dead air

I think I have an emotional hangover, and nothing I write is postable. I expect that as I continue decontaminating my house, things will start to sound funny to me again.

So have a picture of a California hiker, and note his attire.

broken

Today I drove a car I really don't tolerate over 200 miles while wearing a big silicone mask I tolerate sometimes. I guess I learned that I can physically do something like that once and get away with it. It's not at all clear to me that that information is actually good for anything.

best deal ever!

Today I got an email from a scammer selling a 2000 BMW with 83,000 miles on it for $3000. It's my fault - I found a listing three days ago on Craigslist minutes after it had been posted, and I sent an email asking what the heck was wrong with the car because for that price, it would have to be missing something major, like an engine compartment. Also, I was curious, and I think we all know where that gets you. It's really too bad I don't have the wherewithal to play with a scammer right now.

I have just been informed that my husband thinks playing along sounds highly entertaining. We'll let you know how it goes. (Or if anyone actually gets around to doing anything.)

better now

Today I learned that I tolerate some people much, much better when they aren't polluting my airspace. 'Nuff said.

cooking outside, death in a bottle, and a potential grill

Today I learned to fry steak. I guess the proper term is to sauté, but most people who learn to sauté steak don't do it on a borrowed propane burner outside on a patio table. I'd have to say that my technique consisted of pouring olive oil in the pan, then when that was hot, putting the steak in, and then standing over it anxiously until I deemed it necessary to turn it over. That part went fine, but then I got distracted washing the moldie/carbon-monoxide EI lady's laundry. It all worked out fine anyway, but we probably won't survive the night because everybody knows fried food will kill you.

Speaking of things that'll kill you, The New York Times had another installment in its 'Really?' series of things that'll kill you. The latest is two cola drinks per day. Not all soda, just colas, they think because of the phosphoric acid. It doesn't really matter because we already knew that soda will kill you, so maybe colas will just kill you faster.

So I expect many of you are still wondering why the heck I learned to sauté steak outside. It's because I still have a gas stove, and our current houseguest, the moldie/carbon-monoxide EI, is terribly sensitive to natural gas. You can fix up gas heat so it's tolerable, but I haven't figured out how to seal off a stove. The good news here is that I pretty much have a new part-time job, so in another month or so, I'll be able to afford a nifty new electric stove, which will promptly kill me if I don't offgas it on the patio first, so I may well get to cook outside again.

It was nice cooking outside. There was a light, not-too-chilly breeze, I got to talk to the neighbors' dogs, and nobody was burning anything or spewing laundry chemicals. It's too bad the homeowners' association would get all bent out of shape if I moved my gas stove outside when I get my electric stove inside. It would make a perfectly good grill-like object, one that you could bake cookies in and attract all the local wildlife.

sensitivities and horses

Today I learned that somebody who got sick from mold plus low-grade carbon monoxide poisoning has a bunch of sensitivities that don't make any sense to me. I mean, somebody tells you they're a moldie, and I pretty much know what to expect, but apparently carbon monoxide really skews everything a different direction. Carbon monoxide poisoning sensitivities are much closer to natural gas leak sensitivities as far as I can tell, not that I've met many people with either kind.

In other news, today I sniffed two cars for sale. The first one absolutely reeked of carpet cleaner, even though to the person selling it, it "smelled like carpet cleaner if anything." The second one smelled almost exactly like ours - a little like car and nothing else. I really, really want another car, and on the basis of smell alone, I should attempt to scrape together enough cash to buy it. The problem is that it's only marginally younger than our car and has 293,000 miles on it. I feel like I'm looking an absolutely beautiful gift horse in the mouth, but this would be a $1700 horse.

killer fish and stolen metallic objects

Today I learned that tuna sushi will kill you if you eat more than six pieces per week. I don't think very many people outside a big city like New York really have to worry about eating that much tuna sushi.

