Mr F himself is beyond limits. (Question of the Day, 72)

Why do we say "off limits?"

This morning, in one of my occasional bouts of parenting, I had to lock off the laundry room door where we have cat litter, laundry, and hot water heaters. Mr F likes to go in there and play, and when he gets in that mood, we simply lock the door. (But not for long, because that's the cats' bathroom, at least until September 1 when Oldest takes them both to her new place.)(The cats, not the Babies!)

I told Mr F "You know that room is off-limits," and then, because I'd finished my parenting for the day, I thought about that saying for a while. It's a strange one.

We never say something is on limits. When the Babies! want to go play in their room, I don't say "Sure, that's on-limits."

And limits aren't really something you're off, anyway. They're a boundary, aren't they? So shouldn't I have told Mr F the room was beyond limits? Although that might mean that there are no limitations to what can be done in that room. Or maybe that there were no limits to the room itself. Just think: The Room Of Infinite Possibilities!* My mind spun with the various permutations, so much so that I forgot to brush my teeth.

Next time, I'll just settle for a spanking.

(*The Room Of Infinite Possibilities would make an awesome book, and I call dibs.)

I'm supposed to be working right now. (Stuff, and Junk.)

Photo ripped from the background of Sez's blog.

...But instead I'm reading blogs.

Sez has a link to a blog you've got to read. I'm just glad that clicking it didn't lead back to here.

Stanley Goodspeed appears to have invented an entirely new category of porn.

Hyperbole And A Half explains how it is that someone can never be an adult, and includes the incredible phrase "Clean ALL the things?," something I've frequently asked Sweetie if I really need to do.

And I got to that last link by starting at Read.Dance.Bliss, who haikusizes (maybe inadvertently?) about stepping on a bee. RDB: Submit that to the New Yorker as a poem.

1001 Ways To Tune Up The World, Number Sixty-Nine.

69. Launch garbage into space.

I was watching the news the other day (in between Lost episodes) and saw that there's now another controversy brewing about oil in the Gulf.

No, not the controversy where the government now claims that half the oil evaporated, a claim they made only now, instead of, at the beginning, saying "Hey, did you know oil can evaporate? So don't worry about that spill in the Gulf so much because half the oil is going to evaporate in 2 months." If they'd said that then, I might think it was true. Saying now that the oil has evaporated just further erodes my faith in government and science. And that faith was pretty eroded already. My faith in science and government is the Grand Canyon of belief.

Anyway, the new controversy is about what to do with the oily, tarry waste, and the apparent choice that's been made about that question is "Dump it a little further into Louisiana and Missisippi," so that instead of oil waste on the beaches, we have oil waste in landfills not far from the beaches.

What to do with our garbage is always a problem -- not just when companies like BP decide to kill 11 people in the name of slightly higher profits. It's also a problem when cities make us separate our recyclables and when people dump old cars in swamps, and our only option so far has been "bury the garbage and hope our kids develop a resistance to tainted ground water."

But for 50 years now, we've had the capacity to build simple rockets, and we live only 93,000,000 miles from the largest incinerator in the neighborhood. NASA's not doing anything right now -- they can't even keep the space station's air conditioner working (try hitting it with a hammer, astronauts!), so why not have NASA start launching our garbage at the sun? No landfills, no ugly waste, no protesters, and, as a bonus, imagine what kind of cool new elements the sun can create using its fusion powers on our soda bottles and dirty diapers.

Prior entries:

68. Stop bleeping out words.

67. Just say thanks.

66. Change the side of the road people drive on about every 10 years.

65. Get rid of those mid-forearm buttons on men's shirts.

64. Make spray bottles work when tilted.

63. Pay teachers a lot more.

62. Longer school years.

61. Longer school days.

60. Paparazzi-fy The News.

59. Make refrigerators wider and shallower.

58. Let everyone use "forever pricing" on everything.

57. Start all buildings on the first floor.

56. Process EVERYTHING.

55. Make children's toys solar- or kinetic-powered.

54. Abandon the north.

53. Give in and have computers start remembering things for us.

52. Make cups and glasses wider on the bottom. (All cups and glasses.)

51. Sometimes easier is harder (and dumber.)

50. Don't lather, rinse, repeat (I'm going somewhere with this...)

49. Ban cigarettes.

48. Use metered lanes to close a lane when doing traffic repairs, thereby avoiding long backups when jerks opt to ignore the lane closing signs.

