Time to work on your decision

If you have managed to ignore all talk so far about the upcoming presidential election, I commend you from a particular standpoint. How on earth can you tune out something as important as that? Do you have the new Bose BodyPhone, which enables a person to completely shut off the real world entirely? I thought the BodyPhone was only in prototype?

Anyway, now is your chance to get back into the mix. Even if you know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about who you want to vote for, rest assured that I can help. Er, I guess I won't help as much as Know Your Vote will.

The site is a great place to start because of its organization. There are separate pages for important issues, separate pages for the candidates and also links to sites with additional information. In 10-15 minutes, you may not know everything about every candidate, but you should at least have a start for who should be in office in 2008.

Put the BodyPhone away until 2009 ... there will be plenty to ignore after the election.

Kung-Fu your way to presidency

It's election time again, and this is a big one. I'm not just talking about the Big Mac/Whopper taste test (Who won that vote anyway?). Americans will elect a new president in 2008, and the caucuses have already begun. But there's another way that you, a citizen of the United Internets of the Galaxy, can participate.

Check out AtomFilms' Kung-Fu Election, which pits each primary candidate against one another. Each player comes equipped with his/her own special weapon, moves and in the extreme cases, a hat. Besides an obstacle course, this might be the best way to have each contestant compete in an overall contest. "Running Man," anyone?

Oh, that's right, Arnold is the Governator. Don't forget to vote when that time comes, and don't forget to crush your opponents in Kung-Fu Election.

This just in ... everything on the Internet is NOT TRUE!

Have you ever used a search engine to find medical advice? I have plenty of times. I'm not sure too many people who can read this article haven't used it, whether it be for checking flu symptoms or making sure you don't have the Bubonic Plague.

But checking for health answers on YouTube? It seems to be a stretch, but according to a press release from the University of Toronto, people do it, with surprising results. The release reports that 45 percent of 153 analyzed videos contradict the 2006 Canadian Immunization Guide on a range of childhood vaccinations.

Without having all of the videos or the immunization guide handy, it's hard to say what this means. Furthermore, if the videos were created for entertainment purposes or spoofs, then this wouldn't be shocking anyway. And the main message behind this is that people should look elsewhere for medical information.

But seriously, who would even think that looking on YouTube would be a great way to find answers about an illness? My general theory behind self-diagnosis is to check multiple sources via Google, possibly the Wikipedia, and make judgement on what's right and what's wrong. And if I'm feeling bad enough, I'll schedule a doctor's appointment.

You can't get all of your answers online, but do you think that every doctor knows everything about medicine? But there is a definite distinction between doing your research in a library and doing your research in the circus. For the sake of humanity, I would hope that people know this, and that the University of Toronto is making much ado about nothing. It's making me sick just thinking about it.

Book review: "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair

Nearly everyone I have talked to has heard of Upton Sinclair, a muckraker at the turn of the 20th Century. And more often than that, people have heard of "The Jungle," one of his masterpieces. Yet I have not encountered a single person who has read the book, nor anyone who knows more about the book than its focus on the meat-packing industry.

True, Sinclair goes into vivid detail regarding one of the main meat production plants in Chicago in the early 1900s. Many of his descriptions are too grotesque to start to explain here, although I'm sure you can gather what the general gist of his writings may have contained. In fact, the novel led to new legislation for checks and balances between the government and the food industry with the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.

Even still, I do not think this is the primary reason the book is not read more often than it is. The last third of the book is devoted to Sinclair's ideas on So******m and the reasons this could cure America's problems. His information is biased, no doubt, but it is valuable nonetheless. Unfortunately, with the capitalistic society that surrounds the U.S., any evidence that a strong government is the sole answer is sure to be thwarted by nearly everyone in charge.

Is this a good thing? It depends on who is answering the question. Corporations should not be allowed to take advantage of its employees. Governments should not be allowed to take advantage of its citizens. Both do, in more respects than can be described here. It's coincidental that the problems exposed in "The Jungle" are eerily similar to those of many large corporations today. You may argue they are completely different because the meatpacking plants were obviously endangering society.

And you don't think 100 years from now, the same things will be said of numerous businesses today?

Check out Ben's book, The Developers (The easiest thing to find on the Internet: crazy people.), which is now in stores across the country. Send comments and suggestions to info@benwoods.com.

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