THE LEFT LANE
Tea-time benefits

• For tired, swollen eyes, use wet tea bags as compresses to reduce puffiness.
• Place brewed, cold tea bags on your skin to help lessen the discomfort of painful sunburns.
• Soothe dry skin with a cotton cloth soaked in peppermint tea.
• Black tea that has been refrigerated for a few hours makes a natural skin refresher.
• A soothing foot bath can be made from a tub of warm tea. Black tea may even help give feet a fresh smell.

Fight shower grime

Don't you just hate those hard-water marks on shower walls — crusty little white lime deposits that sometimes seem impossible to remove? Home writers Morris and James Carey have a solution: First, try sodium carbonate, which happens to be the base for many cleaners and is the primary ingredient in washing soda. If a strong solution of sodium carbonate doesn't do the trick, try a squirt of liquid toilet-bowl cleaner. Bowl cleaners are strong, dangerous chemicals, so use them with eye-and-skin protection and plenty of ventilation. Once the water stains are gone, apply a coat of car wax to all the surfaces in the shower. Doing so will make cleaning a breeze the next time.

Need a rich uncle?

Always wish for a rich uncle to pay your way through school? He's on the Internet at MyRichUncle.com, but his deep pockets have one snag: You have to agree to give up a portion of your future income in exchange for the money.

Investors have focused mostly on graduate students in fields such as law, business, medicine and engineering.

In return, investors have been promised anywhere from 0.1 percent to 0.4 percent of each thousand dollars of a student's future gross income for 10 to 15 years.

Raza Khan, one of the brains behind the business, said MyRichUncle has doled out cash to 75 college students since opening its cyber doors last year. The mission is more about investing in the future of America than finding the next Bill Gates, Khan said. "It's more like having a rich uncle than taking money out of a bank," he said. "Investors are taking a chance on you."

Jazz isn't the only thing that always tastes best 'round midnight. So in recognition of Child Abuse Prevention Month in April, a trio of Honolulu's best blues musicians will get together for "Midnight Blues," a concert benefitting Prevent Child Abuse Hawaii.

Headlining the April 12 blues fest at John Dominis' The Edge nightclub will be Third Degree, Keahi Conjugacion and Bluzilla. The concert starts at 10 p.m. and ends at last call (uh, that's 1:30 a.m.). Tickets are $15 in advance and $20 on concert day. Sponsor tables are available for $500. For more information, call 523-0955.