Hello friends.

Greetings from Montecito.

The weather is crisp, cool, and sunny. And cold at night, which comes all too soon. I hate it when Daylight Savings Time goes away and it gets dark at 5:15. And gets dark earlier every day until December 22, when it turns the other way and starts getting a little lighter each day.

For all kinds of reasons, I’ve had a busy, busy week this week. Yesterday I found a few minutes to run out and walk three holes at my golf club. Here is a photo I took looking back up at the clubhouse. The ocean is behind me. It’s about 4:45, and the sun is starting to set. Just being out there for about a half hour, though I was running from darkness, saved my sanity.

This issue of The Arrow may be a bit abbreviated. I got started late because of my hellish week, and today is my bride’s birthday, so I’m quitting early to take her to dinner.

Okay, back to work.

Omega Balance

I’ve been doing a deep dive into the omega-3/omega-6 literature and have become convinced that it is one of the driving forces behind the obesity epidemic. A few years ago, I gave a talk on one hypothesis of how omega-6 fats, specifically linoleic acid, might be at least partially causal. But there are other ways an imbalance of omega-6 to omega-3 might be an impetus for our bodies to put on fat.

Last week, I discovered A.J. Hulbert, an author whose papers I’ve read over the past 20 years, had written a book on omega fats. I immediately grabbed a copy and dug in. The book’s title Omega Balance: Nutritional Power for a Happier, Healthier Life did not inspire a lot of confidence that the book would be a serious one. Boy, was I wrong. Instead of the watered down, written for dummies book I expected, I got a fairly technical tome with 55 pages of citations, which are always catnip to me.

One of the things I liked most about this book is that Dr. Hulbert takes great pains to describe the various findings of his own research and that of others as observational (which can’t prove causation) or randomized controlled trials (RCT), which come much closer to being able to do so. As close as one can come with clinical studies.

There are not a lot of RCTs looking at omega-3/omega-6 in humans. There are a fair number of them in animals, but not so many in humans. And there aren’t likely to be many in the future.

Why?

A couple of reasons.

First, the few large scale ones comparing omega-6 fats to saturated fats ended up showing the subjects on the O-6 fats had worse outcomes. O-6 fats from corn oil and other vegetable/seed oils were known to lower cholesterol levels, so a number of researchers tested them in RCTs against saturated fats, assuming the subjects on the O-6 fats would have better outcomes. As it turned out, they didn’t. They had worse outcomes. Consequently, in a couple of now-famous papers, the original authors decided not to publish, because the outcomes were the opposite of what was suspected.

The lipid hypothesis posited that elevated cholesterol caused heart disease. If true, then any food or drug that lowered cholesterol levels should decrease the rate of heart disease in those who took them. It was known that corn oil and other such O-6 oils reduced cholesterol levels, therefore those subjects consuming those oils should a) have lowered cholesterol levels, and b) have fewer cardiac events.

As it turned out, those subjects did lower their cholesterol levels, but they didn’t reduce the bad outcomes; thus they did not confirm the lipid hypothesis. So the author’s opted not to publish.

(Now before I go on, I’ve got to inform anyone out there who has read Malcolm Kendrick’s book The Clot Thickens and has internalized the discussion on how saturated fat cannot cause elevated cholesterol levels, don’t send me any long descriptions copied from that book of how fats are transported by chylomicrons throughout the system, and how they dump their fat into the cells, and how the chylomicron remnants go back to the liver. And therefore saturated fats can’t raise cholesterol levels.

I know all these pathways as well as, or better, than you. And I agree, it doesn’t seem that dietary saturated fat, or any other kind of fat, could have an impact on cholesterol levels. But there are countless studies out there showing they do. It is probably via a mechanism we don’t yet understand. It could be the homeoviscous adaptation model in action, which was not published when Malcolm wrote his book. Who knows what it is? But O-6 polyunsaturated fats reduce cholesterol levels, and saturated fats raise them.

