There have been a variety of studies that seem to demonstrate that over zealous cleanliness can have an negative impact on the human immune system. Science Daily has an article on research at Duke suggesting that the higher incidence of allergies in nations with more fastidious habits is due to their immune systems not having to confront the diverse soup of microbes and allergens found in the habitats of less fastidious nations. There’s an important lesson here for those paying attention: stop vacuuming and cleaning obsessively and let a little mother nature seep into your house – you’ll sneeze less. This also validates the cleaning strategies of bachelors like myself – less is more, baby!

… so to speak, anyway. My friend Larry passed along a piece that ran in the Boston Globe recently about the trend of folks like me who are choosing to be single rather than pursuing a relationship. The timing is ironic in that I posted to a personals site for the first time in my life, but there are definitely shades of me in the folks they interview in the piece. Worth a look if you’re interested in the subject.

…pleonism. From today’s dictionary.com word of the day, which gave me a good laugh. It means ‘the use of more words than are necessary to express an idea.’ True, that, though not on this post.

I’ve ranted about this before, but since Wired ran a piece recently, I’ll rant again. How many times have you cut your fingers on the blister-style plastic packaging so many things come in these days? I could care less about retailer’s shrinkage problems (ie theft) – there are better ways to solve this than subjecting all customers to risk and inconvenience because a small percentage of them will steal. This is an occasion where I actually wish for a ridiculous class-action lawsuit against one or more of the retailers to try and force them into changing their practices.

The article’s interesting in that it points out this packaging trend is largely about shrinkage. I had figured it was about protecting the product from breakage in shipping.

dqbooks.com has put together a pretty slick flash-based book-like interface with generally unobtrusive background soundtracks, great art and photography, and a great user interface. Check it out if you’re an even occasional fan of avante garde flash stuff.

I often tell folks I’m cursed when it comes to dealing with the DMV, and most often they shrug, as if to say – we’re all cursed, it’s banal. To which I assert that you’ve seen nothing till you’ve seen the trouble I’ve been through. My latest story:

I moved to MA. I go get insurance, they charge me an extra $80 a year for driving without insurance in ’92, which I did not do, it’s a paperwork error from NY that I discovered when I moved to NY 2 years ago.

Anyway, next I go in to MA DMV, take a ticket, wait 45 minutes, and get my turn at the window. Some minutes later, I am informed that my right to drive in MA is suspended, and has been since 1992. Why, I ask. Turns out I had a ticket which I paid, but which they claim I paid late. Suddenly I remember what happened 14 years ago – I got a ticket returning to Maine from NY after Thanksgiving. I paid the ticket. A year later I get a letter informing me I did not pay, and that my right to drive is suspended. I dig up the canceled check and send it via registered mail to MA, saying ‘I did pay, here’s a copy of my check you cashed.’ They respond – ‘ok, but you paid late,’ because they calculate the payment not by when the check was cashed, but by when I responded via registered mail (!!!). I write them back a registered snarky mail which amounts to, fuck you, your system is mistaken, look at the date again, you cashed my check before the due date of the ticket.’ They respond ‘no. Pay up.’ I start ignoring them, and 14 years pass. We forget about each other.

Until this past Friday. It costs me 4.5 hours and several hundred dollars to resolve this, get my new license and registration, and escape DMV. I go home. As I am putting the registration into its pouch, what do I notice? They’ve issued me a license with my Dad’s name (David C. Hamilton instead of the correct David L. Hamilton). This despite me having provided multiple forms of ID with the correct identity on it (NY License, Passport, Birth Certificate, Social Security Card).

So, back to DMV for me today. What do you want to bet this costs me hundreds to resolve? And trust me, you don’t want my Dad’s identity, he has creditors looking for him, they sometimes end up calling me. Now that my license says me is him, I almost guarantee they come looking for me.

I’m cursed when it comes to the DMV, I tell you. Cursed!

(I never wrote about my last run in with them, when I moved to NY, but it was similar. Failed to turn in license plates when I moved to maine in ’92, so NY recorded me as driving without insurance, which I had not done (I had simply failed to turn in my plates), so NY recorded me as driving unregistered and uninsured. For 13 years. I say fine, how much will it cost to fix this, they say ‘$25’ I ask to pay, and they say ‘you can’t do that here, this is a regional office, go pay at the central office.’)

!!!

Fucking DMV.

I don’t normally post to stuff like this, but this caught my eye on a website whose ad banner wasn’t being blocked by adblock + (yes I know, time to update my filters). Anyway, shed a tear for the poor, poor bottles of Grolsch:

I posted a panorama of the land behind my house in my image gallery. It’s a Quicktime VR, meaning you need Quicktime to check it out, and meaning that you can click and drag within the image to look around. It’s in the ‘Misc photos II’ gallery, or you can go directly to it.

My house is behind the red barn. You can spot the ghost of Soolin if you pan around in the shot, and if you look at the treeline when you pan around you can see the mountain range that is a couple of miles south.

So I’ve learned something. It’s actually cheaper and more convenient to pay someone else to do your laundry than it is to own a washer and dryer. It’s costing me a little over $10 a week to get my laundry done, whereas when I was in NY and doing my own, I was paying at least that much in electricity to power the washer and dryer. And as a huge positive, the laundry service is folding my clothes for me. I don’t think I could even get it done cheaper by going to the laundromat myself, even without factoring in what my time is worth to me.

They say owning a dog’s good for your soul, and today I have a perfect example of why. Most afternoons, weather permitting, Soolin and I head out to the farmland behind my house and play fetch. I have one of those ‘chuckit’ sticks that look kind of like an atlatl that enables me to throw the ball 50 yards or more. Usually I have Soolin sit until I throw it, at which point she tears off after it. It’s her favorite thing on earth. Every now and then I let her run off without throwing the ball, and wait till she is 50 or more yards away, then issue a command like ‘sit’ or ‘down’ as a way to reinforce her training. She wants the ball so badly that she’ll do anything I ask in return for me tossing it.

So yesterday we head back to the field and after a few tosses I release her before throwing, wait till she is far away, then toss it as high as I can in the air. It was very windy and I had noticed the wind was carrying the ball so I figured I would toss it high to get it to go further than normal. Soolin loses sight of the ball and amazingly, it comes down right on her forhead, giving her a good soft bonk before bouncing away. This disorients her, and she barks once then proceeds to spin in circles trying to figure out what it was that bonked her. Or maybe she knew it was the ball and was just indignant, but either way I laughed for at least 5 minutes. I had to apologize to her when she finally came back with the ball. This little episode basically made my day.