DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The ongoing saga of tainted fish makes the news again with the release of the Got Mercury website, a project of the Turtle Island Restoration Network.

It’s a great idea: you type in your weight and the amount of a certain fish you’d like to eat, and the calculator tells you whether or not you’re poisoning yourself.

Startling example: a 4oz. piece of Orange Roughy puts me 30% over the EPA’s “safe exposure” limit. Last Fall, I had a bag of SeaMazz Orange Roughy fillets in the freezer. I’d guess each fillet weighed 4 oz. I had no idea these were unsafe to eat.

I actually traded emails with SeaMazz about the product; their customer service reps correctly noted that “Orange Roughy is not included in the FDA’s key advisory list of highest mecury level fish.” But saying that some other fish are even more toxic doesn’t really address the safety question. (I don’t mean to disparage SeaMazz; I’m quite sure their product meets or exceeds all governmental safety regulations.)

Finally, in case anyone was wondering, the whole “Got” campaign still irritates the hell out of me, even though I once succumbed to its foul pop-culture charms.

(We were going to write these up for houseguests until we realized the list would need a table of contents and an index.)

No shoes in the house. You can borrow my sandals for wearing inside, but not those sandals because they have turkey crap on the soles. Those are the indoor sandals.

The yellow sponge is for dishes. The blue one is for wiping counters. The white mesh thing is for nonstick pans.

Don’t use warm water for cooking because the water heater has an aluminum anode.

Before you fry anything, close the doors in the living room, so the bedroom doesn’t smell like onions.

Don’t use metal utensils in the Teflon pans.

The red towel is for wiping counters. one of the other towels is for dishes, and the third for hands but not even I know this rule.

Don’t run the washing machine or the dishwasher until they’re full. No, that’s not “full.”

Paper, but not paper towels, and plastic, but not plastic that doesn’t have a recycling code on it, go into the paper bags near the stove. Food scraps, but not animal parts — except for eggshells, which are OK — go into the compost container. Everything else goes into the trash compactor.

Don’t run major appliances between noon and 6:00 PM, except on weekends and PG&E holidays.

Diapers go into the washer with 5 squirts of Bac-Out, a tablespoon of Bio-Kleen, a shot of vinegar into the rinse cycle, and maybe a handful of baking soda if you have a hand free. Dry them for 45 minutes, then take out the wipes and lay them flat, then dry the diapers for another 30 minutes, or put them in the sun to bleach out the insides if it’s a nice day or if it’s already noon and you can’t run the dryer.

You can take the Golf, but the Jetta has to stay with the baby (two months old and he has his own car!). If you put gas in the Jetta, it has to be premium.

Nothing foreign goes into the toilet.

Use the switches on the power strips to turn off the power to the stereo and TV when you’re done with them.

Turn lights off when you leave the room. (Are you sure you needed to turn them on in the first place?)

Yes, 65° is “warm.”

Keep track of your cloth napkin. You’ll see it again.

You weren’t going to cook that meat here were you?!

Buried 290 feet below our driveway is an iron mine. It’s called a “well” but in fact it pumps more iron than water.

Pictured is the impeller after nine years of service. It had choked itself with iron mud and burned out the pump motor.

This is the myth of drinking water. The stuff that comes out of the kitchen faucet has an aura of purity. But at its source, our water isn’t fit to wash socks in.

Our well-water gets pumped through an air injector, which like the ozone injector at the old house attempts to expose the ferrous iron to air in order to drop it out of solution. Then it sits in a small offgassing tank for a few minutes, from where it’s pumped through a “berm filter,” which I believe is a big box of dirt. And then it goes into a 1200 gallon holding tank.

To peer into the tank is to begin questioning the myth of “drinking” water. Our tank is not exactly sterile. There are four or five float switches suspended inside; the cables are black with slime. Iron bacteria? Grease? I don’t know, but I’m drinking it.

If there’s more than two feet of water inside the tank, I can’t see through it to the bottom. Your pool water is cleaner — but you’re not supposed to drink that.

As gross as this iron well is, though, it’s nothing compared to the horror buried in the back yard.

Last weekend I started getting ready to finally track the dulcimer part for Ode to Soup. You can see how far I got.

Hint: those are not wireless microphones.

You know, I should write some really short songs. Maybe then I’d have time to record them.

Chuck found a link to these on the TapeOp message boards…
drum outtakes from John Bonham.

Track 22 is Fool in the Rain, one of the great half-time shuffles ever recorded (along with Jeff Porcaro’s Roseanna).

Listen to Bonham grunt his way through on Track 17… he reminds me of Glenn Gould.