advertising household poisons

From the latest on the poisoned pet food, we have the quote of the day:

The recall of wet and dry pet foods contaminated with a chemical found in plastics and pesticides expanded Saturday to include a new brand even as investigators were puzzled by why the substance would kill dogs and cats.

What did they think happens when you eat a pesticide and plastics component? That you get chemical sensitivities?

And, apropos of nothing in that quote, why are we importing wheat products from China? We can't make our own wheat now?

Anyway, still generally on the topic of better living through chemistry, I saw some ads this morning while watching Animal Planet. Apparently Animal Planet viewers are perceived as having smell issues, so I learned that Lysol thinks its 'sanitizer' thingy is better than Oust and that Glade and that other one I can't remember the name of looked pretty interchangeable. And everybody needs some Velveeta, which I finally had to look up.

Velveeta is made of cheese parts, water, something extracted from seaweed, assorted colors, and:

• sodium phosphate, which Wikipedia says is the same as TSP, everybody's favorite phosphorus-containing cleaner and degreaser, and drugs.com says is good for enemas,
• sodium citrate, which Wikipedia says is also an anticoagulant, and
• benzoate, so you won't decompose when you die*.

So what I learned here is that science fiction food has been around for a while now - you can make something that looks kinda like cheese out of seaweed.


* Ingredient list for entertainment purposes only; not meant to imply that Velveeta will be the cause of death**.
** Cause of death will likely be prescription drugs advertised on tv.

boards, beans, and body parts people should be careful with

Today I learned by stacking extra boards in the living room that I'm still sensitive to the underside of the flooring we're putting down, but not to the top of it. So, in case you're ever tempted, don't stack flooring near your couch. Just so you know.

In other news, cooking dried beans requires more of an attention span than I'm currently able to muster. Since I know people who react to can-preparation chemicals and thus can't eat canned food, I was going to be good and not eat canned beans. I could very likely get by on soy noodles and garbanzo bean flour, but it seems easier to just not worry about it. If my doctor ever reads this, I am going to get so yelled at.

And in search engine news, this blog comes up third if you Google search "Ky warming gel and heart palpitations." I'm so proud. Also kind of sad that somebody got sick trying to do something that should have been fun, but totally stunned at the places some people will put chemicals.

where's the food??

I don't expect this trick to work once the grasses start blooming, but today I learned that getting out of the pollen in town really is as simple as driving over a ridge. Besides being a fantastic trick, it has the added benefit of making it feel like you actually went somewhere because from over a ridge, you can't see town.

The thing is that I'm getting enough better that when I find a place I can ride, I can really blow through my reserves, and now I can't get enough carbohydrates while sticking to the rotation diet. My husband confirmed that the same thing happened to him last year when he started riding hard, and that's when he started cheating. But since a bunch of the easy carbohydrates are grasses, we'll see what happens when the grasses start blooming, although I won't be able to ride much of anywhere then, so I suppose I won't need as many carbohydrates. So, problem solved!

interesting information from the U of A

Today I learned that according to this one U of A prof, we're all gonna die in ten years because demand for oil is soaring, but production is down, and economic collapse isn't pretty. Also, grey water has a hippy-dippy aura. I will grant you that the second item was in a comment, but I'm still not sure why I ever read my local paper.

In what I'm confident is related news, it says here (very briefly) that drug use is up on college campuses.

In other news, that giant hexagon on Saturn apparently rotates with the same frequency as the planet, assuming the periodically varying radio signal coming from Saturn coincides with the rotation rate of the planet. The first article says the grandson of Niels Bohr managed to make tiny geometrical whirlpools, so while we were originally voting for the hexagon coming from the space-alien version of the Great Wall of China, we are now leaning more toward some funky natural cause.

I'm rubber and you're glue

Went on hard ride, overheated going uphill. Picking words hard work. News boring, but funny trend:

• LA Times reported on Minneapolis
• NY Times reported on Tucson
• Chicago Tribune reported on Texas.

