Did anyone else see Little City (1997) starring Jon Bon Jovi and Penelope Ann Miller?
Adam: People who are tragically ambitious and smart go to New York and people who are just tragically smart come [to San Francisco].
Rebecca: Oh. Well what about people who are just tragically ambitious?
Adam: They go to LA.
During election season, it begs the question, are people who go to DC just ruthlessly ambitious?
I went to the 24 Hour Fitness in Long Beach this afternoon, since I had an evening appointment there. Heading towards the locker room, I passed a water fountain and a machine that brewed Starbucks coffee — mild and strong blends — by the cup.
Complete double take. But it smelled like coffee and the machine featured a Starbucks logo. For $1.55 via credit card, you two can enjoy some dehydrating coffee while you spin, kickbox, and run your way to fitness.
What was corporate thinking, granting space to a company that sells what is ultimately a diuretic in a space where electrolytes and fluid intake is key?
I had the opportunity to watch a documentary covering research into the dangers of “silver” amalgam fillings while taking an Intro to Folk and Alternative Medicine class in college. The American Dental Association worked hard to bury the story believing it could cause widespread panic.
Personally, after seeing the BBC documentary I promised I’d pay extra for porcelain fillings in the future. (My dentist was not particularly happy I had seen the documentary.) Did you know there’s more mercury in silver amalgam fillngs than silver? (Let’s all applaud the nomeclature consultant who thought “silver amalgam” would yield more trust and acquiescence than “mercury amalgam.”)
Mercury slowly evaporates from the fillings, and some university researchers thought, hey, wouldn’t it be great to find out where it goes? So they gave some sheep and monkeys a mouth full of cavities. Within a year, traces of mercury could be found throughout the body.
Fritz Lorscheider and Murray Vimy set about clearing the smoke surrounding the amalgam mystery. Vimy, the academic dentist and World Health Organization consultant, and Lorscheider, Professor of Medical Physiology at the University of Calgary, pioneered a simple yet dramatic experiment to show not only where the missing mercury went but also that it did do harm when it got there. Their work shattered the comfortable illusion that mercury in amalgams was stable and safe. They took a sheep and put fillings in it’s teeth containing radioactive mercury which would show up as black on X-rays.
Dr MURRAY VIMY: Here’s the outline of the sheep, going all the way around, and this is the jawbone of the sheep. Here are the two stomachs. This area is the liver. And here are the two kidneys. And this is the transverse colon. So the mercury from the fillings, which was slightly radioactive, migrated to these tissues. In fact, it was in all the tissues. Now the dental profession said that well it’s a sheep, it chews too much, they grind a lot, they regurgitate their food, it’s not a good example.
VOICE OVER: So they repeated the work with monkeys and found again the mercury had spread. Furthermore, they discovered that even small amounts of mercury from amalgams damaged the kidneys of the sheep.
Read the full transcript of the BBC’s broadcast of The Poison in Your Mouth to see what kind of information the American Dental Association didn’t trust Americans to process rationally.
Or you can watch the documentary — don’t you just love the Internet.
[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2288515475015225824]
Over a decade later, the same tug of war over the safety of “silver” amalgam fillings continues at several days of FDA hearings in 2006 reviewing mercury toxicity as it pertains to dental work.
The continued use of mercury in dental fillings despite decades of evidence demonstrating its toxicity when used that way seems comparable to the decades of data supression by the tobacco industry that shows cigarettes to be highly addictive and a potential health risk or the current raging battle between mercury additives in vaccines and the growing links to autism.
Why do people drive circles around a gym in an effort to obtain a spot closest to the door? If you’re going to work out, doesn’t the extra 3 minutes it takes you to traverse the lot contribute to your workout? I don’t get it.
Then again, maybe it’s me. People think I’m strange for walking 7 blocks to the gym from my apartment. It’s an extra mile each way that I get to add to my workout.
Planning a trip to Australia? Check out the tasty goodness at these restaurants:
Crown Bakery
215 Swanston Street, Melbourne
Must have: Toasted scrambled egg and bacon sandwich with salt and pepper, on whole meal bread — it’s a weighty sandwich that will leave you stuffed til mid afternoon and darned tasty too.
Also try: their cream puffs — heavy cream to puff ratio
Thresherman’s Bakehouse
221 Faraday Street, Melbourne
The must have: chocolate mud cake
Camy Shanghai Dumpling & Noodle Restaurant
23 Tattersalls Lane, Melbourne (a restaurant that is literally down a dark alley in the middle of Chinatown)
Must have: dumplings with their house-made dippings sauces, as I recall there was a cherry-soy sauce that was mightly taste.
