Wipe hands on pants

Hand dryers in public restrooms have finally improved the point when they blow dust off a counter top. Back in the eighties when I first remember their appearance, the dryers the public toilets were ridiculous. For the last 30 years, hand dryers have been largely wishful thinking that "environmentalists" used because they were supposed to save paper. After washing your hands, there was always a dilemma. The air flow was so weak that not long after you put your hands underneath, you would feel silly and embarrassed to have people witness you engaging in such a pointless activity. Subconsciously, you knew that the dryers were not going to get next guy's hands warm, either, but his impatience drilled into the back of your head filling the air with unspoken thoughts like, "Come on, man. I got places to go!" So you'd step away with your wet hands in order to give the man a chance for the whole pointless dance to start again.
Now, the air flow of many of the dryers I have used lately—in the new shopping malls and some airports—is strong enough to inspire satisfaction. It still takes more time than you want to spend in the bathroom, but things are happening; and it's a pleasure to have my hands warmed.
I used to be that all the hand dryers had the manufacturer's name—World Dryer from Berkeley, Illinois. (I was at least a little pleased that something I used was NOT made in China.) They had a metal plate fastened to them. On this plate were the directions: 1. Push button 2. Rub hands under warm air. 3. Stops automatically. After a week or so in the toilet—I reckon it happened that fast because every, literally every, machine I saw had some of the words or letters scratched out by some vandal. Many of them had the typical: "1. Push button 2. rub hands under warm.". One of them has stayed with me all these years. After the 3 directions with all the customary alterations, was scribbled this: "4. Wipe hands on pants." It was perfect.

Pompeii

Somewhere back in my childhood, I had heard of Pompeii. I had this dim memory of something about a volcano burying a city. The associated image was one of people dashing out of their wooden houses wearing flimsy sandals running head-long down the slope in front of a wall of steaming lava. I've always thought it would be cool to see it. Before we left Albania, someone told me that I could download a walking tour of Pompeii. Since I listen to my iPod all the time, I decided to try it. Maxim also loves to listen to my podcasts. While we listen to NPR's Story of the Day, he might pipe up with, "What's Voodoo?" His favorite show is Car Talk; I'm sure their humor is very nearly on the third-grade level, so it's a perfect match. On the way to Pompeii, we ended up listening to the entire 90-minute walking tour twice. That made us exceptionally ready to see the sights once we got to Pompeii. We were ready—no European Vacationers in this family.
In 79 A.D., Mount Vesuvius, a previously dormant volcano, erupted for 30 hours, showering the surrounding countryside with up to 30 feet of ash. The residents didn't die from a lava flow, but from suffocation. I'm not sure why people were caught so suddenly. I guess the ash must have been falling over an enormous area and it was impossible to escape it. Some died in terribly contorted shapes. A cool thing is the manner in which plaster casts of the bodies were made. When the city was discovered in the 19th century, the ash had solidified while the bodies of the people, and some dogs, had disintegrated leaving a hole in ash the outlined their shape perfectly. Plaster was then poured in the hole and the shape was created.

If you would like to see Maxim's writing about the trip, go to: http://sixyearoldfriends.blogspot.com/

These guys are holding up the cieling of the bath house.

Here is the arena.

A great picture of the infamous mountain. Click on the picture for a larger version.

Oskar modeling a statue.

This is a lunch counter. At the time, poor people didn't have kitchens so they all ate at lunch counters.

The thing I can't understand is how these people were trapped in such dramatic positions. If ashes were falling for 30 hours, wouldn't they have had time to run away? I guess the ash was falling over such a wide area, and the ash was so thick that people couldn't run fast nor far enough, and the ashes just clogged their windpipe.

These are the remnants of people who were buried in the ashes.

"Beware of dog" mosaic

match and coin experiment

This is something I downloaded from the Best of You Tube podcast. The coin sits on an empty match box. One match is standing in a hole with the flamable end up. The non-flamable end of another match sits on a coin while the flamable end touches the flamable end of the match that is in the hole. How to pick up the coin without touching the matches?



Light the leaning match BELOW the flamable end. After the matches burn, calmly pick up the coin. I don't know, but I think the top of the burning match burns quicker than the bottom and thus the material on the upper end contracts more quickly than the bottom. Therefore, the match bends up.