MCS awareness and cows

National MCS Awareness Month starts tomorrow, so I felt obligated to go out and learn something special, even though it's MCS Awareness Month around here pretty much all the time.

The first thing I learned is that if you go to the government site listing all the various health-related awareness months, weeks, and days, the MCS link sends you to about the most depressing site I think I've ever seen. I recognize that MCS is not the best understood illness and not everyone suffers the same injury, but any site that spends all its time emphasizing what I understand to be the worst-case scenario (well, excluding death) doesn't get linked to here.

This blog, written by The Masked Avenger, is the kind of thing that does get linked to. In her last three posts, The Masked Avenger discussed a couple of MCS documentaries that I hadn't heard of (Exposed and The Tomato Effect) and posted a really great interview with two second graders about knowing someone with MCS. Also, The Masked Avenger is a totally excellent name.

In other news, there are still cattle rustlers within 40 miles of Silicon Valley. Well, more of a cattle embezzler, but still.

whatever works, perfume-ban-wise

Today I learned that Olso airport banned sales of L'Oreal's Flowerbomb perfume in its duty-free shops, not because perfume makes people sick, but because it comes in a glass container shaped like a hand grenade that airport security thinks is scary looking.

• Today's homework: write letters to perfume companies encouraging scarier packaging.

the rainbow bridge

Today I learned that there are plans to build a pedestrian bridge across I-10 and the Santa Cruz river from downtown to, uh, west of downtown. Maybe to A Mountain. I'm not really sure, but originally it was supposed to be a big, white bridge with an arch over it.

In its latest incarnation, the big arch is supposed to be rainbow colored, as in this picture. You knew there were going to be some good quotes about something like this, so here you go:

"It is universal, it is timeless," said Teresa Toro, 34, of Tucson. "To me, being able to see a rainbow every evening would be beautiful."

When I read this to my husband, he replied, "Are there going to be unicorns on it, too?"

congressional hypocrisy alert!

First, some background for normies (people not familiar with EI/MCS): all chemically sensitive people are sensitive to car exhaust, so we consider it very bad form to idle a vehicle, and at one lady's house, even the UPS guy shuts off his truck. We will also drive distances walkable by healthy people if there will be any concentration of exhaust along the route. We are, after all, disabled.

Ok, moving on:
Today I learned by reading Dana Milbank's column in the Washington Post that our Congresspeople do things like drive short distances in gas-guzzling behemoths (Mr. Milbank thoughtfully lists them, including the gas mileage for each one), and on one occasion, their vehicles sat idling in the House driveway while they were inside in a meeting discussing gas prices, of all things.

I know that as an ex-train/vanpool/carpool/bus commuter, I am fully within my rights to be Outraged (!!) by these actions, but instead, I find this kind of behavior hilarious. Who else could have a meeting about gas prices while their SUVs idled outside?

a fraudulent imitation: counterfeit, forgery, sham

Read around the typos for the best spelling mistake we've seen all day, found in a blog comment:

I believe psychics who laim to be able to predict the future and speak to dead people etc are all phoneys, but some people get to be good phoneys by becoming extremely good at guessing whats going to hapen next!

This particular quote just needed an illustration, so here's a phoney picture:

everything from jury duty to dangerous apparel

It's been a busy morning. So far I've learned that:

1. You can still get summoned for jury duty even if you didn't register to vote. I kept meaning to get around to it, but until recently, I didn't pay enough attention to the news to know what was going on. Also, I didn't want to get summoned for jury duty.

2. "You have to exercise, and if all you can do is crawl, then crawl." I heard that from multiple sources when I got sick, so when the pollen killed my ability to ride about two weeks ago, I tried going anyway (and got a skinned elbow for my trouble) but was finally reduced to walking back and forth in my empty living room, which was kind of boring. Then I essentially sat down and watched tv for the next week. This morning I tried walking the living room again, and I feel soooo much better. Lesson learned.

3. A Swiss biotech company has developed a vaccine for dust allergies that "consists of a length of DNA designed to provoke a normal immune response, attached to the dustmite allergen. When injected, it suppresses the allergic response that leads to sneezing and streaming eyes." In the volunteer testers, it worked really well. They're working on other common allergens. I have no idea if this kind of thing would eventually be usable on chemically sensitive people's dust/pollen/mold sensitivities, but we can always hope.

4. We in Tucson are saving water and fixing our traffic problems. (Not so much, really. Two out of four water mains broke under a busy intersection.)

