Category: Random News

Little Mattie Groves?

Making Light: How To Wash Your Hands:

1) Turn on the water and get it to a temperature you like.
2) Lather up using soap. (Soap does not kill germs in the time that the germs are exposed during hand washing. There’s stuff that grows fine on a bar of soap. The surfactant action of soap helps the running water flush the germs away. That’s how it works. It’s purely mechanical. Antibacterial soap is a waste of time and money, and just helps breed antibiotic-resistant bugs.)
3) Rub your hands vigorously together, paying special attention to the fingernails, getting up onto the wrists, for as long as it takes you to sing one stanza of The Star Spangled Banner or two verses of Little Mattie Groves.
4) Rinse off the soap with the running water.
5) Dry your hands with a paper towel.
6) Use the expended paper towel to turn off the water.

daw•dle•work, n. [from dawdle, waste time, + work; coinage 2007 by David Bruce White]

tasks being performed in stead of more pressing matters
“The windows needed cleaning, but it was merely dawdlework instead of doing my taxes, which were due tomorrow.”

We ordered a TiVo TCD648250B Series3 HD Digital Media Recorder from Amazon last month, then today I saw via dealnews’ RSS feed that they had dropped the price on the other unit, so I checked and saw they had dropped the price on mine by $25. This Slate article describes how to go about getting a refund for the drop in price if it is within thirty days, so I called 1-800-201-7575, hit 7, gave them my email address, told them I saw the price had dropped, and they immediately credited my credit card. Painless!

Now, I just need to send in the mail-in rebate to get some more back.

In one of my first posts, I pointed to this great new gorge over by Canyon Dam that had been formed by flooding. Now, it is open to the public!

New Central Texas gorge open to public
A torrent of water from a bloated Canyon Lake sliced open the earth, exposing rock formations, fossils and even dinosaur footprints in just three days. To protect Canyon Lake Gorge from vandals, it’s been open only to researchers since the 2002 flood, but on Saturday, it opens to its first public tour.