Comments on: Hurt Yourself? Just Cuss!

By: Tricia Spiegel

Tricia Spiegel — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 15:55:16 +0000

Marvin, you’re BAAAAAD, : )

By: Marvin

Marvin — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 03:18:29 +0000

Yeah, it’s always helped me, Pat. . .

Well, either way it helps. Know what I mean?

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:44:22 +0000

The explanation is simple, and I’ve thought this for a long time: Cussing dispells the negative energy that comes with pain. Duh! Now see, expressing that dispells the negative energy that comes with people doing studies on obvious principles :-J.

Nice cartoon, Pat!

By: Pat Racimora

Pat Racimora — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:40:23 +0000

LOL! Yes, we are a coloful lot. I am amazed at the talent of the writers here.

I draw funny pictures and tell little stories about them as a fun diversion (well, except when my pictures are serious like the one ahead of this story) from a more labor-intensive and often too-serious professional life.

By: oowawa

oowawa — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:33 +0000

A doctoral dissertation!?!? Here I assumed you were just someone who drew funny pictures. My primary rule when trying to get a “fix” on any of the writers or commenters on NQ: never underestimate anybody! Lots of accomplished, talented, and very intelligent folks hereabouts . . .

By: Pat Racimora

Pat Racimora — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:43:58 +0000

Well damn! The submission date was July 6th. But what is so amazing about what you found, tzada, is that my doctoral dissertation was on stress and humor and I did several subsequent research papers on the therapeutic uses of humor! I even appeared on TV with George Carlin once to discuss the uses and misuses of humor. Damn–I might have actually gotten that job (using my professional name which is different that what I use here).

Thanks for thinking of me anyway. It is an interesting gig for someone.

By: foxyladi14

foxyladi14 — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:35:25 +0000

i always feel real bad when one of the grandkids hear me.

By: tzada

tzada — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:32:06 +0000

Pat The Feds are hiring people who can make up humorous drawings “on the spot”. You would be perfect

https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=3014e950a92dbb0f7e066f9e088a301f&tab=core&tabmode=list&cck=1&au=&ck=

By: foxyladi14

foxyladi14 — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:30:06 +0000

LOL..

By: Linda Anselmi

Linda Anselmi — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:13:41 +0000

Love the toon Pat.

Who hasn’t been there? Nice to know that now can feel justified in expressing our pain with a little color commentary!

By: Steve_in_KC

Steve_in_KC — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:02:03 +0000

oowawa: Electroshock to sensitive parts of the anatomy? Better.

Now I KNOW there’s something wrong with you!

By: ConfusedAmerican

ConfusedAmerican — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:01:00 +0000

It made it to CNN tv last night on Lou Dobbs…

By: CentralMass

CentralMass — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 22:59:24 +0000

Great cartoon!. If that guy had a little less hair and a little more belly, it could be me

By: momule

momule — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 22:49:03 +0000

Peggy Sue – I am the wife of an emeritus prof from a med school. I am the first to say that there is a lot of lousy research out there (some of the worst is “reinventing the wheel” type, where researchers publish almost identical work to that published years ago because they never study the literature to see what previous studies have been done on the topic). However, don’t have a kneejerk reaction to articles that may seem peculiar to non scientists. A reasonable rule of thumb for the USA is if the study is funded, for example, by National Science Foundation or NIH, the researchers have spent a lot of sweat and tears before they ever see any money and many of them will resubmit grants several times or try for years to get even one grant. In the days before they could be submitted online we (I was my husband’s secretary) had to send about 16 typed copies (before our dept. bought us computers!) which would fill two xerox paper boxes. These contain sometimes well over a hundred references, and always detailed budgets with pages and pages of personnel costs,equipment,chemicals,etc.etc. for each year of the grant. Plus pages of explanations of what experiments would be done, why,and what they might show, etc. If there was a typo it was a nightmare – pages had to be redone.
Finally, if the score wasn’t high enough, it was back to the drawing board! Even if you get funded, you very rarely get it just like that. Back comes the grant and you have to redo the budget and cut the money, reduce the number of years. There are a lot of other things going on, too, like how much your school gets.
One of my pet peeves was Senator Proxmire’s Golden Fleece award for the biggest waste of money in science. It was the usual grandstanding, picking something that sounded goofy and would enrage the populus and make him look good. The only trouble was that you can make fun, for example, of some idiot doing experiments on fruit flies, but if you take the trouble to do some investigation you will find that the fruit fly has yielded some amazing and important information. Please check things out before jumping to conclusions, we certainly do this on this website about politics. We should do the same about science.

By: Rich

Rich — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 21:24:30 +0000

Great Cartoon!

I think that the answer is that whenever we distract ourselves in any way we feel less pain. How often has someone noticed a black and blue mark and not remembered hurting themselves because at the time they were thinking or concentrating on something else? How about the skiers who get hurt, but does not realize it until they get down the hill? Today on TV was a young man who had his leg bitten off by a shark, and said at the time he felt no pain as he was intent on getting back to shore.

By the way, that is one way by using hypnosis that a person can have surgery with little to no pain as well as controlling bleeding and speeding up the healing process.

Rich