[FASTLARRY]

COLDS
Avoid them, stop touching door handles, elevator buttons and money, any time you touch money, and then go wash your hands often and stop touching your face. Refuse to shake hands with people, bow instead and if they shove their hand out shove out your knuckles to bump theirs with, which is an acceptable gesture. Follow a balanced diet high in vitamin C and I take 1000 mg in vitamin C a day, plus drink lots of fruit juices, eat oranges and grapefruits. I have had the flu once and 1 or 2 colds in the last decade because my immune system is so strong. Even when I get a cold is severity and duration is half what you go through. You want to be loaded up with natural antioxidants in your system which includes broccoli, green and red peppers, cantaloupe and drink lots of water to stay hydrated. And when I get a cold, I do not fight it, I accept it, I go to bed and rest, I take the time off unless I am booked into a show which then I will perform half dead, and have.

When you first feel a cold coming on, suck on zinc lozenges. If you’re around sick people, add some garlic to your diet. I take a garlic vitamin pill every day. Try medicinal shiitake, maitake and reishi mushrooms. They may stimulate the immune system. Tomatoes and other lycopene rich foods may help. Chicken soup helps loosen mucus. This stuff is great, it really works wonders. Some even claim acupuncture even helps. The average American gets 2 to 4 colds a year. The pool player more, because he lives in a germ factory, a pool hall and bars, where hundreds of people come in every day and several are infected with colds and the flues and leave their germs all over the place for you to pick up and get sick from. You poor Bastards don’t have a chance, and every year you go through this same bull s***. The same pain, the same sickness. Ok this year, fight back.

You can’t take a week off being in bed, so you try and play through it, and all you do is make the illness last longer, your play tanks at least 25% under your usual game and you now lose. Being around people means they will infect you. But you can reduce these if you know how they work. If you live with a lady, and she is coming down, sleep in another room and do not touch her until she is well. People in your family drag in germs and disease to infect their love ones. People who get sick, no longer stay home, they go to work infected, and they show up at leagues, infected. They don’t even warn you. So during the cold and flu season you must take extra precautions.

Do not touch people. Do not shake hands, period. The main thing you just do is eliminate physical contact with any human you are not trying to hump or pork, and then only pork healthy ones with no snivels’. Before you mount any female, ask here, are you over 18, do you have the cold, flu or Herpes?

Bow instead. Stop touching anything in any strange room. When you walk into the joint, keep a wash rag, or a paper towel in your pocket to put on the door handle to get in. Take your shirt; put it on the handle to open it. To leave, take a paper towel to open the door with it, and then discard it outside. I carry a pool glove in my pocket everywhere I go which is thin and anything I have to touch I put on the glove. I carry my own pen to use, and when I have to use that attached pen to run a credit card, I put on my glove. Never touch anything a lot of people are touching every day, like that pen, they are germ catchers.

Never use their pen to sign in, always carry your own. They hand you a pen to sign your tab, use your own, never theirs. Don’t touch anything others have before you. Don’t use their house cues; carry in your own set of balls. The set of balls they hand you, may have had 20 diseased people handling them before you get them. When have you seen a desk man, wipe down a set of balls, or put them in a ball polishing machine? Almost never, so buy a pro set of balls from me and stop using their diseased balls, which are giving you the colds.

Before I play, I even spray the table with quick clean and wipe it all off with a towel. I carry a can in with me in my bag, I won’t even use their rack, I have my own, I won’t use their rake, I put my moose head bridge head on my break stick. I touch nothing in there. When I hit the Head, my cloth is on the door handle, I hit the plunger with my elbow or foot, and I touch nothing in there. I cover the seat with toilet paper I sit on. I wash my hands a lot, I have trained myself to stop touching my face, nose or eyes with my fingers, unless they have just been washed. Never touch an elevator button, use your elbow. 2009 tests at the University of Virginia, virology department, have proved that germs can live on refrigerator handles and on remotes, pool balls and house cues for 48 hours.

I recently played in a 2 day semi pro event so I was playing on 5 different tables a day including the practice table and a few days after the event I came down sick as a dog. I picked up the germ there, probably off the balls or cloth. In that situation all you can do is go wash your hands after every match and do not touch your face or scratch during it. I did not, and I paid the price to have to work a 2 day trick shot show sick with my nose dripping nonstop. Then I got sicker and virtually spent 2 more days in bed as it went deep down into my lungs. I could lay around half out of it for a week to 10 days and suffer through it, or go to the doctor and get help, and all he is going to do is give me antibiotics which will kill the germs in my lungs. I always keep an extra supply around so I saved the time going to him and the $100 office visit and gave them to myself.

