Q: Dixit? I barely even know it!

A: I know I've already covered lame sex researchers this month, but then I found this Psychology Today story on the front page of reddit, and not only is it even lamer than the last one, but author Jay Dixit has the gaul to claim "the answers may surprise you." T.A.M.S.Y. will be the judge of that, Jay Dixit.

Mixed in with the pseudoscience and old news, though, was one stat that actually did manage to surprise me. If it's true. Which, how can it be?

But the truth is that HIV isn't nearly as easy to spread through heterosexual sex as many people think. According to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, men almost never get HIV from women. A healthy man who has unprotected sex with a non drug-using woman has a one in 5 million chance of getting HIV. If he wears a condom, the odds drop to one in 50 million. And though it's easier for men to infect women, the odds that an HIV-positive man will transmit the virus to a woman through sex are less than one in 1,000.

I know the American Medical Association is full of crackpots and everything, but this seems like a stretch, even for them. How were 2.7 million Sub-Saharan Africans infected with HIV in 2005 without having sex, like, 300 trillion times?

EARLIER: Why is Dr. Alfred Kinsey rolling in his grave?

Q: Aren't you forgetting something, Facebook?

A: I really enjoy Facebook's sponsored polls, for their delightful combination of the unscientific and the idiotic. Except for today's, which is riveting.

Sponsored by Durex, presumably.

Still, I'm sort of confused because my answer, "Getting syphilis," isn't even offered. So I'm sponsoring my own poll, right here on the T.A.M.S.Y. sidebar. Remember to come back Monday for the results!

(OH GOD!!!, that's exactly what Planned Parenthood says in all my night terrors.)

Q: LOLMURDER?

A: Everyone thinks their cat is smarter than everyone else's cat. But they're usually wrong. For instance, I had my cat, Jũniper, file my income tax returns, and now I'm under investigation by the IRS for trying to claim 30 kilos of nip as a business expense.

The only time a cat is actually as smart as you think it is is when it's possessed by Satan. Which is only like 10% of the time. Take Oscar, of Providence, RI's Steere House Nursing & Rehabilitation Center — please!

• Nursing home cat can sense death [Reuters]

When Oscar the Cat visits residents of the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island, the staff jumps into action -- Oscar can sense within hours when someone is about to die.

Raised at the nursing home since he was a kitten, Oscar often checks in on residents, but when he curls up for a visit, physicians and nursing home staff know it's time to call the family.

I wonder how those calls go.

NURSE: Hello, Mr. Johnson? We have some bad news about your father.

MR. JOHNSON: He's sexually harassing the staff again?

NURSE: No. Well, yes. But also the cat says he's going to die.

MR. JOHNSON: Oh God no. NO. WHY OSCAR WHY!?

NURSE: I'm very sorry to have to be the one to tell you what the cat says. Anyway, we might as well turn off his oxygen machine now.

MR. JOHNSON: THAT DARNED CAT!

Dr. Joan Teno, whose colleague at Brown interviewed Oscar wrote about Oscar in the Weekly World News New England Journal of Medicine, claims there is probably a non-Satan related explanation for all this:

"I don't think this is a psychic cat," said Teno. "I think there's probably a biochemical explanation," she said in a telephone interview.

While pets are often used to bring comfort to the elderly in nursing home settings, Oscar's talent is special, though not unexpected.

"That is such a cat thing to do," said Thomas Graves, a feline expert and chief of small animal medicine at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine.

That is such a chief of small animal medicine at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine thing to say.

All this just goes to show how unfair the world is. When 25 people die shortly after Oscar goes to visit them, he gets a fawning write-up in the New England Journal of Medicine. When the same thing happens to me, I get a bunch of detectives with warrants chasing me around asking invasive personal questions about my collection of rare anthrax strains.

That darned cat.

EARLIER: I can has musical theater.

Q: Oh Mary, can ah run ye hame? (or, What's the meaning of "Cod Liver Oil and Orange Juice"?)

