more cars

Today I learned by reading an article on the 11 worst cars sold in the US that despite the fact that the Toyota Yaris gets great gas mileage, car-rating judges hate it. They apparently put a premium on things like side airbags and traction control, so those of us who drive mid-80's BMWs and, now that we think about it, have mentally put traction control in the same category as inertial dampers, are probably as un-American as you can get. It's not all about baseball and apple pie; if you don't fear for your life every second of every day, you just aren't doing it right.

In the spirit of doing it right, you should fear the Yaris because the air quality alone will kill you. And given a choice between being poisoned by a car interior or killed because of a lack of inertial dampers, based on recent experience, I'd take a Darwin Award over poisoning any day of the week.

recovery is imminent

Today I learned that Cherry 2000 was filmed in Death Valley, or at least that's what it says at Furnace Creek Resort's website. Thus I also learned that the best way to get your robot girlfriend to get out of an airplane is to say, "Cherry," - assuming her name is Cherry - "I want you to get me a Pepsi."

ow and irony

Today I got that whole comeuppance thing that I remember from high school English class goes with hubris, except I don't remember any of those hubris-y literary characters getting themselves taken down sniffing cars for old ladies. I think I'm going to keep my nose to myself for a while. Either that or switch to glue.

And national parks will kill you, and you can light up many, many fluorescent light bulbs for free just by planting them under those really big power lines.

sorta discouraging, I guess

Today I learned that it takes a very, very long time to upgrade your operating system if you take five and a half hours out to sniff a car, find out it's sort of ok, run it by the pesticided teacher, eat dinner standing up, run the car by the husband of the really, really sick lady, and then return the car to the extremely nice family who let you run off with their car for five and a half hours. And if that sentence sounds sort of run-on, then it accurately describes my day.

I find it very difficult to describe how I feel about today's events. On one hand, I survived riding around in a car that was almost ok, and a pesticided teacher got to sniff a pre-sniffed car, but on the other, I'm too broke to be doing volunteer work that could hurt me.

party on, dude

Today I learned that this hormone reaction I developed in September 2004 appears to have gone away, so I'm going to declare myself healthier than I was in September 2004. I still don't feel quite right, and I was too tired to write anything last night, but if this is really gone, I should have a party.

too much fun on the trails

Today I read all about what you're supposed to do to overhaul the suspension fork (pdf) on my bike. I retained the part about how you need a wrench.

But I'm pretty sure I cured the embarrassing squeak from one of the derailleur pulleys.

modern art

Today I learned that if your keyboard is maimed in a bowl-dropping accident and you have to offgas a new one quickly, you can use a hairdryer to heat it for over an hour if you put the hairdryer on a cookie rack to keep it from overheating. The thing is that if you want to get the whole keyboard, you have to move the hairdryer periodically, and if you get it too close, you can do something like accidentally melt the 'm.' So then I learned that you can, for the most part, melt it back.

The important thing to take away from this experience is that if you are recovering from an environmental injury, you should avoid breaking computer components that could gas you when you point a hairdryer at their replacements.

horses, cars, bikes, and tea

Today I learned that they close the schools around here for the first two days of the rodeo, which started today. The resulting lack of traffic made it a whole lot easier to move about town, which we did to go admire a mountain bike my husband might want. I've been hoping he'd like to go riding with me, but after watching him test-ride this thing, I concluded that despite the fact that he's out of shape, he's going to ride circles around me. It's going to be embarrassing.

In other news, my husband has been detoxing something overnight lately that makes me pretty sick by about 5 am. I thought it was some mold he got into last Saturday, but as the days wore on, I wasn't as sure. Then tonight he got out his Oregon Chai Tea latte mix that he's taken a liking to and asked me to sniff it, and that stuff is nasty.

We have a food-cooking ban already in place - no one is allowed to make flatbreads out of teff, but this is our first food-ingestion ban: anyone who drinks Oregon Chai Tea lattes can't sleep next to me.

death and moonbeams

Today I learned that compact fluorescent bulbs will give you breast cancer! Apparently it only happens if you're exposed to blue-tinged light at night, which blocks melatonin production, but that means that computer screens and the night shift will kill you, too.

Speaking of night, there's going to be a lunar eclipse tonight.

But back to things that'll kill you: Salt will kill you! The argument there is that kids who eat salty snacks drink more soda, and I'm confident that we're all pretty clear on what happens when you drink soda.

nerd alert

Today I learned that there's a new version of new math driving parents nuts, and as someone who learned math easily the conventional way, I'm confident that it'll destroy America. I've seen physics taught the same way, and it's fine for 'physics for poets' classes, but if you really need to know it, new math ain't gonna get it done. So not that anyone asked me, but I really think they ought to save the new math for the people who are never going to use it.

