3 Things You Need to Know

Actually you don't need to know any of these things but I am going to share them with you anway:

1. Your cat litter may be making Dick Cheney rich. Excuse me, richer. More than half the litter in the United States is made of bentonite, a stripmined clay, and may also contain carcenogenic silica dust (kind of scary when you think about how the dust explodes out of the cat litter and fills the air when you pour it into the litter box). Halliburton, where Cheney was CEO, produces about one-sixth of the 3 million tons of bentonite sold each year, of which 1.7 million tons go into cat litter. So buy the green stuff - it needs to be changed more often but isn't your cat worth it?

2. There are birds that live in caves and build nests out their own saliva. People climb down into these dangerous caves to collect the nests and sell them to restaurants, where they are used to make soup. And people actually eat this soup, which is fairly expensive as soups go. It just goes to show that some people will eat anything if you charge enough for it. I myself ate silk worms once.

3. I am finally going to reveal why I did not like the book She's Come Undone, which everyone else in the whole wide world apparently loved. Here is what I remember about the plot (and it's been a while so no guarantee that it's totally accurate but I think I remember the highlights correctly). Ready? Here goes: Young girl is raped by a trusted family friend. She deals with this tragedy by becoming grotesquely fat. She somehow gets into a decent college but screws the pooch by creating a fantasy identity for herself and writing phony letters to her future roommmate. Her roommate is disgusted by her when they finally meet. Somewhere along the line her mother is killed by a speeding truck at a toll booth. She has a revolting sexual relationship with an obese female janitor at the college. They sit around devouring junk food a lot. She poisons the janitor's fish and runs off. The end. So.... that is pretty much why I didn't like the book.