DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

So the water-treatment guy says, “How long has it been since you flushed the holding tank?”

I said, dumbly, “It needs to be flushed?”

After several months’ delay, we’d finally found someone to service the ozone generator on our water-treatment system. I had previously been led to believe that at least this part of the system was maintenance free. (I’d like to think I’m not that naive, but I am often faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary.)

The technician laughed, but not in a friendly way. It was more of an “I’m writing your invoice in my mind” sort of laugh. He explained that the injection of ozone into our raw well water causes all the dissolved (ferrous) iron to solidify into ferric iron, which comes out of solution and collects in the bottom of the holding tank. This iron needs to be flushed out every month or two, or it will clog up the rest of the treatment system. Even though this was not part of the plan for the day’s maintenance visit, I asked the technician if he could flush our tank.

He said he could, and then did something unexpected — he reached down to flip open the drain valve, which would have poured 200 gallons of orange muck onto my driveway.

“Whoa, hang on!” I said, just in time. “Can’t you put a hose on that and run it out to the drainage ditch?” In reply I heard some mumbo-jumbo about fittings and hose sizes and so on, although in the end the technician agreed to come back later to drain the tank without trashing my driveway or flooding my yard.

I missed the best photo opportunities, when the fluid was completely opaque, pouring out of the hose with the viscosity of latex paint. This image was taken a few seconds later: still pretty nasty. I was equally surprised when the same hose ran clear, about five minutes (and two rinses) later.

A magazine caught my eye at the gym the other day. The cover pictures a slice of chocolate cheesecake that looks like a plate full of sclerosis. It’s labelled “decadent,” one of the meanings of which is “Being in a state of decline or decay,” which sounds accurate to me although I think that wasn’t what the editor intended.

The surprising thing is that the magazine that featured this recipe is called Cooking Light. I don’t think there’s anything “light” about Brownie Cheesecake Torte. No, I’m not interested in hearing about lowfat brownie mix, nonfat creamcheese, etc… if you really want to eat light, just skip the pie. It’s not that hard to do.

Let’s take a quick poll. If anyone in the audience believes, really believes that Brownie Cheesecake Torte has any place in a healthy diet, please raise your hand. Erm, set down that greasy lamb shank first. Thank you.

I don’t write this to disparage Cooking Light magazine. I’m picking on it momentarily because it makes a convenient example, in the case of this particular cover story, of the wrongheaded thinking that keeps most people unhealthy, even when people want to change. Many Americans believe they can have contradictory goals: eat the pie, lose weight anyway. Sorry, but chemistry just doesn’t work that way.

To be clear, I think everyone should eat whatever they want to eat. I have no designs on becoming a nutritional expert or diet guru. But I wish people would stop deceiving themselves about the relationship between their lifestyle and their bodies. Or, in short: “Actions have consequences.”

Now, put your hands back down before you starve to death.

Call it lazy, or call it efficient, but I check UPS.com before I check my front porch when I’m expecting a package. I think it’s not so much that I mind standing up and walking 30 steps to the front door, as that I hate the waste of time it would be to check for a package that I could determine from here has not been delivered yet.

So, eagerly expecting a package, I checked the UPS site. To my surprise, my friend tracking.cgi showed that the package was left on my front porch two hours before. I actually ran to the door, for this was an expensive package, an Apple Powerbook G4 (laptop)… but I didn’t see it on the porch. I came inside, turned around, went back outside and checked again. I know that’s the sort of thing George Carlin makes fun of, but I did it anyway. Still no package.

Next I checked the logfile from the motion sensor on my front porch. As far as it was concerned, no one had been out there all morning except for me (twice). This gave me some hope that the package had not been delivered. The other possibility, that it had been delivered and subsequently un-delivered, was nearly too unpleasant to consider.

I called UPS. They read me the same info I saw on their website, as if it was a revelation: “Says here the driver left it on your front porch. Did you check on your front porch?”

“Yes, twice, in fact.” I did not mention to her that I’d actually dug through a pile of empty cardboard boxes in the garage on the off chance that the UPS driver had hidden my package underneath.

The UPS phone rep had nothing else to offer me, except to recommend that I call back after the driver had returned to the warehouse, later that afternoon. At that time, apparently, more information would be available, perhaps including the address my package was really delivered to. Envisioning a delay of weeks while the vendor and UPS battle over who has to buy me a new laptop, I decided my best course would be to attempt to retrieve the MIA unit rather than wait for others to decide my fate. So I went up and down the block, scanning porches for suspicious boxes.

I knocked on one door a few houses up the street. I introduced myself to the owner, explained that I was missing a package, and after hearing his assurance that he had not seen my package I immediately began wondering if he’d already unpacked it and was at the very minute I knocked, editing some digital video using Apple’s bundled iMovie app.

Did I really believe that? No. But I was incensed by the idea that one of my neighbors might have swiped my new laptop. I wanted revenge, but I didn’t even know for sure that I had anything to want revenge for. Yes, I am a victim of my own rage… I am Jack’s flaming hypothalamus.

Later, after lunch, I was “strung out” in my hammock in the back yard. I heard, or thought I heard, a truck driving away. By sheer force of will, I ignored what might be an audible hallucination brought on by wishful thinking, or protein deficiency (sorry, sharp segue; that’s a meat joke).

My willpower lasted approximately 3.5 seconds. I leapt up and ran a few steps to where I could look up the driveway, and I thought I caught a glimpse of a familiar brown truck. Argh! I sprinted through the house, out the front door, and down the driveway. No sign of the truck! I was losing my mind, I was convinced. Also I was aware that some of my neighbors may have seen me peering at their front doors earlier, and now noticed me running full-tilt into the street to look wildly up and down at the complete lack of vehicles. So I turned back toward my house and as nonchalantly as I could, my gaze fixed firmly down where there would be no danger of making eye contact with anyone, I trudged up to the front porch, whereupon I nearly tripped over a large box that had materialized there.