A: Currently in constant rotation, between my iTunes and my brain, is "Cod Liver Oil and Orange Juice," an ode to drunken hookups performed in 1966 by Scottish folk-revivalist Hamish Imlach. Between the Scot slang and Imlach's Glaswegian accent, I barely know what half the song means, and yet I find it entirely irresistible.

Hamish Imlach
Cod Liver Oil and Orange Juice
Hamish Imlach [OOP], 1966

I'm still getting a bunch of hits for my post on the history and meaning of "For What It's Worth", so I thought it might be useful to do the same for "Cod Liver Oil..." But after Googling (and Urban Dictionary-ing) around for a while, I discovered that extensive annotations are already available. Thanks, the Internet!

According to those notes, the song evolved as a take-off of an American spiritual song, "Virgin Mary Had a Little Baby"; the Mary in "Cod Liver Oil" gets pregnant by entirely non-immaculate means in a slum basement. As may be obvious to Brits and/or old people, cod liver oil and orange juice was a concoction commonly served to promote the health of pregnant women and children during WWII. The cod-liver cocktail is still recommended for sufferers of arthritis, and still tastes terrible.


The song is one of many reasons to check out the wonderfully eclectic Transatlantic Story, a four-disc anthology compiling highlights from a British label, Transatlantic Records, that was a favorite of hippies and other drug addicts in the 60s and 70s. The set is apparently out of print, but it's available via Amazon Marketplace for a cool $20.88.

Q: Why are doctors going postal? Part one

A: Fox News surprised some people when Roger Friedman, their film critic, called Michael Moore's SiCKO "brilliant". Of course, Fox News being Fox News, they're still leaving room for some healthy fearmongering. As Think Progress reports, yesterday's Your World with Neil Cavuto featured National Review Online columnist Jerry Bowyer warning us how universal health care will get us all killed by terrorists. But there was a delicious irony to Bowyer's comments that Think Progress seems to have missed.

In the transcript, Bowyer argues that the bureaucracy of a public health care system would breed vulnerability:

A state run health care enterprise is bureaucratic, and I think the terrorists have shown over and over again, whether it’s dealing with INS or whether it’s dealing with airport security, they’re very good at gaming the system with bureaucracies. They’re very good at getting around bureaucracies.

(Let's ignore, for a moment, that the recent terrorist threat in London, allegedly orchestrated by foreigners within the national health care system there, was largely unthreatening. Or that every domestic "terrorist" plot we've busted up over the past six years eventually turned out to be either:

1. the pipe dream of incompetents; or
   
2. a work of fiction relayed by the Justice Department and/or Homeland Security; or
3. some horrific combination of the two.

Have you ignored those things yet? Shouldn't be too tough; most of the populace is already doing it.)

Assuming the terrorist threat is as real and present as the average Neil Cavuto viewer fears, Bowyer seems to be making a valid point. Government bureaucracy is a real problem. Things fall through the cracks here and there. So I guess universal health care could theoretically pose an opportunity for terrorists... right?

Except later in the same segment, Bowyer undermines his point into oblivion:

And if one of your guys is a jihadist, if one of your doctors is spending all the time online reading Osama bin Laden fatwas, someone’s going to notice that. But the National Health Service is more like the post office, you know there’s a lot of anonymity, it’s easy to hide in the bureaucracy.

Hmm, post office? What's this "post office" you speak of? A government bureaucracy that comes into regular contact with, and has access to the homes of, millions of average citizens every day? OMG THAT SOUNDS TERRIFYING. Thank God we're not socialists, or else we might start some kind of "post office" here in the United States. We'd all be killed within hours.

P.S.: If Bowyer thinks the current health care system isn't a crippled bureaucracy, he's apparently never been covered by Kaiser Permanente. I abandoned Kaiser a couple years ago, but from what I remember of the place, by now it must be like the Al Qaeda reading room over there.

P.P.S.: Before you remind me that jihadist mailmen did try to anthrax the bejeezus out of us in 2001 (but then forgot about their nefarious plan and took a nap), it might interest you to learn that all signs point to those attacks being carried out by a government scientist. Specifically, by a government scientist whose career stood to benefit greatly from anthrax hysteria.

