Soda Craze

Having been pinned by a piece of Ikea furniture, I decided to take a short break and clean out my bookmarks. And found a delightful little thing, one of those sites that makes you glad Al Gore invented the internet – Bugs of Chernobyl. This woman goes around to nuclear sites, including the former Chernobyl containment site, and documents the mutated insects there. They are truly lovely and a wonderful testament to the artistic powers of fugitive radioactivity.

And you know, it’s not always the case, is it, that when man messes with nature it turns out better than before? Cane toads in Australia: giant mess. Parasitic wasps in Hawaii, ditto. Kudzu, hey? Oops much?

Which reminded me of those big giant jellyfish in Japan, those nomura. At around 500 pounds they’re bigger than the average sumo; they clean the waters around them of all plankton and they poison fish, they tangle fishermens’ nets, they generally weird out the ecosystem. And there’s more of them every year. But you know why they’re blooming like that? Why the numbers go up every year? (PS. Aren’t they pretty?)

It turns out that a nomura isn’t killed by the average fishing net, so they land on the deck of the boat pretty well intact. Of course, you can’t have that; if you tip the stupid thing off the side, it’ll just get caught in the net again. So the fishermen generally take their work knives and slice it into several large pieces before shoving the rest overboard. But it’s been discovered that if you ‘breach’ a nomura, it’ll empty all its, um, what’s a good term for mixed company, all its genetic material into the water (this happens whether it gets sliced by knives or snagged on a piece of coral). So what are the fishermen doing? Creating a soup of eggs and sperm in the water. Fertilization, maturation, blooms.

Which makes you wonder if there’s anything that we can do, us humans, about the nomura (aside from making more nomura). Things like this, to me, are a pretty solid argument for the preservation of as much biodiversity as we can. Who’s to say that the natural enemies of the nomura won’t come seething up from the depths and take advantage of the bounty? Then, who’s to say that the ten species on which they depend will be there to ensure that happens? Or the ten species that each of those species count on? Or etc ad infinitum.

Anyway, the moral of this post is:
1. Things depend on things, even if we haven’t discovered the relationships yet.
2. Particleboard is heavy.

So Thursday evening I was feeling some pressure in my left ear, but this morning I woke up with undeniable pain, and a persistent stomping throb, or throbbing stomp, the unmistakable call of the wild ear infection. I was all, “What am I, four years old?” So I did what all reasonable four year-olds do and went crying to my mommy, who said, between large mouthfuls of her lunch, “An ear infection? Oh, stick a clove of garlic in there.”

“MOM. NO.”
“But I saw it on that Doctor Oz show! It’ll kill the – ”
“You always told me not to stick anything in my ears.” I paused. “Also, garlic?”
“It’s got antibacterial properties!”
“What if it gets stuck in there?”
“Well, at least it won’t get infected.”

Anyway, ear infections are usually viral, Mom, so just KNOCK IT OFF.

Anyway, though, I got to thinking about my usual cold/flu regimen, which goes like such:
1. Zinc cough drops (preferably cherry flavour)
2. Ibuprofen
3. Lots of whining

Not so much a standard home remedy as a standard drugstore remedy, unlike my crazy mother’s garlic advice. Then I was like, “But how crazy is it?” We don’t necessarily head ‘er to the drugstore for every little thing, we do subscribe to quite a lot of home remedies. Cranberry juice for urinary tract infections, ginger ale for motion sickness, toothpaste on a zit, toast with honey to cure a hangover. For all that we pride ourselves as being a modern bunch with the Better Living Through Chemistry and medicines done up in nice little foil packs, I think most of us would honest-to-Gob rather smear some baking soda on a beesting than drive to London Drugs for one of those Benadryl rub-on sticks. Am I right?

Readers, do you have any family/home remedies you swear by? (Or, in the case of hangover cures, at?)

I mean, not a single word in this headline actually goes with the other words in the sentence.

Then again, if the Beatles, MC Hammer, and the New Kids on the Block could do it…