Am I Blue?

It's been recommended that hospital patients be issued flesh-colored gowns so that it would be easier to tell if they (the patients) turned blue or yellow later, which would be medically significant. This idea would never have occurred to me, for the same reason I would never have thought to inject my head with botulism poison just to see what happens. I'm not creative.

Most people have problems with hospital gowns. My problem is not what they expose, but that they're sly about it. Even in my dreams, I don't feel embarrassed until the moment I recognize that no one else in the House of Pancakes is naked. I'm fine up till then. But in the setting of the doctor's office, when he or she peels back portions of your get-up as needed and then pats everything back in place again, it feels more like a strip-tease. I'd be less embarrassed if we dispensed with the gown altogether. Especially at the gynecologist's office, where there doesn't seem to be much point in modesty at all.

One time my gynecologist rolled in the door and asked me if I minded if a few students came in to observe the proceedings. She was pretty familiar with my sense of humor and thought I might be fine with that, and I was. In fact, it sort of reminded me of my twenties. But then the students filed in and pressed themselves up against the far wall in obvious discomfort. My doctor invited them to come look at this or that, and to a man, they had the same look a four-year-old gets when he's being boosted up to the casket to give Grandma one last kiss. I didn't start out embarrassed; I caught it from the students.

Anyway, the issue with the standard hospital gowns is that they tend to be blue or green and a change in skin color is not as noticeable as it might be if the gowns matched the patient's (original) skin color. It's probably true. I know that never once have I been in for a check-up and had the doctor say, "didn't you used to be pinkish?" So maybe the gown throws them off. If the colors weren't problematic enough, lots of them come in some sort of pattern meant to be cheerful. And I have to admit: with the right plaid, I can't tell a Norwegian from a Pakistani.

Of course, the hospital would have to stock up on a lot of flesh tones. Even Crayola abandoned its "flesh" crayon in 1962, admitting it didn't cover all the bases. (It didn't even cover one base. No healthy person in history has ever been the color of a "flesh" crayon. True to theme, Crayola renamed the crayon "peach," because no peach has ever been that color either. They might as well have named it "avocado.") There has also been talk of using flesh-colored sheets. If the patient is well matched to both gown and linens, he should disappear entirely. He might not get proper attention, but at least we'd know he was not cyanotic or jaundiced.

There are other possibilities. Dots wouldn't work; they'd confuse the dermatology department. And we'd probably want to stay away from a hound's-tooth. The patient could sit abandoned for hours, with all medical personnel assuming he's already been checked.

A jungle print is another possibility. Except if the patient were to develop monkeys flying out his ass, the doctor might not catch it.

But how about a nice vertical stripe? As a diagnostic tool, vertical stripes would be invaluable. The next time the patient came in, if the stripes were going horizontal, the doctor would know to check for heart attack, pulmonary embolism or other forms of death.

Get Thee To A Flummery

Give me a man with a long reach, size-13 stompin' boots, and a high threshold of pain, and I'll give you a blackberry pie. I won't do it for less.


Western Oregon has a climate exquisitely suited for readers, writers and blackberries, but the blackberries are the most successful. One of the easiest ways to spot a newcomer is if she spots a sprig of what she hopes is a blackberry vine in her back yard and gets all excited. "You don't want that," I explain as forcefully as I can, which is to say with a spade and a canister of napalm.

Oh, but they do want that. And so every year, in exchange for permission to exterminate the sprig, I take the newcomers out to a spot--any spot--out of town where the blackberries romp and gallop over the landscape like radio hosts talking over a reasonable man. You can find acres of them in any direction. If they are allowed to root in the neighborhood, however, it is a matter of a few weeks before they have vaulted the fences and arched over your house. You'll be putting in one last comment on your Facebook page, oblivious to the creeping darkness, and that will be that: it's 9-1-1, and send in the goats.

According to the OSU Agriculture Extension Service, there are two thornless varieties. They are located in Sasquatch's back yard under a thick mulch of leprechaun poo. The rest of them are violent and sneaky and no fun to pick, but they can be tamed into a delectable pie, and every year I haul out the buckets and tell Dave to suit up and off we go. The juice gets all over everything, but it does mask the blood.

It was only this year, as we played the par-three eensy-beensy golf course at McMenamin's Edgefield Manor, a sprawling brewery and resort guarded by attack blackberries, that it came to us how to make Operation Pie more enjoyable. The par-three is the only course I'm allowed to play on, because I can't count high enough to play the others. Each hole is encircled by a blather of blackberries which are chopped back on the hour by the grounds crew, and community-minded citizens from all over plant their golf balls in them in preparation for the winter ball harvest. Because of the aforementioned high threshold of pain, we usually come off the course with a few more balls than we came with, but it never occurred to us until this year that we could come for the blackberries.

