Farewell Latvians, hello bagpipers

I slept through a fire alarm. Again.

The bells in the hallway rang a few weeks ago in the early morning hours. Amanda woke up. I didn't. So, she woke me up to tell me the fire alarm was going off. I went back to sleep. Thankfully it was a false alarm, as she was able to see courtesy of the TV's Lobby Camera Channel. Yes, I caught hell for it later -- it's impolite to allow your nearest and dearest to assume full responsibility for your smoky and/or fiery death just because you sleep with earplugs in.

I slept through another alarm when at a hotel. I think it was in Calgary for the launch of 660News. I went to work the next day and the rest of the crew was complaining of exhaustion from the fire alarm and evacuation. I slept right through it because I sleep with earplugs in.

It hasn't always been this way. I believe I started with the earplugs back when I lived in Toronto. The mid-century highrise where I lived decided to restore all the balconies. That meant several summers of jackhammering the hell out of the concrete all day, every day. And at the time, I think I was working a morning shift...or an evening shift...some shift that involved me wanting to sleep during the day. The earplugs didn't completely help. Jackhammers on concrete tend to reverberate through a structure in a way that snoring partners can't even emulate.

I continued with the earplugs because of snoring partners.

Rewinding through history, my nighttime noise-shaping began with a filter fan. Y'know, an air filter to screen out the dust. I may have had some kind of dust allergy. The filter rarely got replaced -- vacuumed every couple of months -- so it became more of a noisemaker than an air purifier.

I took that with me when I moved out, and it conditioned the ambient noise (or lack of it) for years until the fan gave up and started sounding more like an outboard fishing boat engine than a blissful blanket of white noise.

Christmas, if I recall correctly, brought a gift from mom and dad in the form of a noise generator. I pretty much stuck with the plain ol' white noise, although it had various selections from nature. This being the 1990s, the sound samples were a little meh. They were loops, and if you listened, you could hear the loop points. Some of the samples sounded decidedly unnatural.

Well, along comes the new digital world. We have ipods and tivos and key chains that show pictures. Shouldn't there be a next generation of White Noise Machines?

Whaddya know, there are ... er, there IS! Here's a video to prove it:

The link is brought to you by the folks at Vat19, pitching what they call "Curiously Awesome Gifts" (a slogan the folks at Altoids have not sued them over, as far as I can tell). They also have other doodads such as Foot Cozy Heated Slippers. Geek stuff, neat stuff, and stuff you could give people that they'd think was cool but would never actually use, but remember you fondly for all time for thinking of something so unique. You get the idea.

Now, to the present. The Latvian hockey fans went home a while ago. And now we approach the Royal Nova Scotia International Tattoo, with its bagpipe bands, brass bands, drum bands and flaming jugglers. The jugglers and mimes don't bother me when I sleep, but the rest of them do their rehearsals outside my apartment window in the early morning hours.

Y'know what? Earplugs don't cut it. Pillows don't cut it. Windows don't cut it. But maybe, just maybe, some white noise plus those other things will let me rest through the tumult. Completely unlikely, but maybe.

(Don't) Bestill my Beating Heart

Are you at risk for sudden cardiac arrest, or "SCA" as the kids say?

I am! Maybe.

According to a web site run by St. Jude Medical, some of the manageable risk factors are:

• Stress
• High blood pressure
• High cholesterol
• Cigarette smoking
• Excess weight
• Drug or alcohol abuse
• High fat diet
• Sedentary lifestyle

Great!

Now, this SCA stuff isn't a regular heart attack. This isn't a question of your arteries being gummed up with crap and being starved for delicious oxygen-rich blood, or chunks of your hardened arteries breaking off and floating around until they kill you. Naw, Sudden Cardiac Arrest has more to do with the electrical innards of your heart muscle going all cattywompus and messing up the rhythm in a catastrophic way.

In other words, the heart stops beating. And when the heart stops beating, you don't get blood to your brain and vital organs. And in that case, you might as well be dead. In fact, you'd be dead. Very bad.

