House of Jorob

Fair Is Really Not A Good Thing to Be, When You're A House.

I have one of those ARMs.
You know the kind--the papers have been full of home owners walking away from them in droves. Or entire families are moving back to their apartments, hopes crushed.
Me, I just want a mortgage payment I can budget against.
In a 6-month period where all one reads about is the Fed cutting interest rates, my mortgage is going UP.
So, three weeks ago I apply for a re-fi.from Citizens Bank, where my checking account is. My other checking account.
Now, remember. I'm a first time homeowner. Bought the place 5-6 years ago. Never yet tried a re-fi.
Here's a great rule of thumb: When the entire financial world is going to hell, don't refinance when your house still needs some repairs done on it.
The appraisal will kill you.
My home is over 100 years old. Beautiful old wood. Plaster ceilings. Cedar shingles.
Did I mention the four holes in the dining room ceiling where the plumber went in to replace the pipes last month?
The appraiser noticed.
I won't even get into the chimney to nowhere. Basically, its a leftover structure from when some former owner built the attachment onto the back end of the house. I had the chimney cut off at the roof level when it was apparent the rain was getting in where it went through the shingles up there.
But because I hadn't yet replastered the wall where the rain had gotten in (but stupidly had taken off the plaster to make sure the underlying bricks were dry).I had brick showing. And the appraiser called it a carbon monoxide risk--which it would have been had the damn thing been connected to anything at the bottom..
We had explanations for every single circumstance--but I don't think the appraiser listened very well.
So my house has been classed in "fair" condition.
And this morning my loan officer says no bank in the world is going to write a mortgage on it during these times.

Toxic Play Sand

My cousins had a good-sized sandbox that we were invited over to play in when I was growing up.

My most striking memory wasn't making sand castles.

It was uncovering the cat-poop.

Large, open spaces of sand attract all kinds of critters. The overlying tarp didn't do enough to keep them out.

I didn't go near that sandbox afterward.

These days you can buy some pretty nice sandboxes, with serious lids on them to keep the critters out.

What else?

Well, you may end up poisoning your child if you don't take some time to choose the right playsand.

Playsand is one of those gray-area subjects: The kind where a lot of people get together and raise an alarm and have their claims evaluated by the government agency responsible for such things...and lose the arguement.
In any situation where the government finds for an industry over the people raising an issue, there are always leftovers.

Twenty years is a hell of a long time for something to simmer. These leftovers are over two decades old...and still have some chew on the bone.

The trouble lies with playsand--for the most part, it is NOT beach sand. It is ground quartz. Quarried along the coast, It makes a fine, white, powdery substance that's bagged up and sold in toy stores and hardware stores all over.

Even concrete makers sell it--what the heck, it's from the same quarries.

The original debate goes back 20 years, originally centered around which form of tremolite is present in the sand. Back then, both sides acknowledged tremolite was a contaminant. One side argued that there were fibrous forms of the mineral in the sand--making it a health hazard. The other side said it was crystalline--and therefore a safer form of tremolite.

After listening to arguments by the Health Research Group--a division of Public Citizen that urged a recall or outright ban of the stuff--as well as arguments from the National Stone Association and others on behalf of the stone industry, The Consumer Product Safety Commission decided not to take action.

Other things surfaced. The International Agency for Research on Cancer found that crystalline silica, an ingredient in most playsands, was carcinogenic to humans. The result? Bags containing crystalline silica bear a California Proposition 65 warning label: "This product contains crystalline silica, known to the State of California to cause cancer and other substances which are known to the State of California to cause cander, birth defects, and reproductive harm."

No other state is calling out crystalline silica on warning labels.

One company make a playsand that is not quartz at all--their thought is that by avoiding the mineral all together one avoids the whole question. They use a variety of crushed feldspar. And they've got a 2003 Material Data Safety Sheet to back up their claims.

No reports exist of the disease in children exposed to silica-containing sand. And that's why the Consumer Product Safety Commission hasn't treated this like an emergency. However, as one researcher pointed out in 1988,  ''This is a kind of hazard in children that doesn't manifest itself for 20 years, and then it's too late.''