And in great moments in self-discovery, I learned that I'm an editor for a reason: I love finding mistakes. I don't need to wave them over people's heads or anything, I just like finding them, like a golden retriever and a good stick. I am such a nerd.

anti-intellectualism

Today I learned that somebody wrote a book all about how a growing number of Americans are ignorant and completely fine with that, like Bart Simpson ("Underachiever and proud of it!"). Apparently people don't feel compelled to figure out things like where Iraq or Darfur are because it doesn't actually matter to them, but people during WWII went out and bought maps when the President asked them to so that everybody could be all square on exactly where all those picky little Pacific Islands were.

I blame advertising. See, if you have to tune out every other bit of information that comes to you, you start sorting things people used to find important, and there you are: it doesn't matter at all to me exactly where Darfur is. For all I have to do with solving the problems over there, it could be on the moon. And I don't have to worry about it because George Clooney will take care of it, so I can go back to getting better and someday getting an actual well-paying full-time job. Then maybe I'll figure out where Darfur is.

(Actually, I think it's in Sudan. And oh, look, I'm right.) (It's this kind of thing that makes it hard for people with blogs about learning things to jump on the anti-intellectualism bandwagon.)

Also, if you see the smog over the city compressed into a thin, brown line on the horizon in the morning, you shouldn't go into town. Even if it sounds fun, it's not.

blankets and dead animals

Today I learned that if all your kapok mattresses, cot-size or otherwise, got contaminated when you had an extremely toxic houseguest, you can absolutely sleep on a pile of blankets on top of bare mattress springs. The thing is that you need a lot of blankets not so much for the padding, but for the insulation. It got chilly, but those eight little organic cotton blankets I bought 2 1/2 years ago and finally just barely tolerate are at long last being used for something other than just dust covers.

In things that'll kill you, some conventional beef company is recalling 143 million pounds of beef that has probably already been eaten, so, um, beef! Beef will kill you! As will the revived Knight Rider.

things that break

Today I learned how to put keys back on my Dell Latitude laptop. The trick is that when you knock these keys off by dropping a bowl of non-runny food on them, you can see these little white framework parts stuck to the back of the key. The right way to get a key back on is to pull those off carefully, put them in their catches on the deck of the keyboard, and then smush the key back in its spot. I tried mashing a key back in place with the little white parts still attached a couple of days ago when my husband accidentally pried one off with a screwdriver (heaven knows you can't properly blow crumbs out of a laptop without removing the keyboard), and that one doesn't quite work right.

So if you drop runny food, you're on your own. I haven't done that yet.

Also, if Vista eats your user account, and you call your brother in Tucson for help fixing it, it helps if you can tell the difference between a ; and a :. And Vista eats people's accounts with some regularity, so I guess I'm glad that's all I know about Vista.

words I didn't know

Today I learned that 'dendrogram' is a word. It's a kind of diagram with a tree-like structure, and programmers and statisticians each seem to think they're the only ones who use them.

Then I learned that you can eat offal. Apparently it doesn't just refer to animal guts you'd want to chuck, but other animal guts, too. I did not know that. I'm having a hard time getting over the word 'offal.'

dust, trailers, cat prodding, and expected cheesiness

Today I learned that if you don't air out the kapok futon you made a couple of years ago, it gets some dust in it, despite the fact that it's been in a barrier-cloth casing the whole time. Barrier cloth is supposed to have a tight enough weave that it'll keep dust out, but I still think this is regular dust combined with kapok dust. We'll see how airing it out on the patio works since there's a front coming through.

In other news, FEMA trailers will still kill you, I found an article that ends up discussing poking a cat in the rear with a Slim Jim, and there's going to be a Knight Rider TV movie on Sunday evening.

lasers and the edge of civilization

Today I learned that people with MCS seem to get good results for some symptoms with laser treatments. I have no idea how that works, but I guess I'll have to look into it since I'm the local physicist, and I'm sort of expected to know these things. If it weren't 10:30 at night, I'd probably already know something. As it is, I'll go out on a limb and say I'm sure it has something to do with energy. Ta-da!

In other news, today the husband of the really, really sick lady had a haircut guy come over, so we all got haircuts. I have to say the guys look pretty good. I look pretty much the same, but with long hair you keep tied up, that's to be expected. It was surprisingly entertaining to hang out at the outdoor-patio barbershop. People to talk to, nice weather - I had a really good time.

waterboarding and gainful employment

Today I learned by watching last night's A Daily Show that we executed eight Japanese officers after WWII because they were convicted of waterboarding. I couldn't turn that information up on the web, but I found a Washington Post article quoting Senator Kennedy as saying a Japanese officer got 15 years hard labor for waterboarding. I guess what I learned here is that waterboarding is only ok if your side wins.