I feel the need to write the above, because every time I write that PUFAs reduce cholesterol while saturated fats raise it, I always get at least one email or comment along the lines of Whoa, there, partner. Saturated fats can’t possibly raise cholesterol levels. And this followed by a description of the flow of fats from GI tract to the cells right out of Malcolm’s book. So, I’m just trying to forestall that.)

As a consequence of these RCTs showing O-6 fats to be harmful, studies using large amounts of these fats may not get approved. Plus, who is going to pay for them? Certainly not the purveyors of these fats, and that’s where the money is. Enough studies have already shown the negative effects of these fats that I doubt anyone would want to fund one in an effort to show their particular oil didn’t cause issues.

Despite the fact that we are all consuming enormous amounts of these fats daily, I don’t think we’re likely to see any large human RCTs checking to see if they are more harmful than animal fats.

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The reason I’m kind of obsessed with O-6 fats is because of the diagram below.

The graph is from another book I’m reading by my friend Chris Knobbe, M.D. titled The Ancestral Diet Revolution. Chris is an ophthalmologist who correlated macular degeneration in his patients with O-6 consumption.

In the graphic above, you can see how the rate of obesity basically mirrors the rate at which we have increased our consumption of omega-6 fats. Now it is axiomatic that correlation does not mean causation. But it also doesn’t mean that it’s not.

When you have a substance—omega-6 oils, in this case—that have not been part of our ancestral diet ever, and have been shown to drive health issues, and are consumed in greater and greater amounts as the years go by, it makes a person wonder. At least it makes this person wonder. Which is why I’m kind of obsessed with it.

I had someone ask me the following question a few days ago. “Do you think keto works to reverse diabetes and obesity because you remove the seed oils from the diet when you go keto? Or because of the carbs? And are the carbs only harmful because of the seed oils you ate with them?”

I answered: “As it stands right now, I think most of the heavy lifting is done by the carb restriction. I believe the seed oils are contributory, but the carb restriction does most of the work. In other words, if people diligently avoid seed oils, but continue to go face down in carbs, they’ll become fat and diabetic, assuming their genetics line up.”

The reason I answered this way is because MD and I were putting patients on low-carb diets back in the day when low-carb junk food was all the rage. There were low-carb brownies, cookies, breads, pastries and all kinds of crap made with almond four and other products that had a ton of O-6 fat in them. And patients lost weight. They probably didn’t lose as much weight as they would have had they gone on whole food low-carb diets, but most of them did lose weight and improve blood sugar, blood pressure, triglycerides and all the rest.

If you are genetically predisposed (ie, carb sensitive), you’ll gain plenty of weight on a diet full of carbs without a pinch of omega-6 fats. Refined carbs such as sugar and flour will do the job all by themselves.

Back when I was a kid, everyone ate carbs. Cereal for breakfast was pretty universal. Always sweetened with sugar and always consumed with a side of toast, butter, and jelly. A sandwich or two for school lunch, cookies for a snack after school, and a traditional American dinner, usually with potatoes and bread of some sort. On this diet, a small percentage of people became obese, but most didn’t. Every class in school had maybe one overweight kid in it—the rest of us were string beans.

Then came the O-6 fats and UPF and, bingo, the obesity rate tripled.

I definitely think O-6 fats are contributory. Reading Dr. Hulbert’s book makes me believe they are more contributory than I once thought they were.

It’s difficult, however, to separate O-6 fats from carbs, because they co-exist in ultra-processed foods (UPF). Those are usually a combination of refined carbs of one sort or another and some kind of seed oil along with the usual handful of flavors, gums, and other chemicals.

If you cut the UPF to cut the carbs, then you get rid of a lot of O-6 oils as well. Potato chips, tortilla chips, Cheetos, French fries and all the rest are loaded with O-6 fats. (in the old days, fries were cooked in beef tallow, so that wasn’t the case with them back then.) If you don’t eat UPF, you don’t get a lot of seed oils. They aren’t something you just sit around and swill for the hell of it.

