Scratching My Chin Today

No... I'm not deep in thought. I'm not dazed and confused. I'm allergic. I have no idea what's in the air today, but I'm reacting to it. I can tell because of my chin. It itches whenever I'm around cats, and whenever there's pollen in the air, etc. It's a warning sign. When the chin itches, it used to be s a sure bet that a sneezing, red-eyed, miserable allergic reaction is on the way. I use it as a cat detector. When I walk into someone's house, my chin will tell me within a few minutes if they have cats. Improvements in anti-histamine medications these last ten or so years have gotten it to the point that the sneezing, red-eyes and general misery are minimized, but the chin-itching doesn't seem to be lessened at all. My physician can't explain it. It can't be psycho-somatic becasue I experienced the itchy chin when I was very young, well before we knew that I was allergic to cats or anything else. I've never met anyone else who reacts this way, although the power of Google did turn up one other person. There are a lot more who sneeze in bright sunlight the way I do, too, though. I used to joke that I was allergic to sunlight, but since my chin doesn't itch when I go out in bright sunlight I know that's not true. There's actually a couple of medially-approved name for sneezing in bright sunlight: photic sneeze reflex, and Autosomal-dominant Compelling Helio-Opthalmic Outburst, aka "ACHOO" syndrome. I kid you not.

What's my point? Nothing in particular, I guess. But I think it's at least as relevant a topic for the Domino blogging community as pregnant Hooters girls. Not as interesting, amusing, or controversial, perhaps. But definitely as relevant. ;-)

I'll get back to my promised series on what Bill Gates could really do about spam soon, but the recently-announced Microsoft dividend might have taken too much of a bite out of the Microsoft treasury to allow the expenditure of the billions of $US that I think will need to be spent to really do something about spam, so I may have to scale back my suggestions a bit. (I realize that this is a bit of a digression from the topic of itching chins and photic sneezes, but I figure that if anyone has actually read all the way through this post, they deserve to get something at least vaguely related to technology. So, I'll reiterate: billions. That's what I think it will take. Many billions.

And to bring this somewhat stream-of-consciousness post to a close, I'll mention that I'm using the US definition of "billion" as 10⁹, having only fairly recently become aware that the significant portions of the English-speaking universe have a different definition for "billion", and those folks' 10¹² usage is actually more consistent with the terms used in many other languages. How can that be? Aren't numbers one of the more important things to standardize in a language? Now that's something to scratch one's chin about.