Lenten Update
As you know, I gave up bad language in my car for Lent. Yes, I could have given up chocolate. It would have been easier.
I’ve done fairly well. I totally slipped up once, my husband was driving. At first I thought, “well it doesn’t count because I am not driving” but – it does. It counts.
I have not succeeded in not thinking the bad word. I ask forgiveness, and I ask for help not even thinking the bad words. He IS helping. My language is getting better. Alhamd’allah.
For my non-Kuwaiti, non-Middle East friends and readers, you can actually get in more trouble here for bad language than you can for crashing a car.
True story: in one country, a man was trying to get into a gated community and was refused. He was angry and wanted to back up, rather than going forward and turning around, so he put his car in reverse and gunned the engine and smashed into the car behind him. The woman driver was shocked, and just sat there. So he moved forward, and gunned the car in reverse, and hit her again! He did it a third time. She got out of her car and screamed at him “What are you doing, you a$$####???” and he had HER arrested for bad language. He stoically paid for the damage to her car, but SHE had to go to court and through a lengthy humiliating process of finding a lawyer, etc. She also had to pay a huge fine and listen to a lecture from the judge.
A wise person NEVER makes any hand gestures, either.
Giving up bad language on the highway is not only a spiritual improvement, it could also save me a lot of trouble down the road.
Offices Full of Germs: Women the Worst
From – I am not kidding – The Nigerian Tribune.
(A recent) study pointed out that for a woman, her office desk may harbour far more bacteria than the workplace restroom and the office desk of men. In fact, women have three to four times the number of bacteria in, on and around their desks, phones, computers, keyboards, drawers and personal items than men do, the study by University of Arizona Professor Charles Gerba found. Gerba, a Professor of Soil, Water and Environmental sciences, tested more than 100 offices on the UA campus and in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oregon and Washington, D.C. in a study commissioned by the Clorox Co.
The researchers swabbed the offices of 59 women and 54 men in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oregon, and Washington, D.C. They sampled eight sites in each office: the phone, desktop, computer mouse, computer keyboard, exclamation key on the computer keyboard, pen, bottom of desk drawer, and handle of desk drawer. The researchers also swabbed workers’ personal items at the office, including personal digital assistants (PDAs), women’s purses and makeup cases, and men’s wallets and found women have more germs on their office desks than men.
“I thought for sure men would be germier,” Gerba said. “But women have more interactions with small children and keep food in their desks. The other problem is makeup.” The tendency is high to doubt this statement. But much as a woman’s desks may typically look cleaner, the germs are likely to be more abundant. Cosmetics and hand lotions make prime germ-transfer agents, Gerba said. Makeup cases also make fine germ homes, along with phones, purses and desk drawers. Food in desk drawers also harbour lots of microorganisms, and it is more abundant among female office workers to have food in their desks and munch while on an assignment, on the computer or even picking a call.
Then, they tend to be around children more often than men, and we all know how easily kids transmit germs. And finally, they use makeup, which tends to absorb germs. Then it rubs off the face or gets scattered by brushes and sponges. The news was not all negative for females though. Gerba in the study found the worst office germ offender is men’s wallets. The back pocket is nice and warm; it’s a great incubator for bacteria. Another hot spot for bacteria in men’s offices: the personal digital assistant.” Men tend to play with their palm pilots more, thinking they’re playing video games or something,” Gerba said.
The top three bacteria hot spots in women’s offices, in order of germs amount : Makeup case, phone, and purse and in men’s offices starting from the highest to the least: Wallet, personal digital assistant and phone. Though a similar study by the Clorox Company, a manufacturer of disinfectant in February 2006, reported that in a study of nine office-based jobs, teachers had the work space with the highest amount of germs and lawyers had the least, Gerba said everyone should arm their office with a germ arsenal that includes: disinfectant wipes, disinfectant spray, paper towels and fruit (for drawer).
According to Gerba, people should clean cell phones and desk phones to get rid of bacteria. “You need to use a disinfectant wipe, or spray disinfectant on a paper towel, and clean the phone off. Never directly spray disinfectant cleaner on phone,” he said. “Do not use soap and water — that just pushes the germs around.” “We recommend that you use a wallet or purse that can be easily wiped off — like leather. A fabric bag is harder to clean and just holds more germs.”