In other news, the cops around San Jose, CA set up a metal recycling business, staffed it with undercover cops, got themselves a reputation for accepting just about anything with no questions asked, and bought a stolen Porsche. They also bought assault weapons and bombs, and then they went out and arrested a whole slew of bad guys. I don't think that being a cop is generally considered fun, but buying a hot Porsche from someone you knew you were going to send to jail just sounds fun.

jumbled mess

Today I learned that I can ride my bike for two hours now without feeling like I've been beaten. After that I sniffed a used car, which was silly, and went in a few grocery stores for the really sick lady's husband. Here's a cool website: HealthyCar.org.

I can't write. There's a reason I didn't do all that stuff the day I had to tune up that conference paper.

convoluted reasoning

Just like pretty much everyone else who came in any contact with news today, I learned that caffeine will kill you. Ok, maybe not you, but your unborn children. Maybe I just have a sick mind, but that news in combination with all the fussing about abstinence-only education and a website my husband found about the most expensive Starbucks drink ever made me wonder what kind of clueless letters Dear Abby is going to be receiving from uneducated teenagers with unintended bodily conditions.

Other than that, I spent a lot of the day playing with that conference paper and arguing with Word, which, as a Microsoft product, doesn't get a lot of respect in a linux-based household. I think that despite it being stressful having to deal with a deadline and a recalcitrant Microsoft product, I may have had fun. I will not, however, do it again tomorrow just for the entertainment value.

the warm-up

I learned some things today, but this post is mostly an exercise in demonstrating to myself that I'm not currently writing-impaired. Writing ability is important this evening because I have to tune up the paper I was going to present - the part that will get published in the conference proceedings despite the fact that I can't go personally tell people about it. Tuning up something nerds are going to read seems to fall out of the realm of stuff I can handle easily. I'm pretty good at weekends, in that I'm well enough to grocery shop, ride a bike, keep house, and occasionally go out to dinner. Weekday activities are harder, but I'm very pleased that this project involves writing. I appear to enjoy that kind of thing, if this blog is any kind of indication.

Ok, it looks like I can at least type and use three-syllable words, so I'd better get to work. I'll leave you with a few tidbits before I go:

• Burning wood in your fireplace produces multiple nasty chemicals in addition to particulates. I already knew woodsmoke would kill me, but apparently it'll kill everybody else, too, no matter how appealing a crackling fire is.
• Diversity training actually reduces the diversity of company management unless employees volunteer to attend. According to the study cited, covering your backside lawsuitwise by requiring attendance should actually be opening you up to lawsuits.
• Cell phone companies funded a study that reported that radiation from cell phone use disturbs people's sleep afterwards, so all those teenagers who talk on their phones into the wee hours show up to school the next morning with ADHD. So I feel compelled to report that cell phones will kill you, but the cell phone companies took these results to be inconclusive.

best laid plans

Today I learned that people come right out and say a house is in foreclosure on the for sale sign. I had assumed that would be an admission of financial failure, but maybe it's the bank's way of announcing, "We're desperate!" When homeowners announce things like that, I think the preferred method is to report that the price has been reduced, which I always read as "We're not too good with reality," but could just be a comment on the skill of the real estate agent.

In other news:

• I am now sensitive to the styrofoam parts of my IQAir GC air cleaner, and why the heck did the Swiss decide to put styrofoam in an air cleaner, anyway?
• I think I got a cold when I went up to Phoenix to sniff that room. I am never, ever, going to go sniff that room again.
• The air in Southern California in the 1950s was worse than the air in Mexico City is now. I'm never going to visit the 1950s, either.

Ok, I learned that last one on a site that reported the same information multiple times on the same list of bullet points, so I'm taking it with a grain of salt. I'm still not going back to the 1950s.

quiet day

Today I learned a little bit about cockroaches in space. That's all I need to do in a day.

death in a bottle

Today I learned that:

• Cold medicine will kill your children.
• Lowering your cholesterol with drugs won't help your heart attack risk, plus one of the drugs will actually give you a heart attack.
• Antidepressants aren't actually much better for depressed people than a placebo, and drug companies suppressed this information.