If I were going to create a sandbox for the kids--or the grandkids--I'd focus on a couple things:

• Make sure I could lock the box down after the kids are finished.
• I'd change out the sand a couple of times in a season.
• I'd avoid sandbags that were blank. If I were selling this stuff, I'd sure as hell want my customers to know my sand is crystalline-silica free, or at minimum, not made from ground quartz.

This one says no asbestos. It's a very nice webpage. Says all the right things. I'm sure the folks there beileve in their product. But it's still quartz. If I'm in a store and I find this, I'm heading over to the customer service desk to ask about alternatives.

Hopefully you won't get the boneheaded answer my neighbor got when she asked a local dealer about it.
She had a bag of playsand in her hands, and it was completely unmarked, as far as ingredients and warnings went. She asked the "do-you-want-fries-with-that" intellectual representing the store where the sand came from.

His answer? "I dunno. The desert?"

More on the subject:

Here is a 1988 article published in the NYTimes.
National Geographic's Green Guide
Healthy Child Care's guide

Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Lifelock.....

Remember LifeLock?

"Hi. I'm Ted. Here's my social security number: 457-55-5462. I'm so sure that LifeLock will protect me from identity theft that I'm publishing it on the web."

It was bold.

Daring.

Fantasy.

Yesterday, CCN says LifeLock customers in New Jersey, Maryland, and West Virginia are suing Davis, saying his service didn't work, and that he knew it wouldn't--because it had failed him already.

Infoworld reported a theft incident last year, so they seem to have something to stand on.

Personally I liked the bus ads that plastered the number all along the broadside in 14-inch letters. Not like you needed any specialty equipment to find his number, now did it?

It'll make a great defense for the next time a kid gets caught wandering the neighborhood bus and trolley yards after dark: "Hey, I was looking for that guy's number for a computer project I was working on."

Nominations to the Graveyard of Useless Words

Eloquence is an attainable goal.

Lofty, yet attainable.

Even if you approach the heights of the late William F Buckley, Jr. in your mastery of the lexicon, you gotta wonder....why do some words exist? Why were they even born?

Really.

Like eleemosynary. There it sits, amongst perfectly respectable "e" words on the page of my dictionary (an effect lost when using the web dictionaries. A websearch feature is helpful, but lends no sense of  place-on-page).

Who uses it? Who needs it, when "charitable" is out there, doing all the recognizable work. Who decided they needed another way to talk about charity?

There's more.

There's majuscule. Who decided they needed another way to talk about capital letters? And why do they get to slap their self-styled galimatias into the language, and onto my Scrabble board? Nonsense, I say. And simpler, at that.

And I have yet to hear someone describe our majestic national bird as a glabrous eagle.

Time to titivate the language, and send these words to the sepulcher.

The Mailstream: So Why Doesn't Glue Stick to the Inside of the Bottle?

Mailstreams are rivers, with lots of stuff floating in the depths.

I understand people like to slap filters in their streams, cleaning the screens every couple of days without a second thought.
Me, I sift the screens. There's always something interesting in there.
Like the following question.
I peeled it off the filters, hung it out to dry a bit, and tried to come up with an answer.
It was perhaps an Imponderable once, or part of an Andy Rooney or comic's stand-up routine.

Why doesn't glue stick to the inside of the bottle?

• Taco says it's because there's no air.
• Elmer says its because their glue hardens when exposure to air causes the water to evaporate, and a well-capped bottle keeps the air out.
• Frank Wright, science teacher agrees, and points out that some glues' ingredients react with air to become adhesives.
• And WonderQuest's April Holladay covers the last piece--that bottles of glue still have some air in them, but not enough to permit effective evaporation--gotta love those bouncing molecules!

Sleep will come easy tonight.

Bookshelf: Eat This, Not That!

Eat This, Not That!
David Zinczenko with Matt Goulding
c 2008

There's a scene in Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me where our hero has a...bad reaction....to the continuing consumption of food from the McDonald's drive-thru window. Rather graphic, and makes a point. (or two, actually. The second one being if one has been feeding one's body a steady diet of vegan meals don't suddenly replace it with pounds of beef and bread.)

