So I'm doing the laundry (yeah, I know, the excitement never ends) and I'm laundryfying the flannel sheets - and by the way, who invented those? What an evil evil person. Is there a god of sloth we can thank? A saint of lazy people? Dear gods, they make it difficult to get out of bed.

It's not like these sheets are new; we've had 'em for ages. And I'm still collecting wads of lint from the filter-thingy on the dryer. So I gotta wonder about lint. How can sheets this non-fuzzy still produce so much fluff? They're not worn down totally mind you but where is it all COMING from?

It's just baffling stuff. I seem to recall in Margaret Atwood's novel CAT'S EYE that there was an artist who actually used the stuff to make art. I mean, she bought fuzzy things, like flannel sheets, and ran 'em endlessly through the dryer to create lint sheets from which to create. I wonder if she's still around and wants more. It never ends.

Lint.

In coming weeks we'll look at how cobs and spiders aren't the same thing and how you can tell the difference between their webs; how soap really doesn't clean the dirt off your hands, but it's a secret dye that makes the water look brown and we'll offer a scientific study on how it's not gonna be the cockroaches that survive the heat death of the sun, nuclear winter and um, hope not springing eternal (fall's too obvious) but how the real survivors will be the dust animals. Never mind the roaches, here come the dust hippos. And we'll introduce you to the dust T-rex that lives under our bed.