It’s difficult to get a lot of seed oils if you stick to a whole food low-carb diet. It’s especially difficult if you’re cooking at home. If you use a store bought salad dressing, you’re going to get some, at least in most of them. But that’s about it. Unless, of course, you use margarine, God forbid.

Going out to eat is another story. You have no idea what your food is cooked in. But even then, if you stick to whole foods, you’re not going to get much O-6.

But what can be problematic are the foods, primarily the meats, you eat when you eat out or even eat at home.

One of the points Dr. Hulbert makes in his book is that seeds are the source of most of the O-6 fats we eat. Seeds contain the majority of O-6 fats in plants, whereas the leaves contain the O-3 fats.

Cattle are herbivores that graze on grass, i.e., leaves. Therefore they end up with a fair amount of O-3 fats. But these days, cattle are fed a lot of grain, which is a seed. And which jacks the O-6 content of their meat. If you get grass-fed beef, you will be getting more O-3 and less O-6, or so you would think.

But short of knowing and trusting your purveyor of beef, all bets are off.

I reached out to my good friend Peter Ballerstedt, a PhD forage agronomist, who consults with farmers and ranchers all over the world, to ask him about this. As per usual, he was traveling. But he sent me a couple of articles about cattle feeding and what the terms grass-fed and grass-finished mean.

Here is an excerpt from one of them from South Dakota State University. It applies to grass-fed beef.

The long and short of it is that you don’t really know what you’re getting when you purchase grass-fed beef. As the article says, it could be pasture raised and finished on grain. Or any of the other options mentioned.

I think this makes a big difference in the O-3/O-6 content of the beef in question.

Let me explain.

Since Dr. Hulbert couldn’t do RCTs on humans, he decided, being a human, to do one on himself. Before we get to the experiment, let me tell you what he looked for. Most everyone looks at the ratio of O-6 to O-3, but he doesn’t. He goes through the calculation in his book showing why he believes a different way is a much better gauge of true O-3 levels than the ratio. He looks at what he calls the omega balance, which is the amount of O-3 as a percentage of the total of O-3 and O-6. If you’re interested in why he looks at it this way, he explains it well in the book. I don’t have the space here.

In essence the higher the omega balance, the better off you are health-wise. He himself has evaluated fat tissue from humans and many other researchers have done the same.

As he discovered, obese subjects had lower omega balances than did non-obese subjects.

Let me hasten to add, as did Dr. Hulbert throughout his book, this does not necessarily mean that the low omega balance caused the obesity. It’s simply an association, which does not prove causality. But it is something to consider. And it is an association found in many studies.

Dr. Hulbert decided to do experiment on himself. Here is his description of what he did.

Below is the chart showing what happened to his own omega balance as shown by analysis of the fats in his cheek cells collected each morning.

Looking across the top of the chart, you find the omega balance of his evening meal. On the Y-axis on the left side, you can see the omega balance of the fats in his cheek cells. And time is displayed on the X-axis on the bottom.

As you can see, the omega balance of his cheek cells changed rapidly in both directions. It doubled within days after starting the higher omega balance diet, then rapidly declined when returning to the low omega balance diet.

This tells me the omega levels change quickly, at least in this one human. If we can extrapolate this to cattle, it means that meat from a steer that spent its life grazing on pasture then fed grain for the last few weeks of its life would be low in omega-3 fats despite being sold as pasture-raised, or grass fed.

So you really don’t know what you’re getting, even if you’re eating supposedly grass-fed or pasture-raised beef.

Which is why I like to eat sardines. But, as I’ve heard from many people, sardines are not on the menu for everyone. One of my readers suggested eating them with some chopped onions and a little vinegar on them. Which both MD and I tried, and both of us liked. But our tastes may be different than yours.

