Tuesday thoughts about sugar and other stuff…

Good Morning Humboldt County!

Good to see you here this morning. Pull up a chair, grab a cup of your favorite hot beverage, and let’s see what’s happening today:

Sugar may be sapping your memory

Do you ever forget people's names? Enter a room and forget why you went there? Forget a word mid-sentence? As we get older, these types of "senior moments" happen more often. Many of the people I evaluate worry that these slips mean they are getting Alzheimer's disease. In most cases, they aren't. They're just part of normal, age-related memory decline. Starting at about age 30, our ability to process and remember information declines with age.

New app allows your unborn child to choose his/her name

Nathan Parks created the 99 cent "Kick to Pick" iPhone app for parents undergoing that conundrum of being responsible for that ultimate act of choosing a name for their child, placing the choice in the hands — and kicking feet — of the unborn child.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Food prices set to double
by 2030, aid group says

Food prices could double in the next 20 years and demand in 2050 will be 70 percent higher than now, U.K. charity Oxfam said on Tuesday, warning of worsening hunger as the global food economy stumbles close to breakdown.

"The food system is pretty well bust in the world," Oxfam Chief Executive Barbara Stocking told reporters, announcing the launch of the Grow campaign as 925 million people go hungry every day.

General admits protesters in Egypt subjected to 'virginity tests'

Things have gone from bad to worse since President Mubarak was ousted. I can tell you one thing, I wouldn’t want to be a woman in that part of the world! They’re treated like cattle with less rights.

A senior Egyptian general told CNN Tuesday that officials performed "virginity checks" on women arrested during the uprising that led to former President Hosni Mubarak's ouster, the first time the authorities have admitted they performed such tests during the revolution.
The tests were first reported by the human rights group Amnesty International, weeks after a March 9 protest in Cairo's Tahrir Square in which female demonstrators were allegedly beaten, strip-searched, threatened with prostitution charges and forced to submit to procedures that supposedly determined whether they were virgins.

'Weinergate': The 'strange' scandal of a congressman and a lewd Twitter photo

Finally this morning, I’ve saved the best for last. This weekend, Rep. Anthony Weiner's Twitter account sent out a photo of a man in underwear from the waist down. Weiner says his account was hacked. What's going on here?

A "lewd" photograph of a man in underwear, shot from the waist down, was sent from the Twitter account of Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) on Friday night, then quickly deleted — but not before Andrew Breitbart's Big Government website posted the photo. Weiner says his Twitter account was hacked, and has hired a lawyer to explore criminal or civil action against the perpetrators of the "prank." Conservative bloggers claim Weiner sent the photo to a Washington State college student, dubbing the "strange" saga "Weinergate."

PHOTO - Rep. Anthony Weiner leaves his apartment amid controversy surrounding a lewd Twitter photo

That’s it for this morning. Time for me to walk on down the road…

Life is like a rainbow… You need both the sun and the rain to make its colors appear

photo VIA Stumble

Watch out for those mosquitoes during your Memorial Day barbeque

Some folks seem to be magnets for mosquitoes, while others rarely get bitten. What makes the little buggers single you out and not the guy or gal you're standing next to at the Memorial Day backyard barbecue?

The two most important reasons a mosquito is attracted to you have to do with sight and smell, says Jonathan Day, a professor of medical entomology at the University of Florida in Vero Beach. Lab studies suggest that 20 percent of people are high attractor types, he says.

Mosquitoes are highly visual, especially later in the afternoon, and their first mode of search for humans is through vision, explains Day. People dressed in dark colors -- black, navy blue, red -- stand out and movement is another cue.

Once the mosquito keys in on a promising visual target, she (and it's always "she" -- only the ladies bite) then picks up on smell. The main attractor is your rate of carbon dioxide production with every exhale you take.

Those with higher metabolic rates produce more carbon dioxide, as do larger people and pregnant women. Although carbon dioxide is the primary attractant, other secondary smells coming from your skin or breath mark you as a good landing spot.

Lactic acid (given off while exercising), acetone (a chemical released in your breath), and estradiol (a breakdown product of estrogen) can all be released at varying concentrations and lure in mosquitoes, says Day. Your body temperature, or warmth, can also make a difference. Mosquitoes may flock to pregnant women because of their extra body heat.

But with more than 350 compounds isolated from odors produced by human skin, researchers have barely scratched the surface behind a mosquito's preference for certain people, says Joseph Conlon, a medical entomologist and the technical advisor to the American Mosquito Control Association.

Although it may all boil down to human odor and genetics -- studies of twins have revealed they tend to be attractive or repellant to mosquitoes in the same measure -- it's more complicated than that, suggests Conlon.

He says the latest thinking is that it might not be about what makes people more attractive to mosquitoes, but what makes them not as repellant. It could be that individuals who get less bites produce chemicals on their skin that make them more repellant and cover up smells that mosquitoes find attractive.

Mosquitoes don't bite you for food, since they feed off plant nectar, Conlon explains. Females suck your blood to get a protein needed to develop their eggs, which can then send more pesky insects into the world to annoy you.

