Dish washer

The majority of houses have a dishwasher.  It is generally accepted knowledge these things are for washing dishes.  Most would not try to catch a razorback with a fishing pole or try to open a beer bottle with a Howitzer anti aircraft gun.  Most!   I have a fancy laboratory dishwasher at work and for a mere $12,000 this stainless steel juggernaut will clean the chrome off of a bumper hitch but the point is you do not put a bumper hitch in a dishwasher. 
The older I get the more particular I become about the loading of a dishwasher.  First lets get one thing straight.  Doing the dishes is not simply loading the dishwasher any more than doing laundry is mostly throwing a bunch of cloths in  the washing machine a pressing start.  Doing dishes involves cleaning the kitchen, emptying the dishwasher, loading the dishwasher with hopefully dirty dishes in an orderly fashion to maximize the cleaning efficiencies.  Engineers have spent decades designing and fidgeting with water jets as well as the soap to ensure we have clean forks and spoons.  What good is a spoon that ends up in the back of the dishwasher, stuck on the drain.  Only really short people can reach all the way back past the pointy things sticking you in the chest to retrieve a fork that somehow jumped out of the silverware tray. 
Lets talk about things that should not go in the dishwasher.  Anything made of plastic except the giant plastic ladle with the flat burned edges from scooping spaghetti sauce out of a frying pan.  Most cheap plastic cups, bowls, and flatware will fly like confetti inside a dishwasher and the bowls and cups fall only to collect soapy water that spills all over the floor when you open the door.   There is a undefinable hunk of plastic stuck in the back of my dishwasher.  This multicolored blob has melted itself in a donut configuration around the center sprayer that is supposed to transport water to the top shelves. 

 Do not put anything made of wood in a dishwasher.  Most wood products are not really wood and it will disintegrate under the heat and moisture.  A wooden spoon is usually several pieces of wood glued together.  A cutting board will become Jenga blocks if you put it in the dishwasher more than once.   A wooden bowl will be fine beaver food after two washings in the Whirlpool Potscrubber II.  I used a freshly autoclaved wooden spoon to scoop clabber off the bottom of a Greek yogurt container.  The dry, open pores of the fine wooden spoon sucked up the fromaticum like a New Guinea bower bird on crack only to become embedded nearly permanently in the crervasses.  After two more washing in the dishwasher, some bleach and a little heat, the spoon was clean.  It was sawdust but it was clean.  I have seen rags, flipflops, car parts, children's stuffed animals and once a cat in the dishwasher.  Rumor has it you can cook tuna or any north Atlantic whitefish in a dishwasher.

As I mentioned earlier with the Potscrubber II, you can put pots and pans in the dishwasher.  Just because something fits in the dishwasher does not mean you should put it there.  My ass once fit in the dishwasher but I never washed it in there.  An average frying pan takes up a third of the space and if you put it on the bottom rack of the dishwasher, it blocks most of the water for the entire load.  Your dishes will not get clean and there will be indistinguishable bits all over you dishes.  I thought the goal of this noisy, heat mongering torture chamber was to clean you dishes.   (and now some really short sentences) So? Yeh! Hmmm.

Deodorant

No such thing.  I stink.  I put on the deodorant thick this morning.  With all the waxy gunk, my under arm areas are stuck to my chest.   Now I have to go wash up in the restroom.  I have meetings that I am now not attending unless they are outside and I can get down wind.
I read up about the stuff and it is supposed to keep "odor producing" bacteria from growing.  That is advertising genius.  It is a factual possibility but in really it is panda poo. 

It is only Eleven AM.  I must go.

Humorless

I watched Comedy.TV yesterday and laughed very little.  I felt the humor was either weak or tasteless, sort of like my humor.  I do not remember laughing yesterday, even when the cat had to get out of the kitchen quickly.  I thought about laughing when my son was decked out in his Indiana Jones getup and he was practicing sliding under the garage door as it closed on him.  He would throw the hat to keep the door open, do the slide, grab the hat and roll out of the way just before the giant slab crushes him.  

I was wearing my Oh Crap t-shirt and there were no comments or  stares from those who passed by.  I could feel the humor running out of the universe with a big hug sucking sound.   It was a slow sucking sound because I think a large celestial cat was stuck on the drain grid of the universe.  I felt only pity for the Walmartians and the Dollar Store devas.  I even watched three episodes of "The Big Bang Theory" only to agree entirely with Sheldon on all issues.  Well, I did chuckle when he was visited by his mother (Laurie Metcalf) as she cuts through his nonsense.

I tried doing some chalk drawing and thinking of Dick Van Dike doing chalk pavement pictures. ( "Mary Poppins" )   Jumping into drawings of another dimension always perks me up.  Humor is gone far away, not just around the corner for a smoke.  It usually hovers dimensionless overhead where I can pick gems as fruit from an endless row of pear trees.  I tried sanding wood, returning to the earth, smelling the evolution of a decades old oak, only to increase my carbon footprint threefold by burning the whole mess in my wood burning stove to provide meaningless heat to and unthankful landscape.  (By the way, the Senator, the 3,500 year old bald Cypress burned down over the week end)  I remember fondly the Senator at Big Tree Park's Joint in the Woods where I went to see the Winters Brothers Band (billed as jonny and edgar)  only to watch a sold out crowd of a thousand drunken dudes and dudettes throwing pine cones at Leroy and Daryl Winters singing Helen Reddy's biggest hits.  I laughed then but not now.
 

