New rule: Croatian terrorists and drug companies shouldn't hire writers.—The guys and gals at Big Pharma, the pirates of capitalism, had a bright idea. In order to deter Americans from buying drugs in Canada, which has price controls and a moral health care system, they hired two people to write a novel in which Croatian Muslim terrorists contaminate Canadian drugs in order to kill Americans. I’m not making this up. But the gang who can’t shoot straight, still can’t shoot straight. The novel, tentatively called The Spivak Conspiracy, was the idea of Mark Barondess, a Hollywood divorce lawyer (need I say more?) who took it to PhRMA, the lobbying group for the drug industry, which willingly produced $300,000 for the project. According to Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lazar in Slate, the scheme backfired. They found a publisher, a writer (Julie Chrystyn) and an editor. The editor was Jason Blair, the disgraced New York Times reporter (great minds think alike), who was promptly fired after four days (he's not having a nice life). A lawyer, Kenin Spivak, joined Chrystyn in producing the manuscript. But when Barondess saw the finished manuscript, he rejected it. The writers blame an executive at PhRMA, who wanted more polemics and wanted to dumb it down to attract women readers. (I repeat, I’m not making this up). So the project got killed and the writers were offered $100,000 to shut up about it. But they didn’t accept. They rewrote the book and it will be published next month. The new villain? Why a giant drug company, of course. It’s called The Karasik Conspiracy.
Oh, and by the way. The drug companies have, for years, justified the exorbitant prices they charge American consumers as the cost of doing the research that produces new drugs. As Brownlee and Lenzer point out, a new study in the British Medical Journal reports that there is no relationship between what drug companies charge and their ability to do research. “Lower prices do not lead to less research.” Non-American companies “fully recover their research and development costs, maintain high profits, and sell drugs at substantially lower prices than in the U.S."
I must have sex with you, I’m a writer—Where was this great line when I needed it? Psychologists at the University of Newcastle on Tyne and the Open University in Britain (the Brits can be counted on for pertinent research) report that creative geniuses really do lead active sex lives and may need it. Artists and writers screw twice as many partners as, say, lawyers and insurance salesmen. Their creativity acts as a sexual magnet. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they suffer from higher rates of depression. The study is the first to tackle the reputation that us creative folks are more sexually active than the rest of you slugs. They found that artists and poets had between 4 and 10 sexual partners while, say, your average CPA had only three on average. It was true of both men and women. "It could be that very creative types lead a bohemian lifestyle and tend to act more on sexual impulses and opportunities, often purely for experience's sake, than the average person would," said Daniel Nettle, one of the researchers. It’s all for the sake of creativity. Have some Madeira, my dear.
Get your fat butt on the table while I get the long needle—The increasing obesity of Westerners, particularly Americans, is as much a health horror as an aesthetic one. It has forced coffin makers to redesign wider coffins, airlines to charge double for really fat people who want to fly coach, and clothing manufacturers to expand their offerings in multiple ways.According to a study at an Irish hospital, reported at the Radiological Society of North America, the standard-sized needles used to inject drugs into buttocks muscles aren’t long enough. They can’t get through the layers of fat to deliver the drugs. In a test of 25 women, the needles failed to deliver in 23 of them; the women ended up with the drug in buttock fat, not in the muscle, meaning they did not get the correct dosage. Doctors use the buttocks for drug delivery because muscles have plentiful blood vessels to carry the drugs around the body and the buttocks have few nerves, bones and major blood vessels that can be damaged by a needle. The drugs that end up in the fat just sit there and can cause irritation or infection. And they don't improve anyone's looks. So if you want to have sex with one of those horny writers above, you girls know what to do about it. We have standards.
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