Bad Nancy!

          Oh, dear. I'm afraid I'm going to indulge in another small rant. Please indulge me for a minute or two.
          Yesterday I googled my name. I am possibly the last person on planet Earth to do this. I know there are lots of Nancy Bankses in the world, at least 70% of whom are better at self-promotion than I*, so I've never seen much percentage in bothering.
          But now I have a blog, and I'm interested in upping readership, so I googled my name to see where I showed up on the search.
          I ran out of patience before I found my actual self, but among the lawyers and actresses and whatnot I did find a rather famous Nancy Banks, MD, making the tired and erroneous old argument that childhood vaccinations cause autism**.
          So in the interest of clarity, I'll say that I never was, am not now, nor ever will be, that Nancy Banks. I was vaccinated as a child. I have never had autism. I do not now have autism. QED.
          And I'll be using my Authoritative Middle Initial from now on to differentiate myself from that other Nancy.

Oooooh! Authoritative.

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*The rest? Miscreants all, wanted for various felonies and misdemeanors. I learned this while buying a house in New Jersey. Before we could close on it, I had to attest to the fact that I was not any of a long list of criminal Nancy Bankses. And don't worry, I'm not.

**The British medical journal The Lancet, where the original paper was published making the claims for a link, refuted the paper on February 2, 2010, saying that three of the paper's authors (the other ten had retracted the hypothesis of an autism-vaccination link in 2004) acted "dishonestly" and "irresponsibly" when doing their research.