rant alert: moldy airport

Once upon a time people thought the world was flat. People had opinions about it. It says here that if you get some opinionated people and scan their brains, they have an emotional dial that makes them feel better about their opinions. The dial fixes it so they can care deeply about hating the other guys, but they can tune out anything that challenges their opinions. I think that's probably how those screaming debate shows work - each side can see the other's inconsistencies, but they can't see their own.

Anyway, now everybody pretty much agrees that the world is round, but people have opinions about whether or not mold or chemicals in their buildings can make people sick. Today I learned that the Denver International Airport has been aware of mold problems in Concourse B and de-icing chemicals leaking into the Red Carpet Club, not to mention local waterways, pretty much since it was built, and it doesn't sound like they've done anything about it.

My husband and I, on our do-or-die plane ride to scope out Tucson, changed planes in the infamous Concourse B a year and a half after that article was written. There was enough mold in there that we went looking for better air, which turned out to be away from the carpets, which were pretty much everywhere. When we did the early-boarding thing, parents with small children let us go first because we did not look good. We started to feel better on the plane (on the plane!), and then started to feel worse again when the girl who'd been sitting on the carpet came to sit next to us. That's contaminated.

People are getting sick in Concourse B; lawsuits have been filed. So when I read that airport managers are scratching their heads over a plunge in customer satisfaction, and airport spokesman Chuck Cannon was quoted as saying "We can control how clean the bathrooms are ... but there's just a lot of it that's out of our hands," it just makes me want to go over there and hit somebody. Also (from the previous spokesman, Steve Snyder, in the first article), "The traveling public is in absolutely no danger."

Um, Steve? We were in danger.

car races, band concerts, and parks

Today I learned that last year, the San Jose Grand Prix track, which runs right through downtown San Jose and practically across some people's front lawns, wasn't wide enough to let any cars pass each other, so it was essentially a high-speed parade. The article I read said that a lot of downtown once-a-year tracks don't allow passing, and that people just go for the party atmosphere. Anyway, this year there were a couple scary places to pass, and I'd tell you something interesting about that, but I don't pay much attention to car racing.

So instead of attending what I'm sure was an exciting day of car racing, today I went to a well-attended band concert in the park. In order to be upwind of the crowd, I ended up at the opposite end of the park from the band, but it wasn't a very big park, so I could still hear. Besides getting to hear a medley of ten different old sitcom themes, there were all kinds of dogs and kids to watch. It was kind of fun, and yes, I know a band member. After the concert he said, "We didn't have any train wrecks!"

In other park-related news, the park near my parents' house has rubber sidewalks in the play areas. Instead of looking like granite or whatever like the ones in DC, you can see little chunks of rubber in them, and when the sun shines on them, they stink. I had to stand in the mulch. Also, the new play structures in the parks around here (they look a lot like this) have a lot of plastic in them, and it's not the good kind of plastic. "Auntie Christmas" (that's me, don't ask, and isn't that the cutest thing you ever heard?) had to climb down like an old lady instead of going down the slide like Patrick did.

the state quarter and mange

If you ask Arizonans what they want the governor to put on the state quarter, people tend to come up with saguaro cacti, unless you ask schoolkids, who come up with fish, volcanoes, and kickball. Grownups have some pretty good off-the-wall suggestions, too, if you check out the slideshow to the right of the article text.

Some people suggested saguaro flowers, which are the state flower and are kind of pretty by themselves, but really, when you get a whole bunch of them on top of something my husband calls a 'cartoon cactus,' it looks like a cactus wearing a fried-egg hat.

In other news, here's an article about a bald squirrel in Cleveland. In case you ever needed to know what a bald squirrel looks like.

dork alert

Today I learned that:

• I can walk to downtown near my parents' house, but once I get there, I react to the traffic fumes. The air in the cell phone store (yes, I know my cell phone will kill me) was better than outside, which is saying something.
• It takes three hours to drive through Los Angeles on Friday afternoon, making it a 9 1/2 hour drive to San Diego from the Bay Area. You could get to San Diego from New Mexico in the same amount of time.

