I have always been a proponent of the idea that you can have whatever opinion you want, but you should have a reason to think that way, other than that someone told you or that you saw it on a internet meme.

As I was dressing after a workout at our local recently ‘upscaled and modernized’ club, I noticed on the flatscreen in the locker room that there was a video of a gorgeous footprint-sized  Pacific NW forest spring with enticing and presumably very cold and clear water tumbling over pristine and undisturbed mossy rocks surrounded by ferns and trunks of large hardwood trees.  Soon there appeared written over this scene in advancing bold type, a description of the water served in the cooler near the weight room I had just left. The rolling ad described our local water as being contaminated with trace, but safe, levels of bad things like lead, arsenic, and fluorine.  As the ad rolls forth, it describes how the water served HERE is not like that water depicted on the screen, in that it has been forced thru “carbon block” purification to extract all those ‘toxins’ that will surely build up in your system if you drink as much water as healthy people do. As my skeptical mind tends to do, I mused at the depiction of the very source of life on earth, that of fresh tumbling water. The ad was depicting this inarguably ‘natural’ forest scene as toxic, and that since we are so smart, we can make this water healthy for you to drink.

But the next ad was reminding me to stop in at the Smoothie bar to get an all-natural drink concocted with unprocessed fruits and grasses, shipped fresh, by plane, from natural orchards in Chile, and rain forests in Brazil and Guatemala. How intellectually prostitutional is the thought that whatever happens to have been freshly deposited on the leaves and grasses imported urgently from Guatemala is good for me, but somehow the water in this stream is toxic and needs to be remanufactured and processed to save me from poisoning myself with it!

In case you are interested, check out the label on the bottle of water that you drink. Likely you will find it is bottled from somebody’s city or commercial water source, often from a tap. May not even be as good as what you get from your own city.  Just FYI.

And for the Fluorine content of water? Consider that seawater is quite high in Fluorine ion, about 0.001 g per kg of water, AKA 1ppm. The relative percent of the dissolved substances in seawater is relatively constant around the world, even tho the density or total salinity may change. Oddly enough, this is the amount also found in ‘sea salt’ and the target range for communities that fluorinate water supplies. The point? The healthy and rejuvinating sea spray you feel at the coast is laced with fluorine. Maybe Fluorine is not such a bad guy after all.

But back to my story. The next ad on the flat screen TV is for me to go to the spa to get a facial peel. The models on the video were coating faces with chemical ‘mud’ that required the applicant to wear gloves. The chemicals applied were toxic enough that the mud, when peeled, removed the outer layer of skin, and caused an increase in cell turnover of the underlying younger layers. The result of this inflammatory treatment is a “new, healthier-looking you”. In the same video as the water propaganda.

As you leave the club, you will be invited to ingest Vitamin D. One of my favorite non-science recommendations. Our skin is very well capable, thru a complex and tightly-controlled mechanism, to generate all the D you need at any given point, even if sunlight intensity is low, such as in the Pacific NW. In fact, most of people tested in the NW during the winter will test ‘low’. The problem? Vitamin D, as with A, E, and K, are not soluble in water/blood, and is not stored there. Testing blood for D levels is like checking someone’s wallet for cash to see if he is rich or not. Rarely do rich people carry all their money in their pocket. The point? Blood testing for D is irrelevant to body stores. Let your skin take care of it. Get 10 minutes outside every day, and skip the D.

The shelves will also contain various supplements like CoQ-10, sold as an energy-producing enzyme. ALL the energy produced for my recent workout was produced by a pathway in mitochondria that is an intricately controlled function of CoQ-10. But eating it, thinking that it will somehow wind up in your mitochondrial membrane ready to make you a boatload of energy, simplifies the mechanism absurdly.

Which brings up another absurdity “If I can’t say it and God didn’t make it, I won’t eat it”. We make up names for all the chemicals. We made up the name ‘water’, ‘mud’ and ‘salt’. We made up the name ‘aspartame’, ‘sugar’, and ‘high fructose corn syrup’. The chemical name for Vitamin A is difficult to say, hence the name ‘A’. Ever wonder why we refer to a ‘B complex’? Ever wonder what B1, B6 and B12 are? Have you ever even heard of B5 or B9? I hope that if you ever used this as a description of healthy vs unhealthy supplements, that you stop saying it. It doesn’t make you look smart.

