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The News That's Fit to Blog
You have probably noticed that I'm often indebted to Radio Prague for my strange or endearing Czech news. Here are the highlights of Daniela Lazarova's Magazine this week.
A while back, a friend of mine was warned about the dangers of dish soap:
We never found a true answer. Now, a new study by Czech scientists claims that dish soap is particularly harmful to male hormones. Supposedly, experiments by scientists at an Olomouc university prove that detergent contains substances that change male hormones into estrogen and damage sperm. It's suggested that "[male] dislike of washing up may be rooted in an age-old survival instinct." What to say? The big question, of course, is how did they ever get past the powerful soap and detergent corporations and their evil mafioso goons? But perhaps in the long run this will be to their advantage if the soap manufacturers just start marketing detergent as a cheap replacement for hormone treatment medicine. It's a business opportunity, not just a population control device. OK everybody, get your tinfoil helmets ready!
In other capitalist news, it seems that the post-Communist society is changing sexual habits of people in former Eastern bloc countries. Lazarova writes:
People now have less time for sex and more time to spend money, pursue a career, get stressed out, and wage war on terrorists. Hooray for the new world order! Three cheers for freedom and the free market!
So many new explanations of the aging society problem. (Of course, cats may also be at fault. Hey, Nori! Or maybe there are too many secession negligees in Prostějov museums. Or perhaps it's because Czechs use their IKEA tables for the wrong purposes?)
Tags: czech, society, news
A while back, a friend of mine was warned about the dangers of dish soap: Allegedly, one can never rinse away all the soap particles, which then get into the food and eventually cause cancer because they dissolve the fat molecules in the intestines and kill the beneficial bacteria that help us digest our food. . . .
Sadly, few people are aware of [this] because soap is big business and a lot of money would be lost if we didn't use it on dishes.
We never found a true answer. Now, a new study by Czech scientists claims that dish soap is particularly harmful to male hormones. Supposedly, experiments by scientists at an Olomouc university prove that detergent contains substances that change male hormones into estrogen and damage sperm. It's suggested that "[male] dislike of washing up may be rooted in an age-old survival instinct." What to say? The big question, of course, is how did they ever get past the powerful soap and detergent corporations and their evil mafioso goons? But perhaps in the long run this will be to their advantage if the soap manufacturers just start marketing detergent as a cheap replacement for hormone treatment medicine. It's a business opportunity, not just a population control device. OK everybody, get your tinfoil helmets ready!
In other capitalist news, it seems that the post-Communist society is changing sexual habits of people in former Eastern bloc countries. Lazarova writes:
Before the fall of the Iron Curtain sex was one of the very few pleasures that the regime could not interfere with. People could not travel, career opportunities were restricted and shopping on the communist market was more a pain than a pleasure. So people devoted a great amount of their free time to sex.
People now have less time for sex and more time to spend money, pursue a career, get stressed out, and wage war on terrorists. Hooray for the new world order! Three cheers for freedom and the free market!
So many new explanations of the aging society problem. (Of course, cats may also be at fault. Hey, Nori! Or maybe there are too many secession negligees in Prostějov museums. Or perhaps it's because Czechs use their IKEA tables for the wrong purposes?)
Tags: czech, society, news
Posted 11 November 2006 at 10:15.
A graduate student in music and anthropology writing a dissertation about music in Moravia, the eastern third of the Czech Republic. At some point, the Czech Republic's "second city" (that would be Brno) captured my attention, and I've since been blogging about events, arts, music, and other stuff—basically whatever interests me in and around the cityscape. I'm not living in Brno now, but I keep up with the cultural pulse from afar as best I can.
Comments:
I'll bet the Olomouc findings are actually faked by a group of men who resent being asked to wash a few dishes. I mean, if I thought I could claim that washing dishes was messing with my vital hormones, that would seem like a good way to argue for a dishwasher.
As for the alleged drop in Czech sex, I'd like to know who is keeping all those Erotic City outlets in business. There aren't that many tourists... after all, there must be three Erotic City stores per square kilometer in Prague. Perhaps these are for the entertainment of those who don't have time to find partners?
9:22 PM, November 11, 2006
When I came, I knew lots of people who were having affairs. It was pretty standard: you would never leave the co-parent of your child, but you would go elsewhere for sex, because you were bored with that person as a partner. Now, either people are less open about that practice or they do it less. I suspect the former, to be honest. Or maybe the questions change. "How often do you have sex with your wife?" is going to yield a different result than "How often do you have sex?"
The "fewer children" is an economic question, I think.
7:34 AM, November 12, 2006
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