If you were born today and somehow manage to live to retirement age you will have been exposed to over seventy million advertisements of one sort or another by age sixty-five. These mostly rude interruptions are called exposures or sometimes nowadays impressions because the implication is that they happen while you are living life and many times don’t consciously make note of them.
The FDA, the U. S. Food & Drug Administration, has one thing in common with the pharmaceutical industry: They don’t don’t think the average citizen is too bright. Maybe more to the point, they think America’s physicians lack common sense or integrity or both.
In what probably won’t seem like much of a diversion from what is typically posted in this space, today I am introducing “Cranky Old Guy” as a guest columnist at They’re Just Words. You probably know “Cranky Old Guy” or someone like him, he may be your neighbor or coworker, he could live at your house. He can’t handle things that defy logic and he is ill-equipped to deal with most aspects of the modern world, so he tells kids to get the hell off his lawn and shakes his head a lot asking himself rhetorical questions. He’s not really looking for answers to those questions, he just likes to complain. I’m glad I’m nothing like him, but in many ways, I love this old fuckin’ guy.