Nope, I’m not talking about missed opportunities or that one last glass of wine that one night at your company holiday party (although I wish I could find a way to erase those regrets…I’d make a fortune, and the world would probably be a happier place. No, scratch that. I’d make a fortune, but the world would be even more naive and spoiled, as no one would learn from mistakes…oh, well.)

I’m talking about getting a tattoo at sixteen. Yeah, I know every teenager out there would hate me for writing this (I would have, at sixteen) but the fact is, I just don’t think most of us are enlightened enough about our identities at that age to make such decisions as permanent body art (which is why I am such an advocate for parents saying “yes!” to piercings–they can be removed) or even college (which is why I wish it were customary in America for high school grads to take a gap year) but I digress. I know I was not secure enough in my identity to choose an appropriate tattoo all those years ago. In fact, I was sick and tired of seeming like I was a nerd who wasn’t “tough” compared to my friends (hard to do when you are 5′ tall and 90-something pounds), so I got a big old ugly gecko tattooed on my back. With six legs. At a party. By an amateur.

And of course, weeks later, it looked like shit. So what do I do? Oh, I am such a genius that I go and get it covered. With a bigger, uglier, blacker, six-legged-er, lizardier gecko.

Who’s the wussy nerd now?

See, I have lived with this eyesore, visible to all in yoga, at the pool, and any time I wear a tank top, for too long. TOO LONG. I went to med spas and dermatologists, inquiring about removal, who told me that the 2 layers would take 8-10 visits. At $500 a visit.

Yeah. NO.

So I asked around, and found out about a tattoo studio that did amazing cover work. I thought maybe I could get my ugly mistake covered by a big lotus flower (from darkness to light-quite fitting, right?) Only when I went in, they told me I would have to have it lightened by removal, or NOTHING would cover it.

I balked. 

“No way,” I said.

“You won’t get it removed?” the guy asked.

“Um. I can’t. Afford. It.”

He then went on to introduce me to the “resident laser chick,” as I will call her, who quoted me a price that basically proved to me that the doctors and med spas are, um , a rip off.

(Don’t get me started on doctors.)

Now, I really don’t like the thought of lasers and my skin, together. I mean…I don’t even have a microwave in the apartment. (Not lasers, but you know what I mean.) But I also hate the idea of a big ugly black “IS THAT A FROG???” on my back, when it means nothing and I expose my back daily at the gym and in yoga.

So I did it. Apparently, it should only take a few treatments to lighten it enough to cover it, and it might fade completely. And it is very affordable…about a fifth of what I would spend every 8 weeks (which is as often as I can get treatments…healing time) on cheap shit at Target that will get worn once and then thrown out due to stretching and seam creep. Ugh.

Here is before:

Yeah. Maybe not as "WTF?" as some, but still very "WTF?"

And I took this about 30 minutes after, when I got home. (Only the first half of it…because it is way hard to photograph your own back with a cell phone.)

...and it keeps fading for the next 8 weeks or so. Hooray!

It itches. I mean, it itches A LOT. Much, much more than a tattoo.

And if you are wondering about the pain, it is bad, but not excruciating. It was over in 30 seconds, and it feels like drinking a bit too much on July 4 and letting the sparkler get too close to your skin. It also sounds a bit like bacon frying. Gross.

I will post more photos as time goes on. I am looking forward to being lizard-free!

I have not used regular fluoridated toothpaste in years, for several reasons. (I won’t bore you with them right now, but I might someday).

Right now, I use something called Blanx, which is a great little toothpaste that costs a pretty penny. I was reading online today about how even natural toothpastes contain ingredients that can be detrimental to your tooth enamel, and came across a product called ToothSoap.  Since I just bought a new tube of Blanx ($15, y’all) I decided to control my itchy mouse finger and wait on the ToothSoap.

As I was reading the ingredients, I thought, “That sounds a lot like regular old Dr. Bronner’s castile soap.”

And thus, this new blog feature–Weird Experiments–was born.

I grabbed a room-temperature bottle of water (yes-I rinse with distilled-I won’t put tap water in my mouth at all) and headed to the bathroom. I grabbed my toothbrush and put a nice liberal squirt of Dr. Bronner’s Organic Peppermint Castile soap on the head.

