Your dog drinks out of the toilet - why can't you?

Orange County, California is setting up a facility to recycle sewage as drinking water. "Toilet-to-tap" sounds gross, but this actually happens in nature already. Treated effluent typically is released to places where it re-enters the global hydrological cycle, either through evaporation, percolation into groundwater storage, or returning to rivers and lakes. In many cases the water that comes out of sewage treatment plants is cleaner than the bodies of water it enters. The OC facility is not going to take freshly treated water and pump it right back into drinking water supplies, though. The output of the plant will be put into area riverbeds where it will infiltrate to the groundwater and join the existing sources of drinking water. The cycle will take, at the very least, several months if not years to complete, so sewage that enters the plant now isn't going to be coming to a faucet near you for quite a while.

odds 'ñ' ends

...Today on the campus shuttle I saw something that I'm still trying to process. A fairly heavy person of indeterminate sex (probably female, so I'll use the feminine pronouns, but I'm not certain) stepped onto the bus. Her hair was buzzed on the sides, and the top was short - between 1 & 2 inches - and bleached to a yellower shade of blond. She might have been pierced, but if so it was only moderate. Maybe a nose ring or something - nothing outrageous. To complete this picture, dress her in standard college student garb - jeans, t-shirts in layers, sneakers. Make the t-shirt Coke-red with the words "Chick magnet" in black, accompanied by a cartoon drawing of a bespectacled, scrawny nerd, shirtless and flexing. I still don't know what it means. It may well keep me awake for a night or two.

...[I can't remember this item... if I do, I'll write it down so I can share it later.]

...From Heloise, she of the Helpful Hint, two tidbits (from the Strib, 9/17/07):

Plastic Grocery Bags
Dear Heloise: Please let your readers know that plastic grocery bags can be used at inner-city churches that have food pantries and clothing for the needy. I also take my bags to area nursing-home residents. SUE, via e-mail
For what? So they can tie one over their head and end their suffering? Or maybe the eccentric ones like to store things like their toenail clippings and feces.

Sound off
Dear Heloise: I refuse to use the "self checkouts" in grocery stores! Why should I pay the same price for my groceries, doing all the work myself, as the next person, who gets service? Give me at least 10 percent off my total grocery bill, and I might think about doing it myself. I know I am not the only one who thinks this way. BOB in Texas
Well, Bob, I'm not sure what to do with your helpful hint, but here's a couple of other things that might get you riled up: The newspaper used to cost a penny, and you still had change to buy a phosphate at the local malt shop! Plus, young people use curse words! And the whippersnappers have the gall to congregate in public places! When I was your age, computers used punch cards! You don't even know what those are!

HoTT T33n GurrrlZ 4 SALE!!!111

By way of Julie: Marry Our Daughter, a site for people interested in selling their teenage daughters into arranged marriages, per the Biblical tradition of treating women as property.

**ADULT LANGUAGE WARNING**

I have trouble believing this this is real. It's got to be a joke. Then again, they seem pretty serious about it, and are quick to point out that the concept of a "Bride Price" is in the bible, and therefore protected as a religious thing. I have to ask, do Americans have any inalienable rights that trump religious beliefs? I mean, if my religion tells me to go out and slaughter 2 children on every full moon, then collect all the corpses in a giant freezer, and have a festival of necrophiliac sodomy on the Winter Solstice, does that make it okay?

On the other hand, this makes me reconsider my opposition to having kids.

***UPDATED: It is, in fact, a hoax.***

Whodunnit? And more importantly, why?

Browsing the TV is a bad idea. I just stumbled across a "reality" show on Spike TV. It's called Murder, and one site describes it this way: "Each one-hour episode of Murder will give two groups of civilians the chance to solve a real-life homicide by working at an exact replica of a crime scene." Civilians include people like firefighters, teachers, business dudes, and "Tank, Law Student and Former Gang Member."

They include graphic "actual photos" flashed on the screen at intervals following no discernible pattern. Yay! Episodes have catchy titles like "The Bludgeoning." And your host, Detective Tommy Le Noir (seriously).

