spacy tv-watching lady

Today I learned that they're showing the A-team again on TVLand. Other than that, apparently the first aid treatment for embarrassment is vodka. Don't ask.

way to make a point

The Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) sent a letter home to parents after several hundred students walked out of class to "express their opinions regarding the much publicized border/immigration issues."* The letter goes on to explain that they really don't approve of students leaving campus without permission, and that they'd make sure everybody got to write letters, sign petitions, and talk about it in class or scheduled forums**.

As much as I understand that when students bail unexpectedly, the school loses money, could get sued, etc., you cannot tell me that kids believe a nice, orderly discussion group will get their opinions noticed, much as their opinions don't count anyway because they're too young to vote.


* What, exactly, are the students' opinions? I don't have a freaking clue; I stopped reading the news again.

** Detention?

warning: boring statistics

Today I got to wondering where people get the statistics for how many EIs (people with MCS) there are in this country. I'd heard 15 to 37% of the population have some sort of chemical sensitivity, and it turns out that these numbers come from studies by IR Bell in the mid-90s.

From what I read about Bell's studies on the US Department of Health website, the 15% comes from college students reporting trouble with at least 4 out of 5 common chemicals/products (like paint) and the 37% from old people reporting the same. Those people, of which I most definitely was one in college, probably don't consider themselves chemically sensitive and may even think MCS is a psychological problem. All I know is that I definitely count them as chemically sensitive, and I wish somebody had taught me all about this in college so that I would right now be a productive member of society.

I also turned up this guy's work indicating that we have elevated levels of nitric oxide and peroxynitride in our systems, but no one knows why. He says epidemiologists report that about 3.5% of the US population have severe MCS and 9 to 16% have moderate MCS.

So, I learned where some numbers came from, but not everyone appreciates numbers and references as much as I do (not that I got anything on the epidemiologists in the previous paragraph), so here's a picture of a Desert Museum prairie dog:

the hospital

Keeping in mind that:

1. home improvement stores are universally dreaded by EIs because of their high formaldehyde and pesticide content, but Lowe's is better than Home Depot,
2. bike racers are very likely to, at some point, visit someone who was hit by a car in the hospital, and
3. EI's sensitivities vary widely, so this won't be true for everyone,

here is my husband's assessment of the air in the local hospital:

"It was worse in there than it is in Lowe's."

brakes and 24

Boring stuff out of the way first: those itty bitty screws on your bike brakes are used to adjust the spring tension. By playing them off each other (one on each side), you keep your brakes from dragging. Just so you know.

Ok, on to the confusing stuff: I finally got around to watching Monday's episode of 24, where they blow up a natural gas distribution facility, thereby burning up all the nerve gas the Chechen terrorists with totally bogus accents had released into the natural gas. Our hero didn't shoot anybody this week, but the explosions really made up for it.

It was all good fun, but we have a little problem at my house. I've been sitting around with the resident chemist trying to figure out the delay tactic the writers used to give our hero enough time to get to the bad guys. Apparently, in undergraduate chemistry (according to the new annoying character), you learn that putting a dangerous gas in a safer, pressurized gas makes it inert, so the bad guys spent a bunch of time reducing the natural gas pressure.

We don't get it. The best we got was that under pressure, the two gases would combine, but then when they came out of your stove, uh, you'd burn it anyway, so I guess what I learned here is that I should just shut up and enjoy the explosions.

not much to report

Today I learned where to pick up the Arizona Trail on the west side of Pistol Hill Road, but now I'm all worn out, so here's a picture of some rocks in Fort Davis, Texas:

Time magazine said it this time

It's not just the eco-nuts; now Time has reported that we screwed up the environment to the point where a big change is going to be very hard to stop. They're talking fires and droughts and no more ice caps in fifty or sixty years, which I think will be hard to ignore, much as the current administration would like to. Encouragingly, by signing the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, more than 200 mayors around the country have decided that since Bush and Co. aren't interested in the Kyoto treaty to reduce emissions, they'll go ahead with it themselves. That's pretty impressive, but I hope it's not a useless gesture in that they end up doing it from little Waterworld-esque atolls.

starch chips

I was aiming for starch crackers, but I got chips:


All I did here was use equal parts tapioca flour and water, drip the mixture on a cookie sheet in chip-sized blobs, and bake it at 425 F for 15 minutes. The chips curled up nicely and didn't stick at all.

