News You Can't Use: Disney Worker Went on Booze-Fueled Rampage

Disney and its thousands of subsidiary holdings truly is the happiest place on earth. What could be better than taking your 2.5 children and government sanctioned life-partner to a heavily monetized theme park? Nothing, as long as you don't go on that one weird weekend or run afoul of an alcohol-fueled Brit whose behavior and general demeanor are a little different than what you'd see on "Downton Abby," replacing trite drama with wanton destruction and an incredibly foul mouth.

A Disney worker went on the rampage in his office and attacked two police officers after a booze-fuelled lunch break.

Nothing like a depressant to get you all riled up. Does it really count as a "rampage" if you never leave your office? Take that, monitor! See you in hell, replacement toner cartridges! On the other hand he attacked police, so there's that.

Owain Houston, 35, “exploded” and repeatedly shouted ‘F*** Disney’ after downing pints and shots in a nearby pub.

This is why you don't mix "pints" with the hard stuff while on your corporate headquarters approved unpaid lunch break.

He attacked colleagues and hurled computers around the call centre, causing £15,000-worth of damage.

The real life version of "Office Space" seems to be lacking in lighthearted humor.

Cardiff Crown Court heard he snapped after being asked to take a call for a colleague about the DisneyLife app.

Understandable.

He then entered some sort of rage whereby he has walked through the premises smashing up equipment.

You have been diagnosed with "Rage: Not Otherwise Specified." Suggest treatment includes sleeping it off and a cocktail of expensive psychiatric "meds" to take daily.

Houston, from the Coryton area of Cardiff, was fired on the spot and kicked out of the office.
 
If you were expecting a surprise ending I'm sorry.

Houston kicked a police van and then attacked the officers, swinging his arms like a windmill.

Don Quixote is never there when we really need him.

He was given a 12-month suspended jail term, ordered to perform 160 hours of unpaid work and told to pay £1,200 compensation.

You'll pay a small fraction of the damages and go wash dishes or whatever for a month. That should fix everything.

10% less soul-damaging than our previous film!

The DisneyLife app launched in the UK last year, allowing users to stream Disney films, TV shows, and music soundtracks. 

DisneyLife and chill, if you know what I'm saying and I think you do.

Full Article. 

Aaron Zehner is the author of "The Foolchild Invention" available in paperback and e-book format. Read free excerpts here and here.

News You Can't Use: From Text Neck to Blackberry Thumb

With affordable high quality health care now available to every American there has never been a better time to suffer injuries and assorted misadventures. Unfortunately, an increasingly sedentary lifestyle the revolves around sitting for hours and pecking at tiny screens isn't exactly Mountain Dew commercial material. Still, it appears it is possible to suffer life-ruining ailments and enter the exciting and sexy hospital industry anyway. You might get the "Text Neck" or the "Instagram Inner Rot" or even full-blown "Pathetic Human Jelly Enslaved By Lame Technology and Racing Toward the Chilling Embrace of the Grave."

Smartphones. The majority of us now own one, and we can't comprehend how those who don't live without them.

I feel that "Smartphones" is enough for a complete sentence all by itself. I mean, am I right or what? They guide and nourish us, they crush our imaginary candy and how could anyone possibly live without one?

We use them as alarm clocks, calendars, personal organisers, entertainment systems, games consoles, online messengers and, yes, even phones.

Cue hearty Ed McMahon laughter.

Just yesterday, a South Korean study suggested that the excessive use of smartphones by children is causing them to become cross-eyed.

Stop that, it'll get stuck that way.

It doesn't end there. Researchers and health professionals have identified several physical pitfalls of smartphone use in recent years, all on the rise as we steadily transform into a nation of 'smombies'.

How would you survive the "smombie" apocalypse? By setting down the portable Skinner Box? Don't talk crazy.

So keep your smartphone firmly in your pocket, ignore the bleeps and bings of notifications, and instead inform yourself of the dangers of these pocket-sized perils.

Buckle up, tuck it in, keep both hands visible and prepare to enter a world beyond your wildest dreams.

