Planet Earth keeps trying to make me cry, but I know it’s just a movie.
I wet my bed after I saved your soul
I’m sitting at home on a Friday night watching ABC because that’s what was on when I came home and I’m too lazy to get the remote from D because he’s on the other side of the sectional couch. Friday night TV is horrible unless you’re into news magazines and/or murders committed by the least likely suspect. But 20/20 just came on and changed my life in an episode entitled “How Young Is Too Young?” I was tuning in and out until halfway through the show, when a seven-year-old, born-again Christian boy started preaching to me out of the clear blue. He had flaxen blonde hair and was wearing a coat, tie, and shiny shoes. He stood in front of his very own church congregation and delivered a sermon about Jesus in a rich Southern accent. Later he was shown wearing a sandwich board in front of an abortion clinic, shouting “Don’t kill your baby!” at women walking in the door. The newscaster asked him if he knew how babies were made. He said no. The newscaster told him she was a Buddhist and asked if she was going to hell. The boy said “Yes, unless you get saved.” The boy said he’s been saved since he was three, when he had a crisis of conscience after he disobeyed his mother. So forget you, Saint Augustine, and your stolen pear. Forget you, Thomas Merton, and your substance abuse problem. You never had to reach maturity to absorb the life experiences and spiritual wisdom that would eventually lead you to the Christian faith. You could have just gotten your redneck fathers to brainwash you with a bunch of Tollhouse cookies and a kid’s illustrated Bible. And oh yes – I found video.
paper rock blog
Last night D & I sat on the couch after soccer practice and cuddled with our laptops. We find that after a long and arduous day, sometimes the only thing that rejuvenates our spirits is making that quality time with our loved one – the internet. D kept bragging about the awesome blog he was writing (“this blog is so good it’s going to make people have diarrhea”) and I felt inadequate because I didn’t have anything to blog about. For inspiration I surfed the internet, which is less than blogging. [blogging>surfing>programming>?] When D looked over my shoulder and saw that I wasn’t editing a new post in WordPress like he was, he snickered, “Too bad we don’t have a cat or you could be blogging about it.” Tonight I am going to stay in and blog him out of the water. I will blog him until he bleeds. No one gets away with making fun of my blog. I may publish letters written by cats, but I would never give a cat its own post. Unless the cat did something reeeeally cute. But it would have to be an inordinately slow news day.
Lead in lipstick
I always knew there was a reason why I choose to look so frumpy. It turns out I am a scientist. National news outlets like CNN have been picking up this story today about the presence of unsafe doses of lead in popular lipsticks made by L’Oreal, Dior, and Cover Girl.
More than half of 33 brand-name lipsticks tested (61 percent) contained detectable levels of lead, with levels ranging from 0.03 to 0.65 parts per million (ppm). None of these lipsticks listed lead as an ingredient.
One-third of the tested lipsticks exceeded the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s 0.1 ppm limit for lead in candy – a standard established to protect children from directly ingesting lead. Lipstick products, like candy, are directly ingested into the body. Nevertheless, the FDA has not set a limit for lead in lipstick, which fits with the disturbing absence of FDA regulatory oversight and enforcement capacity for the $50 billion personal care products industry.
Research money is finally going to the study of harsh chemicals in cosmetics, and I couldn’t be happier about it, even though the published findings will continue to be scary. Women (and the men and babies that are kissed and snuggled regularly by women) need to demand that the FDA regulates the chemical content of cosmetics. When harsh cosmetics aren’t swallowed or absorbed directly into the skin, they are washed into our water supply where they cause untold environmental damage.
Here is a great local website – environmentalhealthnews.org – that chronicles the problems in more depth.
Here is a website that will tell you which beauty products are safe and which are not: Skin Deep