indoor air quality

Today I learned that the local paper, which I admit I enjoy making fun of, has a whole series on indoor air quality and how we're all going to die. I approve, except for having to scroll down on that page to get past the 'making of' pictures to the actual articles, and the part where they fail to recognize that not all molds are created equal, and that's why mold remediators wear hazmat suits. But I can't complain.

invent green hovercars now

Today I learned that I only started using ammonia in my laundry in May, so I'm right on schedule with laundry sensitivity problems. Preliminary studies indicate that ammonia fails to remove some contaminants, which apparently can be shaken loose by agitating laundry for half an hour with a cup of baking soda, draining that, and repeating twice with vinegar and once with just hot water. I have a lot of laundry to do, plus baseboards to attach to walls, so I'll be impressed if I learn anything else other than this stuff:

• People worry about peak oil, but it appears that we've reached peak junk food.
• You can buy tires that smell like lavender at Sears and Discount Tire. The Korean manufacturers put enough heat-resistant synthetic chemicals into them that they can be smelled from 25 feet away, so you can impress entire sections of neighborhoods or parking lots with your ability to shell out an extra $10 per tire to increase your VOC inhalation.
• 75% of US households use air fresheners, which, until recently, contained a s**tload of pthatates that no one officially knew about. I'm sure the remaining products are perfectly safe, just like lavender scented tires you can smell from inside your vehicle.

things not to worry about

Today I learned that kids are getting rickets again because they don't go outside enough, which, according to the article I found, would only be 10 to 15 minutes a week. I'm pretty sure 10 to 15 minutes a week in most of the US in almost December will not get the job done, but I live in Arizona, so I'm not going to worry about it.

In food news, you can bake milk, and baked milk is apparently good for cakes, pies, and cookies, but I can't eat it, so that's something else I'm not going to worry about.

not much to report

Apparently I didn't learn anything yesterday, but today I learned that there's a website that thinks it can help you find jeans that fit and that the Museum of the Moving Image has some entertaining old political ads. Now I'm not sure I learned anything worthwhile today, either, so have a rerun of last year's young, inexperienced lizard.

rocks, makeup, and death in a bottle

Today I learned that there are some really cool little-known rock formations on the Arizona-Utah border, except once something like that makes it into the LA Times travel section, you can't call it little-known. Also the late Tammy Faye Messner had her makeup tattooed on her face.

And flu drugs will kill your kids.

death flies, or would if its wings weren't clipped

Today I learned that not only can I be in the same room with an open container of Ecological Paint, I can paint baseboards with it and not get in trouble with it. I won't grow up and become a painter, but I'm at least a partially productive member of the household.

Then I learned that there are several diseases chickens get that cause them to develop tumors at very young ages, even younger than they typically get their heads removed, that being a rite of passage among today's chickens. That, and ending up at the local Kentucky Fried. Marek's disease, which causes lesions on nerves and skin and other places you wouldn't want a lesion, is a variety of herpes virus. The skin lesions look just like those caused by lymphoid leucosis, which I understand is birdy leukemia. Ok, it's not clear to me from the non-paranoid-sounding site that Marek's disease causes tumors, but I'm sure eating chicken will kill you all the same.

alert the media

I occasionally read the local paper.

It is not a well-known paper, and I have heard people make fun of it.

Today I read a 30-paragraph article made entirely of single-sentence paragraphs.

I think that if local kids are given homework requiring them to read the newspaper, they should read a different one.

things you learn on holidays

Today I learned that:

• The trick to eating cold turkey is to put hot gravy on it.
• If you make pumpkin pie with hazelnut milk instead of sweetened condensed milk, it's best to add some sugar, but you could just make pecan pie instead.
• I'm not the only one who has very little experience with mashed potatoes.

Also, mashed potatoes could substitute for rubber cement.

big cats and multiple dinners

Today I learned that there was a big orange cat living in the warehouse associated with one of the local Ace Hardware stores. When we were at the store, the cat had been corralled in a cat carrier and was being bid farewell by various employees. Its name was, somewhat predictably, Ace.

