clearing things up

You remember back the day before Thanksgiving when I predicted, based on chemical usage, pollution, and radioactive goat milk, that in fifty years, Connecticut would be inhabited solely by radioactive zombies? It says here that yesterday police found two severed goat heads, a coconut, and a pentagram on someone's driveway. They said that usually things like that are found in the woods, and it's not illegal, but they just want to know what it means.

The cops have not been paying attention. The connection is goats. Goat milk, goat heads; it's obviously the radioactive zombies.

In other news, Lance Armstrong is not guilty of doping. Miss Molly could have told you that because guilty athletes read statements saying they are not guilty. Innocent athletes read similar statements, but when people bug them about it, they say things along the lines of "What the #*&^$ is wrong with you people?"

This rule may only work on athletes, who tend to be a little more aggressive than normal people. I don't think it would work on politicians, but then again, there's not usually much question with them.

stinky people and usage

Today I learned that if you let your bike-racer husband go out of town to race, he can come home with a bunch of chemicals in him such that you can't actually get too close to him without getting sick. Fortunately, this condition can be cured by a trip through the sauna.

In other news, the revered editor-lady at the Washington Post says it's legal to use 'hopefully' incorrectly because there's no other construction that covers its common usage. So hopefully that will get into the books soon so it won't make us twitchy anymore.

obscure legislation

Today I learned that until 1997, the government was allowed to experiment on people without their consent. Apparently a nurse brought the situation to people's attention by discussing it on the radio, thereby providing the outrage necessary to produce section 1078 in HR 1119, which specifically spells out that the government can't use human subjects unless they have informed consent. Having worked on a project with human subjects and some government funding in 2001 and 2002, I can tell you it's a hassle and they're strict.

I find it alarming that it took until 1997 to pass a law like that, but I found out about it almost ten years after the fact, which renders this information almost boring, so have a sunset:

exploring, autobiography, and updates

Today I went exploring again on my bike. This time I went away from Fantasy Island instead of toward it, and I found a mostly dirt route to the dirt road up the really big hill on the east edge of town. I also found the sandiest neighborhood trail ever, which I will henceforth avoid at all costs.

In other news, a couple of months ago I agreed to write something for the autobiography feature in the local HEAL group's newsletter. With the deadline approaching, today I learned that it's pretty difficult to write a funny story about getting really sick.

Onward to the updates:

• Made so far on the $83 (on sale) sewing machine:
  • number of $9 biking jerseys: 4
  • number of futon outsides: 1
  • number of $7 pairs of shorts: 2
  • number of $4 wrap-around skirts: 2
  • number of repairs to a $3 knock-off Birkenstock: 3
  Threatening to make: an untreated canvas tent.
• Ants in the house:
  • number of days borax and honey ant baits have sat outside: 8
  • number of indoor ant-free days: 5
• Mourning dove nest:
  • number of eggs in nest: 1
  • number of teenage sex-fiend parents currently sitting on egg: 0
  I accidentally scared off the momma bird half an hour ago, but I was hoping she'd be back by now.

This isn't an update, but

• number of times today I was told I looked like a monster to a horse: 1
• total number of horses I have talked out of being scared: 3

Horses seem to like it when you talk to them because then they can tell you're a person on a contraption instead of a space alien. That is pretty much everything I know about horses.

tired

Today I continued my quest to find a mostly-dirt route to Fantasy Island from my house. I still didn't get there, but I learned that there are some perfectly good extremely steep hills between here and there, and I'm kind of dead.

So here's a lame collection of what else I learned:

• Rockford has had several girlfriends get murdered, disappear, or both. It's never his fault, but he seems like kind of a jinx.
• BBC America is showing the Sharpe series on Saturdays. Lt. Sharpe is much less compelling with ads in between his escapades.
• Baby quail swarm around after their parents instead of walking in a fairly orderly line like ducks. The ones I saw on the other side of my back fence had two speeds: a Mom-is-ahead-of-me sprint and an eek-she's-behind-me dead stop.
• This is what a bamboo bike looks like.

smoking

Today I learned that the EU will stop subsidizing tobacco by 2010. The way they presented it when I was in school, I thought the US was the only country that subsidized tobacco farmers, and I came away with the impression they all lived in North Carolina. It says here a lot of them live in Kentucky, but even Wisconsin and Minnesota have some.

