Asparagus pee, Gooblek & Other Neat stuff
Time to take this bull by the horns and milk it.
My healthcare organization is Kaiser Permanente, and this is an actual image from their “refill a prescription” page. Maybe it’s just me, but something here doesn’t seem right.
The good news is that they have adopted one of my best ideas — to print a description of the pill on the bottle. It’s a great idea, even if they didn’t get it from me.
So Oprah’s been at it again, and the big new buzz is a book and a movie called The Secret. It’s basically just a rehash of a bunch of old stuff like the law of attraction, positive thinking, affirmations, and karma. No great harm, but as my mentor Jim Rhon says, “Affirmation without labor is the beginning of delusion.”
Well, here’s a great big bashing review over at skeptic.com:
The Secret behind The Secret
(Scroll down when you get there.)
“He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head
is a craftsman. He who works with his hands
and his head and his heart is an artist.”
–St. Francis, religious leader
Here’s a long NY Times article by Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma that I recommend you read, a further diatribe on the shortcomings of the American Diet.
His conclusion? Try to eat more food.
Our 2nd-grade daughter Emily was given the assignment to “Write a story about a soldier who sees a horse behind a tree — use all the words in the box [soldier, story, behind]. Here’s how it turned out:
Once I was a soldier in an old old fairy tale and in that fairy tale I saw a horse that got out of a farm. So the horse hid behind a tree so I ride it back to the farm. And that story was a good one wasn’t it? The End.
(The teacher’s red pen says “Yes.”)
