if you're squeamish, skip the first paragraph

Today I learned that two or three times per semester, a drunken college student will vomit on the 24-hour shuttle between the Metro and the GW campus. The university is going to start charging those people for cleaning costs and taxi rides for stranded students, which I'm quite confident that some people will take as permission to spew all over the bus. Ok, but here's the quote of the day:

Supriya Shah, a freshman from Pennsylvania, said: "To just target the [shuttle] seems random. People throw up all the time in the dorms, they throw up in the elevator, they throw up everywhere."

I'm really glad I went to college before that became commonplace.

Other than that, I went to a HEAL meeting and learned that when a chemically sensitive chemist explains to a bunch of chemically sensitive civilians that ammonia is a gas, so that when the water in which it is dissolved evaporates or is otherwise removed, the ammonia is gone, they don't believe it. I understand that these people have been lied to by all kinds of people selling purportedly harmless products like weed killer, which gives some of my friends seizures, but when one of their own speaks up, they don't believe it until someone who uses ammonia in her laundry offers to let everybody smell her shirt.

So I got my shirt sniffed, but I think someone would have noticed before now if I had gone around smelling of ammonia. Also, that ammonia doesn't leave any kind of residue in laundry was about the first thing I learned when I came to Tucson, so this very community that taught me about ammonia apparently just up and forgot.

Well, probably not the lady who told me, but you'd think this kind of information would stick around a little longer than, say, ammonia fumes.