Do You Realize?

Asking the Wrong Questions

This video has surfaced, prompting people to question whether our beef is safe. It shows a cattle worker torturing a dairy cow who is too sick to walk into the slaughterhouse. (Unless an animal can walk in unassisted, it is not supposed to be slaughtered for human consumption.) Though that is a valid question (for those who don't do buy pasture-raised & finished beef), the question people should be asking is whether humanity itself is safe when there are members who are willing to look into the eyes of a weaker species and then do these things to them. Certainly the possibility of their willingness to treat children the same comes to mind. I'm sure the wives of the two workers pictured here are proud of their husbands.

According to this video, we're just monkeys that can operate forklifts. Animals, just like the others. (Warning to all my religious readers: you will be offended by this video, I'm pretty sure.) This video was passed along to me by a friend of Eldest; Eric, you are quite the fabulously intelligent and charming guy. Dance, monkeys, dance!

Science(ish) Friday (and where I've been)

Sometimes (okay, most of the time) all I want is for life just to slow down a little (or a lot). This past week or so has been no exception. This week:

*My mom suffered a bout of acute rejection. Not unusual for a liver transplant patient, but not a good thing, either. After four (five?) days of intense prednisone and anti-rejection drug therapy, her biopsy yesterday finally came back to say the rejection had reversed. Whew!

*We found out Youngest has to have mastoid surgery for a cholesteotoma this Tuesday. He has had to be hospitalized for mastoiditis once before, so it's not a complete surprise. Before a lot of antibiotics were discovered, mastoiditis was pretty common, and death was an unfortunate side effect.

*My precious babykitty Gilda has to have yet another ultrasound to determine whether she has some sort of intestinal cancer or not.

*We found out Eldest's boyfriend (who went away to college this year) has been lying to her (and us) about his partying and drinking for months now.

*I found my first major scratch on Pru.

Now that I have all that off my chest, let me tell you about one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time: National Geographic's Genographic Project.

For $100.00, you can get a kit to send in a buccal swab. National Geographic will test your mitochondrial DNA (or, if you're male, you could also choose to have your Y-chromosome DNA tested instead). They will trace your DNA to its origins in Africa and provide you with a map of the migratory patterns that your ancestors took, which landed you where you are today. Quite a fascinating concept, in my opinion. (My friend RedMolly does this science thing a whole heckuva lot better than I do, but I did want to make a mention of it.)

Entomological Update

After a truly traumatizing night involving our guinea pig, rabbit, and thousands of our unidentified Nasty Buggers, samples of the offending critters were sent off to Texas A&M to be identified by an entomologist. The verdict is that chiggers are not, indeed, our culprits. No, it couldn't be anything that mundane. Noooooo... We have Ornithonyssus mites. Depending on the species, their hosts are either wild birds or roof rats; the two look so much alike, it's very tricky telling them apart (the mites, not the birds & rats).

So, using common sense, remembering our roof rat revelers that stayed around for 3 weeks or so, and utilizing the knowledge that the mites had attacked the guinea pig, but not our birds, I believe we are looking at an attack of Ornithonyssus Bacoti, the Tropical Rat Mite. According to Texas A&M, one usually notices the mites once the hosts have died or left the building (the rat bastards left after they finished off all the kitty treats in the TV cabinet). Although they can't live off human blood, they will readily bite them, causing all sorts of hellish itching. And apparently, they aren't terribly uncommon... then why haven't I ever heard of them?!?!?

Anyway, armed with pyrethrin and diatomaceous earth, I'm off to war. Any other suggestions welcome.

Nasty Little Buggers

Okay, I'm hoping that this post will draw 47 comments, because I'm desperate!

Some subversive critters of the most vicious variety are eating me alive in bed at night. Itchy, itchy bites, and over the last 4 or 5 days, I probably have a dozen or two bites on me. I have found two or three tiny little unidentified buggers, and when I mash them, they explode with blood. And I do mean TINY... as in about the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

My first thought was bedbugs... crap! But, I have inspected the seams of the mattress & boxsprings, and between the two, and I can find absolutely ZERO evidence of that. From what I can gather, bedbugs are pretty easily visible to the eye, about the size of a non-engorged tick.

