I haven't said much about the tsunami situation, but it has been on my mind a lot. I've been reading what others have had to say, including some journalers on site. All the numbers of dead, and TV tapes of the waves hitting, and reporting from aid distribution points - nothing brought it home to me like the satellite "before and after" photos. Coastlines drastically changed, densely populated and vegetated areas cleared down to blank tan dirt, islands halved or gone. When you look at the pictures, and realize that there was NO warning.... Search on "satellite tsunami" - there are several sites full of photos, pick any. (Be sure you look at the Banda Aceh north and south shorelines (northern Sumatra in Indonesia)). Enlarge the photos, so you can see the houses in the "before"s. Remember there were people in them. Suddenly the numbers have faces, families.
The White House keeps saying that aid donations should come mainly from the private sector, not the federal government. The problem with this is that only the heavily advertised disasters get donations. Smaller disasters, un-newsworthy stuff, and chronic conditions won't get any assistance. We should be giving more - free assistance, not loans - for education, economic development, famine relief, victim assistance, crime fighting, etc. all over the world. We need a centralized group to disperse the funds where they will do the most good. Maybe the group should be not just at a federal level, maybe it should be at a world level. Maybe we could form some kind of world organization to pool funds from the richer nations to disperse to the less developed areas to help them grow. Maybe we could call it something like, oh, maybe "United Nations", or something like that. (Ok, sarcasm button off now...)
Something to consider is that if we as a nation spent the equivalent of our war chest on assistance worldwide, maybe we wouldn't have to go to war so often, so alone, to such resistance. Think of what it would mean if the first image of a US soldier was as a saviour....
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Just something I've noticed that distresses me - when they show tapes of emergency food and water being delivered, there's usually a melee, people shoving and elbowing and clawing and climbing on top of each other to get get get. I don't know how to prevent that, but it makes me sick to my stomach to see it. Allowing that scramble rewards the most vicious, and penalizes the small, young, or gentle. Notably, when you see the same distribution scene in a Buddhist area, there is no clawing. Buddhists wait in line, pass things on, and share, so no one has to worry about getting nothing. Because all are patient, all know that they will get something, so all are patient. It's lovely.
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I have registered for the Mensa Annual Gathering in New Orleans, in July (The Big Easy for a whole week in July? Maybe not so easy...!) The hotel is right on the French Quarter on one side, the river on the other. I don't have my hotel reservations yet. In true Mensa fashion, the website has a link to the hotel reservation site, but it says right next to the link "If you have difficulty with this link...", and of course it timed out everytime I tried it, it doesn't respond. Obviously they know there's a problem. Hence the note. But it has occurred to no one to just fix the dang thing?
Umm, Daughter, any chance you could keep Miss Thunderfoot for me during that time?
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Coming back from Rochester I followed an SUV on the Thruway that was shooting big bright sparks out its back end. They were bright for like 20 feet behind him. When I got closer, I saw that he was dragging a thick chain fastened to something under the vehicle. Unless he was blasting the radio, he had to be aware of it. I wondered if his gas tank was in any danger. I passed him as soon as possible.
Back in the '60s and ''70s it was common for young men to drag a small chain - it was supposed to make a cheap radio work better by grounding it or something. But it was dangerous, because if somehow you came into contact with downed wires, you could get electrocuted.
It also reminded me of an incident about 20 years ago, where an elderly couple were driving a big RV through the mountains out west somewhere, and towing a car. Something went wrong with the car, and it was dragging metal. The couple couldn't see the car, and couldn't hear the dragging. The sparks set fire to brush along the road for more than 20 miles. It caused the biggest forest fire that year. The state sued the couple for the cost of fighting the fire.
I'm still wondering why the guy on the Thruway was dragging a chain.
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I've got something wrong with my hands.
Last spring sometime I tried a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser (yes, it does work, but you have to be careful not to erase the paint as well as the marks, light rubbing only!) I didn't use it very much. The sponge I used still looks almost new. The box said nothing about wearing gloves, and the pictures on the box show bare hands, so I didn't wear gloves. The next day, all the skin on both my palms blistered up and peeled off, several layers worth over the next few days. Daughter snorted and said "Well, duh!"
Over the next few weeks, the skin on my palms and fingers got stiff, dried, cracked, peeled several times - very unusual for me. My hands are usually so oily I have to scrub them or use alcohol before I touch needlework. (I could never commit a barehanded crime - I leave perfect fingerprints.)
Then it finally settled down. I thought.
I'm not sure there's any connection, but for the past few months I've had a different problem. I'm never heard of anything like this. I get a pinpoint dark spot that feels firmer than the skin around it. The spot forms a pin-head-sized white blister. It looks exactly like I have a tiny splinter, like maybe you'd get from cactus hairs. The blister contains thin white fluid. I have learned not to break the blister, because if I do, a perfect ring of 6 to 8 more tiny blisters forms equally spaced around it. Within two days or so, the blister subsides, and then a nickel-sized patch of skin around the site dries up, cracks, and flakes off. (If there's more than one blister, the dry patches overlap. I've had them cover my entire palm.) There will be a tinier-than-pinpoint dark spot left, that eventually disappears.
The blisters can be single, or in clusters. The clusters are not random - they are straight lines or perfect circles. They look planned, or alien.
Mostly they happen on the palm, usually toward the heel, but I've had them on the palm sides of the fingers, and there's a dry patch right now on my right thumb. There's always at least one at some stage somewhere. They involve no itching or pain.
At first I thought it might be that hand-foot-mouth thing that kids get, but this is only my hands, no where else, and has been going on way too long.
I looked up the Magic Erasers on the internet, but I can't find anything about anyone else having trouble, not even anything like that initial peeling. Lots of personal experiences ("Wow, it really does work!") but no mention of skin reactions. But then again, how do you search for something like this? Searching on "Mr. Clean Magic Eraser Blisters" gets you a zillion places that sell both the Magic Erasers and Dr. Scholl's Moleskin.
I did find out what's in the things. Ingredients: Formaldehyde-Melamine-Sodium Bisulfite Copolymer , MSDS. , HTH! It releases hydrogen cyanide on decomposition. It uses Melamine plastic resin for the sanding action. "The resin penetrates microscopic grooves on smooth surfaces and gently abrades dirt without any additional chemicals or solvents." ("Without any additional"?)
Have I become sensitized so that now I am allergic to some common thing? Have I absorbed something awful from the first use, and now my body is gradually eliminating it through the blisters and flaking? Is it totally unrelated to the Magic Eraser?
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