So, whatcha gonna do? Hopefully someone around knows what the heck is going on, and you're somewhere that has a defibrillator. You know, the shock paddles. Zonk, you're dead. Zap, you're alive. W00t!

But there's another option if you've had these sudden heart attacks before and are likely to have them again. How about a defibrillator that's stuck inside your chest? Aha! The ICD implant is about the size of a pocketwatch, and since you don't carry a pocketwatch any more, you won't mind the excess weight. Of course, it's inside you. It's no good for telling time, but it is good for detecting an abnormally slow or fast heartbeat and zapping it back to the proper speed. I'm not doctory enough to explain the difference between this and a pacemaker, other than that it sounds like this implant is smart whereas a pacemaker may be dumb. I dunno. Ask your doctor.

If you're having sudden cardiac arrest right now, hit the "back" button on your browser right now and call 9-1-1. You only have 4-6 minutes to get help before you're permanently deceased.

If you're not having one, find out if you're about to by visiting www.insidecardiacarrest.com.

Mastering a house full of monkeys

We've stumbled on a fun show on TLC called Jon and Kate Plus 8. For those who haven't seen it, it's a reality-type show about the life of the Gosselin family. They have two sets of multiples -- twin girls, and sextuplets -- three girls, three boys.

I guess I've reached the point in my life where kids are cute and hilarious. And parents, too.

The dad cracks me right up. I totally dig his sense of humour. I think I'd be a dad like him. The mom has a great voice and is almost equally funny. How they don't lose their minds is beyond me. The chaos of one or two kids looks maddening. They manage eight kids and still have a sense of humour.

TLC has been running sets of four episodes -- one new, three reruns -- in packages. They go onto the PVR, and 'manda and I can snuggle on the couch and crack up at the shenanigans. As reality shows go, it's very down-to-earth and not plot-driven.

One episode we saw tonight featured the kids getting a chore chart. It looked like they ordered a custom one from a web site. Only the two oldest kids, aged 7, can read, so the little ones followed the pictures. I don't know if it's brilliant parenting or just the nature of three-year-olds, but the little ones got right into the act and scurried around doing chores. Sweeping, making their beds, sorting laundry. Of course they don't do it right. You can't expect them to. They're three. But it's well worth rewarding.

I think I would've benefitted from such a chore chart when I first moved in with my lady. It took some training and tears to get me to load and unload the dishwasher the right way, sort the laundry, clean the bathroom, set the table and so on. I'm good at it now. She hardly even has to ask...more than once. I've become quite domesticated.


Oo! A lull in the Latvian noise outside! Perhaps I'll sleep tonight after all! No ... no, weight, they're at it again, louder. If I can't cope with a street full of Latvian hockey nuts, how can these parents cope with a house full of shrieking children?

A picture can say a thousand words ... or just a few

Before we went on our trip to Cuba, mom and dad sent a really cool card.

It was a picture of a cat exploring some luggage ... and the caption was something along the lines of "Going somewhere?"

I thought it was very unusual -- and cool. I think she explained that a local photographer made and sold them using his or her own photos. What a neat idea! It was just a regular photo print, like you'd get at the store, on a simple card ... but it had a real sense of personality and creativity that you don't quite get with even the most appropriately-chosen Hallmark or Carlton cards.

I even thought to myself ... now that's a smart way for a photographer to monetize a hobby. I think I even said it out loud. Not in a crass, commercial way. Just a little "well, isn't that one smart cookie?!"

Well, there are ways to do it yourself. Of course, you could print up your own photos and find the right card stock. I suppose you could even learn calligraphy and get stickers and decals and transfers and stamps. Scrapbooking hobbyists would have a blast!

Me, I'm not so fancy.

I know that my flickr photo account is linked to various services that let me print photo cards, photo calendars, photo beach balls perhaps, and photo albums that I ordered the first Christmas we were here to show the folks back home some of the pictures I took during Year One on the Right Coast.