Sleepy. Bye.

on the road with mattress springs

Today I learned that the Golden Glades is an interchange in South Florida where the Florida Turnpike, I-95, US 441, state road 9, and the Palmetto Expressway all come together. It sounds like a mess.

In other news, if you take your mattress springs that, after a night out in the back yard, no longer smell like Febreze, but still make you kind of sick, off to the do-it-yourself car wash, you can make them all shiny and almost ok. Wrapping them up seemed to help, so they're in the bedroom under the futon masquerading as box springs. We'll see how it goes.

In entertainment news, I went into a Blockbuster for the first time in over two years, and I can now definitively state that Blockbuster smells like plastic. Also, my husband doesn't yet tolerate Twizzlers.

Which actually says that he felt well enough to try them, even if I laughed at him for it. We're starting to wonder if pressurizing the house did more than just make some bad days better. It's entirely possible it's making our good days better, too, hence the Blockbuster and Twizzlers run, but there's really no way to know for sure, so have a picture of something that made people stare.


The ones on the bottom are the ok ones. I don't think I'll ever tolerate the top ones, and we've been working on those for a month, but they were new instead of used.

Speaking of used, we couldn't fit all the padding we cut off the ok springs into our trash bin, so that ground squirrel that bit my shirt thinks it's hit the mother lode of fluff. It bundled up some of the fluff with a thread in it, though, and apparently pea-sized brains aren't good for much, because you never saw a more frustrated tiny squirrel. I recognize that this is a terrible picture, but if you click on it, you can probably make out the thread and the pissed-off little squirrel.

in search of the ultimate mattress

[A little background to start with: the futon I made over a year ago is starting to pack down, and it's really comfortable if you put mattress springs under it. The trick is finding some I tolerate.]

Today I learned that if you buy a mattress on Craigslist for $20, even when you peel off all the Febrezed layers of polyester and foam and God knows what, the springs can smell just like Febreze. A while ago I learned that it's very difficult to get oils off of springs, so we'll see how it goes with Febreze chemicals.

Say, does anyone know of something I could spray on my stuff to get the smells out?

all about brain damage, complete with Star Trek references

Today I learned that the CDC surveyed 12 states for incidences of brain injuries, and of them, Arizonans were per capita the most frequently brain-damaged. Apparently in most of the states, traffic accidents are the worst problem, followed by elderly people who get hurt falling. In Arizona, even with all the snowbirds and retirees, we get more assaults than falls. So, come visit the Wild West!

In other brain injury news, people who have damage to the prefrontal cortex lack empathy. I'm not sure how much information got lost in translation to a newspaper article, but it sounds like if you ask a bunch of people if the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, ie, would you push somebody under a bus to save five other people, the people with prefrontal cortex injuries say yes more often than other people.

Ok, so that's a little different than Spock volunteering to get fried to get the Enterprise going again, but my answer was that you should absolutely push one person under the bus to save five others, so I'm in total agreement with the people with brain damage. (I also yell "Kill him!" when one of those indestructible bad guys on tv is down.) The only problem here, and the article points this out, is that asking hypothetical questions doesn't tell you what people would really do, so this study is essentially reporting that some people lack empathy on paper.

The thing is that I know exactly what I would do in real life in that situation. If I were in charge of pushing somebody under a bus, I would dither around looking for some other solution until we all got killed. So, EI in action, and problem solved!

And in news that should be brain-damage related or at least made up, Chicken McNuggets are 56% corn.

drugs and global warming

Today I think I learned that it's such common knowledge that tobacco causes 40% of illness-related hospitalizations and alcohol causes half of emergency room visits that you don't have to cite your sources. I could have tried looking those up, but I also learned that a bunch of sixth-graders in Longmont, CO held a debate and concluded that global warming isn't caused by humans. They used data found on the internet on Wednesday, I assume during class, and they didn't see An Inconvenient Truth. Since I have 45 minutes, an internet connection, and haven't seen the movie, either, here you are:

The graph of temperature rise from 1860 to now is pretty standard, but the Elmhurst College Chemistry Department's global warming site (workbook?) says some scientists say there's so much uncertainty in the numbers that it's not good for much. Here are two examples, the first from Elmhurst, the second from a Nova/Frontline collaboration on PBS:



Looking at those graphs as a physicist, I see the general upward trend that goes along with drowning polar bears and melting permafrost, but it doesn't look like the temperature is shooting upward. It looks more like a too-small data sample to see much, so Nova/Frontline's next graph didn't disappoint:


Oh, yeah! It looks pretty clear we're all going to die, until you see this one from NASA:

The purple dotted line in the graph above is our current global average temperature of about 15 C (59 ^oF).

