Think you’re healthy because you’re drinking diet soda instead of regular? Guess again! The drink will kill you with sodium.

Using data collected from a nine-year analysis of approximately 2,500 people over the age of 40, scientists found a relationship between diet soda consumption and vascular problems. A second study using the same data linked salt intake to ischemic strokes, which result from vessels blocking blood from reaching the brain. According to the research, subjects who consumed one or more diet sodas on a daily basis had a 61 percent greater risk of experiencing vascular events than their soda-less counterparts. The second study showed that individuals who consumed more than 4,000 milligrams of sodium a day had twice the risk of experiencing a stroke when compared to individuals with an intake of less than the recommended limit of 1,500 milligrams of sodium per day.

On the other hand, you know, no calories! So at least you can LOOK good while you’re having that heart attack. And, really, isn’t that what matters?

Sadly, it appears that Fort Wayne, IN, will not be naming its new city council building after former mayor Harry Baals, even though the entire Internet thinks that would be hysterical.

• Over the course of the demonstrations, the Egyptian military detained “hundreds and possibly thousands” of “government opponents”: some of them were tortured, receiving “extensive beatings and other abuses.”

• Rich people: they’re all alike, all around the world! “Well-heeled Egyptians, who drive the country’s economy, are concerned about ongoing unrest.”

• Best Facebook update ever? We are all Khaled Said: “Thousands of lawyers have taken their protest to Abdeen Presidential Palace. Thousands more have joined them and the palace is now surrounded. The army has now withdrew from in front of the palace. The president is NOT in this palace unfortunately. He is in another palace (he has so many palaces).”

• A very dramatic roundup of images from the last three weeks.

• Members of the government are making unfortunate threats about martial law. That has been no deterrent today, as immense and exceedingly well-executed demonstrations continue apace. Nearly every workers’ organization — from doctors’ groups to the lawyers’ outfit to the artists syndicate — is demonstrating today. Yesterday, tens of thousands of workers were on strike.

• Some preliminary talks with the government, talks which were not even recognized by all opposition groups, ended without any progress. The government literally, actually, somehow believes that it will remain in power, and that they can “manage” the populace. This will turn out to be untrue.

• Demands by some protesting organizations include: the dissolution of Parliament and the preparations for free elections — for starters.

• Are you afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood’s plan to install a MUSLIM CALIPHATE that STRETCHES FROM INDONESIA TO PARIS, or whatever Glenn Beck is saying now? Well, I wouldn’t worry too much: “The Brotherhood has already decided not to field a candidate for president in any forthcoming elections.”

This has become one of my favorite party games: “So it’s that time of night again when you find yourself sleepless on the couch, watching the same movies you always end up seeing at that hour. (Let’s face it, it’s never Bergman on late-night TBS, is it?) Perhaps you find yourself distracted, thinking about what’s missing, an ingredient that could have made the movie a bit better, brighter. And four little words enter your brain as if from a dream: Should Have Been Speedman.”

Geico’s “Rhetorical Questions” ad campaign has never been my favorite. Not even among the various rarely-amusing ad campaigns the insurance company has been concurrently running over the past few years. (I guess the cavemen ones would be my favorites? If only because of the one where the cavemen pull up on their motorcycles to the song that goes, “Don’t wanna hurt you/Try not to mess with your feelings…” I kinda like that one. That song is by a Swedish band called the Sounds, apparently.) But as lame as all those ads have been, this latest one takes the cake.

“Could switching to Geico really save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance,” asks the announcer we’ve seen ask that question so many times before, in his mock hard-boiled detective voice. Then, answering himself, “Does it take two to tango?”

To illustrate for us that, yes, it takes two tango, the commercial makers then show us a silly video of three people clumsily trying to dance the tango together. So we can see that the tango doesn’t work very well with three people dancing it together. Clearly, it would work better if there were only two of them.

Except that’s not what that expression means! No one ever says, “It takes two tango,” to get across the idea that there are too many people trying to do something at once. That would be, “Too many cooks spoil the broth,” or, even more appropriately, “Two’s company, three’s a crowd.”

“It takes two to tango,” means that the thing you’re talking about can not be done by just one person. As a quick visit to Wikipedia, or Eric Hirsch’s The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002) would have told the Geico ad copywriters:

“It takes two to tango is a common idiomatic expression which suggests something in which more than one person or other entity are paired in an inextricably-related and active manner, occasionally with negative connotations. The phrase recognizes that there are certain activities which cannot be achieved singly — like arguing, fighting, making love, dancing the tango.”

