fancy water

Today I learned that you can buy Structured Oxygenated Water. Apparently if you model water molecules as 'O's, you can cluster them in groups of six instead of groups of 25, like this:

Diagram of Oxygen Waters Structured Water (6 H2O Molecules per Cluster)
O
OO
OOO

But if you read the whole page, it says lower down that the group is hexagonally shaped, so maybe their marketing people have accidentally given away a fantastic trade secret.

You can also sell 10 ml of water for $100 if you program it first:

One frequency used in the programming process of H2X™ Scalar Wave Activated Water is 528Hz the miraculous Solfeggio healing frequency that is used by genetic scientists to repair human DNA.

I would be laughing much harder if I didn't know that uneducated, truly ill people pay money for this stuff.

slow news day

Today I learned that among other things, IMDB has full Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes available for free. Between that and the continuing sausage reaction, I didn't learn much else.

more food

Today I learned that I am seriously sensitive to the turkey sausage from Whole Foods that I put in the stuffing yesterday. The sausage was the only processed food in the whole meal, and all its ingredients were theoretically ok, so I guess I learned that sausage is in the same category as powdered sugar: stuff that sounded safe enough but will kill me. As far as I can tell, the problem with powdered sugar is that there might be cornstarch in it. I don't know what was wrong with the sausage.

Also, if I have heart palpitations from eating sausage, and you really piss me off, the adrenaline rush knocks the heart palpitations down. That was an interesting experience.

onions and turkey

Today I learned that pearl onions are tree onions, which would make them different from boiling onions, which are just little onions that grow in the ground.

In other food news, to make yesterday's heat PSA even more ridiculous, we got pea-sized hail this afternoon just as we were ready to put the turkey in the fryer in the back yard, so we had to cover the pot with a cookie sheet and wait it out. Cooking the bird went fine, but in oil news:

• The manual said to put the bird in the pot and fill around it with water to find out how much oil you need. Since you don't want to unwrap the bird the day before you cook it, people on the internet said you could do that with the bird wrapped, and that didn't work for us. We used 3 gallons of water, so we bought 3 gallons of oil. Today we repeated the experiment with the bird unwrapped, and we needed close to 4 gallons of oil. If I didn't have a bunch of rotation-friendly oils floating around in the cupboards, we'd have had to crush the turkey to get it all in the oil.
• Along the same lines, it appears that turkey-fryer pots are built with the expectation that you will fill it with one of those porn-star turkeys with the overdeveloped breast. Free-range turkeys are rangy in comparison, and, as a side note, I understand that they can reproduce without human intervention. The upshot is that even if your free-range turkey is under the weight limit for your pot, it could be both too big and too small for your pot. It will be taller and require more oil than a similar-weight freak of nature sold in a conventional grocery store.
• Since we got the oil to the correct temperature before we put the bird in, it didn't turn out greasy or anything. In fact, it tasted to me just like a roasted turkey, but I understand the breast was perfect, not that I tried it. As a dark meat fan, I will recommend deep-frying strictly for the entertainment factor. It's more expensive than roasting, and you can't stuff the bird, but roasting doesn't get you stories to tell about standing in a hail storm with a cookie sheet trying to keep water out of a pot of 350 degree oil.

weather-appropriate information

Today I learned that one local radio station is, in late November, still running public service announcements about how to avoid heat illness. So you all be careful that you don't overheat, and drink lots of water, y'hear?

faith

Today I learned that mass-produced Obama merchandise has no chance of gaining value. We are shocked. Just shocked.

Also, teen-age instant-message-gadget reviewers write in complete sentences and can spell, if you believe what you see here.

mosquito bait

Today I learned that mosquitoes like lactic acid, carbon dioxide, and warm people.

So if you've recently exercised, watch out: The combination of lactic acid (which builds up when muscles are exerted), sweat filled with carbon dioxide, and an increased temperature make you an ideal host.

This could explain some things.

this just in

This evening, despite recent pollen-related weight gain, I ate some flourless chocolate cake. The pain under my ribs on the right side that felt like someone was grinding up my liver with rocks has lessened considerably.

This is the best discovery ever, assuming exercise season returns soon.

the turkey pot and pee

In the spirit of it being turkey-fryer-safety-warning week (officially or not, we don't care), we decided to read the directions for the turkey fryer in which we have been boiling fabrics pretty much daily for several weeks, thus learning that it is important to clean the spiderwebs out of the fryer before use.

Unless deep-fried turkey is even better than I've heard, and keeping in mind that I'm not advocating developing a sensitivity that requires boiled sheets, it seems to me that people who let their pots sit around and collect cobwebs all year are really not getting their money's worth out of them.

In other money news, it appears that no-flush urinals do save water, but they don't actually save money, as the following quote reveals:

Craig Hansen, who's overseen Fort Huachuca's no-flush urinals since 1996, found them beyond the capacity of his housekeeping staff.