The establishment is fine with the idea. You, little man or woman, are no threat to their incidental blackberry crop. Neither is your army. Not even if you're a goat. You may pick all day from clumps of berries at a comfortable shoulder height, if you wish, and then you can have a beer. And then you can go home and make pies.

Blackberries are found in a number of items, including cobblers, pandowdies, slumps, grunts and flummeries. (They are particularly prevalent in bear grunts.) Pies are my choice, even though pie dough tests my own threshold of pain. There are only five ingredients in a pie filling; my tradition is to leave one of them out. That is what the slits in the top crust are for: you slide the butter pats through them.

At least now the picking part has gotten easier. Just drive on up to Edgefield, and whatever you do, don't park too close to the berries.

Ground Zero Tolerance

A group of progressive Muslims is interested in developing their property, located two and a half blocks away from the site of the ruined Twin Towers in New York City, into a community center. It is conceived as a cultural center to strengthen ties between Muslims and people of all faiths and backgrounds. According to Imam Feisal, who has made a career of promoting interfaith tolerance and understanding, "we want to push back at the extremists."

It's not a bad idea. Surveys show that The Terrorists believe all Americans are evil people, when at most some of us are just a little annoying.We feel the same way about Muslims and people who look like they might be Muslims. In spite of this obvious common ground, we have failed to come together. So the plan was endorsed by the mayor, the NY Times, the local synagogue, 9/11 victims' families, and many others when it was proposed eight months ago.

Naturally, folks were shocked when it was recently revealed, by conspiracy blogger Pamela Geller (who previously informed us that Malcolm X was Obama's father), that a "monster mosque" was going up at ground zero. Even before she was able to disclose that the mosque was planning to open an exploding underwear concession from a booth constructed from the bones of firemen, the story was picked up and widely disseminated (via hitting the fan) by serial fabulists Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Fox News. People are hugely upset. I'm upset because I had no idea that bloggers were influential. We shouldn't be; we make shit up. And if we is, why amn't I?

The whole project, now universally portrayed as The Monster Mosque At Ground Zero, has become distasteful to a majority of Americans, many of whom identify as Christians. Forgiveness is an important part of being a Christian. Some of them are even able to forgive Jesus for that Sermon on the Mount, assuming he was just having an off day.

The very thought of a Monster Mosque At Ground Zero took many by surprise, especially Imam Feisal, since it wasn't a mosque and wasn't at ground zero. The quickest to rebound from the shock was the Committee for Obama Defamation (COD), which sprang into action with a COD piece for every contingency:

Obama supports mosque, because he's a Muslim.
Obama says nothing about mosque, because he's a Muslim.

Obama decries mosque, because he's a Muslim and sneaky besides.

We the people have always taken being bombed very personally, as well we should, since it was meant personally, which is what makes it different from the bombing we do. We intend to cede zero ground to the terrorists.

I get this stance. There is a huge organization out there with power greater than most entire countries, and it revered its profits so highly that it was able to set the lowest wages on the planet. Then it packed jets in the name of almighty Moolah with all the middle-class manufacturing jobs and rammed them right into the economy. In spite of that, it has managed to erect giant Walmarts all over, usually in the precise areas of devastation. That there hasn't been a greater outcry over this is just another case of failing to connect the dots.

Meanwhile, many of the great Internet typists have undertaken to determine the exact distance away from Ground Zero it would be appropriate to put up a mosque, but that distance varies, because Uranus travels in an elliptical orbit.

The consensus, though, is that there should be a blank space, nothing at all, around Ground Zero. Think of it as a monument to atheism.

Oh, Snap!

On a recent JetBlue flight, a flight attendant was treated rudely by a passenger, not, I suspect, for the first time, and as the plane taxied to the terminal, he grabbed the intercom and screamed obscenities into it, grabbed himself a beer, pulled the cord for the emergency chute and slid on out of there, and wouldn't you love to have been on that flight? I don't know what the passengers did, but I would clapped until my palm-prints were polished off.

It's the whole thing. It's the jerkwad passenger getting her what-for, it's the tedium of airplane travel utterly relieved in one instant, it's the brilliant means of exit. It is the rare soul who hasn't dreamt of going out in a blaze of glory and saying what he really thinks when he couldn't take one more day at work. But with an intercom? And a cushy bouncy sliding board? And a beer? Brilliant.

At the post office, even those of us who were not disgruntled had to be on the lookout for the ones who were likely to snap. The official post office line is that we don't have any more people snapping than in any other workplace, which would be true if it weren't false. We were all seriously nuts. Some arrived nuts on their first day and others had nuttiness thrust upon them. I don't actually understand it, having always thought it was a rather pleasant and straightforward job, but there were an astonishing number of people around who were royally pissed off at everybody:  fellow workers, customers, and definitely the bosses. I believe most of those came pre-packaged with rage and continued to sharpen their own edges as time went on and it became clear that no one ever gets fired. It could be anything that sets them off. "These goddam letters," they'd say, flinging them aside. Honey? Did you think we built space ships here?

