Tend to obsess over your health? Then don’t read Merck’s Manual of Medical Information. Pick it up and you will quickly fall down the rabbit hole of the index, where you can find every malady you’ve had, might have and will have over your lifetime. It’s a miracle our bodies function at all, really.
Archive for May, 2008
A Hypochondriac’s Dream
Posted: Saturday, May 31st, 2008When Urine Need
Posted: Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
Want to help figure out the colors for the next batch of kidney tees? Please help decide! Perhaps you’ve always hated the colors, but liked the shirt, so here is your chance to weigh in. Obviously the shirt was yellow because of pee, but not everyone loves yellow, and the gents don’t seem very fond of it. First image is the original yellow-and-blue design, second is a bright blue tee with a kind of cracked-out late 80s color palette and last is a more subdued dark green with yellow kidneys. I tried to install a poll to make this easy, but wordpress is being a real biznatch and not letting me install one, so if you’d be so kind as to comment, that would be great. Here’s what the poll would have looked like:
+ Yellow. Why change in mid-stream?
+ Blue. Urine, er, you’re on the right track.
+ Forest. I dig the yellow kidneys, they’re pee-tastic.
Chemistry of the Hangover
Posted: Tuesday, May 27th, 2008
If you’ve ever wanted to know exactly how a hangover works, grab a couple-weeks-old issue of the New Yorker and school yourself on this age-old problem following a night of good cheer. “The liver, in processing alcohol, first addresses itself to ethanol, which is the alcohol proper, and then moves on to methanol, a secondary ingredient of many wines and spirits,” explains sober reporter Joan Acocella — are you still with me? “Because methanol breaks down into formic acid, which is highly toxic, it is during this second stage that the hangover is most crushing.” Crushing indeed. Our favorite item from this story is the perfect colloquialism for the hangover, from the Danes: “carpenters in the forehead.”
