It's been a rough couple weeks for me lately, probably because I've spent too much time thinking about myself and not enough time doing things.

I suppose its a mark of some sort of progress, though, that I've gone from being unhappy and discouraged to my current state, which is one of nearly complete annoyance.

I'm annoyed with my Jeep, my television (and sometimes the things it shows me), my home, the weather, my computer stuff, and even with the games I play on it. I'm trying to keep my annoyance directed at the things in my life, but my unhappiness with myself keeps poking its head up and I don't really have much of a defense against that.

All my problems with the things in my life are pretty much my fault, but not all.

When I get my computer to work and connect to the internet (which I still feel like capitalizing even though it's recently been downgraded by AP), my annoyance changes to be directed at what I see on there. Of course, part of that's my doing because I go mostly to sites where people share their thoughts on things, and those can annoy me no end.

While the internet opens up the world so we can all see what's going on everywhere, what I've seen lately is massive numbers of people who use it to display their selfishness, their ugly natures, and their total lack of compassion and even the most meager attempts to understand other people.

It's not much of a relief from what I'm trying to escape at the moment, but I'll get better.

There’s a lot of things that surprise me, but you shouldn’t take that to mean everything does.

The other day, after my car passed its smog test by the slimmest of margins, I was wondering what I could do to lower those pesky hydrocarbons to, say, a more tolerable level. Being all hip and with-it and all, I did a Google search and the results were different than I expected. That’s the definition of surprising I believe in.

Rather than offering up anything particularly mechanical, my query returned links to pages of people selling or touting additives. “Pour this stuff in your gas tank, drive it out, and pass the test” pretty much sums up the process.

These products, which may or may not work as described or help in the slightest, don’t seem to me to be a way to “fix” your engine. Few details are given, but it reminded me of one of my all-time favorite expressions, the one that comes from marketing: People don’t buy drill bits, they buy half-inch holes.

That is, the results, not the means to acquire them, are what’s important, and I really shouldn’t have been so surprised.

I wonder, though, how these Blue Sky type products work their magic. Do they take all the things that could be contributing to hydrocarbons, burn ‘em up, and shoot them out the tailpipe before you take the test. That doesn’t sound particularly beneficial, even though it may result in you passing the test. How long before they come back? The directions on the Internet say to burn up the tank with the additive, then fill the tank as normal and then take the test, so this strikes me as more of a band-aid than a fix, if you catch my drift.

Still, any problem in this capitalistic society will have solutions provided by people out to make a buck. If we didn’t need paper, a lot fewer people would be growing trees.

The other thing that struck me as obvious within a minute of hearing about it was this recent discovery of pharmaceuticals in the water supply. While I, myself, am healthy enough not to need medicine, I’ve taken enough vitamins over the years to be familiar with green, smelly pee. Extra vitamins, that I bought and paid for, I might add, literally going down the drain.

It makes perfect sense that heart medications, birth control, antibiotics of all types, anti-depressants, cholesterol drugs and all the rest would also have enough extra stuff in the pills that there would be some waste. When you buy from a printer I think you get plus or minus ten percent of the quantity, and every carpenter or painter knows to get about ten percent more than they need. Just to be on the safe side, you understand.

Now, no one knows what the long term effect of taking all this mystery, unwanted medicine will be, but I sleep easier knowing I won’t be having any babies. I don’t think I’m getting as many anti-depressants as I might want, but it’s comforting to know that I’m getting a few molecules of heart medicine with every bowl of soup.

The steroids don’t bother me at all. They’ll just pass through my system and into the next person’s. If our digestive system had any way of handling those things, Roger Clemens and bicycle riders wouldn’t have to get shots in their butts.

So things which might surprise me at first really shouldn’t. If they do, they don’t do so for long, but that’s because my mental faculties are getting all this free medication!

I'm sure I've mentioned before this great thing I heard or read somewhere about memory and how someone said something about how some things are remembered because of utilitarian reasons, some for no reason at all, and others, maybe, because we make a conscious effort to remember them.

I'm not sure, exactly, because the quote and whoever said it must have fallen into the second of the three because I sure didn't make any effort about remembering it for future citation. Still, it's true, and things in the second class are the best, anyway.

I can't help it. I'm intrigued by how inconsequential shit sticks in my mind for years and years.

I'm not sure if I remember it because I heard it so often growing up, or if it was just one of those things my mom said once, but quite often at three in the morning I remember my mom scolding me about "wishing my life away." I don't remember the exact wish of mine that incited that remark, but it may have been the typical "I wish I was grown up" thinking I believe lots of kids do. The only time I can honestly remember wishing time would pass quickly was once on July 4th when I was bored setting fire to snakes and staining the sidewalk and wanted to see some real fireworks.