That's much closer to serious thoughts than this blog usually gets, so I feel compelled to report something really stupid, except I don't have anything really stupid. I went out and got myself a real part-time job copyediting a geology journal, and it turns out that it takes a lot more time than they said it would because they saved up a bunch of extra work while the position was unfilled. My head is all full of formatting errors and geology-speak, so have a freak of nature.


His horns aren't photoshopped. His nickname is Curly.

stuff you might not want

Today I learned that I tolerate the stuff we have in storage much better than I did when it arrived in town slightly less than a year ago. That still doesn't necessarily mean any of it will be allowed in the house, but it's sure going to be easier to sort through.

In semi-related, not-sure-you-want-it news, low-flow toilets apparently don't generate enough sewer water to wash 'solid waste' downstream in old, minimally-sloped sewers. So, ew.

bubbles and water

Today I learned that Tucson absorbs about 7000 retiree households every year. In 2008, local builders are only constructing about 4000 new places to live, so the retirees will likely take up the housing-bubble slack next year, and we'll be back on track in 2009. Then in 2012, when the first wave of baby-boomers show up, we can expect more like 15,000 retirees to start showing up each year. I'm very curious to know what they're going to use for water.

Speaking of water, Georgia wants the land the government said it was supposed to have in 1796, but in 1818 they sent a mathematician out with a sextant instead of the more accurate tools he wanted, so now Georgia's all bent out of shape because it can't suck water out of the Tennessee River.

Then I learned that if you need to tighten a hinge screw on my laptop, the whole operation takes much longer than you'd think. The result is that I'm typing on my husband's laptop, which doesn't know dvorak, so I'm not going to fix up the previous paragraph/run-on sentence. QWERTY keyboards give me tendonitis, plus if I don't look carefully at my fingers, everythglu kfol; sfk pgvd kjgl;e

nice ride and death in a bottle (again)

Today I learned that it is possible to have that one trail in the National Park system that allows mountain bikes all to yourself on a Saturday. It could have something to do with the gem show being in town, but I'm not sure what. The pavement was packed, but the trail was bare.

In other news, diet soda will kill you. I'm starting to wonder if I ought to retire that one, but even more than that, I'm wondering why people still drink that stuff.

big day, aka I get to sleep in the house again

Today I learned that if we forget to turn off the fluorescent lights over the kitchen counters, they warm up just enough to make the particle-board cabinets offgas and kill me.

Once I returned from the dead, I sniffed all three kinds of shampoo in my bathroom and learned that I tolerate the Pure Essentials worse than the new & improved earthscience stuff, so now I'm using a year-old bottle of Magick Botanicals, which says right on the label that it doesn't actually contain anything botanical because of sensitivities. I have yet to discover where you can buy Magick Botanicals here in town, but worst case scenario, I can order it online.

Meanwhile, I'm back using ammonia in the laundry, I got all the dust bunnies up, even the ones under the stove, and that pain under my ribs and the heart palpitations have gone away. I couldn't go in the video store late this afternoon, however, so I'm still pretty overloaded, but that should go away if I behave myself.

Also, apple cider vinegar makes things all sticky.

total confusion

Today I learned that the printing on polyethylene water pipes is worse than newsprint, and I say that as someone who has not read an actual print newspaper since 2004. The good news is that you can scrub it off with Bon Ami® and a Scotch-Brite® Scrub Sponge.

The only other news is that I felt crummy until I got all the pipes and the wheelchair out of the house and washed the new & improved fragrance-free 'earthscience' shampoo out of my hair. That wasn't exactly a controlled experiment, so I can't say for sure that the new chemical they put in my shampoo (new & improved!) was the problem, but it's my prime suspect.

trash and credit reports

Today I learned that because other people go around flinging their plastic grocery bags every which way so they end up in waterways and impaled on cacti (around here, anyway), I'm going to have to start buying trash bags in May. Wild Oats bags make the greatest trash bags ever, and Whole Foods bought them, so the bags are going to change anyway, but Whole Foods won't be giving out plastic bags after Earth Day. Whole Foods bags were good for making sewing patterns.

In other news, a foreclosure is a smaller hit on your credit than a bankruptcy, so it can be well worth it to bail on your mortgage but keep all your other bills up to date. If you do it right, you can even buy another house like the one you have at current reduced prices, then let your first house go into foreclosure. It makes your credit bad for a couple of years, but as long as you plan ahead and don't need a car loan or something, you're all good to go. Now I understand the stories about people walking away from houses in Connecticut around 1990.

tooth fairy visits and killer elementary schools

Today I learned that smoking marijuana makes your teeth fall out! It said so right in the headline, but, disappointingly, the article text admitted that cigarettes have a tendency to mess up your gums, too, so any kind of smoker probably has a similar chance of tooth fairy visitation.

