147 Reportedly

I've just visited Google Trends, a Google application that tracks the most commonly searched words on Google, and the current number 1 most searched word is... wait for it...
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Neurosyphilis...
(I know what you're thinking...)
Yeah, what the... The rat's quite surprised too...
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But I figured out why...
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It's currently number 3 on my last check, and here's why... House M.D. Season 4 repremiered after the hiatus due to the Writers' Strike, and it's one of the possible diagnoses Dr. House and his team came up with, during the treatment of a patient who is just too nice... And when I mean too nice, I mean, getting deliberately hit by someone else and still let it pass off as an accident.
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Of course, Dr. House can't believe that there is anyone that nice in the world (he used evolutionary psychology to explain it), and takes it to be a symptom of a disease, neurosyphilis among others... but it was Chagas' Disease in the end.
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But here's the thing, not many people believe the pathogen responsible for an STD (well, if you didn't know syphilis is an STD, go... I don't know...), can actually travel up to the brain causing strokes, and in this case, emotional disorders. So, I guess after the show, all the audience run to the nearest computer they can find and Google all the diagnoses in the show to learn more about it. That's good, at least people are getting educated about diseases that infect one out of every 10000 people or more. But, I doubt anyone actually remembers it a year later. Except maybe neurosyphilis, or lupus, because it could be lupus...
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PS: ...but it's never lupus, or some other autoimmune disease...
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PPS:...and suddenly letting sex get to your head takes on a whole new meaning...

1 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Neurosyphilis? Wait until you read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Never before, or since, have I seen a writer draw connections between neurolinguistic programming, the origin of consciousness, the tower of Babel, Sumerian mythology, and the possibility that religion is a sort of virus - all in the smooth literary packaging of a cyberpunk story.

Also, hi.