You know how all the cool people you know always have one of those hard-plastic "Nalgene" bottles to drink out of?  I recently learned why they are so cool: they are made of special plastic that doesn’t retain odors, which means they don’t get smelly and nasty over time like every other plastic drinking bottle you’ve ever had.  It also means they’re much easier to clean.

So if, like me, you are fed up with drinking water out of stinky old water bottles, you’ll want to get one of these babies soon.

Kim’s recent post about smoking reminds me that I have an anti-smoking rant that I’ve been meaning to post about for a while now.

I have two questions.  Why does anyone smoke, and why is smoking legal?

The only reason that anyone smokes is because they were tricked into it when they were young and stupid, and now they are addicted.  Virtually no one starts smoking after their late teens/early twenties.  Cigarette companies know this, so they deliberately target their advertising at young people.  Who really thinks that Joe Camel or the Marlboro Man are cool, other than kids?

(Of course, some adults who smoke will claim they do it because they like it, not because they are addicted; but for the purposes of this discussion we will consider such blatant lying to be invalid evidence.)

This is an unfair and frankly predatory practice.  It’s unfair because everyone is young and stupid for a while; it’s evil to take advantage of people in that state.  And it’s predatory because their product hooks into you and kills you.

This brings us to question #2: why is smoking legal?  Why are the cigarette companies allowed to exist, to continue to make billions of dollars, and to prey on children?  The only reason is that the companies are already rich, and therefore are able to influence politicians in ways that are favorable to the cigarette companies.

It bothers me that smoking is legal not only because it’s freaking nasty and it kills tens hundreds of thousands of people annually, but also because as public policy it’s so glaringly inconsistent.  If drugs like heroin are illegal because they ruin people’s lives by causing them to be severely addicted and/or killing them, then smoking should be illegal for the exact same reasons.  The only difference is that there is a powerful political force in support of cigarettes, while there is no such support for the other currently-illegal drugs.

OK not quite, but Bob Evans is pretty good, and tonight I had a meal there which was really amazing: pot roast hash.

This is hash browns, topped with pot roast, and then topped with eggs (cooked to order, i.e. overlight) and cheddar cheese.  As I read the description, I was thinking, "Wow, this sounds really good" until I got to the eggs.  Then I thought, "Eggs?  Hmmm..." 

Nonetheless, I pressed on with my order, eggs and all.  And it turned out to be delicious.  Of course steak & eggs is a very common breakfast dish, but I’ve never gotten that, and pot roast isn’t quite the same as steak.  So it seemed like an unlikely combination of foods at first.  But they went together delectably, and I loved every bite.

I’ll probably be getting this almost every time we go to Bob Evans from now on.

I haven’t received any email at any of my @nodivisions.com accounts since about Monday.  It turns out that this is because my IP address had gotten temporarily blacklisted by my host due to spam coming from this machine.

On the contact page there is a field labeled "your email address:" which had served 2 purposes: first, it allowed me to reply to whomever was sending me a message, and second, it allowed me to send a copy of the message to the visitor himself.

But apparently some spammer noticed this, and started entering the addresses of his spam-victims into the "your email address:" field, and then typing his spam messages into the message box.  Of course the spammer didn’t care that I also got a copy of every message, and I didn’t notice because they all got transferred to my junk-mail folder automatically anyway.

So, it worked great for a while, but now the contact page here and on all my sites will no longer send a copy of the message back to its author -- that is, to the person in the "your email address:" field, which may or may not be the author.

Thanks, spammers.

I get the best hits from people searching the internet for ridiculous stuff.  It looks like I’m #2 on AskJeeves for:

some problems that might happen if you don’t use the bathroom

But what’s really funny is the title of the first hit: "Use a dog crate."

When you go to Italian restaurants like the Olive Garden or Maggiano’s, they serve you these huge salads with literally two or three tiny tomato slices.  Not two or three tomatoes, two or three slices, for the entire salad.

How is it that Italian restaurants, establishments that owe their very existence to the power of the tomato (in sauce form), are so consistently skimpy when it comes to tomatoes in salad?

Kim’s aunt and uncle are nature photographers, and they have some really amazing photos on their website from their recent trip to Australia.

There are quite a few photos, but be sure not to miss the kangaroo fight.  That set contains some of the most freakish and funny and awesome photos ever, like this one:

They are even better if you imagine the captions being read in a super-calm National Geographic commentator voice.

Sorry for the lull in activity around here lately; I’ve been really busy these past couple of weeks.  But here’s something really cool from the new Thrice album (Vheissu):

This hollow in my chest is filled with reasons not to sing, but I found one: I know we are not alone.  We feel an unseen love.  We are sons and heirs of grace.  We are children of a light that never dims, a love that never dies.

-- Thrice, "Music Box"