In other news, I forgot to sign up to vote by mail before the deadline, so I had to go to my polling place for the second time in three years. I thought since I found it totally intolerable the first time, it would be better this time because I'm so much better. Instead, I found that even with that silicone respirator, I couldn't make it through the line. I went right over to one of the volunteers and asked, through this big mask, that since the carpet chemicals were doing me in, could I cut in line? So I got to cut in line, but I'd been in there long enough that I had trouble figuring out physically how to vote. I did it, and I'm sure I didn't vote for Pat Buchanan.

I'm never going to forget to sign up for a mail-in ballot again, and I'm going to write a letter to the people in charge of polling-place accessibility. That was insane, and I've been all f**ked up ever since.

The worst part is that there are elementary school kids breathing that air every day, and I bet that isn't going too well for some of them, and no one knows why.

pthalates, craziness, and wheelchair tires

Along with everyone else in the civilized world, today I learned that baby powders, lotions, and shampoos are all full of pthalates, and that parents should avoid smearing their children with pthalates. This action would potentially reduce the smell rays emitted by your average small child, a step which is long overdue.

In other news, while sharing anecdotes with some friends, I learned that more than one EI in the world feels that 'you break it, you buy it' should apply to their health when someone does something that causes them to seek medical attention. I can see that applying if someone you don't know comes right up to you and sprays you with perfume (that's assault), but these people will apply it to people who are actively trying to help them, know what they are doing, but can't anticipate every possible trouble source. So I'm going to come right out and say it: some EIs are crazy. The thing is that they were most likely crazy to start with, so you can't really blame the chemicals.

Ok, that came up because someone (we'll call her Washerwoman) recounted a story about helping a lady decontaminate some laundry, and the lady had a disagreement with Mr. Washerwoman because he apparently wasn't conforming to her standards. Washerwoman was in a different room and pretended not to hear the argument, but when she went to ask the lady if she wanted all of her stuff put in the dryer, the lady said, "Just throw it out. I don't care." I think Washerwoman should have just thrown it out.

In yet more news, ancient Roman wheelchair tires will kill you. It's no wonder people in old wheelchairs don't seem to be doing very well.

nothing going on here

Today I learned that one of my friends lost some money on the Superbowl and that the kitten halftime show on Animal Planet was kind of entertaining for a few minutes, but the finale, where they dropped paper on the kittens, pretty much just showed a bunch of confused kittens.

traffic and the 1950s

Today I learned early that Hillary was coming to town to screw up our traffic and that the gem show, which also screws up traffic, has started enough to have a theft worth more than my first house.

In my effort to avoid getting stuck in traffic, I watched Forbidden Planet just to see Leslie Nielsen when he was whatever age he was in 1956, and I learned that seatbelts and incredibly short skirts were futuristic.

television will cure all

Yesterday I failed to report that I learned by watching Sudden Death that if you don't just kill the bad guys like Jack Bauer does, they will feel better right at the end of the movie and kidnap your bespectacled little girl. Then, after you extract her from their clutches and shoot them, they will slowly fly their getaway helicopter tail-first onto the ice of the hockey arena where they were holding the Vice President hostage during the Stanley Cup. This helicopter flew so straight, you'd think it had been hung by the nose from a crane.

I think the whole point of having a perfectly good looking little girl wear enormous nerd glasses was so we could watch the helicopter explosion reflected in them.

Today I learned that:

• Arizona is a good place to build funky houses. It's not just the cave house - there's an artist house up near Sedona.
• If your ammunition is old, it can bounce off the forehead of the guy breaking into your house, and your retired Green-Beret peers will tease you for using a weapon of insufficient caliber (scroll down for the pasted-in article text).
• There has been a whale corpse rotting on the beach in Pacifica, CA, for seven months, and Pacifica finally decided to bury it despite the fact the land is attached to a golf course owned by San Francisco. It's California. They're pretty laid back about their rotting whale corpses.
• The city of Tucson wants to be an inland port and has for the last ten years. I guess they should discuss that with the people who are working on picking a route for a truck bypass of Tucson.

In quotes of the day, here's one I missed on January 13:

Michael German, the ACLU's national security policy expert and a former FBI agent, said: "It seems the telecoms, who are claiming they were just being 'good patriots' when they allowed the government to spy on us without warrants, are more than willing to pull the plug on national security investigations when the government falls behind on its bills."

And here's one from the 27th from a young man who stuck his tongue to a flagpole like the kid in A Christmas Story:

"I decided to try it because I thought all of the TV shows were lies, but turns out I was wrong," Gavin said.