Like the CDC manufacturing a prediabetes epidemic and pregnant women getting a scarlet letter if they have a glass of wine while pregnant, flossing seems to be a distinctly American phenomenon. Are we right? The British are famous for bad teeth, for example, and fiscal conservatives will say that's because dental care is not free under their socialized medicine. They must not floss, right?

Well, they don't, but it may not matter. Most people in Europe who have great teeth don't floss. They think it is humorous that we pull string through our teeth the same way European women wonder why their babies don't have more birth defects if a glass of wine causes fetal alcohol syndrome.

The biggest shopping day of the year is not Amazon Prime Day, nor is it Black Friday, it is instead on November 11th - Singles Day.

China has so many unmarried people they turned it into a shopping celebration.



In Sweet Lemons Rationalization, if you are unable to find someone worth marrying, you can declare you don't want to get married anyway.  If I say I don't want to date Heidi Klum, it is empowering and therefore not an insult that she does not date me.

That is the case with a growing number of Americans.

Halloween is the time of year when you are most likely to find out your significant other is a vampire - or vampire hunter. Sure, vampires can't be real and never have been, there can't really be hunters for those any more than there are ghost hunters, but History Channel is stuffed with people hunting ghosts, so let's light a science candle rather than curse your supernatural darkness and tell you how to get rid of your partner's garlic breath after they return from a night of slaying.

Halloween is just a few days away so prior to worrying about razor blades in candy or kids getting run down in the streets you may want to think about pumpkins.

They are full of toxic chemicals. Even organic pumpkins.

Andy Brunning, of the Compound Interest site, made this graphic for Chemical  &  Engineering News, but they have nothing to do with this article about the dangers of pumpkin chemicals. Theirs is informational, the snark is all mine.

Harvard University, and its anti-science allies like The Guardian(1) paper in England, are again claiming that meat causes diabetes.

If you are a parent, or know a parent, you have had someone claim that if their kid eats sugar they get 'hyperactive' - that may happen, but only because a child has been told they get hyperactive and act that way, the same way if you tell a child rum cake has rum they may act drunk.

Biologically, it doesn't work that way. Sugar can certainly help you if you are diabetic(1) and "anti-sugar rhetoric is simply diet-centric disease-mongering engendered by physiologic illiteracy,” according to Edward Archer, PhD.(2)