View Episode 278
Originally aired 07.05.11
1:24:11
57:08 – Seth watched Hot Coffee, part of his 13-week Monday night HBO documentary series. It’s all about tort laws and uses the story of the bitch who spilled hot McDonald’s coffee on herself in 1994 and sued the restaurant for it. The story about it was she was a passenger in a parked car. She was 81 or 82 when it happened and they showed a picture of her – it looked like her skin had been melted off by hydrochloric acid. It was all up her inner thighs. Seth felt terrible because she’d been talking shit about this lady for 20 years.
59:39 – There was a new show on the ID Network called Disappeared. This episode was called “Mystery at the Border” about the family that disappeared – the McStays (Episode 274, 29:45). The detectives on the case were completely stumped as to where they were.
28:06 – Seth saw a movie on Wednesday at 9 a.m. called Transformers: Dark of the Moon, in 3-D. Seth said it was a feat to make it through the entire movie. On Wednesday night he went to the Orpheum Theatre for the final night of the Los Angeles Conservancy’s program “Last Remaining Seats,” where they show old movies in the beautiful movie palaces in downtown LA. He saw the silent film Safety Last! with Harold Lloyd.
41:51 – Jah realizes that listeners don’t know he has a gold tooth now.
42:27 – Jah’s mom sent he and Seth an article from The Wall Street Journal saying she and John have been suspect of “old sperm,” as they call it. The article claims that there are a litany of things that can happen to the offspring – primarily neurological abnormalities – if a man waits into his 40s to father children.
48:10 – Jah says nobody masturbated more than him when he was 13. Seth says no one has done it more at age 34, either.
1:16:47 – A UYD voicemail caller asked that Seth suggest to everyone to leave a message saying what they don’t like about the show. They think that would be a bad idea. Jah says he knows there are voicemails that Seth doesn’t share with Jonathan because he would get so livid at the people and hunt them down on the internet (i.e. callers suggesting live shows in their respective towns). Jah prefers the suggestion from last week – a Dear Abby-type column that listeners can submit via the website.
3:24 – The Anointed Men for Christ are presenting Madea’s Big Happy Family: Mime Edition at 6 p.m. on July 30 at the Municipal Auditorium in Shreveport, La. Tickets are only $12.
18:06 – Austin Hatch is a 16-year-old star basketball player in Indiana. He was a passenger with his stepmom Kim in a single-engine plane being flown by his father, Dr. Stephen Hatch. They were flying to the family summer home on Walloon Lake in Michigan, when the plane crashed, killing the father and his stepmother. Austin is in critical condition. In 2003, when he was 8 years old, he was on a plane piloted by his dad that was coming back from a stay at the family home that also crashed – killing his mom, Julie (38), his sister Lindsay (11) and his 5-year-old brother, Ian.
24:31 – Web suffixes like .com and .edu may be less common in the next few years. On June 20, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, also known as ICANN, will relax the standards by which websites may be named. As of next July, top-level domain suffixes will no longer be confined to 22 3-letter options, but will be able to stretch up to 63 characters long. It will cost $185,000 to apply for a new suffix, leading critics to accuse ICANN of corporatizing the future of the internet. Companies including Canon have already announced they will apply for custom suffixes.
38:17 – The TSA plans to reduce children’s pat-downs. Changing a controversy policy, the TSA plans to perform fewer patdowns at security checkpoints, TSA head John S. Pistole said. The shift was part of an ongoing effort to get smarter about security. The decision will ultimately reduce, though not eliminate, patdowns of children.
51:31 – July is National Anti-Boredom Month. This started in 1984 by the New Jersey-based Boring Institute.
55:02 – Time magazine has a picture of a bug in it this week – an ash borer. It is a bug insect from China. Since it was found in the U.S. in 2002 it has killed around 60 million trees in 15 different states. Cities will spend more than $10 billion over the next decade trying to stop it. They call it “the bug that’s eating America.”
10:17 – Seth goes about 30-50 on his SPF depending on his mood because he likes to be sun-kissed. Jah thinks that’s like wearing a linen suit. If J-dawg’s in Hawaii he’ll put SPF 30 on his nose.
26:24 – Seth thinks Prince might have been right when he said the internet was done. Seth gets on there and can’t find anything anymore.
4:24 – A frightening number of drivers may be unfit to drive, according to a new study that is the first of its kind. Researchers from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and two other institutions set out to randomly sample drivers’ sobriety. Authorities stopped thousands of drivers at 300 locations in 48 states. Blood and saliva samples were used to detect the presence of over 75 different drugs. Among daytime drivers, 11% were positive for drug use based on saliva tests, with about half of those cases involving illegal substances. Among nighttime drivers, 14.4% tested positive for drugs, including about 10% for illegal drugs. Alcohol was found more than any other drug, with marijuana coming in second. States that have legalized medical marijuana may have even higher rates of drivers under the influence of the drug. In related analysis, 819 California drivers supplied saliva samples and 8% of them tested positive for marijuana. The next phase of the research will look at the extent to which drug use is related to car crashes. The study was presented last week at a meeting of The College on Problems of Drug Dependence.