"People accustomed to coming in, wiping things down, scrubbing the floor and going away, show a lot of resistance to having to do something new that takes some thought," he said.

So Hansen turned instead to the fort's higher-skilled - and much higher-paid - operations and maintenance teams to monitor and change urinal cartridges.

So that's a thing to think about, I guess, if you had any interest in no-flush urinals.

the medical establishment and a cat

Today I found an article via Fark about anger resulting from the diagnosis of a chronic illness, which brings us to the quote of the day:

Gary McClain, president of JustGotDiagnosed.com, said that chronic illness can leave patients feeling that their life is spinning out of their control as the medical establishment seems to take over.

I read that quote to my husband, who responded, "If we had let them take over, we'd be in deep [doodoo]." Not that that left us feeling any less cranky while they failed to help us.

Hopefully we're done developing chronic illnesses and won't have to think about that anymore, so here's a video of a cat riding a Roomba.

gloating is unbecoming, but here it is anyway

(queue up the boomy part of the 1812 Overture)

Today anyone who looked at a newspaper, and I can only assume this information was all over the tv, too, should have learned that after roughly 15 years of attempting to disprove Gulf War illness, the government has issued a 452-page report on exactly how real it is. At the risk of repeating myself, the US government has recognized that environmental injuries occur, and also that they are a**holes for their pathetic funding of research on the topic, particularly since 2001.

We may now:

• officially label all doubters of environmental illness denizens of the Stone Age.
• point out that the Texas Medical Board is trying to take away the license of the man I refer to as the God of EI doctors, Dr. Rea of the Environmental Health Center - Dallas, and that if anyone has any money to help out with legal fees, here's the information for where to send it.
• point and laugh at the Quackwatch guy, but he was pretty pathetic to start with.

fluffy paper products for brains

Today I learned that Basha's cheap, store brand Value Time paper towels make the greatest 'facial tissue' ever. It's softer than Bounty paper towels or Scott bathroom tissue (ok, so I don't have a lot of different options on hand) and won't make you cough up a lung like Kleenex. Ask any EI -- Kleenex is infamous.

disclaimer: no coherent thought went into this post.

antennas and complete squares

Today I learned that you can make a directional antenna for your Wifi using things like appropriately-sized soup cans in about 10 minutes if you have the right tools, which, as nerds, we do. We lack cans, but 3 inch ducts aren't hard to come by.

In brain-revival news, after taking a major perfume hit in a store earlier, it only took me half an hour to rederive how to complete the square, i.e., convert y = a_o + a₁x + a₂x² to a y= (x + b)² + c type of format. Half an hour is a horrible time for deriving something like that, but I suppose I spent 15 or 20 minutes of that time wiping my nose since the wind kicked up a whole lot of pollen outside.

I suppose given the wind and the perfume hit, I should be pleased I can remember how to tie my shoes, so for proper entertainment, I recommend Time's 50 worst cars list, which contains the following quote:

It took the drivers at Road and Track 32 seconds to reach 60 mph, which would put the Dauphine at a severe disadvantage in any drag race involving farm equipment.

more and better ways to get sick

Today I learned that wind farms make some people who live near them sick. The theory is that low frequency sound pressure and flickering light from the rotation of the turbines are causing the problem. Since a signal processing/acoustic engineer buddy told me about low frequency sound being investigated as a weapon, and since I know a bunch of people with chemical injuries who can't stand being in the same room with fluorescent lights because they flicker, I'm inclined to believe living near a wind farm would be stupid for some portion of the population, and, just as with chemical exposures, it's not always clear who will get into trouble. Although, if the low-frequency sound thing is a decent weapon, and I think it worked by interfering with the frequency of your heartbeat or something (don't quote me), probably nobody with a heart should live too close to a wind farm.

In other news, I didn't learn a whole lot else because it was really windy today, and we both felt crummy and thus were too stupid to tape up the door facing the wind until the worst of it was over. So, note to the Broken Physicist household: if it's windy enough that you feel too crummy to tape up the friggin' door, tape it up anyway, you morons.

rampant confusing

Today I learned by reading a comment on the local newspaper's website that there are people who believe Barack Obama 'supports abortion through the ninth month.' I was stunned that someone out there could believe that of anyone, anywhere, but then I remembered that just yesterday I heard an intermittently homeless EI say that a generous friend of mine had made her pay for freely given food.

The EI at least has the excuse of having chemicals in her brain. I don't know what's wrong with the Obama-is-the-Antichrist people.

the butler in the library

Today I learned by reading a headline that homicides are soaring in Tucson, so we're all going to die. The thing is that if you read the article, it says that homicides are up everywhere, not just here, and here, in an area with a million people, there were only 69 murders so far this year. I think that when I was in high school back home, the city next door managed that before breakfast, and they only had about 25,000 people.

