EtOH, Part II

My EtOH blog post remains one of my least popular of all time. So in the grand Hollywood tradition, naturally, it will be the one I pick for my first sequel.

In my defense, it’s not my fault. It’s sheer chance that the topic came up again. One of the major complaints that people have with it is that they don’t believe me that getting drunk doesn’t feel special to me. Now I’ll be the first to admit, I have no idea what being drunk is supposed to feel like for most people. But I recently discovered a way to more clearly illustrate what it feels like in my mind.

Earlier this week, I woke up with symptoms of an inner ear infection. I had one of those once in high school, so I knew what was going on. But my brain made a connection that it had never made before, and I thought of my EtOH post.

To the best of my knowledge, inner ear infections are relatively rare. I’m going to describe them for you for two reasons. First, this is probably going to be funny. Second, I at least try to make these posts make sense, even if I know in advance that my point will just annoy most people.

Now then, the story of me waking up with an inner ear infection:
--Alarm goes off.
--I push button on alarm. The act of raising my head off the pillow comes with a slight spinning sensation.
--I stand up. The room seems to be ever so slightly spinning.
--I walk towards my bedroom door, stumbling slightly.
--Miss the door and walk into the doorframe.
--Stop and ponder. Could have sworn I was on the correct course a second ago.
--Try again, managing to exit the bedroom this time.
--Room still spinning slightly.
--Walk towards bathroom.
--Impact wall with shoulder.
--Put two and two together and realize that at least one vestibular system is malfunctioning.
--Make joke to self about feeling like I’m drunk.
--Suddenly realize I actually do feel drunk.
--Conclude that being drunk feels exactly like an inner ear infection.

I don’t want to spend every Friday night pretending to have an inner ear infection. I should start using that line.

I think at this point we can safely conclude that somewhere in my subconscious is an unstated goal to stop getting invited to parties by the time I’m thirty.

My superego is less upset about that than you might think.

Strap-On Mood Lighting

For some reason, the news outlets (especially CNN) have spent this week obsessing about gay issues and theory. I’m not going to worry about why that might be. (Although maybe I should.) Rather, I’d like to take a few moments to prattle on about the nonsense being discussed.

Did you see this one? http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/06/26/sexuality/index.html
Apparently, a grad student at my local university of choice has been strapping little light bulbs onto people, turning them loose in dark rooms, turning on some video cameras, and asking anonymous strangers to figure out if the people walking around in them are gay or straight.

Funny, I have some friends who do the same thing all weekend (every weekend) without the bling. They never get any grant funding for it though. The secret must be in that strap-on mood lighting.

I’m obviously doing research for the wrong department. Never before have I considered testing for “swish in his step” to help solve some sort of engineering problem. Apparently, if I were working for the Psych labs, I could get away with passing off any or all of the following as groundbreaking research:
--Are gay people really fruity? Monitor their diets and compare to a control group to find out!
--Are gay guys better at packing fudge than straight guys? And do they prefer the same recipes?
--Can you tell the difference between gay and straight people by the quality of their haircutting skills?
--Are gay guys attracted to Disney movies slightly more, or slightly less than flies are to honey?
--Can you spot gay guys by their ugly shoes alone, or do you have to check their manicures to be sure?
--Does this shirt make me look gay? Ok, does it make that other guy actually gay?

I’m hoping that most people who read this thing (if any) find all of those questions funny or retarded (as opposed to serious).

What scares me is that apparently a huge slice of the population would not. At the time of this writing a CNN poll has an even third of the responding public answering a question in such a way as to indicate that homosexuality is a choice. And this is CNN. I have to imagine that if Fox had this thing up it’d be twice that.

This has me a tad confused. Why do so many people apparently think that this reasoning does not work both ways? It would logically follow that people could and would start being randomly gay at will. This theory does not seem to have the same backing as the “be straight at will” theory.

Or does it? I occurs to me that there would be very little reason for most straight guys to go around telling people that they figured they could go gay pretty much any time they wanted to. It would make a poor pickup line with the ladies.

