Although my favorite game is baseball, I do also like football and last weekend was the NFL’s biggest game: the Superbowl. Since I’m certain the MN Vikings will never again play in that big game, I never have much of a rooting interest in which team wins the game. Sometimes I might pull for a particular team, but most of the time I just want a good game. A game with plenty of offense and great plays. A close game, in which the teams are evenly matched and that either could win. Blow outs are boring.
However, the Atlanta Falcons were playing the New England Patriots. And hard to believe as it is, those Patriots managed to come from a 25 point difference to win in overtime. Insane!
I got that good game after all.
Speaking of baseball, which I did on the show, there’s an experiment that MLB wants to try on the minor league level. In an effort to shorten games, they want to, in extra innings, place a runner on second base at the beginning of the inning. (Oh, boy! More bunts!) Extra inning games might get shorter, but that’s not the cause of longer lasting games. Most games don’t go to extra innings, but can still go for more than three hours.
MLB is considering other options, but this one just seems dumb to me.
One of the regular segments of my show is the Pedantic Moment. Last week I did one on a McDonalds McCafe TV ad. I was needled in the chat room that I needed to lighten up. It’s just a commercial.
Well, yeah. A Pedantic Moment is called that for a reason: I’m being pedantic. Duh.
If I lighten up, I wouldn’t have a segment for my show. And you try filling an hour each week.
An Example Of Fake News
A Facebook friend posted a bit of fake news from a site called vaccines.com. The anti-vax site posted a triumphant article about how the Center for Disease Control and Prevention “admits 98 million Americans were given cancer virus via the polio shot.” Well, that’s not exactly what happened.
I replied to my FB friend:
This anti-vax site is an example of fake news. If you read the information in the screen capture from the CDC that the anti-vaxxers are so proud to have captured you would learn:
1) The CDC did not admit 98 million Americans were given the “cancer virus” via the polio shot. 98 million Americans received one or more doses of the polio vaccine between 1955-1963. Of those 98 million, 10 to 30 million could have received vaccine contaminated with SV40.
2) SV40 is a virus found in some species of monkey. And, although some research results conflict, the majority of the scientific evidence does not show SV40 to be cancer causing in humans. Quoting from that same page “…the majority of studies done in the US and Europe, which compare persons who received SV40-contaminated polio vaccine with those who did not, have shown no causal relationship between receipt of SV40-conaminted polio vaccine and cancer.”
3) This information is not gone from the CDC site. The information is still there, but it has been summarized as follows:
“Some of the polio vaccine administered from 1955 to 1963 was contaminated with a virus called simian virus 40 (SV40). The virus came from the monkey kidney cells used to produce the vaccines. Once the contamination was discovered in the Salk inactivated polio vaccine in use at that time, the U.S. government established requirements for vaccine testing to verify that all new batches of the polio vaccine were free of SV40. Because of research done with SV40 in animal models, there was some concern that the virus could cause cancer. However, evidence suggests that SV40 has not caused cancer in humans.”
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history.html
Judging by what the anti-vaxxer wrote, they hadn’t read the information thoroughly before believing this to be some “grand admission” by the CDC. That was evident from the jump when they claimed all 98 million polio vaccine recipients got the contaminated vaccine.
Vaccines.news is what fake news looks like.
I think I’ll talk more about this on next week’s show. I didn’t have time to get into it fully this time.
Movie Recommendation: Dirty Harry (1971)
I watched it again recently and I was struck by Andrew (Andy) Robinson’s performance as the serial killer named Scorpio. He’s so intense and his angelic face makes his demented need to kill and for fame even more distrubing. His plea that he has rights when suffering Harry’s wrath is so creepy in one of the film’s pivotal scenes.
Eastwood is solid, but Robinson steals the show.
Music heard on the show…
First ad break bumpers: ‘Waltz The Halls‘ by Game Theory & ‘Absolute Beginners‘ by The Jam
That’s it! See you next Saturday night for Dimland Radio 11 Central, midnight Eastern on www.ztalkradio.com you can also download my show from the z talk show archives page. You can email your questions and comments to drdim@dimland.com
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