Kids Can Be So Cruel

That's the thing people always say. Parents take the cruelty of other kids into account when they name their babies. Kids say things to each other that your boss would get fired for saying. Kids do things to each other that, if adults did them, they'd be arrested and charged with assault. 
Why do we say it with such resignation? We can all agree it's bad, but we all accept it's inevitable. 
I'm curious if this is universal across cultures. I wonder if there's something more that can be done about it besides some YouTube videos and an occasional school assembly. 
But you know what? I remember this once in grade schools I flipped the hell out on some kids who were picking on me. I just snapped. I can't remember which bullies or what they were doing that resulted in my flipping, but you know, occasionally other kids spit in my hair. Made games of bull-rushing me and knocking me down as soon as the recess lady was otherwise occupied. 
Someone took me (and not the bullies, by the way) to the office and sat me down with the principal. I can still remember how I was sobbing so hard I couldn't breathe. My hands were shaking so hard I couldn't wipe my nose with the Kleenex the secretary gave me.
The principal honestly thought she was being helpful when she sat me down and explained to me how I needed to grow a thicker skin. How my life would be much easier if I wasn't always trying to be different (as if this was something I had a say in). She told me it was okay to lie a little and pretend to like the bands the other kids did. The other kids wouldn't change, she said, so if I wanted them to leave me alone, I would have to.
This isn't a sob story so much as a hopeful one. They've finally started caring about bullying, stopped being so resigned to its existence. If that woman is still a principal, I highly doubt she's as tone deaf as she was then. And I suspect it's more common for the bullies to get the talkings-to. 
Know what's funny? I know all that bullying made me stronger. Made me more empathetic; made me care less about what other people think.

I'll be Back when the Day is New

It's no surprise that Fred Rogers is among my heroes. I think we all know I still live in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. But I do find it kind of surprising how ubiquitous my generation's love for him is. Yesterday, I couldn't open Facebook without reading another birthday tribute to the late PBS star. My generation was once defined by how jaded we were, how cynical. We're way too cool for syrupy sentiments like "you're special just the way you are."

And yet we'll spend half an afternoon watching and weeping over YouTube clips of his speaking with childish sagacity when there's a whole Internet full of pr0n and cat videos out there. 

And among the chest thumping and political opportunism that followed the shootings at Sandy Hook elementary, people my age posted, re-posted, read and re-read the words of Fred Rogers with tears in their eyes: 

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.' To this day, especially in times of 'disaster,' I remember my mother's words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers--so many caring people in this world.

And you know, I think maybe the reason we love him so much is the same reason that we're so jaded. We love him because he's one of the few heroes we've had who never let us down. While politicians lied to our faces, kids' show hosts got arrested for jerking off in a movie theater, sports stars killed people, and wave after wave of our favorite entertainers drugged themselves into oblivion, one of our idols was exactly what he appeared to be.

But this post is meant to be more than just oddly ardent hero worship. This post is about one of those quotations a friend posted yesterday. An article in Esquire revealed that Fred Rogers swam every day, ate a healthy vegetarian diet, and maintained the same weight his entire adult life. He said that this was his way of saying "I love you" to himself.
I've been having the damnedest time keeping my plates spinning lately. Eating terribly, coming up with every excuse to avoid exercise, not writing, even though I know those things only make me feel more crappy and exhausted. So maybe instead of pushing and punishing and all of that, I'll try and look at getting my act together as a way to say 'I love you' to myself. And that's a horribly cheesy thing to think and even cheesier to say, but Mister Rogers said it, so that's okay.

Remember when I used to post pictures I took?

Naturally

Hey all. I'm sorry I've been such a bum. Truth be told, I've been exhausted lately, and I don't even know why. It's been all I can do just to get to work, church, and physical therapy lately. I'm running with the theory that it's the changing of the season. Either that, or my rigorous schedule of sitting down all day has finally taken its toll, making me unable to do tasks that involve further sitting down.
Speaking of weak segues, yesterday while being exhausted, I was watching an episode of My Cat from Hell, a show on Animal Planet wherein a gentleman named Jackson Galaxy makes poor choices with regard to his facial hair and fixes crazy cats. Generally by giving cat owners a feather on a string and telling them to take the lids off their cat boxes.

