Friday, August 27, 2010

THAT'S Specious Reasoning!

Don't you love those lies the media tell you that are just implausible enough to make you wonder if they're true after all? The first one I am exposing is that you can get sunburned worse on a cloudy day than on a sunny one. Riiiiiiight. In all my years of busking during peak hours, I have never once gotten burnt on a cloudy day, even in mid-July. However, on sunny days, even in September when the rays aren't as intense as they are in mid-summer, I have gotten burned despite slathering myself with 20 SPF sunscreen. Liars!

Then there is the oft-surfacing lie about tea vs. coffee and which has more caffeine. "Did you know tea has more caffeine than coffee?" scream the headlines every couple years or so. Oh yeah? Then why do people get a wake-up buzz from coffee but not from tea? Perhaps they bury the fact that English breakfast tea has more caffeine than decaf coffee in the fine print as a footnote to a disclaimer. Brilliant; way to get folks to click on your story. (Morons.)

Finally, there is the blatant fashion lie that if a woman has lumps of fat on her back, it's because her bra is too big, not too small. Horse manure! Case in point: at the beginning of this spring, I had unsightly lumps of fat on my back and I was wearing a 38B. All summer long I've been biking 16 miles a day to work and back. The fat on my back is now history, and I'm wearing the same bras that I wore at the beginning of spring, the 38Bs. So it stands to reason that on May 12, the day I started biking regularly, the bras were SMALLER on me, not LARGER. Where do the fashion writers do their research, on Planet Idiocracy?

I rest my case.