Within a few hours all of the crud broke loose inside me and what came out would make a maggot puke. The next morning it was all drying up and I was on the road to recovery and well the next day. Any time I get any infection deep in my lungs I get at it fast, as these things can go into pneumonia and kill you fast. If my own treatment did not begin to work, which it always does, then I would see my doctor at once.
The doctor does not want you treating yourself and losing the office visit. So when I get a prescription of antibiotics and it clears up my problem I do not take all of them like they tell you to. If I have 3 or 4 left, I save them. I also call the nurse back and tell her I dropped the bottle into the stool and lost all of them, and need a refill, which they now have to do. There is my emergency supply I now carry in my suitcase so if I get sick out in the middle of nowhere, I can doctor myself. I have 6 dogs and they get hurt in fights and I get antibiotics for them, which are the same one’s humans take, and what is left over, is used and taken by me when I have a need.

Real athletes are on a team with a payroll. If they get sick or injured, they still get paid. A pool player is on his own and if he gets sick and can’t work or play, no income, he starves. So he has to be extra careful to stay healthy and to avoid germs which lead to colds and the flu.

This means if you see anyone sick, coughing or sneezing, get away from them fast.


A pool player travels around a lot, staying in one cheap hotel room after another one. The germs are still alive in your room when you enter it from the sick person who checked out the day before. They are all active the entire first day you are in there. Remember they live for 48 hours. Rooms turn over daily.

You pick up the phone to make a call. You just got nailed. You need to carry a can of Lysol and spray and wipe off the phone, the remote, the door handle, the toilet flush, the bathroom knobs, anything you will touch. The first thing you do is disinfect the room.

If you have kids, they are the worst; they drag everything into the house, being in school with so many other kids. If they get sick, you have to isolate them from the other family, or you just keep spreading it around in a circle. Lock the little fooker in the trunk, poke a couple of air holes, and open the trunk and toss in a couple of burgers once a day, then let him out in 3 to 5 days.

Just kidding. But everyone in the family has to stop touching him.

You take the kid to the doctor for a checkup, he feels great, he plays with the toys put there to entertain them, and two days later the kid has a cold, and he spreads it to everyone in the house. The doctor’s office, for God’s sake touch nothing there, do not pick up the magazines, and keep your hands in your lap.

I do not suggest you freak out and become Howard Hughes, but you have to protect yourself better. When I board a plane, and somebody next to me is sick, I put on a surgical mask and cover my head with a blanket I carry and I stay covered up until we land. I can’t tell you how many of these ass holes have boarded a flight sick as a dog and sat down next to me and then put me out of work for 3 or 4 days. You board 3 to 5 flights in a row, and your ass comes down sick. It’s a mess up there.

Some sick person sneezes in an elevator, I pull my shirt up over my head. I know this seems weird to you, probably double weird. But this is how you stay fit and healthy. I gargle 3 times a day with Listerine, and I feel keeping alcohol in my system kills germs in my system. What germ can live in me when they are floating in Johnny Walker?

Wash your hands, every time you go anywhere, stop touching things. Sick people get sick a lot. Young healthy athletes rarely get sick. So get healthy.

You catch a cold or get sick easier because your immune system is weak. Poor diet, toxins, lack of sleep, not drinking adequate water, not getting moderate regular exercise, lack of good supplements are some reasons for getting a weak immune system.
To strengthen/ boost your immune system, do as many of these as possible, and you will not catch a cold! Load up on vitamin C, 500 to 1000 mg a day. Eat a lot of fruit, an orange, and a grapefruit and drink a lot of fruit juice.

1) Keep practicing good personal hygiene care, wash your hands! The great plague of 1918 could have been avoided by practicing good personal hygiene. Bath or shower once or twice a day, stay clean.

2) Get plenty of rest. During deep sleep, our body release potent immune-enhancing substances that strengthen your immune system function. By not allowing our body sufficient rest, the immune system will sputter, and as a result, not function at full capacity. We then are more likely to become ill with common illnesses. A healthy, deep sleep allows our body to release a significant amount of growth hormone that boosts the immune system and aids in the growth and repair of the body. A pool player must have 7 to 9 hours a day, 8 is about right.

