Our mouths have many types of beneficial bacteria. Yes, some of them aren’t so great, but if it wasn’t for the beneficial bacteria, the “bad” ones would overmultiply and make us sick!

The best defense is a good offense – not of cleaners, but of competitive “good” bacteria. Same goes for your skin – if you’re scrubbing all your skin every single day, you’re removing the good bacteria that help compete out the stuff that makes you sick!

The door handles and soap dispensers are why you should wash your hands for at least 15 seconds in hot, soapy water (NOT under the running tap), dry with paper towels, and use a paper towel to open the door on your way out.

As for the cell phone thing, you could wash after use (yet another reason not to use it in the car!), or just make sure you wash your hands between cell use and touching food or your face.

Personally, I found this article pretty enjoyable to read.. even though people here have claimed it’s “least useful” and not part of clutter. It’s not, but at least it’s something nice to know about. Thank you for sharing!

Bacteria are not clutter.

Most of them are harmless or even beneficial; if you got rid of all the bacteria in/on your body, you would regret it.

If you have prior experience, point taken about the link love. Besides, like I said, they get plenty of trackbacks from sites with (hopefully) people who don’t take the language so seriously. I don’t exactly understand your methodology, though; googling the article or going to Cracked and searching for it through hundreds of similarly-crass articles (a much faster process than your newspaper citation example) is almost as easy as clicking the link. You’re making it slightly, slightly harder and therefore weeding out those with the most passing curiosity, but other than that, people will probably reach it anyway. The only way to really stem the effect would be to not mention the site at all, but that would be even less link love, so you’re between a rock and a hard spot.

Those who’d like to declutter their browser of distracting profanity could do like I did and install the anti-profanity Greasemonkey filter (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/4175) or other such addon. Once you do that, the Cracked articles are pretty alright.

I actually had a neighbor who, before and after using a grocery store cart, would wash her hands with antibacterial soap. She had gone through a month-long, debilitating gastro virus, which her doctor said was most-likely contracted from that kind of surface. I could understand her paranoia.

I have an iPhone, so no keys to get gooped up, and now that I have a baby, I’ve been running anti-bacterial wipes over everything within reach. All the same, though, yuck!

I’m certainly not going to start toting a tube of anti-bacterial gel around and start insisting that my friends put their shoes on a hot plate when they come into my house.

By giving explicit instructions for how to find the article instead of the link itself I was avoiding that exact same kind of clutter. (It’s the same way articles are referenced in print newspapers and magazines — article name, publication.) I hate nasty grams. Every time I have linked to a NSFW article I have had my inbox filled with complaints about the language — even when I have said “this link is not safe for work” or “not family friendly” before the link. So … I’m keeping clutter out of my inbox. Clutter that the good people at Cracked.com know a great deal about.

Oh, and I read Cracked.com. I also do stand up comedy. Too bad you missed my last show at the DC Improv.

I knew someone was going to trot this out. True or not, it doesn’t make handling dog spit any less disgusting–and I hope everyone would agree that it’s really bad customer etiquette to expect a cashier to be cool with it. Also, I don’t stick my fingers in my own mouth, either, especially when cashiering.

My comment on this post was meant to be humorous, by the way; if I got any response, I was expecting at least a (virtual) chuckle or two, not a bunch of “oh, well, germs are a part of life” remarks. Sure they are, but there’s a happy middle ground between OCD germophobia and dismissing any need for cleanliness!

And if anyone’s tempted to try the doggie-with-credit-card trick… don’t. Just don’t. Thank you.

I wish you would include some link love to the article you’re talking about (it’s blogging etiquette). With your warnings and a NSFW label, no one should complain. But hey, Cracked doesn’t need trackbacks that desperately; they’re already pretty popular.

Just out of curiosity, how did you find this article? You don’t seem the type to troll the comedy RSS feeds, so I imagine someone emailed it to you.