Be prepared: the joints smells like boiled dumplings all the time
The Raw Prawn Cafe
103 Esplanade, Cairns
The must have: “A hop, skip, hump, and a jump” entree featuring crocodile, emu, camel, and kangaroo steak. (Note: ‘roo steak is tastiest hot, so don’t eat that steak last.”
After experience much travel drama, bloggers Laurel and Sonia and Ree thought we should come up with contest featuring stories of surviving a really effed-up travel experience. My entry is below.
See details for the contest at Ree’s blog, The Hotfessional. Yes, there are prizes.
I spent my final semester of college in Australia. While I would describe it as 6 of the best months of my life, I could not travel on a plane without incident.
Making my initial trek from NJ to Australia, I scheduled a 24-hour layover to visit a college-friend. My luggage didn’t make the initial flight; after several panicked phone calls with the airline, they arrived for the second leg of the trip.
I hope to someday be able to afford plane seats with actual leg room; until then, coach gets me there. The trip from Los Angeles to Melbourne included a stop in Auckland for those travelers going to New Zealand. I had the window seat (in an attempt to make sleep more likely) and sat beside an elderly couple.
A few hours outside of New Zealand we hit some pretty wicked turbulance. The seat belt sign in turned on and passengers start buckling up. The woman next to me is not looking particularly well, and her husband is frantically searching for something. The flight attendants are making their way through the aisles and ask him to sit. He explains his wife is diabetic and her blood sugar is clearly off, and he can’t find her pills. . . a flight attendant begins to help him search through their carry-on luggage in an effort to find the missing pills. The turbulence gets worse — I am glad seat belts are invented.
The woman next to me is looking worse by the minute, and before her pills are found, she falls into a diabetic seizure. (I am now wishing that I had taken a first aid course of some sort before getting on a plane to travel half way around the world.) The situation is now more dire and flight attendants are clustering around our row of seats, trying to figure out what to do. The husband and I are trying to restrain the woman so that she doesn’t clock us; flight attendants find there is no doctor on our flight–just dandy.
The husband explains she needs sugar immediately. Haven’t we all seen this episode on some television programming with the crashing diabetic who is quickly rushed orange juice with table sugar stirred in? Not our flight attendants, who return with a paper cup of maple syrup. Turbulence + diabetic seizure + maple syrup = a sticky mess for all parties involved. Fortunately, it does the trick and the woman gains control of herself.
The flight attendants aren’t sure what to do. The husband and I check on his wife to make sure she’s not about to relapse. Once all parties believe the woman is stable for the rest of the flight and the turbulence subsides, the flight attendants ask me if I’d like to switch seats so that the couple can have more room. I gladly agree, having had more than enough excitement for one trip.
My thanks for my seizure assistance? They seat me next to a Canadian with the most atrocious body odor ever experienced in an enclosed space.
While I wanted to believe that my plane drama was behind me. Flight incidents continued through the duration of my stay in Australia.
Prior to leaving the States, I booked my flight to Western Australia for spring break, knowing it was my golden opportunity to do some traveling. I booked flights on Ansett Airlines, which went bankrupt and shut down about a week before I was set to fly west. Quantas, the only other domestic carrier, now had travelers by the gonads and raised the prices of a number of flights.
(Australia struggled with the 50% cut in available domestic flights, literally overnight. The best expression of the nation’s overwhelming frustration was written on a chalkboard in a cafe I passed through — “The definition of frustration: a terrorist an Ansett ticket.” This airline shut down occurred just weeks after 9/11, and anyone holding an Ansett ticket was not going anywhere.)
Fortunately, Quantas agreed to honor Ansett tickets if one could find an open seat on a plane. In order to get to Perth, I had to take a train from Melbourne to Adelaide and then catch a flight to Perth. (In rescheduling my return flight to Melbourne, I had no choice but to miss 2 days of classes — darn!)
I spent Christmas in Sydney and had to go back to Melbourne to pack my bags for a flight back to the US on New Year’s Day. I got back to the airport for my return flight to Melbourne early because I was tired of dragging my duffel bag around Sydney. To pass the time, I picked up a book in one of the kiosks and planted myself down in front of the gate listed on the TV monitor. The book I picked my have been plastic-wrapped with a sticker noting it was not for consumption by minors. (Don’t judge me for reading erotica in an airport — I look at avocados in an entirely different way now, but that’s another story for another time.) A few hours later I look up and realize my flight is gone from the monitor, and this gate is empty. I’m concerned. . . and then I hear an announcement paging ME to my flight, which boarded at the other end of the terminal. The flight was waiting for me, and the only excuse I had was I was lost in a “good” book. I got to be that person that everyone hated for holding up the flight — evils eyes abounded as I got on that plane.