You can always supplement, but that has its own issues. As one of my long-time readers wrote in the comments section last week:

First, let’s ignore the krill oil for now. I’ll address that in another Arrow. Krill oil is different than fish oil in that its fats are in a phospholipid configuration while fish oil fats are in a triglyceride configuration. Some people argue that the phospholipid form is more easily digestible, but let’s leave that argument for later. I need to go back and review the studies looking at the difference between the two before I can comment intelligently.

Throughout his book, Dr. Hulbert discusses various studies that show little to no difference in outcomes between subjects taking fish oil and the control subjects who took none. He makes the case that almost all of these studies were done using fish oil capsules, which typically contain from 750 mg to a gram of fish oil, which he believes is not enough to do much. Bumping the fish oil intake up to ~2 gm per day seems to make a difference. Especially if you’re being careful to avoid a ton of O-6 fats.

You can take a couple of fish oil capsules per day and probably get enough. But my caveat is to do like I’ve always done when taking fish oil capsules, which is to chew them. O-3 fats are incredibly delicate and can go rancid in a hurry. If you chew a fish oil capsule and it tastes like bad fish, then you know to throw the lot of them out. And always, always keep them in the fridge.

We used to keep Carlson’s cod liver oil stocked in our clinic, because I had looked at different brands and determined that was the best at the time. I took a look at Amazon and discovered Carlson now has actual fish oil. And the dosage of omega-3 fats is 1.6 g per teaspoon, which is more than half again what cod liver oil contains.

I ordered a bottle and gave it a try. It is mildly lemon flavored and totally unobjectionable. MD and I each now take ~1.5 teaspoons of it per day. And we still eat the sardines a couple of times per week, just because we like them. As with the fish oil capsules, it you try the fish oil, keep it in the fridge with the lid on tightly . Don’t leave it out. If it goes rancid, you’ll know it. Toss it if it does.

It’s nice protection against the unknown omega-3 content of the meat you buy.

Before we leave this section, I would like to show you an old study I came across. In going through Dr. Hulbert’s citations, I found one that led me to another that was done in France and written in French. That study pointed me to one done at the Los Angeles Veterans Administration hospital and published in 1966. Given the bad rap that seed oils are getting, I doubt this kind of study could ever be done today.

Titled “Composition of lipids in human serum and adipose tissue during prolonged feeding of a diet high in unsaturated fat,” the study randomized almost 800 institutionalized elderly men onto one of two diets to be followed for up to five years. That’s a lot of subjects and a long time for a study.

Here is the layout from the abstract:

Those on the control diet of saturated fat saw their cholesterol levels rise by 4 percent over the first 20 months, then fall over the remainder of the study. The subjects in this study are elderly men, and elderly people usually see their cholesterol levels decline with age, so nothing out of the ordinary here.

Subjects on the vegetable oil diet (the vegetable oil was not described, but given the date of the study, I’m pretty sure it was corn oil, which was in common use then) had their cholesterol levels fall.

Here is a graphic showing the difference in the fatty acid content of the diet.

The black columns are the control diet, and you can see from all the zeros after the number of carbons in each fat how much is saturated. And there is a lot of monounsaturated fat as well. I’ve put the 18:2 fat in a box as that is linoleic acid, which is an omega-6 fat. As you can see, the study group got a whopping dose of it compared to the control group.

The next graphic shows what happened to the parameters that were measured.

The subjects on the vegetable oil are represented by the dotted line, and those on the saturated fat by the solid line. As you can see from the top two parts of the graph, lipid levels declined way more in the vegetable oil group than in the saturated fat group, a common finding of such studies.

If you look at the very bottom of the graph enclosed in a red box, you can see what happened to the weight of these subjects over the five years. Remember, they were institutionalized, so their diets could be controlled. And according to the researchers, the diets were exactly the same in all respects except one contained saturated fat while the other substituted vegetable oil. As you can see, there is a difference in weight at the end of the five years.