5. Pricepoint, a discount biking gear web retailer, is selling both 'Pearl Izumi Ankle Attack Socks' and 'Oakley Scatter Skull Hats'. This does not sound like a safe place to shop.

buttonholes and pollen update

Today I figured out how to use the buttonhole foot and options on my low-end sewing machine without reading the directions. This wasn't much of a challenge, but I'm a little hard up for entertainment.

I also learned that while the pollen that gives me heart palpitations is waning, whatever it is that makes me dizzy is not. So it's springtime, and the weather is great, and I have cabin fever plus a tendency to bump into stuff.

socks

Having introduced the concept of criterium races, in which people on bikes ride around and around a roughly one-mile loop for a specified length of time, now we're going to cover primes ('preems'). Primes are essentially one-lap races in the middle of the race to keep things exciting, and whoever crosses the start/finish line first gets some prize, generally provided by the race sponsor. The race announcers ring a bell and announce a prime over the loudspeaker as racers go by.

So today I was congratulating my husband for winning a prime, netting himself four pairs of biking socks, which I had assumed he had won on purpose because he was, until yesterday, running low on socks. Instead I learned that he "heard the bell and 'wah-wah-wah-wah-wah,'" and he was in a good position, so he went for it. He won a jacket the same way, which was good because it was cold out.

Just so you know, other primes we've heard of are:

• an ice cream cone from a local shop (not bad),
• various items from bike store clearance racks (unpopular),
• a Rat Race dvd (a what?),
• and a $100 voucher for airline tickets that everyone heard as just '$100' (dammit).

tucson traffic

Today I watched a local access show all about the Tucson Regional Transportation Plan that Tucsonans vote on May 16th. We have to approve both the plan and a half-cent sales tax, and then in the next twenty years, our position as fourth on the 'worst congestion for a medium sized city' list should improve.

There was a bunch of information presented, pro and con, but this is about all I retained:
1. Opponents want a gas tax instead of a sales tax. The gas tax was set in 1983 and didn't index for inflation, but the state is in charge of changing that, so fussing about it anywhere other than Phoenix isn't going to do a lot of good.
2. Both sides are very excited about bus pullouts so we don't all keep getting stuck behind buses every single time we drive in the right lane.
3. When people say streetcars, I have this image in my head, having grown up near San Francisco. Call me old-fashioned, but new streetcars (see the upper right corner of this page), as nifty as they are, are kind of funny looking.

puffy clouds and drive-thoughs

This morning I detected a break in the pollen, and just so you know, there were strings of small puffy clouds in the sky, so there wasn't an inversion layer, according to last night's theory.

It could also be that the pollen is past its peak. I can, however, still detect individual palo verde trees if I get too close and will stay far away from places that look like this:


In other news, according to this, drive-thoughs make you fat and create a lot of extra pollution, so they're bad. The article goes on to mention that the very first McDonald's drive-though showed up in Sierra Vista (about 70 miles from here) in 1975, but it says here that drive-throughs have been around since 1947 or 1948.

inversion layers and government entities

Today I got to wondering if there was an inversion layer (a layer of warmer air sitting over a cooler one) that was holding in the pollen earlier this week, and what I think I learned was why outdoor allergens seem to bother me less after about 11 am, when the breeze picks up.

Now, keeping in mind I learned this from part of a discussion of radio wave propagation on a ham radio site and I could be wrong about this and the allergens, I'm pretty sure that if you detect the following conditions, you have an inversion layer:

• a very clear sky,
• dead still air, and
• a warm or hot temperature.

The inversion layer can start the night before if similar conditions are present, and they are present a lot around here, just not in the afternoon, so maybe that's why I feel better in the afternoon.

In other news, the FDA said something highly unbelievable about marijuana, and the CDC sponsored a study on chronic fatigue. (Maybe the FDA should hand marijuana studies over to the CDC, seeing as there's a link to schizophrenia.) Anyway, I'm pleased somebody is learning something about chronic fatigue, even if the results, as presented by this article, sound as though they weren't quite sure what they learned. (Not that I should talk, with the ham site and the allergens.)

The results, published in more than a dozen reports and commentaries in the April issue of the journal Pharmacogenomics, released yesterday, suggest that many cases of chronic fatigue have links to a handful of brain- and immune system-related genes that either harbor small mutations or are working abnormally for other reasons.

What I get out of this sentence is that this study was really important and found malfunctioning genes. They have no idea why the genes malfunction, which is fine. They can study that next.

fences and roadies

Today I learned that there are people willing to build fences on other people's land to the tune of between $125 and $150 per foot.