The first of these cyber-syndromes is Blackberry thumb. Named after one of the first smartphones to have a Qwerty keyboard, this repetitive strain injury is caused by overusing mobile phones to send emails and texts.

If I became unable to do my double-thumbed Trump Salute I don't think I'd be able to continue functioning in society. The tragic inability to "trigger" others, I blame it on those tiny keyboards.

Blackberry thumb is no laughing matter.

My brother died that way.

So worried were working professionals, in fact, that back in 2011, co-founder of the Roberts Jackson solicitors Karen Jackson warned employers that they should expect to receive a series of lawsuits from bum-thumbed staff claiming compensation.

Every generation gets the "Power Line Lawsuit Scare" it deserves.

But our thumbs are undoubtedly much busier than they were before the dawn of the smartphone

Uh...yeah. Don't be so sure about that.

And researchers at the University of Zurich recently discovered that the part of our brain responsible for thumb movement (the somatosensory cortex, obviously) has actually begun to grow in the heads of frequent phone-users. 

Mental retention of physical patterns...how does it work?

Prolonged mobile phone use has been found to cause the disconcertingly vague-sounding  'cubital tunnel syndrome'.

Stop being so vague, Doc! I'm ready for the horrible truth about my busted hands.

As we hold our phones up to our ears, our elbow presses together and the resulting pressure can damange the cubital tunnel, a channel which allows the ulnar nerve – your 'funny bone' nerve – to travel over the elbow and down to your hands. Decreased blood flow and nerve ischemia are also side effects of those long phone calls we love so much.

You could get that on an old-time rotary phone. I thought this was supposed to be about exciting new inventions hurting us, not the terrible legacy of Alexander Graham Bell. Booo!!!!! Refund!!!!!

'Blackberry thumb' and 'Smartphone pinky' may attack individual digits, but 'Text claw' strikes at your hand as a whole.

Let me tell you something, when I slap on the Text Claw, a claw that can crush most sports balls, you'll beg me to stop the agony. And that. Is. All. The People! Need!!! To Know!!!!!!!

Brain claw!!!

Text claw develops because many people work on their phones in a position that’s not natural for the thumb, wrist or finger joints.  

The only unnatural phone act is that which one can not perform.

In 2013, before 4G was rolled out across the country, network provider O2 surveyed their customers and found that 43 per cent of smartphone users had suffered from bad hand pain in their palms and wrists over the previous 12 months.

Something else might be putting stress on those wrists and palms. I'm just saying.

Full Story.

Aaron Zehner is the author of "The Foolchild Invention" available in paperback and e-book format. Read free excerpts here and here.

News You Can't Use: Online Symptom-Checkers are Often Wrong

With the high cost of affordable health care for all, including that poor little boy with sick parents or whatever who vanished never to be seen again after the bill passed, it makes sense that you'd want to find alternative ways to diagnose and treat your rapidly putrefying body. Traditionally these methods include straightforward interventions like checking every inch of the body for the devil's mark, kidnapping medical students and pumping them for information and gleaning as much knowledge as possible from 2 am infomercials. However, in case you forgot, we live in an age of high technology and information, which explains all the intellectualism in our popular culture. Clearly, internet doctoring is the future, but what if it's wrong? Is it time to panic?

Online symptom checkers often misdiagnose patients’ problems, often encouraging people to seek care for minor issues that don’t need immediate attention and other times incorrectly telling people with true emergencies that treatment can wait, a U.K. study suggests.

Next you're going to tell me internet dating is not an ideal way to meet attractive, successful and mentally stable life partners.

The apps were imperfect at best, offering the correct diagnosis on the first try only about a third of the time.

Stop sawing off your own arm, the hand-phone might be wrong about that advanced stage leprosy.

For triage - assessing the urgency of the problem - the apps were too cautious in situations requiring only self-care: only 33 percent of the time, on average, were patients appropriately advised not to go to the doctor.

Suggestive alternative: writing "you'll be fine, quit complaining" on a scrap of paper and looking at it every time the old hypochondria starts acting up.