Those with the saturated fat in their diets steadily lost weight, while those consuming the vegetable steadily gained.

The gradual and steady gain of weight by those in the vegetable oil group pretty much mirrors what has happened to us as a society since the late 1970s/early 1980s when vegetable/seed oil intake began to skyrocket.

I’ve spent more time on this section, I think, than I have any other section in any other Arrow. I’ve done so because I think it’s important. Thanks for indulging me.

Impending Vaccine Damage?

A couple of years ago, I wrote in these pages that I have info on the membership of two different golf clubs with a total membership of ~1,300 people. Most of these members are 50 years old or older. Almost all of them have been vaccinated for Covid-19. I am an outlier in this group.

I wrote that if there are commonly occurring vaccine injuries, I would know about it. Since then, I’ve had a handful of people ask me through the poll responses or via email if there have been any deaths attributed to the vaccines in this 1,300 person cohort. As far as I know, there haven’t been. At least nothing I can confidently attribute to the vax.

But I’ve now come across two people I know who have probably been vaccine inured.

A new paper just came out written by Peter McCullough and others showing that a large number of people who have taken the Covid-19 vaccine are suffering from cerebral thrombotic syndromes, i.e., blood clots in the brain.

The introduction to the paper describes the historical record of the syndrome.

As I’ve written countless times in these pages, more subjects in the Pfizer study who got the vaccine died than did those who got the placebo. The difference in deaths did not reach statistical significance per the statistical determination used, so the deaths were reported as being equal between the two groups. But for a company to tout (incorrectly, as it turned out) a 95 percent efficacy rate in terms of prevention of disease while killing a slightly larger number of subjects than placebo is unconscionable, at least in my view.

Now, as the VAERS data indicates, many, many people are developing symptoms due to cerebral vascular issues. As you can see from the graphic below, the numbers are huge.

The above numbers may seem extraordinarily high to you until you realize that less than one percent of all vaccine injuries are reported to VAERS. Multiply the above figures by over one hundred, and you can see the true extent of the problem.

Recall from the study introduction above that “sex-specific risk factors include women, contraceptive use, pregnancy, puerperium, and hormone replacement therapy.” in other words, women are at much greater risk for these problems than men.

And though I know no one from the golf clubs who has died from Covid, I have encountered two women over the past couple of weeks who have experienced cerebral vascular injuries.

One is the wife of a friend of mine who is in her early 70s. She began having symptoms two weeks after her second Pfizer vaccine. Now she is suffering from dementia, seizures, and is in hospice not expected to live much longer. She has no family history of dementia, or any related disorders. Her parents both lived well into their 80s.

The second is a 77 year old woman who has never smoked and was fully vaccinated and boosted. She awoke with a right sided hemiparesis a couple of weeks ago. She is now in intensive physical therapy in an effort to regain her mobility and function. Like the woman above, she has no family history of stroke, high blood pressure, or any related problems. Both her parents were heavy smokers, yet live to their late 70s. Her grandparents lived to be in their 80s.

There is no way to know for sure that these women suffered vaccine injuries. Neither of them reported their problems to VAERS. But, in my view, based on this latest paper, I think the odds are high.

I would be on the lookout for much more of this as the days pass.

The paper is making the case that the vaccines be recalled before more people suffer the same fate. I agree completely.

I happened to stumble into one of the vaccine reports from the UK, which does a vastly better job than the US of tallying such things. Here’s what it shows.

These data were from 36-39 weeks into the pandemic before the Omicron variant appeared, which blew the top out of everything. But even based on the original variant and the one that followed (delta and alpha), you can see by looking at the two columns on the far right that other than the age groups from under 18 through 29 years old, those from 40 to 80+ came down with Covid at greater rates than those who were never vaccinated. Those under 29 years old were not the ones who had bad outcomes with Covid. The bad outcomes were in folks who were older. And according to the UK data, those people who were vaccinated got Covid at higher rates than those who weren’t.

