a good laugh this a.m.

nice spice

a and i have really been enjoying the chipotle tabasco hot sauce. now, regular tabasco is very pedestrian and too damn vinegary, but if you have just continued to pass by all their products in the aisle of capsaicin joy, stop and turn around for this one. seriously. it is rich, smoky, and a medium supply of fire to please most crowds. mmmmmm, good.

change o' the season

awoken by the percussive pitter-pat of droplets let go from a puffy grey sky on this chilly monday morning. a reminder that fall is here and a selection of different jackets should be kept at arms length for a little while.

i have several fond memories of fall days growing up. it was always a time of playing outdoors again without feeling weighed upon with the thick jacket of iowa humidity. fall was a break from all that sultry oppressiveness and a reminder that there could be comfort found in the outdoors. although in the heartland, it was about 3 weeks in the spring and 3 weeks in the fall when you really could smile along with the weather.

interestingly enough, as i don't follow sports at all, the recollections of iowa fall that are quintessential to my memory involve either playing football with friends or there is also a couple second flash of driving in a car to go play football with others and seeing the leaves head downward and the smells of autumn in the crisp air that soothe my visions.

to this day, fall holds a strong 1st place for seasons in my book.

keep on keepin' on

one of those catch phrases that i always enjoyed in my early twenties. then there is keep on truckin'. beef had one of his signature large non-folding wallets that had a yellow patch sewn upon the face of the wallet with a comical old bearded man with the latter mentioned catch phrase.

wallets have a story behind them, no? i can recall several wallets that i really liked through the years. i bounced in and out of the velcro phases of wallets a time or two. one of my first wallets was, and i hang my head shamefully but you must remember that i was in 5th grade, a black nylon bi-fold that i bought at the qwick trip gas station. screen printed upon the front was the copyrighted playboy bunny profile face.

at the time, i had no idea what playboy really was other than some nudie mag that seemed to raise the eyebrows of generations--for what reason, i was unsure, but i thought i'd cast my vote by getting a sheath that would hold my public library card and my $5 a week allowance.

but get this-- a boyhood chum of mine, a "good" friend who was notorious for thieving at stores and staying out late with his carousing alcohol-dependent parents, stole my wallet and an atari video game from me in the same night. needless to say, i was crushed. my ego was shot, i lost my library card, my pitfall video game, four bucks and change, and my forlorned friend.

it's my day

iraq v1.0

digging through drawers last night, i found a major dick...

can bar soap get dirty?

occasionally, this question comes to mind. is seems wholly possible for bar, and liquid for that matter, soap to become dirty itself. how then do you clean dirty soap... with more soap?

i found one article that explained a bit of the resolve to this inquiry:

"according to a series of tests conducted in the early 1980s, bars of soap are often covered with bacteria and carry a higher load than you'd find inside a liquid dispenser. But no one knows for sure whether this dirty soap will actually transfer its germs to your hands during a wash. in fact, what little clinical evidence there is suggests that dirty soap isn't so bad. a study from 1965 and another from 1988 used similar methodologies: researchers coated bars of soap in the lab with e. coli and other nasty bacteria, and then gave them to test subjects for a vigorous hand-wash. both teams found no transfer of contamination from the dirty soap. however, both studies were tainted by potential conflicts of interest: the first was conducted by proctor and gamble, and the second came from the dial corp. still, there's no good evidence to contradict these studies, and it's likely that the bacteria on a dirty bar would just wash off when you rinsed your hands. in other words, you'd be cleaning the soap as you cleaned your hands."

very interesting. the study from 1988 can be found here.

the article continues and notes that "recent hand-hygiene studies in the developing world have found that washing with soap and water reduces infections even when the water supply might be contaminated. dirty water, like dirty soap, might not make washing less effective. even under the best conditions, washing your hands can actually increase the number of microorganisms present on your hands, thanks to contaminated surfaces near the sink, splashes of contaminated water, or improperly dried hands. (in general, it's safer to leave your hands unwashed than to leave them wet.)"

i find this fascinating and disturbing all the same.

changes

there seems to be a pattern of threes in my life: flat tires on the bike, meals in a day, and major life events...