Jayne: You wanna go, little man? Wash: Only if it's someplace with candlelight.

'Objects In Space'


Natter 67: Overriding Vetoes  

Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, nail polish, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.


Consuela - Mar 22, 2011 8:41:32 am PDT #29567 of 30001
We are Buffistas. This isn't our first apocalypse. -- Pix

Or maybe he figures the current place is no great shakes anyway, so it would be better to be together?

I think so. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that my mother's horrible to him really difficult, and having other people around, especially kids, makes things manageable for him. A couple visits a week with his daughters isn't enough.

She's on her own and makes her own meals, and walks the three blocks to church every week.

Oh, if only. ::sigh:: My mother is my inspiration for eating well and exercising, and keeping my brain active and engaged, which is sad. One shouldn't be a reverse example for one's children.

I should start going out there on a weeknight, but the traffic is a bear. I dunno, maybe that's my tradeoff. I get to live alone but I spend more time with them.


§ ita § - Mar 22, 2011 8:48:02 am PDT #29568 of 30001
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

My mother's been having some health problems. A year or so ago when I was with her and my sister in New Orleans, my sister wouldn't let her go anywhere unsupervised. I was freaking out. I'm not supposed to find out my mother can't be left alone because I show up to someone's funeral! This either has to come up in conversation earlier, or someone's over-reacting. Or both.

I still come down on the side of over-reaction. After all, she's not even retired yet, although my father is doing more of the driving. But I'm not there! Maybe they were just being typical and not telling me shit. Still, she is doing a lot better now.


Ginger - Mar 22, 2011 8:51:32 am PDT #29569 of 30001
"It didn't taste good. It tasted soooo horrible. It tasted like....a vodka martini." - Matilda

Nora, fear of radiation is often so irrational that it's hard to come up with an argument someone will respond to. One problem is that many people seem to think radioactivity is some kind of cartoon-villain death ray that turns the food radioactive. Instead, we're talking about small radioactive particles floating in the air. Most of the radioactive isotopes from a nuclear plant have very short half-lives, so they don't even come into the equation on crops away from the plant. The main culprits are Cesium 134, Cesium 137, Strontium 90 and iodine 131. Cesium and strontium have half lives about 30 years, so they'll be around for a while. Iodine 131 has a half life of eight days, which means it's gone altogether in about 80 days. Cesium gets into the food supply because it's water soluble and absorbed like potassium by living things. Strontium 90 mimics calcium, which is how it gets into milk. However, both of these elements pass out of the body pretty quickly and that can be speeded up by using chemicals that bind to them. Everyone alive today has ingested some radioactive strontium and cesium from atomic bomb tests.

In the U.S., one of the first instructions after an event is to put milk animals in barns and feed them stored food. (Once, in a media conference drill, one of the participating journalists asked, "I'm nursing. Am I a milk animal?" The executive doing the briefing took a while to recover.)

Foods like spinach tend to show higher levels because they have so much leaf surface. The highest readings found so far was on spinach grown about 60 miles south of Fukushima Daiichi, which was found to contain 54,000 becquerels of iodine-131, or 27 times the allowable limit. That sounds terrible, doesn't it? To reach the exposure allowed annually for power plant workers, you'd have to eat 41 pounds of spinach. To reach the level that could increase your cancer risk by 4%, you'd have to eat 820 pounds of spinach. In the case of the highest level found in milk so far, you'd have to drink more than 58,000 glasses of milk raise your lifetime cancer risk by 4 percent.


Hil R. - Mar 22, 2011 8:51:46 am PDT #29570 of 30001
Sometimes I think I might just move up to Vermont, open a bookstore or a vegan restaurant. Adam Schlesinger, z''l

My great-grandmother lived with my grandmother and her family for the last 40 years of her life. (She lived to 103.) When my grandmother got sick, my mom offered to have her come live with us, but my grandmother wanted to stay where she was, because she said she didn't feel safe having her neighbors be "so far away." (She'd lived in apartment buildings her entire life. We lived in the suburbs, on about 1/3 of a acre, approximately a 30 second walk to any of about six neighbors.)


Hil R. - Mar 22, 2011 8:54:11 am PDT #29571 of 30001
Sometimes I think I might just move up to Vermont, open a bookstore or a vegan restaurant. Adam Schlesinger, z''l

To reach the exposure allowed annually for power plant workers, you'd have to eat 41 pounds of spinach.

I probably do eat about that much spinach in a year. This is going to become one of those things where my crazy relatives point and say, "See? Eating all those vegetables will kill you!" isn't it?


DawnK - Mar 22, 2011 8:55:29 am PDT #29572 of 30001
giraffe mode

Oh Consuela, I wish I had words of wisdom for you, we are in exactly the same situation with my mother-in-law, and instead of trying to find a place for her to be comfortable before she was as far down the dementia path as she is now, we moved in with her, it was a mistake. I can tell you it is a constant struggle for us (this morning she came up the stairs to tell us that she had swine flu at 4:50). Plus I have lingering resentment that we are living in her house, it's not "my" house, etc. My sister-in-law comes over 4 days a week and my husband takes Friday's off, but we haven't been on a family vacation in the 3 years we have lived with her, because of her fears.


Allyson - Mar 22, 2011 8:55:37 am PDT #29573 of 30001
Wait, is this real-world child support, where the money goes to buy food for the kids, or MRA fantasyland child support where the women just buy Ferraris and cocaine? -Jessica

I'm trying to find the origin of this legend:

Once upon a time, there was a big truck stuck under a bridge. It was too big to clear the bridge, and woe, the traffic backed up for miles as engineers of great expertise tried in vain to find a way to raise the bridge.

And then, a tiny voice emerges from the back of a station wagon, and a five year old child asks, "Why not just let the air out of the tires?"

And the moral of the story is engineers are stupid. I think.

Has everyone heard this? Where does it come from? Google is being bitchy about giving me any clue.


§ ita § - Mar 22, 2011 8:56:51 am PDT #29574 of 30001
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

"See? Eating all those vegetables will kill you!"

I am feeling pretty vindicated about my life choices right about now, to be honest.


Connie Neil - Mar 22, 2011 8:57:09 am PDT #29575 of 30001
brillig

I've heard that story, but it's not a cute, wise child that comes up with the answer, it's an engineer who comes up with it. With the moral being that "smart people will get it fixed when everyone else is standing around with slack jaws."


Polter-Cow - Mar 22, 2011 8:57:30 am PDT #29576 of 30001
What else besides ramen can you scoop? YOU CAN SCOOP THIS WORLD FROM DARKNESS!

And then, a tiny voice emerges from the back of a station wagon, and a five year old child asks, "Why not just let the air out of the tires?"

I've heard this as a brainteaser, I think.