I know I learned some other things today, but everything was rendered trivial when I realized I hadn't checked my college buddy Funball's blog in a while and found out he got a kidney transplant two weeks ago. I am a lame, lame friend, so have a picture of me in a dorky hat, not that you can really make it out:

camping in downtown and turkeys

Today I learned that for the last two days, there have been flash flood warnings at the campground where we were going to stay outside of San Diego this weekend so my husband could (all together now) go to a bike race.

I was all excited about going camping, but flash flood warnings mean that there is a little too much water around for us moldies, so he's going to have to go all by himself and stay in a hotel someplace. Where is still up in the air because there's some tennis thing going on, so he may end up staying somewhere in the next county.

The only other thing I learned today is that there are wild turkeys wandering around southern San Jose, and little turkeys are called poults. I saw seven poults out with their parents crossing the bike path I was on and wandering into suburbia. They weren't as pretty as Canada geese, which I saw in the park, but as a homeowner, I'd take a flock of half-grown turkeys over a gaggle of pooping geese any day.

water in Arizona

Today I read that there was a particularly violent monsoon storm yesterday south of Tucson. The article I saw was just a little blurb titled "Weather turns for the worse," which was critiqued in comment #3 by Bill S., bringing us to the quote of the day:

It does seem like the recent crop of Star reporters is very 'indoor' oriented. The Star used to have some fine outdoor reporters who would appreciate rain and other seasonal weather - now anything hotter, colder or wetter than shopping mall weather is reported as bad.

the pollution obsession continues

[For the last couple of days, the weather report has promised that it'll be ten degrees (5 C) cooler tomorrow, but as many of you know, tomorrow is always a day away. Miss Molly is hanging in there, but she's getting a little weird.]

Today I learned that:

• Hong Kong is so polluted that you can't see all the way across the city. It's apparently difficult to get foreigners to come work there on account of the air quality, and it makes the tourists sick, so ew.
• The Air Force base in Tucson wants its own power plant. They're looking into burning trash to generate power, and they want to do it southwest of Irvington and Harrison, which if you've been following along here, is just to the left of the proposed housing that's going to be built on Fantasy Island. Can't you just hear the real estate agents? "We've got trails on this side, and on this other side, you have the base, which is the last gross polluter in the valley, being all environmentally conscious!"
• The drought is so bad in part of Australia that the town of Toowoomba in Queensland is thinking about filtering the heck out of its sewage and putting it back into the reservoir. In theory it should work, but there's a quote in there about not being too interested in being a guinea pig, and I gotta say, I'm not enjoying being a guinea pig much myself. I keep learning things, and it's interesting, but all in all, I'd rather not involuntarily test other people's laundry chemicals and such.

Last but not least, we have the quote of the day from this article about people fighting over Katrina pets:

(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)

Cuba, a paperback, and fabric

Today I learned that you can go to med school in Cuba for free, but the food is pretty much beans and rice all the time, which would kill me in about a week, not unlike leftover flourless chocolate cake.

In other news, I found out that I can read an entire well-aged paperback book in a day as long as I do it where there's a slight breeze, and I finally found a useful fabric store around here.

You'd think in a large metropolitan area you'd be able to find fabric stores, but it turns out you can find craft stores. You have to drive to find any useful fabric, so we ended up in a jam-packed discount place called Fabrics R Us in San Jose. Inside, we found a comically cranky scowling saleslady. She was fast, but she was determined not to cut less than a yard of anything, even though one of her colleagues and another customer assured us that a half a yard was fine. Maybe it was the peer pressure, but she relented when I assured her that if I couldn't get half a yard of this one thing, I didn't need any.

way to pick a verb tense

You can thank my local newspaper for this article containing the quote of the day in the first sentence:

Mark Ogram views himself as a David slewing Goliaths, not just another "patent troll" abusing innocent companies for profit.

I recognize that four in the morning is a little early to pick a quote of the day, but a mosquito bittened me and wokened me up. I'll be good and go back to sleep now.

