Don’t worry I’m not going to start any kind of trend cat blogging, but I can’t resist a grim reaper story involving a cat. An adopted feline named Oscar lives at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center which treats people with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease and other illnesses. Oscar has a dark talent.

About four hours before the patients die, he curls up next to the dying one giving the hospice staff a cue to call family that the end is near.

No one’s certain if Oscar’s behavior is scientifically significant or points to a cause. Teno wonders if the cat notices telltale scents or reads something into the behavior of the nurses who raised him.

Eat your heart out, Freddy Kruger, Oscar’s in the house.

Hmmcast #142 mp4

For the first time since my wife and I got married, we bought a new bed and a five piece dresser set. It’s been something like 18 years, so she felt we we’re due. I was pretty happy with the existing digs, but will admit the bed was getting a bit weathered. The first thing you notice when you enter the room is the smell of the wood.

The furniture didn’t arrive without problems, unfortunately …

Behind the Hmmcast
This video was intended to be published at 4:20pm yesterday as scheduled, however yesterday turned out to be a really strange day all around. More on this in today’s Hmmcast which is already in the hopper to be published on time.

Hmmcast #140 mp4

It’s supposed to be a record heat day tomorrow and was getting hot today, so it was time to choose some outside work with water involved. This table needed a lot of work.

A study finds that men are almost as talkative as women. This doesn’t surprise me as I never believed the stereotype. Did you?

The researchers placed microphones on 396 college students for periods ranging from two to 10 days, sampled their conversations and calculated how many words they used in the course of a day. The score: Women, 16,215. Men, 15,669.

What would be interesting is to be able to map the context of conversations with men versus women. Would women talk more about relationships than men? Would men talk more about sports than women? Would men be more geek prone than women? All the blog related conferences I’ve attended have been predominantly male, so who’s talking about gadgets and devices more in daily, regular conversation? Who would talk about sex more?

I’m not curious about these because of redefining or defining sterotypes but I’d love to see more studies that shatter them. Guess we’ll need to keep waiting for the context study.

Doing our part to stay green. Something we’ve been wanting to do in our house for awhile: get rid of standard lightbulbs in favor of CFL bulbs which use up to 75% less energy and last up to 10 times longer. In our home, including one outside bulb, this meant replacing 13 bulbs total. Most were 60 watt bulbs which we replaced with the 13 watt CFL bulbs. We’re giving the replaced incandescant bulbs away to our neighbor.

At a savings of $38/year per bulb this equals $494 a year. But the first year we need to factor out the cost of the bulbs which have really come down in price. A package of six CFL bulbs at Wal-mart cost $15.16 + tax (my wife informed me after publishing that the 6-pack of CFL bulbs was on sale for $9.88) and the bulbs advertised to last with regular usage 5 years.

Not going to start a daily countup like we’ve done for ridding our family of television and credit cards, but it is in the same spirit.

Next thing we’re considering doing is adding wireless outlet plugs so that we can conveniently power off devices that are left plugged in and not being used. Any other good energy saving, money saving ideas to share?

Hmmcast #136 mp4

On our last vacation I bought us a blood pressure monitor to be able to check our blood pressure at home. We’ve been trying one in the pharmacy inside Fred Meyer and my wife’s blood pressure was a bit on the high side so I wanted to have a way to check it out at home. For under $60 you can purchase an automatic blood pressure monitor for home usage. We bought ours at Target.

Approximately 1 in 4 have high blood pressure [source]. Things we can do to keep blood pressure down include:

- maintain a healthy weight and diet [calculate your body mass index (BMI)]
- exercise
- limit alcohol consumption
- reducing salt and sodium in your diet
- quit smoking

My wife suggested buying bikes to ride on the trail in town together. We still have the stationary bike but it’s not getting nearly enough usage. In the summer time riding bikes seems better than a stationary bike both for scenery and fresh air.

Update 6/28/07 4:23am PST: As my buddy Harold correctly notes in the comments below last night, this Hmmcast does not demonstrate the proper method to check your blood pressure. Sorry, my bad. A confession: that was somewhat intentional in order to force a high blood pressure reading for the video (dramatic license, since I don’t have high blood pressure under the correct blood pressure taking conditions and my wife wasn’t available). The problem is nowhere in the video do I ever say this, so the viewer is left with the assumption that I’m demonstrating the proper method and showing a true reading.

I’m not.

Clearly not one of my brightest ideas ever without any explanation as some viewers might get the idea that this was intended to be a serious instructional video — as Harold did. Being put by me in the “how to” category doesn’t help that much either. Doh! My apologies to anybody that might have been confused.