But they couldn’t have not known that, right? Everybody knows that. Is it just that they loved the bit where three people are dancing the tango so much, that they decided, “To hell with making any sense…”? Is the joke supposed to be on them, the ad guys? Like, “Look how dumb we are!”? Or, “Look how unafraid we are to look stupid!”? I don’t get it. (Maybe I’m the stupid one?) But how many people must have had to green-light this? How did it actually get on air?

What’s going on with the world?

Don’t worry, poor people, Barack Obama will almost certainly take care of you once he gets re-elected. Until then, maybe you should pick up a couple of extra sweaters from Goodwill, just to be on the safe side.

by Matt Ealer

You’d be forgiven for thinking it the height of silliness to try and tease out some deep cultural truth from the contemporary action movie — an art form in which Sly Stallone mentioning that some kind of vague bad political and/or drug stuff sometimes goes on south of the border passes for trenchant political commentary. But then you may not be a fan of the action movies of one Jason Statham and you may not have had his most recent punch-fest, The Mechanic — an otherwise well paced, competently shot affair, with no wince-inducing dialogue and with plenty of stoic Statham ass-kicking — marred by the fact that the only gay character in the movie is stabbed to death, gruesomely, with a screwdriver.

The Mechanic is a remake (from the director of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, sure, but also of Con Air) and it’s a simple story of a fellow avenging the folks who set him up to murder his friend — a voyage accompanied by that friend’s son. This film, and many of the action and thriller and horror movies of today, stem from the exploitation tradition. Unfortunately, exploitation is not all Pam Grier blowing shotgun holes in motherfuckers and looking like a goddess while doing it. There’s a long homophobic thread in this type of movie: the 1968 Frank Sinatra potboiler The Detective featured an entire prominent subplot of gay panic. The fear of the urban that fuels even my beloved Batman was switched from fear of an ethnic-other criminal element for a fear of the heathen yet hip homosexuals who, according to the movie, were huddled in the back of every box truck, quivering but nefarious.

So what’s the big deal here? Isn’t this par for the course, (straight) boys will be (straight) boys? Maybe. Not really.

Were there a relevant corollary to the fictional state of being that conservatives like to invoke when criticizing President Obama and others on purely racist terms — well, call it post-gender — you could almost make a case that this sequence is not harmful to gay men. After all, none of the characters in these sorts of movies are good guys.

Our anti-hero, Statham, kills his mentor, his employer and his protégé in that order before driving off into the sunset in the brand-new version of the beat-up Chevy truck he’d been driving throughout the rest of the movie. (At least British supermen still buy American.) Since our gay character is a hitman too, and a hit is all business, can’t it be said that the movie is just saying that gay dudes can be well-paid killers for hire just like Jason Statham? Equality!

But we don’t live in a post-anything world. When Statham kills his protégé it is because he has just tried to kill Statham, because he’s finally realized that it was Statham that killed his father. There is a clear line of the movie’s logic that buttresses both murder attempts: Statham goes after his boss because he realizes the boss set his mentor up and duped Statham into killing him.

There’s another key, telling scene. When Statham terrorizes his boss’s bodyguard for the boss’s whereabouts, he threatens the man’s daughter by forcing her hand closer and closer to a running garbage disposal. When the bodyguard still won’t talk, we see bloody gore fly out of the thing as the girl screams. The bodyguard talks, and as Statham leaves we see that, by some miracle of physics, he’s switched a cut of filet mignon for the girl’s hand without anyone noticing. Even murderous hitman Statham would never put an innocent white girl in danger! (The treatment of women in the film is predictable — they are for fucking and protecting. He has a relationship with a hooker which is supposed to demonstrate that his character is an exceptional tipper. Well, also it’s mainly supposed to demonstrate softcore scenes.)

What these exploitation films (and broader pulp culture in general) do is set up an intractable, extra-legal Man Code for proper heterosexual behavior. There are certain lines you don’t cross. It’s Batman’s self-imposed vow never to kill, even though he can do everything else illegal under the moon for the greater good. Here, Statham will not hurt an innocent girl, and he will only kill the protégé he suspects is going to try to kill him after the protégé makes his attempt.

