Don’t Try This At Home

My life has been changed of late due to the discovery of a wonderful hair styling tool.  It’s called the “CHI Turbo,” and its effectiveness in straightening one’s hair is amazing.

Sadly, my post is not about hair styling, but about the warning labels affixed to hair styling and other implements in commerce. My CHI Turbo’s label contains several warnings.  One reads as follows: ”In Canada, not for household use!”  I suppose this means I will be in violation should I travel to Canada with my CHI.  And why, I ask, is it unwise, or even illegal, for me to use the tool in Canada but not in Raleigh, NC? 

Anyone who has purchased household items of late will have encountered the warning labels that have become a part of our lives. The ubiquitous warnings on bed pillows are of particular interest. ”DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF DEATH!” reads the tag on most pillows. It makes me think that going to sleep in the comfort of one’s pillows is a dangerous act if one’s sense of feng shui requires label removal before installation. 

And there is what I think of as the “lawn mower” warning. This is a pictorial story in the owner’s manual of my new lawn mower, indicating that using one’s lawn mower as a hedge trimmer is a bad thing (picture of lawn mower shaving a hedge, encircled in red with a red diagonal slash). Who, I ask, would think to use the lawn mower as a hdege trimmer? And who could wield the mower thusly? I can barely push the mower around my small flat plot of turf, much less thrust it into the air to attack a privet hedge. 

Returning to grooming tools of a personal nature, my hair dryer also came equipped with various warning notices regarding electrocution. These mostly have to do with the warning about not drying one’s hair while soaking in the bath tub, a multitasking effort that most certainly leads to a bad end.

Finally, back to the CHI Turbo. Its prohibitive labels are graphic in the extreme. One of them indicates that one should not use the CHI (which is heated to a very high temperature, I must admit) to straighten one’s eyebrows. Whether in Canada or not, I think this is a very bad idea. It makes me wonder (and not for the first time) how Homo sapiens has made it as far as we have.

-posted by B Barron

Green Tea Allergy?

I heard something the other day that I’d never heard before. We were talking about the purported benefits of jasmine tea, and green tea in general, at work the other day, and one of my coworkers said that she can’t drink green tea, because she has a horrible reaction to it. She said it made her jittery, anxious, and have big mood swings all day. After her first experience drinking green tea, she had no inclination to do so again. But with all the news about the health benefits of green tea, she tried something with green tea extract in it. Same reaction. No more green tea for her. She said she also had a friend that this might have happened to as well.

Now, I know, the plural of anecdote is not data. And I certainly drink a lot of green tea, as do many of the people I know, with no ill effects. But I was curious to see if this was an acknowledged phenomenon, given how widespread green tea and its extracts are becoming. I’m sure people can develop a food allergy to pretty much anything, but usually it’s to a certain thing in the food, and what would it be in green tea? Is it in other stuff, too?