Finally, Gerba said office knickknacks and accessories should be given the same thorough cleaning as everything else , explaining that “people tend to touch and pick up the germs on their desks. It’s a vicious cycle of germs transferring from hands to objects to desks. Hand sanitizers are great in eliminating the transfer of germs from your hands.” The level of germs on office desktops and telephones came in gender neutral; women had three to four times more germs on their keyboards and computer mice than their male counterparts. Desk drawers at women’s desks contained seven times more germs than men’s. Surprisingly, the research showed that the average office desktop has 400 times more bacteria than the average office toilet seat.
What Gerba found among the bacteria was coliform — intestinal bacteria generally found in human waste — on the restroom handles and faucets, in the kitchen sink and sponge, and even in candy basket. That “indicates to me somebody’s not washing his or her hands after coming back from the bathroom,” Gerba said.
That’s why Gerba found hundreds of thousands of bacteria on hot spots like a printer button and the button for the first floor in the elevator, touched by hundreds of fingers each day. Even though none of the bacteria Gerba found was life-threatening, they could lead to more colds and flu.
Prof Oluwole Adebo, a cardiothoracic surgeon commenting said this is a study Clorox, maker of a disinfectant commissioned and is motivated at helping them sell more of their products.” Without being in an office, the surface of our hand picks up germs throughout the day, but you don’t get infected by them because the skin is a barrier against germs. Some of the germs are not in a state to infect, especially in places that are dry and hot, but where humid, it can incubate bacteria. So when you are to eat, wash your hands because there are bacteria on your hands. These bacteria are not in a position to harm us and therefore these is no reason to clean with disinfectants.
“America is full of studies like that. They study everything and make money out of it. The fact is this, in the air you breathe in, there are bacteria in it. Do you sterilize it? No, the body is sufficient to keep the germs at bay. It is all out to pursue people to buy their product”, he concluded.
My Comment: Remember Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics where we talked about who structures the survey? It works the same for studies. The sponsor of this study is Clorox, who make Clorox bleach and multiple cleaning disinfectants. It is in their interest for Professor Gerba to find a very germy environment. The more disinfectants we buy, the higher their profits soar. Prof Oluwole Adebo is right! Germs are everywhere, and we survive, and even develop immunities to them. This study is purely to sell more Clorox products by convincing us we have an epidemic of uncleanliness.
On the other hand . . . it may be time to clean out the make up case and throw away that candy bar . . . 🙂
Good Omens
When our son asked me what I might like for Christmas, I told him “find three really good books that I probably wouldn’t buy for myself.” I can trust him to do a great job because:
1. He has alwasy spent a good amount of time hanging out around books.
2. He has a good idea what I buy for myself.
3. He has a whacky sense of humor.
Good Omens, by Niel Gaiman and Terry Pratchett was one of the books he and his bride gave me, and it was a riotous good read.
This book is not heavyweight – you can read it on one leg of an airplane trip or two or three nights before falling asleep. It treats a very heavy topic – The End of Days/ the Apocalypse in a very irreverant, very funny way. It treats the characters of good and evil – angels and devils – as real characters. In spite of the lightweight plot, there are some interesting – and hysterical thoughts.
Crowley, the demon/devil who was placed on earth to torment and tempt humans, hopes the end of the world will be a long way off . . . through the centuries, he has grown to rather like people.
Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff that they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of nastiness. There had been times, over the past millenium, when he’d felt like sending a message back Below saying Look, we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there’s nothing we can do to them that they don’t do themselves, and they do things we’ve never evey thought of, often involving electrodes. They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination. And electricity, of course.
The Anti-Christ is born, and cosmic events get underway. But . . .this being Earth, and bureacracies being as they are, things get screwed up. I’m not going to get specific; it’s part of the droll fun these authors have with us as they write this book. The Four Horsemen appear, but they ride motorcycles, and Pestilence has been replaced by Pollution.
As the situation heats up and the end of the world as we know it nears, Crowley ends up with an unlikely ally, the angel Aziraphale.