I'm afraid we here at Broken Physicist are going to have to report that drug companies are trying to kill you. Again.

not my old self

Today I went to Phoenix to sniff the room where a nerdy conference is going to be held in a couple of months. I'm all set to finally present the work I finished while I was getting really, really sick in Illinois, and I wanted to make sure that I wouldn't get sick during my talk.

I had a fine day. I wore real shoes instead of hiking boots, and I chatted about finishing PhD theses with people who weren't originally from the US or Mexico (and who knew where the conference is going to be held). My husband and I found a lovely restaurant that served all organic food, so I didn't have to worry about eating non-food items for lunch. I did pretty well in the Fry's electronics, too. On the way home, we stopped at the ostrich ranch and let a bunch of lorikeets pry the lids off the little containers of syrupy lorikeet food for me. One of them sat on my shoulder and licked my face, so apparently I'm sweet. (Also ever so slightly abraded.)

So I had a fine day. It was fine, except for the two minutes I was in that conference room.

pick-up chicks and broken glass

Today I learned how to pick up models and strippers by reading excerpts from The Game. Since I'm not exactly in the market for a model or a stripper, I don't know what possible use I could have for this information, but here you go:

1. You have to have a good opening line that does not involve hitting on your target, and there are places on the internet where you can locate these things.
2. You need to deliver a 'neg' - a backhanded compliment - to knock down your target's self esteem.
3. Self-esteem knocking may also be achieved by ignoring your target if she's in a group, and in bars, pretty girls only come in groups.
4. Self-esteem challenged women apparently are more likely to kiss funny-looking guys with low-level social skills who have a memorized shtick, or at least hand over their phone numbers.

So, um, who knew? Also, this information did not particularly help the author when he met a woman he actually liked.

In other news, I learned that there is something in the air outside that when I breathe it feels like there's broken glass in my lungs, so it might not just be the baking soda bugging me. In fact, it could be that I dried a bunch of loads of laundry including my sheets yesterday with regular outside air instead of filtered air. I don't really care as long as I'm not awake at 3 am again.

BREAKING NEWS

I just spent upwards of three years not using baking soda for my laundry detergent because I didn't want to develop a sensitivity to it. About two weeks ago, when I started developing a washing soda sensitivity, I started using baking soda, figuring that I'm getting so much better that baking soda would be safe.

Baking soda is no longer safe. The good news is that my middle-of-the-night laundry revelations are much less painful than they used to be, but this is probably going to hurt for another hour and a half or so.

I'll take this opportunity to record my baking-soda-required banana bread recipe, which I'm pretty sure only lives in my head and will evaporate shortly from disuse:

3 big bananas or 4 little ones, mashed
1/3 cup oil
1/4 cup beet sugar
1 1/2 cups garbanzo flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cream of tartar

Preheat your oven to 375. Stir up your glop, put it in a giant muffin tin, which takes 30 minutes, or a bread pan, which takes 45.

Now I have to figure out what to do with the really, really sick lady's leftover bananas, which tend to congregate in my freezer. Maybe I'll make goopy unrisen muffins until my husband complains.

the roundup

Today I learned that scribbled notes from 1503 in the margin of a book say the Mona Lisa model was the lady everybody sort of thought she was, there is theoretically some safe hairspray out there, and antibiotics don't do anything for sinus infections.

So, all is well in the art history world, I could theoretically be around hairspray-dependent old ladies, I'm glad I don't get sinus infections, and if you get up at noon and dedicate the rest of the day to it, you can learn three things.

scrapbooks and sociologists

Today I learned that if you enter the national scrapbooking contest, you can't use any pictures that you, personally, didn't take. Apparently this little-known rule is a huge freakin' big deal to some people. Also, there are traditional scrapbookers who commemorate events, like a grandkid's graduation, but the younger generation is more into expressing their own personal angst and such, so there's a generational clash. All I have to say about this situation is that I'm very pleased that I got out of elementary school so I could stop gluing things to paper.

