DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Via Magazine asks, How clean is your hotel room? The answer may disturb you:

Chuck Gerba, an environmental microbiologist at the University of Arizona, conducted a study of hotel cleanliness. The results? Well, let’s just say that bacteria you’d expect to find in the toilet often turned up on the TV remote control.

Gerba has a knack for soundbites. Here’s another one that’s relevant to hotel-room cleanliness, from a Salon article contradicting advice from Self magazine that women shouldn’t sit on public toilets to pee:

“If you have a choice between licking a cutting board or a toilet seat,” concludes Gerba, “pick the toilet seat.”

I’ve had mixed feelings about writing this article. On the one hand, as Michael Moore illustrated in Bowling for Columbine, US media frequently publish fear-mongering stories, presumably because sensational headlines intimating risk generate high-volume sales.

On the other hand, I don’t get sick very often, but about half the time that I do it’s just after returning from hotel stays and airplane trips. I’m quite sure I’ve handled hotel-room doorknobs, toilet levers, and TV remote controls and then touched my food or face or eyes. The thought makes me shudder. I don’t want to live in fear… but I don’t want some hairy truck-driver’s crotch germs on my hands, either.

The fact that Chuck Gerba travels with disinfecting wipes tells me I have something to worry about. But then again, the fact that the Clorox Disinfecting Wipes website quotes Gerba in a half-dozen studies designed to prove that the Clorox product is a requirement for keeping healthy in this germ-ridden world tells me that Gerba’s research may have been promoted past its actual value. I’m interested in what an expert in microbial science has to say… unless he’s on the payroll of a company that profits from my belief in his research.

But I guess I have more issues with trust than I do with bacteria.

We returned to Armstrong Woods on Sunday to tackle that tough 9-miler again. I credit my wife for keeping me on a training plan. Without her, I’d probably lay around all weekend eating soysage.

I’d finally aquired the lumbar pack I intend to use to haul my clothes and food to the summit of Pike’s Peak. I’m breaking with tradition by not using a backpack, but it makes more sense to me to keep the weight low on my body. Also, if I have too large a pack, I’m afraid somebody in the group might ask me to carry something for them. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’ll need all my strength to finish that climb… I wouldn’t carry someone else’s insulin.

Anyway, within a hundred steps of the Armstrong Woods parking lot, my fancy new pack was bouncing around like a politician’s ethics at a fundraiser. This was an irritating development, to have a thoughtfully-considered, well-reviewed, highly recommended, store-tested, prized new piece of gear fail so miserably in the first moments of a three-hour hike. Not only would I have to endure the bouncing for the rest of the day, I thought, I’d have to return the thing and buy a backpack after all.

But I hadn’t fully appreciated the gloriously complex support harness built into this Mountainsmith Cairn lumbar pack. It has four “Delta compression” straps which, when tightened properly, are designed specifically to prevent bouncing. Had I read the booklet that accompanied the pack, I’d have known this from the start. (For as often as I’m annoyed by people who don’t read the documentation I write, I too rarely read the documentation provided by others. If you think about it, both are manifestations of the same core belief. But I digress.)

So the bouncing was under control, but the profile was not. Like scuba diving, trekking is a sport where the gear does not complement the man: it’s just as hard to look cool in a snorkel as it is to look cool with a 1100-cubic-inch sack strapped to one’s butt. I am consoled by the notion that I didn’t look cool before attaching the pack.

We began the hike along the same route as last time, up the East Ridge Trail toward Bullfrog Pond. On the return, we tried a new descent, using the Pool Ridge trail. Halfway down we learned that there’s an even more discomforting feeling than not knowing which way to turn. The worse feeling is: “we’ve been here before.” Trail maps, like IRS documents, have an ability to make me feel dumb. At the point where we thought we’d finally be back on the map, we learned that instead we’d circled back to the place where we first realized we were lost. Argh!

The feeling of frustration was compounded by the fact that we were standing at a three-way intersection, and we’d been up or down all three of the trails. We’d initially arrived here from one leg, then set out on a second, and returned on the third. There was no escape! We were stuck backstage in Cleveland!

Overall, though, it was a nice hike. The gear worked well. My knees worked well.

Here’s an example of culinary craziness: invite two friends to dinner on short notice, and then when you learn that two other friends will be in town the same night, invite them too. And then make a fancy dinner comprised of recipes that you’ve never tried before, e.g., instead of making mashed potatoes, make mashed peas-mint-potatoes, which sounds unusual and certainly is if for no other reason than the bright green color. And instead of making fish, make three kinds of fish all wrapped up together like a turducken.

[Aaron recognized the recipe — Fish Roll with Compound Butter]

And then go with the two last-minute friends on an hour’s walk through Golden Gate Park, and then meet the other friends at a margarita place for an hour, and still manage to put on a 3-star, 4-course meal when you eventually arrive home.

Did I mention the three desserts? Or five, really: hazelnut shortbread, chocolate chip cookies, french vanilla ice cream with raspberries, and (for the guy who doesn’t eat dairy (i.e., me)) lemon sorbet. And here I was thinking my scale might be broken. Sigh.

In case I haven’t been clear: I wasn’t the host. I might have attempted this menu, but I would not have attempted to leave the house for two hours in the middle of the prep. I respect and admire the “dinner will be served if and when we finish preparing it” attitude, but I can’t muster it at my own parties.

I took off my sunglasses and reached out to shake my dentist’s hand. He reached out but froze halfway, aghast. “What happened?!” he said, his eyes wide above the paper nose-mask. “Your nose is all red — it looks like somebody hit you!”

“Oh,” I said, “my sunglasses leave red marks. It’s nothing.” I mentally dismissed the alarm that had started adrenaline boiling through my veins.

“No, really!” he continued, as he handed me a mirror, “see how you’re all blue under your eyes, and your nose is red.”

He was right. I looked ghoulish. I felt like a cartoon, looking in a mirror to see some grotesque monster-head peering back at me. I shook my head and felt reality snap back into place — it’s just my face, colors distorted by sun, wind, lack of sleep, and the green fluorescent light in the dentist’s office. If you stare at anything too closely it will begin to look bizarre, an unfamiliar collection of lines and textures. Still, he’d made me self-conscious and unsettled in my own skin, and I wasn’t happy about it.

A couple of minutes later, I bit him.

I haven’t seen Holes yet, but I will, even though (a) it’s a Disney film, and (b) I do not have teenaged children who could learn the value of a hard day’s work in the hot sun.

The book was really great. Read my review: Holes, by Louis Sachar

Of the movie, Mick LaSalle writes,

It was directed by Andrew Davis, who has made too many good movies for it to be a coincidence… He allows for outlandish characterizations but keeps the movie real, not permitting it to degenerate into silliness despite the inclusion of typical kid-movie jokes about smelly feet and flatulence.

What’s wrong with silly jokes about smelly feet and flatulence? If these are really just a kid-movie phenomenon, maybe I’ve been seeing all the wrong movies.

Apple’s Movie Trailers site hosts the Holes trailer in 3 stream sizes.