Kafka, Roosevelt, W.C. Fields, among others.
Category: Uncategorized
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Butter Flavored Popcorn Linked to Lung Disease
[Irma] Ortiz, 44, is among a group of California food-flavoring workers recently diagnosed with bronchiolitis obliterans, a rare and life-threatening form of fixed obstructive lung disease. Also known as popcorn workers lung, because it has turned up in workers at microwave-popcorn factories, the disease destroys the lungs. A transplant is the only cure.
Cripes. Time to stop buying microwave popcorn. We prefer the old-fashioned, artery-clogging version anyway.
Flavoring Suspected in Illness – washingtonpost.com [via digg]
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On My Feet Again
Sorry for the hiatus, I spent the last 9 days lying flat on my back. Apparently sometime on the last Saturday in April I managed to mess up my back. I did some odd jobs around the house, played with the dog, that kind of thing. But by early afternoon, I couldn’t bend over to pick stuff up off the floor, hard shard, shooting pains in my lower back from pretty much every motion, and was feeling pretty damn miserable.
After toughing it out Sunday, Monday brought no relief and so off to the back specialist I go (thank you PPO for not requiring a referral; MCARE, we hardly knew ye). One co-pay, a diagnosis of you-might-have-itis, and two prescriptions later and I holed up in the bedroom.
Today was my follow-up and I’m probably 70-75% better. I did get a refresh on one prescription and have plenty left on the other (muscle relaxer and anti-inflammatory), but tomorrow I’m back to work.
Things learned:
- I need to lose weight (join the club, you say?)
- I’m not 22 anymore, although, as the song goes, I’m much to young to feel this damn old.
- Our couch is not suitable for recuperating from back injuries.
- The dog is more agile than I am by a magnitude of 10.
- It is impossible to use a laptop computer resting on your stomach while lying flat in bed.
- The Google search string that will lead you to a device that allows you to use a laptop while lying in bed is very, very elusive. I have yet to stumble on it.
- Rifftrax are hilarious (and well worth $3).
- I miss MST3K.
Tomorrow it’s back to work and a ton of ribbing, I’m sure. I already caught wind that my “cripple leave” was the topic of a few comedic endeavors.
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If you want to know if Spot loves you so, it's in his tail
When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.
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It suggests that the muscles in the right side of the tail reflect positive emotions while the muscles in the left side express negative ones.
Sounds like a good candidate for an Ig Nobel prize.
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Mozy Online Backup
Nerds, rejoice.
Online backup company Mozy is here to save your data. Mozy is essentially off-site backup storage for the consumer. What’s that, you say, you don’t have off-site storage? What happens if tragedy strikes and your hard drive fails and the last backup you made was a 700MB CD two months ago?
With Mozy, you get 2GB of storage and a client that automatically synchs your new data to the Mozy servers. The best part? It’s free. 2 GB of free storage. Got more than 2 GB? For $5 a month you get unlimited storage.
And they’re not going anywhere; Mozy just landed a contract with GE to provide the Pro service to all 300,000+ employees.
I’ve been using the service for about a week and even convinced J– to try it out. If you’re thinking about trying it out, consider using this link to get me a referral. If you do use it, we each get an additional 256MB of storage space.