47. Switch to a parliamentary form of government with proportional representation. (If you already do that, then stick with it.)

46. Quit Cell Phone Charger Thinking.

45. Create an Internet Superhighway, giving high-speed Internet access to everyone, everywhere.

44. Stop teaching any math past algebra and geometry to almost everybody, and instead just provide a general theory of math to high schoolers.

43. Launch people to Mars. Or even further.

42. Think nice things, and then say them.

41. Get the cheapest toothpaste possible, then use the money you save to do some good in the world.

40. Allow gay marriage.

39. Stop describing things as "hell" or "hard work" when they're not at all.

38. Accept the idea that eventually we're going to have to pay for stuff on the Internet.

37. Spell your kids' names the right way.

36. Look up more often.

35. Put people before pets.

34. Share the profits with employees, directly and frequently.

33. Dress up, at least a little, in public.

32. Apply the "Line Pass" philosophy to everything (including some government services).

30/31. Impose a luxury tax that increases exponentially the more people spend/Never watch another Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie movie again.

29. What's so great about mom-and-pop stores and farms?

28. No more long answering machine or voice mail greetings.

27. Stop federal support of student loans.

26. Require everything we build, from here on out, to get at least some of its power from the sun or the wind.

25. Do an "Oklahoma Land Rush" in the cities.

24. Personalized Candy Bar Making Machines.

23. Learn new languages just for fun.

22. Opposite yourself.

21. Just like dandelions.

20. Why not have Radio-DVRs?

19. Start treating health care like what it is: a universal, inherent right of all people.

18. Baseball should have a shorter season and shorter games.

17. Open the borders. Everywhere.

16. Just start DVDs without all the preliminaries, please.

15. Just allow colleges to pay athletes, already.

14. Don't get married before you're 30.

13. Ban driving any kind of automobile, motorcycle or other personal vehicle within 1-2 miles of downtown in any city with a population of more than 100,000.

12. Abolish gym class; instead, teach kids to play musical instruments.

11. Change copyright laws to allow anyone to use anyone else's creative work provided that the copier pay 60% of the profit to the originator and that the copier not cast the original work in a negative light.

10. Have more sidewalk cafes and outdoor seating.

9. When you have to give someone a gift, ask them what they want, and then get that thing for them.

8. Never interrupt or finish someone's jokes.

7. Periodically, give up something you like for at least a month.

6. Switch to "E-money."

5. Have each person assigned one phone number, and then add an extension for the various phones and faxes that person might be reached at.

4. Abolish Mondays and Tuesdays.

3. Don't listen to interviews with athletes or comedians.

2. Have "personal cashiers" at the grocery store.

1. Don't earn more than $200,000 per year.





Is this working? You bet --

1001 Ways also helped change the world here!

And

1001 Ways also helped change the world here!

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Claudius wanted to be the first man to reach the stars... but it was murder to get there. Read Eclipse, the haunting sci-fi book from Briane Pagel. Available at Lulu.com and on your Kindle.


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I think I set a World Record For Almost-Dying: Part Three: How Long Can I Milk This "Bees" Thing To Avoid Work?

I almost died twice in one week. This is part 3 of the story-- Part one is here.

(Part two is here.)


When I was little, my mom was allergic to bees -- "allergic" in a way that made her, if she so much as saw a bee, go running at full speed for the nearest enclosure. I don't know if she ever had been stung by a bee; she must have, I suppose, or else she wouldn't have known how bad it would be if she was stung again, and clearly, in her mind at least, it would be bad.

I remember one time, we were out gardening. At least, Mom was gardening. We -- my brothers and I -- were alternating between saying "Is this a weed?" and pulling up her rose bushes in an attempt to never ever have to garden again. Mom was wearing jeans and a longer-sleeved shirt, which at the time didn't seem so unusual, since that was what people wore back then. This was the late 70's or early 80's, when adults generally dressed like adults instead of like people who secretly wish they weren't too old to shop at the GAP anymore, the way adults dress now. (As usual, I except myself from that, as I dress like someone who primarily buys whatever clothing is on the discount rack at Wal-Mart.)

