A NEW METHOD OF REMOVING THE HORRIBLE HORRIBLE SMELL

I thought that I was done with the household odor removal rants last month, but I've made some new discoveries.

You can remove the horrible horrible smell from dishes, glassware, coffee maker filter baskets, and darned near anything else with ethanol. I've been using grain alcohol, although gin, rum or vodka should work as well. Just fill your sink with tap water, add an ounce of alcohol and dip your items into the sink for a few seconds. Remove and rinse. You don't even have to scrub. The smell comes right off.

REMOVING THE HORRIBLE HORRIBLE SMELL FROM YOUR ATTIC

The other day I was up in my sun-baked attic and realized that I was only addressing a fraction of my household odor issues. The vast surface area of the insulation in my attic is a huge reservior of horrible horrible smell collected over the course of fifty plus years. Every summer as the sun heats the attic, horrible horrible smell volatilizes and filters down into the living space.

After some trial and error, I've found that putting greenery in the attic will remove the attic smells. And it doesn't seem to matter what the greenery is. It can be a dozen roses or a plate full of honeysuckle or whatever shrubbery clippings you've taken from your back fence. Use common sense. Obviously using poison ivy is DUMMMMMMMMB. Just change the greenery once a day and discard the old. The attic odors gradually dissipate.

UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE

You know who has universal health care? Cattle. The rancher gives them all the food they can eat. The rancher protects them from predators. The rancher gives them lots and lots of medicine. Of course, the rancher has an agenda that ultimately benefits himself at the expense of the cattle.

COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER

I had a sudden thought as to what might be causing Colony Collapse Disorder among America's European honeybees.

Boric acid.

I'll summarize all my previous rants about boric acid. It's considered to be harmless, but that's what makes it so dangerous. It's excreted very slowly by the body, but every year it finds its way into more and more commercial products, ocular solutions, cleaning products, detergents, deoderant douches, and ant and roach powder. See what I'm getting at? Not only are we massing this stuff in our own livers without regard to possible health effects, each year we introduce more and more into the environment. Perhaps we're reaching that tipping point where it's affecting the honeybees, which are social insects like ants.

The symptoms of a colony collapse sound a lot like the symptoms of an ant colony poisoned with boric acid. Check it out. Is there boric acid in the water used by the beekeeper? Are the bees gathering nectar from flowers near a wastewater outlet? Does the beekeper clean his gear with detergents that use boric acid as an antiseptic agent?

Just about any doctor will tell you there's such a thing as too much salt, such a thing as too much fat, too much cholesterol, too much alcohol. If you absorb it faster than you can get rid of it, then that's usually too much. Given that we cast this stuff off so very slowly, why does it not occur to anybody that there might be such a thing as too much boric acid?

If you're a chemist analyzing water for boric acid, I've got a suggestion or two. If you're testing your extract by GC-MS try reducing the injector port temperature to just above 100 degrees C. Boric acid breaks down at temps not much above boiling, so if you're testing water or broccoli or carrots or paper products, boiling temperature will not break it down, but raise the temperature of your injector port above boiling to toast, stir fry, broil, grill or bake and the boric acid cracks. If you've been testing chlorinated city water the breakdown of boric acid will probably produce a lot of chlorinated ethanes. So if you're seeing 1,1 and 1,2 dichlor and probably twice as much chloroethane, those are probably from the ethly-ester groups of boric acid. Set the injector port temp to 101 deg C and see if the boric acid peak comes through at the expense of the chloroethanes.

RTJ -- 5/30/2010

It's hard to pin harmful long term exposure effects to a particular cause. Here's a hypothetical point to consider. People make much of mercury in their vaccines, blaming it for everything from increased incidence of diabetes to obesity to autism. But the very vaccines that are preserved with mercury are also buffered with boric acid. Assuming that vaccines are causing problems, shouldn't the effects of the buffering solution be scrutinized as well as the preservative?

Both mercury and boric acid get in your body and are hard to remove. We know that mercury is toxic, but what about boric acid? Are there interactions? Suppose we find out that our national epidemic of obesity and diabetes is caused by boric acid building up in our livers. Or worse yet, what if it's the stuff that softens your backbone and turns you into a people pleaser? Many of us have so much of that stuff in our bodies already that we'll never be able to pee it all out.

RTJ -- 6/4/2010

A NEW METHOD FOR REMOVING THE HORRIBLE HORRIBLE SMELL FROM HOUSEHOLD ITEMS

An extension of the attic trick mentioned above, fill a wash tub with lawn clippings and nest your household items on the top of the pile for a few minutes. Remove the items. Smell is gone.

This method is the best yet. It works fast. It costs next to nothing. It's not very messy. I can't think of any way it would be dangerous so long as you are careful of any herbicides or pesticides used on your lawn. So you can put away the raw linseed oil for the time being. This is a better way of removing odors from coffee mugs, plastic bottles, toys, TV remotes, books and CD's, and ice cube trays. Wash food related items before using.

The quickest, most certain way to remove the horrible horrible smell from canned goods is to strip the labels off and discard them as soon as you get home from the store.

RTJ -- 6/9/2010

GETTING RID OF OFF-TASTES AND SMELLS IN YOUR TAP WATER

Your tap water smells like antiseptic. When you drink it, the inside of your mouth feels slick. When you hork and spit, it comes out white and stringy. You get a scratchy throat and your eyes get itchy and bloodshot. Maybe you get a rosacea flareup or your scalp itches. Maybe you get nervous and anxious. Reduced urine flow? You drink a lot and pee a little? In extreme cases you might even develop some constipation and lower back pain.

Put a dried pea or bean into your tap water. Give it a stir. Wait five minutes. Discard the bean. Now the odor is gone and the water is drinkable.