Since NASA is full of good scientists, they have a nice zoom view of recent history, so you can see that the temperature has remained relatively constant over the last 100 years.

But now I have a problem, that as a sixth grader, would probably send me to the teacher for some help. If you look up a couple of graphs, the scary Nova/Frontline graph is for the same years as this NASA graph.

So now it's an issue of where you got your data. Nova/Frontline says scientists got their data from coral, tree rings, sediment, and ice cores, but NASA cites tree rings, ice cores, and geology, so as far as I'm concerned, temperature-watching is useless.

CO₂ is the next place to turn. I understand from the sixth-grader article that since there are volcanoes on Hawaii, that we can completely discount this Nova/Frontline graph:

except for the fact that I have to disagree with them because here, from the description of Dr. Keeling's work on UCSD's global warming site, is the famous Keeling curve:

which is apparently not at all controversial, besides looking pretty smooth to be volcanic.

The result of today's 45-minute study is that

1. I have seen the CO₂ evidence, and I conclude that the climate modeling people are probably our best bet for interpreting it.
2. Anyone, anywhere, who tries to point to temperature trends of any length in either direction as evidence ("the 1960's had a cooling trend!") is totally full of it.

I should fess up here: I don't care if people cause global warming or not. I care that people cause pollution, and after my experience last week, that's gotta stop, and if global warming fears accomplish that, sign me up.

progress

Today I learned that the local Safeway has eight organic kiwifruit in a bag for $3.59, and

→ I can go in the local Safeway. ←

Ok, so my forehead went numb at the cash register, but I'm pretty sure I still made sense.

Chinese food with a spoon and the human/AI combo

Today I learned that vegetables will make you fat! Well, more accurately, I think I learned that people who measure calories in restaurant Chinese food dump the whole container into their measuring gizmo, including all the sauce that would get left behind either in the container or on the plate, resulting in quote-of-the-day quality advice:

-Hold the sauce, and eat with a fork or chopsticks to leave more sauce behind.

But the real quote of the day comes from my cell phone hunt. I chose to chat with the helpful staff on Verizon's website, and this is the conversation I had:

A Verizon Wireless online pre-sales specialist has joined the chat. You are now chatting with Alice
Alice: Hello. Thank you for visiting our chat service. May I help you with your order today?
You: Hi there, I'm an engineer and a guy. I like the chocolate phones, but I'm worried that I'll look like a bigger nerd than I am because the name 'chocolate' makes the phones sound like they should be 'chick' phones.
Alice: I'd be happy to help you with that.
Alice: You can call it the VX8500 if that sounds better.
You: So it was not designed specifically for the female demographic? You don't have any statistics on that, do you?
Alice: Keep in mind that you will receive an instant online rebate and a current promotion of free shipping. Your package will be delivered by Fed Ex with 2-5 business days. How does that sound?
You: Alice, not to get too personal, but are you an AI?
Alice: No, it is just the name that they gave the phone because the first one was black and looks like a candy bar.
Alice: Great selection. What made you choose this particular phone?
You: Well, Alice, I see that you are a fine AI and are not really programmed to deal with my insecurities, but it was fun anyway. Thanks!
Alice: Yes.
Alice: Several men have that phone.
Alice: I know several work here that has it and several order it online.
Alice: As long as you don't get the pink one I think that you will be fine.
You: Oh, ok. Thank you Alice, I do appreciate your help.
Alice: You will love that phone. With its minimalist-inspired style and silky-smooth slide design, the Chocolate offers a rich array of features that include V CAST Music, a glowing touch-sensitive keypad, superlative music/video player, luxurious 1.3 megapixel camera/camcorder, Bluetooth capabilities, and a microSD memory port for extra storage.
Alice: Are you going to be using the phone for business or personal use?
Alice: Is there anything else I can help you with today?
You: No, I'm all set, thanks.
Alice: Thank you for visiting Verizon Wireless, I look forward to speaking with you again. Have a great day!

