"Ask the__" in reverse

Sometimes I have questions that are too small for General Questions. I am sure I am not alone.

So if you have a question that can be addressed by an expert or someone else in-the-know, leave it here. And if you are in-the-know, please answer!

My questions:

How do they wash the hair of coma patients?

Do news anchors write their own copy? And what do they do between the six o’clock and 11 o’clock news?

In the simplest terms, what is the main reason a website suddenly stops working? And what causes the network to go down at work?

Where do bus drivers generally take their bathroom breaks?

Are school bus drivers considered part-time or full-time employees? Can they draw unemployment benefits during the summer?

Same way we wash the rest of their body - by doing a bed bath. We simply use a no-rinse shampoo.

No-rinse shampoo.

Didn’t know such a thing existed. I may try it one day!

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

Some do. Although it’s often more like editing than writing.

Drink.

Incompetence.

Incompetents.

It probably depends on the district (county, state, etc.). I have a friend who drives a school bus, and she is considered a “9-month employee” along with certain other employees like school secretaries and lunch ladies. She is considered part-time, but is qualified for a few certain benefits, but cannot get unemployment over the summer.

I think the better ones are making decisions about what stories will be included in the broadcast.

Do women who die during menstruation continue to bleed in death? If so, how is this dealt with in the morgue? And when the body is prepared for burial, is the uterus emptied?

A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could, if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

There are a few options; the Portland transit company (TriMet) pays businesses to allow their drivers to use the bathrooms. They’ve also installed at least one porta-potty; recently, a driver was stabbed by a person unknown when he exited the facility.

The 10 o’clock news.

Just asked the Army Nurse sitting beside me, he says no, with no blood pressure, no bleeding.

I have a family member who is a school bus driver in NYC. He gets paid full-time even though he only spends 4-5 hours a day working, and he collects unemployment during the summer.

Okay, I’ve got a question for all the bug experts out there. What are these tiny, aphid-like bugs? I spotted them on the Tomales Point Trail in Point Reyes – I’ve seen mass hatchings from other insect egg cases, but I can’t figure out what these are.

Honestly this is pretty much like asking why a car would stop working. There are hundreds of ways to build a Web site, dozens of ways to put them online, and millions of ways for them to break.

One way that web sites go down that often makes the news is called Distributed Denial of Service, DDoS. A baddie writes a virus that goes on a bunch of people’s machines, then all these machines go to a Web site and do the equivalent of hitting the “refresh” button over and over and over. Every one of these requests must be served and the Web server gets overwhelmed and nobody can get to it.

There’s also a myriad of reasons why one’s network would go down at work.

But it’s the uterine lining sloughing off, not real bleeding. Of course I don’t really know what the mechanism is for the sloughing…?

They look reduviid-like, but I’d need a microscope and a key to really be sure.

As far as which species they are–you’d need an expert on the local Hemiptera (the insect order these little guys are in) to figure that out. Depending on the anatomical features used to identify specimens in this group down to species, you may not be able to get IDs past genus, if you even get that far.

Where I live, school bus drivers are part time employees and even receive unemployment for spring and winter breaks. So do the people who work in the school cafeterias.

I don’t know, but a nurse friend of mine told me that when preparing a newly deceased person for the casket, she usually plugs up the anus with a wad of cotton wool.

Car question: When you put your car in “Park”, what is actually happening inside the transmission? I’ve read there’s something called a parking “pawl” (iirc), but I don’t know what it does. Does it somehow engage a gear that can’t turn? Or the car version of putting a stick in the spokes? It doesn’t seem to be a “brake” mechanism where some sort of caliper grabs something, due to the fact that it will bind on a hill (a brake wouldn’t do that).

This has always mystified me.