All in all, the film hammered McDonald's menu. And left those of us who dined on the flame-broiled goodness of Burger King feeling smug.

So when a book cover proclaims McDonald's Big Mac is healthier for you than a Burger King Whopper with cheese, I want to know why.

Turns out its a difference of 220 calorie/18 fat grams between the two sandwiches. (Whopper with cheese 760 calories/47g fat vs Big Mac 540 calories/29 g fat)

Health-conscious and you're reading this, I know. I know. I know. This is like I'm comparing death by a noose vs death by a blade. The outcome is still less than desireable for you.

But for those of us who relish our burgers, for those of us who've fallen off the South Beach funride and put all that weight back on, for those of us who want to eat what we like to eat, this book offers a toehold on a slippery path.

Zinczenko's guideline is simple: Eat smarter wherever you are eating. His premise is to present the better food choices within the context of each restaurant food chain itself. The idea being that if you find yourself at an Arby's, at least make the right choice among the sandwiches.

Calorie, sodium and fat counts are listed for each item. He even goes to the donut chains!

Zinczenko is a diet-book guy, having created The Abs Diet. But with this book he outdoes himself, providing  menu-translators (what to eat, what not to eat) for unbranded restaurants (Chinese, Thai, Steakhouse, Indian) and diners.

Check out Zinczenko's blog in support of Eat This, Not That, here.

And the President plays....

I'm sitting in front of a Final Fantasy XI session, partying with three online friends. We're in a campaign battle that's going particularly rough: not enough damage dealers to spread across the three named that have shown up.

And I think, If I were President, would I still play games? Ever?  At all?  Does he even have time?

Wouldn't that just suck:

Most powerful man in the world. Check.
Big airplane. Check.
World Leaders react to your actions/words/policy. Check.
Freeps vs Creeps night. Che--no. wait. Nope. Damn.

Now, I admit I have no idea where that thought came from.
I followed it to it's next point: What kind of video games does our sitting President play?

So I pulled up another browser window and and wrote an email, and asked:

Mr. President,
Do you ever get any time to play video games? If so, which one (s)? It occurred to me as I was gaming with a couple friends that other night that it would really be lousy if my job kept me away, never allowed me any time, to play.
No, I'm not twelve years old. I'm middle-aged, and rarely watch TV as a matter of recreation--except for Flyers games.

Anyway, thanks for your time.

Respectully,

Joe Robinson
www.house-of-jorob.com

It seemed like a fair enough question to ask.

Bookshelf: Pattern Recognition

Pattern Recognition
William Gibson
C 2003

Footageheads.

Before FaceBook. Before Myspace. Before Youtube. Before Cloverfield. Generating underground buzz larger than anything Madison Avenue can hope to create.

Before any of these, there were Footageheads, avid devotees of strange, enigmatic video clips being posted anonymously on the Internet.

Cayce Pollard, footagehead herself, is a highly respected American design consultant. Her international reputation has brought her to London to evaluate a redesign of a corporate logo. In London, she accepts another assignment: to find the poster of those mysterious film fragments. Her employer knows buzz when he hears it.

I first read Gibson around 1990. Mona Lisa OverDrive was my first exposure to the author who coined the term, "cyberspace." God, what a rush that book was. Tad Williams, the Wachowski brothers and any anime artist working after 1989 owe Gibson a creative debt.

This book was most definitely NOT like the Gibson of almost 20 years ago. When you've practically invented two genres, you've probably said all you've got to say on the subject, and should be moving on.

This is new stuff, Gibson writing in the mainstream. A slower pace, perhaps. Imagery does not fail, ever. The science fiction flavor is strong, but not occupying the entire text.

Well worth tracking down and reading.

Cole Slaw

Earlier this month, my daughter Jess shot me a text asking for my mother's cole slaw recipe.

Mom's not too terribly forthcoming when she chooses to be (the topics that invite this reluctance seem to be random). Recipes being one of them, I stopped asking for this one after the third reminder in a week.

