Would you like genetically modified fries with that?

Had lunch yet? How about a nice big juicy radioactive tuna fish sandwich!

Eating the fish is not harmful to humans, researchers have told the Christian Science Monitor, but it may be a good idea to bring a Geiger Counter to your neighborhood sandwich shop just in case. Lack of curiosity can kill the cat, even though for humans ignorance is often bliss.

“Small amounts” of cesium-137 and cesium-134 released from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant turned up in tunas snagged off the California coast near San Diego last August. That’s four months after the chemicals were released into the Pacific.

The Japanese used water to cool the nuclear reactors and millions of gallons of runoff went right into the ocean.

Cesium-134 breaks down fairly quickly and ceseium-137 breaks down after a few thousand years, so everything should be back to normal by about 5012.

ABC News, covering the tuna story last year, reported: “Japan’s nuclear crisis is an ocean away — unless you’re a tuna, the kind that ends up in cans of tuna fish across the United States.

“Every spring the torpedo-shaped tuna leaves the waters off Japan, swimming at speeds of 50 miles and hour to the waters off Oregon and Washington, arriving in late summer. By the time it gets there, it may have spent time in some of the most radioactive water on Earth.”

Daniel Madigan of Stanford University told The Monitor: “I wouldn’t tell anyone what’s safe to eat or what’s not safe to eat. It’s become clear that some people feel that any amount of radioactivity, in their minds, is bad and they’d like to avoid it. But compared to what’s there naturally … and what’s established as safety limits, it’s not a large amount at all.”

The bluefin tuna already has low levels of natural radioactivity — potassium 40. Levels of this chemical have increased about 3 percent, according to Madigan. No big deal, maybe.

But what happens if you eat a tuna fish sandwich right before going through a screening booth at the airport? Will your body light up on screen like a Christmas tree?

You’ll know when you’re walking passed the security people and one of them asks you: “Hey! How was the tuna sandwich?”

Photo: Tuna salad sandwich via Flickr.com

 

Doggy dentists put bite on canine tooth decay

I was sitting in the vet’s office the other day when a young woman came out and asked me: “Do you brush at home?”

I said, “Well I try to brush my teeth every day, but sometimes … Oh, you mean my dog.”

Yes you can brush your dog’s teeth. At my wife’s insistence, we took our 8-year-old dog in for a professional cleaning, without anesthesia. Had they tried this with our previous dog, who unfortunately succumbed to old age several years ago, the staff would have needed a first aid kit handy to patch up all the wounds on their fingers and hands.

But our present dog, who has a very laid back, smoke-em-if-you-got-em attitude, endured the process without so much as a whiff of nitrous oxide, I was told.

Although this was a shelter dog who apparently spent some time roaming the mean streets of South Florida solo, his dental health was absolutely impeccable. Well, maybe not impeccable. He had some enamel stains which is not surprising considering the unknown material he likes to dig up in our backyard and and chew on.

He also had a lot of plaque and mild case of gingivitis, but overall he had no missing or loose teeth so I was quite impressed.

They recommended that we have our dog brush regularly and use an oral rinse. So I’ve been trying to teach him how to rinse and spit just with plain water as practice, but he can’t seem to get the hang of it.

A note we were given on home care had this to say: “Your pet’s home care routine can be easy! This can include brushing your pet’s teeth with a soft bristled toothbrush and pet toothpaste. Please do not use human paste because the flouride levels can be too high and it can make your pet sick.”

The other danger is that it can turn your pet into a communist. Just kidding on that one.

One advantage to having your dog’s teeth cleaned is that when he arrives home, his breath is minty-fresh. But I noticed that only lasted for a few hours.

His teeth are now pearly white though, the color of porcelain on a freshly cleaned sink at the Holiday Inn.

So I’m off to buy my dog his first toothbrush and then it’s on to the pet store to purchase some special dog toothpaste, with extra-low flouride levels.

Yes, I know he should be flossing as well but really, how much can you expect? Perhaps if we got him his own WaterPik ….

Photo: Dog teeth cleaning Via Flickr

 

America’s priority shift: From food quality to big homes and cars

Here’s another interesting slice of economic data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics via NPR’s Planet Money. It concerns how much money consumers spend on necessities now vs. 1949.

