out

Today I learned that Whole Foods' farmed salmon, which we had tolerated fine for over three years, is not always safe enough for us. You might think one mistake over three years would be forgivable, but since we're animals, and most animals have a built in cause-and-effect, one-strike-and-you're-out food testing system, it's not.

warning: hard day leads to collection of bad news

Today I learned that there's beryllium in dental fillings, and for the dental technicians grinding the fillings, the exposure OSHA said was safe would give you lung disease. Then from the same newspaper, I learned that the disabled lady who was stuck living in a moldy house because the government program designed to fix her house was corrupt, died, probably because she was living in a moldy house.

In other news, cell phone companies do not want people to know that it doesn't cost them anything to shuttle all those text messages around, and if you go to the Sunflower Market nearest my house, and some teenager decides to shoplift a bottle of alcohol, the store employees are not exactly sure how much force they're allowed to use to stop him. He essentially walked out of the store while people yelled at him.

death by odds and plastic

Today I learned that alcohol will kill you, but only by raising your risk of colon and liver cancer by 20% while decreasing your heart attack risk. (Note that we are not stooping to the level of the article by saying it increases the risk by a fifth.) In that I'd rather have a heart attack than screw around with chemotherapy, I'd better start drinking.

But not out of plastic bottles. The FDA decided that maybe they should look at all the studies on bisphenol A instead of just the two long-term ones funded by the plastics industry, and thus, maybe bisphenol A will kill you. If the FDA is worrying about it, it'll definitely kill you.

party on

Today I learned that not only can you tour the house where A Christmas Story was filmed, but you can also buy one of those leg lamps. If you pay extra, you can get it delivered in a crate like Ralphie's dad's.

And I forgot to report that you can get wild scallops at Safeway for $5.99/lb. at around 5:45 pm on Christmas Eve because the meat counter guy needed to get rid of them. That was a good thing because we were planning on having shrimp, but we forgot to get safer ones, and ordinarily farmed shrimp has roughly a 50-50 chance of totally killing you.

preparations

Everybody ready for Christmas? We have your checklist right here:

• Food ready to go?
• Presents wrapped and tucked under the tree?
• Envisioning sugarplums?
• Sang at least one Christmas carol, even if it was out of tune?

Ok, it sounds like you're ready. Now go tape up the doors and windows so the smoke won't kill you, and have a good night.

unexpected

Today I learned that killer whales are dolphins and hyenas are cats (sort of).

Also, our UPS guy, Larry, was delivering packages at 6:30 pm tonight, and I only know that because the Amazon order I sent to my parents' house arrived. Here. Because I'm a moron.

proper literature and something that looks like dessert

As a result of watching A Scanner Darkly, today I learned that Philip K. Dick was a druggie in the sixties and knew a bunch of people who died or had brain and/or pancreatic damage from drug use. I had somehow assumed the gods of science fiction, whose work covers entire walls at my parents' house, were all sort of nerdy, kind of like those of us who sometimes refer to them as the gods of science fiction.

In other news, today I made chocolate mousse for the first time ever, and it was reportedly not bad. By the smell, I shouldn't have mixed two kinds of chocolate, but I didn't think to smell it until too late. It's a challenge to make great dessert when you can't lick the spoon without having to wash your tongue immediately thereafter.

how to walk

Today I theoretically learned to walk in high heels. According to an ex-Rockette, the trick is to stand up really straight, suck in your gut, walk heel-toe heel-toe instead of balancing on the balls of your feet, and swing your hips more than usual, thus transferring weight to your heels. If only I had any useless-female shoes to try it on.

Also, The Wizard of Oz may be too intense for people tripping on wood smoke.

downside

Today I learned definitively that it is the local wood smoke that's been making me really dizzy in the mornings. As an added bonus, now I get car sick on my five-minute commute to the really, really sick lady's house, and you would have to pay me good money to get me on my bike.

Two things:
1. It's going to be like this until after Christmas. I totally understand why some of my friends leave town this time of year.
2. The really, really sick lady's house is all filled up with smoke tonight, so at the risk of sounding extremely Grinchy, happy freakin' holidays.

bed repair

Today we learned the location of the hard-to-find leak in the foil-wrapped, formaldehyde-free particle board base to our bed. It was easier to find once we took the whole thing apart, and it won't recur because I also learned that it takes a couple of hours and a roll and a half of aluminum tape to cover 12 oak bed slats. Even if we damage the tape, the holes will be small, and they won't leak glue chemicals.

I am too tired to say anything funny about that. I'd go to bed now, but it's 8 o'clock, and I haven't had dinner yet.

birds, bees, and unexpected talent

Today I learned that bees like hummingbird feeders, but when you take the infested feeder down, you disappoint a bunch of birds, unless that was just one bird being disappointed multiple times. Also, more than one person in the local sick people group can really dance.

broken scary stuff

Today I learned by talking on the phone that today is some kind of unofficial house-repair day. So far we've had calls from friends about how best to clean up a broken compact fluorescent light bulb (mercury contamination) and where the best place is to get a replacement garbage disposal (water leak = mold potential). At our house, the room we've been sleeping in smelled sort of like wet wood late this morning, and according to the water meter, there is a very small leak somewhere in our house. A trip into the attic revealed that the pipes are even farther away from that room than we thought, and they didn't appear to be dripping or anything, so we're pleased to report we probably have a leaky toilet.