I think of it often at three in the morning, though, when I wish it was five so I could get out of bed at a more reasonable time. Not that five is a such a good time to wake up, but it beats three, hands down. Three is just plain weird.

All of which has nothing whatsoever to do with any of the Fs referred to in the title. I was going to dazzle everyone with my knowledge of anatomy and talk about frenums (knowing full well that the plural of frenum is actually frena) and, then, show my insight by talking about how knowledge is frequently confused with simple memorization of terms.

I still think that, mostly because whenever any expert is consulted, they far often are only conversant with the specific and accurate names for things, which we all take for conclusive evidence of their wisdom. In fact, I think use of jargon or technical terms is pretentious, and mostly used to disguise or obscure insecurities, but I think that about lots of things.

In any case, the point is, using and insisting on technical terms, to me, is the exact opposite of knowledge. It's an old saw, but it's true, that being able to teach is the best indicator of knowledge. If you can't make a lay person understand what you're talking about, you don't know it very well. Hammering people with technical terms only makes you look like an ass, and not a very knowledgeable one at that.

Then, California wildfire season sprung on us, and everyone in the LA area who watched TV was treated to newscasters rambling on and reminding us all of two things:

1. Most newscasters, when not given copy to read, are indistinguishable from any other great looking person


2. Extra points are given any newscaster who mentions Foscheck

It can't be easy to fill several hours of broadcast time when there's, honestly, very little to say. Many of these news anchors, and I suspect they do it just to piss me off, spend an inordinate amount of time treating the reporters in the field as if they were absolute idiots by warning them repeatedly to "stay safe" and checking that they're wearing their goggles and masks.

Now I'll grant you that the reporters in the field have no more to say about wildfires than they do hurricane winds and rain, but I guess it's their lot in life to stand about outside when any sane person would be inside and offer inane comments about the most glaringly obvious of observations. Maybe they're all hoping to get a job with Fox News, I dunno.

In any case, I got my two Fs in, and even talked a bit about memory.

It's pretty simple, really. What I have against lawyers is that they don't want me in their world.

Years ago I was watching the OJ Simpson trial and in the beginning, during the questioning of one of the police lab workers or something, a very innocuous question was asked by a member of the defense team. I don't remember it exactly, but think I do, and it went something like this:

"Did you do your best possible job (when you handled the evidence)?"

That's when I realized that, if they don't want me dead, most people want me off their planet. It's a very good question, and one I'd hate to answer under oath. I can't recall ever, in doing anything, not doing the "best" possible. As far as I'm concerned, there's always room for improvement.

Not one thing is ever done perfectly, not when I add in hindsight, so I'd have to honestly answer "no" to that and similar questions. And that answer, I've learned, implies that I'm a total slackard and ambivalent. Lawyers, and others, would eat it up.

Since I can always imagine doing things better, not one thing has been done to the best of my ability. Not one. Nada. Zilch. Zero. I can always a do a better job, from everything from tying my shoelaces to writing an entry for my blog. Not one has been done the "best," which to me means perfectly.

Not everyone, of course, would say they want me dead since I can't be perfect, but I think they'd all agree that I should change. I'm not sure what their answer would be if I told them I refuse to change, so that's why I came up with that "get off my planet" thing.

In the end, it's all the same. Every accident is preventable, at least in hindsight, so if I'm ever hauled into court for causing one, I'm dead meat. Lawyers must live in a perfect world, one I'm not qualified to join.

This weekend marks the unofficial beginning of Summer, 2007, which coincides with the end of Spring, 2007. Because of that, I'm going to pose my weather question.

I think I've already said that I have questions about the "inches of mercury" used to measure barometric pressure, ones that my personal assistant could answer for me if I'm ever lucky enough to have one. Another thing my assistant could figure out is why we measure rainfall in inches.

Not that we've had very much at all this year where I live. The word dry comes to mind, unless we're talking about my yard, in which case the better word would be brown. Still, the little rain we've gotten, as well as the seasonal norm, is always given as a matter of inches.

It goes without saying that when we receive rain every container in the yard fills up with about three times the amount the officials say we got. I suppose I could get around that and get a result more in line with the proper number if I had a tube about a foot tall with a one inch opening, but I don't. As it is, the buckets and coffee cans out there all give me a wildly inflated figure and get me excited about just how much rain we've gotten.

But that doesn't have much to do, at all, with my question.

Water, and by extension, rain, is a liquid last time I looked. I guess counting up the inches that have fallen is a measure of volume, but doesn't water already have a built-in measure of that? Don't we, for every thing other than rain or snow, measure volume in cups or quarts or shots? If we want to be scientific or European, we could use liters or ccs, and I think any of them would be a better way to measure rainfall than the way we do now. Inches, to me, measure length.

