#799 X-Snooze

I’ve never really appreciated the concept of snooze, and its technological ally the snooze alarm. When it comes to waking up in the morning, it’s either do it or don’t—and don’t is not an option.
I mean really, if I went to the trouble of setting an alarm, chances are I had a reason. That reason is just as important when the alarm goes off as it was when I clearheadedly set it.
At some point in my maturity, maybe it was the actual point I arrived in maturity, that logic became unassailable to my conscious, my unconscious, my subconscious and my dream avatar.
Alarm goes off, get up. Groan if you like, be grumpy if you like, but get the heck up and start your day. No one’s requiring you to embrace the damn thing, but roll out.
One of my kids was an expert in waking-up denial. He had two alarm clocks, one near his bed and one across the room. He also had a remarkable ability to be totally dead to the world when they went off.
His clocks succeeded in waking the rest of us very effectively.
So it is I get amused by alarm clock technology. The new ones on the market illustrate the snooze extremes. One clock has and infrared motion sensor. Wave an arm in its direction and it goes into snooze mode. Great, you can be lazy even when you’re sleeping.
One escalates its attempts to wake you, starting with an annoying buzzer, then flashing a strobe light. If that doesn’t work a vibrating attachment will force you out of bed.
And this one I like best: It’s called Clocky. Clocky has big balloon tires and runs away from you. At alarm time, Clocky rolls off your nightstand and “beeps and tweets like R2D2” until you catch it. The chase across your bedroom wakes you.
Unless, like my son, you sleep through it.
This is the same kid who could always rouse himself at an ungodly hour on a weekend to play paintball.
It’s like alcoholics but with slumber.
You can’t quit sleeping until you want to.
America, ya gotta love it.

#798 X-Results

Recently there have been a lot of scandals about Big Pharma faking results. Drugs killing people and stuff, tests done by the companies suppressing negative information, you know, big business gone bad.
Some of us fear big government, some of us fear big business, I’m just afraid of big. When people, customers, and taxpayers get reduced to statistical blips, bad things happen.
In any event, there was this story about a drug that was supposed to be given to people with strokes. The idea was it would bust up potential clots and cause less disability and death. The drug was tested and found to significantly reduce disability and death in post stroke patients.
Doctors started using it. People started dying.
Guess what? The drug was, by design, never tested on severe stroke victims. So the study results naturally reflected better outcomes since it studied better beginnings. A Band-Aid is going to work a lot better on a scratch than a six-inch gaping gash.
The other thing the study did was show results using an accepted technique known as Combination End Point reporting. And interestingly, this method depends on semantics and not science.
Specifically, the tortuous reasoning one can employ with the word “and.”
Remember when I said earlier that this drug significantly reduced disability and death. Well actually it reduced disability in a lot of mild stroke patients. It only killed a couple of them. But it reduced disability in far more of them than it killed.
So the drug company could truthfully say that the combined results of the two end points—death and disability—was that when both numbers were taken together, the drug reduced disability and death.
That’s like saying that statistically, the headlights on your car reduce darkness and your battery going dead.
Combined end points leave lots of drugs on the market. Like certain cholesterol drugs that reduced cholesterol but had no effect on coronary arterial plaque build-up.
The drug company could say the drug lowered cholesterol and plaque together.
One doctor put it best after a number of people died:
“Dying with corrected cholesterol is not a successful outcome.”
America, ya gotta love it.

#797 X-Sense

The other day I was thumbing through a coupon catalogue for a hunting and fishing store.
I like the term “thumbing through.” It often refers to page turning. Yet I actually “finger through” a book or catalogue. Index finger on the top corner of the page, or at the very most a finger and thumb pinching sort of turn. I don’t remember ever exclusively using my thumb to turn a page.
Some of the outdoor products this place offered made no sense. One of them was this durable full-feature golf bag, with lots of pockets, back straps and extendable legs so it can stand on its own.
What’s a golf bag doing in an outdoor store that purports to specialize in hunting and fishing, you say? Maybe occasionally you have to combine hunting and golfing. Those pesky deer have been cropping a little too much of the golf course landscaping. The rough just isn’t as rough as it should be.
When you happen on a deer on the middle fairway, why, this bag’s just big enough to hold a different kind of iron. A shooting iron. Fire off that shot to the green and fire another one in the deer’s spleen.
That explains the other feature that first drew my eyes to this odd golf bag. It’s done in camo. That’s right, a camo golf bag. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why it would be necessary to have your golf bag blend into the scenery. Shooting through the deer hazard had to be the reason.
Then it occurred to me—early morning stealth golfing. Camo bags… Camo golf outfit...... No greens fees!
But I’m still wondering about this other product I saw in the catalogue. It’s called a sit-on-top style Kayak. Excuse me, isn’t that a canoe?
The picture shows this shallow plastic shell. No tight hole to wedge your body into. And no tight hole to hold you in when you hit the class four rapids.
I have a suggestion on how to use the 50 dollars the coupon saves you.
Buy a life vest.
America, ya gotta love it.