But keep this in mind when you're outdoors this summer: Mosquitoes are more attracted to people after they drink a 12-ounce beer. It could be that people breathe a little harder after a cold one or their skin is a little warmer, suggests Conlon. But that won't stop him from having a brewski, even though he considers himself a mosquito magnet.

Here are more fun facts about mosquitoes and bites:

• Eating bananas will not attract mosquitoes and taking vitamin B-12 will not repel them; these are old wives' tales.
• Some mosquito species are leg and ankle biters; they cue into the stinky smell of bacteria on your feet.
• Other species prefer the head, neck and arms perhaps because of the warmth, smells emitted by your skin, and closeness to carbon dioxide released by your mouth. 
• The size of a mosquito bite welt has nothing to do with the amount of blood taken and everything to do with how your immune system responds to the saliva introduced by the mosquito into your skin.
• The more times you get bitten by a particular species of mosquito, the less most people react to that species over time. The bad news? There's more than 3,000 species worldwide.
• article source

What happened to the real meaning of Memorial Day?

By Dave Stancliff/For The Times-Standard

Posted: 05/29/2011 02:30:30 AM PDT

Tomorrow is Memorial Day. Today, I'd like to talk about how it has been transformed into something else, and what it means to most Americans.

Barbecues and beer. Getting into vehicles and traveling for fun. A three-day weekend. A time to go to the beach and burn ourselves to a crisp. A day off from school. A break in the work week. All of these activities and more go through the average American's head regarding a holiday originally designed to mourn our military dead.

What a bizarre twist for Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day. Once it was a day of remembrance for those who died in our nation's service. Now it's a time to hope that gas prices don't get too high for travel.

While Waterloo, New York, was officially declared the birthplace of Memorial Day by President Lyndon Johnson in May 1966, it's difficult to prove the origins of the day. Historians think the day had many separate beginnings as towns held spontaneous gatherings to honor the Civil War dead in the 1860s.

Memorial Day was officially proclaimed on May 5, 1868, by Gen. John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, in his General Order No. 11, and was first observed on May 30, 1868. Flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery.

It's not important what was the very first town to honor the war dead. It is important that Memorial Day was established. Memorial Day is not about division. It is about reconciliation; it is about coming together to honor those who gave their all.

Were you aware of this history? Are your children aware of this history? Did you know the first state to officially recognize the holiday was New York in 1873? By 1890 it was recognized by all the northern states. The South refused to acknowledge the day, honoring their dead on separate days until after World War I when the holiday changed from honoring those who died in the Civil War to honoring Americans who died fighting in all of our wars.

Traditional observance of Memorial Day has faded over the years. Many Americans have forgotten its meaning and traditions. At many cemeteries, the graves of the fallen are increasingly ignored, neglected. Most people no longer remember to fly the flag at half-staff for the day.

While there are towns and cities that still hold Memorial Day parades, many have not held a parade in decades. Some people think the day is for honoring any and all dead, not just those fallen in service to our country.

What happened? How did this day turn into a free-for-all, three-day vacation? Many feel when Congress made the day into a three-day weekend with the National Holiday Act of 1971, it made it easier for people to be distracted from the spirit and meaning of the day.

As the VFW stated in its 2002 Memorial Day address: “Changing the date merely to create three-day weekends has undermined the very meaning of the day. No doubt, this has contributed greatly to the general public's nonchalant observance of Memorial Day.”

To help re-educate and remind Americans of the true meaning of Memorial Day, the “National Moment of Remembrance” resolution was passed in December 2000, which asks that at 3 p.m. local time all Americans: “Voluntarily and informally observe in their own way a moment of remembrance and respect, pausing from whatever they are doing for a moment of silence or listening to taps.”

What we need is a full return to the original day of observance. On Jan. 19, 1999, Sen. Inouye introduced bill S 189 which proposed to restore the traditional day of observance of Memorial Day to May 30th instead of “the last Monday in May.” To date, there have been no further developments on the bill. Go to www.usmemorialday.org/ if you think that we should restore the traditional day of observance.

Meanwhile, if someone wants to start a new three-day holiday at the end of May, I say go for it. Call it “Barbecue Day and Travel Too,” a day of escape from drudgery.

As It Stands, the true meaning of Memorial Day is rapidly becoming a trivia question!

Sea otters holding hands to keep from drifting apart while sleeping

(via Wikipedia, Reddit)

Alice in Medicareland: One Voucher Makes You Larger

Guest Opinion

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

"If I had a world of my own," said Alice, "everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn't."

The rabbit hole's got nothing on this place."Let's save Social Security from a 25% cut in 27 years," they told Alice, "by cutting more than that, starting now." Paul Ryan's GOP plan doesn't "end Medicare," they explained. It just, well, ends it. And vouchers aren't really vouchers. Even "fact-checking" site Politifact joined in, chastising Democrats for saying Ryan's proposal would "change the essential nature of Medicare." That was right before they noted that it would "end the aspect of Medicare that directly covers specific services, such as hospital coverage." Read the rest here.

photo source

Saturday Morning Thoughts: melon-sized hail and other stuff

Good Morning Humboldt County!