Liters of rain per square meter, or cups per square yard, would be a sensible way to measure rainfall, and I guess that's why we don't do it. One of the first things my personal assistant would be charged with is starting the march to get everyone on board with adopting the Russell Standard for Precipitation Measurement.

Unless, of course, someone else has come up with this idea already.

No, I'm not talking about that. Besides, that's for married people and I think the frequency's weekly, though last week must have upped the ante, what with the holiday and all.

My sister tells me that dogs like routine, but if they do they're not alone. People do, too. Here in America we've grown used to changing the battery in our fire alarms twice a year when Daylight Savings Time comes and goes, we bathe on Saturday night and have roast on Sunday, we change the filters in our heaters monthly and brush two times a day.

We have set routines for all these things and perform them without thinking, which may explain their popularity. Most everyone I know likes being mindless as often as possible, and having a structured routine lets us accomplish mundane tasks without giving them much thought.

It's easy enough to launder my clothes when they get dirty, what with automatic washers and dryers and store-bought detergent, but I feel a little left out of the mainstream. The ads for soaps and things show kids playing, and I can't remember the last time I got grass stains on my knees. They've gone the way of stubbed toes.

Nor do I work in an oil field. I can't recall ever having iodine in the house, but that seems to be a pretty common stain from what I've seen, as is blood. The number of times I've had my clothing ruined by blood is precisely one, but it's much more common than my personal experience would lead you to believe. I understand that.

At some point in my twenties or thirties I realized that I didn't work up as much of a sweat sitting in my office as many people did at their jobs. Not only didn't have stains to remove, I barely soiled my clothes at all. Still, after each day's wear, I washed them so I could safely wear them again.

I still do, usually, but winter brings with it a number of problems. Unlike summer, I routinely change my clothes several times a day now. I wear clothes to bed and leave them on for the first hour or so of waking, coffee-drinking life. During the day I wear one set, and it's sometimes shorts, depending on my activity, but once the sun goes down, I change again into heavier, warmer clothes.

I pull layers on, and remove them, and I'm never sure how much "wear" I've given a particular sweatshirt or pair of jeans. Have I crossed the threshold of acceptable use? It's one thing to wear a pair of jeans all day, but when that's broken up over a couple days for a couple hours each, can I keep wearing them?

I ask, mostly because I'm very much aware that not only do I have to remain on the right side of society, but I don't want to wash my clothes too much. It only took me a few times cleaning out dryer lint before I put two and two together and realized that if I washed my clothes often enough, they'd completely disappear. If they were losing that much fabric each time I washed them, it was only a matter of time before they'd be laundered into non-existence.

Yesterday, in what may be a record for my neighborhood, some kids were out playing with water wearing bathing suits. Incredible. Tomorrow, rain is forecast, and yesterday was hot as a pistol. Some people may point to these changing weather conditions as reasons for illness, but I'm not convinced about that. What I can suggest is you only get to wear a bathing suit once before it needs laundering.

Think of it as underwear, but, sometimes, cuter.

Last night, in Madison Square Garden, Dr. Robert A. Indeglia picked James, an English Springer Spaniel, as "America's Top Dog."  The Westminster Kennel Club selects a new genetically modified dog each year for the title, and this year's is pretty damn cute.

We Americans usually focus on celebrating genetic modification in the summer, what with all the dog and horse racing going on and the county fairs, so this award pretty much stands on its own. We hold it, too, in what's as unnatural a setting as we can find, but I never hear of any protests by the hippies.

This year's winner was one of my favorites, but that's not hard when two of the competitors are poodles. Now, don't get me wrong: I like poodles fine enough, just not when they're shaped with clippers.

The dogs in the show are as unnatural as the setting. There isn't much talk about genetic modification, but we all know it's there. Nature never built any English Springer Spaniels, or Dachshunds, or even Dalmatians, we humans did that. We're rather fond of pushing together different things together to see what we get, and it doesn't much matter if it's done in a breeding pen or a scientific lab.

For some reason, though, if some kindly old farm woman in a calico apron is grafting a branch of one plant onto another, or her husband chews on a weed while wearing overalls and watches his favorite rooster mount his fattest hen, we're fine with that. In each case they're trying to manipulate nature to produce a better result, but we get in a tizzy if a geneticist does the modifying directly inside the cells.

There's a difference, sure, but not a difference in kind.

We humans can build mules out of an unholy alliance between horses and donkeys, and everyone's cool with that. We've made so many hybrids, someone's come up with a top ten list of them. When we're not content with seeing what happens when we mix different species, we go up a level and see what we can come up with members of different genera. You can buy one of the results of this, triticale, at Whole Foods.