So much for my healthy trip to the gym. But I still enjoyed my workout, even tho it was a contrived set of movements using chunks of metal that I pick up in various ways for the express purpose of making me hurt, knowing full well that there are machines that can pick up thousands of them at the same time for years unceasingly. I exhaled about 0.87kg CO2 greenhouse gas during my hour workout. But the point isn’t to get the weights from one place to another. In fact, an hour after I picked them up, I put them back in exactly the same spot where I found them.  An odd sport indeed.

So you’re female and traveling alone. You are afraid, perhaps rightly so, that you will become some sort of a victim. Well, you may be. But rather than give ya some tips for driving or handling your concealed weapon, just some common sense suggestions. I have traveled a lot, mostly by car, and my observations may help.

1) Don’t look like a single female. If you have cute stickers on your car, consider adding some that are not so cute, even if just for the trip. Logo stickers from auto racing supply, motorcycle racing decals, or even hunting or fishing gear makers. Lots of them make a sticker that you can put on the window then peel off after your journey. Glock, Remington, FMF, Promaster, GoPro, numbers or decals of professional car racers like Tony Stewart or even Danica Patrick give a strong suggestion that your car is inhabited by a male, and a potential predator may want to move on to an easier target.

2) Along with that, consider adding some unnecessary luggage to your back seat. Simple and powerful would be a cowboy hat or baseball cap on the rear deck facing backward.

3) Give off the suggestion that the driver may be armed. Simply keeping an empty box of 9mm handgun ammo on the back deck or the back seat will send a strong message, that if the owner happens to see someone messing with this car, the molester is likely to be met with firepower. The intent obviously is not to get in a gunfight, but to send the message that breaking into this vehicle may be more risky than the one with a PoohBear in the back deck.

4) Offroad permit stickers are required in many states, and serve to certify to other potential invaders that a male, or at least a rugged female, is in command of this vehicle.

5) Back in to your parking spot. This serves three purposes. a) Faster exit if challenged. Just start it up and drive   b) You are parking with mirrors and windows cleared. When you want to leave, they will be fogged, and all you need is a clear windshield.  c) women rarely back into a spot. Pure and simple, looks like a guy drove it there.

6) Consider concealed (with permit) or even open carry of weapons. Nothing is a bigger deterrent to a bad guy than to think he may get shot at, He wants to be the only one with a weapon. Of course, you don’t need a rifle in the back window, but it would work well. Be careful if you are crossing state lines or you are traveling with others. There are rules about how you are allowed to carry. But I think it would send a clear and effective message.

7) Let your car get dirty for a few days before your trip. You don’t need to cake it with mud, just try to keep from washing it just as you leave.

8) One of the ultimate tricks. If you can, or have the option, take a pickup truck. Trade cars with someone for the trip, or if you have your own, it may make sense to take the truck, even if you get worse mileage, just to reduce the possibility of some kind of bad scene.

9) If you are driving alone, put some stuff in the passenger seat and throw a jacket over it, so that it may look like a sleeping partner. A pink jacket or blanket will not convey the same message as a work jacket or duffel bag. You won’t get to use the seat as a big shelf for junk, but maybe the tradeoff is worth it.

10) Seems obvious, but DON’T social message your trip!! You broadcast that your home will be empty and you will be vulnerable on the road.

11) When you get out for a stop, put on enough clothes and have enough ID that you can have a chance of walking somewhere or hiding somewhere or traveling with just what you have. You never expect to lock yourself out, but if you did, wearing PJs and slippers, life is gonna suck. If someone steals your car, you’d feel pretty foolish hitching a ride in those clothes. If you are traveling in winter, it may even be a fatal error.

Of course, you need to know how to change tires, how to check your oil, and be prepared to spend a night in a ditch or parked by a closed road for a few hours. More in other posts about that.

Perfect example of what Not to do if you’re traveling alone.

Since the recent mainstreaming/legalization of cannabis use has increased, it is getting easier to do research with people carrying brains exposed occasionally, frequently, or continuously to THC, one of the active ingredients in Mary Jane. Most of the work cited here comes from PubMed abstracts.

