Monday, May 26, 2014

Our Wacky World—5/26/2014

Al Feldstein dead at 88 after warping the minds of a generation (look at how I turned out):
"Feldstein edited Mad from 1955 to 1984 when the magazine was the most widely read satirical publication in America. He was responsible for bringing on some of the "Usual Gang of Idiots" -- the Mad staffers and freelancers who filled its pages with their caricatures, puns and general wackiness."
My dad loved the famous One Finger Salute cover. I still have all of mine. (CNN)

Here you can see Fred Astaire as Alfred E. Neuman in 1959.

'The opening months of Colorado's first-in-the-nation recreational marijuana industry have seen a rise in fiery explosions and injuries as pot users try to make the drug's intoxicating oil in crude home-based laboratories. 
'Firefighters in the state have raced to at least 31 butane hash oil explosions this year, compared with 11 last year… The data represents only reported and confirmed cases, and the actual number of explosions could be higher, said Kevin Wong, an intelligence analyst for the agency. "This is just the tip of the iceberg," Wong said.'
ABC

"It used to be a young women, she gets married, she has children, and that's her job," he lamented. "They literally count my wife as unemployed! She's not unemployed, she doesn't want to be employed. I mean, she's a wife, she's a mother."
Anderson noted that Annette Funicello, a star of the Mickey Mouse Club in the 1950s, had promoted birth control for a 1960s-era advertisement. At one point, he even began to sing "fornicate with me" to the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club March theme song.
Crooks & Liars


Psychic faces tough crowd in Middlesbrough:
"I also don’t think that [the audience] reacted well to some of the particularly offensive scenarios Sally was recreating. One involved her re-enacting a dead man flushing narcotics down a toilet to his immediate family, whilst repeatedly saying 'flush it down'. Another was when she was talking to a teenage girl whose boyfriend had recently committed suicide by hanging himself. Sally told the girl that she can feel him hitting her leg and that he was, infact, re-enacting swinging against a door as he was committing suicide."
Myles Power


Got milk? PeTA says it's no wonder your child has autism:
"Regardless of the cause, testimonials show that many people with this disease may be able to find relief with a simple dietary change—removing milk from their diet. The Internet contains numerous heart-wrenching stories from parents of kids who had suffered the worst effects of autism for years before dairy foods were eliminated from their children’s diets."
The testimonial fallacy. (A Million Gods)


Another money-making gimmick based on the "natural" fallacy:
'The American Podiatric Medicine Association put out a policy statement back in November 2009 — which they still stand by today — saying that "research has not yet adequately shed light on the immediate and long-term effects of this practice… Barefoot running has been touted as improving strength and balance, while promoting a more natural running style… However, risks of barefoot running include a lack of protection, which may lead to injuries such as puncture wounds, and increased stress on the lower extremities."'
Vox

"The country's interior minister, Jorge Fernández Díaz, singled out an icon of the Virgin Mary, in Málaga, to receive the gold medal of police merit – which is normally reserved for police who have died in terrorist attacks."
Not the Mother of God herself, an icon of the Immaculate One. (Guardian)

"France's national rail company SNCF said on Tuesday it had ordered 2,000 trains for an expanded regional network that are too wide for many station platforms"
CNBC



An excellent overview of the awesome nonsense that is EMDR:
'While strolling through a park one day, Francine Shapiro noticed that certain of her troubling thoughts suddenly lost their distressing qualities. Curious about what had happened, Shapiro regenerated the mental images and again found them no longer upsetting. Attending closely to her behavior, she realized that her eyes had been spontaneously and rapidly shifting back and forth."

'Shapiro renamed her method “Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing” or EMDR, a method that one enthusiast has claimed to be “the most revolutionary, important method to emerge in psychotherapy in decades.” Others have declared EMDR to be nothing short of “amazing,” “profound,” and a “miracle”'
"Bullshit" is more like it. (Skeptic)

Dreaming O' California