Can you tell I’ve been playing a lot of Civilization lately?

So yeah, I’m pretty sure this happens to everyone, but I’ll discuss it quickly just in case. At the start of any Civ 4 game I play, I’ll usually set a scout to “explore” while I begin building settlements and land improvements. At some point much much later in the game, I’ll get a notification to move the scout, who has been wandering aimlessly for thousands of years.

Poor guy.

So, I’m done with the real estate certification class and the state exam is set for Tuesday, so hopefully that goes well. While I did mention a post or two ago that the class has generally been silly, I forgot to mention a few events that occurred in the last week of the class.

Every couple of hours we’d be given a fifteen to twenty minute break to stretch/get coffee/etc. While many of the students would take this as an opportunity to sign the attendance sheet and leave for the day, there would always be a few people who liked to converse with each other, often loud enough that everyone else in the room could hear.

Intentionally, I believe.

Anyways, there was this girl who all week had been talking about the fact that she was also a nutrition specialist, and a few classmates were eating that #&$% up and asking her questions about diet and exercise. One such fellow (who I figured was talking to her because he wanted to go out with her) was… lamenting, I guess… the fact that he wasn’t getting enough vitamins and minerals in his diet.

The girl instantly exclaimed that she could figure out what vitamin deficiencies he had right there in the room. What followed completely blew me away:

The girl (let’s call her… Janice) told the guy (Mike) to hold his left arm straight out at his side.

“I’m going to call out a mineral or vitamin,” Janice said, “When I do, focus hard on that mineral or vitamin.”

A moment passed.

“Calcium!” she blurted out, and pushed down on his arm.

Since Mike wasn’t prepared for what was about to happen, his arm was pushed down a few inches, but quickly became upright again.

“Your arm went down, you have a calcium deficiency,” remarked Janice, proudly.

No… no she isn’t, I thought, No $%*#([email protected] way is she doing this.

The nonsense continued.

“Vitamin C!”

Mike, now anticipating her push, kept his arm up.

“You are getting enough vitamin c,” said Janice.

This continued for a few minutes. Honestly, it took every bit of effort I could muster not to stand up and shout, “NO, WHAT YOU’RE DOING IS TOTAL CRAP. HOW DARE YOU TRY TO CONVINCE PEOPLE THAT WHAT YOU’RE PRACTICING IS EVEN REMOTELY MEDICALLY SOUND, YOU CRAZY, CRAZY WACKO?!”

If you are a health nut and feel as though what Janice was doing is an accurate and reliable way to measure vitamin deficiencies, I apologize for calling shenanigans on your beliefs. I generally wouldn’t have posted this story, but I ran it by Jackie and she thought Janice was equally stupid, so I’m sticking with it.

Other than Janice the magical nutritionist, the police have been called twice during class: once for someone accusing another student of assault, and a second time for someone being publicly intoxicated in the classroom. I have… no words…

Finally, a quick note about an experiment we tried out yesterday. In an episode of Mythbusters, they tested the myth that filtering low quality vodka through a water filter multiple times would increase its quality. We had a water filter, and we had bad vodka (as well as good vodka) to test with.

After ten filtrations the bad booze actually tasted pretty great, even better than the good stuff we had. However, I knew which drink was which beforehand, so my opinion was possibly tainted. I gave each to Jackie as a blind test, and even she liked the filtered, low quality vodka better as well.

I guess we aren’t gonna get good liquor anymore, just a lot of water filters…