Humans just can't leave well enough alone. Nor, should we. We have fancier tools now and better ways of using them, but once we stopped our nomadic ways we began genetically manipulating our environment. Doing it with a pipette is no different than doing it with branch and twine or a penis, only more efficient.

It may seem horrifying to move some DNA from a trout to a tomato, but they share over half the same genes, anyway. Every living thing on this planet does, which either argues for a common ancestor or a lazy god. Also, it makes discovering life on other planets even more interesting.

Someone, and I'm looking at you, Teresa Patton and Ruth Dehmel, did a great job constructing James. Congratulations!

I could be a damn fine philanthropist if I had the money to give away. Everyone, it seems, wants to make money off or from me.

I went to Home Depot, which this entry is marginally about, to pick up a bag to hold my gardening implements. There's no sense in them being mixed up with my other bags, the ones for carpentry, wood working, automotive repair, or power tools, so I'm now the proud owner of a cheap bag that will hold whatever flavor of pruning shears I bought, my little hand hoe, and my weed eradicators. Also in there is a noxious mixture for use in removing stumps, but that's another story.

What surprised me when I went to Home Depot wasn't that I was immediately accosted by someone asking me what work I needed done: I'm used to that, but it's not as flattering as when some damsel in distress seeks me out in the aisle to ask for advice. I guess I look the part of a knowledgeable handyman, which I assume comes from the work boots I often wear.

No, what surprised me at the market was the stalls set up in the parking lot. Much like the little suitcases full of Rolex replicas or DVDs, people were selling all kinds of things. Not tools, which I would expect, but belts, hats, and probably food dehydrators. They were all my friend as long as they felt I would give them money, and in that they're just like everyone else on this planet.

When I was done filling my six bags of backyard growth I slumped in front of the TV and caught an ad for Home Depot. Kismet. They were enticing me to buy a new refrigerator, one that would save energy.

Now, I'm the first to admit that I used to be quite the little hippy, and even today I hold many of the same beliefs I did then. The thing is, this razzle-dazzle refrigerator was, I think, offering energy savings as a rationalization, as an excuse for consumption.

There's some research to be done, and when I get all that money the funds I don't give away will be used to hire a personal assistant. One of the things he or she will get to do is work with numbers and look stuff up for me. I have no idea how all this works, but to get this entry posted I'll make some up so my entry makes sense.

If I can save a couple hundred bucks a year in energy costs, that's a good thing. What I'm afraid of, though, is that replacing an existing refrigerator with one of these fancy ones is making things worse. I'm not doing the planet any good at all if I get a new refrigerator to save a barrel of oil a month in creating energy for it because I have a hunch that it will take more than a lifetime's oil savings to manufacture the damn thing and ship it to me.

Sure, there are those who will say that "every little bit helps," and they're right as far as they go, but not in any big sense. A few years ago I went to that website and learned I was using something like four planet's worth of resources. That sickened me, and I think I've managed to cut that way down and am now using a state or province less, and I'm talking a western state and not one of those piddly east coast ones. What disturbs me, though, is that we so easily look at immediate gratification and listen to sales people.

I have no idea how many barrels of oil it takes to dig up the raw materials and turn them into a refrigerator, but my personal assistant would find that out for me. I also have no idea how many barrels of oil I'd save in a year with a more energy-efficient one, but that would be good to know. I do think, however, that Home Depot will sell no few number of these new appliances, and the majority of those who buy them will smile, thinking they're doing good things for the planet.

Saving a smidgen of energy with something while being responsible for using much more to make it is a fool's argument. Yes, brushing your teeth during your Saturday night bath is better than never brushing at all, but saving a little bit of energy every day doesn't make much sense if it takes more than you'll ever save to make the damn thing in the first place.

I must be wrong about this, but I'll be damned if I can see my logic error.

At my last job when I wasn't busy grumbling about how we were counting kisses to measure love, a metaphor I was very proud of, I responded to a lot of suggestions by saying "Just because you can, doesn't make it a good idea."

I was thinking of that the other day when, for the first time in years, I was at a gas station filling up my car, which took 5.94 gallons. When I was first driving, not only did we have the old pumps with the analog display like the odometer, but the gallons advanced much quicker than the dollars did.

Those old pumps, which couldn't display prices over one dollar a gallon, were accurate enough to have kept the American motorist on the road for the first fifty years of driving, I'm guessing, but when we advanced to the computer-controlled, digital pumps, we suddenly realized that we could needlessly measure the gasoline dispensed. As if that helps anyone.