We know, from past surveys, that the amount spent on medical care has risen sharply. This snapshot shows that people spent 3.2 percent of their income on medical care in 1949, but 7.1 percent in 2011.

That’s about what you’d expect. The surprise is that Americans spent 40 percent of their income on food in 1949 but only 15.3 percent last year. That’s a 62 percent drop in what people spend on food, even though the assumption is that much of the inflation we see today is at the supermarket.

Some items have jumped in price, particularly those that are dependent on commodity prices, such as beef. Produce has remained relatively inexpensive especially if you look around for deals at farmer’s markets.

Corporate agriculture is the reason food prices have become a smaller part of the American budget. Family farms may have been wonderful environments in which to grow up and prosper, but they were largely inefficient ways to produce food, at least in comparison to mass production style corporate farming.

Unfortunately, the downside of corporate farming is pretty ugly. I recently watched a documentary on factory chicken production on the Top Documentary Films website and I won’t bother to post the actual link to the movie because it was nasty stuff. I’ve sworn off chicken and eggs unless they’re free range, and even then I’m not entirely sure about it.

A couple of week ago, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a piece about chickens rasied in factory farms, and what goes into the birds to maximize production. Namely, caffeine, the active ingredients in Tylenol and Benadryl, antibiotics and arsenic.

The analysis was based on a study by a researcher at Johns Hopkins University. Lab personnel were unable to test the actual chickens, so they looked at feather meal, a byproduct of chicken feathers.

According to Kristof, the Tylenol and Benadryl calm the birds down so their meat is more tender. (In China, they use the active ingredient in Prozac, he claims.)

“It turns out that arsenic has routinely been fed to poultry (and sometimes hogs) because it reduces infections and makes flesh an appetizing shade of pink,” Kristof said. The United States Poultry and Egg Association declined comment.

But essentially this is the price we pay for cheap food. You can go organic — if you trust the labeling — but then expect to pay much more than 15.3 percent of your budget.

But getting back to the BLS survey …. What ARE Americans spending more of their income on today? The biggest chunk is now spent on housing. The percentage shot up from 26.1 percent in 1949 to 41 percent in 2011. That’s the result of a trend that’s become very visible over the past decade: bigger houses.

In 1950, the average housing unit was under 1,000 square feet; it is now more than 2,000 square feet. Everybody needs more rooms to watch TV, surf the web and play video games.

The other big increase is in transportation, which climbed from 7.3 percent of household income to 16.9 percent. True, much of that is in the price of gas, but the rise in car prices is phenomenal. And, almost every Tom, Dick and Harriet have a car now. In 1950 there were three for each American; now there are eight.

These are the priorities of the culture that have been brewing over the last five decades. How will they be fine-tuned over the next 50 years?

Photo: McMansion under construction via Wikimedia Commons

 

Frank talk at the pizza test kitchen

For years, people have been trying every which way to cram more fat and calories into a pizza. As it turns out, it’s not that easy.

The original pizza pie idea was genius: Combine bread dough, sausage, tomato sauce, two or three different kinds of cheese and pepperoni and pop it into a 500-degree oven. The Right Stuff, as they used to say at NASA, but then some marketing guy at a pizza chain went to see the staff at the test kitchen. Go nuts, he said.

One of the first tricks was to infuse the crust with additional cheese. That outer crust is nice, but it’s a little dense isn’t it? Ideally, you have the flour and the yeast coming through and maybe a little olive oil and garlic. But still, crust is crust. Admit it, you’re sometimes tempted to leave it on the plate.

Then somebody walked into the lunch room at Pizza Hut, where the executive staff was eating arugula and salad with cherry tomatoes and drinking iced tea with fresh lemons, and said: “Hey, what about filling up the outside crust with more cheese?” The head of menu development dropped his fork on the floor and looked up with a smile, a tiny speck of green lodged between his two front teeth.

This is outstanding, he said, and so it began.

But that was then and this is now. As my brother-in-law recently explained, there is no progress without imagination, hard work and risk. So the head of a test kitchen walked into the Big Cheese’s office first thing after his morning trip to Starbuck’s and said: “Are you sitting down?”

