results to us
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POPSWhy is sexual assault investigated differently from other crimes? More: Dr. Lisak, by the way, appears to be the best ally to and advocate for survivors of sexual assault that I've never heard of. In the past hour, I've found this rape fact sheet that he prepared containing a metric fuckton of good information, multiple presentations (pdf) and papers (pdf), a submission to an anthology on "Confronting Rape and Sexual Assault," and an unflinching critique of "Male Gender Socialization and the Perpetuation of Sexual Abuse." This is a man who knows how to work a goddamned teaspoon. Thanks, Dr. Lisak. Couldn't make the links to Dr. Lisak's Google Books excerpts work – click through for those.
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POPSSoy Lotion Ball This thing is awesome. I get dry skin on my hands (bartending i s beast on the hands sometimes) and this lotion ball is the goods.
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POPSMens Luminite Rain Jacket It's designed for biking, so the back flap extends down over your butt when you're in the saddle. And they're Scottish, so they know rain. Tried on a size M and it fit me well, but they only had it in the gunmetal grey . It's slim-fitting enough to run comfortably in, but if I'm biking/running in the rain I'm going for the one in "don't-hit-me-you-fucking-oblivious-driver-yellow" rather than the one named "Stealth". ;-)
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