One of the other things I'm pretty sure I learned in school is that marijuana is worse in terms of lung cancer than cigarettes because you hold the smoke in your lungs longer. It turns out that that was just speculation. There's a new study that says smoking marijuana might actually have a slight benefit.

So here's my bored-engineer-type plan: anybody who needs a tobacco subsidy gets governmental permission to grow marijuana instead.

great names

Today, in honor of all the weird names celebrities choose for their children, e.g. Zolten and Bluebell Madonna, I turned up this wonderful list of historical names and their accompanying nicknames so that I can continue a family tradition of suggesting great names for babies. There are a bunch of other good ones on the list, but the ones that caught my eye were:

Abijah: 'Bige'
Artelepsa: 'Epsey'
Eliphalel: 'Life'
Experience: 'Exie'
Lecurgus: 'Curg'
Mehitabel: 'Hetty', 'Mabel', or 'Mitty'
Melchizedek: 'Dick' or 'Zadock'

I didn't really find anything after the M's; Melchizedek is kinda hard to top.

voter lottery, fire retardants, violent deer, and amorous birds

1. I really need to get around to registering to vote.

2. Because of the Romero Canyon fire, I got curious about fire retardants and turned up information about this one, which is apparently the good kind because it doesn't contain cyanide. The site says that flame retardants are designed to make burning plant material produce fewer volatile gases, oils, and tars, which burn well and spread the fire better. The goal is to produce only carbon and water. Retardants are supposed to last a while, too, so it might not be safe for EIs to go into Catalina State Park for a few months. We'll have to sniff it and see. I think we'll survive; not being able to go to one park is probably better than having the entire mountain on fire.

3. Unidentified deer have been roughing people up at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. (It's fawning season, and it sounds like it only happens on one path.)

4. For a few minutes we had doves in the nest in the vine again. I thought they were going to have something to show for all that birdy sex that's been going on on the wall outside my kitchen window not ten feet from my computer screen, but despite a bunch of odd-looking tail twitching, the nest is still empty. Y'know, the first pair of doves acted like an old married couple. This most recent pair, led by the girl bird, acted like horny teenagers.

rant alert: asthma

Today I learned that most albuterol inhalers use CFCs as propellants, and by 2009 they'll have switched to something that doesn't deplete the ozone layer. To start preparing for the switch, companies are cutting back on CFC inhaler production, causing a shortage of inhalers. I suppose that'll drive the cost up so that people won't get such bad sticker shock when they have to buy the new, more expensive inhalers.

In other news, doctors are trying a new way to treat hard-to-control asthma that involves disintegrating the muscles that contract. They don't offer it as a cure, and they don't know the long-term effects.

They can do that for mold-induced tachycardia, too; they offer to kill part of your heart, when all you need to do is stay out of the mold. I actually had gut surgery for mold-induced acid reflux so severe I would sometimes stay home from work. It helped, but I still had to take drugs and sleep tilted, and it was uncomfortable. Now I can't go to work at all, and I don't have any acid reflux. Staying out of mold and chemicals has improved my health dramatically.

So now we're going to read about asthma triggers in a brochure handed out by a children's hospital in Seattle. Read down past the list of triggers, which include perfume, car exhaust, and smoke, to the part under Why is it good to know my asthma triggers? (!!), where you will find the quote of the day:

You can leave the room if someone's perfume is too strong. If your parents smoke cigarettes, it's best if they only smoke outside.

Here's my big question, and I'm oversimplifying, but still: why is getting your bronchial muscles fried considered a reasonable solution when we could just make possession of perfume or cologne a felony?

oxygen concentrators and Mrs. America

Today I learned that oxygen concentrators use a molecular sieve to filter nitrogen out of the air, leaving something like 90% oxygen. In the past oxygen concentrators have been these 55 pound, mini-fridge sized devices, but some UC Santa Barbara students won a prize a few years ago for making a 9 pound portable one that, if you pick your airline correctly, you can take on an airplane with you, assuming your flight isn't too long or that you can plug it in somewhere.

(In case you were wondering why I'm interested, a lot of EIs use oxygen to get out of or to try to avoid a reaction, or when they aren't using the oxygen in their blood correctly.)

That was pretty educational, so the other thing I learned was that between 1938 and 1968 the Mrs. America pageant was a non-stop, eleven-day housewife contest. The guy who started it up again in 1977 as a, uh, dog and pony show, had never heard of the housewife contest.

graphic picture of WMD

Ok, it's really just a picture of a bunch of ants eating. At first I thought the bait had killed them because they were so still, but it turns out they're just really busy eating.