Seriously, if you want to check your blood pressure correctly you should do the following (and this is paraphrased from the Healthy Living pamphlet that comes with the automatic inflate blood pressure monitor, no messing around):

- be sitting down in a comfortable environment for about 10 minutes before taking the reading. Take deep breaths and slowly let out your breath. If you just smoked a cigarette or drank something with caffeine in it (coffee, soda, etc) then wait 30-35 minutes.
- always check the blood pressure using the same arm
- sit with your legs uncrossed and feet flat on the floor
- wear loose fitting shirt and make sure the cuff is placed over your naked arm, not over clothes
- place your arm flat on the table with your palm facing upward

Additionally, Harold offers some other good suggestions in his comment below.

I watched wrestling a little bit in my younger days. Playboy Buddy Rose, Andre The Giant, Rowdy Piper and others. One of things I liked about TBS out of Atlanta was Mean Gene and wrestling but I never got into it in a big way like some folks. Nowhere near like I’m interested in the “real” sports like the NFL and MLB. Still, I appreciate the entertainment value that wrestling brings.

But when it becomes real like the situation with Chris Benoit it’s scary.

The disturbing details of WWE wrestler Chris Benoit involved in a murder suicide and questioning if these crimes were the result of roid rage.

The 40-year-old champion strangled his wife, Nancy Benoit, and suffocated his 7-year-old son Daniel, authorities said, before he hanged himself on a portable weight machine inside his lavish home outside Atlanta … authorities suspect “that [Daniel] had been taking growth hormones for quite some time,” and are hoping to prove that with toxicology. The boy, Ballard said, was diagnosed with a form of dwarfism.

The part about this story that bothers me the most is the 7-year old son being allegedly injected with growth hormones. At 7 years old taking growth hormones? Is that what doctors prescribe for dwarfism for a 7 year old? Seems kind of young to be shooting the kid up at home.

Bibles were left next to the bodies.

The Howard Sterns kicked off this morning discussing the incident. The crew pondered why the WWE would be running out a tribute of Benoit’s wrestling career before the details of what investigators learned. WWE leader Vince McMahon called the incident a “tragedy” in a follow-up response, adding (emphasis mine):

… now some 26 hours later, the facts of this horrific tragedy are now apparent. Therefore, other than my comments, there will be no mention of Mr. Benoit tonight. On the contrary, tonight’s show will be dedicated to everyone who has been affected by this terrible incident. This evening marks the first step of the healing process.”

Wrestling might be fake, but this is real. Real sad.

Hmmcast #135 mp4

For $4.99 we picked up the hamburger press, a handy tool for your grilling arsenal this summer. Eat your heart out, Rachael Ray!

The Mingle2 What’s Your Blog Rating generator scans a webpage for keywords and assigns a movie rating: G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17. The homepage for Hmm currently ranks PG-13 as of this writing. I was able to find a recent post that ranked NC-17.

Mingle2 is a free dating website run by a single guy named Matt. Talk about a super crowded market, he’ll need all the web linkable goodies he can round up and/or create. I don’t know what would be harder these days: a single guy finding the perfect love match or trying to create a successful dating site? Since I haven’t been single for, oh, about 20 years now, I’ll let somebody single answer that.

Added to the growing Hmm web generators page. What’s your rating?

Fellow male readers, how important is a woman’s face to you? A study showed that the first thing men looked at in a still picture of women having sex was their faces. The women’s eyes went to check out the sexual activity first, naughty, naughty!

Via AJC.com:

Wallen and his former graduate student, Heather Rupp, showed still photos of couples having sex to 30 women and 15 men between the ages of 23 and 28. Each was rigged up with a high-tech eye-tracking gizmo to measure where his or her gaze went first, and how long it stayed there.

Yeah, I know, only 15 men and 30 women studied. Could have picked different set of people and had different results, but it’s interesting that the results go against stereotypical thinking. Too bad the article is missing the still pictures so we could run our own informal testing.

Speaking of dirty pictures, I’ve been following the evolution — or degeneration, depending on one’s moral perspective — of Zinio at this blog for almost four years now with the first Zinio mention during Blogathon 2003. Zinio provides digital versions of print magazines that you can download. These digital copies include page turning, search, hyperlinks which actually work and even those annoying index cards that fall out at the most inopportune times. I’ve been a big fan of digital reading and subscribed to numerous magazines like PC Mag and Macworld.

I remember when the adult webmaster print magazine Klixxx that I used to write a monthly column for had to work to get Zinio to offer their print magazine. Klixxx magazine wasn’t for people who liked to look at naughty pictures, it was for webmasters who creates sites for people who wanted to look at them. Klixxx eventually prevailed and Zinio ran the magazine and then later expanded to offer Playboy in August 2005. At the time I wondered how long before even more racier types of adult mags would be offered?

The answer is today Zinio now offers non-mainstream adult magazines at an 18+ site called Undercover Mags. There you’ll find many of those x-rated adult mags that lurk behind the counters of convenience stores usually with some sort of black screen in front of them like High Society, Cheri, Swank and many others all available to download to the privacy of your computer and cheaper than the nearly $8.99 per issue price tag.