OF A GOLDEN AGE

New suspect in sports doping is, no joke, Viagra — college athletes are testing Viagra for any potential, um, performance enhancement. The effects are most noticeable in cases of high altitude or air pollution.

No wonder Bob Dole won the Tour de France all those times. Dole, you fiend!

The artful combination of steroids and Viagra is up for chicken-or-egg debate:

The former major league baseball player Rafael Palmeiro once served as a pitchman for Viagra and tested positive in 2005 for the steroid stanozolol, although the connection, if any, between the drugs in his case is not known. Some athletes are believed to take Viagra in an attempt to aid the delivery of steroids to the muscles and hasten recovery from workouts. Others take Viagra to counter the effects of impotence brought on by steroid use, said Dr. Gary I. Wadler, the chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s committee on prohibited substances.

Way back in 2000 my family was in Florida for Christmas and we stopped at some outlet mall somewhere. This was probably our one sad year in Orlando, when we realized it was gross there and we felt out of place. Anyway, cruising the aisles of the Puma store at the Orlando Premium Outlets, I bought two pairs for cheap and fell in love.

Since then I’ve owned like eight pairs and worn them into the ground. The ones I have now are legit running shoes, but, I won’t lie, they stink so bad I can’t put them on my feet anymore. The same goes for my faithful Rockport boat shoes. So it was time to restock, and I found these:

My friend, we will have a long happy life together.

Two weeks ago I competed in a Scrabble tournament with the Chicago Northside Scrabble Meetup.

The Chicago Journal covered the event in this article, including a blow-by-blow of my terrible first game.

My friend Adrian Mannella ran the tournament. The Journal writer asked about the Scrabble surge and Adrian said the magic words:

“The golden age of Scrabble, if I had to put a date on it, would be in the 1950s . . . at that time playing board games like this, with your family, was at a peak.”

No wonder we all still own our grandparents’ (aetataureate) Scrabble sets.

The New York Times pays gracious tribute to Chicago in this article: A New Wind is Blowing in Chicago. (The photo with the article shows the sign for one of the city’s busiest train stops, Jackson on the CTA’s Blue Line.)

Oh, Chicago, no longer even the Second City but the third. My friend John described it best as a big city on a budget: Chicago is well-organized, inexpensive, accessible, and humble. The whole city was offended when Sarah “Irascible Moron” Palin cut down the work of community organizers, especially in the city’s flux, transitioning South Side neighborhoods. She really drove a stake between working-class Republicans and working-class Democrats, who often believe in the same values but live in different environs.

I think many people forget that charity is as often about advocating for poor people as it is helping them financially — it is by no means a “HANDOUT” to educate a single mother on her tenant’s rights, to offer her guidance on cheap, healthy meals for her family, to help her choose the right schools for her children. Is this the stuff of controversy, over which city-dwellers and small-town citizens disagree? I’m guessing it isn’t.

Last week I picked someone up at O’Hare, and while circling the airport several times waiting for his arrival, I noticed the parade of Obama banners attached to every lightpole. Oh, hometown pride. As usual, the particulars of Obama and his connection to Chicago are only symbolic of a much bigger feeling.

Title taken out of context from “Chicago,” written and recorded by Graham Nash but most famously performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young on the live album Four Way Street:

Somehow people must be free
I hope the day comes soon
Won’t you please come to Chicago
To show your face
From the bottom of the ocean
To the mountains of the moon
Won’t you please come to Chicago
No one else can take your place

Ahhh, Ta-Nehisi Coates:

“[A] relationship couldn’t be about talking to other people. It couldn’t be about telling other people what I was gonna do; it had to be about the actual work. From that perspective, a wedding was abominable to me. It was the antithesis of everything I wanted–a vain spectacle of love, when love is to be demonstrated, it is to be done, it is to be worked like a job. Was it Andrew [Sullivan] who said religion is what you do when no one is looking? That was what we wanted out of our relationship. To always be about our business when no one was looking, and then when people were looking they would see the truth.”

So many rituals we’re assigned in our lives are so-called vain spectacles: pomp-and-ceremony weddings, elaborate engagements, gift-demanding showers for each new baby. As Carrie Bradshaw points out in an episode of Sex and the City:

“If I don’t get married or have a baby, what, I get bubkes*? Think about it. After graduation there is not one event that is just about you.”

She doesn’t specify which graduation she means, but presumably it isn’t high school, which is as close to required as possible. College brings up a whole different list of issues:

Should we require the SATs and other standardized tests? Do they accurately predict success in college?

Is there something wrong with students who are simply not suited to college?

I take massive issue with the idea that four-year college or beyond is the way for every student to succeed. Yes, it is right for many, and an emphatic YES that each able, willing, wanting student should (in a perfect, or just less-imperfect, world) have the opportunity to study at a four-year school. But that doesn’t mean everyone should, and I think it’s crippling to a lot of students when they find they simply don’t do well in a college environment.

What’s wrong with pursuing a trade? We’ll always need able, smart, well-trained people to install, troubleshoot, and maintain all kinds of things: the electrical wiring in your local schools, the radiator heat in my old apartment building, the grass-covered roof of a new LEED-certified green building. In a time of record social mobility and free exchange of information, why are we less tolerant than ever of those who make different choices?

