PART ONE
More of 2018’s most noteworthy news stories:
“Think I would die if you were to ignore me,” sang tennis great Serena Williams during Breast Cancer Awareness Month as a topless tribute to singer Christina Amphlett, who died of the disease. Well, Serena started the year by telling a hospital horror story of struggling to convince doctors that she needed to be put back on her back on her blood-thinning medication not long after giving birth: her symptoms had returned, and sure enough, so had the blood clots in her lungs. Here’s hoping that a NON-celebrity would have been as successful.
Online commentator Tommy Sotomayor decided to test his skepticism about children accidentally dying of heatstroke by being left in cars by filming himself sitting in a car with no air conditioning on a summer day. Not long after one of his cell phones stopped functioning due to overheating, he did, too.
Speaking of self-filming, biting detergent packets certainly deserves its status as the year’s worst Internet craze. But while its participants were mainly too young to know any better, that cannot be said of the raw water movement. After showing a video of water being drawn from a pond by a man touting the health benefits of its microbes, Cenk Yugur of the Young Turks online show instantly laid “waste” to that theory by pointing out that a major source of those microbes is animal poop.
New Jersey has 298 “same day” surgery centers — where you can undergo certain procedures without an overnight stay. And since 2008, they’ve racked up 52 deaths and more than a thousand “events” resulting in “preventable injury.” That might explain the moratorium that was placed on opening more of them in 2010 — and they are all finally required to be licensed by New Jersey and subject to inspection and regulation.
A professional animal caregiver in Bridgewater found an injured raccoon in her yard and bought it to the local vet: she and her four dogs had to undergo treatment because it tested positive for rabies. And here’s hoping that authorities eventually caught up with the person who picked up a bat that had crashed after flying around in an Acme Supermarket in Pilesgrove. There have been a total of 250 cases of rabies in New Jersey since 2017 — call for Animal Control instead of interacting with potentially rabid animals, especially dead ones.
The women’s cross country team at Rowan University are not issued uniforms. When a complaint was issued from the men’s football team that their training in sports bras were too “distracting,” the university banned them from using the athletic field and made wearing shirts mandatory. A team member wrote: “We do not run in a sports bra as a way to show off our bodies…How is it expected for the women on this team to partake in an non-existing dress code?” Presumably after checking their calendars, the university uttered something about a “longstanding verbal protocol” that “does not accommodate today’s training practices” and reversed their decision.
Is it possible that more men would use condoms more often (only a third of them do) if they fit better? Now that it’s officially determined that the standard size is about 25 percent too large, a company is preparing to offer them in SIXTY different sizes. Could preventing the spreads of sexually transmitted diseases and unexpected pregnancies possibly be that simple?