If he looks like a cross between King Tut and
a white supremacist, no one will notice that
his answer to everything is a $2 cat toy.

In one episode, Galaxy meets one cat who can't be cured by a cat toy or by taking the lid off the litter box. This cat's issues went beyond simple behavioral or environmental triggers - he felt the cat was mentally ill and needed to be medicated. Galaxy says hates to give the advice, since he's in favor of holistic health, but in some cases it's needed.
Interesting thing, though, holistic, which apparently comes from South African English, actually doesn't necessarily mean "non-medical," although some wheat-germers (as we'll call them) insist otherwise. Holistic therapy is actually the practice of using multiple approaches to a person's wellness. For instance, if I were to go to a holistic health provider with back pain, that provider might try a combination of physical therapy, chiropractic, meditation, medication, and diet. It doesn't eschew Western medicine, but sees it as only one component of treatment. The holistic philosophy is widely accepted in the medical community in the US, although some of the components, such as homeopathy and acupuncture generally aren't.
And speaking of homeopathy, that's another thing that people often use incorrectly. Lots of people think that homeopathic is another term for alternative therapy, and that stuff like acupuncture,  vitamin therapy, and magnets and crap fall under its umbrella. Totally untrue. The term homeopathic only refers to the totally debunked belief that poison and other random crap, highly diluted, can magically cure diseases. In fact, these substances are often so diluted with plain water that there's maybe a molecule of the snake oil in a bottle of "medicine". But it's cool, because water "has a memory." If you detect a tiny note of contempt here, it's because I'm not a fan of snake oil salesmen actively discouraging seriously sick people from getting actual medical help, while making absurd claims about actual effective treatments. These hucksters are freaking killing people.

Walk a Mile in Their Shoes

Last year when she turned 30, my friend Janice's husband commissioned this birthday cake:

That's Janice's brain (I mean, well, it's a picture of her brain, obviously, real brains taste terrible. And also if they had used her real brain for the cake, she wouldn't have made it to 30). The white spots that look like they don't belong there aren't icing, they're the lesions that accompany multiple sclerosis. 

And if this cake seems more appalling to you than funny, then you don't know Janice. Janice wears blatant eff-me pumps when she goes out in her wheelchair because, if her feet are going to be purely decorative, then she's going all out. She insists that she'd be safe in a zombie attack because zombies would turn up their noses at her brains (I'm dubious, but who am I to argue with the crippled lady?).

Through medication, determination, and a hell of a lot of work, Janice is in remission; she's doing so well, in fact, that she's participating in Walk MS Akron this year. You might think it's greedy of her to demand more donations, what with her having raised over $1,300 already. But come on man. Throw the crippled lady a bone.

She's been posting chapters from her story on her Facebook wall in honor of National MS month, and it turns out it's not all rock star parking and stripper shoes. 

Here is one chapter from May 2, 2007. I cannot imagine ever being this brave.

"It always seemed as though I lived in a state of cognitive dissonance. There were times I would lose track of where I was or what I was doing. I would look over my notes for class and see a jumbled replica of English. I learned how to translate what people were saying to me, I didn't interpret things the way everyone else did. People thought it was because I was lazy, or less intelligent, or incapable; in some aspects they were right. And I agreed with them. I remember times when I would ask Lucius to "remind me where my leg" was. He would lift it and we'd laugh and think 'gee that was strange!' 

