Take with Ritalin as part of a balanced diet

This public service announcement comes from the November 1972 edition of National Geographic. Click on the image to enlarge. (You'll have to enlarge it again by clicking the bottom right corner to read the text) The ad speaks for itself. The part at the bottom left is particularly funny though.



I thought that I'd pull this one out of the "memory-hole" just to show how quickly our perceptions of something can change and how truth is found in glossy ads and pseudo-scientific talk. Anyone remember how before the whole Atkin's fad became stamped in our brains, word was that staying away from meats and eating pasta was the way to slim-down? If you are one of the many converts who think that carbs are the new public enemy #1, then the Registered Dietitians at Kellogg Canada have this message for you.

Maybe if I look through my National Geographics from the 1980's, I'll find an ad telling me how good aspartame is for brain function.

BL baffles brains

Danone is running a TV ad for its new yogurt called Activia.

The commercial features a husband and wife (both about 40 years of age) doing what appears to be some type of mating dance in their kitchen while eating yogurt lustfully. The announcer tells me that this yogurt is the only one on the market to contain the probiotic culture BL™ and like the dancing old-people, I should “take the Activia 14-day challenge and feel the difference”.

…end of sales pitch.

Then what?

If I eat this yogurt for 14 days, what sort of difference am I supposed to feel? Danone doesn’t say. Is the probiotic culture BL™ anything more than BS, or will it confer some real positive benefit on me… like the stamina needed to dance with 40-year-old women? I checked out the Activia website to find out.

Generally, I don’t give in to such baiting tactics used by marketers to get me interested in a product. I have never asked my doctor about Celebrex. I have never typed “www.yaris.ca” into my web browser to find out what Uncle Yaris was all about (although he did appear to have some sweet dance moves). In this case however, I made an exception.

According to Danone, BL™ is its own brand of bifidobacterium lactis, which is a class of naturally-occuring bacteria thought to “contribute to protein and vitamin metabolism, exert anti-microbial activity and possibly act on intestinal transit”. Now the other kinds of natural bacteria that you normally find in yogurt apparently also do the same things, except that bifidobacteria lactae supposedly survive longer in the intestinal tract, and therefore amplify the benefits that run-of-the-mill yogurt bacteria would confer only in limited fashion.

Fair enough. So Activia yogurt might be good for your poop-chute.

At least this gives me some idea as to why the TV add was so hush-hush about the “difference” that I would feel if I ate this yogurt for 2 weeks. Yogurt and poo probably don’t mix well in the mind of the average consumer.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go eat some chocolate pudding and dance around my kitchen.

Will someone please help me sue the law school?

Go to any library on the UWO campus save the law school's, and near closing, you will hear a shrill tone followed by a public address indicating that the library will soon be closing for the night. Go to the law library at about the same time, and something completely different will happen.

You'd figure that being a library filled with books on what does and does not constitute irresponsible and tortious behaviour, the law library would get the closing ritual right (like all the other libraries) and not do anything that would create a potential liability in tort. Instead, the law library not only does something that carries the potential for an action in tort...it does something that begs for someone to sue them and here's what it is: Without any warning whatsoever, all the lights in the library go out at once and they stay off for about 10 seconds.

Hopefully, I'm not the only one who sees the risk here. Imagine someone who is walking in the stack stairwells (no windows in there) or even down the main lower-level stairs at night. Now picture them falling to their severe injury and/or death in darkness. No real stretch of the imagination there.

Perhaps the risk wouldn't be so bad if the library staff were to only flick the lights off briefly and turn them back on right away. That would be a slightly safer way to get across the message that the library is about to close. The full 10 second outage however, is just asking for trouble. Look at it this way: If someone is thick enough to need a full 10 seconds of darkness to figure out what is going on, then they would probably also be a likely candidate for continuing on their merry way without sight until they go bouncing down the stairs not so merrily. (Such a person would also be a likely candidate for having to wear a helmet everywhere, but since the law library apparently thinks that this means everyone who steps into its domain, I find such a suggestion highly distasteful.)

Since the law library is just begging for this to happen (and since I want to feel smarter than someone who should have to wear a helmet 24-7,) I am looking for volunteers to help me sue the law school in tort.* The plan is simple: I will need someone to wait at the bottom of the stairs just as the lights are about to go out. I will also need someone waiting with a chair-in-hand at the top of the stairs at the same time. I will wait at the bottom of the stairs with the aforementioned person. When the lights go out, the person at the top will hurl the chair down the stairs and the ensuing racket will hopefully sound good enough to pass for the sound of someone falling down the stairs. To complement this sound, I will shriek and scream and then proceed to lay myself out on the floor at the bottom of the stairs in mangled fashion and feign agony while the other person at the bottom makes sure that all the broken pieces of chair are removed from view. The person at the top of the stairs can also help with clean up by running down the stairs (carefully, I hope) to make sure that there isn't any debris left on any of the stairs.

I will sue the law school for one meelion dollars.

*If you have not yet concluded that this post is merely a joke and think that I actually mean to do this, then you need to put a helmet on...NOW!