The chips are lighter than potato chips, and they could use some salt. Also, if you want enough to last through a two-hour movie, you'll probably need to run water on the cookie sheet between batches to cool it off, and it'll likely take a million years.

something I'm glad I don't have

Today I got to wondering how bubonic plague ended up in squirrels in the Sierras, my problem being that Europeans first came to the Americas about 150 years after the plague took out a third of Europe.

It turns out that the plague took out a third of Eurasia, and then it kind of hung around for a while, but that's still not how it got over here. It was the Third Pandemic, which started in China in 1855 and killed something like 12 million people in India and China alone, that spread it all around the world.

Now I can hear you saying 'Third Pandemic?' so here you go:
The first recorded bubonic plague pandemic was in 541-2 and was called the Plague of Justinian, and the one they told us about in school twenty years ago as though it were the only one and only hit Europe was the second one.

And last but not least, I learned how to make a text rat: ~(__)Oo.

shopping and recovered EIs

Today I went shopping, so I'm still a little impaired, but here we go:

Today I learned that you can make cologne wearers twitch by announcing through your mask to the grocery checkout people, who are wondering what's going on, "There's cologne in here. I'm not doing too good." (I wasn't doing really badly, either, but I was getting things out of the cart at little-old-lady speed.)

In other news, I found one of those elusive recovered EIs inconspicuously blending with the normies behind me in line at the fabric store. She'd done the whole thing twenty years ago: fragrance-free everything, didn't get out much, etc. She said she got better, and there she was standing near the perfumy lady and wearing regular lipstick and everything.

That brings my recovered EI count up to two: the other one's a fellow moldie who owns a futon shop across town. She got sick ten years ago and still has to be a little careful, but she can work, and with futons, which are all full of formaldehyde and fire retardant.

uh...

Today I learned that the San Fernando Valley is the home of the nation's porn industry.

Also, there's a bat problem at Magee Middle School, and a con artist walked away with $1400 worth of Botox-like stuff in her face in Scottsdale.

grass update

There's going to be fake grass going in at Tucson High Magnet School in time for graduation.

Back in October, I reported that fake grass was made of polypropylene, which gives me heart palpitations if I get too close to it. Now I'll be able to let you know first-hand how it is, but that's assuming I actually go and purposely sniff some plastic.

NASCAR and pollution

Today I was very surprised to learn that the "bunch of high school dropouts driv[ing] in circles for 500 miles" in NASCAR races drive cars that get 4 mpg, so that roughly 5375 gallons of leaded gas are burned in one race, not including practice and qualifying.

That sounds pretty appalling, but if you do the math, assuming 300,000 fans at 3 to a car getting 20 mpg driving an average of 60 miles to get to the race, that's 300,000 gallons of gas burned up by the fans.

In other news, if 3% fewer people die each year in cities that reduce their soot per square meter of air by one microgram, then potentially 75,000 deaths per year in the US could be averted.

I'm guessing the 75,000 people who don't die still aren't going to be feeling well enough to attend a lot of NASCAR races.

rats, and science fiction is good for something

Today I learned that I'm too sick to ride on the Rillito River Path (that's the green line on this map that follows the river from I-10 to about halfway across town). It was kinda neat, but I don't need to try that again for a while.

In other news, all those years I spent filling my brain with stories about smart-aleck truth-twisting heroes being questioned by evil bad guys has paid off. Read between the lines in this article where two sources said that Tom Cruise threatened to stop promoting some movie we have no interest in if the Scientology South Park episode aired again:

Cruise spokesman Paul Bloch said neither the actor nor his representatives "had anything to do" with the scheduling of "South Park" reruns and that Cruise had never said to anyone he would refuse to promote his film. Paramount spokeswoman Janet Hill denied any knowledge of such a threat.

bikes and quotes

Today my biking buddy and I went up the big hill with the rocks on it again, and we did great. It's really surprising sometimes what a difference a month makes. Besides riding better, we both noticed recently that certain chemical exposures didn't do us in the way they did. It's not like we're going to be playing in car exhaust (me) or using conventional hygiene products (her), but noticeable improvements are not something that come along every day.

