Happy Orange Gnome

Sooooo… Last year, I decided I’d really step my game up oral-health-wise. You know, flossing and mouthwash every single day. And, this year, I go to the dentist and I am told I have six cavities that need filling. According to the dentist, my oral hyigene is really good, but I have really deep crevices that are impossible to reach or some shit (I do get seeds caught in them with alarming frequency). Anyhoo, all the cavities were single-surface, which I hear is the best kind of cavity to have. I need to stop eating so much sugar and acid (I mostly eat meat? (Anemia?)). (Is it true that orange juice has more acid than pop? Someone google this for me. I am too lazy.)

Actually, apparently, I might’ve had these cavities for years, because, according to my mom, my old dentist didn’t believe in filling in tiny cavities, preferring to wait and see if they got bigger. My new dentist likes to fill in cavities before they get bigger. One of the black dots he’s going to fill, I’m pretty sure I’ve had for about 10 years.

And, I might be getting my wisdom teeth out. I don’t think they’ll be coming in all the way anyway. Damn bacteria factories.

In other news, two years ago, I had a really bad experience with some asshole landlords and their asshole apartment managers.  Now the government says I deserve a tax credit for the rent I paid to them. The only problem is that I have to obtain records from the landlords to get the credit. I don’t think that the credit is worth enough to warrant dealing with these douches again, my mother disagrees. Someone remind me to stop letting other people read my mail.

• Fish Are People Too! (0)

I was watching Oprah today (a momentary lapse in judgement) and Jenny McCarthy was on talking about her son’s autism.

“Coming up next: Jenny tells us what she thinks caused her son’s autism…”

If she says inoculations, I’m going to be very upset.

If she says inoculations, I’m going to be very upset.

If she says inoculations, I’m going to be very upset.

And then I was very upset.

She blamed the MMR (measle, mumps & rubella) vaccine and the use of thimerosal, which contains a tiny amount of mercury, for her child’s autism.

Her evidence? Her child became autistic some unspecified amount of time after the MMR inoculation.

The problems with her evidence?

1. Thimerosal is no longer used in the U.S. and Canada in any childhood vaccines, except in some flu vaccines, yet autism rates are supposed to be rising. (In fact, it probably wasn’t used in her son’s MMR vaccination.)
2. If small amounts of mercury cause autism, how come nobody ever blames fish?
3. There are children that get the MMR vaccination after they have become autistic and people that are autistic that have never had any inoculations. What caused it for them?
4. There have never been any credible studies that have found a link between vaccines and autism.

And now there are people that have watched Oprah that will not have their children vaccinated, because of Jenny’s socially irresponsible, anecdotal, bullshit “evidence” about autism.

I hate to think about children that could possibly contract a horrible disease and die because of this stupid stupid show. It might be none. It might be one.

One is way too many.

And to all people that still believe that vaccines will give your child autism, I offer to you my own personal belief:

It is better to live with autism than it is to die from measles.

Every year, for about the last five years, people in the media have been predicting that, come flu season, there’s going to be a bird flu pandemic and it’s going to infect 99% of the world’s population and 50 billion lives will be lost.

And every year, more people die from getting hit in the head with a coconut than from the bird flu.

My ultimate summation? THE BIRD FLU PANDEMIC ISN’T COMING!

But, Laurel, the last flu pandemic was the Spanish Flu in 1918. Aren’t we long overdue for another one?

Hey, I haven’t seen any bubonic plague pandemics around here in a while, either. Isn’t it about time for another one?

Pandemics don’t run on a schedule. Life is far too dynamic for that. The next pandemic could be a 1000 years from now. It’s really hard to tell how and when a virus is going to mutate.

Also, wasn’t there some sort of really big war going on, when the Spanish Flu happened, that might have had a lot of countries’ governments a little too busy to deal with the flu?

I heard that in humans the bird flu has a 70% mortality rate. Doesn’t that worry you!?

First of all, yes, about 70% of the known cases of people with bird flu have died, but I suspect that the vast majority of actual cases is unknown and most of the people that have died from bird flu are from developing nations, where just about any disease is likely to kill you.

Also, in most of these cases, the disease was discovered postmortem. Most people that were infected with the bird flu, probably survived and just thought it was the regular flu (the symptoms are practically the same), so they weren’t put in the statistics.

So what is the actual mortality rate? I don’t know, but it ain’t no 70%. I suspect that it’s actually pretty close to that of the regular flu.

It’s the morbidity rate that you have to be worried about and right now, it’s at about 0.000000001%.

If there isn’t really anything to be worried about, at the moment, what is all this fuss about?

1. It makes good television.
2. People stocking up on Tamiflu and shotgun shells boosts the economy.
3. Deep down, everyone wishes that everyone else was dead. We want the pandemic to happen.

And, yes, I am a doctor, so I do know about these things.

This is a shout-out to all my Anna and Mia sisters out there. If you ever feel like the fight is too hard and you’d just like to give up and eat a sandwich, then take some thinspiration from this:

If you ever, ever, eat a sandwich you’ll end up all fat and jolly and children the world over will love you! Is that what you want!? You want greasy little mongrets shoving their sticky fingers in your jellyrolls, while they whisper their Christmas wishes in your ear!? Huh!? No, I don’t think that’s what you want.

If you ever eat a sandwich, I’ll come to your house and kill you. KILL. YOU.

I wrote a poem about how being Anna makes me feel!

Fat Butterfly
I am a fat butterfly
I cannot fly
Sandwiches have weighed me down
I will stop eating them forever
Yay!

Goodbye for now, my sisters. I hope you all reach your goals, or die trying!

In Canada we have many different kinds of sales tax. Like the GST (goods and services tax) and the HST (harmonized sales tax), which follows the same rules as the GST. Either the GST or the HST apply to all the provinces but none of the territories. The sales tax applies to almost all consumer goods purchased except those deemed as essential like: basic groceries, prescription drugs etc., which are exempted. All the goods that are not exempted are considered luxury goods.

Funny thing, tampons and sanitary napkins are not exempted from the GST and HST.

Now, I may be crazy, but I wouldn’t exactly call stemming the flow of the river of blood from my vagina a luxury. No, I’d probably call it, oh I don’t know… a NECESSITY!?

The government doesn’t seem to it’s a necessity though, even though they exempt adult diapers and incontinence pads from the GST and HST.

“Alright, we won’t tax you if you’re leaking piss or shit, but if you start to leak blood, then that’s just going too far, bitches!”

Pretty much every female between the ages of 13 and 45 menstruates and the government saw this as a steady stream of income that that they could take advantage of. A vagina tax, if you will.

I almost got upset that there was no penis tax, but then I remembered that porno mags and video games are taxed. That should more than make up for it, right?

• Herpes and other Deal Breakers (2)