braids, ammonia, and plagues

Today is Earth Day, but since we already know ethanol is evil and plastics will kill us, we're going to talk about hair and makeup. See, there's this AP article about how the polygamist ladies wear funny-looking long dresses, no makeup, and, horror of horrors, french braids, which get their own special quote:

Allison Berlin, founder of Style Made Simple, doesn't expect FLDS-inspired fashion to go mainstream.

"Women don't actually want to look like that," she says. "I can see the Brooklyn hipsters rocking a French braid, but not in a serious way. Maybe ironically."

My only comment, having rocked a French braid off and on since about 1990, is that style reporters should get out of New York once in a while and visit the real world, where a good braid implies not only manual dexterity, but an ability to do something besides just look like the fashion magazines tell you to.

In other news, we gave up and started scrubbing our old dishes that were exposed to stachybotris in 10% ammonia, and that appears to be taking the mycotoxins off (they're passing the no-chest-pain sniff test), so ammonia does work, but you have to get a high enough concentration. Maybe you don't need 10%, but I don't want to have to do this again.

Speaking of ammonia, I may have mentioned the mold plague theory, where every few centuries mold becomes a bigger problem than it had been, and you end up with starvation because all the food rots, or Salem witch trials or something. This theory could explain why we're having so much trouble these days with bad molds like stachybotris, which didn't seem to be much of an issue 25 years ago, but I have a new theory: back when everybody cleaned their houses with ammonia, they killed off the mold in their houses before it could get started. Now, everybody has been trained by cleaning product companies to think that if there isn't some kind of petroleum-based, fakey flowery stench involved, stuff isn't clean, and then they don't use ammonia. Ammonia kills mold; fakey flowery stuff doesn't, and a growing number of people are pretty sure Clorox actually encourages it. Therefore, our current mold plague is due entirely to fakey-flowery-smelling cleaning products, so artificial, petroleum-based, fragranced products will kill you.