Except that's the whole reason we started riding: the guy who started this biking trend said after about two months that he felt better, and here we are at two months in.

In other biking news, the guy who started this biking trend went to San Diego to play on the track, and he slept in hotel rooms and won two races. There is still some payback, however, which leads us to the quote of the day:

"I can't believe we have a roast in the oven and I'm still in my pajamas."

velodromes

I'm told a standard velodrome track is 330 m around. There's an indoor track in Los Angeles that's only 250 m, and instead of having 27 degree banking, it has 45 degrees.

I don't know anyone who has ridden on the indoor track, but I hear that while the velodrome in Balboa Park in San Diego is patched and bumpy, it's still pretty entertaining to ride around on.

define 'bake'

Today I learned that recipe writers are dumbing-down their directions because people don't understand cooking verbs anymore. Here's one solution:

In 1935, for example, a Land O'Lakes butterscotch cookie recipe directed cooks to "cream together thoroughly the butter and sugar." Today, Botham said, "we don't use the word 'cream' anymore. People don't understand what that means. Instead, we say 'Using your mixer, beat the butter and sugar.' "

So, if you can't figure out what 'cream' means by surfing the web, what are you gonna do if you don't own a mixer?

under assault

Today I learned that the minute your husband runs off somewhere with the car, the neighborhood fills up with the smell of burning tires. (I don't know what it is; coyote urine smells like a chemical spill to me, so for all I know it could be a Pop Tart fire.)

In other news, it's Drug Friday over at CNN. I don't know why this all happened at once, but today there are articles about kids being put on anti-psychotics for ADHD, white kids sniffing chemicals more than other kids, a scary Alzheimer's drug trial, and a really scary drug trial for autoimmune and inflammatory conditions.

Some of us need a distraction after that last one (other news outlets' versions of the second drug trial story are much scarier), so here's something you can add to your yard that I'm quite confident will increase your property value.

And so you know, you can use a beet juice/salt mixture to de-ice your streets, except it sounds like you should warn people first.

caffeine and bike tires

Energy drinks will kill you! Oh, wait a minute... I think I already learned that. Twice.

In other news, if you go on your second mountain bike club ride, and you get a cactus spine in your foot right through the side of your shoe, when you stop and sit down to pull the spine out, three fellow riders will grab your bike and let all the air out of your tires.

Ok, they didn't let it all out, but it turns out that when people say you should ride on loose rocks and sand with low tires, they mean really low. That really helped.

One more thing: I put a 'Miss Molly's Lists' section on my homepage. Check it out if you're bored.

why we ride

We ride bikes because it makes us healthier, and we can use all the help we can get in that department, but we also ride because you get to hang out with other people. Other people are a great source of entertainment, so without further ado, here's what I learned at Fantasy Island this morning:

1. Single-speed mountain bikes are reportedly around 5 lbs lighter than 27 speed bikes. On some trails, they are faster.
2. Poker dealers who are young and cute make $70 to $80k a year.
3. The bike cop I talked to said that he and his partner cover everything east of Craycroft and south of Ft. Lowell, all the way out to Vail. They answer regular calls and everything.

drugs, fires, and pants

Today I read that Ambien, the sleeping pill, uh, 'sleep aid,' makes some people sleepwalk, talk, or shoplift, thus potentially ending a perfectly good Navy intelligence career. For this I will consider revising my statement on prescription drugs: if you see a prescription medication advertised on tv, it might not kill you, but it could get you in trouble with the law.

Onward to fires. This afternoon I was talking with a friend who mentioned that if you live in a fire-prone area, you not only have to worry about being sensitive to wildfire smoke, but you also have to worry about fire retardant being sprayed on the sides of the roads, or worse, on your house. So despite my whining about laundry fumes, I think I'm glad I live in town.

In other news, I picked up a pair of promising looking hiking pants at the annual Southern Arizona HEAL give-away/swap-meet, where we trade safe stuff we don't use anymore. I didn't bother trying the pants on until I got them home and washed them twice (safe is safe, right?), and I was astonished to learn that they made me look dumpy.