I was crossing the Steel Bridge one day on my bicycle when the horns went off indicating the span was going to be raised, and we should all wait behind the pair of closing gates. Another bicyclist got trapped between the gates--it was confusing--and the bridge tender, who had a microphone, bellowed at him. "Dumbass" was the nicest word that spewed out of his mouth for a full minute. Then he opened up the appropriate gate to let him back out, telling him to get the **** off his bridge and don't ever come the **** back. It was loud. It was like the voice of God on the day His team lost the pennant. And I thought:  here this bridge tender had probably raged his way out of thirty jobs a year and finally found one where all he had to do was sit in a little box by himself and make the bridge go up and down, and he couldn't manage it. He could have been a great letter carrier.

They might say otherwise, but there isn't a mail carrier in America who hasn't sketched out a plan for what he's going to do when the shots ring out. There aren't a lot of options. We all sort our mail into big metal cases with enough room underneath to crawl under and possibly hide; but that's the area we keep tubs  of mail for people who are on vacation. One too many vacationing customers, and the whole scheme falls apart. And most people don't take it well when we explain, as their official letter carrier, that they can't go on vacation.

After the employee has flipped out and done what he could with his assortment of firearms, they always interview the survivors and his neighbors. A lot of times anyone could see it coming. But sometimes people say "I just don't understand it. He was always such a quiet fellow, kept to  himself."

Shit. You know how many of those people we have down there?

Plastics!

A TV ad from the mid-1960s is stamped in my memory bank. A woman peeks coyly around the shower curtain and asks her husband for the shampoo. "Here," he says, throwing the bottle at her head, and as it ricochets around the tub, she exclaims: "Hey! It didn't break!" This was the dawning of a new era in plastics and sub-lethal marital violence.

It sticks in my head because it marks the time before which we managed to muddle through life without plastic. It's almost inconceivable now. Plastic, a petroleum product, is ubiquitous and an object lesson in ecology, or the interconnectedness of things. Everything affects everything else. A plastic butterfly barrette snapping open in Omaha leads to a gyre of submerged garbage swirling around in the Pacific. The stuff never goes away, but it does bust up into pieces so small ("nurdles") they are now being ingested by plankton. We don't know just what that will mean for the food chain, but odds are we're not going to like it.

Here in Portland, our mayor, Sam Adams, is looking to ban single-use plastic bags from stores. Some people are incensed. "He's just trying to look green," says one, and that's a valid worry. It sets a nasty precedent. What if the President pulled out of Afghanistan just to look peaceful? What if Sarah Palin corked her cakehole just to look intelligent? Where would we be then?

Other dissenters point out that the plastic bags have handles and are much easier to carry, especially for the disabled and elderly. Perhaps we are being a little too hasty in abandoning our present system before we have developed the technology to make reusable cloth bags with handles.

But the most compelling case of all in favor of plastic bags is their reuse in the field of dog poop removal. My friend Margie not only bags up the voluminous output of two Labrador retrievers every day on her walks but then carries it in her coat pockets. "It keeps my hands warm," she explains, another consequence unforeseen by me. I had to think back. What did we do before we scooped dog poop into plastic bags?

We didn't scoop dog poop into anything. Our dog pooped in the neighbor's yard and their dog pooped in ours. Kids revved up their immune systems by rolling around in quantities of it, and everybody watched their step. It's not feasible in the cell phone age.

So what's it going to be, people? Dog poop, or plastic inhalers for the kids? Cold hands, or a continent-sized wad of garbage in a part of the ocean nobody ever visits anyway? The planet, or Lunchables? Give it another few decades of thought, and be strong. We'll never know if we can live without plankton until we give it a shot.

Mysterious Ways

Thank you for visiting mylittlescienceblogspot.blogspot.com. It is my hope that by introducing research from my own backyard, I can help demustify the world of science, making it accessible to the general population; and in so doing, to banish, once and for all, scientific illiteracy, and replace it with a mild form of dyslexia.

Faithful readers may recall how I solved the puzzle of the missing possums around here (the raccoons ate them). You're welcome. It's just a simple matter of applying sound scientific principles to the evidence at hand (possums all gone; raccoons very, very fat). I am pleased to now bring you the results of my latest study.

As you may be aware, our local hummingbirds have all but disappeared. There are a few relics around, but the buzzing hordes of last year have gone away. Also gone are the jewel-like little dragonflies, sparkling in iridescent shades of blue and green. In place of both are alarmingly large and, frankly, unattractive dragonflies with feathered heads and military-style wing bars. They are zooming around here like black helicopters. Obviously, the dragonflies ate the hummingbirds.

