Cure-Alls
 

In My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Windex cured everything.

Toula Portokalos: [narrating] My dad believed in two things: That Greeks should educate non Greeks about being Greek and every ailment from psoriasis to poison ivy can be cured with Windex.

Gus Portokalos: Put some Windex.

In Chris Rock's family, Robitussin cured everything.

Chris Rock: When I was a kid, I had to be near-death to see a doctor, so my daddy got into the habit of putting Robitussin on everything, and I mean EVERYTHING!
[Impersonating his father and himself]
Chris Rock: Daddy, I got asthama! "Well here, take some Robitussin!" Daddy, I got cancer! "Here, take some Robitussin!" Daddy, I broke my leg! "Here, put some Robitussin on it... that's right, let the Robitussin sink in there."

Chris Rock: Yeah, boy! Let that 'tussin get in there. Let that 'tussin go down to the bone! If you run out of it, put some water in the jar, shake it up, more 'tussin! MORE 'TUSSIN!

Well, medical miracles aside, apparently everyone should know the cure for back pain, for ANY back pain, is a pillow.

Yes folks, sit on a pillow. That's all you got to do. Who knew?

I don't know why the pillow does more than the padding in a chair. But it just does. :rolleyes:

I've heard tell it works for hemmorhoids too, but the research is sketchy.

What are YOUR cure-alls?

Advil is pretty good for some things.

1) Duct tape - if duct tape doesn't fix it, you're not using enough.

2) We raised 3 daughters from birth to adulthood,
plus every visiting grandchild on orange-flavored Triaminic Syrup.

Kids have it made with modern medicine. Remember merthiolate? Geez mom, I'd rather my arm just fall off!

That stuff was nasty. And it was applied with a glass poking stick. WTF?

But Merthiolate burned like the dickens... Mercurichrome didn't

And it hurt like a mudder!

Now they have those nice little antibiotic creams. No pain. Kids no longer sit out in the field hoping they don't find you before your arm falls off from gangrene because the cure was worse than the injury!

Was it the sodium that made it hurt?

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/30/sc...id-or-not.html

All we kids would gave around the wound, and when Mom would put the merthiolate on, everybody would blow on it. In hindsight, that probably added more germs than it killed.

Strangely, I don't remember mercurochrome as part of my mother's armamentarium. Whatever she put on cuts HURT, though, so maybe it was.

Remember cod liver oil? (oh God, that dates me!) You just know that's where Mike Myers got the line, 'Better out than in, I always say!' I'd rather just die of Vit. A deficiency.

My late mil: Put some alcohol (a variation on the Windex; she was only half Greek, so perhaps that explains it)!

My cure-alls: a cup of good, strong coffee (kill or cure). Homemade chicken soup. Sleep.

Oh, and Heet liniment ... my parents' cure-all for sore backs. When I was about five years old I was fascinated with the soft cotton applicator thingy, and having been warned away from the Heet bottle in no uncertain terms, I waited until my parents were out one afternoon ... and I painted Heet on the screen of our little B&W TV. I just wanted to use that applicator on something - thought the TV would be safe.

The damned liniment etched the screen everywhere it touched - the back and forth lines and the drips that made their way to the bottom of the screen.

We couldn't afford to replace the TV, so for the next number of years we watched it through the scars of my failed experiment. That was worse than any spanking.

Homemade chicken soup was a favorite cure-all joke on tv for years.
Then one day my wife made some for my "incurable cold"... It worked !

:)

I love your TV story, ortho. Funny.

But when you were a little kid and sick? Mom putting Vapo-rub on your chest, was the best thing ever. I think it had more to do with mom's love than with the vapo-rub.

And when I was a teenager and getting over the flu, the first thing mom made when she thought I could tolerate food was tea and toast. It was wonderful. :sick2:

And flat ginger ale with dry toast for 24-hour flu (aka food poisoning :eek:).
The flat ginger ale was actually a great idea; too bad it tasted awful.

And Vapo-rub, yes, the best! I used it on my kids too and they loved it. :)

That TV story was awesome.

I have a similar memory from my childhood. My grandfather retired from his contracting business, and he had all these extra stickers that he would put on the sides of his trucks and equipment. They were left over, so he gave them to us grandchildren. I knew he put them on his trucks, so I put mine on the side of our family's VW bus. :lol:

This did not please my father, and I got a spanking. But he was able to peel the sticker off without damaging the paint.

My brother and I thought it would be fun to see how high we could make the thermometer go. So we boiled some water on the stove. And the thermometer melted. Hi, would you like some mercury with your potatoes?

These days they'd get hazmat. I don't remember if we told mom or not. I know we still used the pan.

Don't worry, the amalgam in the bottom of the pan protects you from lead-poisoning.

I HATED the slathering of Vaporub my mom used to douse me in whenever I had a cold/cough/flu/ear infection. Rubbing it on my chest felt nice, but she'd also rub it on my back (to better sink into my lungs), under my nose (so I could breathe it in) and behind my ears. (???) It just left me feeling yucky rather than healed.

Mercurochrome...meh.

Merthiolate...piffle.

Wanna get really mean?

Castor oil.

:greenface:greenface:greenface

Suppositories.