So, in accordance with this code, the gay hitman is not just another hitman who ran afoul of Statham’s employers. When going over the assignment, Statham describes his “weakness” as “boys,” his voice dripping with pedophilia-implications and venom. In setting up the hit, the protégé is supposed to act as though he’s desperate, out of money in an unfamiliar city and vulnerable. They’re reverse-engineering a date rape. As if the only way this man can pick up guys is to date rape them.

And then there’s the sex/fight sequence. My viewing companion pointed out at drinks after that you could feel the audience growing tense as the protégé started to go down on the dude. This being the same audience that featured a man sleeping right through a Statham-on-model/hooker full-frontal sex scene. This sequence was specifically designed to heighten tension with the end fear being, “Oh my God he’s not really gonna do that with another dude is he? They can’t show that!”

When in the next few seconds the bloody, gratuitous-even-for-this-movie fight ensues — which, again, ends with a screwdriver penetrating the only gay character in the film’s gut until he dies — we’re supposed to want the other hitman to die not because this is some clinical job or even the protégé’s trial by fire, but also because he almost made us see gay sex on screen.

And by now, in the patois of this movie, gay sex and gay people have become a violation of the extra-legal Man Code.

This is especially alarming given another recent and even more far-reaching example of the greater Man Code in action. Everywhere in the lead-up to the Super Bowl was the implication that if only Ben Roethlisberger could pull this game out, his demons would finally be laid to rest. His “indiscretions” would be forgotten. Because in the culture of the man code, a trail of egregious rape accusations can be laid to rest by a show of physical acumen. You can become a source of municipal, national pride, because of how far you can throw a football and how few interceptions you allow.

Some people didn’t even need the (in any case not to be) Super Bowl victory. ESPN’s SportsCenter has been running hammy commercials with the quarterback, seeking to prove that he’s just one of the guys, while making the definite statement that the Worldwide Leader in Sports, on whose website two-thirds of men aged 18-to-34 spend nearly an hour a day, does not mind hitching its star to an accused — accused mind you, never forget the accused — rapist.

As the Times has just pointed out, ESPN is a main disseminator of the Man Code. It’s how you know it’s okay to keep bringing up the Roethlisberger rape allegations as a way to root for your team, sure, but it’s also a place that “legitimize[s] male preening” — all for the perfectly Male-Code-loyal cause of sport, you see. Athlete beefcake shots as an appreciation of athleticism, fashion spreads that teach one how to be a man.

At least that’s what’s said. ESPN’s embrace of Roethlisberger for the cause of the Man Code, or the sequence in this Statham movie — whose Transporter franchise regularly featured our hero going into elaborate striptease routines either in the midst of beating up other dudes or just for funsies — are reactions. The way to say “no homo” in sports broadcasting rather than rap music is to embrace a rapist. The way to do it in an action movie is to pantomime killing someone with a screwdriver.

There are glimpses of hope, however. On the NHL ice, notorious, cartoonish bad guy Sean Avery has recently said that if any kid was afraid to come out in front of his team, he’d fly out and stand by him. It’s maybe an empty gesture if we want to talk about objective reality, but coming from a bonehead among boneheads, that, at least, is downright heartening.

You should ask Matt Ealer for his thoughts on Death Race.

Prison Island opposition leader Tony Abbott is currently embroiled in the delightfully Australian named “shitgate” controversy, which concerns remarks he made when discussing the death of a soldier. “Sometimes shit happens, doesn’t it,” asked Abbott, and while many seem willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, the whole episode has inspired a fascinating linguistic debate: “Australians use the phrase in two quite different ways, and the clue to whether what Mr Abbott said in Afghanistan was disrespectful or not lies in the modulation of his voice. Did he say ‘shit happens’, meaning ‘get over it, suck it up, spilt milk’? Or did he say ‘shit happens’, meaning ‘nothing could have been done, it was fate, or God’s will.’… I think he meant it in a sympathetic way, reassuring those soldiers around him. In your head, do a voiceover. Replace ‘shit happens’ with ‘these things happen in war and you are not to blame’.”

There is something about this news that makes me feel like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes when he [SPOILER ALERT] sees the Statue of Liberty: “Bordeaux’s fabled wine grapes are under threat from global warming, climate experts told a meeting of industry leaders Tuesday.”