One of the more interesting and relevant papers was by Curran, 2002, where they found a dose-related increase to both speed and error of answers. The common interpretation of this finding would be that the more THC aboard the brain, the more sure the individual is that he is correct, yet the more likely that his answer is actually wrong.  He loses both ways. But it does have very interesting application to the general users’ feeling that they see connections while high that others don’t see. And the more THC aboard, the more convinced the user is that his observation is real. Ironically, at the same time it seems more real, the more likely it is to be wrong, at least as far as can be proven. Enter Conspiracy Theory…

Another paper by Hunault 2009 compared doses of THC with short-term memory problems, spatial problems (like having a odd-shaped piece of cardboard and trying to determine which structure it could be folded into), ability to multi-task, and some motor coordination tests. The findings supported the common feeling among users that their physical abilities are not impaired, in a sort of rough sense. However, reaction time was progressively slowed, and ‘executive functions’ were rapidly impaired. Executive functions are, for example, if a deer were to step in front of your car, you need to decide if it will move on out of your path, you need to veer to your right or left, whether you can stop in time, or the likely presence of other deer that you have not seen yet. The accuracy and speed of these functions declines precipitously in all the studies I could find to review. Along with impairment in these judgments was the finding that sustained focus decayed rapidly as dose increased. Interestingly enough, the THC level at which impairments occurred varied widely between subjects, but consistently occurred at the point where one felt ‘high’. In other words, users may vary on how much THC it takes to get stoned, but these impairments reliably occur at that point, as if the user was seeking these effects.

Hart, 2010, described a failure to detect a dose effect of 0% to 3.9% THC smoking in mental testing of users who claimed to smoke at least 24 times a week. It should be noted here that this is about 1/10 of the dose used in other studies, the pre-test joint probably had little if any effect on the users’ blood or brain levels of THC. Interestingly enough, tho, when given a list of words, and asked to decide if the word shown had been on the list previously, a common and dose-related error was to report a word had already been seen. Flash back to Curran, discussed above, where THC tends to produce apparent connections or memories that are provably incorrect.

A study by psychiatry of cannabis abstinence suggested that most impairment had largely disappeared in eight weeks after the last cannabis use. However, impairment in attention span and ability to focus recovered very little.

An interesting paper was written (Hannerz, Annals of Neurology) that reports no clinical effects nor anatomic scan abnormalities when testing 12 individuals who smoked at least 1g of cannabis daily for at least ten years. This seems to be in contrast to the rest of the studies mentioned here, until one realizes that it was published in 1983. Clinical testing involves whatever an examiner can see in his office, and is very unlikely to pick up the deficits discussed above. CT was remarkably crude, MRI was mostly theoretical. Computer-based testing was based on Atari and Apple II computers running at 1MHz, considerably slower than the brain the computer was trying to evaluate, and was not part of the testing in this report anyway.This study may be frequently cited by cannabis users without noting the obvious outdating of the tools used for evaluation.

1. Cut off about 1 1/2 to 2 inches of the base of the tree so it will soak up water as long as it is in your house to reduce fire hazard.
2. Go buy a screw hook 1/4″ x 2″ long.  Ask someone how to find a stud in a wall, or get a stud finder.
3. Locate a solid point in your ceiling with a stud finder or use the *finger-tap method.  Drill a hole smaller than the screw hook you just bought.  Don’t hang the tree until you’re sure the screw is solid into the stud!
4. Tie a twine wire around the trunk of the tree near the top, below a branch.  Give it a couple good yanks because the tree is gonna get heavy with light, ornaments, and cats and drunk people.
5. Find a bucket, bowl, or vessel of some kind that will hold enough water to keep the base of the tree submerged.  You will be covering this with a tree skirt or sheet so it only matters that it won’t leak or tip over.
6. Put the twine which is now tied to the tree through your screw hook and lift the tree as you take up the slack.  You will likely need someone to help lift the tree.  As the trunk clears the floor, tie a knot anchoring the twine to the screw hook. 
7. Swing the base of the tree out enough to slide your bucket under it.
8. Put an angel or star on top of the tree to hide most of the twine.