At the risk of sounding smug, making me look dumpy is a fairly impressive feat. I discovered shortly that the problem was the design of the pants: I was expected to have an hourglass (or pear?) figure. What I learned here is that you can undumpify pants by sewing down the hip flaps.

development

Today I learned that they're going to build houses on some Hohokam ruins not awfully far from my house. I didn't know we had any ruins around here, particularly in town, and they'd be fun to see, but that's not my problem.

My problem is that when it gets a little warmer, we have a pretty consistent breeze from roughly the direction of the construction/archeological site, so I'm wondering exactly how many construction chemicals we'll get at my house. I mean, I felt bad for two days when the next-door neighbors got new carpet. If a whole subdivision gets it roughly a mile from here....

Ok, I'm a nerd. I have some facts:
1. One of my friends developed chemical sensitivities when a subdivision went in uphill from her, which means a lot of those chemicals are heavier than air.
2. Heavy stuff will spread out in a two-dimensional layer with a density that falls off like 1/r².
3. The breeze tends to blow in the afternoon at 5 to 10 mph, so

Depending on how sensitive I am to construction chemicals, I'll either be ok or I won't. That helped a lot, didn't it?

how much, you say?

Today I learned, two years after the fact, that How much is inside came clean about how much foam is in a can a shaving cream.

Also, it appears that I didn't learn anything yesterday.

fun with high school

Today the wind blew really hard, and whatever blows around in it makes me stupid. It's ok; I'm used to it, but I can't seem to edit this post to save my life, so here's what I think I learned:

1. A high school on Cape Cod is probably going to go fragrance-free.

2. All sophomores in the Chicago public schools are required to take driver's ed, including the blind kids.

If you're new to this blog, perfume is bad. It makes people sick. Go read my homepage. The thing about making blind kids take driver's ed? That's just stupid.

home invasion

If you climb into the elephant enclosure, and they don't know you, you could get smacked.

In other news, I got hailed on as I rode my bike today in the Redington Pass area at around 4000 ft, and tomorrow it could snow as low as 5000 ft. I think I'll stay in.

I'm so proud

Two things:

1. We Arizonans can spell. Mostly, anyway.

2. I wasn't going to mention this, but then Funball said:
Arizona: where the men are men, and the sheep are scared.

conservative environmental wackos?

I heard that Deirdre Imus, conservative radio talk show host Don Imus's wife, had been on The View, a chatty tv talk show, touting a chemical-free environment for children because, get this, chemicals cause cancer.

While checking this out, the first thing I learned is that she's selling a cookbook, but then I came across this article from a year ago about New York Governor Pataki banning toxic cleaning products in state agencies and authorities and citing Ms. Imus' statements as the reason. The article goes on to describe Ms. Imus as "a radical environmental activist with no scientific credentials" and also points out that she stands to profit if the State of New York buys non-toxic cleaning products from her through the Deidre Imus Environmental Center for Pediatric Oncology.

So I have mixed feelings about this. I'm all happy that some buildings in New York are less toxic. I am also pleased that a notoriously not-too-scientifically-discerning talk show audience was exposed to the idea that lots of chemicals are bad. I mean, I think they're bad. I'm really quite confident that they're bad.

My problem is that, as a physicist, Ms. Imus sounds less than convincing. The studies done at her center find the results they expect, which makes me itch, even if they're right, which based on my current sensitivities, doesn't seem at all unreasonable.

The best part of that article is the part where Mr. Imus attacks somebody for calling his wife's work junk science. Mr. Conservative sided with 'a radical environmental activist,' and I thought that only happened when good places to hunt were threatened.

coffee, old soda, and caffeine

Coffee might kill you! It all depends on whether you metabolize caffeine quickly or slowly. If you're fast, it reduces your risk of a heart attack. If you're slow, it increases it, but the study only included people who'd had non-fatal heart attacks, so heaven only knows what could happen to you.

