I was hungover again today. Two days of hangover in a row are rough, but today I managed to rally my energy a bit better than yesterday. I finished two musings entries, for example, along with several web pages related to my expanding online art gallery.

The first of my skeptical utterances concerned ear candles, a kind cone-shaped wax-paper device whose little end is put in the ear and whose big end is burned, creating a "suction." Deya, who claims to have problems with excessive ear wax production, used an ear candle today. I guess she got it free from Rebecca's Natural Foods, where such untested hippie crap is peddled right along with the organic artichokes, herbal tea and rice cakes. She showed us the results, which certainly were impressive: several cubic centimeters of brownish waxy stuff. But I said that I wouldn't be convinced that the crap actually was earwax until someone tasted it and proclaimed it bitter (as we all know earwax to be). Jessika was willing to accept on faith that the substance was earwax and, like Aristotle many years before, considered experimentation unnecessary. She doesn't have a skeptical mind and finds mine to be a constant source of irritation.

Later, I saw Jessika drinking some kind of homeopathic "liver cleanser." For my part, I don't believe in homeopathy at all. I know a lot of biochemistry and it makes absolutely no sense. How can an extremely dilute version of a poison be a cure for that poison? I told Jessika that I thought homeopathy worked, if it worked at all, only by virtue of the placebo effect. Disgusted, she cited (as evidence of homeopathy's power) the positive healing effects it has on sick babies (Ana and Peggy are both big fans of homeopathy). I responded that babies are always getting sick only to inevitably get well again and would continue do so with or without homeopathic quackery. Jessika didn't talk to me for the rest of the day.