New Shower Curtain September 17, 2010
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Other Stuff.Tags: Chemistry, Physics, Wright Brothers
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Our Shower Curtain from ThinkGeek
Our new shower curtain featuring the Periodic Table arrived from ThinkGeek. It’s a little flimsier than we’d hoped, with no magnets at the bottom and little reinforcement around the holes for the curtain rings. But the design is great, and the colors really perk up the bathroom. We’ll get a liner to extend the life of this fancy shower curtain–and so that the full periodic table can be draped on the outside of the tub allowing us to study up on the measurement conversion listed at the bottom of the curtain.
If you’re interested in a really sturdy shower curtain (something that holds up in the washing machine) or one that doesn’t need rings, we recommend the hookless options from Arcs & Angles. We only wish they had more colorful designs (they used to).
On a more somber note, today marks the anniversary of the first powered airplane fatality. In 1908, Orville Wright crashed a Wright Flyer during a demonstration flight in Virginia for the military. Thomas Selfridge died in the accident at age 26. Orville Wright spent seven weeks in the hospital.
Currently, Southwest Airlines has the best record in U.S. passenger air travel, with more than 15 million flights since 1970 and no crash fatalities. American Airlines has had the most fatal events since 1970, with 13, but it’s also flown the most flights of any domestic carrier. The Colgan Air crash in 2009 is the most recent fatal crash in the United States (view an excerpt from the Frontline documentary here). But U.S. air travel is incredibly safe. If we don’t count the four doomed flights on September 11, 2001, fewer than one fatal crash per year has occurred in the last dozen years (for NTSB list, click here), even though almost 30,000 commercial airline flights take to the skies on any given day.
I love that shower curtain, guys! I also think it’s just another example of what’s been happening in the general retail world in the last few years–everything’s getting more personal. We’ve got more options to express ourselves than ever before. Yes, even in our bathrooms. I finally got the penguin-themed bathroom I’d always dreamed of as a kid back in the ’70s, for example (I haven’t done a shark-themed one yet, but I’m sure I will).
A suggestion on liners, because I always use one. If you have a Christmas Tree Shops or a Walmart in your area, you can get inexpensive liners for three bucks or so. I buy four of them — and then when it gets ratty, I don’t clean it, I just replace it. Most of them do have magnets. Since most of my curtains are cloth, I have to do that anyway.
…and besides, trying to clean the soap scum off those expensive liners is a pain.