Clearly, the aggressive move would be for an army of gay guys to take to the streets as spies, trying to secretly seduce as many straight guys as possible. Oh wait, they already do. Oh wait, that’s exactly what most gay guys want to scientifically disprove as possible, even if they’re occasionally participating.

So where does that leave us?
--Straight people (esp. guys) would seem to have strong social pressures to maintain an image of strict heterosexuality. This would be true even if the occasional homo might actually be able to turn some of their cranks just fine.
--Gay guys would have strong social-standing reasons to find scientific proofs of inherent homosexuality. This would be true even if some of them really have proven they can sexually handle the occasional women just fine.
--Gay women are invisible, except in pornography. They can say or do anything, but no one will notice.
--Everybody hates bi people, but that’s ok, because almost everyone agrees that they couldn’t possibly exist.

My conclusion?
People need to have more experimental sex before they’re allowed to pretend to be authorities on the subject. Even if they’re really good at dressing people up in strap-on lights in dark rooms.

Concerned Women for America

Did you know there is a group out there called “Concerned Women for America”?

Apparently there is. Generally, I am the king of PC (at least, when applied to groups of unimposing people), but with a name like that, even I start to think that PMS jokes might be ok sometimes.

Anyway, I bet you would never have guessed that this group of naturally upset ladies would have helped make my morning wonderful. But they did.

They have this critical article posted on their website: http://www.cwfa.org/articles/753/CFI/cfreport/

Funniest children’s toy ever! (If you haven’t bothered to read it, it’s a Mattel-issue Harry Potter broomstick toy that makes swooshing noises and vibrates when clutched firmly between the legs.)

I need to start a toy company now. Clearly, thinking up toy ideas is fun and easy to do. Let’s see what I can come up with…

--Toy Replica NASA Spacesuit. Impervious to the vacuum of space – seals airtight!
--Puppies and Yuppies Trampoline. No longer must your pets watch the action from the sidelines! Bounce with them!
--Willy Wonka’s “BottleCAP” gun. Bust a fizzy candy cap in your friend’s ass!
--Spiderman III Spider Garden. Not just for butterflies anymore! Watch your own spiders hatch and grow!
--Lil’ Tykes’ First Espresso Machine. Make any beverage with blasts of real steam!
--Tommy’s First BioChemistry set. Comes with live transgenic E. Coli!
--Mysterious Cold Sore Barbie. She and Ken will never be the same!
--Domestic Abuse Bratz. That’s not eyeshadow anymore!
--Doctor-Makes-House-Calls Playset. Comes with four washable hospital gowns; a stethoscope; and a child-safe, mercury-free thermometer.
--Happy Baked Oven. Comes with a 40 Watt lightbulb, and four packs of hemp brownie mix (just add water)!

My Body

[Note: My working title for this post was “Lake + Caffeine,” but I changed it because I decided the enormous list in the middle was the best part. If you opened this expecting scandal or something, sorry to disappoint. I considered using a phrase that will appear within the list instead, but decided it would ruin my best joke.]

My complete unwillingness to join company in drug-altered states is usually described as “lame” or some variation thereof. This is not troublesome because I have no concept of peer pressure. To me “peer pressure” sounds like what happens to me when I’m forced to ride in crowded elevators*.

Anyway, if we pretend for the moment that health considerations have nothing to do with my non-participation, it makes for an entertaining topic of discussion. Even if various substances had no effect on my well-being, let me try to highlight why I’d still stay well away from them, for practical reasons.