The wet-looking stuff on the wall is dried dish detergent, and the white scum on the pavement is laundry detergent residue. It's not quite what you want your front porch to look like, but it's better than land mines.

In other news, I'm allergic to borax. I got in trouble with it the night after the race around the scum pond, but I thought I was just shaking off the effects of the scum pond. New laundry detergent: washing soda, as soon as I get some. Until then, a water-wasting two cycles of hot water.

the war at home

(cue up 'When Johnny Comes Marching Home' again)

My dearest friends,

The battles over the kitchen window continue yet, these five days later. We have grown proficient at cutting the enemy's supply lines, but as we sleep, they rebuild. Every morning we arise to rejoin this Righteous Fight, even as we struggle with our own survival.

The General has brought into play a new weapon assembled using 9 parts honey and 1 part 20 Mule Team Borax. I pray this new armament will soon let us stop squishing those *&%$^%$ buggers.

Yours most faithfully,
Miss Molly

news roundup

1. The reason everybody seems to have allergies this year in the extremely dry Southwest is that our mucous membranes are all dried out, leaving everybody susceptible to the minute amounts of pollens our practically-dead plants have managed to produce. The source quoted by the article goes on to briefly discuss the effects of positive ions in wind on people, and I understand you can get positive ions in flowing air from the effects of friction. So, you may ask, where the heck are the negative ions? My current theory is that they end up in the ocean or the ground, and then eventually there'll be a thunderstorm someplace to even things out.

2. Here's another article about soft drinks that'll kill you. (We originally learned that soft drinks'll kill you in March.) Also, Sunny D has lots of sugar and preservatives so it's not good for you, but it's really not good for fish (not that this is funny, but do not fail to enlarge the picture).

3. Speaking of spills, 100 gallons of sulfuric acid spilled onto the street near the U of A because a water pipe backed up. They use sulfuric acid to treat the water at the university's cooling plant. I have no idea how that works.

4. In other news, if people who don't believe in evolution are offended by the idea that we evolved from apes, suggesting that we interbred with chimpanzees, even 5 or 6 million years ago, is not going to make things any better.

Update: I missed a sewage spill in DC, so:
5. A regional sewage treatment plant in the DC area lost power for three hours, resulting in 17 million gallons of raw sewage getting into the Potomac River. The spill is apparently nothing to worry about because

EPA spokeswoman Terri White said the spill will be diluted quickly because of the Potomac's rapid flow. She said the size of the spill "is less than what you would typically get during a major wet weather event," when the city's combined sewer-stormwater pipes often overflow into waterways.

So, you know, nothing to worry about there.

chainring mistakes and Urgent Care

Today I learned that I was intimidated by (and avoiding) Fantasy Island's main loop because I'm sensitive to the landfill, not because I'm out of shape. Now I know not to go over there unless there's a fairly good southeast wind.

good news: I rode the main loop without mishap despite having a major case of sewing machine leg during the part with the enormous washes (read: roller coasters) near the landfill.

bad news: When I got home, I got my front wheel out of the trunk and proceeded to put it back on my bike, which is a symptom of residual reaction because I only do that at trailheads. Then the phone rang, and I rushed putting the bike down in a way that works on the sides of trails but not on hard surfaces, and on its side, the bike shifted on the end of one pedal. I failed to get out of its way, and I got a hole in my shin the size of a chainring tooth.

really bad news: I could probably have cleaned and dressed my new puncture wound myself, but I couldn't have given myself the tetanus shot I knew I needed.

unexpectedly good news: The Urgent Care place near here isn't that bad. My mask and puncture wound let me bypass the laundry-fume train wreck in the waiting room, the nurse who knew nothing about chemical sensitivities was really nice and let us wait outside in the staff parking lot, and the doctor knew the drill because his dad has MCS, so it went great.

So that's a bummer about the trail near the landfill, but I survived a trip to Urgent Care.

ant update

The ants are coming up from a crack in the front porch, up the wall, inside the wall, and through a tiny hole in the paint at the corner of the kitchen window. Apparently the frangrance-free, biodegradable dish soap we poured along the crack is time-limited in its ability to deter bugs.