It finally dawned on one of us that maybe the bed itself was the source of the smell, and by crawling around under it, we found a tiny hole in the aluminum-foil wrapping of one of the formaldehyde-free particle board pieces. Judging by the inflation of the wrapping, the particle board has been offgassing, and standing on the bed this morning to change a light bulb caused a blow-out.

It took a few months for that wrapping to inflate. If you want to see something really offgas, you should get one of those remote controls Cox hands out with its cable boxes. The husband of the really, really sick lady has to let the gas out of the plastic bag he keeps his in at least once a day or it puffs up enough that you can't push the buttons.

airline usefulness and stupid stuff

Today I learned that United Airlines takes sick kids to the North Pole by taking them to a dressed up part of the concourse via the runway, so airlines are actually good for something besides in general eventually getting you to where you're going after charging you to walk on their carpets and breathe their air.

Other than that, I learned that the TV Highlander had managed to stay out of trouble for 12 years before.... Never mind.

better late than never?

Today I learned that despite having lived in Illinois long enough to get really sick there, I failed to understand that Illinois is not like other places, as exemplified by the following quote:

If indicted, Mr. Blagojevich would be the fifth of the last eight elected Illinois governors to be charged with a crime, and if he is sent to jail, the fourth to serve time.

two wrongs and a right

Today I learned:

• In more proof that you shouldn't write anything incorrect on the blackboard, even if you spell out carefully why it is wrong, six months of 'meth will kill you' ads make teenagers more confident of meth's safety.
• If you end up homeless, you should do it in LA, where they periodically are able to make more little covered wagons to upgrade people from damp cardboard boxes.
• It's official that Safeway tomato products will kill you, in that their buyer got bribed to accept moldy and otherwise yucky tomatoes. I'd say that we already knew that because their non-salsa organic tomato-based products made us sick, but their organic green beans (frozen or fresh) make me sick, too, and those come from a different supplier. But there's nothing to have stopped their buyer from taking bribes from more than just the tomato supplier.

If you're curious about what-all else the environmentally injured community knows about your food products, you probably already know that things like conventional fruit, potatoes, and peppers are pretty well contaminated with pesticide, and conventional meats have all kinds of bad stuff in the fat, but as to organic products:

• I understand Horizon switched suppliers to one that was technically organic, but used feedlots, and people who had tolerated their dairy products before didn't after that.
• The one time I tried Trader Joe's applesauce, it was rotten and made me sick. And I mean made of rotten apples, and it was in the fall, too, when they should have been good.

It's too bad sick people have very little economic clout, but we know which way the wind blows in terms of contaminated products.

changes to the plan

Today I learned that the air quality around my parents' house can be pretty crappy this time of year, even near the beach, which may or may not affect my future travel plans.

In other news, if you cut out the moldy part of a green pepper that looked fine from the outside, pour hydrogen peroxide over the part that looks perfectly fine, and eat it, you can end up with a bad case of poison husband. We ate that two night ago, and this morning, I can't get near him even after he took a shower. At least I can be in the same room with him after the shower.

This situation will probably resolve itself by dinnertime tonight, but it's still exciting now.

more mayhem

Today I learned that San Francisco spent a bunch of money on surveillance cameras that don't get good enough pictures to be useful even if you can get ahold of the footage. SFPD apparently uses store camera footage, or, if you commit a crime on Adam's block, Adam's famous webcam.

In other news, some pesticides are endocrine disruptors, so besides killing you, they will also wipe out all life on the planet, with the possible exception of cockroaches. The article didn't say anything about cockroaches.

warning: probably revolting information

Today I learned that it takes a couple of days to recover from a liver cleanse. There are three options I can think of as to why:

1. I am sensitive to epsom salts.
2. I knocked something toxic loose from my liver and it's sitting in my guts making me sick.
3. Drinking epsom salts punctuated with a cup of 50-50 olive oil and grapefruit juice would make anybody sick, and the people who think suffering makes you healthier are pleased by this.

I'll find out if it changes anything in the long run.

In other things you probably don't need to know, of the six feet that have washed up on beaches around Vancouver, B.C., four of them belong to two people. Apparently your appendages fall off if your body spends a bunch of time in the water.

pain vs. hunger

Today I think I learned that a study said having a happy next-door neighbor is better than having a happy spouse. I'm not actually sure because I didn't get any dinner, and lack of dinner is close to cataclysmic around here.

I didn't eat dinner because I'm doing a liver cleanse, which, as an analytical science nerd, I still think sounds like made-up, New-Age bullpoop, but the last time I did it, the pain under my ribs, about which I recently complained, improved. I get that pain once a month, and after last month, I have an incentive to skip dinner and drink nasty-tasting liquids.

I didn't mind the nasty-tasting liquids last time. I don't remember missing dinner this much, either. This better do some good.

death in the toy chest

Via CNN, today I learned that Barbie will kill you! Well, maybe not all Barbies, but some of them. And Wiis will definitely kill you on account of all the brominated fire retardants.

I just can't even express how much I love websites that list things that'll kill you.

mistake

Today I learned that if you know an intermittently homeless lady who has been sleeping on some non-EI's used couch, and she's not tolerating the couch, you should not let her in your house even for a few minutes. Detoxing EIs will kill you.