air quality obsession over

This morning I learned that even when town is horribly polluted, Colossal Cave Mountain Park is over a ridge and far enough out that I can ride there safely. I wish I'd have learned that before I put on two and a half weeks of pudge, but I suppose it only took me two and a half weeks to figure that out, and it'll only take two and a half weeks to repair the pudge problem.

About the time I got home from my ride the inversion layer lifted, allowing all the gunk in the air to blow away, so after lunch I learned that parts of our irrigation system are dead - specifically the parts under the concrete walks. The way you diagnose that (if you're us) is

1. dig up a piece of the hose where it comes out from under the walk and cut it
2. turn on the irrigation system and fail to see any water coming out
3. assure yourself that the rest of the system at least sort of works by attaching the garden hose to it
4. leave the hose running for a couple hours while you trim oleanders, thereby buying yourself another week to figure out what the heck you're going to do about the hoses under the walks.

Other than that, for the last thirteen years and up until last week you could go to this one museum in Japan and touch $2.1 million in gold bullion. I guess we missed it.

the air quality obsession continues

Today I learned that if the air outside gets bad enough, it's important to switch your house pressurization system from 'pressurize' to 'recirculate' for a while to let the filter get caught up. I also learned in a totally unscientific poll of two of my friends that the local sick-people community has never seen the air look quite this bad, and the wind has been generally from the west, so the west side of town is better than the east side.

This weather system is supposed to change tomorrow afternoon or Wednesday, so as soon as it goes away, I promise to stop obsessing over it.

Houston, we still have a problem, but it's looking much better

Today it got to be time to leave town for the afternoon again, so I learned that the Discovery Center at Kartchner Caverns State Park smells like WD-40, which was enough to make me turn around and go back outside, so I didn't get to go in the caverns. Not that I expected to be able to go in a bunch of caverns, particularly on a Sunday afternoon with a bunch of perfumy Sunday-visitor types.

Since we couldn't go in the caverns, we tried out the consolation-prize hiking trail, which turned out to be the greatest trail ever because I have spent much too much time inside lately.

On the way home I learned the locations of a bunch of mountain biking trailheads that I'd been putting off trying because they were kind of far away, and thus, intimidating, so I was pretty happy with the universe until after we got back on the freeway and closer to town, at which point, my tongue starting tingling.

Now, you may be thinking that tongue tingling is a pretty weird reaction, and I have to agree with you, but until this afternoon I thought it only happened when I was exposed to pesticide, but now it looks like it's also a pollution indicator.

So now I'm thinking that I have a cold and it's pollen season and I'm getting in a lot of trouble with the the air pollution, but at least if I got pesticided, it's not making nearly as much difference as I initially thought. I felt pretty much fine out of town, and on top of that, I found a bunch of trailheads outside the range of the pollution, so things are looking up.

Houston, we have a problem

Today I learned that I got pesticided.

It happened on Thursday when the neighbors' pesticide guy came and sprayed around the outside of their house and we were working outside and just thought they had a visitor. If I'd noticed the truck, I'd have sprinted inside because my doctor said pesticide is the only thing you can get into that can worsen your overall condition even before you feel it. So on Thursday, I worried, but I slept off the reaction and seemed ok yesterday, except for that cold I caught. Which I'm still pretty sure is a cold, since I felt funny on Thursday morning before the exposure.

Anyway, today we tried to repair the leak in the irrigation system in the front yard, and I got that same reaction, and I've never reacted to the neighbors' pesticide two days later. There was a horrible carpet-soap kind of smell out there, too, which made me think it wasn't pesticide and probably also made me stupid, so I stayed out in it longer than I should have.

