More Than Ugly

Stupid, Too

Watching the Series, I was struck by the resurgence of what I’d thought were Dookie ropes*, inexplicably now brightly colored and popular for some reason with baseball players.

But no. These aren’t just garish Dookies (and it’s pretty hard to garish up a Dookie**). They’re pseudoscientific claptrap, too.

From the product page:

This necklace features Phiten’s Phild processed Aqua-Titanium, which has the ability to regulate the body’s natural electric currents through cell ionization

Promotes muscle relaxation, pain and stress relief, fatigue reduction, blood circulation improvement thus helping prevent injury.

And we know this because they told us.

There’s otherwise zero scientific research to support it. Wired has a good article on it, but come on – Wired? The sports blogs I admittedly didn’t delve too deeply into seem to take it at face value, which is a bummer. Even worse is the Washington Post taking no stance whatsoever, doing no research, and generally skipping the whole journalism thing.***

It’s not just that they’re selling a nickel’s worth of whatever for 50 bucks. These things are flacked all over MLB.com, and after all the steroid outcry we immediately get this stupid shit. We’re practically begging kids to believe snake oil pitches, or at least accept them uncritically in the name of fashion. I know there’s a limit to what we can expect sports to do, especially when it comes to kids, but they do emulate the guys in the bigs, even if they don’t canonize them like they used to. But does MLB have to promote bad science? I wish they’d just have taken the claptrap off of the product descriptions. If kids want to wear ugly necklaces, fine. Ugly necklaces that actively promote stupidity is kind of enraging.

Uploaded by mr427at

* If I were a different person, in a different life, I would wear a Dookie rope, and wear it unironically.

** Why yes, I do love saying Dookie. Dookie dookie dookie!

*** If newspapers are dying it’s because they’ve stopped doing their jobs. Seriously, if this is the Washington Post, would it matter if it was gone?