Weird Wednesday: How I Became A Dallas Ambassador

There's a very good reason I never went into politics.  It's all because of this family curse.  See, generations ago, in Iceland, at a family reunion, one of my ancestors pissed off a local witch by refusing to coordinate the receiving crew for a rousing game of dodgerock.  She laid a curse on him and all of his descendants down to the seventh generation that went something like "May You Always Be In Charge."

Which is what happens.  It's very dangerous for me or other family members to join an organization because the odd are within six months we'll be President, or some other high ranking official.  Trust me on this. In one amazing year I watched my dad become President of the band parents association, the local flyers club, Kiwanis and the Society of Left-Handed Nordic Engineers Who Drive Tiny Trains.  (Okay, I made up that last one.  My dad isn't really left-handed.)  You'd think, being a woman, that I'd get out of this particular thing but guess what? Women ran the country back in 900s Iceland while the men took off and, you know, raided coastlines.

So I bought a condo; I got elected to the condo board as vice-pres. (I only escaped presidency because Joan threatened to divorce me.)  I joined OA; six months later I was running the Web site.  (As Seth Bullock of Deadwood: "I only said I'd be the building inspector because I didn't want to be the god-damned sheriff!") I got picked for jury duty; within minutes I was the foreperson.  (My name will be on that crummy verdict till the end of recorded time.)  I joined the church choir; suddenly I was in charge of altar flowers, chapel candles and something involving Sunday school.  Oh, wait, that's the other curse. The big-woman-with-large-breasts-and-a-clipboard syndrome that just sort of happens around churches. Beware, all ye well-endowed wenches who seek God. Whatever you do, do not let them hand you a clipboard. Not even if all they say is "Here, hold this for a sec."

Well. I've recently been placed in charge of something else.  This one is different, so pardon me if you have trouble taking me seriously.  I have been designated as a local ambassador for World Hijab Day on February 1, 2014.

What is World Hijab Day, you may ask, which is how I know you didn't click on the link. Geez, people, do you think I write HTML code to pass the time?  World Hijab Day is a day for non-hijabi Muslims and non-Muslim women who have never worn a hijab to try it out for one day.  See what it's like from the inside, as it were.  Why? Well, because especially in the Western world, there are all kinds of misconceptions about why women wear hijabs. A lot of people think that you only wear a hijab if your husband or father makes you. False: Most Muslim women decide for themselves how much to cover, often after talking about it with their husbands and sometimes religious leaders. You might also think a hijab is hot, uncomfortable and a symptom of women's oppression. False again. There are hijabs made of cotton and silk which are very cool and comfortable.  I'll admit I haven't worn a hijab outside for two hours in the middle of the Texas summer, but for the most part I don't even notice it's there. (And I'm never outside for that long in the middle of the Texas summer, but if I was, I'd point out that a hijab is pretty good sun protection.) And as for the women's oppression part, I don't believe that any woman should be telling any other woman what to wear. So if you're doing that, stop it.  Thank you.

So World Hijab Day is about promoting awareness, greater understanding and a peaceful world.  Which is pretty cool.  And--Oh. You don't even know what a hijab is.  (Uh, you could click on the link.)  Here is a pic of me wearing a hijab.  This is The Lavender One; I also picked up The Magenta One and The Grey One. (It was a good deal. Three for one.)  The Magenta One is my favorite but there are religious reasons not to wear a red or red-similar color in much of the Muslim world, so anyway, The Lavender One. I think I look kinda cute, or as cute as anybody looks in a selfie, anyway.  Joan looks very cute in hers, though it does have the unfortunate tendency to age-reverse her to about twelve.  (No pic of Joan. Sorry.  That is not happening in this lifetime.)

I'm waiting for somebody to point out that I'm not even Muslim.  (Thank you, guy in Ohio, for pointing that out.) True fact. I am, however, besotted with the Muslim world.  Pretty sure I've talked about this before, so I'll just say that in my opinion, Islamic women really know how to dress.  It's smart, it's practical and even if people are staring at you, you know they can't really see anything. And as someone who gets stared at -- a lot -- that's pretty nice. Someday I'll get up the nerve to post a pic of me in my Muslim swimsuit, which I bought for sun reasons.  If you want to imagine it, though, think of Jeannie's bottle draped in aqua with a hood.  Yeah, it really is that funny.  You can stop imagining it now.  Thank you.