Watsonville

Today I went to a crit in Watsonville and learned that the people who stole the wire at the velodrome accidentally stole aluminum wire instead of copper wire, netting themselves, I was told, about $150 for four hours of work. I forgot to ask how many thieves you need to cut up that much wire in four hours, so assuming two thieves, that'd be eight hours of work, so let's see... that's $18.75 per hour, which is considerably above minimum wage. However, if you assume four thieves, that's still above minimum wage, but at $9.37 per hour, it might be easier to just go get a job.

I also learned that Watsonville still has an actual useful downtown, complete with a hardware store, so it has not been all Silicon-Valleyed all to high-end uselessness. But you can still buy a cute little 2 bedroom, 1 bath house for $625,000, where once a year you can watch a crit from your front yard.

non-existent trails

Today I learned not to ride my bike up near Skyline, which is the road along the top of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The reason I'm not going up there again is that the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District put a trail in Upper Stevens Canyon Open Space Preserve on the map, and it wasn't there in real life that I could find. My ride today was kind of long.

It other news, if your mom cuts off pants to make shorts, you can make the legs into the cutest sports bag for your husband, complete with bike tool pockets and pockets for extra chainrings, which 'trackies' (people who ride on the track) carry around as a matter of course. You will probably never see another sports bag with chainring pockets.

You may not ever see this one; we'll have to see if its intended owner can stand the cuteness factor.

the epic chocolate buzz and my air quality obsession

Today I learned that you don't lose your cake-making abilities if you don't use them for a year and a half. Using my husband's birthday as an excuse, for dessert tonight we had pound cake with a lemon glaze and a flourless chocolate cake with raspberry sauce. As required by the rotation diet (not really), we both ate as much as we could, and now we're all zingy from the chocolate. I expect to sleep about three hours tonight.

In other news, I learned that those air quality maps I keep staring at on wunderground don't have as much detail as I do. Today, just to see if I could, I rode from Hellyer Velodrome toward Anderson Reservoir on the Coyote Creek bike path that runs along and occasionally crosses under 101 (partly visible as the green wiggly line at the bottom right of this map). The air was not so good on the west side of the freeway, but it was fine on the east side. I don't report numbers like 'ozone - 52,' but I can tell fine from not fine and ozone from particulates in much greater detail than the maps. Especially this one.

a car labeled 'Psycho Patrol'

Today I learned that if you don't actually impersonate a police officer, it's ok to drive around in a car that looks an awful lot like a police car. I also learned that life is better if I only walk seven or eight miles instead of ten, and that the air quality around here is going to suck until at least Sunday.

breaking news and BO rant alert

Today I learned that thieves ran off with the copper wire attached to the lights at Hellyer Velodrome, so my Wednesday and Friday night entertainment is curtailed or canceled. Also, wunderground is missing its usual air quality information, so I discovered this site, which scuttled my trip to Almaden Quicksilver County Park, which is in the middle of the Santa Clara Valley.

In other news, I've saved up enough energy to go all ballistic again, this time over this article that tells people to use antiperspirants and deodorants with 'a pleasant scent.' Besides the fact that plugging up your sweat glands with an antiperspirant is a bad idea, that 'pleasant scent' comes from a bunch of synthetic chemicals that make some of us really sick.

So I'm all offended that the Washington Post is advising people to use products that make a bunch of disabled people sick.

Ok, all done ranting.

(anyone who believes this should be slapped)

World Jump Day is coming! Here's an article about it, but a German artist has a website where upwards of 600 million people have signed up to jump at the same time in order to shift Earth's orbit and fix global warming.

I should have thought of that. Ok, I'm thinking....

I got it: everybody get an aerosol can and point it west, and at the same time we all spray for a minute, maybe we can speed up the rotation of the planet! Um, now I'm trying to figure out what that would accomplish....

