mmm, Seasonal Affective Disorder...

[robling_t]

I must be getting old, I just wasn't feeling the whole halloween thing this year. (I suppose it doesn't really help that it's a reminder that the Manuscript is another year unsold and I can't even seem to keep beta-readers engaged with it... {grumble}) I managed to sacrifice the ritual vegetable during an early burst of enthusiasm, but by the time Holy Week actually rolled around I was in full-on "it's too cold out and everyone hates me anyway" mode, and I spent last night in front of my own tv rather pointedly Not Doing The WCKG Newsletter until I realized that it was 3am and I'd just sat all the way through Howard the Duck. Gonna be a bad Xmas Season if I can't drag myself out of this funk... Anyway, here's some New Things I've Learned:

• New Thing Learned for 25 October: My bedroom is cold enough to suck the charge out of poor Emil's battery. Fortunately I discovered this in plenty of time to defrost him for use on the L the next afternoon. [Source: Apple.com troubleshooting docs.]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 26 October: There's a truck stop on I-80 in Iowa that's 2 1/2 times the size of Disneyland. (It has its own dentist on-staff.) [Source: Modern Marvels, "truck stops".]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 27 October: Large mausoleum complexes are designed with systems of concealed vents to remove, erm, "gases", since just bricking the coffins up in the walls would eventually blow off the fancy engraved fronts. The guide didn't exactly diagram out where these "gases" were vented to, but I do note that the place was a little... funky. [Source: Rosehill cemetery mausoleum tour.]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 28 October: In an area of China that's lost its bees to pesticide use, humans now hand-pollinate the pear crop. Which kind of only works if you've got as much surplus labor as a place like China, so we've got to get cracking on the Colony Collapse Disorder thing. [Source: Nature, "the silence of the bees".]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 29 October: When casting machine parts out of magnesium alloys, the pour-hole in the mold has to be sealed up with sand to keep the metal from reacting with oxygen as it cools. [Source: "how it's made".]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 30 October: The Centralia mine fire was started when somebody unloaded hot stove-ashes into the mining pit that the town had been using for a dump. Just in case you thought that stupidity around hot objects was a modern invention. [Source: The day the earth caved in : an American mining tragedy, Joan Quigley.]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 31 October: American Sign Language was developed from the natural signing of a French group, and is thus mutually incomprehensible with the independently derived British Sign Language. This is not the time or place to get into the "separated by a common language" joke again...[Source: Talking hands : what sign language reveals about the mind, Margalit Fox.]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 1 November: Don't pour liquid nitrogen down the drain: as it expands into a gas, it'll blow out a pipe somewhere along the line. [Source: Dinner:Impossible, "Magicians Meal".]