But if you're not all flickrized and just want to do up some fancy Photo Cards, there are other options. CardsDirect has a whole mess of options available in color, B&W, sepia, borders, finishes, and whatnot.

I can imagine a lot of people would order them for family photo Christmas cards. Nice, but a little predictable.

How about:

• Look at our new baby!
• Look at our new pet!
• Look at our new baby and our new pet!
• We got new carpet -- see our first stain?
• The best shot from our vacation
• Hubby finally cooked -- can't you just smell it?
• Our province is flooded, and this is the last thing we saw before the house floated away ... wish you were here!
• Does this look infected to you?
• This is infected. Get yourself tested
• This is the last you'll ever see of me
• It's yours. Pay up
• Here's a photo of my new photo card
• Happy Festivus
• We got married and you missed it! Kisses!

Just a few ideas. I hope you find inspiration.

Worst case scenario, you can order a blank one with a non-sequitur shot of anything, and use it as a thoroughly amusing substitute for stationery. Now that seems right up my alley.

The Blue Man Fraud -- blame the media?

Have you seen this guy on the news? He's not the aging founder of the whack-cool-instruments-with-sticks-while-painted art troupe the Blue Man Group. His name is Paul Karason, and supposedly he's been in the news because he took a dietary supplement and turned blue.

Okay, I've heard of eating too many carrots and turning orange -- but what on earth could make you turn blue? I mean, I like the Smurfs as much as the next guy, but this is extreme.

Well, it turns out some people take a silver supplement for their health. I don't mean silver as some kind of ranking, like gold-silver-bronze, or silver as in it's a shiny pill. No, they take actual silver, dissolved, tiny tiny tiny particles. Before the late 1930s, "Colloidal Silver" -- that is, a preparation in which the particles are actually suspended in the fluid, not dissolved ionically -- was used as a mainstream antibiotic. Sulfa and penicillin squeezed it out of the market. The US EPA says it's okay to use silver as a hospital disinfectant.

But drinking the stuff? Yes, people do it. And the man in the picture supposedly changed colour from it.

Now, there may be more to the story. A company that sells colloidal silver would be devastated if people believed taking the stuff would turn you into a Smurf or a drum-banging hippie, yes? That's the problem facing PurestColloids.com. They've set up a web page to debunk what they call the "Blue Man Fraud." According to the site, it's partly his fault for cooking up a home-brew silver drink that's totally NOT like the stuff they sell ... and then going suntanning, which fixed the blueness in his skin much like a silver-particle photographic plate would if you exposed it to light. They say the Blue Man was not consuming the kind of Colloidal Silver they sell.

But they go a step further and blame the media. Uh-oh! I don't much care for that! The company outright says that the mass media cannot be trusted to report anything that even resembles a truthful story.

Now, now. As part of the evil mass media myself, I know that end-of-the-line fact-checking is often lacking. If it comes down the wire, we assume that the people uplines have the story straight, and that it's fair game for reading. I'm smart and cynical enough to research further if the story seems weird enough to be questionable, or is on a subject I feel terribly under-informed about.

And, in the case of silver turning people blue, I might have turned to Wikipedia, for example, to see if silver actually turns people blue. What's it say? "Long-term intake of silver products may result in a condition known as argyria, one symptom of which is a blue or gray discoloration of the skin .... Many scientific articles report cases of argyria after ingestion of colloidal silver.[13][14][15][16][17][18]."

Okay, fair enough. It can happen. PureColloids.com is welcome to try to tell the public that its particular formulation will absotively posolutely NOT turn customers blue. Counter information with information, but please don't smear the media.

As always, I encourage you to read both sides, sort through hyperbole, and err on the side of common sense. Check out the pros and cons (the companies tell you some pros at http://www.purestcolloids.com/blue-man.php, Wikipedia will point you to what the FDA and others suggest about cons) before taking any supplement.

Except bacon. Bacon's a good supplement for anything.