And speaking of caffeine, Tab cola doesn't have as much caffeine as coffee, but there are people who manage to drink eight cans of it in a day. I can only assume their tolerance for aspartame and saccharin (and potentially benzene) is pretty good and that they metabolize caffeine quickly. It could just be that they're in the media or the entertainment industry and are from Mars, but what do I know? I studied low temperature physics, not rocket science.

bleah

I didn't fall on one or anything. I'm just having one of those days where all you get is a picture, so check out those spines:

bike brakes and chocolate pudding

Today I learned that the way you change bike brake pads is by sliding them into position on the holder part, which involves struggling with them for roughly forty-five minutes each.

Here's a good reward (besides having new brake pads), assuming you tolerate chocolate: weirdo three-ingredient chocolate pudding.

Stir together 1/4 cup cocoa powder and 1 1/2 to 2 tablespoons sugar (or equivalent, you know we're all allergic to sugar). Then get 1/4 cup of water and stir in just enough to make a paste; stir in the rest plus a tablespoon of whatever oil you can handle. Then heat it as much as you like. Heat brings out the flavor of the cocoa powder, and boiling it changes the flavor.

I coulda learned something interesting

All I learned today is that California is having a wine snob debate over the state wine and that in 2003 Jermaine Jackson wrote a book proposal outlining Michael Jackson's weirdnesses. Also, the New York Daily News is a real paper, but it tends a little bit toward sensationalism.

Oh, wait: I did learn something interesting. If you wash your hands using soap available at the Wendy's in Casa Grande, AZ, you will emit a smell contrail of such epic proportions that your wife will make you strip in the garage before she lets you in the house to take a shower. At least that's what happens at my house.

keepin' it sorta real

Have you ever had a clash-of-realities moment where, for example, some family member is in the hospital, and you pick up the newspaper in the morning and without thinking check the headlines for something along the lines of Grandpa doing fine? I mean, it's your grandfather, and that should be front page news, right?

. . . Ok, maybe it's just me.

Anyway, I had one of those moments over an article that popped up because of the recent mention of peanut allergies in the news. Here's the part that made me wonder what they're smoking over at Johns Hopkins:

First on the experts’ agenda is "immunotherapy," which would involve exposing children to potential food allergens so they develop tolerance to them.

"The reality is we know exactly how to do that in mice and no idea how to do that in people," said Dr. Robert Wood, director of the pediatric allergy clinic at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore.

I am currently taking immunotherapy for foods as directed by my doctor, and it's working. I tolerate wheat again; someday I hope to be able to tolerate milk, but that's more of a long shot since I became allergic to it twenty-five years ago instead of last year. The upshot is that I'd completely forgotten that most doctors can't do anything for food allergies, and I wish I could grab all the moms with peanut-allergic kids and drag them over to my doctor, who has a lot of experience with anaphylaxis, except people don't really like it if you grab them.

In other news, it appears that tracking someone's cell phone isn't as hard as it sounds.

big mistakes

Today I learned that Toon Disney rearranged its schedule without telling anyone, so now I have three Power Ranger shows and no Ticks for my Friday entertainment.

I suppose that isn't exactly earth-shattering unless you're a Tick fan, but the only other thing I learned was that my high school made the news because a senior sold a handgun to a sophomore in math class. Also, apparently I'm old, because I only recognize the name of one math teacher there anymore.

soda pop and benzene

Soft drinks will kill you! Well, when the preservative sodium benzoate combines with ascorbic acid, you get benzene, which is a recognized carcinogen, and it appears in soda at eight times the limit for drinking water.

I just like announcing that things'll kill you. It's better than the dead-animal phase I went through in October.

34% and dropping

Today I learned that the Mine Safety and Health Administration hasn't collected any safety violation fines since 2003 because of a computer problem. Also, their spokesman is named Dirk Fillpot, and he said "Safety is definitely improving."

So what exactly is wrong with the computer? I like 'fat electrons in the lines,' but take your pick.

in reverse order of importance to me, personally:

1. You have to place in a bunch of races to upgrade your bike racing category.

2. This winter has been the driest on record here in Tucson.

3. If you watch a bike race in Phoenix on Sunday, ride hard on Monday, and hang out outside the downtown Starbucks for twenty minutes before going to the grocery store on Tuesday, there is a distinct possibility that you will sleep twelve hours on Tuesday night and wake up at 10 am on Wednesday, completely missing the trash pickup, which usually occurs around 9:30.