Since the ants used up the dish soap last time they came in, we have now switched to frangrance-free, biodegradable liquid laundry detergent. We'll keep you posted.

curtains

Today I learned that the reason I couldn't sleep in the bedroom the last few nights is that I'm sensitive to the plastic vertical blinds in the window. They were fine before, but they offgas something fierce when the mid-May Arizona sun shines on them. A year ago when I suppose this very thing was happening, I was sleeping outside where you can hear the coyotes, so live and learn, right?

Anyway, those of you who aren't familiar with this kind of problem have likely never heard about the protocol for dealing with it, so here's the procedure once you've identified the culprit:

1. yank said culprit and put it in the garage as carefully as you can manage in case you ever need it again, even though you would really rather it disappeared in a puff of smoke.
2. determine the urgency with which the culprit must be replaced. If you can live without it, you're done. If not, like if the sun is streaming in your bedroom window and promising to turn the house into a sauna (already have one, thanks), you better do something about it.

The upshot here is that the two yards of heavy cotton I was supposed to make into the outer layer of my winter coat is hanging from twenty-three paper clips attached to the mechanism for the blinds. And here I thought my engineering skills were going to go to waste.

ants

You know that song about the ants set to "When Johnny Comes Marching Home?" Where they march one by one, two by two, and so on? Down in the ground to get out of the rain?

They don't march into the ground to get out of the rain. They march into the house, and I find I have a lot less trouble with wildlife mayhem when it involves very, very small wildlife.

asparagus, tents, and bears

Today I learned that:

1. It says here that if you don't want your thick asparagus spears all mushy inside, you should peel them before you cook them, like with a potato peeler. That sounds like a great recommendation for either mushy or thin asparagus spears.

2. If you want, you can buy a tent that needs 100 stakes. I don't think that'll help a lot if you want to have a sleepover in your parents' back yard, but this is America, where bigger is better, so you know you need that tent that requires 100 stakes.

3. In those peaceful zoo enclosures where they have more than one kind of animal, sometimes the animals have dinner together, but not like you'd hope.

lactic acid and snakes

This report on lactic acid and snakes has been pre-empted by breaking Wal-Mart news:
It says here that Wal-Mart wants to offer organic food and organic versions of things like Frosted Mini Wheats and packaged macaroni and cheese. So, wow, and notice how I didn't lump Frosted Mini Wheats or macaroni and cheese that came in a box in the same category as 'food.' We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Today I learned that lactic acid, the substance that we were all told built up in your muscles when you exercised and made you tired, is actually fuel for mitochondria, and the better shape you're in, the better you are at burning it. What makes you tired is now a total mystery. A professor at Cal (that's UC Berkeley) figured that out in the '70s, but you can imagine the reception his work got since we're only hearing about it now.

Onward to snakes. If you will recall, a while back I said my plan for snakes on the trail was to weave past them and then stop to admire them. This plan failed to take into account what happens when you come barreling around a corner and see a snake stretched all the way across the trail just before you run over it.

I am not the first person to run over a snake, and I will not be the last, but I'd kind of thought my days of being responsible for wildlife maimings/deaths ended when my namesake got old and stopped catching squirrels.

when fashions attack

Before we get started, one of the articles below is from a newspaper I don't read that often, and it requires you to register. I dislike registering, as many people do, so I have been known to visit BugMeNot, which will pretty much get you into any free site fast. On to the fashion coverage:

1. In an example of the 'grass is always greener' phenomenon when it comes to skin color, Asian women use creams of dubious safety to lighten their skins.

2. In less dangerous fashion news, it says here that the acrylic toenail industry took off in Southern California five years ago. The very sad part about this situation is that if you have these long, fake toenails glued to your feet, you can't wear stilettos.

scum ponds and Sudoku

Yesterday I learned never to go to a bike race at Firebird International Raceway just south of Phoenix. You'd think the air would be better outside of town, but they had a scum pond. Moldies don't do well with scum ponds.

In slightly better news, I tried that big hat, loose-fitting long pants and sleeves trick so I didn't need to wear sunscreen. It worked like a charm, and in the 100 to 105 F heat, I was always standing in the shade.

Today I mostly learned that some Sudoku puzzles actually make you guess instead of just being able to play process-of-elimination. Math nerds hate guessing, particularly when they don't feel good.

do as I say, not as I do

About a month ago I wrote here that even though we Americans are old and fat, we're living longer, and being fat is good for the economy, so we should all go out and hit the post-Easter candy sales.