But the boss was already sitting down and the test kitchen guy felt a little foolish. Nevertheless, he held up his thumb and forefingers like a 1950s movie director explaining a scene to MGM Boss Louis B. Mayer. “Picture this,” he said. “A hot dog embedded in the crust.”

Well, the boss practically dropped his bottle of Lipitor and pretty soon it was the buzz of the company. The idea was recently unveiled in the United Kingdom, according to CBS News. The pie comes with a free mustard drizzle.

For now, it’s only available across the pond, and the network quoted a Pizza Hut spokesman as saying that there are no plans to introduce it into the U.S. But hey, if enough folks demand it at their local Hut, my money says they’ll cave and put it on the menu pronto. What’s more American than pizza and hot dogs?

And I would bet you a dollar to a donut, as we used to say when a dollar could buy a lot of donuts, that whoever came up with the hot-dog pizza idea ended up with a week all-expenses-paid vacation in the Caribbean, smoking big cigars, sipping spiced rum and eating dinner on oversized white plates with a colorful little arrangement of food nestled decoratively in the center.

Here’s to the good life.

* * *

When I purchase a product and bring it home, I always note the manufacturer as I unwrap the package and prepare to use the item. Nine times out of 10 these days it’s made in China, or somewhere in Indonesia or, outside chance, South or Central America.

Not on Sunday though. Getting into the grass-cutting season this year, I realized how tired I was of my weed-eater getting a busted filament before finishing the job. I’d have to replace the filament once, sometimes twice, which takes a big bite out of my Sunday afternoon.

Well, this time I set my old line aside and tracked down a product called Rino-Tuff at Home Depot. Heavy Duty Univeral Trimmer Line, it said.

And here was the kicker at the top of the package: Made in the U.S.A. The line, a little thicker than the other spool I had, was made in Columbia, SC.

Result: One early break, which I blame on incorrect loading. I put a new filament in quickly and when I finished the job, I still had a weed-eater ready to go for the next cut.

Now I feel like I have to send them a campaign slogan. How’s this: “Rino-Tuff goes on the rampage when it comes to your weeds.”

Well heck. It’s not hot dog in a pizza crust, but I’ll keep working on it.

 

Crunch time at the super-store

I was at Home Depot the other day getting some plumbing supplies, and I wandered over to the light bulb aisle to see if they had 60W bug lights. I’d rather have a 40W bug light, but I can never find them, even amid the half-acre of bulbs that are on display.

The light bulb aisle at Home Depot is stocked with about every bulb you’d ever want, except the one you need. People don’t usually strike up conversations at the Home Depot light bulb aisle, but I ran into a co-shopper who was complaining bitterly.

He couldn’t find a simple 40W flourescent bulb. We both looked up and down, back and forth, for our respective bulbs but eventually gave up.

“It reminds me of the cereal aisle at the supermarket,” I said. That seemed to set him off.

He said that the cereal sections at supermarkets are perverse, and reckoned that there are only four or five brands worth purchasing. He called the supermarket cereal aisle “a hump hanger,” a term I’d never heard before. I hope it’s OK to use in polite company.

But I was generally agreeing with him until he started blasting Cheerios, which I like. Everyone has a favorite, I’m sure.

Overall though, the proliferation of breakfast cereals is a real-life horror story. I suppose the mark-up is so high that every producer wants to get into the act and create their own mini-market for their unique cereal.

Here’s a list of them from Wikipedia.

Whereas in the 1970s Kellogg’s perked up the market with a product like Apple Jacks, we now have Apple Jacks Crashers, Apple Jacks Gliders, Apple Jacks Apple Cones, and Apple Jacks Criss Crossed. There are also CinnaScary Apple Jacks and Apple Jacks Double Vision. I’m not even going to bother finding out what the last one means.

Cheerios appeared on the scene in 1941 under the name Cerrioats. It was renamed Cheerios apparently in 1945. But we now have Apple Cinnamon Cheerios, Berry Burst Cheerios, Cinnamon Burst Cheerios, Chocolate Cheerios, Frosted Cheerios, Fruity Cheerios, Honey Nut Cheerios, MultiGrain Cheerios, Oat Cluster Cheerios, and Yogurst Burst Cheerios, which comes in strawberry and vanilla. Millenios appeared briefly to celebrate the turn of the century from 1999-2000.

