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So I was watching the news the other day, and there was this dude bitching about how everything in the US has corn as one of its main ingredients. He was going on and on about how unhealthy it was, but I ended up turning the channel before he finished. But it got me to thinking, what products do I buy that contain corn?

I thought it might be helpful if I knew a little background. Wikipedia here we come. So the lowdown, is that there are three main types of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and they are categorized by their ratio of fructose to glucose. We have HFCS 90 (90% fructose), HFCS 55, and HFCS 42. They use 90 to make 55, and 55 is what is in all most everything.

Ok, so here are the things I’ve either purchased or eaten this week that contain HFCS, I’ve separated them into surprising and not surprising categories.

I’m sure there’s more stuff, but its almost lunch time, and I have to go nuke my preservative filled crap shoot frozen microwave lunch.

So there I was last night, getting ready for bed, when I got that sensation in my nose that I was going to sneeze.  I don’t sneeze very often, maybe once a week or so; so I just sat there on the edge of my bed for a moment, waiting for the sneeze to come.  Suddenly, I realized something was wrong, my nose was getting warm too fast.  In the amount of time it took me to realize it wasn’t a sneeze that was coming, it was already too late.  My nose was bleeding.  I had just heard someone go into the bathroom, so I couldn’t run down there to get some toilet paper, no I needed something fast.  There on the edge of my bed were the clean underwear I had just folded.  I can only imagine how funny it would have looked for someone to see me there on the edge of my bed, holding a pair of underwear to my face.  They bought me time to find a terry cloth though, so its all good.

I really hate it when I get a nose bleed.  Its always the same, my nose starts bleeding, and I think to myself, “Okay, just gotta sit here for a few minutes and this will be over.”   But then suddenly, I feel really warm, and almost sick to my stomach.   And in just as little time, I think to myself, “It’s only a nose bleed, calm down.”  So I laid down on my bed, terry cloth held up to my nose and I started thinking.  Why is it that your nose can just randomly start bleeding?  Your arm doesn’t just start bleeding, your eyes don’t just start bleeding.  Just your nose can randomly start bleeding.  But wait, there’s more.  You can get punched in the arm, and it will hurt, but it doesn’t bleed.  You can get kicked in the nuts, and yeah, it hurts, but you don’t start bleeding.  But what happens if you get punched in the nose?

It really makes you think.  Here we are, the most evolved animal on the planet, but the air turns dry and we start bleeding?  How is that evolved?  People have probably dreamed about the “next stage in human evolution” since the last stage, and we have all of these shows like Heroes where people have evolved and gotten super powers.  Hi, I am a superhero, I can teleport through time, fix electronics with my mind, levitate things, and heal my wounds, but I can’t stop these damn nose bleeds.  Maybe a new superhero could be non-nose bleeding guy…hmm…well the name needs some work.  Whatev.

-Josh

Yeah…

Haven’t really been keeping up on that promise to write one post a month.  Oh well.  Let’s see, whats new since the last post.  A lot, actually.  The insurance companies sided with me, the dude that hit me had to pay. Woo!  While my car was getting fixed, I had to drive around one of those PT Cruiser things.  My friends and I “affectionately” referred to it as the “Clown Car”.  It was bright red, and burned gas like you wouldn’t believe.  Hmm…what else…

In August, my lease on the Civic was up, and I upgraded to the Accord EX.  Its got loads of bells and whistles: 6-disc CD, cruise control, heated mirrors, a backseat (yay!), a moon roof, key less entry – you get the picture.  I got a really good deal on it too, I got it right at the end of the model year, so I ended up getting about $5000 off the price of the car, plus since I had a Honda already I didn’t have to pay any sales tax.  The car has been great so far, but I did have a little trouble with the heat.  Apparently they didn’t plug in the motor that opens the vent so that heat can actually flow into your car.  Yeah…there were some cold mornings before I got that fixed.  Every time I tell the story someone says, “Why didn’t you test the heat before you bought the car?” To which I reply, “It was August and 110 degrees outside.  I was happy the AC worked.”

A little more recently, I built a new computer.  My old one was dead.  A couple of months ago I was putting some new dvd burners in my PC when I noticed that two of the capacitors near the CPU had popped, and the rest were bulging.  I knew then I didn’t have long.   Here’s the specs of the new computer:

• ASUS Maximus Formula Special Edition Motherboard
• 4 GB DDR2 @ 1066Mhz
• Two Western Digital 250GB 16MB Special Editions
• Intel Core2 Quad 2.4Ghz (thats 4 cores!)
• GeForce 8600GTS (Overclocked)
• Antec P182 Case
• 8 Channel HD Audio (on board)
• Two 16x DVD RAM drives (the ones I got before)
• Vista x64

Everyone I talk to says that Vista sucks.  I must say that it is a very elegant OS.  Like any other OS, it requires a fair amount of tweaking before you would really be comfortable with it.  I will say that for the lack of new features, Microsoft really did take a long time to code it, but I guess I am happy just to be running something new.  The only complaint I have is that Windows Explorer has been seriously dumbed down; it reminds me of the old school Mac OS (like 9 and older).
Well, I’m tapped.  Lata.