In addition, it has been noted that the penstemons in the garden did not make it through the winter. These were the hummingbirds' favorite flowers, and they are no longer of any use, so, lo, they perished from the earth.

This is the simplest and most elegant solution that takes into account all the facts. That's what makes it science-y. As a science-ist, I must remind you that it is not true that things do not change, or even evolve. They do evolve, if in so doing they are able to become more of service to humans, who, all the data indicate, are the Crown of Creation. Hummingbirds, for instance, have been zipping around here for years like little chicken nuggets, but they're too hard to catch and fry up. They had to go. What we really needed was some sort of drone aircraft that could drop fury on our mortal enemies, and in another few years, our new dragonflies are going to be right there where we need them. I quote no less a science-ist than St. Paul: "And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men...and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle...and their power was to hurt men five months." Locusts? Dragonflies. Five months? Nine years and counting in Afghanistan. Same general idea, and translations are always a little dicey. What doesn't change is the fact that all of these things came into being in a blast of glory about six thousand years ago. There's already been a book written about that, so I won't go into it here.

Every scientific hypothesis takes the form of the statement "if this is true, then that will happen"--in other words, it is essentially a prophesy, and I'm all about the prophesies. The book previously referred to is full of them, which is why it is regarded as the premier science textbook for the ages. For instance, I give you: "The chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall justle one against another in the broad ways: they shall seem like torches, they shall run like the lightnings." And: "...chariots shall be as a whirlwind...Woe unto us! for we are spoiled." All of which, I submit, has come to pass. Ipso factoido, nanner-nanner, and boo-yah. I'm just saithin'.

So check back next post when I explain that climate change is a hoax perpetrated on a gullible public by people who don't want us to have any fun with our chariots. I'll get into the details later, but for now, ask yourselves: is it a coincidence that all the global-warming talk started at the same time the Baby Boom generation hit menopause? I think not.

The Hinges Of Hades

It's hot. It's so hot I could accessorize with pepperoni slices. It's a hundred and fifty degrees in Portland, Oregon, give or take, and that's just not fair. That would be like going to Disneyland, the happiest place on earth, and Mickey Mouse up and gives you a wedgie. It should never happen. It makes me cranky and miserable and also reminds me of asparagus beetles.

Asparagus beetles live only on asparagus plants. They don't have a Plan B. Their function is to take divots out of your fresh asparagus spears. There might be something in it for them, too, I don't know. A long time ago, we had what was probably the only asparagus patch in a couple square miles. It stood tall and proud, waving its feathery fronds, until the first asparagus beetle showed up, followed by a squadron. How did they locate our little asparagus patch? They followed a gradient of asparagus-fume molecules. They found one molecule, then happened onto a direction with a few more, and kept moving towards the areas of greater asparagus fumelet concentration until they were smack into Divot City. Same gradient concept applies to flies on poop. Don't ask me why moths find porch lights. I think that's just a lack of personal brightness.

When I was a child, I did the same thing, following a temperature gradient. I grew up in Arlington, Virginia, where Satan sends the people who are acting up. We could only play in the sprinkler for so long, and then we pitched over in the shade until the chiggers drove us out, when we slithered into the house on a slime trail of unevaporated sweat, and ultimately prostrated ourselves on the kitchen linoleum in front of a black oscillating fan, arms and legs positioned as far away from each other as possible. This would be the last time anything I did reminded anyone of Leonardo da Vinci. We lay sullen and miserable, our tissues softening like carrots in a saucepan.

Mrs. Tangerose was the first person we knew who bought an air conditioner. A whole group of the church ladies walked over to her house to see, and I tagged along. The house felt like ours except for one room, and we walked in and suddenly it was January in the Yukon, our sweat iced over, and we had never been happier in our lives. That room air conditioner did a lot to bolster my belief in God, until we had to leave.

Our plan at home was different. The house was closed up with the shades drawn all day, and then in the evening Daddy would obsessively check the thermometers until the moment when the inside temperature was 90 and the outside was only 89, and then the windows were flung open and the creaky window box fan upstairs was turned on, pointing out. Ahh! By morning we were comfortably down to 86 or so and the house was shut up again, while Daddy went off to work in an air-conditioned office.

Mom was not the complaining sort, but somewhere in the mid-sixties she expressed some interest in a new-fangled central air conditioning system. Daddy stoutly maintained that going from an air-conditioned office to an air-conditioned bus to an air-conditioned house was not good for you. At moments like that, I tended to consider mine a miracle birth.

Women's lib came along and dropped some ideas in Mom's head and one day she took her flawless grammar and spelling and 135 wpm typing skills and got herself a part-time job, and just like that we had central air, just in time for me to leave home. I grew up and headed north, then west, following a temperature gradient, and that's how I ended up in mossy Oregon with the asparagus beetles. Where global warming is fixing to give us a giant wedgie.