A lot of the public doesn’t realize how sophisticated the [pharmaceutical industry's] marketing techniques have become, really over the last 10 years… Essentially when a pharmaceutical company gets FDA approval for a drug, their marketing department can assure their bosses that they are going to be able to sell the drug, really whether the drug is effective or not.
Dr. Daniel Carlat, psychiatrist
Fresh Air, July 13, 2010

Emphasis in the final sentence is mine.

Dr. Carlat’s current book is Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry – A Doctor’s Revelations about a Profession in Crisis. He was previously the author of a 2007 New York Times Magazine article entitled “Dr. Drug Rep,” about his experience being paid by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals to sing the praises of its anti-depressant Effexor to his colleagues; he also talks about it at length in the Fresh Air interview.

Carlat is a psychiatrist in private practice in Newburyport, Massachusetts, an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine, and the publisher of The Carlat Psychiatry Report. Oh, and he’s also a blogger. How he is all of these things at once I cannot fucking imagine.

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All I did was plug in text from this post and this post, and it was definitively confirmed…

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Hey, Dr. Karl Hufbauer – you and your C+ dismissal of my Freshman Billy Budd paper can kiss my baby tuckoo!

What can I say? I try to keep C&B more on the Dubliners/Portrait of the Artist end of things than going all Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake up in here. Read the rest of this entry »

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clean-dirt-wanted

The mindset represented by this sign is what I mean when I refer to the Orange County city of Irvine as a soulless, planned-community hellscape. If I hadn’t spent 90% of my waking hours at the area’s one oasis of culture, the UCI Fine Arts village, I’d never have stayed there for four years.

Full disclosure: I took this picture in 1993, a little bit before the advent of the cameraphone. Still, I think any reasonable person will agree that it qualifies as a folly. This little roadside want ad stayed up for at least a week or two, which gave me plenty of time to remember to throw my camera in my bag before the next time I drove by.

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Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be stalkers. Especially if your babies are dumber than a box of rocks.

Via the L.A. Times:

A trial began this week in the case of a man accused of stalking and making threatening phone calls to a Huntington Beach police detective.

Brian Dopler, 27, is charged with felony criminal threats and stalking of the detective between Jan. 8 and Feb. 10, according to the Orange County district attorney’s office.

Look, I understand that stalking isn’t exactly a logic-driven crime… but if you can’t at least pick your spots better than that, you really should get out less often. Read the rest of this entry »

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How ubiquitous are cover versions of Beatles songs? They’re commonplace enough to make me wonder whose songs bands used to cover before the Beatles existed. That’s the price you pay for revolutionizing popular music — every song you ever record is covered by everybody under the sun.

For this “Got You Covered” post series, I’m setting the bar higher for Beatles covers than for those of other artists. I’d include one only if it is in some way surprising and unexpected despite being a Beatles cover.

the-bobsThat’s where The Bobs come in. The group originated in 1981 when a San Francisco singing telegram company went out of business, unemploying Matthew Stull and Gunnar Madsen 1° of separation...» . Needing a bass singer, the lone respondent to their classified ad was Richard Greene. At some point the group named themselves The Bobs, the basis of which was the dog show acronym meaning “Best of Breed”; nevertheless, each member took on the middle name “Bob,” apparently just for shits and giggles. The group soon completed itself with the addition of Janie Bob Scott. Read the rest of this entry »

…whose sister was in musicals with the author of this blog for a couple of summers later that decade.Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.4

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