In my view, we were all sold a bill of goods on this, and I hope someone in the new administration uncovers and exposes to bright sunlight all the treachery that went on to get these approved and, worst of all, mandated.

And Then There’s Fauci…

Open the Books, a journalistic outfit that digs deep into the US budget details discovered that the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and the highest paid employee in the US government, is getting a security detail that costs the US taxpayers $15 million per year.

According to the memorandum of understanding (MOU) received by Open the Books via a Freedom of Information Act request, the services provided “included a publicly-funded chauffeur and a fully staffed U.S. Marshals security detail.”

Pretty good deal if you can get it.

Why is Fauci getting this deal while apparently no one else who has left government service does? Because of some mean tweets sent his way.

Pretty incredible. I suspect it will all come to an end shortly now that light has been shed upon it. That’s my bet, anyway.

It’s just another example of how governments throw money away. If you divide $15 million by 52, you discover that it is costing Uncle Sam $288,461 per week to keep Fauci safe. I’ll bet a lot of non-government security companies could do it for substantially less. But that’s the way Big Gov’t rolls. With your money. And mine.

I really, truly hope a reader here digs into this and finds out it’s total bullshit. I would feel bad having written about it, but incredibly relieved to know it’s not true.

I Did Not See This Coming

According to the Daily Mail, a friend of mine has been tapped to be a part of the Trump administration to help combat chronic disease in the US.

I first met Aseem Malhotra in South Africa about ten years ago. We were both speaking at an international low-carb diet conference. We’ve stayed in touch since and been together a number of time at other venues where we were both presenters.

Aseem is highly articulate and telegenic and has been on countless shows in the UK. When the mRNA vaccines came out, he was behind them all the way. In fact, he got his first injection live on air in an effort to widely promote their use.

Then his father, who was also a well-known physician in the UK, died suddenly from what Aseem believed was a vaccine injury. This came hard on the heels of his mother dying from a chronic disease. And it changed his life.

He immediately carefully looked into the Covid vaccine literature starting just a little later than I did. He discovered all the same things I did, and converted to being a huge vaccine skeptic. He wrote two papers (here and here) on what he found and sent them to me. I put them up in The Arrow as soon as I got them.

Not only is he a Covid vaccine skeptic, he has views similar to mine on statins, and he is a low-carb diet advocate, which is rare for a cardiologist. You can take a look at his list of publications in PubMed to get an idea of his thinking.

If the Daily Mail is correct (I haven’t heard this anywhere else), there will be a big change in the official government position on diet and nutrition. According to the article,

If Aseem really is going to be a part of the new administration, then I think we’re in for a big change on how the government views nutrition. I haven’t read about his appointment anywhere but in the Daily Mail, which is a tabloid, so I’m not sure it’s true. But if so, things will change. I hope.

The new nutritional guidelines come out in 2025 and will be in place for the following five years. Unfortunately, the advisory committee that advises those putting together the guidelines have already done their work. And, based on what I heard when I listened in on one of their meetings, there won’t be any substantial changes. (If you want to be bored out of your gourd, spend some time watching yourself.) From what I could tell, they were all pretty much morons either in the pay of Big Food or ideologues, such as vegetarian Chris Gardner. Most people think, Who cares about the nutritional guidelines? No one ever looks at them. That is not true as I explained to Bill O’Reilly years ago when I was on his show.

One of the big objections those of us in the low-carb world have with the guidelines is that the people putting them together ignore all the data showing the effectiveness of the low-carb diet in treating chronic diseases. Instead, they are locked into the low-fat, low-calorie paradigm and don’t appear to be willing to look in any other direction.

Since these latest guidelines are already in the bag, so to speak, I don’t know if Aseem will have any influence on them at all. I doubt it. By the time the next ones come around, Trump will be finished with his term.

I hope Aseem can make some changes. Time will tell. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Odds and Ends

• An enigmatic stone and turf structure on Bodmin Moor that was previously thought to be a medieval animal pen has been found to be 4,000 years older—and unique in Europe.