You can now safely decorate, find the best side and spin the tree as you put the lights on.  Invite your party friends over and hide the catnip near the tree.  No worries this year!

You can even leave the screw in the ceiling for the next year.  Nobody ever looks up anyway and 8% of the year, there’s a tree hanging from it.

Duct tape (sold under a brand called Duck Tape just to make things confusing) has a purpose.  But it’s not what you make think.

When the heating/air conditioning guy puts in a pipe to carry warm or cool air from your unit to the vent in the room, the pipes have seams between them.  In order for these seams to not leak our heated or cooled air into your attic or under the house, he seals the seams with duct tape.  It is usually a good quality tape and will seal for a few years, maybe a decade.  The tape is tough and fibrous, with a very sticky glue and withstands temperature changes and wet/dry cycles.

That’s the problem!

Duct tape sticks to nearly everything.  It gets used to attach plastic over a broken car window.  It is drafted for duty to seal inner tubes and to stop drips in convertible tops, repair axe handles, and even make book covers.

Trouble is that it holds long enough that you forget that the “repaired” object is actually still broken.  When the repair finally fails, you now have three problems when there was only one before:

1. The broken object is still busted.
2. The duct tape glue is now stuck to your car/window/tool/shoe and is a mess!
3. You don’t have any more time or money to fix it than you did at the beginning.  But now the tape won’t stick to the car, the plastic cracked or blew away, or your shoe works worse than ever, and still needs replacing.

A real guy won’t use duct tape for a none duct repair because he understands that if he doesn’t have time to do it now, when will he find time to do it again?!?  Once something gets fixed enough to “get by”,  it gets forgotten.

So, the bottom line with duct tape is:

Would you rather fix stuff wrong lots of times or fix stuff right only once?

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READ THIS IF:

• You are a girl (woman? female?) seeking a guy and are tired of bars, internet, or blind date mishaps.
• You want to know where to meet guys who aren’t just “hungry” for a good time at your emotional expense.
• You are a guy or a gal just looking for a good way to spend a vacation day in a beautiful place with good company and get some exercise while you’re at it.

I formerly had a habit of closing my office early on some weekdays to meet my kids at the lake for a few hours of twilight skiing.  We got pretty good at it, but one day in early August, at the acme of the summer, our favorite ski broke.  Finding that it was not repairable for way too many days (like 4), they drafted me to go with them to the local, very small golf course.  After at least 3 decades and many thousands of derogatory words about the stupid game, I found it frustrating but very social and a satisfying change.

Not more than a week later, my kids spent about $25 for a set of clubs at a garage sale (my current set still).  I found myself teeing off 3 times the next week.  Playing 9 holes at a local course often costs well under $20, and produces 2 hours of face-to-face time with your fellow golfers.

Typically a group of 4 (guys most of the time) will meet at the Pro Shop or Clubhouse at a specified time called a tee time.  This group is called a foursome.  Three golfers is often called a threesome.  I’m not sure what a pair is, probably a pair of golfers and one guy is probably called a lonesome. 

A group of 1, 2 or 3 will often be looking to add one more to the group.  Especially if the one is female.

A threesome

Do they want to add a girl?

Most groups I have teed with would consider adding a woman to a threesome at least as kindly as adding a raise to their paycheck, or finding a $3000 winning lottery ticket.

Yep. I asked em!

A few cautions:

1. Ya gotta be able to keep up.  Golfers don’t mind socializing, but don’t like to be held up by people who take too much time setting up, looking for their lost ball, or even taking too many hits (like 20) to get done with a hole.
2. You don’t have to be a good golfer.  After watching hundreds of groups, I find most golfers are masquerading.  EVERY GOLFER SUCKS AT LEAST SOMETIMES!  Don’t not go because you are a relentlessly inaccurate hitter. Just don’t hold up the group.
3. A lesson or two, even from a friend, is necessary before you attempt to add yourself to a tee group. This friend will usually have a set of clubs you can use, and possibly introduce you to his local ‘links’ (golf course). Being a bad golfer is easy, and you’ll meet many with expensive equipment who will hit worse than you.  Start with 9 holes (typically a round of golf is 18) so you can quit while still having some fun.
4. Take business cards or some way for your tee group to find you again if all goes well.
5. Turn off your phone.  Don’t make 3 people you’re trying to befriend wait for you to get done talking.
6. It’s ok, or even charming for you to smile or chuckle when you hit a clumsy or rediculously awkward shot, or even miss the ball.  But don’t make any ghost of amusement when another guy’s shot is worse that yours.
7. Women golfers get to start closer to the hole than men.  Often the red tees are past water or obstructions that guys have to hit the ball over.  So an advantage to being female is built right in to the game.
8. Dress for warm weather.  You don’t need to wear a mini skirt and a tank top but don’t try to hide being female.  Wear layers because it often gets lots warmer or cooler during your 2 hours out.

