Does anybody know about this having to sign in to get Sudafed in a drug store? Is this because Sudafed is so great we shouldn't be allowed to have it? I've noticed that Sudafed has changed its active ingredient ... What is this about?

Most Ridiculous Item Of The Day

Quoth GWB, very specifically, on funding the rebuilding of New Orleans:

$110 billion, hopefully that will work. Hopefully, that's enough. It's certainly enough to get us through the next period of time.

Years? Days? Weeks? Hours?

I hope so, too.

doors and drawers

doors and drawers, those are my problems. every day i have to open and close so many doors and drawers. to get from my desk to the bathroom: 3 doors. from my desk to the gym: 4 doors and one elevator. to set up one restriction digest: three freezer doors, one drawer, one door. doors and drawers; it never ends!

i asked my therapist if everyone notices the doors and drawers that confound and define their every move. she reckons i notice them more when i am feeling depressed or anxious. well, duh. but i can't ever seem to edit them out of my day.

you read a novel and people come and go all the time but they rarely mention opening doors, pushing, pulling, straining, bumping into the frames, juggling the coffee cups or the test tube racks. they never mention the toilet paper coming or not coming smoothly out of the holder, or the different kinds of drink cup lids at the different cafes, or the hum of the fluorescent lights on the water-stained ceiling tiles. they leave out the doors and the drawers, but i notice every single one and they all affect me. the dizzying accumulation of mundane details - that's what gets me.

(i think i might be getting a migraine.)

Coming Of Fall

Yesterday was overcast, but not too hot or too cold. I walked home and it felt like fall. The opalescent gray sky can be as beautiful as the brassy blue. Muted, more subtle. The top of the Pru seemed to hover like a flying saucer over the city.

Says Joe Conason of Salon.com

If the neoconservatives were not so adept at claiming the patriotic high ground for themselves -- and convincing the nation that they are interested only in advancing the security of America and Israel and the cause of democracy -- it might be time to start asking which of them are actually agents of Iran. The question is pertinent because "objectively," as they like to say, neoconservative policy has resulted in enormous profit to the Iranian mullahs, at grave cost to the United States and with little or no benefit to Israel.

The most obvious example, of course, is the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, which has conveniently eliminated Iran's chief military rival in the region, and replaced Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime with a weak government dominated by Shiite Islamist parties friendly to Tehran. The only certain outcome of our misbegotten effort is that the Iranians have finally gotten what they could not achieve during eight years of war with Iraq, despite the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives and hundreds of millions of dollars. And we delivered the prize to them at no cost -- except what we have lost in thousands of dead and wounded U.S. troops and hundreds of billions of dollars.

Oddly enough, they don't seem any more grateful than the Iraqis.

A Woman's Concern!

I was going to write about whales, sea kayaking, and other beach-fun related themes. But instead I want to bring to people's attention something I passed on the way home from beautiful Rockport, MA the other week.

I saw this place in Revere, MA, a somewhat down-at-heel suburb north of Boston and it made me suspicious. I did a little research and found that A Woman's Concern .org, .com, and .net are all really evil anti-abortion schemes dressed up as pregnancy crisis centers.

Obviously, I'd heard of this but had never actually seen one, especially not in New England. The .com center is in State College, PA - a place where I had lots of non-marital sex but fortunately never had a pregnancy scare.

Dig around a little, especially at the abortion FAQ pages, to be truly horrified. They even drag in the breast cancer misinformation.

That is so messed up. Tell EVERYONE you know about this. Planned Parenthood is the name to trust!!!

What ho, what ho, what ho!

Hello loyal readers!

No, I have not forgotten about you. I've been at the amazing beach house, commuting every other day into the city, so no time to tell you about the whale watch, the sea kayaking, the cute sand crabs, swimming in the deep green sea as the sun sets behind the trees ...

But here are two funny signs I saw the other day.

eBay Sells Lab Stuff

So last night I was on eBay bidding for a microscope to keep at home. I bid on a light microscope by Vickers (a UK company I'd never heard of) with four objective lenses and a halogen bulb. I don't think it has got a phse condeser, though.

But should I keep trying for that one or do I want a nice binocluar dissecting scope? That might be more useful for looking at bugs, fish, etc.

Why do I do this when a) I spend too much money anyway and b) I have access to at least 6 microscopes in the lab? Well, I am always wishing I had a nice little scope at home, that's why!

Eventually I will get the dissecting scope, but maybe not for a few months when I save up for it.

Joolya Connects With Nature, The WWW

Allow me to list the critters I have found on and around the beach in Cape Ann:

1) katydid (already discussed)

2) tiny transparent fish in tidepool.

