Tag Archives: hygiene

Reviews

What we use on our hair

For about four years now, Ligia and I have used the same hair care product, and I thought I’d tell you about it. I’m doing it for a few reasons. First, I don’t like pretentious hair care products that cost a fortune and yield the same results as the less expensive stuff. Second, I like tried and true products. Third, I’m trying to do my part to see that this product doesn’t exit the market. (The last time we went to buy some, we couldn’t find it on the shelves… That could be both bad and good, I suppose.)

While we use some other things from time to time, and you’ll see them below, we use Murray’s Super Light Pomade all the time. Here it is.

Murray’s Super Light Pomade

Do you know those ridiculously expensive hair waxes they sell nowadays? They cost anywhere from $20-30, barely do the job, dry up in the hair giving you flakes, and have a TON of ingredients… Not so with this pomade. It costs somewhere between $1-2, and do you know what it’s got inside? Petrolatum, Lanolin, Coconut Oil, Aloe and Fragrance. That’s it. It’s had the same ingredients for quite some time. Not sure how long it’s been in existence, but I do know that they were using pomade regularly back in the early 1900s. Guess what? If it’s managed to do the job since then, I know it’ll do the job now as well.

The great thing about it is that it’s versatile. I used it back when my hair was short, and I’m using it now that my hair is long. I still apply it the same way, and it still works great. Back when I wanted my hair straight, it kept it straight, and now that it’s longer, it keeps it wavier. Love it.

Here’s a photo of me back when I had short hair. I was picking mulberries somewhere, I think it was the National Seminary before they started rebuilding it. Ligia took this photo.

Picking mulberries

Here’s a photo of me with longer hair. Same pomade did the trick on both occasions. Ligia took this photo as well.

Composing the shot

Don’t think I’m the only one using the pomade though. Ligia uses it as well, and her hair is wonderful. Here’s a recent photo.

Ligia

If you’ve never used pomade on your hair before, particularly this pomade, it’ll take a couple of weeks to get used to the way your hair feels. You wash your hair as usual and apply it after the wash, while your hair is still warm and wet.

Should you want to purchase it, we’ve seen it at CVS and Bed Bath & Beyond. There’s another place that sells it, but I prefer not to go there if I can help it: Wal-Mart… Murray’s makes two different kinds — the Super Light, and the regular kind, which is thicker, and which I’ve never used. Make sure you get the Super Light.

Murray’s Super Light Pomade

We use some other stuff from time to time.

Hair care products

Nothing else I’ve tried works quite as well as the pomade though, and believe you me, I tried many other things, including other brands of pomade.

We use one more thing which works great to help comb longer hair. Ligia just loves it. Since she’s got curly hair and it’s fairly long, it always gets tangled. All she needs to do is to spray it into her hair, and she can comb it as if it were straight afterwards. I’m surprised myself at how well it works.

Olive Oil Sheen Spray

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Thoughts

Living in a mad world

There are two things I want to talk about today. The first took place right here in the US, and the second happened in Italy. Both happened recently.

We’ve got a conductor who has forgotten the US still means freedom. Apparently, a tourist, possibly from Japan, who knew very little English, was taking photos of the scenery (mostly nature) on an Amtrak train between New York City and Boston. The conductor saw him, and asked him to stop in the “interest of national security”. Huh?! For taking photos from a train? For trying to preserve the memories of a trip?

But that wasn’t enough. She screamed at him even though he didn’t understand what she was saying, then called the police in and had him arrested and removed from the train. Yeah, you read that right.

How wrong is that? It’s the sort of thing that makes one’s blood boil. At the very least, that conductor, and the policemen that went along with that sick gag should be censured or suspended, so they can all remember we don’t arrest people willy-nilly in the US, not for taking photos from a moving train open to the public.

The Economist reports that Italy has passed a decree authorizing the expulsion of any Romanian immigrant who is deemed a danger to public safety. This bothers me a lot, since I’m Romanian by birth and upbringing, and I want to clarify the situation.

There was an incident where an Italian woman was killed and possible raped by a Romanian immigrant. There’s a catch to the story though. That was NOT a Romanian immigrant, it was a gypsy from Romania. There’s a BIG difference, so let me explain.