Why would they do this? Who comes up with these ideas?

I was out of town over the weekend, so of course...

I lost a crown (the dental kind). The tooth in question had been slightly pressure- and cold- sensitive recently, probably because the adhesive was deteriorating. Now every time I inhale abruptly, the flow of air over the little stub of tooth on which the crown once rested causes me a fair degree of discomfort.

Why does this (dental) stuff always happen (a) when I'm out of town and (b) on weekends? My last tooth issue was the temporary crown that came off during my field trip to New York this spring. Prior to that, I had a molar that was rotting out of my head when I was on a 4-day field trip to Door County in Wisconsin. WTF?

I wonder if maybe I ought to find a new dentist.

Oh my god.

I just saw the scariest thing I've seen in a loooong time. A thing so horrifying, I'm almost tempted to actually watch it. I'm looking through the cable tv listings, and I see channel 23, identified as TVGN (TV Guide Network, apparently), has a program called "Look-a-Like." Here is the description:

Look-a-Like
5-6p
"Celine Dion", In the third-season premiere, a woman gets a makeover to resemble Celine Dion. (Reality).

I can't even begin to tell you all the things that are wrong with that.

"Embryos are....

just tiny babies!" according to a billboard I saw on my way home today. And I thought, "Tiny, delicious babies, that you can sprinkle on a salad!"

How'd that ultrasound machine get in my septic tank?

From Slate magazine:

Update on fetal sex selection: At least eight small skulls have been found in a septic tank near New Delhi, India, and investigators are digging for more. An ultrasound machine was also found. Officials say it appears to be another "case of female feticide." Other recent discoveries: 437 baby bones near a hospital in Madhya Pradesh in February and 25 fetuses in a well in Punjab, also associated with an ultrasound facility. In the state where the eight new skulls were found, the ratio of female to male residents is only 86 to 100. (To debate the morality and legality of sex-selection abortions, click here.)

As gruesome and horrible as this story is, that line "an ultrasound machine was also found" makes it sound, well, funny.

Not for the squeamish

I mean it. If you're easily offended by things like bestiality, don't click this link (SFW, visually, but disturbing). Also, probably stop reading this post right now. You've been warned, & you choose to read it anyway, don't come crying to me blah blah words.

I only point out the article because of my favorite phrase in it. One of the people says, of his fellow zoophiles, "I'd invite them to my home, and I'd treat them like any other person that was in my house. I did summertime barbecues, Thanksgiving. I did Christmas dinners. One year we did a turkey and a ham (emphasis added)."

Really. A guy who likes to f% (or be f%ed by) horses shouldn't say things like that. Although it raises the question: Is it still bestiality if you f% a pig after it's been dismembered & part of it has spent 20 minutes per pound in a 325 degree oven?

Are they even trying anymore?

Flipping through the channels on the cable... 11:30 pm, and obviously there's not much on. The Learning Channel (not exactly sure what I'm supposed to be learning from this channel...) has a show on called "When Sleep Goes Bad." The description is "A profile of three people who are experiencing severe sleep disorders." Okay, I get the idea of a show about sleep disorders. But could they come up with a more tabloidy name please? I wonder whe runs that channel? Maybe TLC stands for Tabloid-Like Channel?

But "When Sleep Goes Bad" isn't on till midnight. So what's on right now? "The Man Whose Arms Exploded," about a guy who got so jacked up on steroids that his biceps "exploded." I'm not even really sure what that means, but maybe that's not the important part. Granted, I'm not sure what the important part is, or if there even is one. Given that they can't even find enough material about this guy to fill out the hour (45 minutes, really), and need to spend a lot of time talking about the steroid trade in Britain and the negative consequences of various gym drugs, maybe they shouldn't be calling it "The Man Whose Arms Exploded." Maybe they should call it "Idiot Muscleheads and Their Adventures with Drugs."

Oh, and can a just mention, bodybuilders are gross.