3) tiny crawfish/prawn creature, transparent with brown spots; wriggles under the sand making himself very hard to spot!

4) several small, live sand dollars.

5) more tiny fishes that blend in with the sand.

6) absolutely ginormous snail that oozed himself all over his shell when I poked him, then oozed on my hand for a while.

7) dismembered lobster.

8) tiny sand crabs.

The low tide yesterday was so low that we could walk nearly a mile off the shore and still only be wading. I was awestruck at this, but Springy hypothesized that it was due to the full moon. His mum confirmed this, and we continued to speculate on why that was. (Not having internet access, we couldn't look it up.)

An explanation of this phenomenon can be found here, with animation as well. (We were more or less right in our conjecture.)

The beach house has got a clock with a tide clock on it, which is about the coolest thing ever.

There's a big scrum going on over at Pooflinger's this week. It would be more amusing if we hadn't been through all this a million bazillion times already.

There's also this crazy chick called AnnieAngel, who says she is not the Annie on the threads at PF, but who has her own web site of crazitude. You can find her if you want a good chuckle. I congratulated her on her witty satire, but either it wasn't satirical at all or she is staying really and truly in character. She has got a quote from Jesus' General on the bottom of the page which means it's a joke, though, right? It must be! Right??? I think she deleted my "great satire" comments because she didn't want to let the others, the fishies who take the bait, in on the joke. So swim up, little fishies, cause I want to know if this Annie person is a genius or a nutjob - or both.

But maybe Springy's faith in humanity is just rubbing off on me. Unclear.

"Losing My Religion" Now Officially Classic Rock

An observation I made today while listening to WFNX 101.7 edgy alterna-radio station:

The angsty songs of my youth and adolescence (say 1988-1999) still sound profound, but the equivalent angsty songs of 2006 seem hackneyed and cheesy.

There is no qualitative difference to the general sentiments expressed in the pre- versus post-millenial angsty songs, so the difference must be in my ears. Now that I am an old lady of seven and twenty, straight-up angst of the Conor Oberst variety really doesn't move me. It's not subtle. It makes me go, "Eh, whatever, kid, take your meds."

However, despite my jaded post-angst mentality, the songs that spoke to me when I was an angst-ridden ball of hormones still strike a chord (pardon the pun). They resonate with the inner adolescent in a way that the new angsty songs cannot, because I did not hear them at the receptive angsty time in my life.

Which gives me an insight into the popularity of classic rock and why people tend to cleave to the music of their youth rather than embrace new alterna-pop options. Pop music is the music of adolescence, of unbearable emotions, of wings beating against the bars of the cage. The pop music of our caged bird years gets imprinted on our brains, like momma duck on baby ducks. The new stuff can never compare.

This insight, coupled with the fact that REM is now considered to be classic rock, at least by 100.7 FM Boston, marks my inescapable passage from youth into grown-up land.

The thing is, grown-up land is actually pretty cool. When we're young, we think we are the arbiters of cool, and we kind of are, but that is just because we don't know any better. From the vantage point of 27, I can look down the hard scree slope of adolescence, secure in the knowledge that it's over now, and remember the climb with a smile while I rock out to the classic rock that the kids just don't understand.

More On Bugs

I have been reading up on summer noise-making bugs since the great katydid hunt of two nights ago, and just this morning happened to come upon this very cool blog entry where someone did atomic force microscopy on a dead cicada wing!

Clearly this was not a 17-year cicada (misnamed as locusts by the European settlers who had never seen cicadas before). I was in Pittsburgh for two emergences of Magicicda Brood VIII. The next time they come out I will be forty. Eek! You can find a brood near you here.

See if you can distinguish these summer noise-making bugs!

cicada
cricket
katydid
grasshopper

Sorry I've Been Away So Long

But it's been a busy week! I have been commuting from Cape Ann, where Springy's parents have rented the loveliest beach house in the world for two weeks. I don't think I could handle an hour commute twice a day, though. For one thing, this would increase my likelihood of being in a car accident by like a thousand-fold. I am kind of spacey, too, so me piloting an instrument of death alongside crazy kamikaze Massachusetts drivers sounds like a recipe for disaster. For another thing, it is impossible (or at least very unsafe) to read my book while driving.

I was stalking a cricket* the other night out in Rockport and it was missing a leg. Was this why it sounded different from the others? They make noise by rapidly rubbing/beating the back of their wings together. I got a lot of mosquito bites.

More later, not in the mood right now.

*I found out that it was really a katydid, not a cricket. Katydids look like green leaves.