Welcome, October! Even though the government is shut down, we’re still turnt up.
If you haven’t started planning your Halloween costume, then you better get on it, son! Otherwise the only costumes left at Target will be the child-sized hot dog suits and the “sexy Twister mat.”
Whew, what a week: You voted in student elections, aced your midterms, fretted over the Congressional budget gridlock and watched Rihanna school Miley Cyrus on sex appeal in her new music video for “Pour It Up.”
So relax and get comfy with this week’s edition of Darts & Laurels.
Our first LAUREL goes to Sinead O’Connor, who wrote an open letter to Miley Cyrus warning her about how the music industry takes advantage of young women who rely on their sexuality to sell records.
“They will prostitute you for all you are worth, and cleverly make you think its what YOU wanted,” she wrote.
While the letter was schoolmarmish in some places where she warned Cyrus about baring too much skin, O’Connor’s intentions were pure. Talent and sexuality aren’t mutually exclusive, but we agree with O’Connor’s sentiment that heavy-handed sexiness can obscure talent in the music industry and media.
Next, a big, collective DART to the GOP and its hypocritical concern over children with cancer who were denied clinical trials by the National Institutes of Health due to the government shutdown.
According to The New Yorker blogger Amy Davidson, “The professed anxiety by the G.O.P. about how children will be cared for doesn’t line up well with documents like the Paul Ryan budget, which translates into wholesale cuts in the Children’s Health Insurance Program and Medicaid. The American Cancer Society’s advice for the parents of uninsured children, which makes for depressing reading, talks about Medicaid and other low-income programs in terms of hope.”
Listen up, millennials: You need to unclench. Earlier this week, we reported on “Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next” and quoted a professor at UF who said ours is the most stressed-out generation yet — and technology, she said, may be the culprit.
A DART, then, to millennials who can’t unplug. Put down your phone and go take a walk — communing with nature for a few minutes may help you calm down and quit measuring yourself against your Facebook friends.
Thursday, USA Today reported scientists are working on a new medication for people with clostridium difficile, a bacterial infection that can cause a life-threatening inflammation of the colon. The infection can occur as a result of the victim taking antibiotics that deplete the body’s healthy microbes.
Plot twist: The new medication contains human fecal bacterial. Hence, its hilarious and totally juvenile nickname: the “poop pill.”
A professor of medicine told USA Today, “Just speaking for myself, it would be difficult to compete against the ready availability and very cheap acquisition costs of human poop.”
A LAUREL to the Canadian research team behind this amazing discovery. Science rules.
Happy Friday!
A version of this editorial ran on page 6 on 10/4/2013 under the headline "Darts & Laurels"
