Friday, September 18, 2015

5010 More rambles.

Friday, September 18, 2015

"Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth."
-- Lillian Hellman --

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A township truck came through last night spraying for mosquitoes.  I haven't seen that since the '50s.  There have been a lot of dead crows, evidence that some nasty disease (I forget) is getting spread.  They've found it in captured mosquitoes.

I forgot to cover my tomato plant, so I'll have to remember to wash the tomatoes well before eating them.  I don't know what they sprayed with, but the crickets don't seem to be affected, they were still singing loudly two hours later.  I also doubt that the spray penetrated as far as back yards.  It looked like it just came straight out of the spray pipe and fell on the road.  I'm sure it got nowhere near the pond out back, and I'm absolutely positive it didn't hit the marshy/swampy area two streets over.  Well, at least the township can claim they tried.


I personally won't notice any difference, because mosquitoes don't bite me.  They hover around me like they're looking for skin, then they give up and leave.  Those tiny black bitey bugs that form clouds around your head don't like me, either.  Pretty much nothing does except ticks.


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 I don't have an ad-blocker, so I get a lot of pop-up junk on the screen,  Even with an ad-blocker, I visit a lot of sites that would like me to subscribe or register, and they put up pop-up requests.  I used to not mind them, just closed them without reading them.


Remember when the "X" to close those little windows was always in the upper right corner?  Not any more.  Now you have to search for the darn things.  Some of the "X"s don't show up until you pass over them with the cursor, so it's a physical search.  Piss me off!  And there's one ad company out there that covers the text on the screen and doesn't even provide the "X".  The ad sits there covering text until it decides to leave.  Snopes.com uses that ad company, and I go to Snopes several times a day.


Even worse are the videos that start up with no encouragement.  I'll have five tabs open when suddenly sound starts up, and I have to scroll up and down through five tabs to find out where it's coming from.


I give up.  I guess I'm going to have to install an ad-blocker.  Any recommendations?


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A study has found that the higher your education level, the better your chances of recovering from brain injury with no disability.  (http://www.indianalawyerblog.com/2014/05/education_helps_protect_the_br.html)  Interesting article.

One theory is that the more mental exercise you get, the stronger your brain is.  The other, of course, is that the higher your educational level, the better able you will be to afford top-notch care.  Heh.


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Speaking of brains, back when Jay was getting all those MRIs, I always asked to look at them with the doctors, and they were always happy to accommodate me.  One day we were looking at one, and I observed, "You know, it's no wonder people think about sex so much.  There's a naked woman climbing right into the center of the brain."    The doctor looked at me, "What?  Where?"  I pointed to the structure in the middle, the thalamus is her head, the midbrain is her upper back, the pons is her rear end, and the medulla olongata is her right leg.  Her left leg is bent high up, stepping into the brain and raising and rounding her left haunch, her left arm reaches out to the left side.  He suddenly saw it clearly --- and here's the surprising part, he'd never noticed that before.  Turns out none of Jay's doctors had.  


This is a random scan from the internet, not Jay's.  See if you also see the lady.

2 comments:

Becs said...

West Nile Virus. Several years ago, I worked with a very young woman who became completely disabled after suffering West Nile encephalitis. Dangerous stuff, that is.

Xman used to run after the DDT truck when he was a kid and he's still around. Ho hum.

~~Silk said...

Yeah, I was telling Daughter that with no A/C everyone would be sitting on the porch when the DDT trucks came by, and we just continued sitting there. Mothers would even open the windows to get rid of the flies and mosquitoes in the house. In high school, the science teachers let us play with mercury. Most kids had a little bottle of mercury saved from broken thermometers. We used to coat pennies with it so they'd look like dimes. And when the tar trucks came by to patch the streets, we'd pry off bits of hot tar and chew it like gum. Nobody died. I guess all the weak ones were killed off by measles, tetanus, polio, and diphtheria before the DDT, asphalt, and mercury could get them.