http://dwoolstar.blogspot.com/2004/12/staying-cool.html

I’ve always been both intriqued and a little frightened of the Stadium Pal…

If you need to stretch or take a break, then stretch or take a break. Set an alarm if you need to be reminded to do so, or use a program like Stretch Break. It isn’t necessary to put key supplies out of reach to force yourself to get up — that just ends up being distracting at the wrong times. I know it’s a common recommendation to get people to move more, but there are better ways to exercise than by organizing your workspace inefficiently. That’s like failing to buy key food items at the grocery store in order to motivate yourself to go out more often. Yeah, it will work, but if you need a trick like that to get out of the house, you have bigger problems to address. And if this sort of recommendation keeps proliferating, we’re going to end up with bigger problems than just the QWERTY keyboard design.

Sorry for being so ornery today. Both my parents and my in-laws are coming up from L.A. to visit us in Las Vegas this weekend for my daughter’s 5th birthday party. This means I won’t be able to work as much the next few days, which makes me batty sometimes.

If you haven’t seen the movie Murder By Death yet (which is where the “ish schtupid” reference comes from), you haven’t really lived.

It seemed to be about reusing water bottles you drink out of instead of what happens if you just use them for storage and pour the water into a glass to drink from. I also don’t think grabbing used bottles from school children is a good standard to draw conclusions for adults. If those kids are anything like my daughter (who just turned 5 today), I could analyze anything they touched during a meal and find bacteria on it hours later.

I also doubt this is significant enough to be of any practical concern. The average American meal contains about 1,000,000,000 pathogenic microorganisms (the average vegan plant-based meal contains about 500). So unless the level of contaminants in used water bottles is absolutely phenomenal, it would be of little significance for most people who literally eat toxins for breakfast. 5000 Americans die from food poisoning each year, and direct medical expenses related to food poisoning are $5-6 billion per year. I’m not sure if the medical impact of reusing water bottles would even register.

I can only imagine what kind of bacteria must be growing on my PC mouse right now. My wristwatch. My TV remote. My XBox controller… blech. But before calling a Golgafrinchan telephone sanitizer, if someone was really concerned about microbial toxins, the first thing to do would be to stop voluntarily eating billions of them each day. Unless that step is taken, I’d think everything else would be essentially irrelevant by comparison.

And you’ll stop reusing those water bottles!