Les Bonnes Choses

I was mortified to find that I had a typo in my previous entry, the title of which should have read scurvy rather than scruvy.

I logged on to facebook so I could see whether Kevin had played another heezy word in scrabulous. I don't know if heezy is even a word, because heeze doesn't appear in any online dictionaries, and yet that word, with the Z falling on a double letter square as part of a triply-scoring word brutalized me. So I shall add it to my repertoire. Just don't expect me to define it.

While I was logged in, I saw one of the stupid paid ads. This was for one of those useless devices, like those magnetic bracelets that you sometimes see advertised on TV or in the drug store. This device is to be worn as a pendant as a talisman against electromagnetic waves. So I clicked the link and went to the product website with genuine scientific research and theory! Naturally, I assumed that the manufacturers don't expect you to actually read the research, but instead just be satisfied that it exists. So I clicked on the first entry which describes a pilot study. I read a little bit before I found the following ringing endorsement:

It is argued by the developer that this EMF acts as a carrier wave for subatomic ‘information’, and that this information assists in strengthening an organism’s resilience to stressors. However, there are a number of elements to the above theory that are not verifiable (some because critical details have not been made available by the developer, and others because science does not have the requisite tools at present).

The authors also introduce the product by stating that the EM radiation from which it reputedly shields you has not been shown to have any negative effect whatsoever. So I wonder whether the people at Q-Link even read the paper before posting it.

Key words: snake oil, voodoo magic, hocus-pocus, scam, buffoonery