[RonWhite]...grandmother, she gave me suppositories. She'd take these big, gigantic ass-pills, and shove these things up my ass. For everything. And I hated it.

At first.[/RonWhite]

bwaaahahahahahahahaha

Ron White is one funny futhermucker!

"I had the right to remain silent. But I did not have the *ability*." He cracks me the hell up.

**shivers**

I once bit down on and broke a mercury thermometer. *GAH* Sometimes I get a powerful but fleeting taste memory, and it's nasty.

This is my wife's cure-all.

Attachment 41768

It's a:
dinner knife,
sandwich maker,
food lump masher,
plate scrapper,
letter opener,
jar opener,
package opener,
screwdriver,
hammer,
saw,
paint scrapper,
putty knife,
garden trowel,
string cutter,
wire cutter,
pumpkin carver,

YFTL

Gangrenous limb remover

Achy and sore? Soak in a tub of the hottest water you can stand, with a couple cups of epsom salts mixed in.

Ahhhhh............

Works every time. :)

They even make Epsom salt lotion now, if you can't afford to waste time lounging in the tub.

My mother's cure all was the cheapest: rub it.

Fell down and hurt your knee? Rub it.

have a tummy ache? Rub it.

have an earache? put a hot wash cloth to your ear and ...rub it.

Chemo hurting your bones? Rub them.

My surgeon- the carotid artery where I put the long end of the port? Rub it.

My surgeon- breast/arm swelling? Rub it.


Fell off a chair and broke my coccyx? Rub it.

We had more money than you growing up. We were to rub dirt on it.

Ha! Who knew that 7:30 in the morning on a holiday was prime time comedy hour? :)

When the inch was teething and my dad was still alive, my dad told me to go down to the drugstore and get some Paregoric and rub it on the baby's gums.

When I was growing up it was right next to the syrup of ipecac.

Paregoric has a wonderful smell.
Ipeca seems OK - til you swallow.

(My first job was an old fashioned drugstore/soda fountain in the 50's)

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could all buy Paregoric OTC? There used to be a codeine syrup you only had to sign for in the ;80's---I forget what it was called.

I'd like to go back to the days when your local apothecary just handed the laudanum over with a wink and a smile.

Coda-Clear! I believe that was the syrup's name.

Here's the fella you want:
http://www.westseedfarm.com/index.ph...products_id=61

Papaver Somniferum, it's what's for dinner.

It's what's in the garden ... and in the pirohy (baked, not boiled), and in the poppyseed rolls, and in the ... damn, all those Ukrainian recipes make sense now! ;)

Yeah, well, I've eaten my fair share of poppy seeds- I need to know HOW to make the STUFF. I watched a program about how they make cocaine and I thought, 'who in the hell would've thought of doing all those steps???' but then I thought the same thing when I saw chocolate in the wild.

The stuff is right in the seeds - you get measurable levels of morphine in your blood after eating poppyseed-containing items. The acceptable levels of morphine on urine drug tests are set high enough to be above the maximum level you can get from eating poppyseed, and it's a significant level. No complicated or extensive process needed! Just eat that poppyseed roll ... :yum:

OK, either you two are feds trying to entrap someone or you are yanking our chain.

You know if you plant the seed, you have to be sure not to scratch the seed capsule while it is still green otherwise milky sticky sap will leak out, no a different kind; FOCUS! stay on task here, lift your minds out of the gutter, where were we? Oh yeah. Never scratch the green seed capsule, especially not with something serrated that would make a whole bunch of scratches at once. That would be really bad because then a whole lot of milky sap will leak out.

If that accidentally happens, don't worry, the sap will sort of clot, like blood does, and then it will turn brown. You may want to clean the brown stuff off so that the green capsule look nicer and more tidy for when they dry and you PUT THEM IN YOUR FLOWER ARRANGEMENT, right? that's the whole point. Dried flower arrangements.

So, after you've cleaned all the brown, resinous sticky icky gook off your nice pretty seed pods, you'll probably find that you have a whole bunch of the crap to get rid of. Probably best just to burn it because if you throw it in the trash it will just stick to everything and make a worse mess. Just be careful when you burn it, keep the fire small and in control.

Good luck and happy gardening. Here's an Ikebana flower arranging site with tips on arranging those dried seed pods:

http://www.ikebanahq.org/

LOL.


(please note, I spelled that backwards so as to attract little attention)

Damn, our cover is blown! In future I will also spell lol backwards so as not to attract so much attention.

Oh, and what makes you think we'd be trying to get milky, sticky substances out of something ... green? :eek:

(although since you were so generous with your explanation of how to obtain nice clean pods for dried flower arrangements, I have filed it away for future reference)

Foot: Weird, I cannot open the web page. It would say "Internet Explorer cannot open webpage." However, all other links I clicked on opens. So, it ain't my internet explorer that's having the problem.

I got it to open last night - but sadly, it did not have the detailed directions for dried flower preparation given by foot. I did find other links, but in the interest of keeping my professional license will leave them for people to google on their own.

I opened it with IE last night too, but can't open it now with IE, or Firefox.

Ho Ho Ho!

There are two types of people in this world; Size Queens and Liars

..and I don't see any horns.

that's unusual.