It’s hard for Americans to understand this sort of thing, but ethnicity is a very touch issue in Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe. Just think of the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina, or go back through the last few hundred years and look at the geography of Europe. All of those governmental and boundary changes created and continue to create ethnic conflicts which may smolder for years, or break out into open war, which is what happened in Bosnia. I’m not saying this to set up my arguments, just to give you some background info. There is no animosity between Romanians and gypsies, just deep-seated and justified frustration with these nomadic people that have chosen to settle in Romania over time.

I was born and grew up in Romania, so I’m a bit more aware of these things than outsiders who decry the situation in the country without really knowing what’s going on. You see, we’ve got a lot of gypsies in Romania. They’re nomadic people, but they’ve chosen to settle there in the last few hundred years. Other countries have them as well, but we seem to have been “blessed” with unusually large numbers of them. There are a few classes of gypsies, and they can be differentiated based on how well they integrated into society, and how clean they are.

First you have the Gabors, which are the most civilized. They’re clean, hard working, responsible people and integrate well into society. I have no issues with them and would be happy to have them as my neighbors. There’s another group whose name escapes me — I don’t know much about them except that while they’re more aloof, they’re also fairly decent in terms of how they interact with other people.

Unfortunately, you then have the gypsies per se, a very mixed class of individuals and families that share these common characteristics: they do not integrate into society, they live mostly in shanty towns, they have little or no hygiene or cleanliness, and they have a very high rate of crime. They call themselves the Roma, which is a title I must protest. It’s much too close to the word Romanian or Roman, and they hail neither from Romania, nor from Rome.

You do not talk about normal living when you talk about these gypsies, the so-called “Roma”. You find them begging on the streets or dealing in God knows what, but mostly, you find quite a large number of them stealing, raping and murdering. This isn’t an exaggeration and has been their historical record. Since they do so poorly in Romanian society and certainly have no interest in obeying the laws of the country, they do not deserve to be called Romanians, and indeed, I would not call them citizens of Romania or bestow on them the rights that go along with that citizenship.

When Romania got accepted into EU, several programs got started whose aim was to integrate these gypsies into society. So far, they have failed. Why? They’re too different and have no interest in life as civilized people know it. Really, they don’t, and if you don’t believe me, you’re welcome to go there and try to integrate them yourself. You will fail miserably.

At any rate, it’s these gypsies that immigrated to other European countries in droves when the borders were opened, along with a number of actual Romanians. When the gypsies arrived in these Western European countries, they started engaging in their usual behavior: living in shanty towns, polluting society in general, participating enthusiastically in crime and other misdemeanors, etc. When they’d get caught by the police, they’d say they were Romanian citizens, which, as I’ve just explained, is not quite true. Ethnically speaking, they most certainly aren’t Romanians, and behaviorally speaking, they’re an entirely different breed.

A few years ago, there was a case where gypsies caught and ate swans from a German lake. There was an uproar, and Romania got the blame for it. As if normal, law-abiding Romanians had something to do with that… Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying genuine Romanians don’t engage in crime, because every orchard has its rotten apples, but at least the crime rates are very different among Romanians and gypsies.

In the recent case in Italy, we’ve got a gypsy who lived in one of their shanty towns, who accosted, beat up and possibly raped an Italian woman. Who got the blame again? Romania. Why? Because that gypsy was from Romania. Was he a Romanian? Not really. So now we’ve got Italians horribly worked up against Romanians in general, when most of the Romanians that went to Italy did so to find honest work that they couldn’t get in Romania, who’s still having problems with its economy.

It’s just not fair that Romania keeps getting blamed for the actions of gypsies, which, as a group, cannot be controlled or integrated into any society or country where they happen to live. I wanted to set the record straight when it came to this, and do hope that I’ve managed to make my point.

Updated 11/29/07: Came across a great photo-documentary of gypsy life in several countries. Have a look at it. It has photos of gypsies from Romania as well. Try not to romanticize things as you look at the photos. There’s nothing romantic about an utter lack of hygiene or living in a hovel.

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How To

How to properly clean your keyboard

I found myself needing to clean our iMac’s keyboard a few days ago. I remembered watching a video recently that suggested we should simply stick the keyboard in the dishwasher. I wasn’t about to do that. I doubted the circuitry would have worked afterwards, particularly the Bluetooth link between the keyboard and the computer.

The safer route was to simply remove the keys, wash them separately with warm water and soap, then wash the keyboard base with a cloth moistened with water and a mild soap solution. Ligia also got some cotton swabs and rubbing alcohol ready, just to make sure we’d be able to get into all of the keyboard’s crevices.

