What's in a Magic Eraser?

photo by Cherie Diez at the St. Pete Times

On 24 May I wrote a column about the inane suggestion that people clean their tubs with a half a grapefruit and some table salt. It sparked a conversation in the comments about Mr. Clean Magic Erasers. I was aware of them, but I'd never used one. None of the commenters seemed to know what the active ingredient in them is, the best anybody could do was report that they are made from melamine foam.

Intrigued, I bought some over the weekend and I was amazed at how well they cleaned up my ancient enamel sinks and tub. Amazing.. I noticed that the labeling on the box made no mention of an active ingredient or anything added to the sponge that would make it clean so well. So I dug. Come with me on a journey of discovery.

Here's the Mr. Clean I remember.





And here he is today. The only men I know who look like that and who care about cleanliness are prone to breaking into a rollicking chorus of "Rose's Turn"  when the mood strikes but that's a topic for another time.

As I said earlier, there's no active ingredient listed, but these things clean like you cannot imagine. Well it turns out the active ingredient is elbow grease. Sort of.

Magic erasers are made from a form of melamine foam. Technically, it's a formaldehyde-melamine-sodium bisulfite copolymer foam made by the German company BASF. It was invented as an insulator and fire retardant. That it cleans like the dickens was a happy coincidence. Melamine is an extremely hard polymer and it's what gives things like Formica laminate its rigidity.

However, when it's pumped full of air something interesting happens.

Despite the fact that the material itself is very hard, the tiny strands that make up the foam's matrix feel soft to the touch. On a microscopic level, those rigid little strands are very abrasive, like super fine grit sandpaper.

There are no active ingredients listed on the package because there really aren't any. Magic Erasers clean by a physical process, not a chemical one. When you rub a dirty spot with a Magic Eraser, you're essentially sanding away the dirt. As you rub, the foam disintegrates. If you clean dishes or anything that will contact food with these things, rinse thoroughly when you're done. Eating melamine is not a very smart thing to do.

As a cautionary note, don't clean anything with a glossy surface with these Magic Erasers. Remember that you're using a microscopic abrasive so when in doubt, test a spot first.

So bravo BASF for being so clever and bravo Proctor and Gamble for breathing new life into an old brand. These things really work.

Many thanks to BASF for the information I used for this post.

Oh and one more thing. They are called Mastro Lindo in Italy. Why are mundane things so entertaining when they're in Italian?

It's hurricane season

It's now hurricane season officially. Although The Gulf Coast and Florida are assumed to be at the greatest risk when it comes to these storms, other people elsewhere on the east coast ignore them at their own peril. Though it's been a while; DC, New York, Boston, Charleston, Savannah and many more cities have been devastated by them in the past.

I have never had to deal with something of the scope and scale of a Hurricane Katrina or a Hurricane Andrew, the Category 1 storms I've made it through were bad enough. Though it pains me to quote him, then-governor Jeb Bush remarked in 2004 that "there's no such thing as a minor hurricane."

In 2004, Florida got hit by four, count 'em, four named storms in a little more than six weeks. Prior to 2004's season, I believed the conventional wisdom that it's possible and even preferable to ride out low category storms. Newsflash, the conventional wisdom is a lie.

Tropical Storm Bonnie

It started in August of that year, with a  tropical depression in the Gulf of Mexico. It smacked into Apalachicola on August 12th as Tropical Storm Bonnie. At that point though, folks here were busy panicking over Hurricane Charley. Hurricane Charley was due to arrive on August 13th and St. Pete Beach was the predicted landfall. That's less than five miles from where I'm sitting now. The county where I live started evacuations on the 11th and like a fool I stayed put. Everyone said that it was going to be a minor storm and so I decided to wait it out.

Hurricane Charlie

I went to bed on August 12th expecting a category two hurricane to arrive the following afternoon. I figured that I would lose power and that it would rain a lot. When I woke up Friday morning, the Category 2 Charley had turned into a Category 5 storm over night. We were still in the bull's eye at that point and since I'd not evacuated, the option to evacuate was gone. The bridges out of here had been closed down the night before.

