Once Per Day
Once Per Day
[Megan and Cueball are standing together, facing each other.] Megan: Got any plans for the day? Cueball: I'm going to eat an apple, an egg, one baby aspirin, and a piece of dark chocolate, drink six glasses of water, one glass of red wine, a cup of coffee, and a cup of tea, then do 30 minutes of exercise. Cueball: Then back to sleep for another 8 hours!
[Caption below the panel:] I only do things that news stories have specifically told me to do once per day.

Many news reports on health recommend the "best" way to perform the processes, such as eating, drinking, exercising, or sleeping, that are required to live healthy. These reports tend to give such factors as a type of food to consume regularly, the amount of a nutrient to consume, or how long to exercise, in terms of what or how much to do daily. A simple example of this is the proverb, "An apple a day keeps the doctor away." Perhaps this kind of advice is overthinking things, but Cueball decides to follow it strictly as explained in the caption.
So when Megan asks Cueball what his plans are, he just lists his routine consisting only of things that the news has told him exactly how often to do.
His list includes the following, which he has to do once per day:
Several obvious problems arise with these "you should do ... daily" tips. They are often based on population studies, but they may be harmful in the case of some individual persons. This health-related advice would be beneficial in, say, 60 or 70% of the population, but may be ineffective in other 20% of the people, and deleterious in 10%. This especially relates to the suggested daily intake of aspirin.
The second problem is the shaky scientific foundation of this advice. There have been studies examining the effects of a daily glass of red wine, for example, but there is certainly no study which has observed the interaction of all ten of these health tips at once. In particular, tannins (which occur in red wine and coffee) are known to absorb certain substances, which may influence the way in which apples and eggs are digested.
Furthermore the scientific basis for these articles are shaky at best. A large number of these studies are just junk science - poor methodology and bias making the study more attention-grabbing, but lacking real substance. Even those studies that are scientifically rigorous are often reported on poorly. "Study proves that dark chocolate helps you lose weight" is a better headline than "Several studies over the last five years hint that chocolate may have certain long term benefits; more research needed"
Of course, if Cueball only does these things, then he can't/doesn't attend to other important matters, such as going to work, which most likely allows him to buy the recommended materials in the first place, or even using the toilet. Also, if Cueball only does these things, he will complete his "daily" schedule in significantly less than a day, probably between 8.5 and 9 hours. This means that he will do his "daily" schedule on average almost three times a day. One consequence is that Cueball will be drinking on average about 19 glasses of wine per week instead of 7 glasses of wine per week if he actually drank one glass of wine per day. While drinking 7 glasses of wine per week won't have any negative consequences as long as they are evenly or about evenly spaced, drinking more than fourteen servings of alcohol (where one glass of wine has one serving of alcohol) per week causes long-term liver damage. Also, it's not clear how Cueball is able to overpower his circadian rhythm in order to sleep for over twenty hours per day. Furthermore, while the routine is theoretically subject to change as soon as Cueball hears another such daily recommendation on the news, this won't happen because he hasn't heard a recommendation to tune in to the news every day, so poor Cueball is trapped in his daily schedule.
In the title text Cueball explains that his daily routine is not completely fixed. It is broken twice a year, since he also follows public information campaigns suggesting the replacement smoke detector batteries twice a year. While the US National Fire Protection Association recommends a replacement at least once per year others suggest every time when the clock changes according to daylight saving time , i.e. twice a year. (All such recommendations will likely become irrelevant as citizens of the United States, starting in California, are encouraged to replace their existing smoke detectors with new models containing irremovable ten-year batteries.) This is just another example for official overdone recommendations nobody follows, in this case since smoke detectors make annoying beeps when their batteries run low and thus rarely need routine replacements before then.
[Megan and Cueball are standing together, facing each other.] Megan: Got any plans for the day? Cueball: I'm going to eat an apple, an egg, one baby aspirin, and a piece of dark chocolate, drink six glasses of water, one glass of red wine, a cup of coffee, and a cup of tea, then do 30 minutes of exercise. Cueball: Then back to sleep for another 8 hours!
[Caption below the panel:] I only do things that news stories have specifically told me to do once per day.