When ya finally feel like a just-slightly-less-than-really-bad golfer, go to the clubhouse for a few minutes and hang out near the first tee.  You can see how inconsistent most of us are, and you’re very likely to get added to a group, which is even more likely to be men.

So, the take home message for today is:  You’re a girl. That means you don’t have to be good. You do have to keep up. Be happy no matter what your game looks like.  EVERY GOLFER SUCKS SOMETIMES!  If this group or this day isn’t working, you can quit and go home.  Just don’t give up completely.

• You are with a guy who doesn’t fix things or do stuff
• You are without a guy at all
• You are a  guy who wants to do stuff but is not sure how
• You want to add comments to my articles
• You have a better way you can tell me about

Keep up with us if you need to know…

• How and why to clean out your rain gutters
• Why you need to get rid of all your nails and duct tape
• How to get your mower started
• The easiest way to put up a level shelf or a straight picture
• When to call your doctor and what to say
• Why to back into a parking spot
• When to buy premium, mid-grade, or regular gas, and what “octane” is
• How to start a campfire even in crappy weather
• What the noise your car makes and maybe how to fix it
• How often do you really need to change your oil
• Why you should take up golf even if you hate it
• Whether your mechanic is giving you a straight story
• When it’s ok to put metal in your microwave
• Whether you really do have gluten intolerance 

So Who the Heck Am I to Write All This Stuff

I’m a dad to 5 or 6 kids (depending how you figure*) and managed to raise them to play, travel and work.  We had little cash, since I was in college for 14 years! I graduated with 4 degrees:  ABS, MS, PhD, and MD.  I’m the mis-fit guy who’s a doctor in the day and  a “fix everything, build anything redneck” nights and weekends.

I can:

• build jeeps
• take out and put an engine in a car
• perform office surgery, like vasectomys, and sew up an owie
• keep some people alive in the Intensive Care Unit
• run my own solo medical practice
• maintain our 40 acres of forest land
• heat my house with firewood that we cut and split (no motorized splitter allowed)
• write so you can understand the point I am making

We will cover a wide range of topics to help you keep your life running, so you don’t have to figure out all this stuff.  Just follow along, and if you have questions, don’t be afraid to ask.

We will devide our guy stuff into:

• Home Maintenance Stuff
• Yard Stuff
• Car Stuff
• Health and Medical Stuff
• Non Descript Guy Stuff
• Stuff That You Don’t Know That You Didn’t Know

*we had several teens at our house that weren’t ‘ours’, for weeks or years at a time

What follows is written for those unfortunate women who find themselves trying to manage a home, a life and stuff (car, lawnmower, house, yard) that their guy usually takes care of but, for some reason or another, isn’t  anymore.   

You watched your guy try to start the mower, but have no idea how to do it, since he always did.  Now he’s not doing it and you don’t want to pay to have someone else do it.

I’M HERE TO HELP. 

Over the next few months, we will cover things like:

• What’s that noise in my car and how do I decide if it is a big problem or not?
• What if the mower doesn’t start?
• Do I need to clean my gutters?
• How do I decide what kind of tires to buy?
• What can I do when traveling to be sure to get there and back?
• What kind of tools do I need to have around?
• How do I keep a repair man from taking advantage of me?

There is a whole world of guy stuff out there that you probably don’t even know that you don’t know.  For instance, you may have no idea that you can break things by ignoring them.

I will help you.  Most of the guy stuff isn’t hard, but you do at least need to know the basics.  After all, lots of really dumb guys are pretty good at keeping things going and lots of pretty smart guys can’t fix anything.