Corn Chex is a good solid product that was introduced in 1958. There are now 11 variations, including Chocolate Chex.

Corn Flakes, which kicked the whole shebang off in 1907, is hanging in. You will also now find Crazy Flakes, Cruncheroos and Crunchy Nut Cornflakes.

Some of the oddest brands over the years have promoted movies and TV shows: Ghostbusters Cereal (1988) and Ghostbusters II Cereal (1989); Heart to Heart Blueberry Oat Cluster Crunch; Honey Bunny (Pulp Fiction?); Krusty-O’s (The Simpsons); Nickelodeon Green Slime Cereal (2003); Pac-Man cereal (1983); and Pink Panther Flakes (1972-2007).

Limited Edition Smurfs Pebbles are still on the market, by the way.

You’ll have no trouble finding what you want if you stick to your favorite brands. Because you know exactly where they are so you can get in and out of the cereal aisle with a minimum of muss and fuss. What trips you up is when the store designers shuffle the deck and put your brand on a different shelf. This is a devious ploy to introduce you to cereal impulse purchases.

Or, if you’re at a strange store, an out-of-town market, best of luck. Figure on spending 10 or 15 minutes hunting for your brand.

Last week my daughter, visiting from out of town, asked me to pick up a box of Special K. Sure, I said. But when I got to the aisle I realized my naivety. Special K, but what kind?

I picked up my cell phone to find out. Then I noticed a guy down the aisle on his phone as well. He was reading the names of the brands off to some unknown cereal connoisseur ….

Photo via Flickr.com

 

Four stories spotlight seismic social shifts

There was a lot of health care news last week, much of it about the Supreme Court debate on the health care reform law.

Originally, I was convinced that the court would kick the can down the road and cite a 19th century law that the court can’t rule on a tax issue until the tax actually goes into effect. In this case, the penalty people would have to pay if they don’t purchase health insurance.

Now, it does in fact look like another 5-4 opinion along “party” lines to strike the law down, even though justices are supposed to rule on the law, not their political inclinations. The only point I’d add to what’s already been said is that past courts have been just as influenced by politics and social trends as this one. This isn’t new.

There were other big-ticket stories, too. Second on the hit parade, perhaps, was the passage of the Paul Ryan budget in the U.S. House. It virtually dismantles Medicare, guts Medicaid, and slashes other social services programs.

As alarming as this may be to many, I think passing this bill is a helpful addition to the American health care debate. As a result, people have a clear-cut choice in November. Keep Medicare or can it. Provide medical coverage to the poor via Medicaid or cut them loose to fend for themselves.

If you are in your late 40s or early 50s, and you’ve been paying into the Medicare system for 25 or 30 years, and still you’d like to give it up for the good of the country and the deficit, then you truly are a man or woman who stands behind their beliefs. In my view, you are dreaming if you think companies are going to sell you an affordable health insurance policy at age 75, 70 or even 65, but I salute you nonetheless.

Two other items of interest:

And then there was one: A century ago, Americans came from, and produced, big families. Couples with five to 10 kids weren’t uncommon. In the 1950s and ’60s, the 2.5-child family became the norm.

Families continued to shrink into the 1980s, and the divorce rate rose. Now as we head into the second decade of the 21st century, more people are going solo.

“The number of people living alone globally is skyrocketing,” says The Guardian in the United Kingdom. The number climbed from 153 million in 1996 to 277 million last year, according to a market researcher called Euromonitor International. About 27 percent of households in the U.S. consist of one person.

That breaks down to 18 million women and 14 million men, the majority of them middle-aged adults between 35 and 64. Solo households are king in Sweden, where almost half — 47 percent — have one resident.

The Guardian asks: “So what is driving it? The wealth generated by economic development and the social security provided by modern welfare states have enabled the spike.”

If that’s the case in the U.S., look for another reversal of this trend as changes to the safety net make people more vulnerable to economic shock, and more reliant on family and friends.

Woody Allen syndrome on the rocks: The term “neurotic” has more or less gone the way of the passenger pigeon, the New York Times reports. Decades ago, being neurotic meant that you were quirky but interesting. It has almost fallen out of the language in favor of more medically accurate ways of describing abnormal behavior.