I also learned that you don't have to order a turkey ahead of time. You can, instead, make an impulse turkey purchase at 4 o'clock on the day before Thanksgiving because you found out that the husband of the really, really sick lady was planning on eating Boston Market turkey on Thanksgiving all by himself. We already had plans, but there's no rule against eating dinner twice. Particularly the pie part.

the nerd speaks

Today I read up on electromagnetic field shielding, which, as a nerd, I think is neat. Then I read up on devices that allegedly can change the bond angle of water molecules by 10^o, which, as a nerd, I think are pretty funny.

paying for the label

Today I learned all about mattresses and insomnia and that if you wade into the eighth page of a nine-page New York Times article, you can find a lovely quote about a Vera Wang Serta mattress:

In conclusion, he told me that, like all of Serta’s products, this particular mattress was designed to “relieve stress.” I asked him how it did that. We stood there for a second, side by side. Then he said, “Well, it’s a combination of the sleep surface materials and the peace of mind that comes from it being a Vera Wang.”

bug zappers

Today I learned that the guy who makes a lot of the energy medicine machines, which supposedly 'zap' your ailments into non-existence with some sort of radio frequency electromagnetic radiation, has been at it since the 1980s, when he was an out-of-work math instructor. Now he has an awful lot of money and lives in Budapest.

Apparently no one has investigated whether or not such devices actually work, even by the placebo effect. I expect it's a little hard to take seriously someone whose device has a 'zap mode.'

documentation and diet coke

Today I learned exactly what you need to take with you to cross the border after January 31 and that someone out there wants to know if you can make something equivalent to beer bread with diet coke.

oops

Today I learned that if I turn my head incorrectly, I can whip the end of my braid around and hit myself in the eye.

at least half full

I was all set to just point toward the serious air quality site and report that the PM10 reading over by the freeway got right into the middle of the 'moderate' range, so have a picture of something. Instead, I can report that I felt bad today, but when my husband opened the front door this evening and I smelled what was outside, it put it all in perspective. I could smell that air from 20 feet away, and I was still good for something today.

So despite a couple of rough spots, I had a totally excellent day today. Also, I got an email from a friend with a link to a big mainstream article about how the government has recognized that FEMA trailers will kill you, so that's really good news all around.

plastic and helium

Today I learned that you can get a whole list of kitchen utensils on Froogle by searching for "melamine and plastic utensil." I would have expected the pet food disaster to have impacted sales, even if people are unlikely to eat their utensils.

Also, the price of helium has doubled in recent years, so most people who worry about such things are worried about helium balloons. Nerds like me just think that at some point dilution refrigerators will go the way of the dinosaur, so it makes you wonder what the superconductor nerds are going to do with themselves.

done faking it

Today I learned how to work the digital timer on my oven. It only took me close to three years. I also learned that DDT could have something to do with polio.

Then I learned that I'm not the only one who's been feeling pretty bad lately, and all of us attributed it to something other than the weather and/or pollen. That was before we all got together and compared notes. I'm voting for the weather, despite the lack of high winds.

When the weather gets better, maybe writing won't be so freaking hard.

getting caught up

Today I learned that nitrites from vegetables minimize heart attack damage. I was all set to announce that vegetables have hot dog preservatives in them, but it turns out that those are nitrates, which completely spoils my fun.

In other health news, following up on the study that indicates that chubby people live longer than scrawny ones, I learned that Lillian Russell, a 19th century stage star and renowned beauty, weighed 200 lbs, which I can totally believe from this picture here. I can also see from the other pictures in that gallery that if you get to wear a huge frilly dress with a corset, you can weigh pretty much whatever you want and still look pretty good. Ok, styles may repeat themselves, but I really don't see corsets making a big comeback.

In more and better lists:

• The Right-to-Know Network has a list of all kinds of environmental and chemical safety websites with names like "Accidental Release Information Program (ARIP) Factsheet" and "The National Library of Medicine's TOXNET." I think pages like that could keep me entertained for hours if they don't scare me instead.
• Slate has a whole page devoted to things like the effect of the age at which teenagers lose their virginity on delinquency and the frequency with with binge-drinkers rupture their bladders.

not paying attention

Today I learned that the last time I opened my email program was six days ago. Tomorrow I'll probably work up the wherewithall to read some of it. Other than that, I learned that Ace Hardware will take your old fluorescent bulbs off your hands so you don't have to wait three weeks to take them to the local hazardous waste collection, not that they actually said anything about recycling them.

