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- If you go on a diet for 100 days and lose weight, you’ll still probably gain it all back within the year.
- Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards, J-Lo and Chris Judd, Drew Berrymore and Tom Green, Shannen Doherty and Ashley Hamilton, Shannen Doherty and Rick Salomon, Carmen Electra and Dennis Rodman, and Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson were all married for more than 100 days and look how those unions turned out.
- Six weeks after the Second Gulf War started, President Bush said “Mission Accomplished.” That was six years ago.
- President Bush scored a 62% approval rating for his first 100 days, went on to score the highest approval rating ever for a sitting president, but then ended up disgraced and hated, with the lowest approval rating ever when he finally left office.
- During the first 100 days of the 134-day OJ Simpson trial, the prosecution thought they’d win.
- Same thing with Phil Spector’s first trial.
- Every few years, the world’s top grape growers look at the way the harvest is shaping up during the first 100 days and herald it as “the best ever” until everything’s ruined by an unexpected frost.
- Anne Boleyn got off to a strong start as Queen of England, and both Marie Antoinette and husband Louis XVI survived the first few years of the French Revolution, but all three eventually lost their heads.
- “Seinfeld” was almost canceled after its first season.
- It’s rumored that Thomas Edison’s first 6000 light bulbs didn’t work.
- Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, Dan Aykroyd and Donna Dixon, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett, Michelle Pfeiffer and David E. Kelley, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw, and Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates are all still married, despite dire predictions in their first 100 days.
- Post-it notes were invented in 1974, but didn’t catch on until 16 years later.
Scores of Americans are protesting taxes by holding “Tea Parties” in dozens of cities across the country, but what kind of tea are they serving? The problem is that just about every kind of tea has something that makes it a bad choice. For example:
- Black tea — it would seem to be a good choice, except that it’s likely to be Lipton Black Tea, which is owned by Unilever, which is based in Europe, and it just doesn’t seem very patriotic for Americans to denounce their own country’s tax system with a foreign product.
- Green tea — it, too, would seem to be a good choice because it’s so rich in antioxidants, except that singling anything out because it’s “rich” is what protestors are protesting, because that’s exactly what a progressive tax system does: singles out those who make more and demands that they pay more.
- Chamomile tea — clearly too calming, since the last thing protesters want is to be so relaxed they don’t have enough rage and frustration to march and chant “Give me liberty, don’t give me debt!”
- Starbucks Chai tea — easy to get, but considering its already-high price includes an 8% or so sales tax, it would seem to go against the spirit of the protest to pay some of the very taxes protestors are protesting against.
- Herbal tea — as “Tea Parties” have been carefully orchestrated by conservatives (to appear spontaneous), anything “herbal” would obviously be way too New Age.
- Darjeeling tea —this is bad because maybe our tax rate wouldn’t be so high if all those jobs that have been outsourced to India, where this tea comes from, hadn’t whittled away at the U.S. tax base?
- Genmai Cha tea — the problem here is that this type of tea was created by peasants who were trying to make their money go farther, and since peasants don’t pay taxes (and sometimes leech off those who do) this tea clearly sends the wrong message.
- English Breakfast tea — the historical symmetry is nice, but also troubling, since the government the original Sons of Liberty attacked with their Boston Tea Party was England, which then spent the next hundred years going from being the #1 country in the world with a huge empire to what it is today, and even the most ardent anti-tax conservatives probably don’t want to see that happen to the U.S.
- Rooibos tea — too hard to pronounce.
- Lapsang Souchong tea — not just foreign, but Chinese, which is even worse since part of the reason U.S. taxes have to be as high as they are is to pay the interest on the $2 trillion we owe the Chinese. Plus, it’s also known as Russian Caravan Tea, and it’s likely the mostly conservative protesters still hate those commie bastards.
All of which leaves Long Island Iced Tea, which isn’t even tea but a near-100% alcohol cocktail, which probably makes sense since you’d have to be drunk to think protesting will do any good.
First peanuts, now pistachios.
It seems like salmonella is everywhere these days, making a lot of people equate eating a handful of nuts with playing a game of Russian roulette. But if you look at statistics, you realize you have just as much to fear from a cold winter’s day:
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U.S. Deaths Per Year
Salmonella
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600 |
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Which means all those nut products you emptied out of the cabinets “just to be safe” are just as dangerous as walking out to the trash in bare feet and a t-shirt to throw them away.
It’s clear that worry served us well in our hunter-gatherer days when that rustle in the bushes really might have been something deadly, but what we seem to have now is the reaction without the rustle — we worry there might be a rustle and if there is, it might be something that could hurt us.
The problem is that “what it might be” is usually wrong — as anyone who’s ever googled a health symptom and then rushed into the emergency room knows:
YOU: So… how long do I have?
DOCTOR: To live?
YOU: Yes.
DOCTOR: I have no idea.
YOU: But I just read this particular flesh-eating virus is usually fatal within 72 hours!
DOCTOR: It is.
YOU: And?
DOCTOR: You have poison oak.
YOU: Oh.
Somewhere along the line we seem to have lost our perspective on worry. Which probably explains why more people are afraid of being attacked by sharks — which kill an average of 2 people per year in the U.S. — than they are of equally strange, but much more likely causes of death like elevators and escalators, lightening, bees, dogs and even Bambi:
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U.S. Deaths Per Year
Elevators and escalators
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30 |
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Bee, wasp and hornet stings
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82 |
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In our defense, part of the problem is that we’re constantly reminded of the many things we have to worry about, with dozens of freaky possibilities brought to our attention every day by a 24/7 news cycle that loves to spotlight the odd and the unusual (without mentioning it’s also “the highly unlikely”).
Leaving us in a position of rushing off to the ER in a panic because we’re worried we might be one of the few hundred people killed each decade by the deadly whatever the Evening News just warned us about, when what we should be worried about is being one of the few hundred people killed each day by medical errors.
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