Some things you may not have heard

One of the many great things about living in this time of unprecedented discovery and exploration are the new things we learn about literally every single day because of the unprecedented twenty-four hours a day, every-day news coverage. The world has certainly grown smaller since I was little. When I was growing up, the only national television news we had were fifteen minute news programs aired by the three major networks. In fact, I remember when they expanded their programs from fifteen to thirty minutes. There was a lot of skepticism among the older folks when this happened because they were convinced there wasn't enough news going on to take up thirty minutes.

A journalistic saying back then, especially among newspapers, was that they printed "all the news that's fit to print." News is no longer confined to that axiom, since we get all the news all the time, whether or not it's worth printing, reading, hearing or watching.

But even though we're inundated with news today from a wide variety of sources and much of it isn't significant enough to even pay any attention to, some of it is and I wanted to share some of it with you in case you haven't heard.

Another axiom that people lived by when I was growing up was "Cleanliness is next to godliness." Turns out that's not necessarily true. Recent research indicates that a little dirt in fact is good for our health. If the surroundings we spend most of our time in are sterile, we're exposed to no germs at all and if we're not exposed to germs, it inhibits our immune system. Sort of like the idea behind getting a flu shot, or getting vaccinated for smallpox. We're exposed to a little bit of the disease so our body can develop the defenses to fight off it off, thereby keeping us immune from that particular illness. The recent research indicates that works in our normal lives as well. If we're exposed to small doses of germs during our everyday activities, our bodies fight off those germs and, in doing so, help to keep us healthy. So, just like in practically every area of our lives, moderation is the best medicine. It's possible that if you're TOO clean and your surroundings are TOO sterile, it can be hazardous to your health.

Another recent revelation that confirms what a lot of people have long believed, although the "experts" have told us different, is that talking out our problems isn't always a good thing to do. We have an entire industry that has developed around the concept of talking about our problems including psychology, psychiatry, and counseling. The idea historically has been that if we don't get our problems out in the open and deal with them, they stay buried inside us and eventually cause us all kinds of other problems; not only psychological problems but physical problems as well. We all know that stress is a major factor in heart attacks and strokes for example. But the new research indicates that constantly talking about our problems makes us dwell on them to the point that we're unable to put them behind us and get on with our lives. The more we talk about them, the more we think about them and the more we think about them the more immobilized and unable to move on we become as a result.

There also seems now to be a clear link between regular marijuana smoking and psychosis. A debate has raged for the past fifty years as to whether marijuana is actually harmful to a person over the long term or not. It has been proven in the past that regular marijuana smoking leads to short-term memory loss. We've also known for a long time that a joint inhaled deeply is the equivalent of smoking ten cigarettes. So, if a person smokes cigarettes AND marijuana, they're inhaling and ingesting a significant amount of cancer-causing agents into their bodies every day. Up until recently however, no proof had been offered that regular marijuana smoking over an extended period of time could lead to psychological problems as well but the research says it does.

A New York lawyer, Roy Den Hollander, has filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of "ladies night,' held in bars and clubs all over America. He says it's discriminatory to men. I've never heard a man complain about "ladies night" since the idea, and often the outcome, is to significantly improve the ratio of women to men. The lawyer says nevertheless, "the time has come for ladies night to join segregation and slavery in the dustbin of civil rights history." He says the case will produce "a much-needed victory for men."

I wish some people would just mind their own business.

Finally, doctors have reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that a cat living in a Providence nursing home always knows when residents are going to die. In two years of living at the home, the cat, named Oscar, has curled up on the beds of 25 residents just minutes or hours before they died.

Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.