The Lounge

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I just found this piece of paper and I have no idea what it means

I was looking through some financial stuff and intermixed with some car insurance information I found a sheet of paper with the word "poop" printed over and over on the left side, about 30 lines of it, just a single column of the word "poop" once per line. All lowercase, no punctuation. And then, in the middle of the paper, handwritten in big letters (and it looks like my own handwriting) it says "POOP".

I have no idea why. I have no memory of creating this nor of what I hoped to communicate. Did I mean this to be a reminder to myself? Or had I been intending to communicate this message with future generations? I would ask what sort of deranged mind would create such a thing but I'm almost entirely certain it was me.

White Man's Burden

Without looking it up, can you define "White Man's Burden" both for what it means, and what historical era it came from?

Bonus points if you can name a famous author associated with the expression.

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I work as a laboratory technician at the medical research division of the local university. My particular area of specialization is animal care, which means that I am responsible for the overall health and well-being of many thousands of mostly rodent-type critters. As one might imagine, this sort of work involves a fair amount of highly repetitive physical exertion during the course of the day. I'm on my feet a lot of the time.

A while ago, my supervisor came up with a nice idea to address this problem. Henceforth, every room in the facility would be equipped with a designated Comfy Chair; a plush work stool reserved for the use of animal technicians, allowing us to take a load off even while changing cages or what-have-you. This gesture was a generally well-received little morale booster in an otherwise rather clinical environment.

Tru Fax!!!!! That Get It Wrong

Either widely accepted stories that are passed on as factual, while being nothing of the sort, or better still, stories where the facts as generally reported are true, but still are used in a misleading manner or to support false conclusions.

For the first variety there's the claim that the doctor who pioneered blood transfusions died because the closest hospital was white only and wouldn't take him. The truth is quite the contrary: Dr. Charles R. Drew, while a pioneer in the administrative work necessary for blood banking did not invent nor pioneer the transfusion process itself; and while he did die after an automobile accident in North Carolina the survivors of the wreck all claim that they got prompt and excellent care.

For the second variety a lot of people who get tired of being told to run for their health take a sardonic pleasure in pointing out, "Jim Fixx died while running!" While I don't think this is strictly true, he died a couple hours later, after suffering a massive heart attack while running, it's close enough that I don't think that the claim is false. The implication, however, for most of the smug couch potatoes who point this out, is that running killed him. Which is about as far from the truth as you could get. Fixx had been obese, a smoker, and suffered from congenital factors that left him very vulnerable to heart failure. It can be argued that his running was a very large factor in what allowed him to live as long as he did.

Sorry, fellow couch denizens, you'll need to find a better reason to stay sessile! :D

Anyways, share your own favorite Tru Fax! That aren't, really!

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