I suppose I'm not the only one who thinks like that; you could infer from this article that a bunch of people had similar thoughts, but they went to McDonald's.

do unto others

Today I learned that Paris Hilton announced her new cell phone game by the wrong name. I expect that there was some kind of communication glitch. People don't do things like that unless they are misinformed.

You see here that I am perfectly willing to cut Paris Hilton some slack, but I have been down on myself all week because I can't seem to get organized enough to make this one phone call. All I have to do is call a company on the East Coast and ask a question, but every time I get around to it, they've already gone home.

Ok, my grandmother taught me to do unto others as I would have them do unto me. So:
I'm sick, so I should just relax and know that as I get better, I'll become more reliable.

And Paris Hilton could just be stuck like that.

radiation and handlebars

I've gotten to the point where sometimes I don't have time to write down everything I learned in a day, so that's how come you didn't hear on Monday about the World Health Organization's cancer committee reporting that electromagnetic 'smog' is a possible human carcinogen.

The same article reported on Electromagnetic Sensitivity (ES), which some of my friends have, and you have not lived until you have heard someone with very little physics background accurately describe an antenna pattern (signal strength vs. direction) because she can feel it.

So anyway, today I learned that there's a building on a university campus in Australia where the people who work on the top two floors have an unusually high incidence of brain tumors. The building has a bunch of telecommunications towers on top. This does not sound like a good place to work.

In other news, I learned that if you ride around the loop at Saguaro National Park (which they're closing on Monday) with your hands on the drop part of your road bike handlebars, you are folded in half, but you have a lot more control.

stuff that smells bad

If you look at this map of what Fantasy Island will look like after they build houses on the Bunny Loop, which, by the way, is much better than building houses on the whole trail system, you see an Existing Tucson Water Facility down toward the bottom. Today I learned that the Existing Tucson Water Facility occasionally smells like the inside of a used washing machine:


You can smell that right through the screen, right? That dreadful combination of mold and cheap fabric-softener chemicals? No? Well, you probably can't smell it when people on tv flap paper money around, either.

Ok, I can't actually smell those things through the screen, but I can't think of anything similarly noxious that most people could look at and understand. It could be that there aren't a lot of pictures of that stuff on purpose, so we're going to go to something people can probably smell through the newspaper: a giant impromptu toilet in Palo Alto, CA, where they have an economic situation such that 800 square foot houses from the 1920's sell for around $700,000, which is the kind of thing that could cause, say, a homelessness problem.

Not that the article blames the homeless. It seems to blame diners from a nearby restaurant, denizens of the playing fields right across the street from Stanford Shopping Center (where you can buy a cheesy-looking nylon purse for $450), and bus and train passengers for not availing themselves of the one pay toilet in the vicinity, which leads us to the quote of the day:

"It's unconscionable that people are so filthy," [the Mayor of Palo Alto] said. "It happens all over the world. I'm unhappy it's happening at our train station."

the Grey Wolf

I didn't tell you about the guy known as the Grey Wolf around here before because I didn't have a picture, and really all I knew was that he was a clotheshorse. So without further ado, here's a picture, complete with an explanation, as much as there is one.

voluntary liver damage

[Disclaimer: Miss Molly is still suffering from the aftereffects of playing in the chemicals this weekend and is, to put it delicately, not on an even keel. Nevertheless, she feels compelled to share some of the lunacy, so take some with you when you go.]

David Blaine stayed submerged in a saltwater tank for seven days and had to be fished out at the end while trying to hold his breath for nine minutes. On the second day of the stunt, he showed signs of liver failure, which was addressed somehow, but he apparently has some liver damage. He suffered some liver damage from his fasting for 44 days stunt, too. Does this man have any clue what happens when your liver doesn't work right?

(Just so you know, it says here that his liver and kidney function are improving, but that doesn't make him any less of a moron.)

bubble gum

Today I learned that if I don't have the air cleaner on in the car, and I have gum on my shoe from the day before, I can smell it. In case you were curious, it smells either nauseating or nauseous, depending on how much of a purist you are.

Tombstone

Today I learned that one of the nineteenth-century Cochise County sheriffs has the same name as my brother-in-law by looking at an exhibit at the Tombstone Courthouse.