At the other extreme, symptom checkers typically missed the severity of the situation in one of every five cases requiring emergency treatment.

It gets everything wrong in every possible way. That's what we're trying to say.

“The risk is that people will be told to get care when they didn’t need it and bear the costs and inconvenience, or they will be told not to seek care when they have a life-threatening problem,” senior author Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, a health policy researcher at Harvard Medical School in Boston, said by email.

No, not inconvenience! Spare me that horrible fate. I'll just stuff everything back in the old split middle, duct tape it over and hope for the best.

The software listed the right diagnosis first in 24 percent of emergencies on average, and for 40 percent of non-urgent cases. Accuracy was better for common than for rare diagnoses.

If it's a head cold it probably gives good advice. If you think your skeleton is trying to escape through your mouth, maybe see the saw-bones.

The app that did best at giving the correct diagnosis on the first try was DocResponse.com, at 50 percent.

Doctor Coin-flip is here to help.

Yes, but can it make phone calls?

One limitation of the study is that it used specific clinical language to describe medical conditions in the test vignettes, which may not provide an accurate reflection of how the symptom checkers would perform for patients using nonclinical terms to describe their conditions, the authors acknowledge in the British Medical Journal.

I'm sure you'd get much better results if you typed in "Headbone ain't be right."

In some situations, symptom checkers are never a good idea, Wyatt said by email. 

The logical sentence structure equivalent of a doctor's handwriting.

“Don’t waste your time surfing, call 911,” Wyatt said.

I don't care that my left arm is tingling, there's a curl to shoot. 

Non-urgent patients “can probably afford to spend a few minutes checking symptoms online,” Wyatt said.

Let's not get carried away. 

Full Article.

Komment Korner

My experiences with doctors are useless at best.

Who are we to trust?

I have to ask because many times I take my son to the doctor and they say he's got said 'problem' here with NO testing.

I ended up with fatal pancreatic disease

I wonder how many doctor use these


Aaron Zehner is the author of "The Foolchild Invention" available in paperback and e-book format. Read free excerpts here and here. 

News You Can't Use: Scientists Developing Disease-Sniffing Smartphone

Is there any problem that can't be solved by Smartphones? The answer is no, assuming you don't consider societal alienation, lack of national vision, currency backed by nothing, a foreign policy that is both overly aggressive and cowardly at the same time, atomization, spiritual cancer, narcissism and ignorance, and the fact that movie tickets keep getting more expensive for some reason to be problems. Based on our national graveyard whistling we clearly don't, so let's all sing Hosannas to this hand-held miracle.

A device that pairs with your smartphone and screens your breath for early detection of potentially life-threatening diseases is in the works at a research consortium at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

At alliteration and redundancy nightmare school we're working hard to create a phone that you can cough on and it will inform you that you've got an incurable and highly communicative cold virus.

Unsurprisingly called the SNIFFPHONE, it's being funded by a grant from the European Commission.

I ain't even surprised, bro.

"It will be made tinier and cheaper than disease detection solutions currently, consume little power, and most importantly, it will enable immediate and early diagnosis that is both accurate and non-invasive," says Professor Hossam Haick, head of the consortium.

It's a lot cheaper and more practical than installing an M.R.I. machine in your house.

A combination of micro and nano-sensors will analyze the exhaled breath and send the information through the smartphone to be processed for interpretation -- perhaps in a corresponding app -- which establishes the diagnosis.

Blow on it. Some sort of magic will occur, perhaps. Get your diagnosis and bask in the relief or terror that comes with it.

Breath analysis to detect disease is a developing science.

So give the guy a break, all right? *tries to start slow clap, fails*

This past May, Dr. Raed Dweik of the Cleveland Clinic in the US published a paper on an experiment in which his team was able to recognize the unique "breathprint" of those with heart failure.

There was no breath at all, what with that whole "failure" thing.

Just checking for diseases, it's perfectly normal.

In 2013, Dr. Ruchi Mathur developed a breath test that reveals an individual's susceptibility to weight gain.

