My Life Flows On

NEW YORK (Reuters) - In Scottsdale, Arizona, any new home must come equipped with fire sprinklers, a decades-old rule lauded by fire safety advocates nationwide. But 12 miles away in Phoenix, city officials are not even allowed to discuss adopting a requirement like Scottsdale's, because of a state law passed last year.

The same is true in Texas, Alabama, Kansas and Hawaii, where in the past four years state governments have enacted bills forbidding cities and towns from requiring sprinklers in new homes. A dozen have forbidden statewide building code councils from including the requirement in their guidelines.

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She really hadn’t known.

No one believed her, of course. The more sympathetic among her friends said “Oh, poor Althea, you must have been terrified, of course you couldn’t tell anyone.” Her detractors—her sisters foremost among them—all said “Of course she knew. She just didn’t care. Those poor women.”

No one had actually suggested that she might be involved in the murders, of course. Once the bodies had been identified, it was obvious that she had still been in the nursery for most of them. The youngest of the lot had been dead for several years before Lord Bluebeard moved into the neighborhood, so no one could imply that she was a murderess herself.

Still, she’d kept silent, went the whispers, and that made her an accomplice, didn’t it?

She caught herself wishing that her husband were still alive, so that she could talk to him about it.

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What about Diabetes Awareness Month, or Alzheimer's Disease Awareness Month, which both happen to be November, or my personal pick, Heart Disease Awareness Month, in February? Where are the custom cell phone cases promoting those?

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 329,250 women in the United States died of heart disease in 2005 (apparently the latest year for which they have stats), compared with 268,890 women who died of malignant neoplasms — that's all kinds of cancer put together. In fact, heart disease is the overall leading cause of death in the United States.

Now, I certainly have nothing against raising money to research any particular disease. But if we're going to have a massive advertising campaign, shouldn't it be directed at the disease that kills the most people, or sickens the most people? It looks like there's a start, but I've never noticed heart disease getting anywhere near the attention that breast cancer receives. Besides, a lot of the companies that take advantage of pink to sell their products don't donate very much to research, and some of the products even have carcinogenic ingredients.

...BP owns only a handful of the 11,000 stations that bear its brand and is trying to sell the few still on its books. So those who wish to inflict the maximum amount of pain on the company are instead putting much of the hurt on the family businesses that actually own the stations.

Just how little does BP gain from its gas stations, besides whatever ancillary marketing benefit it gains from the signs? The gas in its pumps may not be extracted, refined or stored by the company and may just get a spritz of BP additives right before it ends up at the service station. All of this puts a mere handful of coins in the company’s pocket per fill-up.

And the gas that people buy when they fill up elsewhere? Fuel from independent gas stations, grocery chains and big-box wholesale clubs sometimes comes directly from refineries or wholesalers that BP owns outright. ...

...Oil is everywhere. It's in carpeting, furniture, computers and clothing. It's in the most personal of products like toothpaste, shaving cream, lipstick and vitamin capsules. Petrochemicals are the glue of our modern lives and even in glue, too. ...