Lung woes

Grace got sick last week. I’d hoped to be spared the fun, but sadly I got hit too. And so for the last couple of days I’ve been coughing my lungs up. I can feel crap in there. I can hear it when I breathe. Well, today my lungs decided the time is right to share that crap with the rest of the world. ( Perhaps TMI? )

I haven’t been this sick in a long time. I’ve had the sniffles here and there, but otherwise I’ve been almost perfectly healthy. My whole chest aches when I cough and my lungs actually burn a little bit from the irritation. If I never get sick again, it’ll be too soon.

A Salty Experiment

Boil one cup of water. To this water add about three tablespoons of salt. Kosher salt is best because it’s pure salt with no added “stuff” but use table salt if that’s what you’ve got. Stir to dissolve. What you want here is a super-saturated saline solution. Seriously. Pour the solution into a clear vessel of some sort and stash it in a sunny spot. In a day or two you’ll see a ring of salt forming around the edge of the vessel. This is cool and all, but what you’re REALLY waiting for will take about a week. As the water evaporates, the salt will become more and more concentrated until at last it will begin to precipitate from solution. You’ll be left with nice, square-ish salt crystals. They’re salty and crunchy and I like them a lot.

That’s what I’ve got on my kitchen windowsill right now. Yesterday, no crystals. Today, bam! Crystals.

This reminds me of a similar experiment I did in grade school. We took a jar and filled it partway with salt water. We then tied a short length of string onto a pencil, and set the pencil over the mouth of the jar so the string just touched the water. Capillary action would draw the water upward, and the salt would precipitate on the outside of the string. As I recall we put some food colouring in it for some reason. Probably to help it stand out. Whatever. It was cool. Maybe I’ll do that again. I’ve got all the requisite components here.

げんき

Well, thanks to cocori’s tip, I found the textbook I was looking for. It’s a PDF, which isn’t ideal but it’ll serve until I can find an affordable copy of the dead tree edition. Thanks, Cori!

Augh!

So Amazon FINALLY gets Ben Folds Five’s “Whatever and Ever Amen” for sale in their MP3 store, the re-release with all the extra material, including the previously Japan-only Japanese language version of Song for the Dumped (which is a great song to begin with but in Japanese becomes a sublime work of art). And the one song I want? I cannot buy individually. Only with the album. FUCK. In fact, the only tracks you can buy individually are the ones on the original album. So Sony/Amazon/Ben/SOMEbody has decided that they want to shaft the customers who already own the album and only want the bonus tracks. Bastards. And iTunes is exactly the same. So it’s not Amazon then. Probably Sony. I can’t imagine Ben wanting to stick it to his fans.

But the crazy stupid thing here is that the MP3 download costs $8.99, which is TWO CENTS MORE than the actual CD! And the iTunes download is $9.99. Yeah. I don’t get that. I’ve heard the argument before that the music is what gives a CD its value, but I beg to differ. The physical medium is difficult to reproduce (if you want something as good as the original, that is), but the music is just an interestingly organised (and easily copied) series of ones and zeros. I (and others) argue that this imbues the music with little real inherent value (apart from the desirability of a particular recording, that is). Well, that’s an argument for another time. Right now I’m tired and I’m sick and I’m feeling like 10 pounds of crap in a 5 pound bag and I need to go have a lie-down.