Links of the Moment, survey-silliness: My High School Senior Year

"The Harder They Fall" Hermione/Snape, wackiness with demonic love potions
http://www.livejournal.com/community/close_contrast/9755.html Minerva/Severus friendship


My High School Senior Year... sheesh.

( I actually haven't changed all that much. )

Don't Drink the Water

Today at work, I was suddenly struck by my lack of a reliable regular local news source. The bbcnewsworld feed does very well at keeping me informed about world events. But I don't have very many local friends, and those I do have either don't post very much, or live in a similar cave.

This was brought to my attention when one of the people in the area that I was walking asked me if the water at work was safe to drink. I checked with Pink Shirt Guy to see what this was all about, and learned that Phoenix is having some issues with water, and stuff might start growing in the slightly grungy tapwater. I hadn't known that there were tapwater problems until I got to work, and the fact that I hadn't known disturbed me more than the thought that I could catch some dread disease from brushing my teeth if nasty little buggies take advantage of the extra dirt. (I drink Phoenix tapwater; it's not really something I'm afraid of, because I have the sort of immune system that can take certain things, and there are things that you have to do to maintain this.) What if it had been something more crucial that I'd missed? What if I'd been ill already, or elderly, or young, or had someone like that in the household?

The water was a theme at work. The same guy kept asking questions about the water that I wasn't able to answer, so I was running back and forth to the Pink Shirt Guy about it. There was a sign on the coffee machine in the supervisors' break room; evidently that uses tap water. The specifically-for-drinking water in the workplace is industrially filtered, and therefore safe.

( Dialogue-based hijinks followed. )

After I got home, I wound up setting up and subscribing to indymedia_azphx and indymedia_az. The signal-to-noise ratio is probably going to be skewed towards the noise vs. a Large Corporate Media Feed, but that was the most interesting, reliable, and local source of news I could think of. Relevance is everything.