3) Get moderate and regular exercise
an increase in blood flow associated with moderate exercise helps to circulate antibodies along with white blood cells necessary to fight infection more quickly. As a result, this provides our bodies with an early warning system to ward off potentially damaging germs. In addition, the increase in body temperature as a result of physical activity may aid in inhibiting the growth of bacteria; thus allowing the body to fight infection more effectively. Find a gym, or walk for 30 minutes fast, after your evening meal.

4) Receiving a Regular Body Cleansing.
Body cleansing is essential because our bodies need to properly eliminate the toxic build up that has formed in our intestines (colon), which may lead to sickness and disease. Our body organs and tissues must be free of toxins for the immune system to function optimally thus enabling our bodies to receive the essential nutrients our bodies need.
Your urine must be white, if it is not, keep drinking water until it becomes white. If it is yellow, you are backing up your plumbing. You must defecate naturally once a day. I move when I first wake up, and around noon a 2nd time. Keep things moving through you? Eat right, move a lot of liquids through your system, eat cereal and fiber and you will be regular. If you need help, go get the prunes.

5) Boost immune system by drinking plenty of filtered water. 8 glasses a day.
Water is essential for all living things and keeps our immune system operating optimally while improving the way we feel, look and live. Without sufficient amounts of water, you may experience routine fatigue, dry skin, headaches, constipation, and a decrease normal bodily function which may lead to your body unable to fight off diseases. Without water we would literally dehydrate which could result in the shutting down of vital organs and ultimately end in death. Pool players need more water intake than the average person. With my tea and scotch I get my 8 glasses of water a day. I drink two glasses of milk, and a Kerr jar glass of V8, OJ, Grapefruit and Grape juice during the afternoon. I keep my system flushed, nothing ever backs up, and it all is kept moving.

6) Eliminate all sugar and allergens from your diet. Its crap, you don’t need.
Just a small amount of sugar has been proven to impair white blood cells up to 50% for very short periods of time. By discovering what our personal food allergies are, then eliminating or desensitizing them will help strengthen your immune system. By removing these triggers, our immune cells are strengthened in order to combat other invaders such as influenza rather than the allergen. The elimination of sugar from your diet can also strengthen immune system. Cut out salt, you get enough in the junk you have to eat out. Get salt off your table.

7) Eat nutritiously
Good foods to eat include organic fruits and vegetables, chloretta, medicinal mushrooms like maitake, shiitake, reishi, or turkey tail. Besides water, wheatgrass juice, aloe vera juice, or green tea are good drinks. If it doesn’t rot or sprout, do without.
Stay away from junk food like pop, bake goods, any processed foods. Bad foods contain stuff like refined sugar, sodium nitrite, Tran’s fats, Mono-sodium glutamate (MSG), artificial colors, preservatives, and flavors.

8) Take supplements
Supplements are needed because our bodies cannot produce the nutrients necessary to maintain optimum health. There are many nutrients needed in order to maintain a strong immune system. It is very challenging in the world we live in to obtain sufficient nutrition with the foods available to us. They are over processed and void of many essential nutrients. Additionally, food is grown in soils that have been over-planted and saturated with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Vitamin and mineral deficiency subjects us to more diseases, aging, sickness, and the weakening of our immune system. Get a very high end multi vitamin, buy the best.

Best herbs include, goldenseal, garlic, olive leaf extract, elderberry, or astragalus.

Best vitamins include Vitamin A, C, or E. These are a good source of antioxidants, which will boost your immune system.
The minerals zinc and selenium also help with boosting your immune system.

As you can see, there is no one magic cure, one supplement, or one way strengthen your immune system, but there are many things you can do to help prevent getting a cold.

You could learn to play wearing two gloves on like Earl does. Or you can treat your hands before you play, but that does not relieve you of washing them after your match, and be sure you read the label and buy one that works.
Hand Sanitizers, Good or Bad?
What started out as an informal classroom experiment at East Tennessee State University has turned up disturbing evidence about some alcohol-based instant hand sanitizers — the antiseptic gels and foams that have become popular as a quick way to disinfect hands when soap and water aren't available.


