marketing and dryer contamination

Today I learned that some public health types are trying to get people in Ghana in the habit of washing their hands with soap more often to prevent disease, and they're getting good results using a technique borrowed from marketers, who have had good luck getting people to form habits that involve using their products. Here is the scary part:

But what Dr. Curtis learned in Ghana suggests that saving the world may be as easy as hawking chewing gum, or, to use a more contemporary example, as simple as training Americans to spray perfumed water on couches that are already clean.

FEBREZE — the perfumed water used on couches — is one of the most successful examples of a habit-creation campaign, and, in a sense, the playbook for how Ghana learned to wash its hands.

So there you have it: FEBREZE is perfumed water, and Americans are trained monkeys.

Which is pretty obvious if you have any contact with the developmentally disabled community. These people have learning disabilities up the wazoo, but they tend to have things like five kinds of painkillers in their medicine cabinets because one is for back pain, another one is for headaches, a different one is for general pain, but you also need the one for general pain at night, plus you never know when you might have an inflammation problem.

On the home front, I learned that I can't use my dryer with an unfiltered air source this time of year. It's been raining every single day here, even though it generally only says there's a 20% or 30% chance of rain, so there's enough mold outside that sucking it through my dryer makes my clothes intolerable. We put the pressurizer back together today, so I expect to feel like a human being in the morning, plus I should be able to use the dryer.