“But in the process,” the Times says, “we’ve lost entirely the romance of neurosis, as well as its physical embodiment — a restless, grumbling, needy presence that once functioned in the collective mind as an early warning system, an inner voice that hedged against excessive optimism.”

In fact, the neurotic has been normalized, experts argue. Barbara Milrod, professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College explained: “These are ridiculous times, and if it all makes sense to you, there’s probably something wrong.”

 

40-year employment graphic highlights (ill) health of U.S. job market

I was interested in last week’s National Public Radio infographic, What America Does for Work. If anything shines a light on what’s going on in the U.S. economy, it’s a comparison of occupations today versus 1972, when the workforce began changing for a number of different reasons.

The meatiest category in 2012 is government employment — federal, state and local, and military. It also includes public education. This presently accounts for 16.6 percent of the workforce.

That is followed by wholesale and retail trade jobs (15.3 percent); education (private) and health services (15.2 percent); leisure and hospitality (10.2 percent); manufacturing (9 percent); financial activities (5.8 percent); construction (4.2 percent); “Other Services” (4 percent); transport and utilities (3.4 percent); media and telecommunications (2 percent); and mining and logging (0.6 percent).

In 1972, manfacturing was clearly king at 23.9 percent of the workforce. Imagine that almost a quarter of the American workforce was engaged in producing a product for domestic or foreign consumption.

And despite the gnashing of teeth over the high cost of the government workforce, 18.3 percent of the labor force were working for Uncle Sam, or a state or local agency, or the U.S. Postal Service. In other words, percentage-wise, the government workforce was bigger in 1972 than it is today.

Wholesale and retail trade stood at 15.7 percent, not all that different from what it would be 40 years later.

The picture is rounded out by professional and business services (7.4 percent); Lesure and hospitality (6.9 percent); education and health services (6.6 percent); construction (5.4 percent) financial activities (5.3 percent); transport and utilities (4.4 percent); media and telecommunications (2.8 percent); “Other Services” (2.6 percent) and mining and logging (0.9 percent).

Obviously, manufacturing has taken a huge hit, to no one’s surprise. This sector of the economy has been blown away by outsourcing, much of it to developing countries where Americans can’t compete with the low-wage manufacturing operations that make companies more profitable despite shipping costs.

The one big employment net gain for the U.S. in the past four decades has been in health care. There are a number of reasons for it. One is that the median age of the population has been getting older, so more care is needed. Another is that medical advances have gathered steam, and new technology is expensive.

Physicians and other providers have also learned to practice defensive medicine in order to head off potential lawsuits. And consumers often beg for the latest drugs because they’ve been told on TV again and again to “ask your doctor” about a new treatment for this or that.

However, some of the fastest-growing segments of the health care employment segment are in management, business, and financial occupations, which comprised 4.3 percent in 2008, and that will jump 16.8 percent by 2018, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Office and administrative support positions already total 17.7 percent of the health care workforce, and are expected to edge up to 19.7 (that’s one in five health care jobs) by 2018. Between the two, that’s 36.5 percent — more than a third of the workforce in this category — by 2018.

The U.S. health care system is one of the most complex businesses on the planet, and now we know what it takes to support it. And by the way, don’t assume that the other 63.5 percent are physicians talking turkey to their patients. A lot of the rest of it includes things like social workers and other mental health counselors, pharmacists, nurses, and lab techs.

They are, however, directly involved in delivery of services.

Isolate it to the insurance industry and you find that in the decade from 1997 to 2007, employment grew 52 percent from 293,000 to 444,000. Positions among providers, such as physicians and nurses, grew by 26 percent.

This is far from the whole picture of the changes in our economy over the last 40 years. But it’s interesting to note that one of the main employment drivers these days is a top-heavy system, strained and politically contentious, that seems out of necessity on the brink of major change.

 

Free pizza as a seminal marketing tool

What is the best marketing gimmick in the U.S. over the last decade or so? Well, possibly the free pizza come-on.

Googling free pizza the other day brought up 254,000,000 results, or 82 pages of unique websites. A heck of a lot of people have been getting into the act.

First of all, the prospect of free pizza is a reasonable one. If someone offers: “Win a free car!” you know your chances are about the same as finding a fillet mignon on the menu at Burger King. So why bother?