And got to thinking--growing up, the kids had been crazy for this stuff--every holiday, if we were heading to their house, one or the other kid would get on the phone and ask Mom to make it for the meal. Didn't matter if the meal wasn't one that featured cole slaw.

And I know Jess had me ask for that recipe before....as in, when we all lived together. And back then, when Mom was actually making the slaw (these days her arthritis stimies a lot of long-term activities, like chopping) I remembered I had actually sat in the kitchen while she made it, and wrote it down.

All I had to do was find a 15-year old piece of notebook paper.

Somewhere in the house.

I spend three days looking for the thing in my spare time.

On the fourth day, I mention my challenge to my wife.
She thought for a second, then said, "I think I have that sheet with my recipes."

Fifteen minutes later I have my Slaw sheet.

After sharing it with Jess, I thought I'd share it here, too.

Like with any other pass-down recipe, Mom never committed to exact measurements, but this was what was extracted from Mom over time. Neither did Grandmom, with whom this originated, near as I can tell.

Best way is to make some batches and see what works out best. She was very clear about the two drops of vinegar, though. Basically, the way I was shown was you pour the vinegar into the bottle's cap, and then drip from the cap into the mixing bowl. This keeps things under control. Unless you have an eyedropper handy.

1 head of cabbage, shredded
1/4 tsp salt (you may want to scale that back a bit for the first time)
2 drops vinegar
minced spanish onion (I have no notation here, but this is a mild onion
so I'm thinking you could work with pinches from a teaspoon)
pepper (pinch, adjust to taste over time)
mayo (3 or 4 tblsp to start, adjust to creaminess preference)
1 tbsp milk

That's it.

Harp, Two

The bedroom looks nice with its new layout.

We left the air conditioner in place. The only window with a sill remains a contested cat-seat.
But with the battleground shrunken to the sill itself, everyone's less likely to take the full-body slam as a path to victory. Nothing like a three-foot drop to make you place nicely with others.

We were still looking at bare bulbs.

We'd taken a run over to our local Home Depot, looking for lampshades.

Ick. Not enough choices, for our tastes. Unless we wanted to buy a lamp along with our choice of shade.

I cobbled together an old harp--it was tight, but it fit--plus an even older lampshade onto one of the lamps so my wife could have her reading lamp without feeling like she was living in an unfurnished apartment.

As it turned out, there still was a lamp shop within a few miles--one that hadn't been wiped out by a shopping mall developer or lost their lease to a burger joint. Lectric Light House it was, and unfortunately they were closed by the time I got there after work.

I'd been recruited to be a staff judge at the Kids Grow Expo this year (Arm Twist: Take a day out of the office, work under an open-air tent in 70 degree springtime weather, get fed lunch, enjoy arts/crafts and horticultural entries from hundreds of kids before the crowds get there. I'm gonna refuse?). The hard part is this: 98 entries made out of grains and seeds, and they all look alike. My job is to pick the blue ribbon winners out of them, potentially breaking some six-year-old hearts.

Kids Grow is partner to Temple University Ambler Campus's EarthFest, making for a very cool way to celebrate Earth Day.

The day before I'm to go, word comes that a wave of springtime colds cut through the ranks of our volunteers right as the Expo was coming together and the entries coming in. Any last minute volunteers would be appreciated.

Hmmm. Who can I recruit, I thought, as I ate dinner that night with my lovely wife.

Which is how, less than 24 hours later, we were heading home from Ambler instead of my riding a SEPTA R3 commuter train. And that brought us to Lectric Light House. Before closing time.

I strongly recommend the obvious: when shopping for a lamp shade bring the lamp--and bulb-- with you. Not because you can see what the shade looks like, but because you can see what the light looks like. Plug in, turn on, stand back and consider. If the shade turns the light into a funky color (orange??? That's a white bulb!), better to know it now, before debuting things in the bedroom.

The shades/harps cost more than the lamps themselves: $73 for two of each.

I'm not sure whether I should laugh about that or not.