Also, you remember how I made a reference to roadies the other day, saying those are people who like to ride bikes on the road? Around here they can race in either road races or criteriums, in which you ride around and around a loop for a specified amount of time. The roadies call the people who like to ride in crits 'critters.'

warning: Miss Molly gets a little preachy

Today I read the following in an article about 'Katrina cough':

The study did show that people with a history of conditions such as asthma or seasonal allergies were more likely to have symptoms such as coughing or wheezing because of exposure to dust and mold.

That was expected, and OPH "consistently" issued advisories for such patients to avoid extended periods in moldy rooms or houses, and to take precautions when cleaning their homes, Ratard said.

Since the article fails to spell out exactly how long an extended period is, as someone who used to just have seasonal allergies and then was seriously injured by mold, I'll tell you: an extended period is roughly 0.037 seconds. Shorter is better if you can manage it, unless you do the whole Tyvek® suit, respirator, and goggles deal like the professionals. Mold is really bad stuff.

I needed a big mental subject change after coming across that, so I checked out the made-up news, where I learned how to tell if you've been abducted by aliens.

There's nothing like knowing whether or not you've been checked out by aliens to make you feel better, so then I was able to go on and learn that despite the fact that we as a nation are older and fatter than ever, we had a record low for dying this year. So clearly being old and fat isn't so bad, and I already mentioned it's good for the economy, so everybody go hit the post-Easter candy sales and let's get going!

stuff you learn when you're stuck in the house

1. On mercury amalgams:

McKinlay also said that while the study revealed children with the mercury fillings had higher mercury levels in their urine, there was no evidence they had a higher incidence of kidney damage.

Honestly, how much mercury do you want in your kid's urine? Holy cow.

2. Governor Ryan of Illinois is going to prison. Before we lived in Illinois, we lived in Connecticut, where Governor Rowland went to prison last year. Between Connecticut and Illinois, we spent some time in Massachusetts, where Governor Cellucci got in trouble with voters for pinching pennies in the government but owing a bunch of money personally, and his lieutenant governor, Jane Swift, got in trouble for commuting home in a helicopter. We were in California for the election of The Terminator when Gray Davis was recalled, so I'm expecting something really, really weird from Janet Napolitano, except she was chosen as one of the top five governors in the country by Time magazine in 2005.

I suppose that for me, that is really weird, so never mind.

misplaced modifiers, cheating, pollen, and birds

1. This article contains the following wonderful quote:

A grade level with 40 students still has to test 95 percent of the class, or 38 students, Downey said, and that's a tight number to achieve. She'd like to see the number increase to 50.

This statement is not quite as good as 'Woman wanted to sew buttons on the third floor,' but it was still pretty funny, and it's in an article about education.

2. The device you use to change traffic lights is an infrared strobe, and if you have one and aren't a fire department, you get a $50 ticket (near Denver, anyway). $50 seems a little low for screwing up everybody else's commute.

3. Today's pollen survey revealed that if you're me, it's actually worse at the top of Mt. Lemmon than it is down here in the valley. That was disappointing. Also, that pain I get in my ankle is definitely a pollen reaction. And, no, I don't know how that works; I just learned it by driving up a big hill, inhaling a bunch of pollen, and driving home with a big pain in the ankle.

4. A mourning dove is nesting on our roof where we can't see it, and it has been calling its mate for roughly seventeen hours straight: coo coo coo ^COO coo (repeat ad infinitum). If I spoke bird, I'd have to deliver the distressing news that the missing bird is currently in birdy Heaven, which might stop the cooing, but you never know. And for those of you who got to the HEAL meeting last week, the doves in the vine hatched two chicks a few days ago, and everybody in that nest is fine, not that you can tell much from this picture:

the trade-off

There's this thing we do sometimes when we hear about long-term illnesses in the news or from friends: decide which disease we'd rather have, that or MCS.

Today's disease is obesity. This article has a quote from a woman who constantly wonders if she'll fit places, and the US Surgeon General said that if people keep getting heavier "the magnitude of the dilemma will dwarf 9-11 or any other terrorist attempt."

I think people already know that obesity is bad; comparing it to a terrorist attack seems really over the top, but then again, it's the government, and they're always telling us things that maybe aren't all that, well, true.

