The Computer Wore Menace Shoes

Wrong potato. He probably gets plenty of exercise, anyway.

Researchers conducting a study of 8,000 TV-watching Australian adults found each hour of viewing is associated with an 11 percent greater risk of death from any cause and an 18 percent greater risk of death from cardiovascular problems. The results applied regardless of differences in age, gender, waist circumference and exercise habits.

The researchers added the results apply to any sedentary activity and likely extended to Americans.

To clarify: spending time in front of the TV instead of engaged in physical activity is bad for you. Is it because you can eat mindlessly in front of the TV but not while playing basketball? (It’s hard to handle the ball and your KFC Double Down.) Is it because exercise has been shown to be good for you time and time again while nobody has proven the health benefits of surfing the Internet?

Well, before this study, another study found adults who reduce their time spent watching TV increase their calorie expenditure. And the authors of the Australian study chalk up the mortality difference to the trade-off involved in watching TV: the more you watch TV, the less time you have for exercise.

The next logical step in the progression is the mortality of people who exercise while watching TV. Maybe it’s better for people on stationary bikes/elliptical machines/stair climbers/treadmills watching TV at home, but it’s almost certainly worse for people trying to run while wearing these.

But that’s an assumption. Only an in-depth study can truly tell us if that’s correct.

After a couple months of leaving the topic alone, some media outlets – for whatever reason – decided to poke the sleeping monster of “sexting” and extract a few hundred words-long story from it for appearance’s sake. It’s sort of like trying to make up for all these lurid stories about Tiger Woods by showing a glimmer of social conscience without abandoning the topic of sex.

Sexting, for the uninitiated who should consider themselves fortunate, is a portmanteau of “sex” and “texting.” It refers to the epidemic of young people sending sexual content, such as naked photographs, of themselves via cell phone text messaging. If you want to be technical, however, “texting” is the wrong term, because images are sent via Multimedia Messaging Service. MMS is obviously less friendly to those who like to create word mash-ups. By the way, dibs on “MMX.”

How sure are you? Seventy-five percent? That's a good figure. Pretty confident.

What led to a new story about sexting and its accompanying headlines and teases designed to scare the bejesus out of parents of children ages 12-40? An Associated Press-MTV poll. (Oh, sure. MTV is bad until it hooks up – pun intended – with the AP to issue a survey about teens sharing sexually explicit content of themselves. Then parents are all ears.)

According to the poll, more than 25 percent of Americans aged 14-24 have participated in sexting. Do you know what that means?

It means nearly 75 percent of that same group has not done so. One-fourth of a group is significant, but the story ignores seems to consider the three-fourths that doesn’t do it inconsequential.

But what really takes the cake is how the phenomenon is explained:

Research shows teenage brains are not quite mature enough to make good decisions consistently. By the mid-teens, the brain’s reward centers, the parts involved in emotional arousal, are well-developed, making teens more vulnerable to peer pressure.

There’s a 25 percent chance your teen is sexting, and it’s because he or she is stupid and immature. Are you worried now? Are you?

I really couldn’t come up with an opening that was more clever or absurd than the original article’s, so at this time I will defer to it.

It may be microscopic and overblown, but it could get you out of that cross-country Thanksgiving trip.

Let us give thanks — and pass the Purell.

Your family might be sharing more than turkey and pumpkin pie this Thanksgiving. Swine flu may also be on the table — and at crowded airports and shopping malls.

Just in time to spare you from a potentially deadly illness and your annual Thanksgiving with the in-laws or other undesirable familial unit (assuming you haven’t been vaccinated), the Associated Press has stumbled upon an earth-shaking report: spending time around people who may be infected with a virus may cause you to be infected with it, too! Why hasn’t anyone given us this information? Where are the recommendations from a government agency? And who’s going to sanitize this table that’s had flu virus all over it?

The article does mention the Center for Disease Control’s guidelines for preventing infection, and it emphasizes the dangers holiday travel by plane, train or bus – AKA “mobile pathogen exposure tubes” – may pose to the unvaccinated. But it’s not very helpful, only offering a rehashing of flu statistics and a collection of travelers’ feelings moments before they board their MPET of choice. Take 39-year-old Judd Nelson, for example:

“The way I look at it is, if I get it, I’m going to get it no matter what,” he said.

That sounds like someone who doesn’t wash his hands if I’ve ever heard one quoted in a gratuitous news article.

