Isegoria

For its 10th anniversary, Slate is republishing some old favorites, like Seth Stevenson’s Extroverted like me, the story of his experiment with Paxil to overcome his shyness:

Day 35: Drinking a lot, several nights a week. Liquor + Paxil = Wow!

Pre-Paxil, I was a social drinker. Now I’m walking a mile in someone else’s brain chemistry. I can see why some of you like to drink so much, maybe even need to drink so much. It’s fun for me now, in a way it just wasn’t before. On liquor and Paxil, strangers mean novelty, not fear. Group conversations are a chance to play raconteur, not a chance to smile weakly and shut up.

And it’s so much better than sobriety. Sober for me these days means extreme detachment. Movies, once a favorite hobby, do nothing for me now. Likewise books — I just don’t connect with the plots or characters. I can’t recall laughing (while sober) in the past couple of weeks. I’m never sad, but never happy. Why wouldn’t I drink?

Day 38: I spent the first semester of my freshman year of college in a haze. During the Southern California evenings, I often played tennis, pulling bong hits between games. I distilled homemade rum in my dorm room, using Sterno cans and plastic tubing. My roommate grew six ounces of weed in our closet. It was more fun than I’d ever had in my life. The day after I got home for Christmas break, I decided to transfer.

It occurs to me that the past month has been a bit like that semester. I’m living the unexamined life. It’s fantastic. I’m about ready to transfer.

From Restaurant staff treated for burns:

Mr Mingotti, 63, said: “It started at the end of May. At 3am the two chefs were in hospital with burns.”

The following night the same thing happened. Head chef Sarah Dickinson, 29, from Dalston, said: “When we were finishing work our skin was red and inflamed. I would go to bed and about two hours later it would start.

“It was a pain in the back of my eyes. It was awful.”

Eye specialists were baffled. They asked if she had been welding or on a sunbed and investigated whether it could be an extreme allergic reaction.

“They took a closer look at my eyes and saw they were blistered. I was screaming.”

Mr Mingotti added: “The hospital asked us to bring in all the chemicals we were using. They were sent for analysis in Belgium. Then the dishwasher stuff was sent away. Everything came back clear.”

They also checked for carbon dioxide and a gas leak.

Then health and safety officers asked to see the blue fly-repellant light bulbs.

Mr Mingotti said: “He took the lot away. What we had wasn’t fly killer lights, they were sunbed lights. Twenty-four hours a day we had sunbed light in the kitchen. Every time we were going in front of it we were frying.”

This is better than the Madonna’s image on a tortilla. Tailing a monkey man in search of healing powers:

Thousands of people are flocking to an impoverished Indian village in eastern West Bengal state to worship a man they believe possesses divine powers because he climbs up trees in seconds, gobbles up bananas and has a “tail.”

Devotees say 27-year-old villager Chandre Oraon is an incarnation of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman — worshipped by millions as a symbol of physical strength, perseverance and devotion.

“He climbs up trees, behaves like a monkey and is a strict vegetarian, but he is no god and his condition is just a congenital defect,” says Bhushan Chakraborty, the local medical officer.

Tucked away in a hamlet in Banarhat, over 400 miles north of Kolkata, the state capital, devotees wait for hours to see or touch Oraon’s 13-inch tail, believing that it has healing powers.

Doctors said the “tail” — made up of some flesh but mostly of dark hair — was simply a rare physical attribute.

“It is a congenital anomaly, but very rarely do we find such cases,” B. Ramana, a Kolkata-based surgeon, told Reuters.

The Venture Bros. Season 2 Promo heralds the new season, starting June 25. Go Team Venture!

Avoid breast cancer. Sleep in the dark…:

Repeated studies have shown that night-shift workers — such as nurses or air stewardesses — are up to 60 per cent more likely to get the disease. Another found that women who stayed up late two or three times a week were similarly susceptible. Conversely totally blind women are half as likely to succumb to it.

A recent study implies that a good night’s sleep fights cancer:

In the new study, scientists grafted human breast cancer tumours on to rats and infused them with blood taken from women during the day, in the early hours of the morning, and after being exposed to light at night. The blood taken in darkness slowed the growth of the cancers by 80 per cent, but the blood taken after exposure to light accelerated it.

Somehow I missed this Colbert Report CNN 666 segment — I must have been getting a glass of water or something — but it’s a real nod to Colbert’s geekier fans. Enjoy.

More evidence for the hygiene hypothesis, from Rat study shows dirty better than clean:

[T]he wild mice and rats had as much as four times higher levels of immunoglobulins, yet weren’t sick, showing an immune system tuned to fight crucial germs, but not minor irritants, Parker said. He said what happened in the lab rats is what likely occurs in humans: their immune systems have got it so cushy they overreact to smallest of problems.

“Your immune system is like the person who lives in the perfect house and has all the food they want, you’re going to start worrying about the little things like someone stepping on your flowers,” Parker said.

Challenged immune systems — such as kids who grow up with two or more pets — don’t tend to develop as many allergies, said Dr. Stanley Goldstein, director of Allergy & Asthma Care of Long Island.

Let Starbucks Find You a Place to Live:

It seems that every week some organization or another comes out with a list of American’s best cities. These lists go by different names (Most Livable Cities, Best Places, whatever), but some how they all end up with similar content. They have Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, Portland, and the like near the top of the list, and Detroit and New Orleans near the bottom (here’s a good recent example, the Sustainable Cities list).

These lists are good and useful, but it turns out that if you just list cities by the number of Starbucks locations per capita, you get a pretty similar result.

The list of the largest US cities from most to fewest Starbucks per person:

1. Las Vegas
2. Seattle
3. Portland
4. Sacramento
5. Washington

[...]

51. Milwaukee
52. New Orleans
53. Philadelphia
54. Detroit