11:45 – Enjoying that bag of jalapeño-flavored potato chips? You’re not the only one. A study finds that snacking may constitute one-quarter of our total daily calories. The study, led by Richard Mattes, professor of foods and nutrition at Purdue University, looked at published research on snacking habits through the years and found that eating between meals has been on the rise. According to a presentation made recently at the Institute of Food Technologists annual meeting and food expo in New Orleans, men consumed about 261 calories in snacks a day, on average, from 1977 to 1978. But during 1994 to 1996, average snack calories among men rose to 501. For women it went from 186 to 346. Calories from what we drink rose as well, and the study reported that today, half the calories we consume via snacking come from beverages.
52:19 – Botox has been the reigning unofficial monarch of cosmetic procedures for nearly a decade. Its claim to the beauty throne was rattled last week when it was found that patents by a study in which patients thought another brand of botulinum toxin, the Botox competitor Dysport, smoothed their “crow’s feet” wrinkles a bit better. In a randomized, double-blind face-off funded by the makers of Dysport, patients received injections of Botox on one side of the face and injections of Dysport on the other. The substances were applied to the muscles that close the eyelids. After 30 days, researchers said, two-thirds of the patients said they preferred the Dysport side of their face; one-third chose the Botox side.
1:03:09 – We’ve heard it time and time again – before making decisions of anymagnitude, we should sleep on it. It’s the most rational way to make decisions, right? According to a study reported on Science Daily, sleeping on it makes good scientific sense. The new study from University of Massachusetts Amherst psychologist Rebecca Spencer found that another positive result of a good night's sleep was an increase in our cognitive skills and the ability to reason. The study used a gambling test based on cognitive reasoning to make its case. The researchers gave two groups of 18- to 23-year-old college undergraduates a brief morning or afternoon preview of the gambling task, so brief that it was not possible for them to learn its underlying rule. Subjects were then asked to come back in 12 hours. The 28 subjects who got the preview in the afternoon went home to a normal evening and their usual night of sleep while the 26 who received the game preview in the morning came back after a day of normal activities with no naps. Those who were allowed to nap understood the task at hand better and as a result, made better draws in the gambling task, thereby having a superior outcome. Those that hadn't slept lacked rule discovery, an underappreciated, yet highly important part of decision making.
1:08:25 – Among academics who track the behavior of young adults and teens, there’s a touchy debate – should the word “entitled” be used when talking about today’s younger people? Are they overconfident in themselves? Jean Twenge, author of the book "Generation Me," is in the middle of the discussion. The San Diego State University psychology professor has made a career out of finding data that she says shows that college students and others their age are more self-centered — narcissistic even — than past generations. Now she's turned up data showing that they also feel more superior about themselves than their elders did when they were young. “There are some advantages and some disadvantages to self-esteem, so having some degree of confidence is often a good thing," says Twenge. But as she sees it, there's a growing disconnect between self-perception and reality. It's not just confidence. It's overconfidence.” Among other things, Twenge and her colleagues found that a growing percentage of incoming college freshmen rated themselves as "above average" in several categories, compared with college freshmen who were surveyed in the 1960s. When it came to social self-confidence, about half of freshmen questioned in 2009 said they were above average, compared to fewer than a third in 1966. Meanwhile, 60 percent in 2009 rated their intellectual self-confidence as above average, compared with 39 percent in 1966, the first year the survey was given. In the study, the authors also argue that intellectual confidence may have been bolstered by grade inflation, noting that, in 1966, only 19 percent of college students who were surveyed earned an "A'' or "A-minus" average in high school, compared with 48 percent in 2009.
1:05:17 – Los Angeles Times Sunday real estate section question: “I separated from my husband 6 months ago. I rented an apartment a couple months back so I could live in peace, but my husband keeps stalking me, keeps threatening me. The police were called the first time and tried to calm the situation, but when he showed up again a week later I had to obtain a restraining order. The resident manager has told me I need to leave before the end of the month because the owner doesn’t want to upset the other tenants with my domestic problems. I can’t find another place by the end of the month. I’m afraid I’ll end up living on the street. What can I do?” The answer: “The situation you described qualifies you for protection under a new state law. California Code Civil Procedures Section 1161.3. This law prohibits terminating the tendency of a victim of domestic violence if the domestic violence has been documented by a police report within the last 180 days or has resulted in a restraining order. Domestic violence covered by this state statute includes stalking. Because you have both a police report and a restraining order, you should be protected from eviction by this statute. You have the right to request that your landlord change the locks to your unit to ensure your husband cannot get in. If your landlord does not change the locks as requested within 24 hours you may change the locks yourself as long as you do so in a workmanlike manner and give the landlord a copy of the new key. The law does allow the landlord to evict you if you voluntarily allow your husband into your unit or if your husband is a danger to the other units around you.”
56:23 – When they were investigating the emerald ash borer, Seth and Jah discovered a tiny Chinese hand holding a grain of rice – this is how they knew it was Chinese.