FOR GENERAL USE Some sanitizers can be a good supplement to soap and water.
Many such sanitizers — whether a brand name or a generic version — work well, and are increasingly found in hallway dispensers in hospitals, schools, day care centers and even atop the gangways of cruise ships as one more safeguard against the hand-to-mouth spread of disease. Several studies from such settings have shown that use of the alcohol-based rubs on hands that aren't visibly soiled seems particularly helpful in curbing the spread of bad stomach and intestinal bugs.
But a study published in this month's issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases found that at least one brand of sanitizer found on store shelves, as well as some recipes for homemade versions circulating on Web sites about crafts or directed at parents, contain significantly less than the 60 percent minimum alcohol concentration that health officials deem necessary to kill most harmful bacteria and viruses.
"What this should say to the consumer is that they need to look carefully at the label before they buy any of these products," said Elaine Larson, professor of pharmaceutical and therapeutic research at Columbia's nursing school. "Check the bottle for active ingredients. It might say ethyl alcohol, ethanol, isopropanol or some other variation, and those are all fine. But make sure that whichever of those alcohols is listed, its concentration is between 60 and 95 percent. Less than that isn't enough."
Scott Reynolds, a specialist in infection control at the James H. Quillen Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Mountain Home, Tenn., discovered the problem inadvertently, in the course of giving a simple demonstration on the merits of hand washing to a friend's class of biology students at nearby East Tennessee State.
Mr. Reynolds had the students place their hands on agar plates of growth medium before and after one of several experimental conditions: rubbing their hands briskly under tap water; sudsing with hospital-grade soap and then rinsing with water; or rubbing their hands with a dollop of one of two types of alcohol-based hand sanitizer. The sanitizers used were a foam version from the hospital that contained 62 percent ethanol, and a gel version Mr. Reynolds's wife bought at a local discount store.
The next day, much to Mr. Reynolds's surprise, the culture plates from hands doused and rubbed with the store-bought gel were covered with clumps of bacteria that had, in some cases, formed a visible outline of the student's handprint on the plate.
Only when he flipped the bottle around to read the label on the back did Mr. Reynolds see that the gel's active ingredient was "40 percent ethyl alcohol."
"Otherwise, it looked like all the rest you see in the store," he said. "Same price. Same claims. Same pump bottle."
In a more formal follow-up study, Mr. Reynolds and two colleagues replicated the results, and confirmed that the lack of sufficient alcohol was to blame. If anything, he said, the faulty gel seemed to mobilize the bacteria, spreading them around the hand instead of killing them.
Allison Aiello, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan who has studied the use and relative effectiveness of alcohol-based gels and antibacterial soaps by consumers as well as hospital workers, said she wasn't surprised by Mr. Reynolds's results from the low-alcohol sanitizer, but she was concerned to read that such a product was on the market.
"I used to work in a virology lab," Dr. Aiello said, "and we knew — it has been known for decades — that an alcohol concentration under 60 percent won't kill the microbes. It's really frightening to think that there are products out there that contain levels lower than that."
Sometimes much lower. One recipe Mr. Reynolds and his colleagues discovered on the Internet for a bubble gum-scented sanitizer aimed at children called for half a -cup of aloe vera gel and a quarter cup of 99 percent rubbing alcohol, with a bit of fragrance. That translates to a concentration of roughly 33 percent alcohol, Dr. Aiello said.
Since 2002, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recommended that health care workers routinely use high quality alcohol-based gels instead of soap and water on their hands when moving from patient to patient — as long the worker's hands aren't visibly soiled.
Alcohol doesn't cut through grime well, so dirt, blood, feces or other body fluids or soil must be wiped or washed away first, if the alcohol in the sanitizer is to be effective. In such cases, hand washing with soap and water is advised.
In October 2005, a committee appointed by the Food and Drug Administration met to discuss, among other things, whether consumers should also be encouraged to use the alcohol-based hand sanitizers.
Dr. Tammy Lundstrom, representing the nonprofit Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, argued that they should. The committee's decision is expected this month.
"About 60 percent of surgery these days is outpatient," Dr. Lundstrom said last week in a phone interview. "We have so many people caring for ill family members at home. Maybe you're without running water because of a hurricane or blackout, or you've got a bad hip and can't move easily to get to the sink as often as you should to wash your hands. What about after you sneeze in the car, or stop to put in contact lenses?"
In all those cases, she said, alcohol-based hand sanitizers — of the correct formulation — could be a godsend, not to replace soap and water, but as an important supplement.
Dr. Aiello sees even more potential uses in the office. "Studies show that the computer keyboard, the phone receiver, and the desk are worse than the bathroom in terms of micro-organisms," she said. "Washing with plain old soap and water should be your first choice. But if you're stuck between meetings and about to grab lunch at your desk, or just use somebody else's keyboard, using a hand sanitizer before and after could be a really good idea."
How much goop should you use? Vigorously rub all sides of your hands with enough gel or foam to get them wet, and rub them together until they are dry. If your hands are dry within 10 or 15 seconds, according to the C.D.C. guidelines for health care workers, you haven't used enough.

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