Schmidt Sting Pain Index

• 1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
• 1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch.
• 1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
• 2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
• 2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
• 2.x Honey bee and European hornet: Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.
• 3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
• 3.0 Paper wasp: Caustic and burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
• 4.0 Pepsis wasp: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.
• 4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.

The leading brand Vitaminwater contains 33 grams of sugar per bottle, and its maker Coca-Cola is being sued by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The suit alleges that the marketing of the drink as a "healthful alternative" to soda is deceptive and in violation of Food and Drug Administration guidelines. The consumer group states that "according to CSPI nutritionists, the 33 grams of sugar in each bottle of Vitaminwater do more to promote obesity, diabetes and other health problems than the vitamins in the drinks do to perform the advertised benefits listed on the bottles". Coca-Cola dismissed the suit as "ridiculous," on the grounds that "no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking Vitaminwater was a healthy beverage" and an attempt by the group to increase its readership.

A 2009 study found that "Americans now get nearly 25 percent of their calories from liquids."

Also, the NCAA has banned a bunch of Vitaminwater flavors because certain ingredients are on the official "banned substances" list.

:-)

Michael Collins, Astronaut

“Imagine a spacecraft of the future, with a crew of a thousand ladies, off for Alpha Centauri, with 2,000 breasts bobbing beautifully and quivering delightfully in response to every weightless movement . . . and I am the commander of the craft, and it is Saturday morning and time for inspection, naturally.”

(quoted from his 1974 autobiography, Carrying the Fire)

Rapper's Delight

Chip Shearin said in a 2010 interview that at age 17, he was visiting a friend in New Jersey. The friend knew Sylvia Robinson, who needed some musicians for various recordings, including "Rapper's Delight". Shearin's job on the song was to play the bass for 15 minutes straight, with no mistakes, something no one had ever done before. Shearin described the session this way:

The drummer and I were sweating bullets because that's a long time. And this was in the days before samplers and drum machines, when real humans had to play things. ... Sylvia said, 'I've got these kids who are going to talk real fast over it; that's the best way I can describe it.'

Numeric Indicator eXperimental No. 1

The absence of timetravelers in our midst strikes me as extremely ominous.

Human Biological Clock

Unsettles me low-down

It turns daytime into all the time, and me into a jeniuz

In another study, caffeine was added to rat neurons in vitro. The dendritic spines (a part of the brain cell used in forming connections between neurons) taken from the hippocampus (a part of the brain associated with memory) grew by 33% and new spines formed. After an hour or two, however, these cells returned to their original shape.

Jeanne Calment - d. 122 years old

At age 85, she took up fencing, and at 100, she was still riding a bicycle. She was reportedly neither athletic, nor fanatical about her health.

She smoked until the age of 117, only five years before her death. Calment smoked from the age of 21 (1896), though according to an unspecified source, Calment smoked no more than two cigarettes per day.

She ascribed her longevity and relatively youthful appearance for her age to olive oil, which she said she poured on all her food and rubbed onto her skin, as well as a diet of port wine, and ate nearly one kilo of chocolate every week.