And in case you were curious, here's what 29 16-ft pieces of base molding look like on top of your car if you're sitting in it. The car, I mean.

paint and asthma

Today I learned that you can get from my house to downtown on a Saturday afternoon in 24 minutes. I'm not likely to need to know that again soon, but now we have enough safe paint to finish priming all our new baseboards. Also, the other kind of safe paint, the kind that we had originally intended to use on the baseboards, dried pretty much on contact, which leaves a lot of brush marks. Watching paint dry should be a little less exciting.

And conventionally produced milk will give your kids asthma.

inedible chips and fat

Today I learned that fancy poker chips are made out of lead and that Disneyland's It's a Small World ride is too small - the boats bottom out in a couple of locations. Disneyland assures its visitors that the bottom-scraping is due entirely to fiberglass patches building up on the bottom of the canal, which kind of begs the question, but it's not because people in this part of the world think that, in the overall scheme of things, 'small' applies to 16 ounces of soda pop. Really.

whiplash

Today I learned three things, and I'm going to take a bad news first approach.

In very upsetting news, there's a moldy apartment building here in Tucson that is making grown-ups sick, but it's killing babies and dogs. They're dead, and when the tenants took the apartment owners to court, the judge threw out the case and fined the lawyer. My understanding is that that's what happens when you try to do something about a moldy building that you don't own, so the owners of moldy buildings are free to keep killing people until the medical community does a better job of understanding environmental illness.

Onward to the regular news: The New York Times reported this morning that deodorant and antiperspirant products are overused; people don't need to cover up their pheromones or clog their pores unless they have extremely stressful jobs or are part of the less than 5% of the population who sweats excessively. The New York Times said it, so I'm going to sit right here and wait for the collapse of the $2.3 billion underarm maintenance industry.

In weird news, we have more toxic chemicals, but I think we can get away with just giving you the headline of the day from the San Francisco Chronicle: Not all butt plugs should glow in the dark.

Aqua Dots, bedfellows, water, and fat

Forget lead! I just learned that they're putting date-rape-drug precursors in children's toys, so Aqua Dots, which melt together when you put water on them, will kill you! Ok, maybe they won't kill you, but young women should refrain from swallowing them at parties.

I picked up a couple of other things on my way to learning about the toys:

• In political news, the Slog reports that to Pat Robertson, being pro-torture is more important than being anti-abortion or anti-gay. (I think it's probably hard being Pat Robertson.)
• You can build a ginormous water park in Mesa, AZ that will still use less water than an 18-hole golf course.
• Being fat won't kill you.

I'm pleased that they got us straight on that last one; sometimes you have to take stuff off the list to maintain conservation of death-inducing stuff.

one week out of October

Today I rode my bike to the hardware store across the street from the library, where I learned that the hardware store has bike racks, and that in the past, when I concluded that locking up your bike was difficult, I must have been feeling really, really lousy. Then I went across the street and learned that the library actually does separate out the different genres, but only in the paperbacks. Best of all, I learned that the contents of the paperback science fiction section don't have personal hygiene chemicals soaked into the pages.

Ok, I know that most people with environmental injuries can't ride their bikes to the store, so locking a bike is not much of an issue, but I can't believe locking a bike used to be hard.

tired writer/pessimism warning

Today I learned that

Roanoke County school officials have found no environmental cause for the strange twitching symptoms that have affected some students at William Byrd High School, but more testing is planned to begin today.

The preliminary diagnosis is contagious hysteria, but a teacher has it, too. It's been a long time since I was in high school, but my teachers had such finely-tuned bulls**t detectors that I find it hard to believe a teacher would get sucked in by contagious hysteria. I also know a bunch of EIs who used to be teachers. I suppose it could be hysteria, but here is my prediction: the kids will get better, but the teacher will end up on disability.

