DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

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!

Mark Morford asks, What are you so afraid of?

This is my favorite part (well, aside from “Fear is the new black”):

Try this test. Ask your neighborhood neoconservative homophobe just what, exactly, would happen if, say, gay marriage were to be legalized nationwide.
Ask them what would change. Ask them to be very specific. How would their lives be threatened? How would society crumble, exactly? Riots? Locusts?

I actually did this once. I didn’t realize he was a neoconservative homophobe at the time. We were having dinner at a nice restaurant with two other people. Someone mentioned a California initiative regarding, I think, adoption rights for same-sex couples, and unwittingly I voiced my support. I thought it was a no-brainer… adoption is a good thing. Broken homes are a bad thing. Foster care is the band-aid on the bullet hole.

This person had a different opinion, which he proceeded to share, along with some spittle and maybe a few used bits of table bread. He launched into a fire-and-brimstone tirade about, basically, the evils of homosexuality. The other guests were embarrassed for both our sakes.

His argument was that children raised by same-sex couples couldn’t possibly end up with healthy attitudes about sex and relationships, because they’d have no male role model. (He was already apoplectic at the thought of lesbian couples — I can’t imagine how he’d have responded to the idea of male gay couples. I think I’d have had to take his fork away from him.)

I said that hetero couples are equally capable of raising kids with unhealthy attitudes. He agreed with me but countered that I hadn’t addressed the point, which was true enough. I was never on the debate team.

So, he won the argument. I could tell because he ordered a fat bowl of bread pudding for dessert. In contrast, I didn’t feel well enough to finish my dinner.