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As some of you may recall, back on February 4th I put up a post which began:
It’s February 4th, assholes. Do you still actually think the city garbage men are going to pick up your Christmas tree?
Why mention it again, lo these many months later? Yes, I’m afraid so:
Tags: adages, apathy, assholes, Christmas, ethics, Hanlon's razor, L.A., malapropisms, Ockham's razor, Sarah Palin, words, wtf?
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.
Tags: anti-depressants, Big Pharma, Fresh Air, health care, medicine, NPR, psychiatry, sales-driven bullshit
My friend Julie and her cohorts at LKG Productions are at it again. Their music video (embedded below) is in some kind of “who can get the most views” competition on atom.com. I hope I’m not posting it here too late to help them, because it’s funny and they deserve to win stuff. Even if I am too late, at least they still have an inside track to making my eventual “Best Web Videos of 2010″ list (which I’m sure means the world to them). Update»
Here are Julie Wittner, Ryan Smith, and Johnny Markoudakis in WWJD a Music Video, directed by Kim Evey.
Ms. Wittner and Ms. Evey may already be on your radar screen if you have notched any of the 25 million plus views of their giggle-inducing YouTube series 2 Hot Girls in the Shower. Yes, it does sound like pØ®n, but it doesn’t stray beyond PG-13 range. It will shortly take up residence here in the C&B blogroll.
Tags: blogroll, Christianity, comedy, consumerism, friends, guns, Jesus, music videos, religion, satire, YouTube
Genealogy is a hobby similar to fantasy sports: the most interesting thing in the world is your own data/team, and the most boring thing in the world is hearing about someone else’s. With that in mind, I’m only bringing the subject up here on the blog because I found an angle that may be good for a few cheap laughs. That’s me, keeping it classy.
The silly aspect is that the 17th-18th century New England Puritans from whom I descend often gave their children first names that, suffice it to say, didn’t quite catch on. They’re strange or comical by present-day standards — but then again, we have been known to indulge in some creative nomenclature ourselves.
After the jump are a few of my favorites; let it never be said that my ancestors can’t take a joke (although I’ve found that dead people tend to be pretty good about that).
Salmon Treat (1673 — 1746) of Preston, Connecticut; first cousin 9 times removed. The man for whom the tidbits you feed to your cat are named.
Cornelis Lambertsen Cool (c. 1585 — bef. Dec 30, 1643) of Gowanus (in Brooklyn), Long Island, New Netherlands Colony; 10th great-grandfather. A misnomer if ever I heard one. I don’t claim to speak for the rest of my family, but I have never been one of the Cool People.
Experience Strong (born c. 1650) of Northampton, Massachusetts; 8th great-grandaunt. She married Zerubbabel Filer, who probably worked his whole life to take the edge off his own first name. Her married name of Experience Strong Filer only compounds the hilarity. These two take the Couples Award, hands down. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: colonial America, Connecticut, genealogy, names, New Amsterdam, New England, New Jersey, New Netherlands, New York, puritans
You remember Richard Clarke. He was the counter-terrorism adviser to Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and (briefly) George W. Bush. He’s the guy who implored the second Bush Administration in January of 2001 to keep a close eye on Al Qaeda, and move forward with measures to that effect which were still in place from the recently departed Clinton administration. In response, the Bush administration blew off Clarke’s warnings and demoted him to non-cabinet level status.
photo: Aude/Wikimedia Commons
He was later made Special Adviser to the President on cybersecurity, but resigned from the G.W. Bush administration in 2003. A year later Clarke testified before the 9/11 Commission; the Bush White House, knowing that his testimony would reveal their fuck-ups, undertook one of their trademark Karl Rove-style campaigns of character assassination. Some would disagree, but I believe an objective eye would conclude that the smear tactics damaged the Bush administration’s credibility far more than Clarke’s.
These days, Clarke runs a security consulting firm and serves as an adjunct lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. This past Monday he was interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air, principally about his new book Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It. brief digression» After describing the serious threat posed by internet-based attacks, Clarke had this to say about the present state of our defenses against such attacks:
CLARKE: …Now, who’s defending us? Who’s defending those pipelines and those railroads and the banks? The Obama Administration’s answer pretty much is, “You’re on your own.” [The Pentagon's] Cyber Command will defend our military. Homeland Security will someday have the capability to defend the rest of the civilian government — it doesn’t today. But everybody else will have to do their own defense.
That is a formula that will not work in the face of sophisticated threats.
GROSS: When you’re saying everybody else is on their own, does that include the electricity grid, the power grid, banking…? Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Al Qaeda, books, Bush, energy, Obama, Oklahoma City bombing, Richard Clarke, Tea Party, teabaggers, terrorism, Terry Gross
If this is your first visit to C&B you may be wondering, “Who the hell is this guy, and why does he have a blog?” It’s a reasonable question, so I’ve dedicated an entire page to answering it: check out About.
Cheek and Bluster is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Some of you may have noticed that comments on recent posts have gone missing. If you haven’t noticed, I sure as hell have. Posts since November 2009 that had comments still say that they do in the meta-link at the top of the post (e.g. “2 comments,” etc.), but those comments just don’t appear at [...]
As some of you may recall, back on February 4th I put up a post which began:
Why mention it again, lo these many months later? Yes, I’m afraid so:
Don’t say it.
But you-
Don’t even say it, because I know.
[in unison]
Oh my God, I thought you had quit blogging.
Oh my God, I thought you had quit blogging.
Told you I knew.
Of course you knew, we’re the same person. What, d’you think you’re cool because you can read your own mind?
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 [...]
Chelsea Cain
Assaf Cohen
Amy Stewart
…nwood…
2 Hot Girls in the Shower
Tara Dublin
Konradical
Life 2.0
Lucrezia's Delight
Memoirs of a Barista
The Moving Target
Toby Sterling