A pizza, though, is at its heart a very simple food. A little bread dough, rolled out thin, topped with tomato sauce (cheap) and mozzarella cheese (mostly cheap) and a meat or vegetable, and you’ve got yourself a respectable pizza.

Mind you, I’m not suggesting that preparing a good pizza is easy, a fact that is glaringly evident in all of the bad pizza shops on the street, no matter where you live. But to put out a C- quality pie is not that difficult and if you’re hungry, it can still be pretty good.

So Americans have become enamored with the stuff and marketers have stepped up to the plate.

This is why we saw, last week, a urology clinic in Massachusetts offer free pizza (large with one topping) for customers who opt for a vasectomy during March Madness.

“Hey guys, want to watch the college basketball tournament guilt free?” a young woman says in an ad. “Schedule your vasectomy with Urology Associates of Cape Cod in Sandwich in time for the college basketball tournament. Then camp out on the couch with uninterrupted basketball and we’ll even throw in a free pizza for the tournament.”

Question. The guy they show on the couch watching basketball — is he even old enough to shave? I’m just asking. Maybe you need to have a little life experience under your belt before deciding to be sterilized.

Because some day down the road the love of his life might ask: “How many kids do you want?”

And he’d have to answer: “I dunno. I had a vasectomy but they said it’s reversible?”

And she’d say: “Why?”

And he’d say: “Like, I got a free pizza.”

He should know that the coal fired oven of life burns on, turning out one freshly baked surprise after another.

Chain stores are big on pizza freebies, with varying results.

Papa John’s offered a rather complicated free pizza promotion for this year’s Super Bowl. You had to go on to their website and sign up as a …. Well, I’m going to let KOWB-Radio’s (Laramie, Wyo.) Wesley Kempton explain it as he did in his Feb. 3 blog post:

“If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably seen recent commercials advertising free pizza from Papa John’s if the Super Bowl XLVI is ‘called’ correctly by America and thought, what is this bogus hoax?

“Well to save you the time, I checked it out, and it turns out that this is not a hoax, and Papa John’s is really giving out free pizzas. Not only that, if America ‘calls’ the opening coin toss correctly, Papa John’s will be giving out free 2-liter bottles of Pepsi MAX as well.”

The majority of voters had to correctly pick the coin toss, heads or tails, after which Rewards Members would get free pizza. (Members apparently chose the correct winner of the toss.)

And another thing, as my uncle used to say. Here’s an outfit called Pizza Peel Cotswold in Charlotte, N.C. that offered free pizza if they rolled up 1,000 “likes” on their new Facebook page. According to the website Charlotteonthecheap.com, they made it and offered free pizza “to their Facebook fans.”

There is even a band called Free Pizza and you can listen to their album, Kool Is The Rool, by clicking here.

My favorite free pizza story goes back to 2008. A website designer went into his neighborhood pizza joint and said: How about I do a website for you and you give me free pizza? They said sure. But he didn’t know he’d get “a pizza or two per month” at Perfect Pizza in Inman, S.C. for putting together www.pizzaperfectpizza.com.

“Of course I’ve got it to go so I can go home and watch something on TV,” he says in his YouTube video. The basketball tournament, perhaps ….

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

 

NASA breaks silence on interplanetary Nibiru event

There’s an invisible planet entering our solar system that will crash into the Earth on Dec. 21!

Just so you know. Forget the last will and testament, and also cancel the pool service or snowplowing contract, whatever the case may be.

And by the way, this information comes directly from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was covered in-depth by the the prestigious Scientific American magazine.

Oh wait a minute. I see that the magazine talks about a new NASA video “to address FALSE claims” about the apocalypse which the space agency has labeled “a non-event.”

Got it.

Really, I think the most interesting thing about this Mayan-calendar-end-of-everything story is that NASA felt compelled to release a video debunking it. Every year we get hit with one or more end-of-the-world predictions and even though nothing happens, somebody is already gearing up for the next one.

This one seems a little different though because well, it’s the Mayans. And they built all of these fab temples and could forecast solar eclipses, so they must have known what they were doing. No wonder the Mayan calendar apocalypse has attracted a lot more subscribers than usual.