I'm kind of upset about the whole thing, and since I'm not taking this situation with my usual "If I die, I die" philosophy, I'm upset that I'm upset. I even tormented a bank teller today by not having the wherewithal to say 'fine' when asked how I was doing this glorious weekend. I tried to make it better by allowing as how it would probably be better in a couple of weeks.

So, I think it'll be better in a couple of weeks. And if I'm more reactive to pesticide than before, it's not like I came across it a lot before this, and the weather'll change on Wednesday, and this cold, and pollen season, won't last forever.

Ok, I feel better now.

still sick

Today I learned that I do, indeed, have a cold, and that I smell funny to myself as a result.

In other news, putting a bottom on the redwood box and sealing it with caulk and AFM's Safe Seal made the house-pressurization system work, and rats giggle ultrasonically if you tickle them.

things you could catch

Today I learned that when I put my nifty shirt I got for Christmas outside because I wore it to the restaurant on Sunday, a ground squirrel bit a hole in it. The ground squirrel was kind of cute up until I learned that.

In other news, I think I caught something. It may be a cold. I haven't gotten sick from something contagious since sometime early in 2005, so this is kind of weird.

lies!

Today I learned that studies indicate that all that stuff about what foods to avoid if you are prone to acid reflux really is bull&$%@. I believe I said something similar in December, but apparently some doctors are catching on.

In other news, I can't write. There's pollution, and I had stuff to do, so the house still isn't pressurized. I expect I'll start making sense again when that happens, but we'll have to see.

tv, phones, and an air cleaner

Today I learned that Hot Dog on Battlestar Galactica is Admiral Adama's son in real life. Other than that, it was wall-to-wall cell phones. If I had a job, I wouldn't have time to torment three or four customer service reps in a day, but if I could have a job, I could probably remember to ask all my questions at once.

Also, the air cleaner we were using to pressurize the house makes me really sick if it sucks air off the tile floor. I'm pretty sure the blame lies with the tile floor (tile or grout, maybe both) because I developed a sensitivity to it when I was sleeping on it, but we'll see what happens tomorrow when we seal up the box, which is open to the tile on the bottom, with Tu Tuff.

We had this great discussion today about how we never get anything done, but then my husband pointed out that we completely disassembled and reassembled an air cleaner today because when something makes you sick, you have to rule out the device before you go blaming the floor. And he spent all of yesterday changing out hoses and sealing particle board under the guest bathroom sink, which, by the way, smells a lot better now. So the thing is that we spend a lot of time on air quality maintenance, which most people don't think much about, so that's why it feels like we never get anything done.

⇒ Fun fact: you can torment your pets and your friends by vigorously sniffing their necks. It may not work on cats, but if everybody else doesn't cringe, I'll give you all the paper money in my wallet.

slow day

Today I didn't learn a whole lot because I was pretty much finished reacting to the restaurant from last night, but something else came up. So, um, there's a little boy in New York who likes subway trains so much that he'll run onto one without his mommy, who I suspect will consider letting go of his hand again when he's in high school. Other than that, have another picture of the road to Arivaca:

water problems and time that never changes

Today I learned that there are a couple of websites where you can get a new-to-you cell phone by taking over someone else's cell phone plan. If I hadn't accidentally put my husband's cell phone in the washing machine, I wouldn't be nearly so interested.

Tangentially speaking of water, bottled water will kill you! Ok, only the kind from Armenia that has arsenic in it, but you all know what I think about drinking things out of plastic containers.

In yet more tangentially water-related news, I went out partying again and learned that if I eat out in a not-too-crowded restaurant with tile floors but cooled by a swamp cooler (by definition moldy), I don't digest my food very well, and that's uncomfortable for a while. It was still fun, but I might wait a while before I try that again.

