DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Three days of rain, and our back yard is soaked. It feels like a college kid on nickel-beer night, unstable and squishy.

For the third time in 13 months, we lost a tree. I don’t mean “lost” in the sense of “misplaced.” The tree is easy to find. The roots are poking out, six feet in the air. Hard to miss, in fact.

Like last time, this one fell across the fence line. It hit another tree, bent it about 30°, and the pair are resting atop one of the fence posts. Without that post, I think both trees would have hit the ground, and taken the fence down too. So I’m feeling lucky. I sound like it, right?

The potential energy stored in this construction — all that weight, cantilevered high in the air — must be huge.

I think the tree surgeon’s bill will be huge, too. It’s going to take someone two days to set up rigging and cut these trees down.

Last year, 3 million PET [plastic #1] bottles a day were being buried in state landfills and not recycled, according to a report by the California Department of Conservation. Only 16 percent of PET bottles used in California are recycled.

This is sad. Californians, by and large, are good at recycling. And yet 84% of plastic bottles go into the trashcan?

I think the problem with plastic bottles is that people don’t use them at home. People carry bottles in the car, or on foot, and then toss them in the nearest trash can when they’re empty. The alternatives — carrying the bottle to a recycling bin, or (even better), taking it home to wash and reuse — is apparently too great an effort.

I think I’d vote for a law requiring communities to put single-stream recycling containers in accessible locations. There are probably already laws about providing trash containers; we could amend that law to require one recycling bin for every two trash bins. Then all these well-hydrated but impatient bottle-carriers would have a more-sensible place to drop their empty bottles.

It would of course be better for all concerned if everybody reused their bottles. Do the math: if everyone reused each plastic bottle just one time, they’d cut the landfill problem in half. They’d cut their bottled-water costs in half. Discarding plastic bottles is a lot like throwing money away.

Your shower curtain is awash with potentially harmful bacteria.

Norman Pace, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado, believes the enormous population of bacteria on your shower curtain feed on organic matter shed from the bodies of the people who use the shower:

When you cough, belch or fart, you’re putting a lot of organic chemistry in there.

Is “fart” an accepted media word now? Just wondering.

On that topic, Dr. Karl of Great Moments in Science once analyzed the contents of flatus by having an 8-year-old test subject aim one at a blood agar plate. The resulting sample was incubated overnight, during which colonies of intestinal bacteria developed advanced civilazations and petitioned the Australian government for official diplomatic recognition.

Dr. Karl described his conclusions on his radio show: Don’t fart naked near food.

I opened AOL’s latest junkmail piece because for a change it contains a useful freebie. The freebie used to be the media; reformatted AOL floppies fed several Linux installs over the course of my career (“insert disk 17 of 30…”). Now, the freebie isn’t the media; it’s a neat CD/DVD case that I’ve named … wait for it … Steve.

Inside the case appears a rather hostile advertisement. It’s a pop-up ad about pop-up ads.

When I opened the case, a small loose piece of paper flew up. Being colorful and mobile, it caught my eye. It claims AOL’s new software blocks pop-up ads.

Popup-blocking is a great feature in web-browsing software. Everybody hates pop-up ads; they’re the spam of the web. Blocking pop-up ads is a noble goal and it’s likely to gain AOL some customers.

But to advertise this feature, AOL has used what is essentially a pop-up ad! When I opened the case, this little ad flew up in the air. See this re-enactment. It’s an analog pop-up.

Given what I wrote yesterday about gay adoption, I find this photo hilarious.

Happy Valentine’s Day, indeed!