BLOGSERVATIONS

Recently I was made aware of an acquaintance falling for a scam known as an “Ion Cleanse” footbath. They actually visited a “clinic,” much like a spa I would guess, where they paid $40 to immerse their feet in a tub with a contraption in it that would, it was claimed, remove toxins from their body through the soles of their feet. $40 is a lot of money, but any amount of money is too much when you’re being ripped off!

This is FRAUD! Pardon my crassness, but how does anyone hearing such a claim not know it is complete bullshit? After all we go to school where, in health class, they teach us about our liver and kidneys which are responsible for the filtration of blood. The liver is the first pass, filtering blood that comes from our digestive tract and removing toxins. The kidneys remove waste from our blood and are responsible for regulation of fluid and electrolyte balance in our bodies.

Even if you were half asleep in class you should at least have gotten the gist of it!

Unless there is a problem with one of these organs or a drug overdose our bodies should not load up with toxins. A regular checkup with your doctor is a good idea too. Good doctors have a tendency to find out if something is wrong with us through blood and urine tests. No level headed doctor will soak your feet or check there for signs of toxicity.

I posted something about the detox foot pad scam a few years ago and I’m amazed to see this kind of con still being perpetrated, and on an even greater level. Not that anything I say would make much of an impact, my readership is scant, but holy crap are we really this gullible? How does this kind of nonsense actually gain a foothold and succeed? We’re not thinking for ourselves and we’re falling for nonsense and quick feel-good remedies. It’s all psychological. There is absolutely no reason to feel good after an ion cleanse, other than the fact that you just had a good foot soak. A good foot soak always feels good.

How the Ion Cleanse Footbath Really Works
It doesn’t work the way it is advertised. It does not cleanse or remove toxins from your body. What does happen is this: salt added to the water bath prompts an electrochemical reaction with metal electrodes present in a device which is placed in the water. The reaction creates a form of rust, that’s it. The color that develops in the water is not caused by toxins in your feet, it is caused by a simple chemistry experiment put in motion intentionally to fool people who will pay good money to have their feet soaked in it.

The YouTube video below, posted by Eb Jensen (three years ago!), clearly shows the Ion Cleanse foot soaking products to be a scam. It generates the rusty colored stuff whether there are feet present or not…

Something needs to give. Something needs to change. We have criminals earning a living by selling nonsense remedies and services to a gullible public. There is something gravely wrong with this picture. If it sounds too stupid to be true (it certainly doesn’t sound too good), then it is. Foot cleansing detox sounds just as stupid as colon cleanse!

We need to put these people out of business, they have NO business being in business. Do not fall for the Ion Cleanse foot spa services and do not buy any Detox Foot Soaking products, they are completely bogus!

Unfortunately these pieces of junk are being sold almost everywhere. If people want to spend money on bullshit there are plenty of retailers willing to grab a shovel.

I heard someone say, “My husband has been having irritable bowel again, so I took him to the chiropractor.”

If that sounds dumb to you this one is a hoot. The Yahoo News headline read, “X-Ray Reveals Hundreds of Gold Needles in Woman’s Knees.” A 65 year old Korean woman had been suffering from joint pain in her knee. Upon further examination, via X-Ray, doctors noticed a slew of tiny gold needle tips embedded in the tissue around her knee.

In this instance slew refers to apparently “hundreds” of needles left in her skin, according to the article. Remnants of a form of “leave-in” acupuncture, where the needles are intentionally left in the tissue to provide prolonged stimulation and pain relief. Hundreds of needles left in her skin. Look at the picture.

I’ll let you digest that for a moment.

Didn’t work huh? Go figure. In addition to not being effective, a stupid practice like acupuncture can lead to infection and other related problems, far worse than the joint pain to begin with. If you’re curious, or just want a rational vacation, visit PubMed for information on the potential risks of acupuncture “treatment.”

I don’t think I have any more to say. Here’s poking at you kid.

There’s a hole in here somewhere. What I really meant with the title was “What’s with Walmart’s Pricing, Jack?” But question marks and apostrophes are not friendly as URLS.

I wouldn’t say this bothers me, but it’s one of those stupid things that makes me wonder WTF everytime I do some food shopping at Walmart. Usually we shop at Wegmans or Giant, but Walmart is a little more convenient at times. Actually I guess it does bother me, or I wouldn’t be posting about it.

