October 17, 2003
Ice
The road to hell, it turns out, is paved not with good intentions, it's paved with ice.
This was made clear to me last night when I served drinks to everyone. Red wine for my wife and my mother-in-law, a beer for my father-in-law, extra-large gin tonic for myself, and phony non-alcoholic cocktails for my daughters.
I figure they're never too young for a nice cocktail.
Suddenly, in a tone of voice normally reserved for statements like, "spit out that toadstool this second" or admonishing small children on nature walks in the woods not to eat those unfamiliar red berries, my mother-in-law told my youngest daughter to, "spit that out."
She was very adamant. I'd been in the other room so I went over to see what was going on. My daughter was shaking her head and munching something.
"You've got a cold. You'll get sick, spit out that ice cube immediately," my mother-in-law said.
It is not ice season, you see. Austrians traditionally do not take ice with their drinks, and ice season, or more strictly speaking ice-cream season is clearly demarcated by the ice cream parlors opening their doors in late spring and closing them again in early autumn. In winter, they're either simply shuttered or converted into yarn shoppes if the owner is particularly enterprising.
Woe unto him who puts ice in his kids' drinks out of season. I might as well have straightened out paper clips for them and told them to have a good time with the electrical outlets.
Posted by Mig at October 17, 2003 07:41 AMThat's nothing! In Poland, people won't even let their children drink cold drinks. Soft drinks are often kept out of the fridge. The warnings I got when wanting to drink cold drinks...
Posted by: Edwinek at October 20, 2003 05:28 AMOh, sure, they do that in Austria too. When we order a sodapop for a child somewhere, a restaurant etc., someone is always careful to specify to the waiter/waitress that it must be "from outside" i.e. not refrigerated.
Posted by: mig at October 20, 2003 06:27 AMI cannot put juice in the fridge without the woman taking it back out. It's bad for the kid, she says. At least, that's what her mother told her. And now that she has brainwashed the kid into believing it, the kid won't drink cold drinks.
But I have a theory. About snot. No, stay with me for a minute. It's simple, but grannies don't understand.
Decreased temperatures do not, obviously, create cold viruses. If you do not have a cold virus in your body and you do not come in contact with someone who is infected with a cold, you will never catch a cold, even if you are naked at the north pole. You will freeze to death, but you will not catch a cold. Similarly, a kid with an ice cube can't "catch a cold" (get a virus) unless the ice cube has a rhinovirus in it or is delivered by Drippy the ice man.
So we're not talking about cold viruses being created, we're talking about viruses spreading.
And don't tell me anything about cold weather and reduced effectiveness of your immune system. You aren't out dying in the cold, you are just running to a car or a bus or whatever. Whoever you are, you are probably a big, robust, well-insulated human being. Your immune system is just fine, summer and winter.
The main thing about winter that causes colds to spread is that cold weather makes your nose run, even when you don't have a cold and especially, of course, when you do. Cold weather makes people with colds wipe snot on everything. Cold weather, importantly, also makes people without colds (especially snotty little kids) wipe snot on everything, which means they're touching infected surfaces and then touching their noses. All that nose to hand to surface to hand to nose action shifts a lot of rhinoviruses.
Combine that with the closed windows and forced confinement of cold weather and all the airborn snot from sneezes and you get nasal infections spreading more quickly in winter.
Hence the bad rap cold temperatures gets about "causing" colds. But it's the _snot_, damn it, not the cold air itself, that spreads the colds that are always with us, summer and winter, in some poor sap's runny nose.
Posted by: Eeksy-Peeksy at October 20, 2003 08:37 AMJuice is left out on the counter at our house too, Eeksy. After a few days, of course, you pour yourself a glass and there are little grey boats of mold floating atop your juice. So I did an experiment and left a carton of fruit juice in the fridge yesterday. This morning my wife looked in the fridge and said, "Who put the juice in the fridge? Who put *juice* in the *refrigerator*?"
I confessed and mumbled that I thought it was a good idea. "Good for what?" she said. "Not good for drinking." Cold juice is bad, I guess, whereas little grey boats are not.
Posted by: mig at October 24, 2003 07:12 AMThat would make a good name for a blog, "Little Grey Boat".
Posted by: mig at October 24, 2003 07:14 AM