Gravity would be slightly counteracted by centripetal acceleration, so everybody would lose weight!!! Yes!! World Weight Loss Day. 'Scuse me, I gotta get a website.

cell phones, searching for okra, and a lot of tapioca pudding

If cell phones that transmit aromas using a combination of 96 chemicals catch on, I'm going to have a freaking huge conniption fit. I'd have one now, but I used up all my emotional energy yesterday not getting to ride on the track because of chemicals, even if I did have fun later.

In other news, I found this really neat article about pesticide doses and cumulative effects. It debunks some unscientific pesticide hysteria but calmly explains how pesticides will do you in anyway. Here's an excerpt:

The concentration of a pesticide in the immediate vicinity of an enzyme determines the likelihood that any reaction with the enzyme will occur. Different enzymes, whether detoxification enzymes or cholinesterase, have different affinities for the pesticide. For example, the residues of some compounds are so low that reactions with the cholinesterase enzyme are nil. Yet these same concentrations could be high enough for reaction with the detoxification enzymes, which have different affinities. Because the rate of every pesticide-enzyme interaction is unique, the relationships among different pesticides are not simply additive, which is presumed when the toxicity of all OP [organophosphate] insecticides are made proportional to a reference OP. When concentrations are so low that the likelihood of reaction with the enzyme is also very low, then adding together residues of different kinds of pesticides is not going to alter the original probability of reaction with the enzyme.

In related news, here's a list of 46 conventionally farmed fruits and vegetables ordered most to least contaminated.

Why all the pesticide information? It turns out that okra is really good in what are essentially garbanzo flour pancakes, and I don't know if I'll be able to get organic okra anywhere in Tucson, so I need to know how contaminated conventional okra is. I still don't know.

And in case you ever need to know, you can make tapioca pudding in the hold of a ship, not that that was done on purpose.

local crime and bikes

Today I learned (here, see June 23) that

1. Bulk marijuana comes in bales.
2. 220 bales of marijuana weigh approximately 4000 lbs (1820 kilos).
3. If you have 220 bales of marijuana in your house, the cops can smell it from the street.

The reason I came across that particular page is that I was looking for the press release for a bank robbery that my local newspaper says the cops want help with. The paper didn't print the robber's race or picture, which one commenter stated very positively were both present in the press release. So now I'm all obsessed with when the TPD is going to update their page so I can see the press release and know whether or not the newspaper is as goofy as the local tv news. I may need to get a life.

But I'm trying to get a life. With expectations of being able to ride around Hellyer Velodrome for a little while at least, I went to this morning's beginner training session. In the car on the way there, my husband told me that there probably wouldn't be a lot of pack riding (huge clots of riders), but it would likely be pacelines (long strings of riders), so I'd just have to make sure I wasn't right behind somebody stinky. Identifying stinky people beforehand and keeping track of them would be a useful skill to develop for later, when I could keep track of strong and weak riders in races. So we got to the track, and the parking lot was really full, which wasn't encouraging because crowds are bad, and then I had it confirmed that beginning/less serious riders reek of laundry chemicals, unlike serious racers, who usually don't smell like much. I spent 30 seconds sniffing around the infield, turned around, and left. I wasn't able to stay long enough to even rent a bike.

As a consolation prize, I rode into town with my husband for an iced coffee (not for me), and we ended up at the park on the bay, where we ran into my parents. We also tormented a 'recreational rider,' who blew past us on the long path. If he'd kept his pace up, we wouldn't have gone after him. We just kept riding up behind him so he'd ride faster and faster and faster. I know I spent too much time with my dog learning to chase things, but that was really fun.

grasses and weird swimsuits

Today I learned that I redeveloped a sensitivity to oats. This doesn't bother me a whole lot because I'm ok with wheat, and I almost tolerate rice again. I suppose I also learned that if I eat a specific grass every four days (which is supposed to be safe), I still develop a sensitivity to it, so I'd better go eight or twelve days between. Oh, yeah, and I still tolerate sugar, not that I'm supposed to waste calories on it, but that means that everything is fine.