Anyway, Wegman’s has a $4.99 per pound deal all the time. That’s a pretty good price, even better than Giant, which charges just a little more. Walmart, on the other hand, the gouge king on this one, charges a whopping $8 something per pound! It might even be something stupid like $8.01 per pound. At least that’s the price at the Walmart near me.

Needless to say I was floored, aghast. Even taken aback! Yes, “taken aback,” not “taken back,” as some people seem to think lately. The term has been destroyed, and it’s meaning mostly lost. It does not mean “Oh what a pleasant surprise!” it means, “Well holy crap, no way!”

Anyway, let me get aback to the cheese.

That’s a HUGE gap — $8.01 – $4.99 = $3.02 in case you were wondering — I wonder how Walmart comes up with their price? Can’t be they’re getting that bad a deal from the makers of this wonderful Swiss cheese. Something smells afoot, cheesy, and is riddled with holes.

Okay, I’ll lay off the Swiss cheese jokes. It doesn’t really smell like feet anyway, I love swiss. That’s why I’m so angry about by the high price at Wally World. My wife and I only fell for it twice, paying their full price, before we were clued into their price-matching policy. Conveniently, Walmart will allow their cashiers to change the price of something if the customer claims they can buy it cheaper elsewhere.

You can’t abuse it of course, most of the cashiers will catch on if you try to pull some funny business, like telling them you can get that flat screen LCD TV for $14.99 at Best Buy. They won’t fall for it, I tried. No I didn’t, just kidding. I joked with the cashier though and she said, “I don’t think so…” Touché!

They do let us slide on the Jarlsberg now though. We make sure to tell them we can get it for $4.99 per pound at Wegmans and they honor the price.

One more thing and I’ll let you go. Why do they have to slice it in such thin wedges? If it is a wedge! Sometimes we get these half-round things, or rectangles. Wegmans knows how to cut the cheese in nice wide wedges. You didn’t think I’d go this far without working in “cut the cheese” did you? Twice now

Could be that the deli folks at our Walmart don’t know from slicing Swiss, or maybe they don’t have the right tool for the job? I’m sure they can cut the cheese though, just not the good kind. They might be trying to keep the big wheel of cheese around as long as they can, as evident by the thick rind that we get sometimes.

Man, I’m tell you, you really just can’t win trying to find some good cheese service around here. Welp, that’s my rant for the day. Until next time… may the curds be with you!

Buck Rogers would have been pissed. Well, we’re only in the 21st Century — Buck wakes up in the 25th, so he wouldn’t be pissed yet — but when we get there we may just be the dumbest civilization in history. Even though our road was paved by genius.

Brilliant progressive thinkers of the 20th Century have brought us amazing technological advances. The late Steve Jobs will come to mind as one of the most recent and influential, having significantly changed the face of personal computing with Apple Macs, iPads and iPhones, branding our civilization with the tempting fruit of Eden. Some Christians will enjoy putting devil horns on him for that… as if.

With over 116 million iPhones and more than 56 million iPads sold by Q3 of 2013, Apple has truly empowered humankind with amazing technology. Powerful tools for communication, productivity, art and expression. And what do we do with it? We Facebook.

It can be used as a verb now you know, not as often as, but similar to “text, tweet, pm,” and the older tech-comm verb “email.” Each has a past participle form as well, “texted, tweeted, pm’ed, and emailed.” Think back too, the original tech-com verbs were words like “penned,” “phoned” and “radioed,” when we first began to use those technologies.

To get back to it… I guess it falls into the “expression” category. Facebook is an amazing technology in that it made one man stupidly filthy rich (Mark Zuckerberg is worth about 18 billion as of September 2013), like many marketable technology fads, and it functions great as a networking tool, but it also enables us to waste huge amounts of time.

Wasted Time, Money and other Woes of Social Media
We’ve become Facebook Zombies! Active users spend an average of about 8 hours monthly on Facebook. I’m one of them, so this isn’t some fringe commentary against the masses. That said I will state that I try to limit my time, only post when I have something worthwhile or incredibly funny to say, and don’t play any of the games. Sorry, but I’ve got better ways to waste my time than virtual “farming” or playing pretend on a computer.