Any dried bean or pea will work, but of course black beans or red beans might stain the water. If you don't have any dried crowders or limas, a stick of wood like a match stick or toothpick will work, although it takes a lot longer. An hour or more. A pinch of rice or a slice of potato also works, but they cloud the water and the rice is hard to remove.

Off tastes and odors from your tapwater will accumulate in plastic bottles. If you refill plastic water bottles, occasionally rinse them using a couple of ounces of water with a dash of grain alcohol.

RTJ -- 6/11/2010

AN OBSERVATION ABOUT HILLARY CLINTON

When Hillary Clinton ran for president, she had the same qualifications as Rosalyn Carter. She was the wife of a former southern governor who was then an ex-president.

RTJ -- 6/20/2010

WHAT TO DO IF YOU GET THOSE SYMPTOMS FROM DRY, UNOILED SNACKS

Speaking of the symptoms in the tapwater example above, I've also occasionally noticed them after eating snacks like crackers, pretzels and tortilla chips. Here's a method of reducing the effect.

Microwave the snacks 20-30 seconds and let them cool on a clean piece of newspaper. Yes, it's important that you use newspaper as opposed to butcher paper or notebook paper or typing paper.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU GET THOSE SYMPTOMS FROM OIL-FRIED SNACKS

Potato chips, piggy pops, etc. No solution yet. I'll let you know. The microwave method messes up the texture.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU GET THOSE SYMPTOMS FROM MILK

Put your milk in a saucepan with a tablespoon of booze. Set the burner on low and gently raise the temperature to 140. DO NOT STIR. Turn off the burner and let the milk cool to room temp. Put it back in the bottle, chill and drink. You'll probably find some white grainy precipitate in the bottom of the saucepan. Rinse that out and discard.

This method works as well for tomato juice, fruit juice, canned soup, canned pasta, canned vegetables, basically anything bottled or canned that can be warmed up to 140 degrees. The reason I picked that temperature is that milk or jug orange juice has already been pasteurized so raising it to 140 isn't going to make it any worse. With canned veggies, pasta and soup, you can take it right up to boiling and the alcohol will cook completely away at about 180 degrees.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU GET THOSE SYMPTOMS FROM FRESH VEGETABLES

Any vegetable that can be steamed, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, onions, can be relieved of its side effects by steaming over water to which has been added an ouce of milk. If you've got tainted water as in the example above, you can make hard-boiled eggs this way and the stuff won't get into the eggs.

STILL WORKING ON IT

I haven't cracked the problem of raw and dried fruits and vegetables or oily nuts yet. Also chocolate's a problem. If I get a bad batch of any of those things I just have to toss them. You can't use any of these methods on pop either because you lose the carbonation. However, you can probably use the heat method to treat beer in the can, since the alcohol is already inside. You're basically repasteurizing the beer. And if it's American beer, what harm are you really going to do? I should point out that I've never tried this with beer myself, but theoretically it's similar to the milk remedy. You've got some alcohol in some contaminated fluid. Gently heat. There's a reaction. Decant. Don't drink anything that sticks to the bottom of the container.

RTJ -- 6/30/2010

CHOCOLATE AND LUNCH MEAT AND DRIED FRUIT

The toddy treatment works.

If you get the abovementioned symptoms from eating cheap-ass chocolate, melt the chocolate in a double boiler. Throw in a dash of rum. Stir. Cool. Eat.

Lunch meat. Throw a dash of rum on your bologna, liver loaf or sliced ham. Spread it evenly with a butter knife. It soaks right in. Heat in a toaster or in the microwave. Eat.

Dried fruit. Put your raisins, prunes or dried figs in a cup with a tablespoon of rum. Shake. Heat a few minutes or let sit overnight at room temp. Eat.

RTJ -- 7/10/2010

OILY SNACKS, NUTS, FRIED CHIPS

Symptoms: After eating store brand peanuts you feel queasy and the peanuts sit in your gullet like a lump of wet clay. This is followed by two or three days of difficult B.M.'s and you feel like you've got a dried peach pit blocking your sphincter. Sound familiar? Thought so. Snack manufacturers coat their snacks in vegetable oils to help the salt stick to the nuts. You might be having a bad reaction to the oil, not to the snack itself. Canola oil is the usual suspect.

Try this. Put those store brand party nuts in a shallow dish and bake five or ten minutes at 350 degrees in a toaster oven. This will thin the oil, which will run to the bottom of the dish. If the oil is canola, the low smoke point means the oil is going to be cooked off completely at that temperature. Leaving any offending oil in the bottom of the dish, turn out the peanuts into a clean bowl. Eat a handful of these degreased peanuts today and tomorrow you will poop a sand castle, unless of course it's the peanuts you're allergic to, in which case cooking off the vegetable oils won't help at all. Don't try this if you have a serious peanut allergy. This method is good if certain brands or preparations of nuts give you problems.

The modern world is canola crazy even though I'm sure there are others out there who would rather not eat the stuff. The government is unreservedly enthusiastic about canola oil, placing higher value only on flu shots and war. When George on Seinfeld got the Yankee ball park snacks fried in heart-healthy canola oil, I should have guessed something was wrong with it. Any time some chip company wants to claim health benefits for its product, they throw in some government-recommended canola oil. You can hardly find snacks that aren't tainted with the stuff any more.

If you're like me and you'd just as soon skip the canola oil (which is actually rape seed oil, canola is a commercial acronym for Canadian Oil like mazola is an acronym for maize oil) you can remove unwanted oils using a toaster oven as described above. Now if I can only find a way to remove omega 3 fish oil from oat bran.

RTJ -- 7/20/2010