Captain Morgan

Any time this commercial comes on, I drop everything to watch it.

...and I'm a loser.

It's okay, I've learned to deal.

A rather lengthy To Do List:

5 things I have to do (but don't really want to, not right now anyway):
1. gather research from the other three books that finally came in over Inter-Library-Loan.
2. type up my Environmental Anthropology final.
3. work on my historiography.
4. study for my History of the US final.
5. vacuum (but I can't right now, anyway, as the dorm has 24-hour quiet hours for Finals Week).

5 things I want to be doing right now (and might be [or might not be, depending]):
1. knitting part of someone's Christmas present.
2. watching a movie with John, drinking coffee, and enjoying the slowness of a weekend morning where you don't have anything you have to be doing yet [this is the "might not be doing" part, unfortunately].
3. rereading the e-mail from theknot.com that cheerfully reminds me that now it's under seven months until our wedding and there's a lot of stuff that has yet to be done!
4. thinking up ingenious things to do with the $50 amazon.com gift certificate I won yesterday evening.
5. eating peanut butter m&m's for breakfast.

xenoestrogens & bisphenol A

Last night in my environmental anthropology course, one of my classmates reported on incidents linking the rising numbers of breast cancer and diabetes (as well as many other health problems) to the release of estrogen levels from...plastic. Studies have shown that some plastics leach hormones into the things they contain (soda, water, foods, etc.).

"In April 1999, Consumers Union confirmed information previously reported by the Food and Drug Administration regarding 95 percent of baby bottles sold in the United States. The bottles, made of a hard plastic known as polycarbonate, leach out the synthetic estrogen named bisphenol-A, especially when heated or scratched [...] A 1993 report published in Endocrinology showed that bisphenol-A produced estrogenic effects in a culture of human breast cancer cells. [Additional studies] have detected leaching of bisphenol-A from polycarbonate products such as plastic tableware, water cooler jugs, and the inside coatings of certain cans (used for some canned foods) and bottle tops. Autoclaving in the canning process causes bisphenol-A to migrate into the liquid in cans [...] In Denmark, the rate of testicular cancer increased by 300 percent from 1945 to 1990. Intrauterine exposure to xenoestrogens during testicular development is thought to be the cause. [...] Perhaps one of the most disturbing current trends is the alarming increase in breast cancer incidence. Fifty years ago, the risk rate was 1 woman in 20; today it is 1 in 8. Numerous studies have implicated xenoestrogens as the responsible agents."

More information:
Science News Online
Mindfully . org
FWHC . org