Also, the OK Corral show put on by the Wild Bunch, a group of volunteer actors that sends proceeds from their shows to the animal shelter ("puppies and kittens"), is really something. My father-in-law reviewed it with the quote of the day: "I'm very pleased that the proceeds go to the puppies and kittens."

elephants

Today I went to a bike race and learned about elephants. (We don't spend all our time talking about the race, after all.) The upshot is that the Tucson zoo's elephant enclosure is too small, the two elephants don't get along, and the proposed $8.5 million bigger enclosure is still way too small and way too expensive. Apparently the city council or somebody is still very much in favor of going ahead with the expansion, but the attempt to raise money has been pathetic.

I think a lot of that information is in here, and I'd love to get references for all that stuff, but I'm going to bed now.

physics in action and yams

Today I learned that optical brighteners in laundry detergents are chemicals that stay in the fabric and absorb UV light and radiate blue light so your white clothes look whiter. It never occurred to me that laundry detergent was so high-tech, but then again, I never gave much thought to laundry detergent until it started making me sick.

In other news, yams in the US are really just different varieties of sweet potatoes. Having read the description of actual yams, it's not clear to me that I've ever seen one. I mean, have you ever seen a yam in a grocery store with rough, scaly skin? If you ever did see a real yam, and you were a brilliant chemist in the 1950's, you could be famous (in some circles) for extracting steroids (hormones) from them, leading to the development of oral contraceptives.

this just in

Here I thought I wasn't going to learn much today because it's been kind of windy lately, and pollen and wind make me dopey, but instead I got all kinds of things:

1. The loop and all trails off the loop at Saguaro National Park East are going to close in a week or two until September or October, so us Eastsiders who consider the loop our personal playground are going to have to go play someplace else.
2. The Safeway I've lived three-quarters of a mile from for over a year carries organic produce. If we didn't have healthy visitors, I don't think we would ever have stayed in there long enough to find that out.
3. And speaking of vegetables, vegetables will rot your teeth! Well, not all vegetables, and mostly only if you roast them, apparently.
4. If we had been paying attention, we could have screamed bloody murder about the Arizona legislature making it easier for yard-care companies to spray Round-Up all over the place. I got an email today that says it still might be possible to screech at the governor to veto it tomorrow, if she didn't already do something with it. So, anyone who's up to making phone calls tomorrow, knock yourself out.

beer

Today I learned that cheap beer manufacturers put chemicals in their beer to make it a more uniform product. I was going to make some kind of snarky comment about it, but then I realized that I don't care. (Yeast is related to mold, and y'all know how I do with mold.)

However, on the off chance you were really looking forward to some food-related snarkiness, these Weight Watcher's recipe cards from 1974 should not be missed.

The Great London Pesticide Debate and spam

Yesterday I turned up an article about pesticide use affecting male body part size, and not in a good way, so you'd think there would be more opposition to pesticide use than there is.

Anyway, there was a sentence in there that caught my eye:

Delivering a special series of lectures this week at the University of Western Ontario, Louis Guillette [the associate dean for research at the University of Florida] has been drawn into London's lawn-care debate during question periods and talk-show interviews.

London's lawn-care debate?

Today I looked into it, and it turns out that London, Ontario is working on banning pesticides for cosmetic use, which would mean no herbicides, insecticides, or fungicides on lawns. As you would imagine, golf courses and lawn-care companies are opposing the proposed ban.

So this is a big deal, with court battles and picketers and hundreds of emails, right?

Well, hundreds of emails, anyway. If you look a little harder, it turns out that a committee of the House of Commons looked into banning lawn chemicals all across Canada in 2002 but couldn't legally pull it off. Since then, multiple cities have gone ahead with bans of their own, including Toronto, which is only about 120 miles (200 km) away from London, and where they have managed to deal with golf courses and lawn companies without too much kicking and screaming. So as much as banning lawn-care chemicals that reduce penis size sounds like it would surely generate discussion of another constitutional amendment here in the US of A, where God meant us to have perfect, bright green lawns no matter what, it sounds almost like a foregone conclusion in London.

In other news, May 1 was the 28th anniversary of the invention of spam. In 1978, a marketer from DEC did a moderately incompetent job of using SNDMSG (an email program) on Arpanet (the government-run version of today's internet) to advertise their nifty new computer system. Not that this comes as much of a shock in this day and age, but people didn't like it.

cheap, overprocessed wheat

Today I learned that some people who are really sensitive to wheat can sometimes get away with eating a cheap wheat product like a hot dog bun or pizza crust because the wheat involved has been so processed that their bodies don't quite recognize it.