Oh. My. Gosh.

My amusement knows no bounds. The back label of Psoriacin (an anti-psoriasis medicated shampoo) reads as follows:

"The active ingredient in this product has been certified by the FDA Expert Advisory Board as safe when used correctly."

And, at the bottom of the label:

"This product contains compounds known by the State of California to cause cancer."

If a product label can possess a tone of voice, the tone here was definitely, "Sigh. Humor those organic-happy environmental alarmists out on the left coast..."

In other news...

....I am OH, SO HAPPY. Why? Robin McKinley has a new book out. She's decided to jump into the alternate-modern vampire genre with this one, and she does a damn fine job of it. If you have not yet bought it - alsafi, troutqueen, whisperflight, I'm talking to you - go out and purchase a book called Sunshine forthwith.

Of course, I'm biased. I'll buy anything McKinley writes, on general principle, and there's not a lot of authors I'll say that about. But it's good. Really good.

An exerpt from Sunshine (Please don't sue me, Berkeley Publishing. I'm trying to sell books for you, here):

"Being able to see in the dark sounds great. Never trip over the bathroom threshold on your way for a pee at midnight again, right? But it's not that simple. Human eyes don't see in the dark. They don't have the rods and cones for it or whatever. Therefore you are doing something that isn't human. It's not like you've awakened a latent talent, like someone who finds out they have a gift for playing jazz piano after a life previously devoted to Bach. That may be odd, but it's within human scope. Seeing in the dark isn't. And you know it. That doesn't mean I know how to explain it; but trust me, you can tell the difference between seeing because there's enough light and "seeing" because something weird and vampiry is going on in your brain that chooses to pretend to be happening in your eyes because that's the nearest equivalent. Like if some human had had a poisoned wound healed by some weird reciprocal swap with the phoenix, maybe they'd be able to fly afterward, apparently by flapping their arms.

"(Mind you no one has seen the phoenix in over a thousand years, and it has never been inclined to do humans any good turns. Rather the opposite. Very like vampires, I suppose. Except a lot of people think the phoenix is a myth, and not many are stupid enough to think vampires are. I think the phoenix has at least a fifty-fifty chance of being true, because it's nasty. What this world doesn't have is the three-wishes, go-to-the-ball-and-meet-your-prince, happily-ever-after kind of magic. We have all the mangling and malevolent kinds. Who invented this system?)"

Buy the book. Buy it. Read it. Love McKinley's writing. LOVE.

That is all.