Having now incurred the wrath of the scrapbooking community should they stumble across this post, I will point out that I'm still getting over that elastic exposure, so they'd be picking on a pathetic sick lady. I mean, sociologists are tougher than me.

ow

Today I learned that if the elastic in my new underwear still smells a little new despite the fact that it has been washed something like ten times, it will give me a killer headache if I decide to just wear it anyway.

I also learned that the electric company wants to be able to control your thermostat instead of having rolling blackouts if you live in California, and it all sounds so very reasonable, except for that thing where the electric company could control your thermostat.

shielding, icky food, and an airline you probably won't need

Today I learned that two layers of aluminum make a better magnetic field shield than one. Some physicists figured that out in January of 1997, and some engineers, who used more passive sentences than I think I've seen in one place for some time, did it in August of 1997. I would bet money than neither group figured it out using cookie sheets.

In impending death news, genetically modified corn and potatoes that contain their own insecticide make rats and mice sick, so when those crops accidentally get released into the general population, we're all going to have to give up high fructose corn syrup and french fries, causing the death of fast food. Also people who eat corn and potatoes.

And in case you needed to know, Wizz Air is a low-cost Hungarian airline.

percents

Today I learned that 1% of autistic people appear to have bad copies of parts of their DNA. I still think the rest of them have been poisoned by chemicals, and this is my blog, so I can think whatever I want.

In other news, 3% of people who use the FasTrak toll lanes in the San Francisco Bay Area don't even have transponders. One guy racked up $50,000 in fees and fines in 637 incidents, which, if you think about it, would be equivalent to blowing through a toll twice every workday for about three years, and the authorities are only just now making him pay up. That's some impressive slacking, even for California.

rerun

Today I learned that Big Food is trying to kill us! Oh, wait, I think I learned that already. Maybe more than once.

In other news, you can learn Spanish in 24 hours. Based on what I remember from those 24 hour take-home tests in college, that should end well.

coyote poop, html, and foam

Today I confirmed that coyotes poop in the desert. It's not like you can miss the poop on the trails and in the washes, but this time I witnessed it. I got to see that dirt kicking thing afterward, too.

Before I tell you about the next thing I learned, I learned how to make a link open in a new window* in honor of learning something from a page that resized my browser window, so:

In other news, when referring to foam you might use to rebuild your car seats, ILD stands for Indentation Load Deflection, which tells you how compressible the foam is. Also, my husband informs me that there's something that looks remarkably like horse hair in those seats now, and I'm not sure what to think about that.


* Update: in Firefox with my settings, the thing I did opens a new tab, which then promptly resizes my window anyway, so that ILD link has been declared too boring to click on.

predicting the future, mulligans, and decontamination procedures

Today I learned that the editor of the Sandy, OR newspaper enjoys predicting headlines, and that commonly flooded local parking lots can be used to great comedic effect.

Then I learned that you can get your money back if you accidentally buy a moldy house as-is, but it takes special circumstances.

But mostly what I learned is that if you buy a used wheelchair that doesn't smell too much like laundry products, you can get the fragrance off it by scrubbing it with Oxyfresh, which contains a bunch of parabens (those are bad) but doesn't stink. It even makes the vinyl smell less like vinyl, but we'll have to see how far that'll get us.

unidentifiable food and pollution

Today I learned by typing in the dumbest search term I could think of ('sea bug') that this one kind of sea critter I'd been trying to identify for four days is actually called a sea bug, at least by somebody. It's a little hard to compare the shelled (unshelled?) version to the version with the shell on, but feel free. You can find the shell-on version by going to the voting page on I Can Has Cheezburger? and looking for a picture submitted on January 3rd at 2:02 pm, which earlier today was on page 52.

In news on the home front, if my husband does too much work on our car or goes into a particularly nasty store, he pollutes the bedroom that night so much I have to go sleep on the couch by about 5 am. Since we now have more than one set of tolerable sheets and blankets, and he's been consistently polluting himself, I've been doing an awful lot of laundry. It might be less wasteful to wrap him in fresh paper towels every night instead of using sheets at all.