Silence is golden

Are you ever in a conversation and completely run out of anything to say.  I called up an old friend the other day.  I have not seen him in thirty years.  We have talked on the phone a few time over the years and I have felt I needed to reconnect with him and re-establish the good if not shallow friendship we had.
So I called him at his place of employment and said up front, "If you are busy I understand, this may be an extremely short conversation anyway."   After the hey how is it going I said, "I have been thinking about who I want to say hello to for this holiday season and your name was the first to come to my mind."  He replied, "That's great, I am glad you did."  I said to him, "If you or I run out of things to say we can just say, I think were done here" and let it go at that.  He laughed and explained that he does feel a little awkward talking to someone he hardly knows.  I reminded him of some of the awkward situations we shared and he seemed to relax.

I was at a meeting the other day and this person came up with an idea for information sharing and wanted to try it at this meeting.  She explained the rules of engagement and said, "Now, take five minutes to gather your thoughts and them we will use this technique and share our ideas".  Well, the five minutes seemed like a week.   "ok" she said, "lets start".  I thought I knew silence and what it sounded like.  It was so quiet I heard the pig valve clicking in the old guy sitting at the end of the table.  I heard the nose whistler in the next room.  I even heard the ocean waves crashing on the shore three miles away.  The lady's technique eventually worked well but at the end of the meeting I said to her, "Michelle, your greatest achievement today is that you created the worlds first instant, completely mobile sensory deprivation chamber".  Humor is lost on some people.
 
My dad impressed on me that if you do not have anything helpful to say, do not say anything.  He knew that given my propensity to say "anything that came to mind", I should have a few tools to keep me out of trouble.  I am not bothered by having nothing to say in a conversation.  I know that given a few seconds or minutes I will come up with something.  Look at this tripe I am writing now.  I have ran out of things to say twice so far.  I pause for a few seconds and off  I go.  There is a scene in "You've Got Mail" where Shopgirl is talking with Fox and she realizes she does not have anything nice to say to this man.  She just stops and says, "Hmmp".  It may have been in "When Harry Met Sally" I do not know now.  Listening acuity increases during silence.  The chances for making a verbal blunder are almost nil when there is no talking.  You can even hear one hand clapping in silence. 

The older I get, the more I want quiet.  I sleep with ear plugs.  I have taken sign language classes in case I lose my hearing.  Henry Limpet said, I wish, I wish, I wish I was a fish and he became a fish so I am not taking any chances with my hearing.  Some sounds, if not all, I can ignore for a while but it takes energy and creates stress to block sound.  My family and friends are hearing impaired.  The children are loud, the dogs are even loud. ( I haven't slept in 5 days!....My Cousin Vinny)  The cats sound like Lions.  The palm trees sound like  badgers have taken over a foil factory.  The louder the yelling, the louder the TV and the spiral goes up.  Sound travels in a straight line.  Straight into my nerve center.  There is a song called Silence is Golden and if you start singing it you will never stop, ever.

Nuclear Weapon Stuff

As a tenant of my blog and a ground rule for operation of such, I try to stay away from serious, injurious subjects like horrible deaths and melting parts unless I can be satirical and jaded and laugh a little.  Johnny Carson used to say, "It is hard to make jokes about Abraham Lincoln."  I feel that way about gross bodily functions and torture. 
Recently, the paranoid fringe, complete with their racist, prejudice, hate-mongering and bile spitting sociopathic bedfellows has concocted a nice story about Iran and nuclear war.  Last year we were worried about radical, independent Islamists creating "dirty" bombs and causing the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl but in L.A. or Cleveland.  A few years before that we were worried about the Freemen of Montana and the The Polygamist Scurge.  Before that it was about John Lennon or any Union sympathiser with skin darker than mine ruining our way of life by asking the world to treat all people fairly. 

Hopefully we can all forget the Y2K concern (the geek software industry rising up to create the Dot com bubble) and now we have the Mayan 2012 ting.  I wish some of these disasters would actually happen so someone, anyone could say, "See, I knew it!".    (California and the San Andreas Fault is going to have the BIG dance this year.  I predicted December 2011 but I recalculated and my new prediction is "soon")  The problem is the average person in our blind, ignorant country does not consider the Tsunami in Thailand several years ago or the one in Japan as  End Times type occurrences but they were.  911 instantly killed about 3000 mostly American people and another  US soldiers 4,400 died in Iraq since.  At least 150,000 others (mostly Innocent Iraqi) were killed.  Really, you do not think that the people in Iraq have had the most horrendous ten years of any generation since Pol Pot.   

Let me be clear, Iran has enough radioactive and nuclear material to screw up the entire world and a conventional nuclear bomb would be a relief compared to a full out war and a dirty bomb.   Look at Afghanistan, Sudan and North Korea.  Instant incineration would be preferred to the current situations.   Not to mention Iran has the technical and scientific intelligence to wreck any major power with the"dirty bombs" or biological junk.  They have not engaged the infidels because they do not want to.  I also know from observation that "martyrdom is in the visions of the poor and the frustrated".  The leaders of these armies and governments (Syria, Hamas, Iran) enjoy being in charge and large.  They are not going to unleash a nuclear bomb on anyone because that will be the end of them and their families, probably horrifically.  In the next few years,  Iran will possess a deliverable nuclear weapon, regardless of what we as a country or a globe want or do.   The time has passed to convince them that Iran does not need a nuclear weapon to defend their borders.  They just may need it.  The US needed it to keep the Soviet  Union's socialist bent out of Cuba.   Boy, that was a successful policy.  A wise government would have insured that the Pittsburgh Pirates drafted Fidel Castro in the late 1950's and there would have been no socialist revolution in Cuba and subsequently South and Central America.

Way too much ranting for my health but remediation must continue.  Will Iran launch a nuclear attack, No.  Will someone, probably.  Will it be the end times, probably not.  Will it suck giant ones, yes.  Will I cry.  Yes.