Thought or Rant of the day!!!

[Marian]

Maybe everyone should just adopt India's system of going directly in a field, street, or river, now that's about as freeing as it's possible to be.

[saztronic]

My friend works at the local bowling alley and has told me that when she cleans the bathrooms during closing:
1) the men's toilets are disgusting because they get drunk and can't aim, and you should never ever pour bleach on it without scrubbing it first because the ammonia (or is it ammonium? not sure) in the lingering urine combined with the bleach will create mustard gas and the bathroom will be uninhabitable for like 45 minutes depending on the ventilation and the size of the bathroom.
2) the counters in the women's bathroom are messy and wet and full of paper towels and there's no soap left in the dispensers. By comparison, the counters in the men's bathroom are nearly spotless and there's still plenty of soap in the dispensers. Um, ew.
Obviously these aren't America's best and brightest, but still.

On the relative cleanliness of men's vs. women's, I really believe this to be true of adults. But I had a job in high school as an after-school janitor at a middle school, and can thus offer at least one anecdotal opinion that girls at that age are much more disgusting and careless in the bathroom than are boys.

Regarding chlorine and urine... this is a bit of a myth I'm afraid. Urine contains only trace amounts of ammonia. Your body produces a little ammonia but the liver breaks it down to urea, which is what you pass in urine. If you have certain liver or kidney diseases your ammonia concentration could increase, but would still be negligible in terms of its reactivity with chlorine. Next time you're at the supermarket, check out the chlorine tablets they sell in the cleaner aisle... round white things designed to go in your toilet tank and ensure the water in the toilet always has a little bit of chlorine in it, to kill bacteria and reduce odor. It's also used in urinal cakes and in public swimming pools (more on that below, because why not spend my time writing a long post about bodily waste?).

Also just to be nitpicky, mixing purer chlorine and ammonia is VERY BAD but it doesn't produce mustard gas (which is sulphur based), rather a whole host of nasty chemicals like chloramines and hydrazines... like mustard gas, also used during WWI as chemical weapons on battlefields, but not the same thing.

POOLS: Interestingly, just a few days ago a study was released that purports to show that the chlorine smell in pools doesn't come from the chlorine that's added to it... it comes from other irritants produced when the chlorine reacts with various biological substances introduced into the water... pee, poop, sweat and skin cells. It's these chemical by-products, they say, that turn your eyes red in the pool, not the chlorine itself. One study does not a scientifically validated conclusion make, but it seems plausible. Still, if you can't really get sick from swimming in (or breathing in vapors from) a large watery soup in which chlorine and human effluent are apparently reacting freely (ew?), then it seems to offer further evidence that throwing some chlorine bleach cleaner down onto the bathroom floor is not going to kill you.

I've been told that men don't have conversations with each other at all in a public bathroom and it would somehow be considered weird and creepy to attempt one, so I guess they just do their business and hustle out. (without washing hands, eeew...)

And as for babies, do men's rooms even have changing tables?

Men who know each other, in my experience, have no aversion to conversing in public restrooms. Probably wouldn't strike up a conversation with a stranger, but being an introvert, I probably wouldn't do that outside the restroom either.

Many men's rooms do have changing tables, and they get used.

Maybe everyone should just adopt India's system of going directly in a field, street, or river, now that's about as freeing as it's possible to be.

I know you're joking, but have you ever seen this in action? It's awful, as I'm sure you might imagine. Not just for sanitary reasons - once you've driven past an open field early in the morning that has several men defecating in it, you just can't get that image out of your skull.

Also it's not very freeing for women, who can't really go out to these fields at night for fear of being sexually assaulted. But they can't really go during the day either, because that would be indecent and therefore cause for a beating (by a family member) or being attacked (by a mob). So the practice puts yet another hardship on women in India, particularly poor women, and is a mechanism of oppression.

It's hard to change. There's an ingrained cultural tradition among Hindus that defecating in public is good for your health Several ancient Hindu texts advise relieving yourself as far as possible from your home, which is -kind of- good advice if you live in a sparsely populated rural area, but not so much if you live in a city of 20 million people. But the belief is persistent and thus undermines efforts to combat the sanitation problem simply by installing more toilets in India... one survey showed that of families that have access to a toilet in their homes, 60% have at least one family member who still insists on defecating outdoors.

