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A fair and balanced compendium of spontaneous exclamations and excited utterances, with 22 entries on the front page. And, now, Home of the YATSASS™ Reports Yet Another True Story About Stupid Studies: • Breathing Bus Exhaust is Stressful • Depressed People May Take Drugs To Feel Better • Smart healthy people choose foods more wisely than stupid drunks • Stressed Out Moms Think Their Babies Are Annoying • People Are Groggy When They Wake Up • Airport Screeners Probably Can't Stop Spread of SARS & Flu • Study on Studies Yields Disappointment! • Lengthy Study with No Findings! A perfect YATSASS! • Making Fun Of Fat Kids Depresses Them • Drinking Highly Sugared Beverages Can Make You Fat! • Americans Prefer Safe & Effective Drugs to Unproven and Dangerous Ones • Study Shows Poor & Homeless Drink More Malt Liquor • Study on People in Studies Yields Predictable Answers, But Also Raises New Questions • Women Don't Like Getting Up to Feed the Newborn While Their Husbands Sleep Like Babies • Sperm Levels Drop With Frequent Ejaculation • People Who Don't Screw Around Get Less Clap • Swimming Can Cause Fluid Build-Up in Lungs • People Who Eat A Proper Diet are Healthier and Thinner • People who don't wet their pants feel better than people who do • Maybe Left Handed Winter Babies have More Brain Cancer, Maybe Not... • People who had nose jobs and people who didn't both like the same kind of noses • People pass more gas when they are active • Kids who spend too much time reading will get headaches • People who get drunk think others are more attractive than they do when they're sober In the old days, My thoughts were more coherent, and I could string together whole sequences of actual paragraphs! Those essays can be found here for those so interested.
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Monday, March 17, 2008 Posted 12:57 PM
  $10,000 Dental Warranty!!! Sounds like a pretty good warranty on the Shock Doctor brand sports mouthguard I just bought for my kid, right? You spend 10 bucks or so on the mouthguard, boil it, mold it to the teeth and tell the kid to wear it - always - while she's playing lacrosse. Worse comes to worst and she takes a ball or stick to the kisser - loses or loosens a tooth or two - and Shock Doctor comes to the rescue. Repair or replace those choppers and everyone's smiling, right? Not so fast, Bunky. Read the fine print - which of course you can't until after you have purchased and opened the thing. First off, they tell you they're not providing any warranty for your kid getting injured by getting hit in the mouth - they're only warranting that their gadget is "free from defects in material & workmanship" that could hurt healthy teeth. Later on in the fine print they specifically disclaim any liability for negligent design - which would be your claim that it was just a crummy mouthguard that didn't do the job, and get this: they disclaim liability for defects in material and workmanship!! Say what? Isn't that the only thing they took responsibility for in the first place? Uh-huh. They also disclaim any warranty for a particular purpose - which means to say that although they have printed - in big bold letters - "maximum protection," Concussion & TMJ protection," "High Impact protection," and "Football, hockey, lacrosse and other head banging sports," they don't really mean it! Next, you're only covered in officiated games or coach-supervised practices. Now I don't expect that they're supposed to warrant that your teeth will be fine, everywhere, but do they mean to say that adult play is not included? Apparently so. Which, is pretty cheesy since this particular model is an "adult" model. I guess if you want to play in a pick-up league you've got no warranty whatsoever - although it doesn't say that on the box. But, to make a claim you need a signed statement from a "game official," "supervising coach," or "school superintendent." But wait - like they say on late night TV - there's more! If some way, some how, you manage to file a claim they can't disclaim, they limit their responsibility to a maximum of $313 per injured or replaced tooth! Not only might you think that $313 would hardly cover a cleaning these days, do the math: There's no more than 32 teeth in a human head. 32 X $313 = $10,016.00 Yep, that's right - the only way you could collect that $10,000 warranty would be to lose or damage every chicklet in the entire pack! I sincerely doubt that's possible, not even in the pre-helmet NHL days. So hey, Shock Doctor! Bite Me! Thursday, March 13, 2008 Posted 7:38 PM
Am I the only one thinking...  ... that for $1,000 an hour, I was expecting a bit more like Victoria's and a bit less like Frederick's? Wednesday, March 12, 2008 Posted 9:15 AM
YATSASS: Sticking People In a Room with Diesel Exhaust Stresses Them Out It's been a while since our last YATSASS Report. Not from any lack of studies worthy of note, but from a recessionary blogging trend here at R&R in general, but this one just cried out for attention. Leave it to the Dutch: Paul Borm from Zuyd University has found that inhaling diesel exhaust triggers a stress response in the brain. Borm and his team put 10 volunteers in a room filled with exhaust from a diesel engine for one hour and monitored their brain waves with an electroencephalograph (EEG). The level of fumes was similar to that found on a busy road or in a garage. First, how does anyone get volunteers to do that? But more importantly for our purposes, someone spent money to scientifically determine that sucking an exhaust pipe sucks! After about 30 minutes, brain wave patterns displayed a stress response, suggesting changes in information processing in the brain cortex. While I offer no comment on the study methodology, I can certify that it complies with all of the underlying YATSASS criteria, and offer the following as conclusive evidence: We can only speculate what these effects may mean… followed byFurther research is needed… Yes, indeed. Hey Paul, here's a time and money saving idea: why not head down to the Greyhound station on a hot August afternoon and ask everyone how they're doing?Monday, March 03, 2008 Posted 7:55 PM
WTF? Just exactly what kind of sophisticated algorithm is NetFlix using to predict my choice in movies?  © 2002-2008 Rob Falk, All Rights Reserved. All Wrongs Denied. Your mileage won't vary; it will be less. | Subscribe to Rants!
  
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