• New DNA analysis of bone fragments found in Pompeii show that relationships that had always been assumed were false.

• AOL’s ‘You’ve Got Mail’ voice, Elwood Edwards, dies at age 74. I’ll always remember how excited MD and I got hearing that message when we were traveling overseas and could finally get internet connection somewhere.

• The bells of Notre Dame tolled on Friday for the first time since Paris's beloved cathedral was ravaged by flames in 2019. Plans to reopen in December.

• In case you ever wondered what a vampire bat looks like running on a treadmill, you can find out here.

• Neuronal wiring diagram of a complete fly brain. Great graphics.

• Newspapers rapidly kill off the presidential endorsement. Nice graphic showing the decrease over the past couple of decades.

• Evidence has emerged that points to the U.K. Met Office inventing temperature data from over 100 non-existent weather stations. If it turns out to be true, it’s a real problem.

• NATO and vaccines, the two sacred cows. Will the new administration have the courage to take them on?

• Pilotless air taxi makes first passenger flight in Thailand. God bless them. I won’t ride in a driverless car, much less a pilotless flying machine.

• The contribution of CO2 to the greenhouse effect is 4% – 5%. Human CO2 emissions represent 4% of the total, which means that the total human contribution to the enhancement of the greenhouse effect is 0.16% to 0.20%—a negligible effect.

• Archaeologists identify centuries-old battle site in Iraq using declassified spy satellite images.

• It started as a social media quest for breakfast dumplings, but ended with thousands of cyclists bringing traffic gridlock between two cities in central China.

• Guy takes a trip through Romania to the Carpathian mountains to duplicate the hapless Jonathan Harker’s voyage in the book Dracula. I would love to do this myself.

• On November 1, an emperor penguin shows up on Ocean Beach in Denmark, Western Australia, about 2,100 miles from its home in Antarctica. No one knows how it got there.

• Let’s spend $200m on an RSV vaccine for babies, but nothing on vitamin D, which dramatically reduces risks?

• Grilled guinea pigs are the specialty of this NY restaurant. Apparently, the head is the best part. I’ll eat most anything, so I would gladly give them a try. But not at $110 per rodent. [The bride, however, will pass.]

• Great article arguing that fossil teeth suggest a long childhood is the prelude to the evolution of a large brain.

• What causes you to jolt awake right before falling asleep? Hypnagogic jerks are as common as they are mysterious.

  Newsletter Recommendations

And one last quick PSA

If you’re a fan of the Bride’s romance series, Caddo Bend, book 3 in the ongoing saga, Rising Sun, is out now and available at Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

Video of the Week

The VOTW this week is going to be a twofer. I’ve had one of these saved forever to use as the VOTW, but then I would come across something more new and exciting and push it to the back of the line. It my lust to get rid of all my tabs, I’ve decided to put it up along with the more new and exciting video and remove both from my tabs.

First, the new. This one is absolutely breathtaking. At least to me. I always get queasy when I see people walk on a tightrope. This one takes queasy to a whole different dimension. For me, at least. Watch and enjoy as Slackliners set a new world record.

Wasn’t that fun?

Now for the twofer. I don’t know if this is a put on deal or not. I’ve known enough Texans to know how they talk and think. And based on my interactions with many Texans, this does not seem out of the ordinary. It’s a customer service complaint to the company that makes Jimmy Dean Pure Pork sausages. The real fun starts when the guy thinks he has hung up, but really hadn’t. Some vulgar language at the end that is NSFW, so beware. Or avoid if you have sensitive ears.

I even learned a new word from this video: geekeroid. May become my go to word for some people I know.

Time for the poll, so you can grade my performance this week.

That’s about it for this week. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back next Thursday.

Please help me out by clicking the Like button, assuming, of course, that you like it.

This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and should never be relied upon for specific medical advice.

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