Do you know what today is?

Get ready for company, World AIDS Day, for today also marks the start of the first ever Crohn's and Colitis Awareness Week! What a busy day for people with immune disorders! Go out and get yourselves some brown ribbon and make yourself a little pin for IBD education.You can even make it hold hands with your AIDS ribbon, as pictured above.

Here are some tips - snagged directly from the CCFA website - on what you can do to take part in the fectivities (that pun might be kind of a stretch but I'm sticking to it):

• Write to your House Representatives and encourage them to join the Crohn’s and Colitis Caucus,  http://capwiz.com/ccfa/home/

• “Like” the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation of America on Facebook (www.facebook.com/ccfafb) and follow the Foundation on Twitter (www.twitter.com/ccfa)

• Change your Facebook status to: I’m supporting Crohn’s and Colitis Awareness week and you should too! To learn more, http://online.ccfa.org/AwarenessWeek

• Use the #CCFAawarenessweek on twitter

• Change your profile picture to our logo, download here. 

• Download our Awareness Week Poster

• Reach out to anyone you know with IBD and let them know you care

• Download the Crohn's and Colitis Awareness Week Press Release.

• Visit www.ccfa.org to learn more about the disease

I've admittedly got some personal reservations with the organization, but I still suggest expanding your awareness or sharing your expertise by reading through the forums at the CCFA site, as well as other sites like e-patients and We Are Crohn's and contribute what you can. Do you have advice or simply words of compassion to share with others? Why not start a blog of your own? Or give some readership to the wonderful folks I've got featured on my blog roll? Go on, get to it!

G2P?

 I'd been complaining to some folks in my graduate programs about how disgusting some of the people that go to our school are - a judgement based on the state of the campus bathrooms. There is always backsplash on the seat, more toilet paper than necessary clogging at least one of the bowls, and some of the dumbest, uninspired bathroom graffiti I've ever seen. It was like kismet, then, when I next used the bathroom and saw a flyer for a website devoted to documenting the public bathrooms of New York City. (Naturally, I had to submit.)

Have you had an NYC bathroom horror, or by some stroke of luck a luxury bathroom experience that you'd care to share? This is the place to do it. I'm hoping it gets populated to a point where it can serve as a sort of Yelp for folks like us who might need to locate a public bathroom in a pinch.


Image source: g2pnyc.com

Hey, Massholes!

You gonna be in Jamaica Plain on Sunday, November 13th? YES?? Then go listen to some live music in the name of furthering IBD research. Give an extra loud round of applause for the bands Firebad and Torpedo Rodeo, featuring some wicked awesome guys I went to college with.

More info at the Facebook event page, and the Midway Cafe homepage as well.

Image Source: Dude, I think we might be fat

This Would Suit Me Pretty Well...

Hopefully I won't die anytime soon, but that doesn't mean I can't plan ahead. Although I'm still pretty smitten with the idea of  feeding my remains to a mushroom death suit I must say the idea of having myself flushed down a toilet seems pretty fitting, given the amount of time I've spent sitting on one over the past thirty years.

Thanks to some Scots, there is now a machine that processes your body into flushable ash via a process that is less damaging to the environment than cremation. Via CNet:

"The Resomator s750 is a 7-foot stainless steel tank. It works by immersing the body in a mix of water and potassium hydroxide, which is heated to 356 F. It's also subjected to pressure equivalent to 10 atmospheres during the two- to three-hour process.

The mortal remains are turned into ash and sterile, DNA-free liquid, which gets flushed. Bones are crushed in a separate process, and any implants including mercury fillings are recovered. There are no airborne mercury emissions.

Resomation says its alkaline hydrolysis machines cut greenhouse emissions by a third compared to cremation, and use only one-seventh the energy."

Sounds good to me! But I think I still prefer the idea of a mushroom death suit popping out me-shrooms to be served at my memorial service.