*rubs his hands together* That was fun! Come back tomorrow when we'll cover dysentery and hook worm! Don't miss it!

[Snowdrop]

Changing topic completely...

Today has been so incredibly humid, my brain feels completely frazzled and I can't concentrate on anything. Some of my characters have important organisation things they need to get on with, but it involves me concentrating a lot, and I-JUST-CAN'T-DO-IT!

[Xander]

I know, it's been absolutely boiling. It's supposed to thunder tomorrow around where I live, but will still be hot.

[Snowdrop]

Had a few claps of thunder here already, it's still really, really hot, but the wind has at least picked up because of it - so when it blows inside there is finally some relief!

Extra relief is coming in the form of ice cream - I'm just about to serve some up

[Axiom]

It's way too hot here too. I just moved across the country for a job, and it turns out that this normally temperate city is in the middle of a prolonged record-breaking heat wave. Yay for global warming. And of course my very nice temporary corporate housing apartment doesn't have air conditioning.

On an unrelated note, more people should use the IRC channel. I've popped in a few times, but it's always very dead.

[sherman]

You all guys come to Finland to enjoy the rain and.. not so warm summer Really, it's been raining like whole summer and only couple times been over +20.... Where's my summer?

[Snowdrop]

Rain would be refreshing right now...it's even hotter today. Do not like. Not like at all. And my computer doesn't either - it constantly sounds like it's going to take off or explode. I feel like I'm going to explode! Spontaneous combustion style!

[Naranjita]

Ufff... May the rain be with you! We're also suffering an unexpected hot summer here (having in mind that this is one of the most rainy towns in Europe). But it's been a few days that you can feel the storm, with the kind of heavy, humid air that gives you headache, but it never comes. With 7 computers around in my job, running all day like Snowdrop says, and the white coat politely fastened up to my neck, at the evening I can hear inside my head how my brain slowly melts. If it doesn't rain soon, I'll go outside and dance calling for the storm!

[Friar Briar]

I'll wash my car and paint my house for you too, so the rain's will come sooner!

I found an old radio in my garage that once belonged to my great-grandmother. It's the size of a shoebox. Ironically, not only does it still work, but the speakers are so strong, my floor is vibrating. God bless mono!

[Axiom]

I wish my problems were still limited to lack of air conditioning. Alas, I fractured my ankle today, and I start a new job on Monday and now have no idea how I'm getting there. I was planning to walk to the bus stop a third of a mile away, but, uh, about that.

[Snickie]

Here in Florida, we have three types of weather you can see in the summer:
1. Beautiful sunshine and HEAT and HEAT and HUMIDITY
2. Severe thunderstorms which are "capable of producing half-dollar-sized hail and damaging winds in excess of 60mph"
3. Tropical cyclones (Hurricanes and tropical storms) (usually only in the fallish months but technically summer lasts through December) (this is different from the severe thunderstorms in that these don't usually have too much lightning and are much more likely to spawn tornadoes, and their winds can be as low as 39 mph or higher than 155 mph)

[Marian]

words about India

Yeah, India is all kinds of messed up. My family donates to a major charity based there so I follow news stories from there a lot and...well, you rarely hear good things. In addition to the sanitation problems and poverty, you've got all the utterly disgusting crap the caste system still lets people get away with and the fact that rape pretty much seems to be the national pastime there, without anything much the victims or their families can do about it, since in many areas reporting rape often in a best-case scenario just has the police hand waving it away.

...I could go on awhile about India but I won't because it's way too early in the morning for that many pages of frustrated ranting.

[SekoETC]

Ever since I got back from camp, it's been hard to get back into the game. I feel a bit overwhelmed.

[Snickie]

Ever since I got back from camp, it's been hard to get back into the game. I feel a bit overwhelmed.

This.
Except I haven't even gone to camp yet. That's next week.



In other news, our super restrictive anti-sociallife Whole30 diet officially ends tomorrow. (Unofficially, we get to eat sushi on Saturday and then I go to camp while my parents go back to restrictive eating which I will resume upon returning.)