In Daylight Saving Time news, some counties in Indiana switched by two hours last night, and I noticed Daylight Saving Time this year. I suppose it would have been hard to miss this year what with the extra weeks added, but last year it took me a few days to notice because here in Arizona, we don't mess with it. As that article points out, who wants to live somewhere where it's 100 F at 10 pm?

a doggie, a bunny, and some interesting construction projects

This morning I learned:

• England had an ugly dog contest. All I have to say about the results is that England is a very small country.
• If you're a rabbit, a good way to scrape off a pursuing bobcat is to run through an occupied golf cart. It freaks them out.
• Indonesia has concrete balls.

On the home front, today we pressurized our house. Things came to a head yesterday when I tried running the dryer, which sucked a bunch of pollution into the house and made me sick. (That lung thing I mentioned on Wednesday really was ozone, not pollen.) Since all the pine boards we (ok, my husband) could find were sap-drippingly green, we used redwood to make a box on which one of the air cleaners can sit. Then we cut a hole in the box, cut a hole in a piece of plexiglass, connected them with an aluminum duct, and stuck the plexiglass in the window. So ignoring the testing stage of a box you put around a computer to keep it from stinking up the place, here's a picture of our pretty new wood box with an air cleaner on it:

opportunity can't find the doorbell

Today I learned about a prime new source for things to learn: press releases. What happened is that I found an article that said bloggers can get paid to write a 'sponsored by' post if they sign up with something like PayPerPost, and I had to look into it because I hate my current gas stove only partly because I'm a little sensitive to gas, and replacing it with a 20 year-old coil-burner stove would be a step up, but I'm holding out for one of those flat-topped electric deals.

So, if I had signed up with PayPerPost and found an 'opportunity' (or whatever) for PayPerPost, I could have gotten paid for this, except there's this review process where the advertiser decides whether or not they like your post, by which point the post would have to start with "Sometime last week I learned," and besides breaking a time-honored tradition, I would have to kill myself.

SponsoredReviews was also mentioned, and they don't review your post first. They can decide not to pay you for it, but if it's legitimate constructive criticism, you're good to go. I think I would really enjoy constructively criticizing the heck out of Glade where I knew they'd see it. However, I'd probably embarrass myself fawning all over the people who make Tu-Tuff, and it would be in the archives forever, and I'd probably still have to kill myself.

I wasn't going to even look at LoudLaunch, but in the spirit of being thorough, I learned that they'll let you write about press releases, and sometimes for free!! Since I appear to have no entrepreneurial spirit whatsoever and the freebees are for good causes, I checked out a press release for a $25 million prize for the first zero carbon-emission airline (not airplane) cooked up before 2021. I would love to see a zero-carbon airline, but also contained in the press release was the quote of the day from Robinson Joyce, the president of LegalLock, 'an anonymous group of earth-wealthy in Europe and the U.S.' which is sponsoring the prize:

"We're not drowning in liquid CO₂ yet, but that's the potential ultimate result of global warming."

Right after you tell me you didn't wonder what, exactly, they meant by 'earth-wealthy,' you may tell me that you didn't just now envision a bunch of people swimming in liquid CO₂.

They're never going to hire me now.

bats, ozone, spelling, and an invasion

Today I think I learned by reading the comments on this article that there are some cavers who got themselves banned from Colossal Cave Park and then tried to get the park in trouble for planning a trail that ended up too close to caves of endangered bats. Unfortunately, the reporter had an ax to grind with the county, so he blamed it on the county, and the bats are going to be fine anyway because they'll be asleep when anybody goes by. And that piece of trail was probably already there. I think.

I was expecting the usual 'the county is incompetent,' 'save the animals,' and 'screw the animals, they probably came up from Mexico illegally anyway' comments we usually get around here, so to get stuff that sounds like actual information is pretty interesting.

In other news, I just discovered this nifty new (new to me, anyway) ozone map. Ozone season is starting here, mostly because California's ozone and precursors are blowing over here. The trick that makes this page interesting is pushing the 'enhanced' button.

Also, 'ax' is better than 'axe' because we don't keep the extra 'e' on flaxe and all those other words that used to have e's on them, according to Webster's. They figure that we, the people who write English, should attempt to be consistent on something.