So anyway, I found out about World Hijab Day and went to the web site and asked a question and suddenly I was the Dallas ambassador. This is just how these things happen to me. See above, re, family curse. I am now in charge of Coordinating An Event.  The first and only thing I thought of was inviting everyone to lunch at Afrah. Afrah was cool with it, so, making some phone calls and will pass around some flyers.  Saturday, February 1st at 1:00, Afrah Restaurant, 314 East Main Street, Richardson, Texas. Hopefully it will be warm and we can sit outside.

Somewhere, a 900-year-old Icelandic witch is laughing at me.  I just know it.

Weird Wednesday: A Cure For Brain Cancer

There's a lot of weirdness going around this Wednesday. To begin with, we have some whack job taking over the Discovery Channel offices because the channel encourage human breeding. Here's a link to his rant--apparently MySpace took his page down, so if you were trying to use the earlier link, sorry about that. We also had a psycho-stalker ex-girlfriend get herself stuck and actually die while trying to break into her former boyfriend's house by way of the chimney. I mean, there's no end to the possible jokes here, but I'll stick to "If Santa can do it, I can do it." But the weirdest by far is this one: A brilliant batch of masters of the obvious have just published an article in the Journal of the AMA, announcing that if you have bits of you lopped off, your risk of dying of cancer in your missing bits drops to zero. I mean, it's hard to imagine how we ever managed twenty thousand years of civilization without knowing that.

Seriously, look at the article. (Oh, sure, you can look it up on CNN or U.S. News and World Report, but let's just be hardcore and look at the real thing, shall we?) Honest to God, there it is, right under "Results": " No breast cancers were diagnosed in the 247 women with risk-reducing mastectomy compared with 98 women of 1372 diagnosed with breast cancer who did not have risk-reducing mastectomy." In short, if you don't have breasts, you can't get breast cancer. Wow. I mean, I'm just in awe.

All joking aside, though, "This is the first study to show that this risk-reducing surgery can extend the life of women," says Virginia Kaklamani, an associate professor of medicine at Northwestern University, who wrote an editorial that accompanied the study. Which is more than a little upsetting to yours truly. Women who carry a "mutant" version of a gene called BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 are much more likely to get breast or ovarian cancer than women who don't. That's a statistical probability. But just because one has an increased risk of getting cancer, does that mean one should have the offending bit removed? And when? Should we DNA-screen every infant and start with the double mastectomies when they're six months old? Or wait until they're twelve? Is twenty-four okay, or has the "mutant gene" already started to wreak havoc by then? When is it the least traumatic to have a body part chopped off? Would you rather lose your leg at five or fifty?

To make this even more tricky, the "mutant" genes tend to be carried by Jewish women of Eastern European origin at a rate 10 times higher than in the rest of the population. "Me of IA" nailed it when he or she commented on the U.S. News & World Report forum,

"Voluntary" sterilization. Implementation is based on a woman's submission to the authority of the medical doctor (and his appeal to her fear of death). 'Jewish women with Eastern European roots should get tested.' If testing is recommended to them, is sterilization encouraged? Sterilize the Jews?!?!?! Holy mother of god! They're mutilating and sterilizing women, and openly admitting the genetic motive! If that's not whitewashed genocide, nothing is.

Thank you, Me of IA. That's exactly what I was thinking.

I gotta wonder if doctors would be quite so quick to recommend this same "risk-reducing surgery" to their male patients with a high risk of testicular cancer. Not an issue, right? You don't need balls to live, do you? And what's a little sack of tissue hanging from your scrotum when compared with extending the lives of men? Good God, DNA screen the dudes and start chopping at age twelve. Better safe than sorry and all that.

Come to think of it, I just thought of a cure for brain cancer. Let's start with Virginia Kaklamani. Oh, whoops. Too late.