Anyway, I'm sure the terrorists will be striking our mailboxes any minute now. Your new issue of TV Guide is probably coated with AIDS. So please remember to be frightened of everything.

Q: Why did the mainstream media fail to cover the "strange death" of the woman who filed a rape lawsuit against George W. Bush?

A: If you're looking for hot reading material, the popular social media site Reddit's always got plenty to offer — but one story in particular today has all the makings of a must-read. Sex! Crime! Death! Mystery! The world's most powerful man! And that's just the headline: The Strange Death of the Woman Who Filed a Rape Lawsuit Against Bush, by Jackson Thoreau.

Granted, the premise here is a bit, ahem, far-fetched: that George W. Bush and FBI agents may have drugged and raped a Houston woman, Margie Schoedinger, in 2002; and that the woman's purported suicide in 2003 may have been state-sanctioned murder. Nonetheless, the story was an immediate hit with Redditors, who voted it up near the top of the front page within a few hours of its being posted late last night.

I suspect that a major part of the story's popularity has less to do with President Bush drugging and raping women, per se, than it does the entirely plausible accusation that the media has failed us. As Jackson Thoreau (a pseudonym, btw) writes in his conclusion:

For all I know, maybe Schoedinger did kill herself. Maybe she dreamed up a lot of this stuff. But I don't know, am I "deranged" to think it's weird that in this mass-media, detailed-information age, so few people are even asking any questions about how a woman who filed a rape lawsuit against the president could be dead less than a year later?

It seems like a reasonable question. Unfortunately, it turns out there are a few teeny little details Thoreau neglected to mention...

The author makes a big deal out of the fact that only one other reporter, LeaAnne Klentzman of the Fort Bend Star, covered Schoedinger's original lawsuit. So why doesn't he include Klentzman's story among his links?

Is it maybe because — in his effort to convince you that his theories are totally plausible — he was hoping you won't notice that Schoedinger apparently suffered from a mental disorder not unlike paranoid schizophrenia?

Here are some of the other claims made by Schoedinger, revealed in Klentzman's piece, which Thoreau conveniently glosses over:

• George W. Bush raped her several times in her home in a suburb of Houston, beginning in Oct., 2000 — a few weeks before the election. Just to make sure this point is clear: In the heat of campaigning against Al Gore — a period during which he was being followed by reporters and camera men at all times — Bush was making secret trips to the Houston, for the purpose of raping this woman. He would continue to make secret rape trips, apparently even after he became President.
  
• The alleged victim did not actually remember any interactions with Bush during the period that he was raping her. In fact, she did not even know that she was being raped; she didn't find that out until later, when an unnamed FBI agent revealed to her that it was part of a large conspiracy organized by a racist organization (Schoedinger was black).
  
• The FBI agent also revealed to her that Bush was spying on her, and also continually raping her. And that the people who traveled with Bush, who were apparently also FBI agents, were also raping her. Thoreau does mention that, although he leaves out the detail that Bush and the FBI agents also may have raped her husband (but apparently he was drugged too, so he couldn't know for sure whether or not he had been repeatedly raped). The alleged victim was not sure how many times she had been raped, obviously, given than she didn't even know she was being raped until the FBI agent revealed it to her.
• "Section VII of the lawsuit states; 'Whether or not Plaintiff's husband was raped remains in question, as Plaintiff was drugged after she was raped and her husband was drugged before her rape. Plaintiff can only state that these men purported to be FBI agents raping her for the purpose of covering for how many times they had drugged her and allowed the Defendant to rape her in the same manner.'" Sorry, I was unable to figure out what any of that meant.
• The FBI and local police department refused to take any actions to protect the alleged victim. The police department, however, "conducted a background investigation into Plaintiff's past activities. In the end, this investigation yielded the following information: Plaintiff had seven dates, (which became seven lovers), had told no lies, committed no crimes, gotten 2 traffic tickets and dated George W. Bush as a minor." Why the police would have revealed such information to Schoedinger — or why their internal investigations are recorded in the form of brief nursery rhymes — remains unclear.
  