Last year I spent the majority of it numb from the armpits down. People don't think of how much that affects. That's not just your legs but the armpits, breasts, stomach, hips, buttocks, thighs, calves, knees, ankles, heels, soles, toes... It started slow. I had a numb patch of skin on my right arm above the elbow underneath the armpit. It itched like crazy... and it started to spread through my chest. It was a few says before my toes started to go. It took a week from the first loss of feeling in my toes to spread through my legs. In the meantime I was taken ill with nausea. I was so incredibly weak, it was frightening at first. Then I was too weak to be scared. I spent a month eating next to nothing. For the longest time I couldn't feel if I needed to go to the bathroom. I purposely made myself get up and go 'just in case'. And even when I went... I couldn't be entirely sure when I was done. So I just had to wait. Even after that I can't feel if I'm clean... so I used babywipes to make sure. I couldn't even feel the moisture from that or the cold. I could just barely get in the shower and once there I had to rest before I picked up the soap. I could never remember what I had just washed. I could have washed my hair five times in one sitting... I had no idea. Once I finished showering I went to the bedroom and waited for Lucius to come in to help me. I couldn't bend over to put on my underwear. Once Lucius had dressed me I needed to rest for about 20 minutes. I hadn't dressed myself and yet I had no energy. After awhile Lucius would help me down to the living room. I don't even remember what I would do. It's amazing how time can pass without your noticing. If Lucius kissed me I could just barely feel it... I had to be careful how I moved my head because the vertigo was enough to make me fall over. I couldn't lie down for the dizziness and nausea. I couldn't lift my legs into the bed anyways. I slept in our recliner in the living room. I had been doing that awhile due to nausea. Now I know why. Funny. Newlyweds that can't even sleep in the same bed in the first year of marriage. And I thought it was all my fault. Guilt doesn't have to be rational. My diaphragm was shot, I was too weak to use it. I couldn't sing most of last year, and that pained me. I would get too dizzy from lack of air and effort. I would sit in church and sing inwardly the hymns. I would cry because I couldn't use my voice for something I loved and had always taken comfort in. 

Nowadays I fight psychological symptoms the most. During Alumni weekend that I had fought off dozens of panic attacks that day alone. Having to start conversation, keep conversations flowing, decisions of ANY kind... it all starts a panic. My mind shuts down and everything goes away. Decisions as simple as "should I use a pencil or pen?" can cripple me. It saddens me when i can't do things. I want to cry when I see my glass of water but know that at that moment I can not lift it. I feel defeated when I haven't the strength to open a packet of Tylenol.

I wish more people knew about this disease."

Don't forget to donate, kids. I don't know if science is anywhere near a cure, because I read the Wikipedia article and there were a lot of big science words. But I do know that any steps science can take to help more people with MS participate in more Walk MS events are worth it. 

As are you, J. and K. My thoughts and love are with you now as always.

Life Sentence

I've had fibromyalgia since I was 19, and it's been flaring up lately. Fibro, for those not in the know, is a disease that causes widespread pain throughout the muscles and connective tissues and it is wrong. The first half of the word, fibro, comes from the Latin word for fibrous tissues. The latter half, myalgia, comes from the Greek words for muscle and pain. Latin and Greek can't live alongside each other like that. It would be anarchy. 
The symptoms I live with are pain throughout my neck, shoulders, and arms. On a good day it feels like you might feel after spending an afternoon playing tackle football. On an average day, it feels like the aches you get with the flu. On a bad day, it feels like you've been run over by a car (this I have on good authority seeing as I have fibromyalgia and was once hit by a car). There are a bunch of other symptoms that can go along with it, the worst - for me - being fatigue and insomnia. 
The first doctor who diagnosed me gave me the verdict, then handed me a sheet printed up from the Internet that essentially called my disorder a highly-specialized form of hypochondria.  Rather than being angry at being told my problems were all in my head, I threw myself into believing it was true. If the disorder was psychological in nature, after all, it wasn't really there, and it would go away if I could stop believing it was. It didn't; it got worse. 
The fact is that the majority of the medical community now accepts that the disorder exists and is medically treatable; though the efficacy of various treatments varies from person to person. I've found a combo of meds, exercise, good sleep, and mindfulness meditation that gets me through the day most of the time. However, with pain flaring and Jeremy and my trip to Europe looming, I went to the doctor to ask him to put me back in physical therapy. He suggested aquatic therapy and it's amazing. The therapy pool is so toasty warm and the exercise so low-impact, that it's literally less painful to me than lying in bed. Which is why I find it funny how so many of the other patients seem to hate it. I had the same experience in the physical therapy sessions I did several years back. Folks would complain that their doctors wouldn't "do anything," for the pain or didn't take their pain seriously. Many seem to be of the opinion that prescribing PT is the doctor's way of blowing them off. In physical therapy, every time the therapist left the room, half the room would start cheating - lowering resistance on machines, doing fewer reps, or just stop work altogether.
Back when I did regular PT, I thought this was just laziness - people wanting the easy way out, wanting to take a pill and feel all better. But this time around, I'm starting to wonder if I'm selling everybody short.
Maybe the reason folks resist therapy is that the treatment forces people to face the fact that this thing isn't going to go away on its own, that there's no magic pill that will fix things. Maybe therapy seems distasteful because it means accepting an illness or injury as a part of your life - something you'll have to work on and manage; that you'll have to learn to live with and make peace with the pain or else keep on suffering.

