Big Bag of Tricks

I raked out the terrarium, and it looks a whole lot better.  Now I have to figure out what plants to put in it.  I'm thinking ferns, and I will take advice from the nursery on which ones as well as which shrubs to plant for privacy on the non-walled side.  You can assume from the fact that we're planting ferns, that it's *really* humid back there.  There is also no direct sun.  The dirt is a gorgeous black, and it stays very wet.  After the rain on Wednesday, there was a huge puddle in the middle.

I also moved some rocks from one pile to the area in front of the sliding glass door.  This way, there's more than this silly line of paving stones out there.  I don't care for that spaced out path of 12" square stones.  It dictates where you can step, and I'm entering and exiting my house, not crossing a stream.

I rearranged my office at work in the same configuration I saw in another cube.  I have more privacy now, but since people can sneak up on me, I need a feng shui mirror for my monitor (which I don't use, but it's behind my laptop screen).  I totally agree that being startled takes minutes off your life.  Frankly, Feng Shui seems to work pretty well for a lot of people.  While it's set in the language of myth and mystery, I suspect that the flow of energy and air through a room *is* actually affected by the arrangements of the furniture.

If you can get past the wackiness of the area of ghosts, death, etc and read in the idea of prevailing breezes for your area and the location of the rising and setting sun and think about how light enters a room...it's worth looking in to.

After reading Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece on french fries, I started to think more about actually trying Olean.  I've been going around with the idea that Olean was to fat as aspartame is to sugar, and my hatred of aspartame is well known.  That shit tastes nothing like sugar.  I'm happy to report that Olean tastes just like fat, and not soybean oil either, which I don't like.  It has one strange quality:  If you eat too much of it, your saliva can't break it down, so your mouth continues to feel greasy for a while afterwards.

I had no problems with my digestion.  I was afraid of it for the usual reasons:  The anal leakage and diarrhea warnings.  Mr. Gladwell pointed out that the study wasn't properly controlled.  As it turns out, the number of typical Americans that have diarrhea at any given time is fairly close to the percentage reported for the Olean study.

His idea is that a version of Olestra could be made to taste like beef tallow and McDonald's french fries could thereby be returned to their former glory.  As it stands now, french fries contain trans-fatty acids, which are also bad, possibly as bad as the animal fats they replaced.  I think Olean is based on cottonseed oil, but I'm not sure where I heard that.

I'd recommend Mr. Gladwell's book, The Tipping Point, and you can find an excerpt here.