Day 'o turkey

Happy Thanksgiving
from The Jerc Store!

It's turkey time again! Hey, did you know that the first Thanksgiving celebration lasted three years? True story. How sweet would that be to be off from work on holiday for three years? Anyway, enjoy your food, football and five-hour, post-feast nap -- I know I will.

And hey, be careful out there shopping tomorrow.

Hiccup in the plan

It's almost 2:30 a.m. and I cannot freaking sleep because I've had hiccups for like, 35 minutes now. No one's here to try and scare me and I've already tried drinking upside down and holding my breath and counting sheep or whatever the shit you're supposed to do.

This lead me to the story of Charles Osbourne (right), who apparently hiccuped for 68 years straight. WHAT THE $%^. I would probably ask someone to shoot me if this lasted for more than two hours.

The Iowa man was entered into the Guinness Book of World Records for Longest Attack of Hiccups after he his bought started in 1922 and ended in 1991, close to one year before his death. He began hiccuping 40 times a minute, and it later slowed to 20 a minute. I'm sure he wasn't inconvenienced at all.

And a fun fact from the incredibly credible source that is Wikipedia: It has been estimated that Osborne hiccupped 430 million times over the 68 year period. The average human only hiccups about 2,300 times in an average lifetime.

Would you like cream and sugar with your nasal spray?

Again, my apologies for the lack of posting lately. Now that I've gotten the major headache holiday out of the way, hopefully things will be getting back to normal.

But lately, I've been exhausted...and perhaps some higher power was trying to tell me something by leading me to this article from wired.com about a nasal spray that helps eliminate the effects of sleepiness. (And ironically enough, it's currently almost 2 a.m.)

A study published in this week's The Journal of Neuroscience showed that a nasal spray containing a naturally occurring brain hormone called orexin A reversed the effects of sleep deprivation in a group of monkeys and allowed them to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests.

The hormone could potentially help the 70 percent of Americans who do not get the recommended eight hours of sleep a night, myself included.

The authors of the study claim that orexin A reduces the effects of sleep deprivation but does not cause edginess and is apparently non-addictive.

Still, the spray would initially be used to treat people suffering from narcolepsy--a condition that the study states is caused by lack of orexin A in the brain. For the spray to become available to the average joe could take almost a decade, depending on the Food and Drug Administration's approval process.

But then it'll totally be so long coffee, hello nasal spray!!