Flight fraccas continued with my return flight to the US. Beverages were served at regular intervals to those who stayed awake on the overnight flight. Each time a different flight attendant worked his or her way through the aisles. Each time the flight attendant got to me, he or she managed to dump my requested water in my lap. By the third visit I was very wary of the flight attendant and inquired jokingly, after yet another lapful of water, as to weather I was being targeted for a particular reason. After this third attendant finished her rotation through the aisles, the head attendant approached me — to apologize. He offered me a very lovely pack of travel size toiletries that were only given to Business or First class customer. Even though I had a great sense of humor about having water dumped on me repeatedly, I highly appreciated the gesture.
It’s been a number of years since I’ve had the opportunity to do some big traveling, but despite my experiences on planes, I don’t doubt the amazing experiences waiting for me just after the next flight.
Growing up on the East coast, whenever the weatherman warned of a nor’easter sweeping through, shelves at grocery stores were quickly stripped by consumers prepping to hole up for the weekend.
Now that I live in Southern California, I no longer have to worry about several feet of snow getting dumped on my block overnight. What I have found this week is that when heavy storm systems bring rain to the region, consumers act much the same here. I swung by a Von’s mid-afternoon today and found the shelves bare for much of the produce staples (bananas, anyone?) and bakery items. Seems like rain brings out the nesting tendency is SoCal residents.
“Why are white men allowed to look at the issues and judge for themselves and the rest of us are expected to take sides grade school style? That is racist and sexist and dumb. That is like if all the stupid people voted for Huckabee (please God let this not happen).”
so sayeth Margaret Cho, blogging on the Huffington Post re: America’s Next Top President
A number of my friends are pursuing or have completed their PhDs. As doctoral candidates they pick a focus that reflects their academic passion. In turn, it makes researchign and writing their disseration (book length) less painful as they try to add to the discussion taking place in their given field.
This afternoon I ran across the following ad on craiglist:
I am finished with my course work and working full time and in a full time internship. I need help with my dissertation. I have done all the footwork for the literature review, I have two experts in the field (substance abuse) on my committee. I am looking for a writer/ researcher that can help me get this done! We will collaborate but I do not have the time to put my ideas to paper.
I will pay well for good work that will help me pass on my first time defending.
Thank you.
Compensation: $10-12 Per page
A doctoral candidate’s career trajectory is basically determined by their disseration topic, as it establishes their expertise and focus with in a field. Any job they get following completion of their dissertation is effected by the culminating work of 4-8 years of graduate school.
But Zak, this person works full time and interns. Still it’s no excuse. When I was an undergraduate, several of my resident advisors were PhD candidates from other universities who work worked full time, making sure college students didn’t do irreparable harm to themselves, while writing their dissertion on weekends over a 2 year period.
Real PhD candidates write their own papers.
Our political elite announced their carefully considered economic stimulus package. I can look forward to a $600 check from the US government sometime this summer because the IRS is a tad busy processing tax returns til June.
I have a few problems with the notion of this stimulus package.
A) We already have a federal deficit of over $9 trillion; clearly pissing money away hasn’t been much use for us over the last 7 years (as we’re about to slam the economic brakes) so spending more money we don’t have might not be the best solution. Borrowing more money from Asia, one of our biggest economic threats, also not so good an idea. FYI : Asia basically owns the US at this point. They could cripple our government and economy by calling in all of the money they’re owed at once.
Maybe I’m just bitter about crappy budgeting, what with pouring money into military operations abroad, while health care, education, and economic issues at home are neglected. It seems to me that it’s a tad hypocritical to expect financial responsibility from our citizens when our elected officials can’t pull the same off with our federal government.
B. How does this stimulus create new jobs? It seems to be it just accepts the status quo and wants to keep people shopping on weekends, while corporations can continue to cut corners at the expense of their employees.
Perhaps investing in green business might generate some new gigs. Perhaps we should look to committing to a 20-year deadline for abandoning fossil fuels. Let’s kick that $150 billion towards research and application of advancements in clean energy — that might create jobs. Ironic that the same companies that have been happily degrading our environment to boost profits, will now get to do the innovating that will make billions trying to save our planet.
C. Per Cardtrak.com, American consumers carry a median $6,600 in credit card debt. I can only speak for my inner social circle, but $600 is a nice payment on a line of credit that has already been extended to me. there’s really no need to buy more stuff. I need to pay for the stuff that I have; fortunately, I only have about $3000 in credit debt to clear, but my student loan is another story. I don’t think payng off my credit card will be the kind of economic action Bush and his lackies are hoping for.
What will you do with your rebate?
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