brainscanner...

Not quite sure who/which blog introduced me to brainscannr.com. But it's very fun. Type in your name and you get a bunch of wise and mysterious 'smilies' representing your true self...or many selves, if you're DD. What I especially like is the Japanese-creator's response to the 'So...what do the Smilies actually mean?' question: What do you want them to mean???

I started with Unkle Phil's moniker for me: Dragonbug. Pretty much right on (maybe not...but if I don't say it first, Felipe will certainly jump on it): Lots of hands reaching and clasping each other...a bunch of eager but dingy smilies cheering them on. Then there's the row of hearts down the middle. Yup. It's all most definitely one of my personalities.

Then there's 'Canary in the mines'. Like the caged birds who were taken down into mines as a barometer for dangerous gases (if they drop dead in their cage, it's time for the humans to skedaddle), my environmentally intolerant/multiple chemically insensitive self is the one you'd want to send into a polluted building (or shall we just substitute planet?) first to see if it's safe. Remember little Haley Joel Osment in Sixth Sense? 'I see dead people...' Well, all of my senses, plus a sixth one, can pick up/label/bear the marks & consequences of exposure to the (mostly) human-created poisons that surround us everyday. I was sending FEMA warnings about those trailers way before they gave it thought (and now that they are...they're not really certain those billions of formaldehyde particles are actually harmful to the inhabitants. Please...!). Every time I see commercials pushing fragranced products that are a danger to all -- but especially victimize children (Oh, sure...your children just love to inhale petroleum-based perfumes and phthalate scent extenders and whatever else Satan encouraged Glade to put into plug-in air fresheners that disperse the product into the air and thus into their lungs and eventually will be part of the ugly and destructive chemical load those little ones will bear into adulthood. Yup. Your home is happier for all this...), I want to scream. Wake up, people! This is a topic for its own blogpost. But for now it seems clear that brainscannr is RIGHT ON: A bunch of emoticon sheeple hug the perimeter of a desolate cave-like brain while I'm singing in the middle, trying to warn them.

I forget what Brainscannr gave me for my real name. It doesn't really matter right now.