Understand Corrosion to Prevent It

T is done with finals, so tonight we went out to dinner (at Chevy's, for some strange reason) and to see the movie Juno.

Unless you've been living on Mars, you know that Juno is a well-reviewed film about a teenage girl who gets pregnant and chooses adoptive parents for her child. It really was as good as all that--every scene between Ellen Page and Michael Cera brought a well-earned lump to my throat.

I was kind of hoping that the movie would bring me some sort of magical healing vis a vis adoption, but that was probably expecting too much. I think it would have helped if the adoptive mother in the movie (Vanessa, played by Jennifer Garner) was a little more like Juno--since I could see some of myself in Juno, but not much of myself in Vanessa.

On the way to the movie, T and I were talking about Christmas presents. The other day, I asked my dad what he wanted for Christmas. He requested a book called Understand Corrosion to Prevent It, by a Canadian professor. My dad is a retired engineer, and he enjoys conducting experiments in the backyard.

I had to send a check to an address in Montreal to get it. Here is a brief description of the book:

Corrosion failures produce accidents, environmental damage and large financial losses to companies, which could be prevented or mitigated by the application of known technology. This 50-page booklet is a simple, concise, and practical introduction to corrosion problems written for engineers, technologists and administrators in industry, as well as for students. Its aim is to make the reader aware of corrosion failures, costs and prevention methods and to avoid costly blunders.

When I mentioned this to T, he remarked: "I bet that Understand Corrosion to Prevent It has never been given as a Christmas gift in the history of the world."

True. But isn't preventing corrosion something we could all do a little more of?

Thanks to Polandeze for the flickr commons photo.