My body has a long track record of responding to things in unusual ways. Let’s list some for fun:
1) Most people drink alcohol and get drunk. In contrast, my alcohol post has annoyed many people who assume I’m full of sh**. (Facebook readers, I’ll try to remember to port that entry as a prequel to this Note. Please leave comments if I forget and I’ll fix that.)
2) Similarly, freezing temperatures make most people get cold. Here too, up to an almost arctic threshold, I simply seem to give off more radiant heat and don’t notice. Anyone who knew me at Northwestern for any length of time will remember that I was the only person around who seemed to think that an Evanston February meant “jacket weather.”
3) Most people think direct sunlight is “nice.” If I’m exposed to it for more than about 30 seconds without massive squinting or sunglasses, the odds that I’ll develop a day-ending headache a few hours later ramp up with each minute of exposure. On the plus side, my vision would make most pilots jealous.
4) Most people get headaches for other reasons. That hasn’t happened to me yet, excepting a few times when I abruptly stopped getting caffeine after having adapted to regular high doses.
5) Most people think that loud club music is great fun. When I’m exposed to it, I lose all ability to hear anything and am comparable (socially) to an autistic koala bear. I wear earplugs on the rare occasions I go to clubs and this – inexplicably – dramatically improves my ability to hear people. On a related note, in other places, most people can hear other people speaking to them whether they face towards them or away. That’s true for me in small rooms, but if I’m outside or in someplace like a supermarket, I might as well be deaf. On the plus side, in quiet areas, I can hear a butterfly trying to sneak up on me from 50 meters.
6) Experimental data applied to a mass and energy balance of my body (you think I’m joking, but I’m not.) revealed my average daily metabolic rate over the course of three months to be about 4800 calories per day. (Here also, you think I’m joking but I’m not.) The same experiment revealed that I am equally happy consuming about 1300 or 4800 calories per day. I can do either one (seemingly indefinitely) and be perfectly happy. Anything significantly different from either value has to be forced, and is not pleasant. I have never heard anyone else claim anything like that before.
7) Most people say that getting hit with something, getting cut, getting scraped, etc. all hurt. I agree that scrapes and impacts hurt, but I can get shockingly deep cuts and I don’t feel a thing – unless something like salt or soap gets into it. (This can be annoying. On many occasions, I have noticed blood stains on something I’m working on, only to eventually discover that I’m personally standing there bleeding on the item while I’m trying to figure out where the stains are coming from.)

All this brings us back to the topic of me and drug use (sort of). I don’t use any because I don’t trust that my body will register them in the first place. (Reminder: the post asked you to assume a premise of health and legal reasons not existing.) If it does, I certainly don’t trust that the effect will be nice.

But I have an exception. I take a very pragmatic approach to caffeine abuse. I tend to like the taste of most caffeinated beverages – to the point that I would drink liters of them at a time, given the chance. When I was younger (before I had developed behavioral controls for this sort of thing), this led to some erratic behavioral swings. It didn’t help that I was unaware that caffeine was the culprit (or that there was a culprit).

These days, I let myself get into “pulses” of caffeine use. I ramp up use of the stuff until I hit a practical maximum, then I stop using it. Repeat as necessary. It’s a good system, and since I’ve developed an awareness of how it effects me, I can adapt my behaviors to best work with it.

This system has enabled me to accomplish some of the otherwise-inexplicable projects that I decided to take on over the years. My last completed painting is very large, and very detailed. It took five years to finish. Roughly 95% of the thing was done during eight-hour sessions where I was on too much of a caffeine buzz to notice the day had ended. Similarly, about five people on Earth are aware that I have a complicated, convoluted, 250ish page website that defies categorization or description. 95% of the thing was done over the course of four intense days (that came as two pairs (the first setup, the second execution), separated by about five years). These blog posts all seem to come to me at the peak of caffeine energy pulses. They tend not to come at all when I’m taking a dry spell. Several other just as outlandish examples are occurring to me, but no one would know what I was talking about if I tried to explain them.

My point is this. Iced tea hits me like a crystal meth/crack cocaine cocktail. So why would I want to try something stronger?







*Sorry, I think it’s pretty likely that this joke will only register with the fluid dynamics crowd, and I suspect that even there it might bomb. But I like it, so it’s staying.

Flashlights Are Fun!

This is going to be another one of those posts that convinces people I’m a mean person. I maintain my argument that all it proves is that I have a self-deprecating sense of humor.

At work (yup, I’m talking about work again, because I get oh-so-many requests for that), we issue everyone flashlights. I have one myself. This past year, a new line of flashlights has been released that have a high-powered LED at the core.