The other thing I learned (by reading this article) is that there's a company that sells swimsuits that are essentially skinsuits with nylon housedresses sewn around the neck. The article made the point that these swimsuits are a step back to the 1920's and are really ugly. I have to agree that they're ugly, but if you detached the housedress, you'd at least have more trouble getting sunburned at the beach.

food, trucks, autism, and salad dressing

Today I learned about organic coffee at McDonald's, organic beer from Anheuser-Busch, and alternative power supplies allowing Wal-Mart to stop idling their trucks during loading and breaks. Then I learned on the Boston Globe's Op-Ed page from two weeks ago that Robert Kennedy Jr. is pretty sure that it is mercury in kids' shots that gives them autism.

So far I learned that nobody can definitively say they know (here and here, for example) because everybody seems to have their pet studies that studied different things in different populations, so they're pretty hard to compare. Also each side thinks the other's studies were done by crackpots. Here's what I know for sure:

• Thimerosal is a preservative used in vaccines (in the US at least) that is 50% mercury.
• Mercury is bad for people.

This list was going to be longer, but I can't really find anything else people seem to agree on. I suspect the reason no one can agree is that there are a variety of things that cause autism. Some people were going to have autism anyway, and the rest of them had some environmental trigger, shots or pollution or whatever.

I'm not saying I'm right; I'm just saying it sounds a lot more reasonable than 'autism hasn't increased - we're just diagnosing it more,' 'it can't be vaccines,' or 'it's vaccines.'

In other news, changing the dates on and then selling 1.6 million bottles of expired salad dressing is not a good a way to make money. You can get 1000% return on your investment, but it looks like then you go to jail.

hiking and sunscreen

Today I learned that I can walk ten miles (16 km) with 1500 ft (500 m) of climbing if I want to. This would not have occurred without much encouragement from my dad. There were some neat views, but now I am really, really tired.

The other thing I learned today is that if I put a tube of this brand of sunscreen in the dip in the dashboard on the passenger side of my car (it lacks airbags) and the sun shines on the dash, the sunscreen melts and runs out of the tube, forming a big sunscreen puddle that sloshes into the air conditioning vents when I turn corners. The worst part is that I can't even wear that kind of sunscreen, but the good news is that a huge puddle of it didn't kill me.

scammer income

It says here all the way at the bottom of the page that at least one Nigerian scammer makes $45,000 per month. I just don't know what to say about that, so since I'm out of sunsets, here's a picture of a tent goon:

bored engineers

The results are in from San Jose State's yearly bad fiction contest. This year's winner is a retired mechanical engineer, and do you remember what I wrote about bored engineers in my little profile blurb?

all about the tent

It has come to my attention that I've been lax and haven't posted any tent pictures, so I've finally gotten organized (and borrowed a camera since I forgot mine). Here, in all its glory, is the tent.


Ok, that was a little less glory and lot more parts. Here's the glory:


I know that blue plaid thing on the bed in the back looks like it's floating in mid-air. A bunch of our stuff is undyed cotton, so it all matches the tent, and I'm not the best photographer in the world. And we were just goofing off with the flag. That pole sticking out front is for holding up the porch roof/tarp/tent fly we forgot. We forgot the floor tarp, too, and one of these days we'll go get some other unstinky tarps (you have to air them, but then they're ok). We just haven't gotten around to it yet because it doesn't rain here in the summer, and the driveway isn't a terrible floor.

The bed, if you were curious, is two pushed-together, metal-sprung LL Bean cot frames with homemade kapok and cotton mattresses on top.

Here's a picture of the inside (from when it was pitched in my living room) so you can see the ties and tent poles:


It's working out really well. With an air cleaner inside, it holds out cut-grass smell and barbeque smoke, and it turns out that Laundry Fest is kind of a non-event around here, however that works.


My mom figured that we'd forgotten to wire it for electricity, so she found us a shop light, so the tent glows in the dark. You can see the shadowy outlines of a chair and a bag we hung from an eyebolt.


