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??"