Monthly Archives: May 2009

Conspiracy Theories
A couple of weeks ago I wrote an offhand remark about toothpaste and received an anonymous comment about toothpaste conspiracies. Since I love conspiracy theories and hadn’t heard about this one I sat down and popped a few queries into my favorite search engine and was sadly disappointed.

I did see a lot of talk about how much sugar is added to major brand toothpastes and since this sounded odd to me I pulled up MajorBrandOfToothpaste.com to see what ingredients are in toothpaste. The site is ugly and giant and about four columns with line after line of informational links which turned out to be a giant exercise in clicking. There was nothing about ingredients. The search tool sucked.

At first I thought maybe it was a trade secret but aren’t the ingredients on the box when you buy it?

During the course of this adventure in time-wasting a box popped up asking if I’d be interested in participating in a survey. “Of course,” I said because I was anxious for the opportunity to tell someone how worthless I thought this website was.

Thirty-seven questions. (37!) For toothpaste. And you couldn’t skip any questions. And some of the questions were like, “MajorBrandofToothpaste.com Has the Most Up-to-date Information on Oral Care” and there was no box to answer, “How the Hell Should I Know?”

Since my question wasn’t answered I decided to try CompetitorBrandofToothpaste.Com and they also had an ugly website with things I had to wait to load, a sucky search tool, couldn’t answer my question AND a survey. The first page said 1 of 12 so I skipped it.

Yesterday after dinner Bob said he wanted to show me something but he didn’t want to tell me what it was because it would be a cool surprise. And we would have to get in the car and drive somewhere.

We drove over to the college and saw this. He was right.

Today was so productive I even cleaned my oven. I would take pictures but I didn’t do such a great job. It looks a lot better but it’s not museum ready.

I know I said I’d already taken pictures of all the tulips but then I noticed these out back. I don’t normally buy such weird looking flowers and these, while a pretty color, look like they fell into the garbage disposal. I don’t know what to think.

This has been a super busy, but not terrible, week. But now I have about 10 trillion things to catch up on and I’ve made a list which means that there is little doubt tomorrow will be a bitter disappointment. Oh, and I have 1,150 words to do tonight to make my monthly goal.

I’d really like to finish this draft of a story I’m working on. I need to exercise. I put on my jeans earlier this week and could barely zip them. Yikes. I’ve almost completely ignored cooking lately so I’d like to make something decent to eat. But also healthy due to the shrinking jeans problem. I’ve got more yard things to get going. I started reading The Yiddish Policeman’s Union which I keep referring to as The Yiddish Policeman’s Ball. I like it so far and can’t wait to dig in. Too many things. And a new Asimov’s arrived which means I’m now three issues behind.

We’ll see how I do.