These flashlights are amazing. It’s like having a tiny spotlight in your hand. In a brightly lit area, you can stand at the far end of the room, point one at the far wall, switch it on, and see the glowing circle of light clearly. Try that with an incandescent flashlight and you wouldn’t see a thing. (These things are also prohibitively expensive, so odds are low that you've seen one already. They make those little keychain LED's that are so popular look like fireflies.)

Here’s why I find this topic funny. These flashlights used to ship with a sticker on the projection lens that said something like, “Do not stare directly into the flashlight beam.” That was sensible advice.

The flashlights don’t come with those stickers anymore. Care to guess why? I’ll give you a few lines of scrolling to try to think of the reason yourself.

. . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

They don’t ship with the sticker anymore because about 85% of the people who saw that sticker put batteries into the flashlight, read the sticker, peeled the it off the lens, pointed it directly at their eyes, and turned it on.
You’re probably skeptical of my 85% figure. That’s fair. But remember, I decided to write about this topic for some reason. That reason is that I witnessed that sequence of events happen. Many, many times.
Now that they don’t ship with stickers, the problem seems to have completely gone away.

Here’s where I prove that I’m making fun of myself and not just being a tool. Remember how I said I have one of these flashlights? Admittedly, I have never shined the thing directly into my eyes just to see what it was like. The sticker sounded pretty reasonable to me at the time. However, sitting here writing about this has made me realize that I don’t know what it feels like to shine the flashlight directly in my eyes. I kind of want to. I’m not going to, but I still think that wanting to do it while I sit here typing this is worse than ignoring the sticker. Instinct is one thing, but self-aware stupidity is outright dangerous.

I wonder what would happen if I started a thumbtack factory, but instead of leaving the plastic cases holding the tacks blank, I decided to print “Not to be used as suppositories” in large letters on each one.

Gay Bomb!

I remember reading this article a long time ago, but for some reason it resurfaced on the BBC News ticker today.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4174519.stm

I’d like to talk about the plans (seriously considered by the U.S. government) to spend $7,500,000 over six years to develop a “weapon” that would make enemy troops succumb to overpowering homosexual urges.

It’s a good thing I wasn’t a chemical engineer for the government at that time, because I read that project description and an enormous light bulb switched on over my head. I would have fought tooth and nail to be chief engineer for that one, because I would have been laughing for years, well after the project concluded.

Check this out. I create two recruitment advertisements, one official, one off the record.

Official Recruitment Ad:
Adult men requested to participate in a paid behavioral study monitoring the effects of experimental drugs delivered via inhalation. Risks include cardiovascular complications, including increased blood pressure within sensory organs. Glaucoma patients would be at high risk for complications and should not apply. Additional risk comes from the possibility of psychological discomfort arising from possible lessening of assumed morals in the form of increased proclivity towards unfocused sexual activity. Participants will be compensated $100 or an hour’s participation. Go to the following address between the hours of 5:00 PM and 4:00 AM to participate: [Address goes here]

That ad will run in local newspapers and be fliered in supermarkets. The supermarket postings will have white pull off tabs on with the address and business hours.

Note how this is identical in content, but strikingly different in tone from the unofficial ad, which will be posted near bathhouses and gay sex shops and printed on neon green paper:

Unofficial Recruitment Ad:
Come party with all the other guys in a paid ($100 per hour!) study of the effects of amyl nitrate (poppers!) on sexual arousal. Poppers provided to all participants. Condoms will not be provided, because they are optional. Party starts at 12:00 AM and runs ‘til 4:00 AM nightly! Grab a VIP ticket below and bring your friends to: [Address goes here]

Everybody who shows up talking about reading the newspaper or holding a white address slip gets ushered into the “Control Group” wing, where they’ll be free to talk about politics while sniffing tiny water bottles for an hour. All told, I think they’ll leave happy.

Everybody who shows up with a neon green VIP ticket gets ushered into the “Test Group” wing, where they’ll spend an hour playing war games and simulating enemy troop movements with the help of lots of little bottles of amyl nitrate. I suspect they too will leave quite pleased with themselves.

The flamboyant secretaries I liberally hire to “randomly” sort participants into the two groups will have very little trouble independantly figuring out how to make my experimental data work, even when analyzed double blind. They’ll get to sit behind a desk each night and see who participates in my study. They’ll go home each night very pleased with themselves.

