I’m a big PGA golf fan and I want to just say congrats to Mr. Corey Pavin for winning his first tournament since 1996. After battling cancer, and struggling to even make the cut this year, I’m real happy to see this gentlemen of the tour win once again.
And yes, sometimes the good guys do win.
Ah, as the media is want to do; they love controversy even if it is something as silly as the debate about breast feeding babies in public. Babytalk, a magazine devoted to raising infants, had a baby breast feeding on the cover in their most recent issue. Amazingly, thousands of complaints came in angry that they would dare put a breast on the cover of a magazine! My response? AMERICA GET OVER IT AND LIGHTEN UP!!!
We complain about radical Islamists covering women up but we act like 13 year old boys when we see a natural event like a mother breast feeding a baby. One mother, was quoted as saying the following regarding the magazine cover and the effect on her young son – “I shredded it,” “A breast is a breast — it’s a sexual thing. He didn’t need to see that.” If our puritanical silliness would interpreting breast feeding as a sexual event, maybe it wouldn’t be. If you ever have a chance to go to Europe, you’d realize how asinine this controversy is.
We don’t complain when we see violence on magazine covers or in games but oh help us Lord if we dare show a women’s half breast on the cover of a baby magazine. No wonder our crime rate is higher than almost any country in the world and we have such a large population of sexual deviants. Time to make a change and put our priorities in the right place.
Some people come into this world with the intent of helping others and some come into the world to hurt others. Then there are people so angry with the world they feel it is important for them to tear others down. I have devoted much of my life to helping others through my work in Rotary, Carbon Based Corporation, and other avenues of service. The most important though is my work to help my daughter Tasya deal with the effects of epilepsy. My parents led me to believe the first choice is best. Still, there have been bumps in the road, and choices I made were not always the right ones but I know that my intent was always to help those less fortunate than me.
It has come to my attention that there is an individual out there attempting to attack my reputation once again with the same tired, old, psychotic ramblings that they have hurled at me and countless others who have dared to disagree with them. This person has gone so far as to join newsgroups (Yahoo) and falsefy their identity and write e-mails about me that were so far from reality as to boggle ones imagination. My only theory is that they are suffering from manganese induced schizophrenic episodes.
Since I know the person is likely to read this blog, I’d like to give a little shout out to them and let them know that the calls I’m getting from friends they’ve talked to has been nothing short of a laugh fest. One said that the persons vitriolic diatribe against me was so pathetic they kind of felt sorry for the person.
They come at me with all of these negative, angry accusations, some actually based on a smidge of reality, but so blown out of proportion as to make them look pretty damned pathetic. The more they do it, the better I look in the eyes of the people they talk to.
The bottom line here is while this person continues to piss on me from a distance, as I tell my friends, I’m not getting wet anymore. So, if they want to continue with the childish behavior and continue to harass me, and tell lies to people, that’s ok. I’ve come to expect nothing less from them. It saddens me to think that this person is so angry that they waste so much energy on trying to bad-mouth me. If they would use that to help others, maybe the world would be a little bit of a better place to live. If not, oh well, I guess I’ll just have to listen to my friends continue to chuckle.
Since one of my pastimes is cooking, I’m going to post a few of my favorite recipes on my blog from time to time. One of the simplest and best ways to cook chicken is known as beer-can chicken. Since discovering this versatile method of either grilling or baking chicken, it is the method my friends and family most look forward to.
Steven Raichlen has a great book on the subject with tons of different ways of using this method of cooking. It’s aptly called “Beer-Can Chicken” and to get a copy, just click on the link below and buy one for yourself from Amazon and while you’re at it, pick up a few extras as gifts (and hope you get invited to your friends house when they try out a recipe or two).
My favorite version doesn’t use regular beer but the other variety, Root Beer. Since my oldest one is sensitive to citrus, I stuff the chicken with apples and onions before hoisting it on top of the can of root beer.
There are other “beer can stands” that lets you set the chicken on a stainless steel contraption that serves the same purpose as the can with better stability for around $20 or so.
Try this method and you’ll never cook chicken (or any other bird) the same way again.