Fifty Shades of Retraction

Okay, I'm only going to admit this once. I was wrong; Fifty Shades of Grey is awful. I mean, not for any kind of oppressing women thing, it's just terribly, terribly written. How did I not notice this before, you ask? Well you see, I had been previously unaware that this genre existed. As far as I knew, there were just plain old vanilla smutty romance novels - porn for soccer moms, and then sneakily rapey romance novels - porn for secretly kinky soccer moms. I was not aware that there is a whole genre out there of porn for non-secretly kinky soccer moms, and most books in said genre look like Shakespeare next to old Fifty Shades.
I've read quite a bit of this kinky lady porn of late - in the name of research of course, all for you, my loyal readers. And I noticed some rather interesting common themes... but I get ahead of myself.
As you've probably heard, 50 Shades started its life as Twilight fan fiction, which is maybe the most pathetic thing ever. But Twilight wasn't the only thing to which there were startling similarities - actually, the similarities to Twilight were passing enough that you could easily pretend they weren't there. Other books, however... I read one about an ordinary girl who has never truly been in love before and who falls in love with a possessive kinky Seattle billionaire who has grey eyes and an a conniving evil ex; he buys her expensive clothes and takes her to fancy balls, and then a bunch of sex. Wow, what an incredible knock-off, I thought. Then there's the book set during the Victorian age in which an ordinary, bookish girl with grey eyes meets a kinky, possessive man with a tragic past who has never truly been in love before. And the book with the ordinary woman who meets a grey-eyed kinky millionaire who has never truly been in love before. Oh, and the book about the famous rich dude who has never done anything but hurt and debase women until he meets the ordinary, bookish girl with the power to make him change his ways.
I eventually had to come to the conclusion that EL James couldn't possibly have copied all the kinky soccer mom porn at the same time; especially since all of the stories had a bunch of stuff in common with each other too. And not just the kinky billionaire thing. If what I've been reading tells me anything, a whole lot of women have a whole lot of unoriginal - and bizarrely specific - ideas about their dream men. 
OR, all of these novels are actually set in an alternate universe in which the following are true:

• With very rare exception, men come in three races: white, native American, and vaguely Hispanic.
• Among white men, grey is the most common eye color.
• Should you be lucky enough to encounter the rare, but elusive black man, he will have green eyes, and you won't have relations with him; he might, however, be the best friend of the man with whom you will have relations.
• There are three types of careers for men:
• Very rich man who does something vaguely businessy that requires suits.
• Cop, firefighter, EMT, etc. Note: In this universe, most cops are independently wealthy due to an inheritance or something; in the interest of fairness, firefighters without an inheritance get paid enough money to live like the very rich guy noted above.
• Agent for a secret spy agency that operates outside the law and just happens to be staffed full of hot, kinky men..
• All hot men are obsessed with ordinary looking chicks. In fact, in spite of the fact that the smoking rich grey-eyed lovers could have any woman they want, they only want chunky, vaguely unattractive mates. And they say so. A lot.
• Most women, and a significant portion of men, have prominent scars. 
• Even though all the good men want to have sex all the time, they adore and respect women, never taking advantage of, or harming them.
• Unless, of course, these men have Tragic Back-Stories, in which case, they harm and take advantage of women until they meet you, yes you, because you are The One.
• There exist, all over this great nation, magical sex clubs where beautiful, big-hearted men troll for scar-ridden fat chicks in the hope of meeting The One. 
• Men love to cook, unless you like to cook, in which case, cooking is the one domestic task they're not good at.
• All men work out enough to have six pack abs and carry fat chicks around as if they weighed nothing, but they always do the working out when you're not around - the only thing more important than maintaining an unrealistic amount of muscle mass is You, yes You.

I have an ax.

So that's it. I know everything I need to know about kinky soccer moms. I thought, for a bit, that I could totally use this formula to create the next Fifty Shades. Turns out I start blushing and giggling like a school girl right around the time the grey-eyed billionaire unbuttons his shirt.

Shut Up and Fix Me a Turkey Pot Pie

Just after the Super Bowl, I read an article from Slate.com titled "Danica Patrick, Shut Up and Drive." It's all about how Danica Patrick, hugely successful Indy racer, is throwing women under the bus for being in some kind of sexist commercials for GoDaddy.com. 
I'll grant that the commercials are in pretty damn poor taste - I mean, poor enough taste that I'm not embedding or linking to one, which is saying something considering the things I have embedded or linked to. I don't really fall into the camp of feminists who thinks that using sex to sell stuff is harmful to women, but that's not what this post is about.
This post is about the a comment that the article author makes about how especially offensive all this is in light of how sexist the technology industry is already.
Uh, it is? I would think I'd have noticed this rampant sexism, considering I work in the technology industry.
I've been working at the same company quite a while now, and I've never seen anything indicating that there's some kind of anti-woman conspiracy. Nobody calling me doll-face in the halls, no boss demanding I fetch his coffee. I mean, sometimes I feel like people don't take me seriously, but I think that's less because I'm a woman and more because of my Hello Kitty fetish and the fact that I have an uncanny knack for relating every conversation back to comic books. For instance, there have been a certain number of conversations that went something like:

• Programmer: Well, the customers are tired of the current user interface, but we don't want to just jump in with something flashy and new at the risk of giving them something the like even less.
• Me: Like when Marvel replaced Dazzler the disco super-hero with Jubilee, who was pretty much the same character only an Asian teenager with even lamer powers and was more annoying than Jar Jar Binks?
• Programmer: That's nice, doll-face. Why don't you freshen up my coffee?

Kidding aside, I'm well aware that the experience of one woman in one office is in no way a reflection of the industry as a whole. My experiences in this industry do give me cause to believe, however, that sexism in my industry is pretty rare, maybe rarer than in most other industries. The thing is, the fundamental building block of technology is logic. You don't create a computer program by intuition or personal prejudices; you create it by plugging variables into equations. It seems to me, furthermore, that most programmers apply the same thinking to everything they do, including hiring and interacting with coworkers. 

Gender discrimination isn't logical; on top of which, the process of hiring someone or evaluating them once they're already an employee is not particularly subjective. Somebody reads the resumes, decides which candidates best fit our requirements, and chooses the best qualified for interviews. From there, it's bubble tests and simulations; objective demonstrations of abilities. Nobody's going to say, "Well, this person scored higher than everybody else on all the tests, but she's a woman and we certainly don't want her getting her cooties all over us, so out she goes.

It's easy to see why someone might think that the industry's sexist, based on the ratio of men to women at tech firms. I mean, I have never seen any evidence in my 7 years at my company that the woman who hires the programmers has some anti-woman agenda, yet there's still never a line for the ladies' room, if you know what I mean. That there are so few women working in the field probably has a lot to do with the fact that only about 10% of people earning computer science degrees use the ladies' room.