I remember walking around and saying good bye to my earthly possessions that morning. I wasn't being hysterical or irrational. I knew that the sustained winds of a Category 5 storm would destroy my home and my neighborhood and that if I were going to survive the day I was going to have to think fast. Talk about a wake up call. My plan was to crawl into my bathtub and then pull a mattress over myself and hope for the best. I knew the windows would shatter and that the roof would probably blow off. I just hoped that the walls would hold. I remember resigning myself to the idea that I was going to have to start over from scratch if I made it through the storm.

At 11am that morning, Hurricane Charley took an unanticipated turn to the right as it tracked up the coast and it wiped Punta Gorda off the map instead of us. The storm passed us by about a 75 miles to the east and because it was such a compact storm, it barely even rained. It was the best let down I ever experienced.

I had a meeting the following week in Fort Myers, just south of where Charley made landfall. 30 miles from where it came ashore it looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off. The trees, the light posts, the billboards, everything that once stood upright was twisted and fallen over on the ground.

Hurricane Frances

The season wasn't done with us yet. Less then a month later, Hurricane Frances ground ashore near Stuart and worked its way across the Florida peninsula. It grazed us as a tropical storm and everyone lost power for a few days. Two weeks after Frances, Hurricane Jeanne hit at Hutchinson Island, two miles away from Stuart. It followed almost the same path across Florida and hit us as a Category 1 storm. Jeanne knocked power for at least a week for a huge number of people. Trees came down, the wind whipped and the rain fell horizontally. Roof shingles and lawn furniture cartwheeled like tumbleweeds.

Hurricane Jeanne

Having ignored an evacuation order I should have known better than to ignore and having ridden out a Category 1 no one saw coming that year was enough for me. I toyed very seriously with leaving my beloved Florida after that.

All of our experiences in 2004 pale when compared with the horror show that was 2005's Katrina. I still get sick when I think about that one.

The point of all this? Mostly it's to urge everyone to take weather bulletins and evacuation orders seriously. Even if you're safely out of the hurricane zone, odds are your area faces some other natural disaster. We keep what are called hurricane kits at the ready and that kind of disaster preparedness is a good thing to keep in mind for anybody. The St. Pete Times' Hurricane guide this year lists what should go into the perfect hurricane preparedness kit. To wit:

Food and drink

• Drinking water: 1 gallon per person per day.
• Nonperishable food supplies: Enough to see you through the first few days. A severe storm can interrupt delivery of fresh food to stores. You need to be ready to feed yourself until stores restock and reopen.
• Comfort foods to relieve stress (cookies, pastries).
• Toilet paper, paper towels, plates and napkins, plastic tableware and drinking cups, wet wipes, plastic wrap, trash bags.
• Two coolers: one for food, one for ice.
• Manual can opener.

Health and safety

• Flashlight and batteries for each person in your household.
• Light sticks.
• First aid kit with bandages, antiseptic, tape, compresses, pain reliever, antidiarrhea medication, antacid.
• Medications for routine illnesses such as colds.
• Liquid soap, hand sanitizer, wet wipes.
• Water purification kit.
• Two-week supply of vitamins, over-the-counter medications and prescription medicines.
• Fire extinguisher.
• Battery-powered clock.
• Infant necessities: medicine, diapers, formula, bottles, wipes.
• Supplies for the elderly or the ill: Depends undergarments, bed pads, medications, special foods.

If you evacuate

• Pillows, blankets, sleeping bags or air mattresses.
• Folding chairs or cots.
• Extra clothing and shoes.
• Personal hygiene items: toothbrush, washcloth, deodorant, etc.
• Food and water.
• Earplugs. Shelters can be noisy, and someone sleeping near you may snore.
• Prescription medications in their original containers. Shelters are not hospitals and do not have access to drugs or medicine. Bring what you need.
• Books, handheld games, cards, toys, needlework, iPod.

Miscellaneous

• Cleaning supplies: mop, bucket, towels, disinfectant.
• Camera or camcorder to record property and document damage for insurance claims.
• Plastic trash bags.

Be sure to have . . .

• Cash. If the power goes out, ATMs will not work and credit card networks will be down.
• Ice.
• Paperwork: insurance policy, identification, home inventory, medical insurance card.
• Cell phone charger for your car. Also have a land-line phone (one that's wired to the wall, not wireless).
• A full tank of gas.

