In the first episode of List-en up!, the Angie's List podcast, Marion County, Indiana lead inspector Buddy Compton mentioned that store-bought lead-testing kits can be effective for testing surface paint, but they might not detect dangerous lead in deeper layers. The Consumer Reports on Safety blog tested several of these kits and posted their results here. You might find these results helpful before purchasing a kit yourself or deciding to have potentially poisonous paint professionally tested (hurray for alliteration!)
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Just a thought. Heath Ledger apparently complained of sleepless nights while playing the role of the Joker in the next Batman movie, Dark Knight. Could playing such an insane psychopath actually drive someone over the edge and cause problems in their personal life? Many actors talk about "getting into the character" they're playing so intensely that they feel as if they're actually the person they're acting as. To people like me who aren't actors or involved in the film industry, it's easy to watch a film and discount the emotional toll certain rolls take on actors. But given the amount of stress most people's jobs cause them, I can see how playing a super-freak (I listened to Rick James the other day :P ) could cause an actor to actually become one. But I guess I'll never know, as I have no desire to act, nor acting talent, for that matter.
I wonder if Malcolm McDowell or Robert De Niro felt like they were minds were being negatively affected at any point while working on A Clockwork Orange or Taxi Driver, respectively...I figured I should follow up to the wave of responses I got about yesterday's post, in which I dared suggest that blogs are a waste of time (I actually didn't get any responses... Surprise!)
I do realize that blogs serve some terrific purposes: they're great for podcasting, marketing, and SEO (search engine optimization) (that last link actually has some great reasons to blog). But when every other link in a typical Google Search results in a blog post (seemingly half of which are useless), the very idea of blogs can become quite frustrating.
It also seems that with so many blogs (175,000 created a day, or 2 per second!), the internet will one day implode under the sheer weight of them all, like a black hole. But until that technological armageddon, I'll gladly keep adding my two cents and hope someone decides to pick 'em up.
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