So anyway, the treatment plan for my illness is chemical avoidance and detoxing, which for me boils down to diet, exercise, and staying away from stinky stuff like stores and offices. I hear I should be better in roughly a year and a half. The treatment for obesity, as far as I know, is just diet and exercise, and if I'd been 100 pounds overweight when I started getting better six months ago, I'd have all the extra weight off in the same time frame, assuming a pound a week loss rate. Now, I recognize that I have a huge extra incentive: I feel like crap if I don't follow my diet or exercise. I know that heavy people feel the difference after two months of exercise, just like I did, but the diet thing, I'm quite sure, feels a lot more like an article of faith, particularly if you put on some muscle mass that obscures your fat mass loss.

I think I'd still rather be fat than have MCS, although, if you do the math with me 100 pounds overweight, I'd have a BMI of 37.8, and obese starts at 30, and I'm imagining strapping 20 5-pound bags of flour to my body, and it's not entirely clear that I could move if I did that.

Easter update

This page contains important information about the appropriate method for filling hollow chocolate rabbits.

driving, gas, and photography

Today I learned that driving to Phoenix isn't hard. I think I spent enough time getting sick that I forgot how easy stuff is supposed to be. All it takes is an air cleaner and totally blocked off vents. (And a car you tolerate in the first place.)

I also learned that gas was 60 cents cheaper in Phoenix today than it was in Tucson, which I assume will even out shortly and is totally insane.

In other news, I know two photographers (both EIs) who worry that with the advent of the digital camera, they will become unnecessary. In an excellent example of why photographers will always have jobs, here is a picture I took of my husband:


He's the one of the guys behind the tent.

brain fade!

I can't believe I forgot to mention this earlier. Today I learned that if you see a snake on the trail when you're out riding, and you screech to a halt 1) so as not to hit it, and 2) because you were wondering what kind it was, if it's a rattler, it coils up and you have yourself a standoff. You stand there next to your bike waiting for the snake to uncoil and finish crossing the trail, and it waits for you to stop staring at it.

This situation can be resolved by pushing your bike through the weeds on the far side of the trail while the snake rattles threateningly. However, after this, my preferred method is going to be weaving around the snake and admiring it after I've passed it.

taxes and high winds

Today I learned that if last year you worked in one state and lived in two other states, paying your taxes is a huge pain in the neck. That's pretty much it, except I found out that I can be ready to go riding with about five minutes notice if I find out there'll be a high wind advisory later in the day. (Heaven only knows what's in high winds around here. All I know is that I get a gut cramp if I go out in them, so whee, I had lots of time to play with the taxes.)

Since that's all kind of boring, check out yesterday's sunset:

prejudice

I know that as an analytical science nerd I have some serious prejudices against things that sound New Agey. Scientific and New Age minds have such different ways of looking at the world that a lot of the time they seem pretty much mutually exclusive. However, since I got sick, I have come to the conclusion that the middle of the road is the way to go. When the medical establishment blew off MCS, they handed treatment over to the 'New Age wackos,' and since, let's face it, most people don't have much of a scientific background, things got weird from a science standpoint. That's how you get a physicist who takes the concept of 'detoxing' very seriously; it's a New Age concept, but it works for my illness. (The concept of aromatherapy, on the other hand, makes me completely nuts. Don't get me started.)

So today we're going to address Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), in which I understand you tap yourself in various bodily locations and repeat something along the lines of "Even though I feel this anger, I deeply and completely accept myself." It's a negative emotion followed by a positive statement, so theoretically, by doing this persistently, you can get rid of that resentment from the time a bunch of jerks illegally brought a keg into the freshman dorm rec room and made so much noise you couldn't hear the Dolly Parton tv special you were watching. (Not that that still bothers me.)

According to these fantastic testimonials, EFT will change the world. And, as it says here on the front page, it's affordable and you can get started for free, which is always a big plus.

The upshot here is that I'm willing to accept that EFT helps some people, and if EFT helps a lot of people with MCS, I'm sure I'll hear about it and hop on the bandwagon, but now I'm going to tell you a secret. Months ago, I was having some trouble with some chemically-induced irrational anger, and someone I now know was an EFT person talked me into trying it. Think about the anger, tap yourself in this complicated fashion, and repeat the sentence you would, as a repressed nerd, never say out loud unless someone pushed you into it, and lo and behold:

I was really, freaking angry.

nouns

Today I learned that there are a whole bunch of different kinds of nouns: proper (we knew this one), common, compound, collective, concrete, abstract, count and noncount. I think there are a few more, but eight is enough.

That phrase may never be usable again, and it's not like there's anything we can do about it. I mean, who're you gonna call?

bad words and paranoia

Today I learned that scumbag used to be, and still is to some people, a terribly offensive word. Other than that and a sudden, pre-HEAL meeting paranoia that our carpet was suddenly going to start offgassing and kill all our friends, not much to report.