Six years down the road, having produced almost miraculous data showing the overpowering effectiveness of my product with minimal R&D (and thus having an earnings sheet with an impressive profit margin), I hand the U.S. government detailed drawings for gigantic poppers to drop on Baghdad. I’ll go home exceptionally pleased with myself.

The US government will discover that my weapons are just as effective as anything else they’ve been using, with the exception that they are received much better by the international press. They’ll be hailed as progressives and go home orgasmically pleased with themselves.

I think having written this post has enabled me to describe myself as a “military strategist.” Now I am pleased with myself on a whole new level.

This idea is like the gift that keeps on giving. We need to get that funding approved.

Plant Metaphor Update

Remember my post about the Easter lily that was on its way to becoming larger than my window?

This morning, I went up to it to water it and to “walk the plant.” (For people who never grow plants, most things that you grow in a pot by a window lean dramatically towards that window over time. The solution to this is to periodically rotate the pot to face a new direction.) The plant had grown so tall in relation to its pot that this time, it fell over onto me.

I believe this counts as satisfying my prediction that it would one day try to eat me.

I’ve returned the plant to its former position and leaned it against the window for support. This has solved the problem for now, and everything looks fine.

Unfortunately, my choice of words is now adding new depth to this topic. I chose to title the entry as being metaphorical, and I concluded by saying: “This seems pretty typical of how projects I manage usually turn out... Many [gardeners] additionally point out that lilies are rarely expected to be taller than the gardeners managing them. But that just sounds pessimistic to me. I’ll just continue to assume that the plants are immortal and care for them as such until proven otherwise. That’s how I usually manage projects like this. It works pretty well.”

So now I see two tenable interpretations:

1) Real world data suggests that projects I manage eventually collapse under their own weight.
2) Real world data suggests that projects I manage eventually attain the capacity to assimilate and control new, larger worlds.

I’d better repot the thing, so that I can better argue for interpretation #2.

Liquid Candy

My work offers concentrated pouches of electrolyte drink to everyone as a stopgap measure to prevent people from overheating and dying of dehydration during the hot summer months. I’m not aware that this was a major problem in the past, but it does sound like the sort of thing that we’d like to avoid.

The little pouches are called “Sqwinchers.” The idea is that you open one up, fill the pouch to capacity with cold water, then drink it.

I adore them. When I first started here, I drank twenty to forty per day. They are delicious. When filled with water, they form their delicious pouches full of sweet, electrolytic nectar in several fruit flavors. They also have a tea flavor that I love.

However, it is not technically necessary to actually fill the pouch with water. The pouches can be opened and consumed in the sweet, sweet concentrated form. The taste is intense. It’s as if you were eating a “Jolly Rancher” candy, but instead of the flavor washing over your tongue over the course of several minutes, every exquisite gustatory neuron fires at once, sending a sensory overload of flavor to your brain. Liquid candy is as good a term as I can imagine.

This topic is on my mind because I eventually forced myself to give the packets up, cold turkey. The little things carry about 45 calories each, all from sugar. When you consider the number of them I was drinking, well, let’s just say that Dr. Atkins would not approve. But today, I discovered that one of my more resourceful coworkers had independently researched and gotten approval to order new “Lite Sqwinchers.” They have zero calories.

Today has been a very good day.

Skeletal Remains LOVE Oprah

Did you hear the latest quirky news? Investigators have discovered the skeletal remains of a woman who seems to have died sometime in 1999 still sitting around drying up in her house. Her estranged ex husband has been dutifully mowing the lawn this whole time. If the fact that all of her friends, family, and neighbors didn’t notice anything all this time is true, I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that she was one of those people whose company can be thought of in terms of “Less is more.”

http://www.wfsb.com/news/13473195/detail.html?cnn=yes

Showing my usual pathos, you know what I wrote that introduction to lead into? A discussion of utility company billing practices. That woman’s electricity is still on, seven years after she paid her last bill. That skeleton has seen a LOT of free Oprah.