So is it the colleges that are sexist? I suppose there might be some sexism in computer science programs (although I've never known a geek to complain about being in the same room with a woman who isn't his mom), but that can't account for such a huge disparity. 

So where does this imbalance come from? No idea. Maybe parents or kindergarten teachers or guidance counselors or TV or McDonald's Happy Meals. But where it doesn't come from is some kind of widespread institutionalized sexism. 

In fact, I've seen very little evidence, in the 9,000 industries in which I've dabbled, of widespread institutionalized sexism. And while I'm sure it exists somewhere, while I'm sure there are more than a few bosses out there calling their female employees "doll-face" and still more who subtly discriminate against said dolls, I just don't think it's as rampant or intentional as so many feminists want to believe.

The wage gap, the glass ceiling? Those are due at least in part to the fact that many women choose to put family before career, and there is nothing wrong with that. I appreciate the hell out of feminist fore-mothers who helped secure for me the right to choose to work and be independent and all of that, but I also know that there's nothing on earth wrong with a woman choosing to be barefoot and pregnant if that's what makes her happy, you know?

I'm in no way saying that gender discrimination doesn't exist (although I am saying that the discrimination cuts both ways a lot more significantly than a lot of feminists seem to think). I still think perfect equality is a ways off; and I do know that women are treated horribly in certain subsets of American culture and even more horribly in other countries. But I really think we've got to let go of the victim mentality that makes us think that the fact that there are more boy programmers than girl programmers, for instance, means that the technology industry hates women. I think we're wasting time tilting and windmills when the real giants are elsewhere.

Also, does anybody else think telling Danica Patrick to shut up and drive is a little, I don't know, sexist? Not in any way I can lay my finger on, it's just, I don't know, slightly more offensive than hot chicks doing inappropriate things.

Vocabulary Is (Etymologically) Unrelated

By Request:

I like curry, to understate drastically. Which is why I was surprised to learn that there's no such thing. Not in India anyway. 

Picture is Unrelated

 Curry is the English version of the Tamil word kari, which just means sauce. The English went to India and amid all their oppressing and such, they discovered a new favorite national dish. Or a new national favorite sauce anyway. Not surprising considering the fact that up until then, the national dish was meat and root vegetables boiled until gray.
Now, the curry powder in your mom's spice cabinet is only the best approximation white guys could come up with. Sort of like how UB40 was the best approximation of Bob Marley that white people could come up with. The thing that gives curry its unique flavor is actually a mix of spices such as cumin, coriander, turmeric, cloves, cardamom, and ginger.

Picture is Unrelated
(That's Bea Arthur wrestling with some velociraptors,
if you weren't aware.)

Now recently, I was hanging out with some friends, and one of them wondered where the expression curry favor comes from, and whether it's related to curry, the spice mixture.

On the bright side, I got nearly to the
bottom of the page of search results
before I found unholy fan art.

Being known, as I am, for spouting off knowledge at every opportunity, I had to think fast. "Well obviously," I said, "this is a reference to Christopher Columbus. As we know, back in Christopher Columbus' time, the spices of India were highly valued - and highly rare. Once several monarchs had denied Christopher Columbus' request for funding to sail around the world, he took a different approach with Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain. See, Queen Isabella was well-known for her fondness for throwing lavish dinner parties and prided herself on the exotic foods she served. Columbus used this to his advantage; promising the queen her weight in spices when he returned from the Indies. Intrigued, Isabella convinced her husband to fund the trip, and thus 'curry favor,' meaning to gain advantage by appealing to an individual's specific tastes."*
Turns out the curry in curry favor is etymological unrelated to the spice. The real etymology is kinda boring. Something to do with horses. So boring that I'm just copying the text from the Online Etymology Dictionary rather than trying to unearth some kind of joke material from some paraphrased version.

early 16c., altered by folk etymology from curry favel (c.1400) from Old French correier fauvel "to be false, hypocritical," literally "to curry the chestnut horse," which in medieval French allegories was a symbol of cunning and deceit. See curry (v.). Old French fauvel is from a Germanic source and ultimately related to fallow (adj.); the sense here is entangled with that of similar-sounding Old French favele "lying, deception," from Latin fabella, diminutive of fabula.