I've long been a fan of slide rules, which got me through high school. I have no idea whatever happend to the large ones in my math classrooms that were nearly as long as the blackboard, but I'd like to think they ended up somewhere. As calculators and computers have replaced them, I can't help thinking back to how much of the world was engineered and built to "slide rule accuracy," a term whose loss I regret nearly as much as "jungle."

Slide rule accuracy, as I understood it, meant three digits. That's not very many, but somehow it worked and, just as importantly, was always a number I could understand. We can now easily calculate things out to ten or one hundred digits and, having that ability, do so. The thing is, I'm not convinced that it honestly adds anything of value.

Do I really need to know, to five digits, the percent of my expenditures that go to food? I have to admit that 27.847% gets rounded off by me to 25%, or one quarter of my expenses. That's a figure I can understand, one that makes sense to me, and one that gives me a ballpark figure I can live with.

I noticed this obsession with needless accuracy when I got my first digital watch. Instead of telling me the time, I read 11:47, and then had to visualize that before I knew that it was quarter to twelve. Few things are more annoying than asking someone with a digital for the time: they'll read off the digits instead of saying "it's almost noon," or some such answer that actually gives you what you need to know.

I can no track my gasoline usage to one-thousandth of a gallon. Last time I checked, that was 3.78541ccs, or, as I like to call it, three and a quarter. I'm guessing that's about a thimble full, and is unneccassirly complex. It does permit me, however, to calculate my mileage to thousandths as well, or five and a half feet.

I think that's silly.

I've never met the man, nor anyone who's claimed to, but I bet when he wasn't mucking about with geometric shapes Abraham Maslow was a decent enough sort. If he had kids, I bet he took them to the movies and bought them popcorn and cotton candy.

I'm not as high up as I'd like, but I'm trying to be comfortable where I am. I know, that isn't easy considering we're talking about needs instead of wants, but I'm nothing if not a rebel.

And, one of the worst sort of rebels, the Internet variety. Effectively nameless and anonymous, I can be a bully and Internet tough guy and continually seek to drag others down to my level, a practice that's neither rewarding nor practical.

Still, I must be lacking something crucial. It's been thirty years since I was introduced to Maslow, and I can't say as I've advanced very much at all in that time. I've momentarily bettered myself, but I've never been able to get it to stick. The most likely culprit is my lack of drive, but it's entirely possible I'm just overlooking something evident to the rest of the world.

Oh, sure, I once described all of life on the back of a blue 3X5 card, but I lost it.

I wouldn't have thought it possible that there would be something sadder and more useless than plastic bags with zippers, but that just shows the limits of my imagination. The depths to which the American public will sink to reward marketing breakthroughs and their own laziness and fondness for new may reach deeper than I'd allowed.

!@(heinz.jpg)

It's evidently too much to ask people to turn their squeezable bottles over to dispense the product. I have no idea what, other than laziness, would make anyone think these mustard bottles with the label printed on upside-down are what the world's been waiting for, but I guess they're all the rage now. I bought this one because it was cheaper than the typical, upright, style, but I'm less than impressed.

Oh, sure, it saves me turning the bottle over, and if you add that one second to all the mustard used in this great country, I guess it adds up to a lot. Probably even enough for us to have time to cure cancer or resolve the homeless or health care issues.

I thought we'd reached our bottom when another marketing genius decided it was too much work to seal a plastic bag with our fingers, but I was wrong. I grew up with wax paper surrounding my sandwiches, then, later, those plastic bags that had a flap and were supposed to seal. I could never figure out the intricacies of those, but the later version, with the seal, were something I could manage.

Then, they came up with the colored ones so you could tell by the purple or green that you'd managed to correctly align the seal, but I found that less than helpful. Even if I left a gap, I still saw the mixed color. I always found it easier to see if I could press any more air out to determine if the bag was completely sealed.

Then, awhile ago, they decided that sealing the bag by hand was too pedestrian or something. In an effort to further discount any notion that there's benefits to manual work, they added built in zippers to the bags. Not only does the zipper require much more plastic than the bag itself and a few more steps in the production, from what I've seen they're just encouraging people to be lazy.

Yes, I know we live in a fast-paced society with much to do and those who can't keep up are relegated to sad, dismal lives of looking up and longing for what might have been, but if we weren't so quick to reward whatever's new, we may make some quality progress.

Or, maybe, we'll just hire more immigrants to do all of our mundane chores.

Years ago I was awarded a prize of my choosing for having endured five years of employment at some place. A month or so prior to my anniversary, I was given a small catalog (think of an Air Mall brochure) and could choose between several items.

I chose a telescope.

That, alone, qualifies me to weigh in on the the latest astrophysical event, whether or not Pluto is a planet. I can hardly wait.