(The carpet is fine. It was pollen getting into the house.)

interesting revelation

I had a neat post all worked up for yesterday that made up for the fact that I read bad news (about mold in schools and unemployment among the disabled), but for reasons that don't need exploring here, it got the spousal veto, so here's yesterday's sunset:

nailed it

Let's see... I pronounce it 'amachur,' but I know there's a 't' in it and there's some weird.... Some people pronounce it am-ee-a-choo-er, so maybe, uh.... There. That looks good.

From the Arizona Criterium Championship flyer, I bring you the following information:

"Only ameatuer racers who are AZ residents qualify for state championship medals."

not much to report, but a good quote

If you will recall, about ten days ago I made a remark about Fox's 24 having some, uh, pretty implausible plot devices, so we should probably just sit back and enjoy the explosions. Now the actor who played the ex-President who was killed off early this season, and who is referred to as 'President Allstate' on Dave Barry's blog because he does Allstate commercials, has said this about all the carnage:

Removing so many characters, Haysbert says, creates "this man against the world thing, and it becomes a bit cartoonish, not plausible."

If you look back at the weekly events on Mr. Barry's blog, you will notice that the show hit cartoonish quite a while ago, but maybe if your character is alive, it's harder to tell.

breast implants

Today I read that there's an article in Analytical Chemistry that says there are high levels of bad-for-you platinum compound(s?) today in women who got silicone breast implants in the 1980's, many of whom had their implants removed for health reasons.

Ok. The article I read about this article mentions something like three different forms of bad-for-you platinum: platinum salts, some oxidized form, and an unstable form, one or another or all of which (I'm not clear on this) can cause "severe allergies, asthma, nerve damage and reduced immune responses." As a PhD physicist, I can't really tell you much about the different kinds of platinum. I can, however, tell you symptoms of MCS and that when I was in high school, twenty years before I had a clue about MCS, I learned that breast implants caused MCS in some small percentage of the implanted-boob community. Now, you know the only way to make high school kids (even nerds) read the news (not the funnies) is to give them some absurdly contrived newspaper-reading assignment. If I learned it, I would expect you'd have had to sing loudly with your fingers in your ears for several years during the mid-80's to miss it, so this morning, I thought, wow, I guess that's what the problem was.

Then I got a little farther into the article where a silicone industry guy pretty much said 'that can't happen:'

Michael Brook, a chemist and silicone manufacturing expert at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said the new study contained some data and conclusions about platinum that he said were very hard, if not impossible, to accept. He said, for instance, that the researchers reported finding platinum in a highly unstable form never before known to exist in the presence of air or water, as existing in the human body.

What I get out of this statement is that yes, he doesn't see how it's possible, but it's not like they took a survey and announced that they had found red kryptonite in doughnuts; they took samples from people who had implants and analyzed them. Other people can do that, too. If they made stuff up, someone will expose them, and not by saying 'I don't see how that's possible.'

Not like he had any choice in the matter. What was he supposed to say? 'Oh, drat'?

terminally clueless

Today I learned that while we EIs get sick from chemicals and then get things like cancer, other people skip the EI part and just get things like cancer. It never occurred to me to look at it that way, even though the concept of carcinogenic chemicals is not remotely new to me, and heaven knows I don't tolerate them. For example, any scientist out there knows that benzene is carcinogenic, and since I got sick, I learned that it's in car exhaust and perfume, so I should have put this together myself instead of reading it somewhere and doing that forehead slap thing.

In other news, even if you have slime tubes on your bike, you should still avoid running over dried prickly pear parts.

disaster!

Here's the important quote from an article in the Reading (Pennsylvania) Eagle (that I expect they'll move tomorrow, so look quick if you're going to):

Withers was driving a tractor-trailer behind a slow-moving box truck driven by Richard A. Coleman, 54, Grantville, when the rig hit the back of Coleman's truck.

Coleman was hauling about 8,000 pounds of chocolate from East Greenville, Montgomery County, to Hershey Foods Corp. in Hershey.

The impact caused the entire load of chocolate, which was in 10-pound bars loaded on pallets, to spill onto the interstate.

The tractor-trailer jack-knifed and one of its fuel tanks split open, spilling about 60 gallons of diesel fuel on the highway and contaminating the chocolate.