My parents wore pants for almost every activity -- Dad being somewhat the exception, as Dad did not wear pants when sitting at the kitchen table on Saturday mornings doing his checkbook and paying bills. He'd get up about 8 a.m. to go through the shoe box of paperwork he had in his closet -- old checks from the bank, bills, other things that we didn't care about and didn't want to know about because Dad worked on them in his underwear and a t-shirt. Or, in hot weather, just the underwear.

The rest of the time Dad wore pants, even for yardwork, and even for coaching our t-ball team. Mom wore pants, too, and generally speaking, my parents wore jeans or pants for everything other than occasional trips to the beach, when Dad might put on a pair of cutoff shorts that used to be pants.

Mom wearing pants to garden, then, didn't seem unusual or anything to note... then. Looking back now, I think it was a protective measure, too, one that gave her no solace from the constant presence of bees in our backyard. Mom loved to garden and loved her flowers, but bees were certain death, so she was torn between digging in the garden and not dying. That generally led to one of us being posted out there even if there were no weeds or rose bushes to pull up, so that we could watch for bees, a duty we performed halfheartedly. At best. After all, how much of a threat could a bee actually pose?

Mom thought they posed a huge threat -- certainly a bigger threat than all the serial-killing-rapists that populated the world we lived in, and we saw just how big of a threat one day, live, when Mom was kneeling and attacking something near a plant with her little garden claw -- the three-pronged metal garden claw that would frequently become a metal appendage for someone fearsome in my games -- when suddenly she leaped up, shrieking and waving her arms. Her yells were unintelligible as she fled towards the back door, garden claw still in her hands, and we watched in wonder as she got into the house and slammed the door.

When we got inside, we learned she'd seen a bee, and that was it for that day. For her. We had to go back out and finish pulling up rose bushes. But we always laughed, a little, about Mom's crazy reaction to the bees, and teased her about that day for a long time.

I bring this up because after I got out of the hospital on Sunday afternoon I decided I wasn't going to be like that. I spent the Sunday After The Bees itching and watching CNN and waiting to be released and wondering, sometimes, if they had forgotten about me because nothing was going on. I can't be blamed for that, though. The hospital bothers you so much when you're there, coming in and taking blood and blood pressures and asking how you're doing and having housekeepers come in and dust off the television while you lay there wondering if you're supposed to make small talk with them ("So, um, how's the weather outside?" I'd ask some of the people who came in. Most of them said something along the lines of "I don't know, I've been here for 13 hours and got in at 3 a.m.," trying to out-guilt me about how tough their lives were. I was tempted, each time, to say, "Oh yeah? I got stung by 16 bees!" But then I'd have to tell the whole story all over again and I didn't really care to make that many new friends.)

After all that activity between 8 p.m. and 10 a.m., there was amazingly little going on for the rest of the day. I got lunch -- real food, not broth -- and sat and watched TV. I didn't have my Kindle with me, I didn't have a magazine with me, and I couldn't find a magazine, either, not at first.

It's amazing how often I forget my Kindle; after getting it for a present and commenting to Sweetie at the time that it meant that I'd never be without reading material, I have a habit of leaving it at home and consequently getting stuck without anything to read. It first happened just after I got the Kindle, when I went to visit my mom, then very ill, and decided to spend the night and help take care of her to give my brother a break. I decided that before I learned that there was nothing to read in Mom's house -- or at least, nothing I wanted to read -- and before I learned, too, that I had to be up about every hour on the hour, so I wouldn't be sleeping at all. As a result of that, I spent the night occasionally flipping through a three-day-old Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and mostly watching Three's Company marathons.

When I'd gone to the ER before, I'd forgotten, in my haste and not-really-being-able-to-breathe state, to pack anything and so I frittered around all day Sunday, watching TV shows and cartoons and hoping that someone, anyone, would come in and let me go. At one point about two o'clock, when a couple of hours had gone by without even seeing a nursing assistant, I wondered "What if I just got up and left? They can't stop me, can they?"