This story highlights (for me) a trend that I have been seeing a disturbing lot of lately. Many people with whom I associate (like it or not) have had great success with exactly this trick. Apparently, you can sign up for many basic utilities under the assumption that paying the bill is completely optional. Service will never go away, no matter how much you take it for granted.

Granted, I assume this does bad things to a person’s credit score.

But if we ignore that little detail for the moment, I really almost feel duped. I’m the sort of person who used to pay bills immediately, just so they would stop being on my counter. I use the past tense, because these days, my bills actually charge themselves to my credit card automatically and I only get them as email receipts.

I do not feel that I am boasting when I say that my system required more brainpower to set up and manage then the “ignore everything forever” method. However, I really have to say this. I felt proud of myself for finding a way to get 1.5% cash back on all my bills by setting them up this way. However, this savings seems quite insignificant in the face of widespread “100% off!” options.

Given that the deadbeats are saving money at a rate 67 times more effective than I am, I really have to stop and wonder who has the cognitive dissonance: them or me.

The scary thing is, to the best of my thinking, we’re both right. The way I want to live my life, my method is best. The way the deadbeats [claim verbally to] want to live their lives (interest rates seem to be irrelevant in this system), their method is best.

We live in an interesting country.

Statutory Rape Laws

I just finished writing a long paper that was rigorously logical, entirely practical, and not likely to spark much casual debate.

Naturally, the first thing that I want to do now that it’s done is write a (relatively) short post that is entirely emotional, subjective, and likely to infuriate everyone’s sense of morality.

To give myself a tiny chance of being taken seriously, I’d like you to test your own objectivity by asking you to answer the following questions, silently, in the back of your own mind. “Is it ever ok to have sex with a fifteen year old?” Now that you’ve answered that question, answer me this: “Is it ever not a big deal to have sex with a fifteen year old?”

This post is not being written for anyone who found either of those questions arousing. I’m going to generally assume that most or all of the people reading this instinctively answered “No.” to the first question and either “No.” or “Well, maybe, but probably not.” to the second one.

Now please read the following news article: http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/06/06/teen.sex.case.ap/index.html

In a nutshell, a bunch of people – including the Republican author of a statutory rape law and jury members who convicted a guy who had sex with a fifteen year old – are getting suspiciously close to answering “Yes.” To one or both of those thought exercises I posed.

Now I’m sure everyone has cleverly become upset with me for pulling a “bait and switch” just now. When I asked you to think about those questions before reading the article, I didn’t say anything about how the guy who got convicted was basically the same age as the girl who was “raped.”

That’s true, I didn’t. But I’m not going to apologize for that, because I’m going to continue ramping up the controversy. (I will apologize for suggesting that the two groups I mentioned are taking an almost pro-fifteen-year-old-sex stance. That’s misleading. They seem to be advocating that the guy get a spanking and be grounded instead.)

I’m going to argue that no one was raped at all, and no one needs to be punished.

I’ll say this before I begin: I am going to assume that no one got the fifteen year old drunk or high for the purpose of having sex with her. I am assuming she made those choices entirely on her own, and that they did not completely rewrite her morals for the period while she was drunk/high. I also assume she was not forced or coerced in any way. To be clear, if the girl was drugged or coerced, then my position in all of this would be very different. But if none of those things are true…

I say that absolutely no real, moral crime was committed. Hold on, reread. I am aware that the law was broken. But I’m going to let the Republican and the jury members do all the fighting about how good the law is. I want to talk about morality and ethics, which are another matter entirely.

The fact that everyone agrees that the girl who was giving head at that party decided to do so several times in a row tells me that she did not find the experience distressing or unpleasant. I also can’t help but notice that no one has even considered the fact that (legally) that girl raped several “helpless” boys one after another and is FAR more guilty of child rape than any of the single-offender guys. That interpretation of events is much less instinctive, but is it any less true? Those boys were all underage. Total children. Who she had sex with.

Here’s where I lay my cards down on the table. I challenge anyone to show me why the following point of view is fundamentally wrong. “Children can (and are) raped. This is morally untenable. Forcing sex on someone who does not want to have sex is ethically wrong, especially if the people raped are children (who are generally helpless to defend themselves). However, it is both possible and common for people who are legally children to want to have sex. It is therefore no more morally wrong for them to do so – with whoever they wish – than it is for people who are legally adults to do the same thing with each other.”