To be truthful, I couldn't care less how many planets there are, but it does upset some people to think children and others may have to change from being "sure" of the nine everyone alive now knows. What I can't wait to hear is how astrologers respond.

Astrology, you see, mistakenly believes that the planets have a strong influence on the human condition, disregarding the fact that the gravitational pull of the attending physician is greater than that of even the moon, our nearest celestial neighbor. Now that Ceres, Charon, and UB313 may become planets, what will that do to astrology?

Will they reprint, at great cost to astrologers, all the empherides? If so, I'd love to hear their justification. If astrology was correct before, how will the explain the changes?

The way I see it, if astrology was a complete and accurate system before, they'll have to add in influences for these new planets. If they do that, how can the astrologers explain why they weren't affecting us before? And, if the new planets are explained by astrologers as affecting something like my love life now with "greater accuracy" or some such thing, how is it that their omission wasn't explained?

I never heard any astrologer saying "this might not be right" or "there may be other factors at work here," things I'd expect if Charon was influencing me but the astrologer wasn't taken into account.

Nope. I'm sorry. If these new planets get added in, then "old" astrology was all wrong, and I'd like them to admit it. I think it's obvious that astrology is great for selling newspapers or otherwise separating fools from their money, but other than giving us cool and obscure-looking symbols with which to decorate horror or paranormal movies, they have to admit they got it all wrong.

And, still do.

I was thrilled to hear that Mozambique was using rats to detect land mines until I saw the article says it's Tanzania. No matter, they share a border, and maybe the rats are used in each.

Still, I was smiling like a child getting a pony for Christmas. What better use for rats, I wondered, than to send herds of them scurrying over minefields? They would not only find the mines, but it may be a better way of dealing with them than the old spring traps. Sure, the rats are too light to trip the mines, but that could easily be solved with tiny lead vests, perhaps festively colored. Hell, you could include wagering and make it a fun event for the entire village.

Alas, the rats only sniff the explosive and, so far, none have been blowed up.

It's a good thing to do, though, so I applaud those who came up with this idea. Not so with these geneticists, though. It seems they've identified a gene that will let them create "waterproof" rice. This Sub1A-1 gene, which sounds suspiciously like the first one mapped, will let rice plants live for a couple weeks while submerged. This is not good. Manipulating the genetic makeup of plants is evil, and those who depend on rice to live are far better off going hungry and dying of famine if their fields get flooded. Especially now, with global warming melting arctic ice, we can only expect more flooding, and treating a valuable food commodity can only result in increasing human life.

The only salvation I can hope for from this horrendous effort is that this is that cheap white crap, the kind nobody of any value eats, anyway.

I can find no argument with the Israelis wanting to live without being subject to rocket attacks. Hell, I'd like that, too.

What I can't understand is why, if they're so gung-ho on this no-man's-land buffer zone, they don't create it inside their own borders.

It's hot, at least locally, and as can be expected this makes me think of my past.

I think I've been told that I was born on the hottest day of the year, which may or may not be true but does work as a way of cementing my relationship with heat. It may well have been hotter outside than in womb, so right after coughing and crying I may have begun sweating.

A year or so later it was, again, the hottest day of the year and this time I remember seeing pictures of my first or second birthday featuring a cake, a smiling baby, and a melting, drooping candle that wasn't yet lit.

But I don't remember any of that. What I *do* remember is my love affair with photography during my college years. I bought cameras, darkroom equipment, film, papers, and chemicals by the truckload and stumbled upon a relic of my youth. For all the years of my life in the hallway of my parent's home was a small thermometer on a sheet of aluminum engraved with the degrees. The whole thing was maybe six inches long, about as long as my open hand, and was made by Kodak.

How we ended up with a Kodak thermometer is anyone's guess, but it wasn't until I began developing film and printing photos that I noticed the thermometer had an arrow on it, highlighting sixty-eight degrees.

Sixty-eight are the exact number of degrees that every film and paper producer use for the standard, recommended, temperature of the chemicals and washes. This no longer matters, but I mention it for historical purposes.

It's easy to see where heatwaves enter into this. During the hot summer months I was occasionally stymied. The cold water in places I lived would not infrequently be over that magical sixty-eight degrees. There's not much I could ever do to make my cold water colder, and other than sweating into the stop bath and adjusting time, I was stuck.

I've no doubt that today the cold water is well into the seventies. I also doubt today's digital photographers have any idea how easy they have it, though they may still be sweating when they take their pictures.

It wasn't my intention to be rude and uncaring, but I was considering having a Bombay martini with my Peking Duck when the looks of silent horror stopped me. I was being chastised, judged, and found to be living in the past.