Mmm...yummy.

I expected it to taste “soapy.” It did not. It tasted minty (duh) and a had a bit of a spicy bite.  Strangely enough, although Dr. Bronner’s does not foam if you use it in the bath or shower or on dishes or in laundry, it created quite a bit of foam in my mouth. It was not unpleasant, but I had to spit it out a few times because I started to grow a foam Fu Manchu. The only weird sensation was that of a filmy-ness (filminess?) as I was  rinsing. It took about 3 good swish and spits before it went away.

And then, WOW. My teeth felt (and looked) very clean. Ridiculously clean. Like, “I-brush-3-or-4-times-a-day-but-never-feel-this-clean” clean. They looked whiter, too, which is crazy. Just crazy. I thought maybe I was imagining it, since I have loved Dr. Bronner’s since I was like 12 and went to a health food store with my dad and had him buy me some because I never tired of reading the bottle. So maybe I am a bit partial.

But wait! My husband came in about 10 minutes later. I usually greet him with a big, fake smile (it’s an inside joke of ours) and this night was no exception. He made a quizzical face. “Did you do something to your teeth? They look really bright and…shiny?” he said.

“Well…I brushed with Dr. Bronner’s. Becausethere’sthisstuffcalledtoothsoapIwanttotrybutitis 25dollarsandrightnowIjustboughttoothpastebutallitisisflakesofsoapsoIthoughtDr.Bronner’swouldwork.”

“Whaaaa?”

“Yep.” *big fake smile*

“Well…it works…”

And that, my friends, is the story of how I brushed my teeth with Dr. Bronner’s soap.

Get some here…it is way overpriced at Whole Foods and such! Use it as body soap, laundry soap, dog soap, dish soap, er…tooth stuff, and more!

Dr. Bronner – Castile Soap Peppermint

Tomographyblog.com is a site dedicated to radiology and nuclear medicine, but we are still information hungry medical students, therefor we cannot ignore other areas of science. So today, I would like to share a couple interesting medical experiments with you that our forefathers committed, because, at the core of scientific development lies research. I would like to warn you ahead of time, that some of the writings and videos featured in this post may be disturbing to some, so do not turn the lights off when viewing these.

1. Let us start it off by Ian Oswald, a British psychiatrist, who conducted most of his research in the realm of sleep. In the famous 1960 may 14th article titled Falling Asleep Open-eyed During Intense Rhythmic Stimulation (free to download) that was published in the British Medical Journal, Oswald explains that he fixed his subject’s eyelids open with adhesive tape, and he did the following: he directed very bright light into his subjects’ eyes; he sent an electric current into their legs; and finally he made them listen to very loud blues music. Two of his three subjects were severely sleep deprived and only one got adequate sleep the night before the experiment, but surprisingly all three were sleeping according to the EEG 12 minutes into the experiment. What is the conclusion? Oswald concluded that monotonity might have been the answer to his findings, such that explains why we may fall asleep, even if for seconds, while driving on a long straight stretch of highway.

2. Carney Landis, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Minnesota set out to find out if emotions evoked characteristic facial expressions. He exposed his subjects to a variety of stimuli designed to provoke a strong emotional reaction. For instance, he made them smell ammonia, listen to jazz, look at pornographic pictures and put their hand into a bucket of frogs. As they reacted to each stimulus, he snapped pictures of their faces. The climax of the experiment arrived when Landis carried in a live white rat on a tray and asked them to decapitate it. Interestingly 2/3s of his subjects carried out his instructions! Does this sound all too familiar to you? If so, read on!

3. Indeed! The Milgram experiment: watch it!

4. Here is a great experiment conducted by the U.S. Army. In the 1960s while on a training flight at an altitude of 5000 feet the pilot notified all passengers that they were to make an emergency landing. A stewards distributed some papers for the passengers that they were asked to fill out just in case they were to die the Army wanted to make sure it was covered for the loss. Not surprisingly, the soldiers had a very hard time filling out the papers. When all of them turned in their papers, they were told that the emergency landing was only a joke.

