Remember those old commercials for Trident sugarless gum, where they said "4 out of 5 dentists recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum"? Many a person has honestly wondered what the fifth dentist recommends. Many a comedian has humorously speculated on it. I believe I have the answer.

I realized what the 5th dentist recommends while I was considering the debate over whether or not to give birth control and information about how to use it to teenagers. Many people who are against making the products and knowledge available to teens take the position that doing so is like approving of teen sex. Their position is essentially "if we give them condoms, they'll use them."

And it hit me what the 5th dentist recommended... don't chew gum. He'd be of the opinion that saying "if you must chew gum, then chew sugarless gum" was like giving his patients permission to chew gum, so he'd just say "don't chew gum!" The patients who disobeyed his dictate would potentially be in greater jeopardy because he refused them the knowledge of the safest gum to chew, but he'd be secure in the knowledge that he stuck to his principles.

Then I looked it up. The survey in which the 4 out of 5 dentists recommended sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum had three options for the dentists to choose from: sugarless gum, sugared gum, and no gum.

The breakdown between sugared and none has been lost to history, but if we are keen observers of sociological phenomena, it's pretty obvious how the average 5th dentist voted. He wasn't going to tell you the safest way to chew gum, because if he didn't hold the line against gum chewing, the result would be dental anarchy.

So, 4 out of 5 dentists recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum. The 5th has an overinflated sense of his importance.

If all you've ever had is steak, chicken sounds exotic.

When someone tells me "slow and steady wins the race", I tell them "it depends on the kind of race you're running." In the 50 meter sprint, the tortoise always loses.

I spent my weekend hunting down online coloring books made by government agencies so I could strip public domain art from them. The Army had one with a cartoon dog teaching kids what to do when they find unexploded ordinance. And this wasn't for kids in Iraq. It was for kids in Hawaii. Chew on that for a while.

Recently I've become addicted to Ninja Warrior (a.k.a. Sasuke).

Like many people in this country, I need to get in shape, but I find the gym incredibly boring. The exercises are repetitive and don't really feel like they link up with any useful skill. But if I could find a gym that offered a 6 month prep course for Ninja Warrior, concentrating not only on exercises to build up the proper muscle groups, but lots of time on practice obstacles, that would keep me much more interested.

Basically, when you were a kid, you didn't like running laps, but if you were racing someone, chasing someone, or running for a game, you loved running. You didn't like doing pull-ups just for the sake of doing pull-ups, but if you were climbing a jungle gym or monkey bars, it was totally fun. As adults, we've taken all the play out of our fitness and made it work. Who wants to work at being fit when you can play at it and get good results with a lot more fun?

That's why I'd be so much more likely to sign up for and complete a Ninja Warrior fitness course as opposed to letting my gym membership lie dormant. For all the seriousness of it, it's a game. It's a challenge. It's fun. And the achievements of clearing obstacles and finishing a stage of a course are so much more concrete than increasing the number of reps or the amount of weight in an exercise.

Realizing that this might not gain a whole lot of traction in the U.S., where Ninja Warrior is still a very obscure basic cable program and the term "boot camp" has become incredibly overused/diluted, I wondered if there might be another pop-culture reference which had challenges/obstacles like Ninja Warrior but much broader mindshare.

Enter Pirates of the Caribbean. It's an incredibly successful movie franchise, well-known nationwide and worldwide, and could present many similar challenges: climbing ropes and rope nets, scaling a mast, balancing across booms and spars, and a variety of other challenges.

They could actually do a Pirates of the Caribbean themed physical competition game show to enhance people's motivation to do a pirate workout. If they did it like Ninja Warrior, I could totally see them franchising a series of "Pirate Gyms" where you could train to be an ultimate pirate, swinging on ropes, climbing nets, sliding down sails... basically creating circuit training courses based on a pirate ship that not only get you fit, but are so much like playing that you forget you're working out.

But I don't need a Pirates of the Caribbean gym or a Ninja Warrior gym. I just want to play again like I did when I was a kid. I want to make all the health benefits of exercise a side-effect of having fun. We need "run, jump, and climb" gyms for adults. It would probably be more successful financially if you theme it with a popular franchise like Pirates of the Caribbean, but the real issue is a paradigm shift in adult fitness... gym as playground, playground as gym. Grids of machines are gone, grids of spinning cycles are gone, grids of exercise mats are gone. If people with the money and expertise to pull that off can wrap their minds around that, it could get very interesting.

So I was reading my daily dose of newsfeeds at Yahoo and saw an ad for a drug that treats RLS (also known as Restless Leg Syndrome). When I accidentally passed my mouse over it, a safety information warning was displayed over the ad. After reading it, I realized I had to screen capture and share it.

The only changes I made were to underline some of the text I found important. For example, it says "Mirapex may cause you to fall asleep without any warning." Okay, that's not "causing drowsiness" like allergy medicines do. Drowsiness is the warning that you may fall asleep. Apparently you skip drowsiness and just go from awake to asleep "without any warning".

I think the term "fall asleep without any warning" is the PR department's spinful way of saying "may cause you to suddenly and unexpectedly lose consciousness."

Next, "when taking Mirapex hallucinations may occur". You're freakin' me out, man!

And, on top of this, when taking this class of drugs, "impulse control disorders / compulsive behaviors may occur".

So here's what I see being a typical evening on Mirapex: First you strip naked and go wave your penis at the polka-dotted dragons in the front yard. Then you come in, and in the midst of ensuring that every photo in the house is hung exactly straight, you pass out on the floor... "without any warning."

But while you're sleeping, your legs are perfectly still.