In other bad news, in February 2008, the TSA will start deciding directly who can have a boarding pass for domestic airline flights, so I understand that we will essentially be entering an era equivalent to Germany in 1934. I think I'll worry about that right after they cancel the elections for which we've been bombarded with weekly debates.

roads, oil, and tires

Today I learned that the government has winnowed the options for an I-10 bypass of Tucson to four possible routes, but either they're being impossibly vague, or the reporter who wrote the story for the local paper is incredibly incompetent. I did find a map of the un-winnowed possible routes on the page provided by the residents and fans of the San Pedro River Valley, where you can sort of guess which routes they're thinking about. H would actually function like a beltway, and it would give good access to the south, but it would go right between the national park and the national monument, so that sounds like a crummy place to put a freeway. All the other potential routes go through the San Pedro River Valley except for L, which appears to stay on a steady course through the absolute middle of nowhere, thus probably sentencing the endangered somethingorother to death. My humble opinion, as an Eastsider, is that I never drive on the freeway, so the Westsiders ought to just stay off I-10, and then we won't need to build another freeway.

Actually, I'd be a lot more ok with more freeway if we all drove electric cars, which brings us to this article that says oil prices have risen to $95 a barrel because of speculators, not because that's what oil needs to cost. I don't know how much higher people need to drive the price, but it's probably time to think about investing in a proper electric car company. If everybody drove electric cars, I'd be much more ok with a freeway between the national park and the national monument.

In other news, the guy who found out radio waves separated out the hydrogen in salt water was actually inventing a cure for cancer, and playing fields made of ground up tires will kill you.

bananas

Today I learned that the grocery store PLU code for organic bananas is 94011. If you buy enough of those for the lady who tolerates bananas and very few other foods, you pick these things up.

In other news, I've decided that the least paper-intensive way to pick a trail in the Santa Catalina Mountains is to go to the Sierra Club map of trailheads, get a trail name, and then look up the description on LocalHikes.com. Thus we chose to try out the Finger Rock trail, which goes up a canyon, and before you get too high, it's totally out of the pollen, so we felt pretty good until we got too high. Unfortunately, on the way down, we re-learned that you shouldn't go hiking on weekends because you catch up to slow people who smell like a combination of new fire-retardant-treated backpacks and scented sunscreen, and you can't get close enough to pass them. If you've visited any EIs, you may be familiar with our tendency to sit around on rocks in the middle of nowhere and chat, so we were properly prepared to wait out the smell contrail.

There were lots of rocks. That's a neat trail.

recipe trove and goofiness

Today I learned that it's ok that my old cookbooks are in storage because I can read every page on Amazon, just like this mini yellow cake recipe (click 'on Page 247') that I've been faking for the last six months.

In things-that'll-kill-you news, I learned all in one article that high-heeled shoes cause schizophrenia and dogs give you cancer. I gotta start writing longer blog entries but selling them instead of posting. It appears that there's a market for articles about things that'll kill you.

I also have to stop trying to write stuff late at night after I've used up all my words for the day. I think I'm all out now.

blackberries, table parts, and things I don't know.

Today I'm fairly sure I learned that I'm sensitive to blackberries. Since those don't grow on bushes around here anyway, I'm not very concerned.

In other news, I overdid it sanding table parts yesterday, thus learning that the penalty for pushing it is having my arms ache all night. I don't know how that works exactly, but I'm very pleased that I haven't been able to do that to my legs.

Also, I need to record something for posterity: something started blooming very early this morning, and I'm not the only one on this side of town who woke up with goop in my inner ear pushing on my eardrum. I actually don't know if it's really a pollen, but it seems likely. If it happens again around this time next year, I'll have my answer.

bonus edition

I think they edited my favorite Daily Show interview ever, the one where Richard Lewis runs over Stephen and Steve. I remember many more helpless appeals to the stage manager or director or whoever's in charge.



And from the same day, Drunken Steve was pretty funny, too. I can't get it to play tonight, but at least now I can find it again.

theft!

Somebody stole one of my pumpkins! Now I don't have to cook it or throw it away or anything!

Back to our regularly scheduled programming. Today I learned that you can't look at a newspaper today without seeing an article about how processed meat and red meat will kill you. I won't argue about processed meat, but I'm not the only one asking questions about organic red meat - check out the comments section here. I didn't notice any commenters saying they could taste the chemicals used in conventional beef, but if you can taste the chemicals, there's really no question that they could make you sick.

In other news:

• You can buy a remote control toy VW van with an MP3 hook-up for $50.
• Besides getting your dental work done when you go to Nogales, you can also get your fingerprints removed.