This solution should work for all keyboards. A word of caution: before you start doing anything to your keyboard, take a couple of photos of the key layout! You don’t want to find yourself with a bunch of keys in your hand, clueless about where to stick them… Take photos of the keys and have them ready to display on your computer, or print them out ahead of time.

Removing the keys is quite simple. You take a quarter or any larger coin, put it under a key, and pry upwards. The key should pop right out. Be careful though, you don’t want to break them — that would render the keyboard quite useless afterwards.

After the keys are removed, the keyboard should look something like this:

Apple keyboard with keys taken off

Please excuse the distortion caused by the camera lens. I used my 24mm prime to make for fast work.

Once the keys are off, Ligia cleaned the keyboard, and I got to work cleaning the keys. I used a basin filled with warm water and I poured in some detergent, then gave each key a light scrubbing with a brush. You can also use the sink directly, but you’ve got to be very careful there. Sinks have drain holes under the top lip, and your keys might just run into them, since they’re plastic and they float. Once they go into the drain, good luck getting them out. You can open up the P-trap and see if they’re there, but chances are that they’re already gone. So be very, very careful as you wash the keys. You want to make sure that you don’t lose any of them.

After the keys were washed, I put them in an absorbent cotton towel and shook them around a bit to get drops of water dislodged from the keys’ undersides, then, while keeping them bunched up in the towel, I ran a hair dryer in there to make sure they got dry a little faster. Here you’ll need to make sure all of the corners of the towel are raised up, otherwise your keys will start flying around… You can also leave them on a towel overnight if you don’t want to bother with the hairdryer.

Keys from Apple keyboard

You also want to be careful that you don’t get excess liquid on the keyboard itself. The last thing you need after you go through the trouble of cleaning it is some problem with the circuits in there. Use a moistened cloth or paper towel, and clean it carefully, making sure you remove any debris or gunk or crumbs or whatever you find in there. Use cotton swabs moistened with rubbing alcohol to get into the tighter spots. When you think you’re done, examine it carefully under a strong light, to make sure you got everything off. Sometimes keys will stick because you or someone else in your house/office spilled sticky liquids on the keyboard, and if you don’t get that sticky gunk cleaned off, the keys will continue to stick even after you think you’ve cleaned them.

After Ligia got the keyboard base cleaned up, we stuck all of the keys back on the keyboard, and it looked quite beautiful when we got done. It was as if we’d gone out and bought a brand new keyboard. Just think of it! We did our part for the environment by re-using a piece of perfectly good hardware, and we also saved about $60. Pretty cool!

Apple keyboard after thorough cleaning

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A Guide To A Good Life

The decline of personal hygiene

I’ve come across so many pungent body odors lately that I’m led to assume personal hygiene is no longer important to people.

Just yesterday, I was in a department store, and two different people smelled so bad I almost vomited as they walked by me. They’re not isolated incidents, either. I’ve seen people of all walks of life and ages whose body odor was so powerful, so acrid, so stomach-turningly revolting, that I was left speechless every time. If you can stand it, let me reassure you this isn’t the smell of sweat after a hard day’s work. No, these people truly stink, as in a medieval, once-a-year bathing, wearing the same clothes for weeks kind of a stench.

How is it possible that in this day and age and country, when a hot shower and a bar of soap are so accessible, that so many people forego this daily necessity? How can it be?

Then, seeing people use the bathroom and not wash their hands (before and after) seems to be an almost daily occurrence. How grown men can handle their private parts after they’ve touched all sorts of nasty things (keyboards and mice being among the filthiest, even more so than toilet seats), is beyond me. And then, leaving the bathroom without washing their hands is an even more disgusting sight. To think, these ninnies then go on to shake other people’s hands, and to pat them on the back, or worse, lend you their pens, or touch your door handle, sit down at your desk to type at your keyboard… The possibilities are mind-boggling.

I’m not germ phobic, and I don’t wash my hands countless times every day – just when I use the bathroom or when they’re dirty. I don’t use hand sterilizers, either. I don’t have cans of Lysol spray lying around, ready to be used. I don’t think I’m cuckoo, but it seems that I see more and more people (no, filthy beasts) acting as if it’s perfectly alright to smell like a pig and have the bathroom manners of one as well.

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