If you were already aware that being around people while a virus was in the general population could put you at risk of infection, then this story is really of little consequence to you. If, however, you’re the type of person who is taken aback by this information, there is only one way to avoid illness: complete isolation on a mountain top. There are only so many available, so you’d better get a move on it! We’ll send you an e-mail when it’s safe to return.

I'm not old. I ride scooters. You're old. You're 85.

“You’re only as old as you feel,” the saying goes, but did you know your age affects who you perceive to be old?

Of course you did. Everybody does. But that didn’t stop Pew Research Center from publishing a study about it or WCBD, the Charleston, S.C., CBS affiliate, from posting a WTVJ piece on the topic. (Miami’s NBC affiliate must have realized how news unworthy it was.)

Generally, common knowledge isn’t newsworthy, and this story isn’t the exception to the rule. Case in point: very few people ever call themselves old.

The study goes over points most of us have experienced as we’ve grown older. As a kid, people in their 20s are old. As 20-somethings, 35-year-olds are the lower threshold for old. Once you get to 35, 55 is the benchmark. Get up to that age, and 70 is the new geezer.

Nobody needed to do a study, and if the news day was so slow that somebody OK’d a story on it, then maybe the news director should have just found a piece on a water-skiing squirrel instead.

Not pictured: someone named Alec, Ernest, Garland, Ivan, Kareem, Luke, Malcolm, Preston, Tyrell or Walter. But imagine if he had been.

Give your son an unconventional or feminine first name, and you may be condemning him to a life of crime, according to a report by David Kalist and Daniel Lee of Shippensburg University.

Well, it’s not exactly fair to attribute that finding to the report. That finding is actually according to Todayshow.com contributor Michael Inbar. Ah, the “Today” show, hub of things that aren’t really news.

I’m guessing the folks over at “Today” just skimmed Kalist and Lee’s report, what with all the big words, math and all. They were able to pick out the top 10 “bad boy” names and place them in alphebetical order – Alec, Ernest, Garland, Ivan, Kareem, Luke, Malcolm, Preston, Tyrell and Walter – which is pretty good considering the show’s track record.

Inbar’s article, however, missed a big assertion in the paper.

“We show that unpopular names are associated with juveniles who live in nontraditional households, such as female-headed households or households without two parents,” Kalist and Lee wrote. “In addition, juvenile delinquents with unpopular names are more likely to reside in counties with lower socioeconomic status.”

Hey, that sounds like an important aspect of the study. It’s probably something that deserved more attention from the article, perhaps even more attention than efforts to think up famous persons who defied their cursed names.

But, in honor of the journalistic standard of ignoring the elephant in the room set before me by “Today,” I’d like to point out that not one person on the FBI’s Most Wanted list – Edward Eugene Harper; Usama Bin Laden; Jason Derek Brown; James J. Bulger; Emigdio Preciado, Jr.; Robert William Fisher; Victor Manuel Gerena; Glen Steward Godwin; Jorge Alberto Lopez-Orozco; or Alexis Flores – has one of the top 10 “bad boy” names.

Hey, that almost made me forget that this study didn’t even come out recently. It was published in the March 2009 issue of Social Sciences Quarterly. Way to be current on your academic research developments, “Today.”

Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kobt discuss the wine koozie on the "Today" show.

Kathie Lee Gifford celebrated a spectacular new invention on the “Today” show: the wine koozie. She and Hoda Kobt marveled at the neoprene sleeve that insulates your wine glass, keeping your preferred inebriant cool. Uh, Kathie, that’s hardly a new idea.

Sleeves of styrofoam large enough to hold a 12-ounce can have been around early 1980s. As technology has advanced, so have koozies. Since their humble beginnings, they have been made of flexible plastic, polyurethane, and, most recently, foam and neoprene, and koozies are now available to fit everything from energy drinks’ slim cans to wine bottles. They can even be personalized. (Alcoholics’ wedding favor, anyone?)

For Gifford, however, these discoveries can’t hold a candle to the cleverly named – hold on to your hats – Woozie! No matter that it probably wasn’t the first – it’s got a better name and design – or the best – dangling strings are just asking to be caught, yanking the glass from an upright position – because it’s got the better name.

Thankfully, being a simple sleeve of insulating material, there wasn’t too much that could be said about the Woozie before the hosts became completely inane talking about it. Right?

“Well, it keeps it cold,” said Kobt of the Woozie’s many wine glass-related functions, “And that’s so it doesn’t sweat. Whatever that means.”

Coincidentally, the product’s name perfectly describes how I feel whenever Gifford and Kobt are on TV.