DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

My RealAge is 29.3. (Link to realage.com removed; see warning below.)

I wish my real age, by which I mean my, err, real age, were only 29.3. I haven’t been that young for about eight years.

The RealAge.com site offers an extensive questionnaire that attempts to calculate a person’s life expectancy based on health and lifestyle choices. Years of “RealAge” are added or subtracted to one’s calendar age based on factors such as smoking, exercise, and diet.

For example, taking antioxidant vitamins like C and E daily is worth one year of RealAge, presumably because vitamin-takers live a bit longer than non-vitamin takers.

Curiously, the “annual family income” question appears to have no bearing on one’s RealAge. I guess they’ve snuck a few marketing-research / customer qualification items into the health questionnaire.

Another quirk of the tool is that there’s no apparent penalty for habitually lying about the state of one’s health. (Really, I drink cod liver oil every day!)

The site provides a personalized plan for improving one’s health, based on the questionnaire responses where one comes up a bit shorter than ideal. There is also a nice set of 12 common-sense tips for living longer, for people who don’t take the time for the full analysis because they’re too stressed out about some damn arbitrary deadline or other, itself worth minus multiple years of one’s life.

Warning! On December 3, 2004, I began receiving multiple spam emails per day to the email address I submitted to RealAge. The evidence suggests that RealAge sold or rented its mailing list to bulk-mail-house asandox.com. I can no longer promote nor recommend RealAge’s service. It’s possible, but unlikely, that I knowingly opted in to any sort of promotional program; the sudden appearance of unsolicited marketing materials suggests that RealAge has changed my contact preferences without my consent.

Mount Shasta, Siskiyou County, California, as seen from I-5.

Wired covers TV “superchef” Alton Brown in The Thermochemical Joy of Cooking. The subtitle sums up Brown’s appeal: “Food Network superchef Alton Brown is part MacGyver, part mad scientist. Welcome to his lab.”

On the topic of kitchen science, the article relates an odd story from the history of oven design:

In the late 1700s, Benjamin Thompson, aka Count Rumford, repurposed tombstones from a Long Island graveyard to build an enclosed camp stove. His invention had the dubious distinction of producing bread crusts that bore the names of the deceased.

Ashland, OR is just north of the California border. It’s about a six-hour drive from the SF Bay Area, and a neat place for a weekend retreat. We weren’t retreating this time, but rather passing through en route to elsewhere. But we’ve retreated here before.

The town is famous as the home for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, an annual event that has been expanded to run for a solid eight months per year. I have not personally attended a Shakespeare event here; I had enough Shakespeare in high school to last me a looong time. Also, there are enough cheesy Shakespeare references in the downtown shopping area to tide me over until, basically, my next life. Examples: The Bard’s Inn, CD or Not CD, and if I had to guess, Henry IV’s Septic Pump, The Merchant of Venicecream, Seven-11 Ages of Man, Burger King Lear, etc.

The downtown area is a mecca of interesting shops and appealing restaurants. Most of the shops seem to be closed a lot of the time, despite the fact that foot traffic is relatively heavy until late in the evening. But I enjoyed the creative signage — in addition to the typical “Closed” signs, I saw several that said “Nope” and one, my favorite, that announced simply “Shut”.

Should you go to Ashland, make time for dinner at the Standing Stone Brewing Company. The food is consistently great. The beers are, too. Note the big wood-fired pizza oven in the kitchen; it turns out excellent breads and sourdough-crust pizzas. If this restaurant were local, I’d eat there every weekend.

According to the RayOVac FAQ:

How and where can I recycle my batteries?
Answer: No general household battery recycling system exists in the USA.

This is false. Here’s a general household battery recycling program: http://www.batteryrecycling.com/

Furthermore, many large grocery and hardware store chains offer community battery recycling programs. If you call the three biggest chain grocery or drugstores near you, you’ll almost certainly find one that accepts used household batteries in bulk.

Even rechargeable batteries can be recycled easily. There’s a great resource at the Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation — find a battery recycling location near you. The list contains US and Canadian collection points. Kudos to the RBRC.