In other pollution news, in general, women contain more pesticide pollution than men, which could explain why there are more women with environmental injuries than men, and anybody with half a brain can figure out that if you poison all the women, humans will die out, so we're all going to die! (I just haven't been announcing that enough lately. It seemed like time.) In related news, some researchers have theorized that women who get depressed start losing their sense of smell and thus begin using more perfume. But they went on to say, "We also believe that depression has biological roots and may be an immune system response to certain physiological cues," which leads some of the rest of us to conclude that it's the perfume making women sick that causes the depression. Thus we may conclude that perfume will decimate the human race.

And last but not least, here's an article titled Why Are Pygmies Short?

party on, dude

Today I inexplicably dodged one of those unavoidable reactions, and I learned that my night vision is improving so much that driving after dark isn't that hard.

That reaction will probably catch up with me tomorrow, so I'll save up the things that'll kill you until next time. Stay tuned!

flourless cake and Homer jokes

Today I think I learned that if you whip the egg whites in a flourless chocolate cake too much, you get a crunchy wafer-type crust on top of the cake, which then, since it's flourless, collapses under the crust after you take it out of the oven, leaving an enormous cavern. This kind of thing is par for the course - I make the ugliest yummy desserts I've ever seen.

In non-food news, Homer Simpson really does exist. (I thought up the Homer joke all by myself, as has probably every other human who has ever seen The Simpsons. If you're only hearing it now, you're as far behind as I am.)

cars, thumbprints, bacteria, and ick

Today I learned that:

• The instrument panel in the 24-year-old BMW has rechargeable batteries in it that say 'Sanyo' on them. I don't know what happens when they fail, but I suspect that if we don't just change them gratuitously while we can see them easily, one of these days we'll find out.
• If you attempt to cash a check at a Compass bank, they require your thumbprint on the check. Thumbprint chemicals don't smell very good, but I think it might have just been the general crap in the bank that gave me the heart palpitations.
• If you have intracellular bacteria and the resultant vitamin D deficiency, when you give up all foods containing vitamin D, your bone density may well improve.
• I'm really not comfortable discussing strangers' watery diarrhea in grocery stores.

big black birds

Today I scared a murder of crows and a coyote in the wash near here, so just now I relearned that crows come in murders. Other than that, I got nothin'.

alcohol and nerds

Today I learned that my understanding of drunk driving standards may have been based on half truths. I never considered whether or not stiffer standards reduce alcohol-related vehicular deaths, or what the typical BACs are of the drivers at fault. As a nerd, and a sick one at that, I really don't have much exposure to drunks, so I guess my lack of thought is not very surprising.

Speaking of nerds, there's a new book out about how kids don't want to be nerds, so the US is falling behind other countries on the technological front. I remember hearing overblown cautionary tales about kids faking stupidity to fit in long about the fifth grade and thinking that only a dumb kid would want to look dumb. I'm pretty sure that says something about my nerdy social skills in elementary school, but because of my nerdy social skills, I'm not sure what.

In could also be that I learned chocolate chips go quite well with leftover champagne, and I have the alcohol tolerance of a gnat.

robots, cholestyramine, a restaurant, and road conditions

Today (or more accurately, yesterday, since it's late) I learned by watching an episode of Family Guy that there was a talking robot in Rocky IV, which I felt compelled to confirm by reading this kind of funny, poorly-written review. Apparently having a robot in your movie was a requirement in the 80s.

Then I learned that cholestyramine is really only a good treatment for EIs who aren't too sick and only need to take it for a couple of weeks; if you take it too long, having it absorb all your essential fatty acids is a very bad thing.

About the same time, I learned that a restaurant here in town called Red Sky is pretty tolerable until some guy wearing cologne is seated right behind you, but you can survive this situation by trading seats with the person across from you, who is less sensitive.

In travel news, people drive worse on New Year's Eve at 5 pm than they do at 11:45. The roads were really quite civilized at 11:45.