The theory is that since the Mayan calendar ends on Dec. 21, so will the world. You have to wonder about the Mayans’ predictive powers, though, since it turned out they were a little overly-optimistic in creating their calendar to last until Dec. 21, 2012.

According to Don Yeomans, of NASA’s Near-Earth Objects Program, the Mayan calendar doesn’t actually end, however. “It’s just the end of the cycle and the beginning of a new one,” he says. “It’s like on December 31, our calendar comes to an end, but a new calendar begins on January 1.”

Yeomans also says in the video that the planet Nibiru, which is supposed to swing into the solar system and approach the Earth, “causing all kinds of disasters,” is in fact imaginary. “This planet is supposed to be coming toward Earth,” he explains in the video, “but if it were, we would have seen it long ago. And if it were invisible somehow, we would have seen its effects on the neighboring planets.”

You might wonder how Yeomans was approached to help produce a video on this subject. “Don, I think you ought to go on camera and address this Mayan prophecy thing,” one of his PR guys must have said. “Don’t forget to talk about the invisible planet issue.”

Another possibility is that we’re destroyed by a solar storm. That’s also debunked, as is the idea of a planetary alignment that throws us into chaos.

As Yeoman points out: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Since the beginning of time there have been literally hundreds of thousands of predictions for the end of the world. And we’re still here.”

* * *
The Food and Drug Administration has issued a grapefruit alert.

Grapefruit juice, and eating whole grapefruit, can interfere with the absorption of some prescription and non-prescription drugs, the FDA says. Some oranges and tangelos have the same effect.

What concerns me here is that now we not only have to worry about drug side effects, but also what happens when we eat perfectly normal, healthy food.

Will we see pharmaceutical-like disclaimers on ads for produce? Dairy products? Stay tuned ….

Photo: Mayan temple via Flickr.com

 

Google innovation opens doors to digital support groups

Like most people, I suppose, I’m a bit tardy when it comes to keeping up with the latest technology. Of course, I tweet — who doesn’t — and I’m on Facebook (nominally). I Skype.

Not all digital innovation interests me. But I am intrigued with the potential of Google+ Hangout, a type of Internet videoconference in which anyone on the web, with a decent connection and webcam, can visually connect with others and chat about a specific topic. Free.

It’s very possible that Hangout will replace videoconferencing for businesses, since there are many business-friendly features including the ability to group edit documents and write on a group whiteboard, according to the tech blog Digital Cupcake.

You can also use it on Android Smartphones, so you could potentially hold a meeting while you’re waiting to catch a plane or taking a train into or out of your friendly neighborhood financial center. Service men and women could use it to hook up with family and friends around the country from foreign assignments. Up to 10 people can be in the conference at one time.

There are some health applications as well, though. Let’s say you want to form a support group for social anxiety disorders, or infertility issues. Trouble is, your community may not have a physical group you can join, or you may be out in the ‘burbs someplace or in a more rural setting. This allows you to meet with people all around the world who are dealing with something similar.

The Toronto Globe and Mail published a story last week about a global Hangout group for stutterers, called Stutter Social. Try finding that in your community directory of medical services.

Times are posted for meetings so you can plan ahead. If you’re looking for something specific, you can do a search of Hangout groups on this website, or if you can’t find what you need you can start your own group.

“It’s one big support group,” Daniele Rossi, a Toronto designer who co-founded the group last summer, told the Globe and Mail. “Growing up stuttering, you feel that you’re the only one in the world.”

So now you can trade stories and offer wisdom and advice with people from New York to California, Australia to South Africa. If only that had been available for King George VI.

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Medicare reform has become a back-burner issue in this year’s presidential race. But among some Republicans, there has been an effort to revive the proposal to turn Medicare into a voucher program. Yes, I know they call it Premium Support, not voucher. But it’s voucher.

Now it appears that pushing the Medicare revamp may work strongly to the GOP’s disadvantage. A poll released last week by Kaiser Health News shows that 70 percent of Americans want the program to stay the way it is. Even 53 percent of Republican voters said Medicare should remain “as it is today, with the government guaranteeing seniors health insurance and making sure that everyone gets the same defined set of benefits.”

Only 39 percent of Republicans would like to see the program based on a voucher system.

Oops. I mean Premium Support.

Photo: Family teleconference (U.S. Army photo via Flickr.com)