Neither Peking nor Bombay exist any more, and only inconsiderate, insensitive Luddites such as myself call them that any more. I'm not sure, but I get the feeling that how we refer to things is now the only litmus test we're judged by.

It may simply be familiarity, but Peking duck just sounds better to me than Beijing duck. I don't know much about it, but I think the name change had something to do with early visitors using the wrong alphabet or something. The confusion of B with P is sort-of understandable since I've heard there's still much controversy in the Philipino community over Filipino or Pilipino, and I'm taking that as a sign that Asian languages have as much trouble with P as they do with L and R.

The Mumbai thing, I'm guessing, is more about shucking off the oppressive names of Imperialism than anything else, but I have to admit it wasn't until the last week or so that I realized the name had been changed. I'd look forward to catchy songs about these name changes, but I'm sure to be disappointed.

With all these name changes going on, especially in Africa, and borders now no more settled and accepted than the authorship of the plays credited to William Shakespeare, I think the time of paper maps and atlases have passed. Maybe we should just stick with easily modified electronic maps. And maybe I could get Winston Smith's job of changing all the old references to be politically correct.

Okay, I admit it, yesterday I had moment's smugness and, for once, it wasn't directed at those who get their news and opinions from Fox news or Drudge. I didn't know it at the time, but it was on Palm Sunday, too, a day when I should know better than to be sinning.

Still, I don't think pride, or prideful gloating, is against any of the Commandments, just one of the sins talked about by the one, true Church. Even so, it can't be a good thing to be so smug, but I can't say I feel very bad about it.

And, I'm nowhere near the first to notice this. I think mention of it pre-dates jokes about airline food.

I took a little walk from the home I'm watching to visit a store and buy some bread and other food. On the way, after leaving the street with practical stores withSpanish names and turning onto the one whose stores had names like "sensual" (lower case) or "Infinitude" and who sold goods that can only be described as "luxury," I ran across yet another place advertising itself as "LA's finest gym." It took me a moment to register that I was walking in front of three or four guys carefully dressed in co-ordinating outfits who were lazing along on treadmills.

It took me but a moment more to realize they were doing the same thing I was (walking), but I was doing it for free, as a consequence of going to the market, and they were doing it as a goal, after having driven to the gym.

There was a big sign out front of the gym ($119 for three months), which isn't a bad price, I guess, but for their money these guys get personal trainers who produce specialized regiments, and the use of a wide variety of state of the art equipment. I'd like to try some of those things out, but as far as walking goes, well, I think I got a better view than they did.

It was on the way home that it dawned on me that it was Palm Sunday. I passed a church, and that was written on the placard out front. There was a steady stream of women with children walking toward the church, but I didn't say any men with them. This struck me as odd, but maybe there was a big game on the TV, or (more likely) the men were all home nursing hangovers.

The only other thing I considered noteworth was the name of the church: St Francis of Assisi Catholic Church. I don't know as too many non-Catholic religions would name a church after a Catholic saint, so I consider their specifying that it's a Catholic church is unnecessary. Maybe there's been some pushing and shoving with the Anglicans or Greek Orthodox, though, so it may be a necessary distinction. I have to say that when I see a church named after a Catholic saint, my first guess is it's a Catholic church.

When I see a church named "Christ's Salvation," I have no idea what to make of it, but I think if I were to found one, I'd call it "Sweet Mother of Christ." That sounds religious enough.

Years ago I read a review in Consumer Reports about shampoos. I don't remember who won, but I do remember them saying the two following things:

1) Shampoos, they said, are chemically identical to dishwashing soap, but with the addition of fragrances. This is no longer true, I don't think, since my dishwashing soap smells like apples.

2) No matter which shampoo you use, you should use another one every so often. Evidentally, each shampoo leaves part of itself as a residue, and that can only be removed by using a competing product.

I was thinking about those things when I recently used, for the first time ever!, some deep pore cleanser product. As soon as I spread it on my skin, I wondered how the less deep pores would feel about being neglected, and felt bad for them. The stuff is gritty, and it felt identical to Lava, a soap I used quite a bit earlier in life, and which I now see is owned by the WD-40 people.

I don't know how much this deep cleaning potion costs, but I have a hunch it's more than either Lava or the more masterly Boraxo. I once had a job, one in an office, where the men's room had Boraxo, and I always considered that to be a nod toward our gonads. No women's room, ever, has Boraxo!

I have another hunch. Marketeers may have learned that people will pay more for any product that's described as a "body wash" or cleanser, much more than they would for a soap. This is the kind of thinking that not only keeps our country great, but profitable as well.

The other night I had a dream where I took a refreshing shower inside an oilcloth contraption on a city bus, but real buses don't have those, not that I've seen.

