On glucomannan

The weather really has been crazy. I'm really tired of this global warming -- it's just too cold for me. So I went to The Philippines for some great weather, and it was cloudy and threatening rain most days -- and then a record Typhoon Ondoy dropped a record amount of water on Saturday. I was lucky that I wasn't caught in it. But my friends were on their way to Manila and got stranded in Bulacan. I had to send them money through the pawn shop system to fix the van that needed repairs after she tried to drive it through the flood and the hotel. And so it's been raining a lot ever since I left. And it's been cold and raining a lot here in St Louis. I thought last Thursday was almost as much rain as Ondoy. I just haven't had time to think much about glucomannan. Today is at least dry and sunny, but still too cold for early October. Where is Indian summer?

On truck accessories

One thing I've never understood is why people who live in the city want to drive pickup trucks and even spend money on truck accessories. Yes, I understand that country people, at least many country people, have good reasons for driving pickups, since they will have to do a lot of hauling of produce, bales of hay, horses and pigs, manure, fertilizer, sacks of feed, and so on. And maybe even country people who don't do that work may sometimes need to drive through muddy dirt roads and need the traction of a pickup just to get to wear they're going. And some city people use pickups to haul tools for a business such as contracting or cutting grass and so on. But many people drive pickups for no other reason I can see except they think it's cool and makes them some kind of cowboy. I don't know why they waste the money on gas.

On pond pumps

I remember when I was a kid we used to go to the pond in Fairmont, the very rich area that began a block beyond our house in the older middle class area where my house was. It was kind of fun to walk around and look for frogs and lily pads and so on, though it got kind of scummy sometimes. And I remember ice skating on it during the winter when it was cold enough long enough to form a thick enough layer of ice to be safe. Though that wasn't often, or maybe we just didn't go skating often, and that's why none of us were hockey fans, and never dreamed that Canadian kids regarded ice hockey like we did baseball, or that somebody it would be a popular spectator sport in the U.S. I don't know, but I don't think anybody ever used pond pumps on that, and don't even know if it's still there. It may be filled in and a house built on top of it by now, by real estate developers.