I have heard it argued that statutory rape laws create a “line” which defines the point when a person is mentally capable of deciding if he or she is willing to have sex. It wasn’t that long ago when I knew many fifteen year olds. I used to be one. I can think of exactly two who I have ever met who I feel were unqualified to answer if they wanted to have sex at any given time. Both of them were special needs children who would have had no idea what I was talking about. The question of whether or not you want to have sex is not difficult.

Again, I invite debate on this subject. In fact, I’ll even make concessions up front. I believe all of the following are true:
--People who want to have sex with people much younger than they are generally do not have the interests of the younger person in mind.
--There is definitely a point before which a child is not qualified to know if he or she wants to have sex. I believe it is the point before which he or she knows what sex is and what it can lead to, and before which he or she becomes aroused by erotic situations.
--Children should not be actively encouraged to have sex. However, this is almost irrelevant because a person’s sex drive starts out high and generally trends lower as age progresses. (In other words, most teens don’t NEED any encouragement to want to have sex.)

However, I want to remind people who are inclined to argue with me what my point is: “Statutory rape laws are really disturbing because they don’t do anything that couldn’t be covered by normal rape laws, kidnapping laws, and other laws – except occasionally destroy the lives of genuinely nice people (like that honors student on CNN).”

Medical Mood Rings

When I write about my work, despite the obvious fact that I'm ignoring logical guesses about what people might be interested in, I usually make it sound like a huge, dangerous chemical plant.

Inexplicable, I know.

Anyway, in the interest of fairness, I just got word that the media has become interested in one of our products. My building makes the chemicals that cause these medical stickers to work. Check it out:

http://www.path.org/projects/vaccine_vial_monitor.php

If you're interested, some of the other big-interest products I handle engineering for include:
--An essential precursor to one of the major AIDS drugs.
--An essential precursor to a heart disease medication that I'm willing to bet someone in your family is taking right now.
--A product that allows silicon to be depostited onto things like the computer chip that's imaging this post for you.
--An essential precursor to cute puppies. (Ok, maybe not that last one.)

I'm tempted to go on, but since I'm making a conscious effort not to get specific about what those chemicals are, I'm cutting it short. (I'm not getting specific on account that a disturbing number of lawyer-types that at least get notice of this thing now, if not actually read it. All I need is more advice about how everything I do is illegal for reasons that always strike me as only possible through the efforts of other lawyers.) (((This is as close as I'm likely to come to giving a shout-out to my peeps!)))

Hazardous Laundry

The laundry bins at work were recently upgraded.

My building employs mostly chemical operators who wear uniforms while they do their work in the process bays. These are washed and repaired regularly by an outside service. (For people who are just joining me, the three exceptions to the uniform rule are the building manager, secretary, and me.)

The laundry baskets that they use to collect the worn linens are nothing more than laundry bags held up by wire frames. The locker rooms each have several of them lined up neatly against the center wall. Previously, the laundry bags were hospital white.

This week, I noticed for the first time that now the bags are now a teal color and are labeled in bright orange letters with the words “Biohazard Linens.”

I laughed.

Technically, the label is totally appropriate, although obviously the company has many systems in place to prevent people from routinely dousing their clothing with known hazardous materials.

But I consider this to be terribly amusing all the same. I knew a bunch of people at college who needed those laundry bags. They might have worked with a lot fewer chemicals than our operators do, but still… Gross.

I wonder if it would be illegal for those things to be sold directly to the public at someplace like “Linens and Things.” I know a bunch of sarcastic mothers who would think themselves awfully clever if they got their kids a hamper like that.

Plus, can you imagine the possibility for abuse? I’m picturing some clever guy living in an apartment somewhere, forced to haul his laundry to a crowded Laundromat on a regular basis, just to wait in line for hours. I figure it will only take a few loads of biohaz washing before he’s alone in there. And even if that doesn’t work, the looks on people’s faces would be classic.