Things younger than Republican Presidential candidate (oh, and did I forget to mention war hero?) John McCain

The “medical” practice of branding babies is younger than John McCain.

According to the December 1938 issue of Popular Science, “a new hand-type ultraviolet-ray lamp makes it easier for nurses in a Brooklyn, N.Y., hospital to brand the initials of a new-born baby on his skin to prevent identification mix-ups in the hospital nursery. Soft ultra-violet rays pass through stenciled initials placed within the easily handled unit to tan the letters on the infant as well as on the mother. Harmless, the identification brand is said to remain visible for a period of two weeks.”

Ho. Lee. Shit.

(ModernMechanix)

I seem to be getting a lot of first time visitors to the site lately… and a lot of them hit the wall around page 3. So I thought I’d make it a little easier for people to find the older stuff by putting together a very unscientific list of the top posts (based on page views, number of comments, ones that I think really help make my case, and ones that I just thought were funny)… and here they are:

Assorted Diatribes
Ageism
A day in the life of a middle-class Republican

Books
The Grapes of Wrath

Codes
The Zip Code

Discoveries
Oil in the desert
Penicillin

Foods
The York Peppermint Pattie
The Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich
Kraft Macaroni and Cheese
Cheerios

Images
A McCain campaign banner ad I wish we’d see
McCain goes after the youth vote
“Caption this photo” contest

Organizations
Mensa

People
Cindy McCain
Larry Flynt
Keith Richards
Ronald Reagan
My Mother
91% of America

Products
The Slinky
Scrabble
Duct Tape

Videos
McCain loses it on birth control issue
McCain says that his age is an issue

The Pill is younger than John McCain.

According to WebMD, the Searle drug company received FDA approval for Enovid - the first birth control pill - in 1960…. about 24 years after McCain was born and about a year before Obama was born.

People often squirm when they learn that they realize that they forgot to use birth control. Want to see someone squirm even more? Watch McCain’s reaction when confronted about the fact that insurance companies cover Viagra but he voted against requiring them to cover birth control.

I particularly like the parts where he says “I certainly don’t want to discuss this issue” and “I, I, I don’t know what I….” - not to mention the pregnant pause (pun intended) when asked for his opinion on the subject.

Stress is younger than John McCain.

While the concept of “stress” has been around since the dawn of time (”Tough day at the quarry, Fred?”), it was not first diagnosed as a medical condition until after John McCain was born.

But what is stress? Well, according to our friends over at Wikipedia, it’s “the condition that results when person-environment transactions lead the individual to perceive a discrepancy, whether real or not, between the demands of a situation and the resources of the person’s biological, psychological or social systems”.

For example, when President Bush was reading “My Pet Goat” to some elementary school students in Florida and learned that the country had been attacked, he probably experienced some “stress” because the demands of the situation were beyond his psychological abilities. His handlers, most notably Ari Fleischer, knew this and instructed him to just sit there for a while until the grown-ups could figure out what to do.

Similarly, when a certain member of my extended family (who shall remain nameless) gets flustered in traffic - either because she’s unsure of the directions she’s to follow or she’s having difficulty merging onto the highway - she just stops the car to regain her composure. Doesn’t matter where she is or what’s going on around her, she just stops. In these instances, she too is experiencing “stress”. (For the record, she is also younger than John McCain.)

To give John McCain the benefit of the doubt, I imagine that he has handled stress very well in his past. His very, very, very, distant past.