I got a call from UPS later, from the account executive for the vendor that sold me the laptop. He explained that drivers sometimes “pre-sheet” deliveries, meaning that they enter their schedule of deliveries for the day into those wireless tablet computers before the deliveries are actually made. The problem with pre-sheeting is that the data hits the Internet within about 10 minutes of being entered, causing otherwise peaceable people like me to entertain revenge fantasies against their neighbors… clearly a bad thing.

So, happy ending: I got my laptop after all. But I sure can’t explain why there was a home movie of my neighbor on there when I first booted it up.

Southwest Airlines recently began enforcing a 22-year-old policy of charging obese passengers for a second seat, if they don’t fit into the single seat they purchased a ticket for. Here is the article I read: Southwest to make overweight buy 2 seats; Advocates for obese blast airline’s plan

The article contained a quote that I found especially pithy, for reasons I’ll explain in a bit. David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association, said: “If you can’t sit in the seat with the arm rest down, then you are taking up more room than you should be. If passengers have supersized themselves and are encroaching on the space of others, fairness says you should be paying for the space.”

I am much enamored of Stempler’s use of the word “supersized,” both for its freshness — it can only have entered the common vocabulary recently, for it has only been a handful of years since McDonald’s began using the term to describe their XXL-size servings — and for its implication that one of the reasons people are obese is that they’ve overindulged in excessive portions of unhealthy foods, e.g. McDonald’s Super Size French Fries.

I am also fond of his use of “encroaching,” and I think everyone should begin using it immediately to describe that which is not First Class. That is, instead of Coach Class, we’ll call it Croach Class. I think “Croach Class” captures the essence of the discomfort that most airlines inflict on everyone on the wrong side of the privacy curtain.

Stempler’s argument appealed to me for reasons beyond linguistics. It seemed logical. But I have to admit my bias; in general I find it difficult to be sympathetic for obese people, because I believe that some of them — OK, maybe I’m naive, most of them — could do something about it. I might be completely wrong, though, so I’ll do what I always do when I don’t know the answer: I’ll look it up.

The Center for Disease Control summarizes the causes of obesity; paraphrasing, they are:

• Obese people eat too much.
• Obese people move too little.
• Obese people had obese parents.

The first two are within the obese person’s ability to change: eat less, move more. And while there are genetic factors involved, the third one sounds like a cop-out. If your genes dictate that your body stores fat in a certain way that makes you predisposed to obesity, then you will have a hard time losing weight, but nothing I’ve read in my research indicated that it’s impossible to lose weight by manipulating caloric i/o. I think that fad diets are, in most cases, misleading and dangerous, and I think that American society’s demand for instant gratification deters most people from becoming healthy. Still, people are not born obese, and for most adults it ought to be possible to not be obese, so far as I have read.

To the CDC’s list of three core causes for obesity, the Surgeon General adds one: they suggest that socioeconomic influences can contribute to obesity. I believe this is true… But on the other hand I also believe that most of the customers of Southwest Airlines can afford to eat less and move more.

(Moving more is a critical aspect of health — read Pete Egoscue for inspiration, especially if your body hurts.)

Anyway, biases aside, I still agreed with Stempler. I thought about it this way: when I go to the grocery store, I pay for the amount of food I buy. If someone else buys more food, they pay more; it’s not a flat-rate plan. If someone can’t fit into one seat on the airplane, then it’s logical that they should buy another one, or upgrade to a class of service that offers additional space if such a thing is available.

You might argue that Southwest was offering a flat-rate plan, because aside from the usual deals and discounts, every passenger paid the same amount regardless of body size, toddler to sumo. But the Southwest policy indicates that the flat-rate nature of the fee schedule was based on the premise that their one size of seat would be an adequate serving for all customers. This turns out not to be the case… and so it seems reasonable of them to charge more for passengers who demand more. If you order a second entree the next time you’re in a restaurant, they will charge you for it.

The counter-argument is that Southwest’s policy is discriminatory. The clearest comparison is with the disabled population: must airlines provide means for wheelchair-bound passengers to fly? Yes, according to the Americans with Disabilities Act. So, is Southwest discriminating against obese passengers by not providing plus-size seats? This is a tough question.

If Southwest charged extra money for wider seats, would they be discriminating against the wider passenger? If Southwest amortized the cost of a few wider seats over all the seats on the plane, are they discriminating against the narrow passengers by forcing them to subsidize the lucky few who are sitting comfortably? If Southwest reserved bigger seats for obese passengers, are they discriminating against non-obese people who would love to have the extra space, and might even be willing to pay more for them?

The ADA requires airlines to provide extra services for disabled passengers. I’m sure these services generate expenses which are not passed along to the disabled passenger. It’s reasonable to assume that all passengers share these expenses, that the expenses are built into the overhead of running the airline in compliance with the law. Should the same service be extended to obese passengers?

Southwest has posted a readable and entertaining FAQ on their seat-usage policy. I am unable to find any such clear statement from the opposition, although I imagine we’ll be hearing courtroom news on the subject before the year is out.

The Duluth Trading Co.’s Longtail T offers a solution to plumber’s butt: “just three inches of shirt body length will keep you in the good graces of your clients and fellow tradesmen.”

So, that should help your concrete guy patch that last crack.

(I am embarrassed to admit I could only come up with that single pun. Submissions are welcome!)