Got my coffee and I’m ready to go. Take a load off and join me. The national weather continues to be the top story in the news: 

Violent weather swept across the Eastern seaboard, dropping heavy rains that flooded towns from New England to Georgia, knocking out power and killing at least three people in the Atlanta area.

Caroline Floyd, lead meteorologist at The Weather Channel, wrote on its website that Saturday would be "another day of thunderstorms in the Northeast."

Melon-sized hail that fell during a severe thunderstorm in Norman, OK. … Read more »

(Photo: api.newson6.com)

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Palin not invited to this rally by current organizers, but she still plans on attending.

Rolling Thunder: Sarah Palin not invited

One day after Sarah Palin announced her bus tour, a group sponsoring a Memorial Day weekend event she plans to attend said they never invited her.

"She wasn't invited. We heard yesterday she came out with a press release she was coming to Rolling Thunder," Ted Shpak, national legislative director of Rolling Thunder, told "Andrea Mitchell Reports." Shpak is one of three members of Rolling Thunder's current leadership who says he had no idea Palin was coming until it was posted on her website.

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Cops: Slain 'Grandma Bandit' was a man

 

The elderly-looking gun-toting robber nicknamed “Grandma Bandit,” blamed for a string of heists of several Atlanta-area drugstores, was actually a man, police say.

The revelation was made by police Friday evening, hours after the suspect was fatally shot after a police chase, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution reported.

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Time for me to head on down the road…

After 92 years, millionaire miser’s heirs finally split $100M

In bizarre bequest, it was locked away until 21 years after the last grandchild died

In 1919, he was a greedy multimillionaire who didn’t want to see his family get its hands on the vast fortune he’d amassed as a lumber baron.

 Story Here

Finally Friday: brace yourself for a summer of sluts and other stuff

Good Morning Humboldt!

Got my coffee and my muse. Pull up a chair, take a load off, and join me this morning.

There’s something fishy going on in our food supply:

When you order fish, or buy it at at a supermarket, there’s better than a 20 percent chance you’re not getting what you think you are.

Scientists are discovering rampant fish labeling fraud in supermarket coolers and restaurant tables: cheap fish is often substituted for expensive fillets, and overfished species are passed off as fish whose numbers are plentiful.

On Wednesday, Oceana released a new report titled “Bait and Switch: How Seafood Fraud Hurts Our Oceans, Our Wallets and Our Health.” With rates of fraud in some species found to run as high as 70 percent, the report concluded, the United States needs to “increase the frequency and scope” of its inspections.

In da (smelly) club? Testing scents in smoke-free nightspots

Smoking bans are increasingly found in bars and nightclubs around the world. But as the smell of cigarette smoke slowly fades from your favorite hotspot, new, not-always-pleasing odors rear their stinky head. Body odor, cologne that should have been left in the 80s, stale beer -- what’s a barfly or club kid to do? Researchers in the Netherlands decided the questions needed a scientific answer.The findings were published online this month in the journal Chemosensory Perception.

Brace yourself for the summer of 'sluts'

The summer of sluts was kicked off this week when msnbc cable host Ed Schultz, perhaps channeling Dan Aykroyd in his old "Saturday Night Live" debates with Jane Curtin (“Jane, you ignorant slut!”) called conservative radio personality Laura Ingraham  a "right-wing slut" on his syndicated radio program . Schultz apologized, but was suspended from his cable show for a week.

The incident provided an unexpected publicity boost to “Slut Walk” protests planned for cities all over North America. Chicago and Los Angeles will see parades of of self-proclaimed "sluts" June 4, followed by San Diego on June 11, with 70 or so walks in Seattle, Portland, New York and other cities through the summer.

The walks, which began in April after a Toronto police officer advised women in a York University audience not to dress like a “slut” to avoid sexual assault, are not only attempting to raise awareness about sexual violence, but to redefine the meaning of “slut.”

The end is nigh! Internet meme spotted in real world

While idly browsing the Web diligently scouring the Internet for important news this morning, I made the mistake of clicking a link which would make me quiver with dread. What could possibly be so frightening? Photo proof that Internet memes are taking over the real world.

The photo in question was uploaded to Imgur — the photo-hosting service of choice for Reddit users — and pointed out by a commenter on the popular link-sharing site.

In the image, we see a bored-looking bespectacled redhead who is holding up a sign proclaiming "I left the ocean. It's too current." Yes, that's right — it's a real-life version of "Hipster Ariel."

The "Hipster Ariel" meme has been making its way around the Internet since about the beginning of 2011, according to trend-tracking site KnowYourMeme. The basic idea is to poke fun of the contemporary hipster subculture by using macro images — photos with superimposed captions — of an altered version of Disney's Ariel.

That’s all for now. Time for me to head on down the road…

The border between heaven and earth is in Bolivia

source