If your breath constantly smells of Big Macs, swine products and diet cola you may have that "susceptibility."

Full Story.

Komment Korner  

It'll be like Star Trek's tricorder as you run your smartphone over an individual and based on the combination of chemicals that is detected, the smartphone can tell what type of disease the person is suffering from or if the they've got a chemical weapon strapped to their body. 


Aaron Zehner is the author of "The Foolchild Invention" available in paperback and e-book format. Read free excerpts here and here.

News You Can't Use: Workers With Smart Phones at Health Risk

Every problem can be solved with the magical phone. Need to call someone? We can probably do that. Calming female voice to create the illusion of human contact while you huddle in your "Omega Man" bunker praying for the daylight that will drive off the mutants? No problem. Bird flight simulators? Aw, yeah. And hey, it gets even better! Now you can completely destroy the lines between work and your so-called own time by being constantly bothered by the next higher pay grade! Yes, comrade phone is our friend. Even if it does kill you.

German researchers studying the effects of people taking their work home with them at night or on weekends found that the workers were plagued by a host of issues, including cardiovascular problems, insomnia, headaches, muscular issues, fatigue, anxiety, and stomach problems, according to the Daily Mail.

Now for some of that efficient German research that has historically been a mighty force for good. As the dream of the 168 hour work week comes to fruition leave it to soft and lazy human assets to have tummy problems and general overall biological collapse.

The study, published in the journal Chronobiology International, examined 57,000 people, more than half of whom worked past normal hours, largely driven by access to smartphones and computer tablets.

Chronobiology International is probably best know for its above average fantasy international rugby coverage (All the hot picks on Team Fiji!) and that one issue every year where they're somehow allowed to show "artistic" nudity.

The researchers claim that the new advances in technology have prompted employers to expect their employees to be available at all hours, and asserted people’s bodies need purely recreational time to recover from work.

You crazy people and your soft and pathetic "needs." Once we fix that bug in our androids that causes them to turn violent and/or explode most of you whiners are out the door.

Remember when they were called "time saving devices?" I guess the new buzz phrase should be "life ruining devices."

Information and communication technologies, such as computers and smartphones... have the potential benefit and the potential inherent danger of making it possible for employees to be available any time and anywhere.

Much like a Panzer VI King Tiger it has both potential benefits and inherent danger.

Free time should be free time, otherwise it must be expected that it cannot fulfill functions of recovery and recuperation.

When the Germans are forced to champion our right to free time and recreation you know something is deeply wrong with the world.

The German study found that 90% of office workers have phones with email access, and one-third of those workers access their email over 20 times a day.

The "compulsive e-mail checking" disorder from the late 1990s is back and better than ever! We need to get this sucker into the DSM XXIX while it's still enjoying this comeback.

Last month, the German car maker Daimler installed software on its employees’ computers that deletes emails if the workers are on vacation; the company has 100,000 employees.

Now to have that software work all the time and you're set.

Daimler spokesman Oliver Wihofszki said: "The idea behind it is to give people break and let them rest. Then they can come back to work with a fresh spirit."

Where a giant wall and secret police failed, a day without a phone succeeded.

"Save me, German researchers!"

"It often needs to start at the top, with bosses taking the lead and attempting to change the culture at work. Not every country will implement regulations like France, so companies should look to make improvements of their own accord."

You could alert everyone to this New Culture initiative with repeated e-mails at 4 am on Christmas morning.

Full Story.

Komment Korner

I stare at two large lighted rectangles filled with information all day in my cube.

I always have to ask myself, "Is it worth it?"

It doesn't help that one boss is in EST and another in China time, so I have opposite time zones working against me.

Democrat propaganda can also make you sick.

They can be turned off! Find those buttons and use them, FCOL!


Check Out My Books!

Aaron Zehner is the author of "Posts from the Underground," now available in paperback and e-book. Read free excerpts here and here.

His first novel "The Foolchild Invention" is also available in paperback and e-book format. Read free excerpts here and here.