I added the funny pictures because this post
isn't very interesting.

* Okay, I said nothing of the sort. I don't think nearly so fast. What I really said was "mmmm want. curry."
But that's a pretty good story, right? I mean, that could totally be a real false etymology. Hey, if you all wanted to send that lie viral...

One for the Funny Papers

In the past week, I've learned three surprising things about the funny papers, specifically how they influenced life outside of the funny papers.

Sadie Hawkins
We never had Sadie Hawkins Day dances at my high school, mostly because I went to a girls' school. I mean, you could sit around waiting for one of the boys at school, but you'd be waiting a while. Also, is that actually a thing that happens anyplace besides sit-coms? Because it seems awfully silly for the school to sanction who asks whom to a dance. But what would I know about dances? I went to my prom stag and in overalls.
They were adorable. And no, they are not why my boyfriend wouldn't go with me. Okay, yes they were. But, I ended up taking a way hotter date to the prom than if he had gone with me. But at least my date didn't discover he'd left his wallet at home halfway through dinner (like he actually did for his Homecoming dance).
Anyway, Sadie Hawkins, according to the Li'l Abner comic strip, was "the homliest gal in all them hills." Her father Hekzebia didn't want his daughter to be a spinster, so he hosted an event in which Sadie chased after all of the town's bachelors. If she caught one, he was legally required to marry her. The official Li'l Abner website tells me that the dance is about female empowerment. And here I thought we had to burn our bras.

*#@!$ Off, You Stinking &#$%@
My mom recently suggested that I try to be a lit more circumspect with the swearing on my blog. She was not pleased to know that I thought I was being circumspect. Okay, so I've got a bit of a mouth on me, but seriously, there are far worse things a preacher's kid could grow up and do.

If, however, I wanted to swear without offending my mom, I might try using something like $&#*. According to DailyWritingTips.com, this fanciful euphemism first appeared in Rudolph Dirks' The Katzenjammer Kids. Equally fanciful names for the string of characters include obscenicon (coined by blogger Benjamin Zimmer) and grawlix coined by Mort Walker. How is grawlix not a Pokemon?
I tend to agree with Mark Nichol of Daily Writing Tips with regard to swearing. He says:

Ultimately, the question any purveyor of prose must answer is, where do you draw the line? Certain four-letter words are either acceptable or anathema. But what about minor league profanity: hell, damn, and the like? If you prohibit these words in your publication, what about heck, darn, and gosh, which are all merely disguised forms of literally profane profanity? What about effing or bleep? Everyone knows what each means or could mean. Why permit euphemisms or evasive explications? Don’t you risk offending readers or site visitors who resent such coy conjurings intended to wink-and-nudge them about what you might otherwise have explicitly stated?

But then Mark Nichol doesn't have my mom for a mom, and I kind of owe her some consideration all I put her through during my high school and college years.