In a study published in the July 2006 issue of the prestigious Environmental Health Perspectives, Goth et al, linked thimerasol found in vaccines to alterations is the was dendric cells respond to biochemical signals. Dendric cells are the bodies signal men telling T cells to attack infectious invaders. Unfortunately, thimerasol may interfere with these cells ability to read the invaders signals correctly. They go on to claim that concentrations of 200 ppb (parts per billion) of thimerasol can kill immature dendric cells which can set a child off into the world with an impaired immune system.
Let’s end the controversy today and have a worldwide ban on the continued use of thimerasol.
Most physicians typically give people with pneumonia a seven to 10 day regime of antibiotics. Recent research published in the British Medical Journal (June 10th) suggests that a three day treatment regimen may be just as effective.
One of the greatest mysteries in earth’s history was the mass extinction known as the Permian-Triassic extinction 251 million years ago. There has been a lot of speculation but it seems that a 300-mile crater found under the Antarctic ice may be the evidence scientists have been looking for. Five times larger than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, this meteor was the granddaddy of them all.
According to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 13th, 2006, mammalian hearts may contain stem cells. This may lead to a new generation of treatment for victims of coronary heart disease if we can get rid of the present administration in the White House whose misguided veto of federally funding stem cell research will set back research by 5-10 years.
In the June 29th, 2006 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from China followed three groups of people with differing intakes and excretion levels of iodine. What they found was startling. People with excessive and more than adequate intakes of iodine had a higher incidence of subclinical hypothyroidism than did those with low intakes. The upper groups also had a higher incidence of auto-immune thyroiditis as well. The group with mildly deficient iodine intake seemed to do best.
A couple of comments here. First off, as is typical with medical research, only one item was looked at and that was the relationship between iodine and thyroid function which is myopic and counter to the complexity of human biochemistry. Did they look at the interactions with protein intake, especially tyrosine competency? Did they look into the availability of selenium in the diet? Of course not. Instead they made a sweeping statement that excessive iodine can cause hypothyroidism and even hinted that too much iodine can cause thyroid cancer. This then is taken by the media to be gospel and public health officials will make decisions based on incomplete science.
If the concept of metabonomics is utilized as it should be, then personalized judgements of the need for iodine would be on a biochemically individualized basis instead of population based guesswork. Medicine needs to catch up to science before more damage to the public’s health is done.
What is important about this study is that blanket statements that everyone needs iodine is potentially dangerous as you may induce hypothyroidism instead of preventing it. Back to biochemical individuality if you ask me.
PDBE’s are commonly used flame-retardants found in everything from electronics, automobiles and furniture. There are 3 main forms in use today, deca-, penta-, and octa-BDE’s each with drawbacks and potential toxic side-effects. Research has suggested that the deca-BDE was the least toxic as the other two have been implicated in fetal development disruption although the EPA considers deca-BDE a possible human carcinogen.
In a study that will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Environmental Science and Technology, researchers have found that certain forms of bacteria like Sulfurospirillum multivoranscan convert deca-BDE into a seven- or eight-bromine form which then imparts a greater toxicity to the chemical. Also, other bacteria can convert the newly formed chemical down even further which can make them even more toxic. Considering that PDE’s are ubiquitous in the environment, this is very disturbing news.
Trenbolone acetate, a synthetic anabolic steroid used in the cattle industry to “beef-up” livestock is being found in numerous streams. The chemical when broken down is a testosterone like substance that is making female fish develop masculine-like traits.
What disturbs me is how these fish might be getting on to the dinner table of our children and into the blood stream of unborn fetuses. Folks, if you eat beef, eat organic and force the meat producers to give us real food not adulterated with fake hormones.
One of the arguments against the use of glucosamine was that it caused, or at least contributed towards the development of type 2 diabetes. While many of us in the supplement field thought this was a bogus claim, it wasn’t until the recent American Diabetes Association meeting in Washington, D.C. (June 9-13, 2003) that researchers put that to bed. Rajaram J. Karne led a team that showed that taking high dose glucosamine “…doesn’t make any measurable difference on insulin’s action.” So the next time your physician warns you about taking glucosamine, thell him to take 2 sugar pills and call you in the morning.
An unexpected finding also presented at the meeting was that people taking antidepressants are at a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes. People on antidepressant medications had 3 times the risk of developing diabetes than others. Another reason to try other means of relieving depression than taking drugs. Your body will thank you.