And last but not least, Sark, one of the Channel Islands between England and France, was invaded in 1991 by an unemployed French nuclear physicist, who got jumped by the fire brigade after the constable distracted him by asking about his automatic rifle.

a flesh-eating cow, ETAs, new reaction, and weirdo custard

Today I learned that there's a cow in India that's eaten more than 48 live chickens. Also, there are various ultrasonic devices (electronic travel aids) that use beeps, pitches, and buzzes to tell blind people about how big and where things are around them.

In news around the house, I went for a very short bike ride today because it turns out that whatever pollen we have right now makes my lungs hurt. Ok, doctors have told me that's impossible, but a lot of them think environmental injuries are impossible, so what do they know, anyway? Um, anyway, I also realized that I've developed a terminal case of irresponsibility with this pollen, so I should probably attempt to cut myself some slack instead of beating myself up over it. I should still pick up the mail more often than once a week, though.

The other thing I learned around the house was how to make custard with no milk or milk substitute. You take a half a cup of ostrich egg, two soup-spoonfuls of honey, a dribble of vanilla, and maybe a tablespoon of oil, and you cook it in a saucepan while stirring continuously. When it looks like stirred custard, you're done, and I can definitely see the merits to occasional trips up north to spend $15 on another big egg.

one more thing

Rubber band + perfectly good hairpin + husband feeling better =

cake servers, smoking teenagers, and rats

Finally, a cake server for foot fetishists. Or shoe fetishists. We aren't really sure because we're not familiar with either one, but we suppose that if you look at a cake server as a glorified trowel, a shoe would be a step up. (Sorry.)

In other news, a study out of North Carolina indicates that R-rated movies only make white kids smoke. Black kids smoke more than white kids, but they at least are thinking for themselves. I guess.

For this morning's entertainment, I looked into what it would take to have pet rats. I found out that you can litter-train them, and girl rats don't scent-mark like boy rats, so we're all good to go with a pair of girl rats, except for that thing where we'd develop a huge sensitivity to them or their stuff, so it would probably be a short association.

On the home front, scrubbing the mattress springs with Bon Ami made them better, but not ok. There's still an oil on the parts you can't reach easily, so we're going to try spraying them with TSP this time, and maybe looking for some that were cleaner to start with.

mattress springs, recovery, and border stuff

Today I learned that I may be able to ride a bike for an hour or two, but scrubbing oil off of mattress springs is a whole nother thing. I hope, having kept them outside for two weeks and scrubbed them as best we can, that I won't be sensitive to them anymore. The futon is nice, but it's better with springs under it.

In other news, I recovered from partying around 1:30 this afternoon and survived a trip to Wild Oats with no ill effects after I returned home. Either I've made some huge progress lately or I'm too out of it to notice, which I doubt. I mean, I'm not writing Shakepeare here, but I'm not stumbling over words tonight, either.

In border news, out here in the desert with the crackdown, we got land pirates, and you can buy a ladder made of rebar light enough to run with for $5 on the Mexican side of the San Diego fence.

empty roads, NIH, and the FDA

Today I learned that if you drive home on Grant at 10:30 at night, the traffic pattern doesn't remotely resemble its daytime parking-lot configuration.

So you know, I'm not quite sure, but I may have used multiple words in the previous sentence incorrectly because I've been out partying. It was a rager, too - we sat around and talked for five hours in a row, and we even listened to some music for a while.

Despite a minor reaction-impairment, I'm still going to report that the government is trying to kill us. The National Institutes of Health's Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction has outsourced some of its work to a contractor with ties to and funds from 50 chemical companies, and here's a quote about what the contractor has to say for itself:

Signed by company founder Elizabeth Anderson, the letter stated that Sciences International "serves the private sector, including many trade associations, on a wide range of health and risk assessment issues. However, we are different from most other consulting firms in that we also currently serve government agencies," which, the letter said, gives the company "a unique credibility to negotiate with regulators on behalf of our private sector clients."