It's a Conspiracy

I've always said that if it turns out that NutraSweet makes you grow extra arms and give birth to mutant babies, I'd have no business getting all indignant about it - it's not as if I thought the deeply irrational amounts of the stuff was good for me.
Folks frequently give me friendly unsolicited advice as to my little habit - claims that vary from “that stuff makes you fatter” to “that stuff'll kill you.” I thought the former was probably true, the latter silly, but I never thought much about the stuff in between. The fitness people who extolled its virtues in the 80s are now avoiding it like they once avoided red meat (which I think is allowed now/again). I'd even heard college educated fitness professionals proclaim this. Someone at the gym told me it was better to drink a six pack of regular pop than one can of diet. Exaggeration, I insisted. And anyway, you've got to die sometime, as the smokers say.
Then I read an article on the extreme dangers of aspartame and the research changed my opinion entirely. 
Perhaps, though, not in the way the article's author intended.
The conspiracy to keep the public from the knowledge that aspartame kills, according to William Campbell Douglass II, goes all the way to the FDA. Aspartame, a deadly neurotoxin, has been positively linked to fibromyalgia, MS, lupus, ADD, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, chronic fatigue, depression, and naturally, cancer. On top of that, “these toxins are MAKING US FAT!” It was the shouty capitals that convinced me... that this was bull. Well, and the fact that Douglass was calling aspartame an agent of genocide and treason. Well actually, it started with the word “conspiracy.”
Conspiracies (for which the Old English word is the far more awesome facengecwis), I've learned lately, are far more easily imagined than done. 
A while back, one of my friends told me she'd seen a documentary about Big Pharma's conspiracy to hide the fact that vitamins and minerals are far more effective at treating diseases than whatever poison the pharmaceutical companies are cooking up. In fact, she told me, there had been a huge, groundbreaking breakthrough in cancer research, in which scientists discovered that a certain formulation of vitamin C could cure cancer. Soon as Big Pharma learned of it, they used their influence to shut the study down, and refused to fund any researcher who studied it.
At first, I was inclined to believe this was the truth, or at least partially true. I've known a lot of people who have been seriously harmed by drugs they were assured were safe. The tricks the pharmaceutical industry pulls to convince doctors and consumers that their products are safe and necessary are - well, they're fodder for a whole other post. The industry has shown no compunction with causing people's deaths in the name of profit, so the idea of their blocking research that could save lives didn't seem all that absurd.  
Until a realization dawned. My best friend was a scientist at Stanford. She studied cancer. I am pretty sure that if vitamin C cured cancer, she'd have mentioned it to me. So I went to the science.
It didn't take me long to learn that the vitamin C study, conducted by Linus Pauling, had serious flaws. I found the study and read it. I could tell the research methods were crap, and I'm an English major. Turns out that the study was reviewed and reviewed again by scientists all over the world who simply couldn't reproduce the results when using appropriate scientific rigor. Science hasn't even giving up researching the cancer/vitamin C connection, because there does seem to be one. That research just isn't anywhere near having any kind of practical application. 
I wondered if, however, a controversy such as the one alleged could happen, so I called up my much smarter friend to ask. 
She said that it would be impossible for a conspiracy of that magnitude to hold up. Every cancer researcher, not just in the US, but on the planet would have to be into it. There are all kinds of entities that fund cancer research, including the government and and the vitamin industry. Even if the government were in on the plot, "big vita," if you will, has more than ample resources to fund research that would prove one of their products capable of actually doing something useful. Also, the competition between scientific institutions is vicious, and the incentive to win is far greater than the incentive to keep quiet. If there's any chance that the Cleveland Clinic will be able to proclaim they've cured cancer, they're not going to care if the solution is a drug, a vitamin, or a poop transplant.
So what in the holy hell does this have to do with aspartame? Well, this is another case in which a conspiracy is just logistically impossible, and to verify that, all I had to do was go to the science.
Turns out that even if the FDA were in on this controversy, they'd have had to get the Government Accountability Office that investigated the matter on board too. Then they'd have had to get the Centers for Disease control to string along. Oh, and the World Health Organization, the Mayo Clinic (and just about every other research hospital), and researchers at each of the 90 countries where the substance is legal.  
While science continues to research, it turns out that there's absolutely no evidence directly connecting aspartame with any disease. There's no evidence connecting any of the ingredients in aspartame to any disease. Not cancer, not fibromyalgia, not even indigestion. On top of which, the claims about aspartame making you fatter are really overstated. There might be a link. Might be. The drug is extraordinarily dangerous to people allergic to phenylalanine, in much the same way that peanut butter is highly dangerous to people allergic to peanuts.
But it turns out a Google search on the initial article's author, William Campbell Douglass, would probably have sufficed. The author of the article is a hardcore whackadoodle whose research proving the health benefits of tobacco speaks for itself. Apparently, we should be eating it. Eating. it.