Gosh, all of that stuff seems kinda pertinent, doesn't it? Maybe Thoreau was going to mention it, but he forgot. Or maybe Thoreau is just part of the cover-up himself!!!

Still, before you get up on your high horse about how journalists are afraid to reveal the truth, Mr. Thoreau, maybe you should try to avoid being such a shitty journalist.

Back to Thoreau's original essay (riding high with 141 points, as of this writing, and still among Reddit's top stories):

But I remember being puzzled by Schoedinger's attitude after hanging up the phone. I wondered that if she had made up such a wild story, why she didn't come up with something a little less outlandish, in which people couldn't necessarily dismiss her as a kook...

Besides Pravda and Internet ezines - one of whom referred to Schoedinger as "deranged" - I haven't seen stories on this strange death of a woman who filed a rape lawsuit against the U.S. president and wound up dead nine months later. I can't say I'm surprised. Or even angry. I don't know what the hell to think. All I know is I was one of the last - if not the last - reporters to speak to Schoedinger, and she didn't sound "deranged" to me in July 2003. She sounded like someone who had gone through something weird and was trying to sort it out. She sounded like someone who wanted the truth to come out.

The truth? I'm beginning to suspect Jackson Thoreau can't handle the truth.

(And look, I don't mean to make light of this poor woman's mental illness. The fact that she was suffering from delusions clearly wasn't her fault, and isn't something to laugh about, especially considering she ended up taking her own life. But trying to suggest that those delusions deserve to be top news — and attempting to politicize her death as an assassination — is entirely laughable. Or, no, cryable maybe. I can't decide.)

(Anyway, maybe you should shut up about George Bush being a rapist and instead focus on how he's a shitty president who has done nothing positive for health care — or, say, for the treatment of the mentally ill.)

---

Redditors, I should note, are generally a discerning lot (and less susceptible to propaganda and yellow journalism than their peers at Digg). So I'll forgive them for this lil' misstep.

And hey, perhaps it's not so surprising if the story is striking a chord, at this particular moment in American history. Strip away the specific accusations, and consider the underlying themes fueling the article itself:

• Blanket distrust of governmental authority.
• Loss of faith in a justice system corrupted.
• Disgust for the mainstream media, and its distorted sense of perspective.
  
• A nightmarish characterization of a president whose dangerous actions seem completely disconnected from a sense of rationality or consequence — and who will go to any lengths, no matter how destructive or criminal, to hide his own misdeeds.
• A world defined by lies, selfishness, cowardice and disregard for human life.
  

If those concepts sound familiar, it's probably because they're your inner monologue.

Q: Really, Los Angeles Times? Did you have to go with "explodes"?

A: And don't even think about trying to pin this one on Brian Grazer.

LA TIMES: Rate of drug-resistant gonorrhea explodes

Q: Why am I crying tears of liquid magnesium?

A: During a very dark period of my life, I tried to kill myself. I took every pill in the bottle.

Unfortunately, the only bottle in the medicine cabinet was Flintstones Vitamins.

I shouldn't say "unfortunately." It really was a fortunate turn of events. Not only because I didn't die, but also because it turned out that the only reason I had been so depressed was my undiagnosed scurvy.

But taking an entire bottle of children's vitamins will do strange things to a man-child. I had a strange series of visions — some of which I videotaped, and then posted on YouTube.



Mmmmm... Dino wins indeed.

---

NOTE: This joke might be funnier if I didn't turn out to be the one millionth person to make it.

Whatever. Today's T.A.M.S.Y. is sponsored by Winston Cigarettes, because nothing will make you forget about your scurvy faster than lung cancer.

Q: What's the preferred method of birth control for the dad from "Cheaper By the Dozen"?

A: Uh, probably the rhythm method. But if he ever decided to switch things up, he'd certainly appreciate the time efficiency of Pronto condoms, part of the fight against AIDS in South Africa.



Because, like, the dad character really liked things that saved time. You know, in the book and stuff. Yeah, sometimes it's hard to think up titles for these posts.

Hey, another excellent way to protect yourself from AIDS is to move to Cleveland, interact with no women, and blog a lot.