So far only family members have been to visit. Everybody thinks it's pretty neat except for Patrick, who is at the age where new stuff can be kind of startling, and you have to admit that people living in a tent on the driveway is kinda different. Ok, EIs do this kind of thing all the time, but that doesn't mean two-year-olds are used to it.

college, sex, and football

The New York Times this morning had an article about how former women's colleges are starting football programs and boosting their male enrollment. Apparently the guys they attract don't feel all entitled because they don't have football scholarships, so their grades and behavior are fine. They're in college and play a sport, instead of being the school's last and best defense against the deliberately malodorous and discourteous crosstown rival. [Ed. note: the author is completely clueless as to the basis of crosstown rivalries. Also, she wasn't sure if crosstown was one word or two, and in the effort to find out, she found this picture taken by the Grammar Cop.]

Onward to an AP article that came out today about community college football players, who don't have scholarships either. [Bad news alert for individuals sensitive to bad news] Two Fresno-area [Central Valley] community college football players have been arrested for rape. Something like eight other football players from the two local community colleges are under suspicion in the same case.

So for tomorrow, compare and contrast* academic standards, financial considerations, and scholarshiplessness in small liberal arts college football and community college football.


* My college roommate pointed out that you can't compare two things without contrasting them, so English professors who use that particular construction should, I don't know, have all their classes filled up with community college football players.

ozone

Ok, I already knew all about ozone. Chemically sensitive people use ozone generators to decontaminate some things, but we're really, really careful around it because it can hurt healthy people. Here's what the EPA has to say about it. Anyway, upon reading that the air at the race today in Lafayette, CA would be Moderate, and the pollutant would be ozone, like an idiot I thought, eh, how bad could it be? I mean, Lafayette's supposed to be a nice area.

It turns out that Moderate ozone means that you have no trouble smelling it, and that if you're chemically sensitive, if you exert yourself at all you end up with ozone bonk. Or that's what I'm calling it. One minute you're going along doing your thing, and the next minute, you're really tired and it's time to go home. This is not such a horrible thing if it's after the race and you're just trying to walk fast enough to keep up with the guy dawdling on the bike ahead of you. It's not at all entertaining, however, if you're the guy in the race.

So it is my pronouncement that ozone is worse than particulates, but anything listed as Moderate means one or both of us should just stay home.

marketing

Today I learned about a site called eMarketer, which discusses interesting marketing trends, by reading this article about how ABC thinks consumers won't mind if they try to get the ad-skipping feature removed from all DVRs.

Since I really don't understand marketing, I'm really interested in the ideas presented on this eMarketer site, but I haven't gotten around to reading anything on it yet. Is this how other people feel about physics?

special shopping edition

Today I went shoe shopping with my mom. I would say it was a typical girls' shopping run except that if one of you has to breathe through a mask most of the time you tend to be a little more goal-oriented and spend less time holding things up and saying "Hey, this is cute!" I still tried on a pair of Crocs, even though that wasn't what I was shopping for. A bunch of chemically sensitive people wear them, so I know they're safe, but I didn't get any. They felt like I was wearing un-sticky marshmallows on my feet.

However, I still did well enough that we got to go clothes shopping for a little while, so I went to a grand total of two mall-type stores today, which is a record. I have to say, however, that if you haven't been clothes shopping in about 18 months that some of the styles look a little weird. I mean, when exactly did people start wearing things like this on the outside?

In other news, my husband went to a couple of bike stores and made himself sicker than I've seen him in a while, so one of them has mold in it. Besides that, I learned that people in the Bay Area think Slime tubes aren't worth much, so I'll be riding the rest of my time here on normal tubes. I'll get another Slime tube when I get back to Arizona, where the normal tubes will last roughly 47 seconds.

tea tree and lavender oils

The regular news is not supposed to be funny. An article about how estrogen-mimicking tea tree or lavender oils in various personal hygiene products are giving boys boobs is not funny.

What's funny is that whatever marketing comes up with as a 'feature' seems to injure somebody.

special tourist edition

Today I learned compelling reasons to go to Bisbee, AZ and the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. It says here that the dog-cat-mouse guy famous for stacking his pets hangs around Bisbee, and it says here that somebody is making a movie about the guy who died after, uh, well, there was this horse, and.... Y'know, maybe I don't need to get to Sundance.

