Friday night: You’re at a crowded bar, and have to pee. Fearing the toilet seat, you pop a squat, clench your thigh muscles and hold onto the walls while you unleash your last five beers. You make sure you wash your hands (sometimes twice, depending on how filthy the pub is), and maybe even reach into your purse for some hand sanitizer, just to be safe.

Saturday night: You’re at a frat party. You just won three consecutive games of beer pong. You don’t think twice about drinking your cups, despite the fact that you’ve seen the ball land in other peoples’ used cups, roll along the basement floor, and watched the ball pass between thirty-something unwashed hands.

What gives?!?

Obviously, beer pong isn’t the most sanitary party game out there. But you have the “water cup,” right? That cup of tepid, dirty water is totes gonna disinfect that old, recycled ping pong ball (that was most likely found under someone’s bed 10 minutes before party time). Or not.

Some microbiology students at George Washington University decided to test exactly how detrimental to your health beer pong can be. If you like beer pong, you may want to skip this article. Read More »

With a hectic schedule of classes, papers, exams, and keg parties, it can be easy to let your dorm room look like a dumpster threw up in it. Besides allowing notecards and empty beer cans pile up, it’s a damn pain in the ass to cart your shizz to the laundry room and spend some precious change that could be valuable on Quarter Drafts night at the campus bar. Then there’s the process of remaking your bunkbed.

However, neglecting your sheets for too long can result in some icky, unwanted guests– and I don’t mean the one-night mistake you made last Saturday. Here are the five nastiest things that should inspire you to grab the Tide and make a date with the washing machine.

1. Bed Bugs

Reports of bed bugs are rising on college campuses and even if you’re particularly clean, you may not be safe. The little bastards can catch a ride to your room on luggage, clothing, and old furniture (e.g. your hand-me-down futon). Plus, they can live up to a year without a feeding, so they could have been hiding out in your empty dorm room for the whole summer just waiting for you to move in and unpack. Luckily, pest control on college campuses is prepared to snuff the buggers via steam, extreme heat, or pesticides. If you wake up with little red welts from bedbug bites report it immediately before the infestation spreads down the hall.

2. Your Personal Sheddings

When we hit the sack every night, we shed dry, dead skin and hair. Gross. I gag at the site of a hair-clogged shower drain, and sleeping with hairballs seems just as unappealing. Girls with long hair shed a lot, so there’s also the chance that you’ve left your mark in your man’s bed as well. Of course, dead skin and strands of hair are a breeding ground for microorganisms, so bacteria can escalate after just a few nights of shedding in your sleep. Read More »

This past weekend was crazy. Well, for after-college-Lauren, that is. I went out both Friday and Saturday night and got D to the Runk (which makes drunk) both nights. My drink of choice: Rum and Diet, with a refreshing squeeze of lime. Not only delicious, but the perfect blend for a happy, fun, drunk Lauren.

Sunday morning, though, was not so great. I felt like sh*t. I crawled out of bed and right onto the couch where I spent a good portion of my day watching TV and playing online. Which only made me feel worse. It turns out that feeling like crap was only the beginning of my problems. My weekend bender had me drinking crap.

And, no, I am not referring to lovely and magical alcohol as crap. I am literally talking about poop. In my drink.

According to a study discussed in this article, the little lemon wedges that adorn the top of water/soda/alcohol cups is not quite as clean and refreshing as we once thought. In fact, of the 76 lemons tested, “a total of 25 different types of germs were found.”

Ew.

Read More »

I cannot stand getting sick. About a month ago, I caught a vicious flu bug and completely denied its existence in my system until I woke up one Sunday morning hallucinating and unable to stand.

Had I only taken more Airborne….my feverish mind reasoned as my roommate and I raced to the emergency room…I would be completely healthy right now…

Well, it turns out, I could have popped one hundred little Airborne tablets and it probably wouldn’t have made an ounce of difference (it also turns out that if you’re crazy sick and in an emergency room, crawling onto the floor and lying there gets you in to see a doctor way ahead of everyone else).

The makers of the popular take-it-and-you-won’t-get-sick tablet have recently settled a class-action lawsuit for $23.3 million, a lawsuit which claims that despite Airborne’s compelling advertising campaign, “There’s no credible evidence that what’s in Airborne can prevent colds or protect you from a germy environment”. Read More »

The “hand washing police” (creepy!) have decided that men are grosser than women.

During a meeting last Monday for infectious disease scientists, “researchers who spy on people in public bathrooms” (double creepy!) released a study that showed men have issues when it comes to washing their hands after using public toilets.

“One-third of men didn’t bother to wash after using the bathroom, compared with 12 percent of women” the researchers claimed, basing their findings on over 6,000 people in four big cities.

A spokesman from a co-sponsor of the survey, the Soap and Detergent Association (seriously?), urged men to “step up to the sink”, after holding their weewees at a urinal or taking a dump.

Because women are forced to frequent stalls all the time, we’re probably a lot more likely to realize just how dirty a public bathroom can get—although holding one’s penis and then shaking a stranger’s hand screams ‘unsanitary!’ just as loudly.

So, what is it? Is pee just considered not as dirty to men? Do they simply not care about poo contamination?

Are men really just really f*cking gross most of the time? Read More »