What's on everybody's mind this season is the fact that there are untold millions of gallons of crude oil floating around the Gulf right now. Oh, did I mention that there's what's very likely the world's worst environmental disaster ever going on right now? Heaven help us.

In the meantime, The St. Pete Times has the definitive hurricane guide again this year and you can find it here. And when a weather disaster's building, the best and least sensational source for updates is the National Hurricane Center's website. All they show are cold clear facts and in the panic that surrounds these storms, cold, clear facts are the road to salvation. So chin up, it's hurricane season!

Where's the value in an innovation no one can clean?

This is the new Polhedra series from Franke.

They sure are interesting but how does one clean a sink with a faceted bottom? Seriously. I'm all about innovation and new ways to approach old problems, but this strikes me as something that causes problems that didn't exist before.

Trendir tells me that I can read all about it on Franke's website but I can't find a mention of it. Again, where's the value in this innovation?

Sarah Jessica parker et al, please retire.

Daily Shite

Sex and the City was a pretty funny sit com on HBO once upon a time. As such it was a moment in time. A group of women running around and acting like stereotypical gay men was funny in 1999.

It's not 1999 anymore.

Ladies, you're sullying your legacy. Let's call it a day. Shall we?

Out, out damned termites!

I came home Saturday only to find a bathtub full of termites. I don't know what the attraction of the tub was, but there they were in a fornicating mass. I've suspected that they were back for about the previous year but a combination of denial and avoidance had me waiting for solid proof. There were about a hundred examples of that solid proof in the tub when I got home.

Florida and most of the extreme southeastern US are in the hot seat when it comes to drywood termites. The species prevalent here is Incisitermes snyderi. I looked it up and ID-d the SOBs in the tub Saturday. Sure enough, they were I. snyderi, the same species as my last experience with them seven years ago. Incisitermes snyderi are called drywood termites because they never touch the ground.

Most termites are subterranean. That means they live in colonies below ground and make mud tubes up to wood they eat. Drywood termites actually live in the wood they're eating. Termites can be found just about everywhere on earth but they thrive particularly in tropical and near-tropical climates.

I live in a wooden building in a neighborhood composed of other wooden buildings exclusively. Building with concrete block didn't catch on in Florida until the boom that followed the Second World War. As a result, dealing with termites goes hand in hand with living in anything built prior to 1945 or so. Termites swarm in the early to mid summer here. When a colony reaches maturity, it starts to produce fertile males and females. These fertile termites are also winged. It's these winged termites, called alates, that swarm. Alates are the only termites that ever leave the colony and they take wing to start new colonies of their own.

California and the west have their share of termite headaches and despite the different species involved, they follow the same life cycle and wreak the same havoc.

Because I live in an old wooden house in an old wooden neighborhood, the termites are never really gone. Every time there's a swarm, each of us is at the same risk of getting them again. I think of them as a cold that a group of people keep passing around.

So now what? Well, the fix is to be tented.

When I first moved to Florida, I remember seeing fumigation tents and thinking that having to live through that would be humiliating. I don't know what I was thinking specifically, but I figured that those tents were a testament to a person's slovenly housekeeping, among other things.

Nothing could be further from the truth though. So in my very near future will be the three-day inconvenience of a tent fumigation.

A tent fumigation is the only way to kill drywood termites. Left to their own devices, they will destroy a home though it will take them a while. Tent fumigation involves wrapping a home in a plastic tarp and then pumping in sulfuryl fluoride (SO₂F₂) and letting the gas do its thing. SO₂F₂ is the ideal fumigant, it's deadly but inert. That means it doesn't bond with anything or leave a residue after the fumigation's complete. Ultimately, the chemical bonds in it break and it turns back into the fluorine and sulfur dioxide it began as. Thou art Fluoine and sulfur dioxide and to fluorine and sulfur dioxide thou shalt return.

Because SO₂F₂ leaves no residue, it leaves behind no residual protection either. If I'm still sitting in this same living room in six or seven years, I'll get to go through this all over again.

Paraphrasing Shakespeare is one of my coping mechanisms, but in this case it won't help. I can pull a Lady MacBeth all I want. Out, out damned termites! But at the end of the day, I need SO₂F₂.