Weird Wednesday: Uncool Behavior

Our air conditioner has been giving us fits of late. Air conditioners, in case you did not know this, are all members of a sinister secret society that is sworn to act according to certain rules. One of these is to never, ever break down in the dead of winter, or even when it's kind of warmish outside. No, the only time air conditioners are allowed to break down is when it's 102 in the shade and the air cannot be safely distinguished from water. (Unless, of course, it's also a heat pump, in which case breaking down in midwinter is strongly encouraged.)

Another rule of the Air Conditioner Code is that one can never break down in an ordinary way, like by having a freon leak or by needing its condenser hose unplugged. One must always cause headaches for both the owners and the repair guy by being as obtuse as possible as to what is actually wrong. Our air conditioner, by the way, is brand new. We had it installed last October. Since then the repair guy has been out here three times, once for a gas leak, once because it was running prolifically but producing no cool air, and then this crazy thing.

It started off rather innocently, as misbehaving appliances sometimes do (unless they're ranges). We'd get home and the house would be around 80 degrees. Not that unusual, considering it's 102 in the shade and the air is--yeah. I mean, really, 20 or 25 degrees and you're doing pretty good. But, again, this is a brand new unit. It's running full tilt. Is that normal? Or should it get to stop and rest once in a while? Do machines need to rest? I am not sure, but I do know that air conditioner units sometimes freeze up if they run too much.

Anyway, the next couple days we came home and it was 82. Still not too bad, but starting to get annoying. Then one night I woke up and it was 85. At three in the morning. It was actually cooler outside than it was in the house. At this point I started to consider that there might, possibly, be something seriously wrong. Again. I opened the closet where the a/c lurks and got the shock of my life. Huge quantities of water were pouring down the side of the unit and puddling all over the floor. I don't care how hot it is outside, that is not normal.

So the repair guy came and determined we must have the ever-popular Blocked Condenser Hose. The compressor is supposed to shut off when the hose is blocked, so that it won't, uh, flood the closet. (Like it kind of already had.) He pumped some compressed air through the thing, got it draining properly and charged us $50 bucks. I cleaned up the mess, which is usually my job when these things happen. The next night we came home and it was--85 degrees in the house again.

Argh.

So I called the repair guy back and he came back over. He inspected the unit for possible ice lock. Nothing. Just in case he turned the heat on, raising the temperature to a nice balmy 87. Then he went outside, messed around with the freon, tapped on things, fiddled with other things, and came back in with a temperature gauge that he proceeded to hold up to all the vents in the house. "Well, it's cooling," he decided, "but not very much."

Which meant what, exactly? Well, after two hours he still wasn't sure. His best guess at this point was that (obscure part) had gone bad, but he didn't have one on him and the store didn't open until eight in the morning. He'd be back then. This was fine; Caesar the Cat really likes him. But we got to spend a third night lying under fans without much by way of clothes on and cursing our continued existence.

The next morning the repair guy, who by the way is a saint, was back with (obscure part.) He popped it in and within seconds, the temperature started dropping. He shook his head in puzzlement. "I've never seen one of those go bad before," he said. Well, they do if your unit is a member of the sinister secret society of air conditioners, but I decided not to bring that up.

Total charge for four hours of labor, poking, prodding, hose clearing, freon enhancement, cat-fussing-over, (obscure part) and three service calls: $50. (Obscure part) was still under warranty.

Now I ask you: How weird is that?

Weird Wednesday: What The Hey Is This?

I hope you can see that okay. It's a photo taken by a friend with an iPhone at a party. She was aiming, I think, at the large girl exiting the frame to the left. (She missed.) That's the side of the garage on the right, and there's some party-goers in the background.Then there's that thing in the middle. Uh, hello? What is that? My friend says there wasn't anything there when she took the shot. Certainly there wasn't anyONE there. And even if there had been, she wouldn't have been out of proportion to everyone else, cut in half and floating a foot or two off the ground.

Seriously, that is a weird photo. Anybody got an explanation?