I know I said I will never eat candy again, but it's the principle of the thing, ok?

time gets away from me

Yesterday I learned that the rest of the country (including Indiana) switched to daylight saving time two days ago, and I didn't notice. You know what tipped me off? Cash Cab was on at 6 instead of 7. (The same was true on Monday night, but apparently, I just don't pay that much attention.)

The only time change I noticed in Arizona is that the roadies (people who ride road bikes) are going out in the morning at 6:30 and 7 instead of 7:30 and 9.

marijuana and predispositions

Today I read an article that said that drug and alcohol use by people with developing brains (teenagers younger than 17) can activate a genetic predisposition to addiction. That's one of the best reasons I've heard so far for keeping kids away from, ahem, extraneous chemicals. However, I had a problem with the very last sentence, where it said that marijuana can cause schizophrenia in the same crowd. Like many of the under 40 set who have been exposed to years of US government bogus-sounding marijuana facts, I'd become conditioned to ignore alarming information about marijuana. (I still never tried it.)

So, I felt obligated to go look it up. Wandering around the internet, I found a list of articles on schizophrenia.com that pretty much agree with the above statement, but I didn't find anything that limited it specifically to people under 17. I also learned:

1. that the US government prefers to report that 80% of teenagers do not currently use marijuana, but other people like to report that 42% of high school seniors have tried marijuana,
2. that professors named Danielle or Daniele like to study drugs, and
3. how to spell schizophrenia.

serotonin, downtown, dogs, and juniors

This morning at approximately 7:52 am I learned that while the correct dose of histamine stops a lot of my reactions, this one I hadn't been able to do much with can be stopped by serotonin, which I had previously considered fairly useless. Now, if I could write songs, they would all be about the wonders of serotonin.

The upshot of this sudden discovery was that I got to go to a criterium bike race today in lovely downtown Superior, AZ. Before you go thinking serotonin must really be a wonder drug for me to be able to hang around downtown, I should explain that Superior is one of those towns where they can shut down Main Street all day on Sunday and nobody fusses about the traffic. As far as I could tell, the only store open was the ice cream parlor/burger joint, and while business wasn't booming, it was at least steady. (To be fair, this was a two-day event, and they had more people there yesterday for the road race.) They also had the required small-town wandering stray dogs, so the guy at the start line warned the riders to look out for the stray dogs because "one has gotten run over twice already."

But most important, I learned that the team sponsored by Waste Management has a bunch of juniors (18 and under) who are commonly referred to as...

...the trash boys.

the flu, food math, and sunscreen

Ok, I started reading the news again because it's usually pretty harmless on weekends, so here we go with three offerings from CNN:

1. Flu experts said that you can't blame little kids for spreading the flu around. The flu spreads following adult work patterns, and we should blame California. (The article said the flu starts in California more often than any other state, and it tends to start about a week earlier there.)

Side note: I spoke over the phone with a little kid, my niece, the other day, who is bringing home all the day-care diseases, and she very cheerfully told me what the sheep says and what the cow says, although her cow says "bvvvvvvv!" which, if you think about it, is probably close enough.

2. There's an interactive 'look how huge our portion sizes are these days' thingy (down low on the right side of the front page) that says a six-inch diameter bagel is twice as big as a three inch bagel, which was a common size twenty years ago.

That kind of statement makes me itch because when you're talking diameters, it just doesn't work like that, and on top of that, it's really a volume comparison, but let's just stick to the diameter problem. (If they'd simply weighed the things, we wouldn't be having this discussion.) So, I'm going to work with the area of a cross section, and since I haven't seen a big hole in a bagel in years, I'll ignore the holes, too, so we just have circles. Bagel 1 (call it b₁) has a radius r, bagel 2 (b₂) has a radius of 2r, and the area of a circle = πr².

Ready? (area of b₂)/(area of b₁) = π(2r)²/πr² = 4πr²/πr² = 4

So, going by diameter alone, modern-day bagels are roughly 4 times bigger than twenty-year-old bagels, and we're hogs, yada, yada, yada, and I can't believe the reporters at CNN didn't leap on that 4x thing, and algebra turned out to be good for something.

3. A law firm that goes after industries has filed a suit against sunscreen makers because they say words like 'sunblock,' 'waterproof,' and 'all-day protection' on the packaging are misleading.

Ok, I know I'm not your average American, but I thought (this is true) sunblock was a synonym for sunscreen, waterproof meant it didn't wash off right away but you had to be vigilant, and all-day protection meant that if you applied it every two hours, you got all-day protection. I could understand someone who'd never seen sunscreen before screwing that up, and this is a country where you have to tell people not to use the lawn mower in the bathtub, but yeesh.