5. But there was no joke to Vlagyimir Demikov’s research. During the dark ages of the Cold War he created a creature in a lab at the Moscow Institute of Surgery by grafting the head, shoulders and front legs of a puppy onto the neck of a mature German shepherd. When one “dog” wanted to eat, the other ate, and when the other “dog” drank so did the first one. You must realize that joining of nerve endings at the time was not possible so the dog whose head was operated on to the whole dog could not control their common body, but it was fully functional from the neck up. These dogs could not live long, and most died after a week or so. Demikov created 19 such dogs before terminating his experiments. Here are two shocking must see videos on this topic:

• PoeTV
• TvData

This blog entry was done using Flock from beginning to end! Try it yourself today.

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With classes starting up again, many of us will be forced to take some kind of bullshit science course which will never be of any use to us. I remember at the start of my freshman year, we all had to take, if nothing else, “Baby Bio” – the liberal arts version of biology. We learned a lot of really long plant names; that’s about all I know.

Baby Bio was the last time science was a part of my life, with the exception of a few experimental liquor drinks I’ve concocted along the way.

For those of you who are like me, and haven’t had much science in your life, prepare to be freaked the f*ck out by this list of the most bizarre and crazy-ass experiments in history. These weird scientists went waaaaay beyond memorizing their plant names, and most of the time, they just jumped right into these odd experiments out of pure curiosity.

Check out the list. Learn some things. Freak out your friends. Warning: some of these are pretty disgusting.

Some of the most whacked experiments asked the questions:

What would happen if you give 297 milligrams of LSD (3000 times the level of a typical human dose) to an elephant? Wow, I ask myself that every day. Scientists still don’t know for sure, cause the experiment didn’t go as planned, but I’d say…ummmmm…it’d have one hell of a trip.

What if you put a female prostitute in a room with a gay man after he’s given “heterosexual hormones”? He’ll have sex with her, obvi! He is, after all, still a man. But, in the end, he was still gay. Dammit, science!

What do you get when you try to breed an ape and a human? Gross! Dr. Il’ya Ivanov was clearly a psycho for attempting to artificially inseminate female chimpanzees with human sperm. He was unsuccessful, but even more disturbing is how he found an orangutan named Tarzan and tried to recruit female volunteers to carry Tarzan’s child.

And even MORE disturbing? There were women who said YES! But Tarzan died before any orangutan baby mammas were created and Ivanov was sent off to a prison camp for a couple of years. Aw. Too bad.

What happens when you drink disease-induced puke? Stubbins Ffirth wanted to prove that yellow fever wasn’t contagious back in the 19th century. So he poured “fresh black vomit” obtained from a yellow-fever patient into cuts in his arms, put it in his eyes, smeared it on his body and DRANK IT. Didn’t get sick. Hey…I think we have a new Shot of the Week!

Why are turkeys so horny? Again, a question I ask myself everyday. Apparently, male turkeys are really horny. So, a couple of scientists removed parts of a turkey model one by one, to see how a live turkey would react to it. What did they learn? “It preferred a head on a stick over a headless body.” Turkeys love head! The scientists went on to do the same experiment, but with chickens, and I’m not kidding you when I tell you that the outcome began the scientific title: “Effects of morphological variations of chicken models on sexual responses of cocks.” Almost too easy.

What happens when you ask a stranger to have sex with you? This one is most near and dear to my heart, because it took place on my alma mater’s campus. FSU baby!

Back in the 70’s, pretty college girls from a social psychology class went up to random college guys across campus and asked them, “Would you go to bed with me?” to find out if girls or guys would be more receptive to the proposition.

“Seventy-five percent of guys were happy to oblige an attractive female stranger (and those who said no typically offered an excuse such as, “I’m married”). But not a single woman accepted the identical offer of an attractive male. In fact, most of them demanded the guy leave her alone.”

Not surprising in the least.

And there’s your science lesson for the day. I hope you’ve all learned something. If nothing else, you now know that elephants like LSD, turkeys are horny, even after having heterosexual sex, a homosexual is still a homosexual, there are women out there who would birth a monkey’s baby, you can, in fact, drink yellow fever vomit and not contract yellow fever, and, above all, a college guy would jump into bed with a female stranger faster than a girl would.

Um, you’re welcome?