| Revolution of the Snails: Encounters with the Zapatistas
I grew up listening to vinyl records, dense spirals of information that we played at 33-1/3 revolutions per minute. The original use of the word revolution was in this sense — of something coming round or turning round, the revolution of the heavenly bodies, for example. It's interesting to think that just as the word radical comes from the Latin word for "roots" and meant going to the root of a problem, so revolution originally means to rotate, to return, or to cycle, something those who live according to the agricultural cycles of the year know well. Only in 1450, says my old Oxford Etymological Dictionary, does it come to mean "an instance of a great change in affairs or in some particular thing." 1450: 42 years before Columbus sailed on his first voyage to the not-so-new world, not long after Gutenberg invented moveable type in Europe, where time itself was coming to seem less cyclical and more linear — as in the second definition of this new sense of revolution in my dictionary, "a complete overthrow of the established government in any country or state by those who were previously subject to it." We live in revolutionary times, but the revolution we are living through is a slow turning around from one set of beliefs and practices toward another, a turn so slow that most people fail to observe our society revolving — or rebelling.
Home Spray Cleaners Could Raise Asthma Risk
FRIDAY, Oct. 12 (HealthDay News) -- Using household cleaning sprays and spray air fresheners just once a week can increase your risk of developing asthma, new research suggests. Whether or not the cleaning products are a direct cause of asthma, or simply a trigger for people who already have the disease, isn't clear from this epidemiological study. However, the European team involved in the study believes that spray cleaners can be a cause of new-onset asthma, because the people included in this study did not have asthma or asthma symptoms at the start of the study. The use of spray cleaners as little as once a week increased the risk of developing the respiratory ailment by nearly 50 percent, the researchers found. "Cleaning sprays, especially air fresheners, furniture cleaners and glass cleaners, had a particularly strong effect.
New storm hits soggy Southern California
A fierce storm barreled into Southern California on Saturday, threatening to cause mudslides and other problems for the region, which has been saturated with rain over the past several days. Meanwhile, rescue crews found the body of a third avalanche victim and rescued a missing snowboarder who survived a frigid night in the San Gabriel Mountains. Christopher Allport, 60, of Santa Monica, was found Saturday morning and was one of two people reported missing Friday after a trio of avalanches swept off-trail canyons near the Mountain High ski resort in Wrightwood. Allport was a veteran character actor and had appeared on such TV shows as "ER," "Felicity," and "Matlock." He wrote a story that appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 2004 about the pleasures of backcountry skiing.
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