Buh-Bye Bedbugs

So a friend of mine in New York just had an exterminator come to his house to check for bed bugs. If you've been following the news, bedbugs are a huge problem in NYC. His apartment is safe...for now. But in talking to him (okay, IM-ing) I realized just how traumatizing the specter of bedbug infestation must be to East Coasters (and anywhere else bedbugs are a big problem) so I decided to spend five minutes this morning on trying to come up with a way to eradicate the problem.

Here are some facts:

Bedbugs are found in beds.
Bedbugs feast on human blood.
Bedbugs are sneaky and come out at night.
Bedbugs are resistant to pesticides.

So what's the solution? Decoy living rooms and bedrooms. Bedbugs are tiny, between 4-5 millimeter in length. What if they had access to tiny beds? Tiny couches? Tiny people? My guess is they'd eat what's closest to them, rather than make the long, arduous trek to your huge bed or couch. So if you fear your home might be the target of these creatures, run to the nearest store and buy yourself a bunch of doll furniture and place it somewhere in the house as far away from your actual bedroom as possible. If you have dandruff, I'd recommend shaking your dander all over the furniture as bait. In addition, add a blood trough to the bed so they stay on the mini-furniture. When enough bedbugs infest the decoy bedroom, set the decoy bedroom on fire. Then start the process over again.

I'm not an entomologist so I haven't field-tested this idea, but I'm 98% sure it will work. If you try this, drop me a note to let me know how successful it was for you.

It's Official: I've Got Brain Damage

I haven't had a doctor confirm this, but I hardly need to when researchers at Ohio State University already have. They exposed mice to air pollution, the kind that's "created by cars, factories and natural dust" and discovered "visible, negative impacts on the brain". In other words, Los Angeles residents like myself are brain damaged. Here's what happened to the mice:

After 10 months of exposure behavioural tests were carried out on the rodents including a learning and memory test where after five days of training they were placed on a brightly lit area and given two minutes to find the dark escape hole where they would be more comfortable.

The mice who breathed the polluted air took longer to learn where the escape hole was and at later tests they were more likely to forget where it was.

In another experiment, mice exposed to the polluted air showed more depressive-like and higher levels of anxiety-like behaviours in one test, but not in another.

If you replaced "took longer to learn where the escape hole was" with "took longer to find her car parked at The Grove", the study has basically captured my cognitive decline since moving here. And are there ANY Angelenos who don't exhibit "depressive-like and higher levels of anxiety-like behaviours"? Actually, there are a small handful, but those are the ones who were cast in TV shows soon after moving to LA, and who spend a good portion of the year shooting in Vancouver.

How's the pollution in South Dakota? Maybe it's time for a move.

Just watched the beginning of "The Making of GBTV" on GBTV.com. I haven't always been a big fan of Glenn Beck, but I think it's because I didn't appreciate how much of a visionary he is. Then I heard his co-host say this:

"I've mentioned before that Glenn will go off on a tangent and say, "All right, we need rocket ships to space," and then we'll go off and start building rocket ships in our backyard. And then he'll come to us a few weeks later and we've got a half-built rocket ship and he'll say, "What are you doin' that for? We're not going to the moon anymore."

So now I'm like, "Wait a second! WHERE'S he gonna go? And is he going to take public transportation to get there?". And I'm also wondering, "How much could you get for a half-built rocket ship on Ebay?"

Needless to say, I'll be watching GBTV when it launches to find out.

Taste My Wife, Please!

I'm hopeful "Top Chef" producers will read this entry and decide to make this a quickfire challenge next season.

I'm sure the glut of cooking shows makes it really difficult for any individual chef to stand out, so I applaud New York chef Daniel Angerer for finding a away to get recognized. He's making cheese out of his wife's breast milk. Will this revelation scar his child down the line, when said child realizes his dad stole his food? Time will tell.

In the meantime, I'm going to see if I can order breast milk cheese online. I've got a dinner party coming up and I suspect it would go great with fancy crackers.

Baseball's Most Dangerous Food

Hot Dogs are perfectly-designed to kill a person, especially a little person. If you have hot dogs, and a little person, you should get rid of one of them. Either put your small child up for adoption, or get rid of your hot dogs. Don't believe me? Read this:

"If you were to take the best engineers in the world and try to design the perfect plug for a child's airway, it would be a hot dog," says statement author Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. "I'm a pediatric emergency doctor, and to try to get them out once they're wedged in, it's almost impossible."

I probably just saved a life with this post. You're welcome.

My Adventure in Sex City

Canada's using the power of gaming to teach its youth about safe sex. I got one question wrong. At least now I've learned you can't get an STD if a dog humps your leg. Good to know.

Murder Does Not Belong on a Bucket List

A 98-year-old woman (allegedly) strangled her 100-year-old roommate at a nursing home in Dartmouth, MA.

She skipped the "passive" and went straight for "aggressive" in response to an annoying roommate. I clearly need to step up my game a bit. When my roommate pisses me off I accidently throw away his soy cheese. But mark my words: If I he's still my roommate when I'm 90, all bets are off.