Category: Musings

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“Hey, they should be able to get us back, right?”

NASA has confirmed today that Neil Armstrong has passed away, marking the end of his decades-long struggle to prove that he has indeed been alive since his first trip into space on the Titan II on March 16, 1966.

Numerous people at in the space program have claimed that they participated in the cover-up. Buzz Aldrin went so far as to say that whenever engineers contacted them in space, “I would mimic Neil’s voice as well as I could to tell everyone we were fine.”

Armstrong had always pointed to the fact that he had successfully passed every physical a doctor had administered year after year, but finally decided it was time to pass on.

Because Armstrong has chosen not to arbitrate against the determination that he has finally died, NASA is stripping him of all his famous accomplishments, including his presence on Apollo 11 and his world-famous quote upon touching the surface of the moon: “That’s one small step for man, one giant step for mankind.”

The official first words spoken on the moon will now be Aldrin’s asking, “Hey, they should be able to get us back, right?”

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Would you like some coffee with your sugar?

I hate coffee.

Okay, maybe “hate” is a little strong. It’s not like my grandmother choked to death one night, then during the autopsy, they found a bunch of whole coffee beans lodged in her throat, leading me to fly to South America so I could wreak havoc across the Colombian coffee bean fields in a massive and violent rage of despair. I just really dislike the flavor.

I’ve tried various kinds and they all tasted yucky. I once showed up late to a picnic and almost everyone had finished eating. One person pointed to about two-thirds of a chocolate cake that hadn’t been eaten and said, “It’s all yours!” My eyes lit up and I began gorging myself… for three bites. Half the people who’d tried it couldn’t taste the coffee inside, but it was enough to spoil my appetite for a chocolate cake, so… yeah. I really dislike the flavor.

Consequently, my caffeine source of preference is Mountain Dew. Go ahead, judge all you want, Judgey McJudgerson. It helps me stay focused when I’m studying and stay awake when I’m in class (the tired head bob is really awkward and really noticeable when you’re in a class of 12 people). And the sugary taste doesn’t hurt, either.

In class last week, the person sitting next to me saw my Mountain Dew and mentioned a show that revealed in each can, there are [blank] packets of sugar. (I don’t remember the number, but I did my own research later that night…) I was surprised, then took a big gulp from the can. Yummy.

So here’s what I found upon further research via Google and the can of Dew I was drinking—if these numbers are wrong, feel free to correct me in the comments section:

There are 4 grams of sugar in a packet of sugar.
There are 46 grams of sugar in a can of Mountain Dew.
Therefore, the sugar content in one can of Mountain Dew is 11.5 packets of sugar.

Since I was looking at sugar content, I decided to look at some caffeine content as well:

There are 54 mg of caffeine in a 12 oz can of Mountain Dew.
There are 260 mg of caffeine in a tall coffee (12 oz) at Starbucks. (Sorry, forgot to write down the web address where I found that number…)
Therefore, the caffeine content in a tall coffee at Starbucks is 4.8 cans of Mountain Dew.

According to these numbers, if I ever find a way to stand the taste of coffee, going to Starbucks and getting a proportional amount of sugar to caffeine as Mountain Dew means I’d have to order: “Tall coffee, no cream and 55 packets of sugar, please.”

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Insecure about the size of your man boobs?

Recently, someone put up a new ad on a billboard that asks drivers a simple question:

“Got man boobs?”

For those who do, they can visit the website manboobsMN.com (the creativity that must have required is awe-inspiring). That site sends you immediately to a page for what?

A plastic surgeon.

That in itself isn’t all that surprising. I imagine a lot of you figured out the answer on your own. What you might not have figured out is the specialty of “Dr. Joe” (and yes, the Welcome page shows his name in quotation marks):

Breast augmentation.

“By performing several hundred breast augmentations each year, ‘Dr. Joe’ has perfected his surgical technique to give his patients beautiful results and a much easier recovery. He speaks internationally on breast augmentation and has published in peer review journals on breast implants and breast augmentation.”

There’s also a list of other available services like facial fat grafting and eyelash growth. (Don’t ask me if he’s injecting saline or silicone into people’s eyelashes because I really don’t want to know.) Gynecomastia—male breasts reduction—is ninth on that list, so at least the billboard isn’t blatant false advertising, but seriously, if I’m a man whose boobs are too big, would I really want to consult a plastic surgeon who specializes in making them bigger?

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In the name of SCIENCE!

In the midst of people complaining about NBC’s wretched coverage of the Olympics and my emotional investment in The Glass House while Steph was on the show, I neglected to write about something important that happened yesterday: the Curiosity rover landed on Mars. SCIENCE!

Twitter did me a great service that evening because I had completely forgotten about the landing, but because of all the tweets people were sending out, I logged onto the NASA website in time to watch the “seven minutes of terror”, the time between Curiosity entering Mars’ atmosphere and its landing on the surface. There was increasing applause for every step of the process (“This is happening as expected”) and a lot of cheering and hugging when it touched down. It was pretty intense and definitely an emotional moment.

So as a personal favor to me, take a breath and remember that the Olympic Games are just that: games. The participants are extraordinary athletes who have invested years of their lives working towards this one event. However, if you keep things in perspective, what they’re doing doesn’t seem nearly as impressive. As far as I know, Michael Phelps has yet to swim in outer space.

A lot of people probably don’t know and/or appreciate what just happened: extraordinary scientists, programmers and engineers invested years of their lives working towards sending the Curiosity rover to Mars. What they also might not know and/or appreciate is that people can use NASA’s website to follow what it’s doing, where it’s going and whether martians get pissed that we’re invading their neighborhood and blow it up. SCIENCE!

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Mars knows its target market’s eating habits

Remember the good ol’ days when junk food tried to make itself seem healthier? To compete against stuff that’s actually good for you, they’d play with the nutritional facts a little bit. They’re not statistics—the numbers aren’t flexible—but the producers would decrease the serving size. Lower amount of food per serving = lower amount of bad stuff in the nutritional facts = junk food is on the verge of being good for you!

Most people know that’s a load of crap now. Looking at the servings and the serving size gives you a much better idea of how much sugar, sodium and empty calories you’ll be chugging down in a 20-oz bottle of Mountain Dew. (I don’t care what Pepsico says, I’ve never thought, “Gosh, that’s enough for me, maybe I should put the second half of this bottle in the fridge until later.”)

Technically, Mars adjusted the serving size on this package of 3 Musketeers bars as well. It’s a “Snack Time Pack” that has six fun-size bars in it. Imagine how small those numbers are, right? So I looked at the nutritional facts and saw that they were really high. “190 calories? 20% of the daily recommended amount of saturated fat?!” Then I looked at the serving size: 3 bars. Two servings per container.

Mars isn’t concerned with how nutritional these 3 Musketeers bars aren’t because they know that once a person pops one into his mouth, the most likely way he’ll burn off some of those calories is immediately ripping open the other five wrappers.