Sink or Swim

So I was at my girlfriend’s house and met her younger sister for the first time. I guess this is getting serious as I’ve never really responded to family dinners and what not. What can I say, I like her.

Her mom’s a great cook. She’s part Hispanic, too so, you can just imagine the sumptuous goodness of the dinner I had. Everything went just fine until I asked for some bread. Then my girlfriend started snickering. I asked her what it was about and she whispered to her younger sister and then her sister nodded and made some sort of approval.

As it turns out, her sister used to fear bread. That’s right, bread. Made of flour, that one you put in the oven. I’ve never met anyone who’s feared something as strange as bread. BREAD for crying out loud. So, I thought of writing this one. I want to know what you fear and I want to know if there’s anyone in the world that can top that phobia. I’ve googled it, and nothing’s come out so far.

I feared clowns. Not original, I know.

I’ve gathered up some trivias which may seem have a small impact in our lives, but then again, we need to learn new things everyday, right?

1.  When Bugs Bunny first appeared un 1935, he was called happy Rabbit.

2.  Walt Disney’s cartoon character was Oswald the rabbit.

3.  There are 11 points on the collar around Kermit the Frog’s neck.

4.  There are 63,360 inches in a mile.

5.  In 1949, Walter Huston and his son John became the first father-and-son team to win the Oscars as director, and an actor, in Treasure of Sierra Madre.

6.  New York has the highest reported number of violent and property crimes in the U.S.

7.  The top killers in Africa are AIDS, malaria, and war.

8.  The song, ‘When Irish Eyes are smiling”, was written by George Graff, who was German, and was never in Ireland all his life.

9.  The song, “Happy Birthday”, as originally written by sister Mildred and Patty Hill as “Good Morning to you”. 

There, some of you may know some of these but I bet many of us don’t know all of these until now. Knowledge is power, as they say, but learning is a more powerful tool to have as we always strive to be better.

So I was browsing on some stuff online and I found out that a big percentage of males aged from 30-50 are for a fact, not as sexually active as some may think. Yes, folks – long gone are the days when people accepted the fact that men think about sex every three seconds – if it is a fact at all.

As it turns out, not all men are after sex, after all and this is a result of a growing dilemma amongst men in that age range. Depression is also a said factor to this as a high percentage of men who are depressed and are counted in based on the studies, to just completely lose interest in sex. Most of these men are married by the way and aren’t even thinking of cheating.

40 percent of these men who seek the help of marriage counselors and professionals are still capable of making love but just don’t want to. While this may be an alarming fact, there being working for long hours coupled up with stress, can be fixed. How long it may take to solve remains

Being a guy who never really cares about anything much, I haven’t really taken that much precaution in other things since lately. I didn’t know that there had been a research conducted by some specialists about the increase of risk in skin cancer due to the use of excess sunscreen.

Yup that’s right, the excessive use of sunscreen. Apparently the countries where sunscreen have been heavily promoted are statistically the ones that have higher numbers of skin cancer patients. More than a decade ago, studies have shown that Professor Johan Moan of the Norwegian Cancer Institute found that the yearly incidence of melanoma in Norway had increased by 350% for men and by 440% for women during the period 1957 to 1984.

In an estimation, an amout of 32,000 heads suffering from skin cancer can produce a rate of about 6,500 fatal cases via estimation. This is a huge number and what I find particularly interesting here is the fact that this has nothing to do with the ozone depletion. Studies show that at the time the numbers have increased greatly, no drastic change from the ozone have taken place that could cause this problem.

Sunscreen might have done all this. The chemicals that are within the sunscreen we use are also responsible for the depression of the immune system — which is supposed to help us regulate our bodies to protect ourselves from the sun. Not only that, a driven fact is also staying out too much in the sun because of the use of sunscreen and the thought that since nobody’s getting any darker means they’re safe from having their bodies toasted by the UV rays.

Of course, all of which have been researched upon by specialists, I think most of them make sense. Then again, its not like I’m going to stop using the sunscreen but perhaps stay a decent amount of time under the sun.