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facts & arguments

Don't blow your stack

"Bottling up emotions is thought to harm both mind and body, but a new study suggests that the opposite extreme may be no better," says Pacific Standard magazine. "In a study of thousands of heart-attack patients, those who recall having flown into a rage during the previous year were more than twice as likely to have had their heart attack within two hours of that episode, compared to other times during the year." Study author Elizabeth Mostofsky, with the Harvard Medical School in Boston, said: "'There is transiently higher risk of having a heart attack following an outburst of anger.' The greater the fury – including throwing objects and threatening others – the higher the risk," Mostofsky's team reports in The American Journal of Cardiology.

Bored to death?

"In a recent British study, epidemiologists Annie Britton and Martin Shipley of University College London examined data collected from civil servants for self-reported boredom and several cardiac risk factors," writes James Danckert in Scientific American Mind. "The civil servants were first assessed in the 1970s on a range of topics, including job satisfaction and boredom. In a follow-up in 2010 [researchers] found that those people who reported more ennui were more likely to die younger and to experience cardiac health issues. Literally, people were being bored to death."

The yuk stops here

"South African clown Norman Pudney has won a defamation suit against men's magazine FHM after it printed his picture with a report likening jesters to cross-dressing drug addicts," BBC News reports. "A court ruled that FHM used the image of Pudney, known as Puddles the Clown, 'intentionally and maliciously.' It awarded Pudney, a clown for about 30 years, $6,100 in damages. He told the BBC he sued FHM to defend a 'profession that is meant to be well-received.'" He added: "It wasn't about the money for me, but it was about protecting the industry and artists in the future."

Renting the rubber to roll

"When the tires on their Dodge Caravan had worn so thin that the steel belts were showing through, Don and Florence Cherry couldn't afford to buy a new set," says the Los Angeles Times. "So they decided to rent instead. The Rich Square, N.C., couple last September agreed to pay Rent-N-Roll $54.60 (U.S.) a month for 18 months in exchange for four basic Hankook tires. Over the life of the deal, that works out to $982, almost triple what the radials would have cost at Wal-Mart. 'I know you have to pay a lot more this way,' said Florence Cherry, a 57-year-old nurse who drives the 15-year-old van when her husband, a Vietnam veteran, isn't using it to get to his job as a prison guard. 'But we didn't really have a choice.'"

Pet owners' lost property

"A Spanish town is keeping its streets clean of dog mess – by sending offending deposits back to the owners in a box marked Lost Property," reports Orange Co. U.K. "The council of Brunete, near Madrid, launched the campaign to crack down on irresponsible dog owners. During the course of a week, a team of 20 volunteers patrolled the town's streets on the lookout for dog owners who failed to scoop. They then approached the guilty owner and struck up a casual conversation to discover the name of the dog. 'With the name of the dog and the breed it was possible to identify the owner from the registered pet database held in the town hall,' explained a council spokesman." The lost property, in a box branded with the town hall insignia, was then delivered by courier.

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