* Did You Know: bubkes means “goat droppings.” In Yiddish, of course.

Fast because I’m a little swamped.

► Mental health professionals are concerned about blogs where deluded individuals find confirmation of their suspicions about conspiracies and stalking and the like.

► design mind offers a visitor’s perspective on the Chinese response to Obama’s election . . .

► . . . while my good friend Tony, a current resident in China on a Fulbright, offers his own take about tokenized reactions to Obama. (He must want to talk about this! He’s an American!)

► From the fresh Obama plum book — the listing of available government jobs which must be filled for each new presidential administration — the Washington Post filters out a few of particular interest. See: Chief, Gang Squad.

► And finally, to make your heart squish, meet a 20-year-old Chicagoland frog.

My friend John described a girl he does not like but hangs around with anyway. It looked kind of poetic. Like a lengthy, offensive haiku.

she sent me a video
of her metal band performing
and i was like
this is stupid
but i didn’t say anything
because what’s the point
i’m not going to convince her
that being in a metal band is stupid
if she’s in a metal band

► A parrot saved a choking toddler by, well, yelling for the sitter (CBS Denver). No, really! Added interest: the parrot in question is a Quaker parrot, a species illegal to own in many places.

► The tongue is not really divided into distinct taste areas (NYT). Also, I did not realize umami was an official taste receptor category now.

► Tony opines on China’s financial crisis and subsequent reckoning package. Of note:

Zhou-sixpack does not respond to price or income changes like your average Westerner. Though having enjoyed things like refrigeration and heating, most here are perfectly capable of getting by on less. As such, policy measures meant to increase domestic consumption are probably less effective than we’re used to thinking of them. If the fiscal stimulus was simply turned into a cash handout, most households would stick it directly into savings – spooked as they are about the slowing economy.

► DNA may be both more “loquacious” and less significant (~1% of the “total human genome”) than we previously believed.

Not long ago, RNA was seen as a bureaucrat, the middle molecule between a gene and a protein, as exemplified by the tidy aphorism, “DNA makes RNA makes protein.” Now we find cases of short clips of RNA acting like DNA, transmitting genetic secrets to the next generation directly, without bothering to ask permission. We find cases of RNA acting like a protein, catalyzing chemical reactions, pushing other molecules around or tearing them down. RNA is like the vice presidency: it’s executive, it’s legislative, it’s furtive.

Furtive! I love it.

► Finally, Megan McArdle started an open thread on bourgeois penny-pinching. (Fiver-pinching?)

This morning my mom called while I was lolling in bed with a budding migraine.

“Ohhh, I’m sorry your head hurts,” she said. “I just heard on NPR that people who get migraines are less likely to get breast cancer though!”

“Are you kidding?” I said. Our family has a, um, profound history of breast cancer so this seemed like a slightly morbid in-joke.

“No!” she said. “I swear, I just heard it.”

It’s true: This study found that migraine sufferers had 30% fewer breast cancer incidents. I did not know this:

Menarche, menses, pregnancy, and perimenopause may carry a different migraine risk conceivably because of fluctuating estrogen levels, and in general, migraine frequency is associated with falling estrogen levels.

It makes sense, though — my doctor told me back in 2004 or something that, for instance, birth control pills could trigger migraines. The pill manipulates your cycle and therefore the migraine risks at various points therein.

On the one hand, this feels a bit like knowing I could cut off a finger in order to lower my risk of breast cancer. Migraines are terrible and I have them pretty frequently (once or twice a month, down from my all-time high of once every few days), and I would still trade them even if it restored that 30% risk.

Then again, my aunt, my other aunt, my grandmother, my great aunt, and my great grandmother all had breast cancer. My mom had an enormous benign tumor removed several years ago, and I had a sizable benign tumor removed by surgery when I was 20.

I’ll keep that 30% reduction after all.

I’m a big fan of the television show House, in which British multitalent Hugh Laurie plays a surly-but-remarkable diagnostic expert whose team works on one rare, unlikely case after another. People I know who don’t enjoy the show usually say something along the lines of, “It’s so formulaic, and none of these conditions sound real or like they exist in real life.”

Yet in real life we encounter cases like this one, reported by the New York Times:

Over the next 10 days her daughter saw six different doctors, had many blood tests and scans and tried a dozen medicines. No one had a diagnosis or a cure. “There’s something wrong in my head,” the young woman kept repeating. “It’s just not right.”

On their last trip to the emergency room, her daughter went crazy. She was talking to people who weren’t there. She was afraid, paranoid. Then suddenly she became violent, lashing out at everyone around her. [...] The patient was taken to a psychiatric hospital. A few days later she developed a fever and was sent to yet another hospital. There she had a seizure. After that, she never woke up.

Don’t worry — it has a happy ending, much like the majority of House episodes. A great portion of why House appeals to me is the idea that even preposterous, confusing problems like this can be solved through human knowledge and collaboration. It may be a match on the fire, so to speak, but solving any “impossible” situation seems remarkable enough to me.

Hulu has an elucidative little interview with the cast of House on their episode vocabulary lists and the challenges of medical terminology in acting.