I’m allergic to smoke. By allergic, I don’t mean that it simply bothers me. I mean, if exposed to smoke my lungs and throat swell shut. I have to literally take steroids to breath freely (after getting the hell away from the smoke obviously), and a ton of anti-histamines to keep my nose from shutting down and running like a faucet.

So, most of my friends that smoke know not to get near me when they’re doing it, and kindly go have a cigarette elsewhere before getting near me. But of course they always come to talk to me right after they have one, and then all that crap lingering in their lungs fills the room I’m in. And it bothers me. Not as bad as if they were actually smoking – but about 30% as bad. Still, I don’t say anything about it because I don’t want to sound like an asshole.

Well, a group of doctors from MassGeneral Hospital for Children in Boston coined the term “third-hand smoke” to refer to the heavy metals, carcinogens and even radioactive materials that come out of smoker’s lungs and get ingested by kids and non-smokers around them. Their study was just published in the Official Journal of Pediatrics. So to all of you parents who “only smoke when the kids aren’t around”, guess what. You’re still killing them.
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While doing a little research for my recent Marc Cohn post I ran across the Harvard Radcliffe Veritones and was flat out impressed. I love acoustic singing troupes, and these guys are fantastic. If you keep in mind that these are some of wickedly smart people on top of being fantastic singers it makes it all the more impressive.

Enjoy.
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In olden times, that is to say pre-Internet, a businessman’s dream was to one day grow up to lead a company as President or CEO into a new era of growth and profitability. Well, not any more. Now, the dream is simply to become the CEO so that you can have an enormous, unchecked compensation package.

A new study jointly issued by professors at Harvard, Yale and INSEAD demonstrates that CEOs with the most outrageous compensation packages, relative to the other company executives, are associated with companies that under-perform.
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Prescription medication often comes with a hefty price tag and a built in bonus on the back end for the pharmaceutical company in the form of an overly aggressive expiration date.

A program called SLEP, the Shelf Life Extension Program, which has been administered by the Food and Drug Administration for the Department of Defense for 20 years has proven that 90% of medications maintain their potency even 15 years later.
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