We're never really sure what power people have, are we? At least, I'm not. I once took my car to a mechanic to have the brakes looked at. When he called me back and I went back to the shop, he had it up on the platform and the tires were off and he said my brakes were really unsafe and he couldn't let me drive the car. I'd have to get them fixed, and it would cost $2,000.

"I don't have $2,000," he said.

"I can't let you drive that car, legally," he said. I was about 20 years old at the time, and did what all 20-year-olds do in that situation. I called my dad and asked to borrow $2,000, explaining that I needed it because I couldn't legally drive my car due to the brakes.

"Let me talk to the mechanic," my dad said, and I put the guy on the phone. After a few minutes, the guy hung up and said "It'll be $200 for the inspection," and put my car back together. I paid him and drove away not long after that. My dad called me later and had me take the car to his mechanic, who charged me $500 to fix the brakes.

I didn't know, then, that mechanics don't really have the legal authority to hold a car and determine who's safe to drive on the road and who's not. And I don't know, now, what authority a hospital has to keep me there if I just want to leave because it's Sunday afternoon and I'm bored and itchy and want to go home so I can rest up before calling in sick the next day, something I'd already decided to do because if being in the hospital overnight doesn't get you a Monday off of work, what does?

I assumed that I could just get up and leave, but I was reluctant to do that because what if I was wrong, and I up and left and dropped dead in the middle of the parking lot? Who would Sweetie sue if that happened, and it turned out I'd left without being discharged? Far better, I decided, to wait until they let me go and then if I drop dead, it'll be an open-and-shut case.

So I sat there and finally got out that night, and it was probably pretty good that I sat there, because they had to give me some prescriptions to make sure that I didn't actually fall over dead or something.

One of the prescriptions was for one of those adrenaline pens, the kind that you jab into your leg if you eat shellfish or get sprayed with peanut butter when a little boy tries to show you his invention and it doesn't work the way it should but instead explodes all over the room, ending the chances for that couple to adopt him but setting him up for an adventure involving time travel and dapperly dressed talking frogs.

"Keep this with you at all times," they warned me, and showed me how to use it, and told me when to use it, and then gave me this improbable disclaimer, too: "Be careful not to stab yourself in the thumb with it."

When I said "Does that happen a lot?" thinking maybe they were joking, the nurse assured me that it did, in fact, happen a lot that people, while trying to save the life of someone who's nearly dying (of allergies, of all things), because of the way the cap is pulled off, accidentally stabs the pen into their own thumb.

"What happens then?" I asked.

"We usually have to amputate the thumb," she said, explaining that the adrenaline would close off blood vessels in the thumb and maybe kill it.

We agreed that was a terrible thing to have happen, and I determined to be careful. I only later realized that such an accident would not only result in the loss of a thumb on the jabber, but also the loss of life on the part of the person who would have been jabbed with it.

I began carrying the pen around with me that week as I eased back into work. I'd already decided, on Sunday, that I was going to call in sick to work on Monday; as I said, I'm not one to waste a trip to the hospital and the resultant obligatory day off watching television, and I had episodes of Lost to catch up on. But when it came time to return to work Tuesday, I hadn't counted on the lingering effects of the bee stings and how'd they'd be hitting me.

The primary effect that I noticed was being tired. That, combined with the ongoing itchiness and some dizziness, really concerned me. How much can a bee pack into a sting? I wondered as I was driving to work on Tuesday morning and trying to clear my head through a medicinal combination of coffee, the Dan Patrick radio show and using my own uniquely opportunistic road rage. When people did stupid stuff in front of or around me on the road -- and let's face it, everything every other driver on the road does is stupid, right? -- I would say to myself, inside my air-conditioned-and-Dan-Patricked car, something like "Geez, get it together! I just got out of the hospital after nearly dying, and you're going to make a left turn in front of me?"

It would have been an even more compelling argument if the other driver had heard it, I'm sure.

The other lingering effect was one I hadn't counted on. The doctors and nurses were warning me about what to do if I got stung by a bee again -- and also asking me, repeatedly, if I'd seen My Girl, because apparently only Macauley Culkin and I are the only two people ever to get seriously stung by bees. Or maybe it's that Hollywood has a dearth of movies in which the lead character dies of bees. Either way, I heard about 10 times in the hospital stay about the movie My Girl.