Now I'm leaning toward chiggers. But, can chiggers live indoors? We have indoor/outdoor dogs, one of whom sleeps with us at night... could she have picked them up in the grass, transferred them to our bed, where they are having all-night drunken raves in our bed? And what can we do to get rid of them?

I'm really starting to swerve psychotically toward delusional parasitosis at this point. AAAAAAAAARRRRRGH!

Note: My stats tell me that this post is one of my most viewed. If you have come here through Google and are having an unsolvable insect mystery, you can find an update on our situation in this post. Good luck!

Monday Meanderings, Part Deux

So, Mark has taken this week off work, as well (the result of not taking all of his vacation time during the rest of the year), and it always seems to happen that I don't post when he's here at home... I've also noticed that the whole household has a veil of tardiness hanging over all its members when he's home. But, as usual, my brain actually does work when he's here, I just don't post about it when it happens. All of which leads to Monday Meanderings. Where has my mind been meandering this week?

Garbage Land. Fascinating book, and I'm only on the 4th chapter. I'll post a little more as I get further along. Right now, I'm just thinking about a good chunk of New York actually built on top of garbage, and it's quite amazing to think about.

Monsanto. I really had no idea how mind-numbingly detrimental this company is to the public's health and wellbeing: from saccharin to styrofoam, Roundup to Agent Orange, genetically modified foods to bovine growth hormones. And what's up with the whole pig breeding patent?  That's more than just a little creepy.

Corn. Speaking of Monsanto, I find myself looking at all corn with suspicion now. Is that corn in my wild bird feed genetically modified? What about my canned corn? And I've heard that corn syrup (which I use at least once a week for my gingerbread pancake recipe) is pretty much all genetically jacked-up.

Chemicals. We just paid $1000 to Terminix to inject our soil with termite poison. I know it's buried, and I know it's supposed to be totally "safe" to be around, but I'm still more than a little discomfited by it. (There goes my hope of growing anything "organic" around my house.) But, it's either poison the termites, or let them eat the house. Neither sounds like a good option to me, just like the politicians around here.

Window screens. I'd love to be able to open our windows this spring & summer, but our windows don't have screens. Does anyone know if screens are easy to install? Do we have to hire someone to do it, or is it a DIY job? (In answer to the first anticipated question, screens are necessary in our house because we have 4 indoor cats and at least 3 outdoor dogs, not to mention that I have this extreme rabid aversion to flies.)

Ooooh, and how could I forget the religious nutcases that have been on my mind? Jerry Falwell and Stephen Baldwin, particularly. Now, I really don't have any problems, per se, with people's various religions. I may not necessarily accept their same views, but as long as they aren't pushing them on me, we'll all be fine. But when someone starts telling me that gays, lesbians, & the ACLU caused 9/11 and that my kids shouldn't watch the Teletubbies because "Tinky Winky is gay,"  it's time to part ways, my friend. (Now, if you were to pose the infinitely more intelligent argument that the kids shouldn't be allowed to watch the Teletubbies because they inhibit their language skills, I'm all ears.) And Stephen Baldwin (yes, one of those Baldwin brothers), the self-proclaimed "Jesus Psycho" that can't remember even six of the Ten Commandments? He's just scary crazy. Or maybe crazy scary. Even scarier, though? The rockin' feedback from his book at Amazon, which indicates there are a lot of Jesus Psychos out there.

And there you have a few of the things that have been on my mind this week. What about you? What's been on your mind?

Dear Meteorologists:

Obviously, between El Nino and Global Warming, the weather has become impossible to predict, as I calculate your accuracy as of late to be in the 4% range.

Please look for new work immediately. You're fired.

Thank you,
Lori

P.S. Before you leave, my hostas & I would like that rain you've been predicting here for 3 days now.