Now as Crowley would be the first to protest, most demons weren’t deep down evil. In the great cosmic game they felt they occupied the same position as tax inspectors – doing an unpopular job, maybe, but essential to the overall operation of the whole thing. If it came to that, some angels weren’t paragons of virture; Crowley had met one or two who, when it came to righteously smiting the ungodly, smote a good deal harder than was strictly necessary. On the whole, everyone had a job to do, and just did it.
Now, throw into the mix an ancient book of totally accurate prophesies that are sufficiently oblique to be disasterously mis-interpreted, The Nice and Accurate Prophesies of Agnes Nutter, Witch. “Nice” in this case refers to its oldest meaning, exact. And, while the prophesies ARE exact, finding out their exact meaning is another hilarious exercise.
All in all, a great read, a lot of fun . . . and underneath the fun, some little pinpricks of thought about human beings, the human condition, and our treatment of our world and one another that needle you long after you finish reading. Son, thanks, you chose a great book.
Party Busted
Wouldn’t you love to know the rest of this story? I sure would! From today’s Kuwait Times:
Detectives arrested a group of over 40 Kuwaiti and Western students of private school who were enjoying themselves at a private party in a very luxurious apartment in Salmiya, said security sources. Officials added that some neighbors heard them arguing in the building’s parking area about who would be allowed in and who would not be; for not contributing in the party’s expenses. An hour later, the apartment was busted and the strangely dressed young people (in devilish costumes) were arrested along with the building’s security officer who rented them the apartment.
My comment: Sounds to me like these kids have too much money, and too little sense, a la Risky Business. These are school kids??? And what were the costumes?
Dying Laughing: Al Qaeda in Seattle
My niece, Little Diamond has found a SATIRICAL article (I can’t figure out where, it is not The Onion ) on Al-Qaeda buying property in Seattle. If you know Seattle, and the pride Seattleites take in civility, friendliness, and neighborliness, then you, too, will die laughing. Click on A Diamond’s Eye View of the World for your grin to start the week.
And a part of me thinks – isn’t this what we are supposed to be doing? Be kind to our neighbors? Isn’t it the only way to interrupt the spiraling cycle of hatred and violence? Sometimes, an unexpected kind word changes everything – I know it has in my own world.
Jet Escort
Less than a minute ago, outside my window, a plane departed Kuwait with a THREE jet escort. Who could that be?
“Was That Funny?”
When my son was little, he went through a time when he would make up jokes and tell us, and watch our reaction and ask “was that funny?” He wanted desperately to catch on to humor, but humor is a whole new way of thinking, and he was only four or five years old.
We started with riddles, I think, jokes in which words had more than one meaning, and then we moved on to knock knock jokes. But when he first started making jokes, he started with pure nonsense.
Around eight, we introduced him to Shel Silverstein, a brilliant poet, who writes books for kids that are also a joy for adults.
(photo courtesy of Amazon.com.)
Where The Sidewalk Ends
Light in the Attic
Falling Up
We all loved Shel Silverstein. Our son would read the poems aloud to us as we zipped around the back streets of Europe. We never got tired of him. His poems are funny to both children and adults “One Sister for Sale” “The King Who Loved Peanut Butter” . . . and sometimes poignant, or even sad.
Slowly, slowly, our son built up a huge repetoire of humor. Today, he is one of the funniest men I know, albeit most of his wit is very dry, and sometimes . . . I don’t always get it.
And that doesn’t begin to tackle the problem of “what is funny” crossing national and cultural boundaries! I think you have really arrived in a language when you can tell a joke in another language, and the native speakers find it funny.
Stephen King and Hearts in Atlantis
You can be talking with serious people and watch their eyes change when they find you read Stephen King. I refuse to back down. Yep, I read Stephen King. I think he is a brilliant author, some books better than others, but when I am reading, sometimes I can feel my blood move faster through my veins as I wait for a life-threatening situation to resolve itself.
I can trust Stephen King. He taps into who we really are. I can also trust that most of the good guys will still be standing at the end, and most of the bad guys will meet a truly horrible and well-deserved death. I can trust that when bad things happen to good people, other good people will gather round, band together and the gestalt of all that willingness to help one another will prevail against the darkness.