Here in Los Angeles we don't talk much about public transportation, and that's fine with us. We're all beautiful people here, far removed from the world, and while we're far too hip to ever voice anything unsavory or hurtful, we tackle the underclass by not saying anything about them at all.

We'd prefer not to even think of those who ride buses as the underclass, which is a hateful, derogatory term, but that's who they are here. It's easier to think about oil addiction when we're sealed up in our cars, away from the world we inhabit, than it is to consider those whom we punish by making them ride buses.

There are three or four types of people who ride buses, and none of them are anyone you'd ever want to be. There are the teens who lack the social graces to have friends old enough to drive them around, and they like to demonstrate their rudeness by yelling and treating the world as their oyster. They'll be fine once they get the old enough to buy a car.

Then there are the elderly and infirmed. These are people we refuse to think about except in the abstract ("build more ramps!"), and we're fine with them being on buses since it keeps them out of our way. There's a smaller group of students, kids in their twenties, and others forced to take the bus for a short time, and they're typically nervous when they ride. Most times, they lock themselves into the chosen and directable world of their iPods, and act as if they aren't where they are.

Mostly, though, the buses are full of those people society has left behind. They struggle, like we all do, but are invisible to those of us who've made it. I see them every day, clutching plastic bags of valuable possessions or burdened with the results of meager shopping trips, and it's obvious they never get invited to any of the better parties.

While we depend on these people to raise our children and clean our homes, to serve as security guards and fulfill our demands when it comes to selling or packaging the consumer goods we insist on having, these people, not even worthy of having a car, are beneath us. I'm not sure we want them to suffer, to be punished for not being up to our standards, but that's what we do.

Since we can't, really, kill them and get them off our planet, we take their next most precious resource, their time. Riding the buses is a true example of why government doesn't work, it's a "public service." Those not good enough to soar with the eagles of society are given the opportunity to remain at the end of the pack, where the predators can more easily pick them off, by an inefficient, choiceless system.

It's a matter, as I see it, of salvaging our guilt. We want everyone to be able to get around in theory, just as long as they don't need to show up in our world. The fact that the means we provide them to reach the destinations where we want them to be wastes hours of their time isn't our concern, because our lives are already too filled. We're in a hurry to succeed, but they're so unimportant that we don't mind at all imposing on them wasteful hours.

In fact, we don't even think about it. If they can't pay with the coin of the realm, they'll pay with the hours of their lives, but that's what they deserve. With any luck it will hurt enough that they'll learn the error of their ways, buy a car, and become a fully-vested citizen.

The big thing about this avian flu (H5N1) isn't that we're all gonna die (we all will, regardless), it's what it reveals about us as a species. The phrase "self-obsessed" comes to mind, but I think anthrocentric has a more academic ring to it.

Here's a brief history of bird flu, as I understand it. About ten years ago it cropped up in China, then travelled to Hong Kong, and for that I can hardly blame it. I worked with a guy who'd travel to Hong Kong every chance he could, and it sounds delightful. After taking a few years off and getting fit and tan near the seashore, bird flu packed up and did a whirlwind tour of southeast Asia and ended up on the front pages of Western newspapers.

Now, it's all over Europe, but has yet to cross the Atlantic. Give it time, I say.
What I'm finding incredible is all these health experts going on about the flu evolving or mutating to a strain that can more easily jump from birds to man and, ultimately, from one human to another. This, they say, is what to watch out for.


I'm no scientist, but that doesn't prevent me from asking questions. Why humans? Maybe this flu is real smart and has looked at the web of life pyramid, and set its sights on the top of the chain. Why strike the middle of the chain when you can lop off the head, right?

Still, it disturbs me that all that anyone's concerned about is the flu jumping to humans, as if that's all we have to worry about. What if the disease mutates to be transferred from birds to, say, lizards? Or octopi? Why is no one keeping an eye on the flu to see if it turns into something that attacks prairie dogs, with prairie dog to prairie dog infection? Are these flus something only humans and birds can get, or are we just being selfish here?

Also, I'm not sure if "ironic" is the right word, but it's the one I'm going to use. I find it ironic that after all the west's industrialization and modernization, after turning up our noses on the progress that permits us to feed a planet of six and a half billion humans and hoping to return the genie to the bottle and reward the ancient methods of raising livestock, that the fowl raised in chicken factories may fare much better than the free range birds. How odd.

There may be something to those antisceptic, unnatural environments after all. It's those damn chickens scratching in God's earth, staring at bright blue skies, who are the only ones at risk. Their cyborg cousins in the Tyson mills will be just fine, thank you, since they don't allow visitors.