(For my own part, I far preferred to think about Dane Cook's "F-- bees.... I would punch every bee in the face." But I didn't say that to the doctors, and also, Dane Cook, you may want to take note from my experience that it's really hard to punch a bee in the face. I couldn't even see their faces.)

When the doctors and nurses would give me those warnings/reviews of My Girl, I'd take note and think to myself "Yeah, okay. Stay away from bees." The only real repercussion of that, so far as I could tell, was that I would never now finish the perennial garden in our backyard, which, let's face it, was never going to be finished, anyway. How could I ever tell if there were bees out there? I couldn't.

I did make an effort at making sure there were not. We have an extreminator who comes around once a month because once we had ants in the house and I vowed never again will I have ants in our house. So for $80 a month, the exterminator comes around monthly, usually at an awkward time, and sprays some poisons around our house.

"We should call him," I told Sweetie as we talked about the yard and the bees on the way home from the hospital.

"Why?" she asked.

"Because maybe he can do something about the bees," I said.

"I'm not sure he does bees," she said.

So we have an exterminator, but he's picky about what bugs he'll exterminate. I bet I know who he was rooting for in My Girl, too.

At least, I thought that was the only serious repercussion of my need to get a Bee Restraining Order: No yardwork, really, forever. (Sweet.) But there was another one, one I hadn't counted on, and I didn't know about it until I got out of the car Tuesday morning in the parking garage, tired and itchy and frustrated that my stay in the hospital had not in any way caused the other commuters to be less stupid.

As I got out of the car and picked up my coffee cup and began to lock up the car, I felt something land on my arm. It was just a little brush, almost unnoticeable, and I in the past would have probably ignored it. In this case, though, I jumped nearly out of my shirt, dropped my briefcase and nearly spilt my coffee and retreated about ten feet waving my arm around.

It was a fly.

Somewhere, my mom is laughing.

Next: The Other Almost-Dying, and The Chili Dogs Of Fate.

Although I seriously doubt that "millions" of people watched. (Stuff, and Junk.)

On Good Morning America, a few minutes ago, George Snuffleupagus commented on The Bachelorette's finale where Alli broke the rules and had only one guy at the Rose Ceremony. George said it was fair for her to break the news to the other guy beforehand to "spare him the humiliation of not being chosen in front of millions of people."

Do you suppose that George is aware that The Other Guy's being turned down was also shown on television?

Double Spoilers, today only! (Hunk of the MOMENT, 1)

The Hunk of the Week is back, sort of, in a new, abbreviated, more spontaneous version. Here's the latest Hunk of the Moment!

Hunk of the Moment: Alan Dale.

How You Might Know Him: He's that always-somewhat-evil guy -- a gangster for Demetri Martin's show, and a judge who kills a guy on Law & Order: SVU/CSI/AFL-CIO, and he was "Charles Widmore" on Lost, which is how I know him.

How I Found Out Sweetie Liked Him: While taking a drive on the way home from the park today, I mentioned that I was excited to continue catching up on Lost -- I'm up to Season 5, episode 3 -- and that the show was getting even more intriguiging, what with [SPOILER ALERT! EVEN THOUGH YOU PROBABLY ALREADY WATCHED IT, UNLESS MAYBE YOU'RE TRAVELING IN TIME LIKE SOME PEOPLE SOMETIMES DO ON SOME TV SHOWS WHICH BRINGS ME TO A POINT HERE, THAT WHEN Daniel TOLD DESMOND, IN THE PAST, TO CONTACT HIM, DESMOND SHOULDN'T HAVE JUST REMEMBERED THAT WHEN HE WOKE UP ON THE BOAT LATER, BUT SHOULD HAVE REMEMBERED IT FROM THAT MOMENT ON AND SHOULD HAVE CONTACTED DANIEL'S MOM RIGHT AWAY AFTER ... YOU KNOW [[DOUBLE SPOILER ALERT!!]] GETTING OFF THE ISLAND TWICE] and anyway, I said "Widmore's an Other!" and Sweetie said that she thought Alan Dale "was kind of sexy."

Also, I should point out that it's very tough to google "Who's the actor who plays Charles Widmore" and not get a billion spoilers. Don't you people have something better to do, like posting about how The Bachelorette broke the rules?