The scariest book I ever read by Stephen King didn’t have any monsters, per se. It didn’t have the Walking Man, or any Wolves of Calla or any great evil, other than the evil that lurks in the human heart. The scariest book I have ever read by Stephen King was Hearts in Atlantis.
Hearts in Atlantis wasn’t even a novel, it was several shorter stories combined in one book. But the title story, Hearts in Atlantis, was about addiction. Not just any old addiction, either, but an addiction I had experienced.
It was my sophomore year in university. I had sailed through the trauma of freshman year with grace, great grades, I felt very confident. That summer, back home, I had taken bridge lessons, and holy smokes – I loved the game. It all made sense to me, and I loved figuring the probabilities and the possibilities, who had what card, how I could finesse that card, how I could WIN. I loved winning.
During the summer after my freshman year, I played a lot of bridge. So it was no wonder, when I got back to school, that I discovered a whole world of bridge players. Early in the morning, before my first class, I would head for the student union and pick up a coffee – and often a game.
The problem was, if I had a particularly good hand, the little devil on my shoulder would whisper “if you skip your class, you can win this hand!” and the bigger problem was – I would listen. I could afford to skip a class here and there, I did the homework. But through the year, I spent more and more time playing bridge and less and less time in the library. At the end of my sophomore year, my grade point average had fallen one full point.
That got my attention. I really wanted academic success. I spent my junior and senior years desperately working to get my grade point average back up to an acceptable level. Once the GPA falls, however, it only inches back up incrementally. It took almost straight A’s to undo the damage I had done to myself the year of bridge playing.
After graduation, I fell back into bridge playing on the duplicate level. But after a while, I noticed that while I travelled from place to place, it was the same smoke-filled room in every new city where we ended up, surrounded by a vampire-like culture that slept a lot of the day and only came alive at night. I also noticed that most of the conversations were about “the one that got away” – how such and such a hand might have been played best. Yawn. Yawn. Yawn. So one day, I just walked away, and never looked back.
Like all addictions, from time to time I hear bridge calling. From time to time I will enter a friendly game – party bridge, but it is no longer irresistable, no longer so seductive, so attractive. Thank God. Reading Stephen King brings back the terror of addiction.
Missing Letters
I am having so much fun. I have a house guest, an old friend, and we are goofing off all over town, having a great time.
She needed to write an e-mail to her husband, though, as as she sat down to write on my computer, she said “Intlxpatr, half the letters are worn off your keyboard! How do you know what to type?”
She is right. I have worn off some significant letters on my keyboard. I send an e-mail or two, and blog now and then ( 😛 ) so I am missing the w, e, i, o, a, s, d, f, g, k, l, c, v, b, n, m. Most of the time I am OK, as I am word processing, and can type really fast without looking, and I can edit before I publish. But when giving passwords, it is a bummer not being sure what I am putting in, and maybe 30% of the time, I get it wrong the first time.
I am using an Apple iBook about three years old. Naturally, there is a part of me that thinks I should buy a new computer (!) but the truth is, I don’t need a new computer, this one does all the things I need to do. It sure would be nice to get some keys that I could see, though. Is that possible here in Kuwait, to get new white letters for my white iBook?
Backing Against Hacking
This morning, a wonderfully quiet Friday morning in Kuwait*, I spent my time backing up all the entries in this blog. A fellow blogger, Fonzy went online to find his entire blog blank. Some mean-spirited hacker had gone in and wiped it out. Maybe those incapable of creating, destroy. I can’t imagine the nastiness it takes to wreck and destroy, to harm the innocent. I don’t want to try to wrap my mind around it, but I will take the warning.
Fortunately for the Fonz, he had back-up. Unfortunately for me, in spite of all my good intentions, I haven’t backed up in a long time. Months. So this morning I thanked God nothing had happened to my blog, and I backed it up.
It turned out to be kind of fun. I’d already forgotten some of the things I blogged about. Life moves on, and at such a rapid pace! And whew, now I am finished, at least for the time being. Thanks Fonz, for the reminder to back yourself up.
*For my non-Kuwait/non Middle Eastern readers, Friday morning is like Sunday morning in the western world. Relatively quiet, most people sleeping, not a lot of cars on the road – a day of rest.
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