Ok, I just looked it up and did some very minor mathematics: if that city had been the size of Tucson, we would have lost about 1700 people in a year. I guess there was a reason the FBI or whoever came in and cleaned that place up.

word police update, death in the mail, and good intentions

Today I learned that either Alaska is a terrible place, or people were misusing 'enormity' all the way back in 1993, which I regard as the Stone Age, when word usage was so basic as to be hard to screw up.

Alaska has long been a magnet for unbalanced souls, often outfitted with little more than innocence and desire, who hope to find their footing in the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier.

In other news:

• Postal workers are developing respiratory problems, potentially from all the paper dust they're exposed to. I don't know if it's dust or not -- I would suspect ink-contaminated dust over straight paper dust -- but mail is the most contaminated thing I have to deal with, and that is exactly why we go to the little outdoor portable post office instead of an indoor office. There are exhaust fumes from the parking lot, and the guy who mans the little trailer wears cologne, but the air quality is a whole lot better there than it could possibly be indoors.
• Mormons can posthumously baptize people. They've been baptizing Holocaust victims so they'll go to Heaven, which is a lovely sentiment if you ignore the fact that the people they're baptizing died specifically because they were Jewish.

dead wood and live wood

Today I learned that our inherited dining room chairs look like a lovely oak underneath the layers and layers of varnish or shellac or whatever they used to finish them. Just as my great-grandfather painted the kitchen cupboards every year, these chairs got another layer of whatever every so often, and that would be why it takes our fairly safe, no-scrape paint stripper an hour or two to work unless you do a bunch of scraping first.

Yesterday I learned that if you trim four or five big branches off a mesquite tree, but you dismember them into 5-foot lengths, they compact into a volume quite a bit smaller than you'd expect.

I'm exhausted, and so is the Mars lander.

slow start, great end

Today I learned that laundry detergent companies are deliberately designing their products to leave residues. I suspected that they did that so they could brand people with their smells, but now they have chemicals that protect the fibers so your clothes last longer. That actually sounds like a great idea as long you don't mind breathing laundry chemicals 24 hours a day. I mean, Bounce sounds like great stuff, too, and I used it religiously until I got sick and had to wash it out of everything I owned.

In other news:

• Here's an article about an EI whose apartment got contaminated with pesticide.
• Apparently coconut oil helps people with Alzheimer's fuel their brains, which no longer handle sugar, so that's why the neurons die.
• Fantasizing about food helps people ignore pain.
• Inbreeding Habsburgs produced Charles II of Spain, whose jaw was so misaligned that he couldn't chew.

Also, we went to Cafe Poca Cosa tonight right at 5 pm, and since it has tile floors, I did pretty well until the place filled all the way up about 90 minutes later, when it was about time to go anyway. It even looks like I can still write.

mushrooms in the news

Today I learned that warming in northern forests kills off the mushrooms, which then stop releasing CO₂, so to the extent that mushrooms can counteract global warming, mushrooms will save us. In other mushroom-related news, treating maple wood in some unspecified way with a kind of mushroom that grows on tree bark gives the wood the characteristics found in Stradivarius instruments. The resulting violin apparently sounded good, but, maybe because I found the article on a nerd site, there were no glowing reviews.

So upon review, mushrooms may be today's theme, but they aren't all that promising as blog fodder.

the lady left

Today I learned that a Target store in a not-so-great part of town is called a Targhetto. Also, you can make insulating paint.

In less global news, the lady who has lived in her car for 25 years drove away today, and I hope she'll be ok, but I hope she never comes back.

electoral mayhem

Today I learned that even if you've already tracked down where the local paper stowed their list of endorsements online, it's so unintuitive that you have to retrace your steps completely to track them down a second time. Try it: the paper is the Arizona Daily Star, and you're looking for endorsements. There's a page all about the candidates and propositions.

In other news:

• Stretching is bad for you.
• Lip balm addiction is recognized by dermatologists.
• You can steal money from the IRS, but we are not awfully surprised that the thief got caught.

Also, your faucet will kill you, but it might try to frame the pasta.

all becoming clear

Today I learned that if everyone answers the vacuum question like I did yesterday, but there is a vacuum cleaner in the vicinity, the lady who has lived in her car for 25 years is fully capable of vacuuming her own car, despite having announced yesterday, "I don't vacuum." In related news, she has explained to us multiple times that it will take her two days of preparation before she can vacate the driveway where she is parked, but today we found out that she's just expecting a package on Tuesday afternoon.

We knew we were being manipulated, but we just became unhelpful and researched social services. It was the owner of the driveway, who has actual parenting experience, who brought the lady into line. Key quote: "You should be embarrassed by your behavior."

I worship the owner of the driveway.

whadaya mean, whadaya mean?

Today I can report that I react so strongly to the lady who has lived in her car for 25 years that I can't be in the same building with her. I suppose I developed the sensitivity last time I had to interact with her, but this problem leads to exchanges like this:
Lady: Would it be possible to vacuum the footspace of my car?
Me: Yes, you can vacuum it.

Wanna know what was actually said? Here you go:
Lady: Please vacuum my car.
Me: I don't think so.