The other thing I learned is that I have a talent for carrying around defective tubes, either that or I puncture them by carrying them around for six months before I need them.

Tylenol, the grocery store, and the track

Tylenol will kill you! Researchers found that 40% of volunteers in a study who took the recommended dosage of Tylenol for two weeks had abnormal liver test results.

I got to wondering about drug warnings because the earliest one I can remember was for Vioxx in 2004. My web search turned up this article that wins headline of the day for "Statistics prove prescription drugs are 16,400% more deadly than terrorists." Then I found this list of recalled drugs, and the ones I looked at were all recalled in the last two years, so maybe this really is a recent thing. The other thing I learned on that page was that there's a recalled drug named 'Warfarin.' Do you think they fed some to President Bush?

In other news, the grocery store is horrible in the afternoon, and it's the other customers, not what they put in the store on purpose. Also, I can't go in the infield of Hellyer Velodrome before about 7 pm, I think because rush hour fumes settle in there.

the Central Valley

Today I learned that when they say the air quality in the Central Valley is 'Moderate,' it means that if I breathe there, my lungs feel sort of like they're on fire. The air smelled like the entire valley was on fire, and maybe it was, in that it was the Fourth of July, so everybody who wasn't at a bike race in Davis was home barbequeing.

Not exactly sure where the Central Valley is? Look for the terrible air quality stripe down the middle of California on this map. If you have any remaining doubt, click on the 'animate' button.

a bunch of environmental stuff

Today I learned that school buses put out twice as much pollution per mile as semi trucks. Also, BugMeNot is a lot easier than registering for the Sacramento Bee site so you can read about the non-toxic substitute for methyl bromide developed by researchers at UC Davis. Well, it uses CO₂, which would kill you if you breathed too much, but it's a whole lot better than methyl bromide.

rubber sidewalks

Today I learned that Washington, DC is experimenting with rubber sidewalks. The article says that concrete sidewalks keep oxygen from getting into the dirt, so tree roots grow upward looking for air, which breaks up the sidewalks and costs the city money when people trip on them and sue. Sidewalks made of molded shredded tires come in sections with a little airspace between them, so the tree roots should grow like they're supposed to, and the sidewalk should last fourteen years around trees instead of around five. They're also sort of springy and look like concrete or granite, unless you're at a Walmart in Texas, where they have a red one.

The thing that bugs me about this article is that it describes what these sidewalks feel like and what they look like, but it doesn't discuss at all what they smell like. I know I've mentioned that I sometimes expect to see things in the newspaper that aren't there, but I kind of expect to know if sidewalks are going to gas me. It just seems newsworthy.

So, it says here that eighty cities in eight states are trying them, so if any of you happen to live anywhere near them, give 'em a sniff and let us know.

my first trip to the velodrome and David Hasselhoff

Last night I got to go to Hellyer Velodrome and watch my husband race. Instead of parking me in the stands as a spectator, where it turns out I would have gotten gassed with laundry chemicals anyway, I got to be his pit crew and hang around on the grass in the infield. There I learned that:

• Hellyer's infield is all grass. At least some of the infield at most tracks is paved so racers can warm up without a trainer.
• People who are extremely sensitive to grass should not warm up on a trainer on the grass.
• The velodrome acts as a bowl that holds exhaust fumes from the motorcycle they use to get racers up to speed for the Kierans, so people who are exhaust sensitive should get the heck out of the infield for those or wear a mask, even if there is a 15 mph (24 km/h) breeze.
• After the sun goes down around here, three layers on top and long pants are not quite enough to keep you warm. Next time, I'm going for four or five.

And as an interesting follow-up to yesterday's post, bathrooms'll kill you! Although maybe that only happens if you're David Hasselhoff and are shaving in a gym bathroom at a hotel in London. (Note: David Hasselhoff is not dead. I just like announcing that things'll kill you.)