Not to be outdone, the FDA has rules that will make it approve a last-resort-for-humans antibiotic for use in cows, whose immune systems we screw up by keeping them in feed-lots, and the drug is going to lose its efficacy as a result, and on top of that, there are perfectly good other antibiotics already in use with cows that work fine.

Well, I suppose that came off as quite the bummer, but I had a lot of fun tonight, so I'm finding it fairly hilarious. Oh, the irony. I think I need to go to bed.

soap, needles, cold medicine, and more soap

Today I learned not to go in the aviary at the Desert Museum if they're cleaning the sidewalks in there. I couldn't keep up with the old lady with the rolling walker-thingy after that, but I got a good chance to recover because shortly after we left the aviary, we got to the javelina area and actually got to see some, which has never happened before. They were either sharing or bickering over a prickly pear pad, and (if you will recall) they're not pigs, but they look just like little brownish-grey hairy pigs. Also they're related to hippopotamuses.

In other news, if you misplace your ten-inch tufting needle/assassin's tool, you can buy a set of four needles with lengths between 6 and 12 inches for about $4.50. Once you have a pack of them, they look much harder to lose.

In actual newspaper news, cold medicine injured as many as 900 little kids in Maryland in 2004. I'm not sure what the article meant by 'as many as,' but as many as 3 zillion Americans will probably take that to mean that cold medicine will kill their kids, which, since the article also states that cold medicines are entirely ineffective, I suppose is not a terrible thing, unless you are a cold medicine executive.

Speaking of Maryland (sort of), the Maryland legislature is discussing a bill that would restrict phosphorus in dish soap and detergent because it's polluting the Chesapeake Bay. The soap industry, knowing that in the end it'll have to give up phosphorus, is fighting it anyway.

Restaurants and hospitals use big machines that work faster and use hotter water than household machines -- and a product without phosphorus would definitely not clean the dishes properly, they said.

Then they said, "Screw the freakin' Bay! You want clean dishes, don't you? Well, don't you??"

the hunt

Today I learned that if there aren't very many people inside, I can sometimes go in stores with doors that open to the outside, as opposed to stores that open onto corridors, like at the mall. I did make it into the mall briefly, where I learned that some corridors are safer than others, and that when I see clothing in store windows, I don't think in terms of potentially buying it, but in terms of how straightforward it would be to make something like it.

I also learned on this whole expedition that if we do anything other than replace the phone I broke with one from ebay, our current cell phone company will raise our rates, and that the supply-and-demand thing kicks in for me at our current rate. Since two other companies would give us fancy new phones for the cost of just one from ebay and let us pay our current rate, I expect we'll be jumping ship, even if it means being signed up for two years. Then I expect we'll promptly do something that'll make us wish we'd stayed month-to-month on the ancient Roman plan with the old company, but that's the way it goes.

Other things I learned today were that

• A homophone generator is highly entertaining.
• Bed bugs die if you freeze them. (I hope I don't actually ever need to know that.)
• There'll be a lunar eclipse on Saturday.
• I am totally cool with renaming the Easter Bunny, even though 'Spring Bunny' doesn't have the same ring to it. I mean, the Christian faith has done absolutely nothing I'm aware of to co-opt the bunny, unlike Christmas trees, which heaven knows have nothing to do with Christianity, either.
• A retired math teacher made the news for not wanting to move to the assisted living part of her retirement community. Based on the description, I wouldn't want to live there, either.

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moving day, prison, global cooling, and Sierra Vista

Today we had movers show up with all our stuff, most of which has been in storage pretty much since we got sick in Illinois five years ago, and it still is, but now it's here. When we get it cleaned up, maybe some of it will be allowed in the house. Overall, the stuff moving went ok, and I never, ever, want to do it again.

In other news, making people quit smoking cold turkey when they go to prison is apparently not cruel and unusual, global cooling didn't have a following nearly as large among scientists as global warming has now, and living in Sierra Vista is, according to the CDC, not likely to cause childhood leukemia even though Cochise County is in the top ten percent of polluted counties in the country.