Why is it so easy for us to get caught up in pretend worlds when there is a truly remarkable real world right outside the door?

In the past — as in, the “olden days” — to kill some time around the house we’d play cards, Scrabble, or watch TV. Many of us spent a hell of a lot of time outside riding our bikes and climbing trees too, but yes, we wasted time watching TV. What I think makes it a little worse today is that we’re doing more of both. We’re watching as much or more TV, and Facebooking, texting, tweeting, whatever-else-ing on the internet.

It gets worse when you consider how much money businesses are throwing away because a larger percentage of their employees are incredibly sidetracked by social media and text messaging. One estimate is that companies surveyed were losing $10 million each year through decreased productivity. Consider this article on the subject.

Should those companies sue Zuckerberg for lost revenue? Of course not, but the impact is real and significant.

Is the technology also “dumming us down?” Will we have generations with fewer bright thinkers or leaders than today? Can our civilization survive? Consider not just the waste of time that Facebook and other social networks contribute to, but the massive spreading of misinformation which in some cases threatens to undermine the science that has helped eradicate disease over the last several decades.

Case in point: Jenny McCarthy and the anti-vaccine movement. Stupid on a level beyond comprehension, but it has grown and proliferated with the help of social media. Why? Because people spread hype and hysteria without first find the facts for themselves. These social networking sites help facilitate the spread of this damaging nonsense. The damage is ongoing.

Night of the Living Dead or People of Walmart?
If you have to herd the human race like a bunch of dumb bovines through a field in order to get them to be more productive something is wrong. It brings to mind the wandering hoard of Walmart Zombies encountered by focused shoppers armed with a concise list who wish to keep their shopping trip brief so they can get back to life outside.

It can be a mind-numbing sideshow. A number of people actually spend hours of their day just walking around the store like the living dead, and some of them dress that way too! George Romero could have saved thousands of dollars on zombie extras if Walmart existed in 1968.

We need to self check
Here’s a test: Look in the mirror (in your bathroom or you can find one in the health and beauty aisle of the store, if that’s where you are)… if you look gaunt and pale, mouth hanging agape, eyes droopy, and you spend either too much time in front of your computer on Facebook, or too much time in Walmart, time to get the hell outside and get some fresh air!

Read a book, play a guitar, take a walk or kiss your spouse. Get the hell up and get with life.

I was going to start calling my Mac OS Slow Leopard.

If you’re noticing painfully slow list population in your Finder windows, whether you’re running Leopard or Snow Leopard, I think I found the fix. There may be some special cases where memory usage and third party apps and background services are causing the slow down, but this worked for me, and a bunch of other people according to a thread at MacRumors.com.

My fiancé has a MacBook, which up until today was running Leopard, and for several months had been running super slow. Sluggish browser behavior, very slow population of lists in Finder windows, that sort of thing. Most of the time I attributed to the fact that she had a bunch of browser windows open at the same time, which can hog memory.

I just upgraded the OS to Snow Leopard in the hopes that it would solve the problem. No such luck. The poor Mac was running as slow as a turtle on flypaper. I checked the activity monitor and found Boingo, banished that since she doesn’t use it anymore. Saw a Rosetta Stone Launch Daemon running, and she had removed that software months ago. Stopped that, but still no improvement.

A quick search of the web revealed the answer, and I could not believe it. A MacRumors thread contains this gem, “Jack the double mouse click speed to the highest setting. The higher the double click the faster the folders in the finder open. Sounds crazy, but it work for me. When set to a low setting the folders in the finder take about 3-5 seocnds to open. I sent bug reports to Apple.”

It does work! The MacBook has a trackpad but the same solution holds true: Go into System Preferences, Trackpad, and increase the Double-Click Speed to the highest setting. Now go to back to your finder, open a folder and watch the file lists load in instantly. Nice huh?

Contrary to what the posts said at Macrumors.com, the fix persisted even when I went back and reduced the Double-Click Speed to the previous setting, so it seems that even a transient change in Double-Click Speed resets something somewhere that affects the finder speed and even browser speeds. Going back into Safari showed it loading pages lickety split too.

Problem solved, but I still can’t understand why. Apparently there has been no official word from Apple regarding the what’s and why’s of this issue, but at least it’s a fix.

Hope it helps you out!