FIOS, Sigh-os

I’ve spent much of the day troubleshooting a goofed-out FIOS connection. It’s a tribute to Verizon, I suppose, that I had so much trouble believing my FIOS connection was at fault.

About two, three weeks ago, started getting funky time-outs when FTP’ing, the Web browser seemed to get really, really slow or even stop a couple of times, and all of a sudden my e-mail would show all kinds of server time-outs for no good reason. At first I put it down to the Web’s inevitable mini-hiccups, then to postprandial access (everyone and his uncle seems to like to go online just after dinner, which can tax the system). Then I began wondering if my system had a virus…

And so this morning I started troubleshooting in earnest. Slow and dropped connections on three platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux), four browsers (Firefox Mac & PC, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera), three computers and two connex (100Mbps Ethernet and WiFi). Hit up mytest.net: Connection has dropped from 15Mbps to 5Mbps on the download (not counting timeouts) and from 2Mbps to about 1.6Mpbs on the up, consistent on all computers.

Obviously a network problem, so I called Verizon, got a GOOD tech with the very appropriate name “James Webb,’ (c’maaaaaan–he’s gotta be making that up, right?), and we dove in.

Sifted through settings and protocols with a fine-toothed comb, pinged and traced until we were blue in the face, tried the line with and without a router in the middle. No change. Conclusion: Something’s screwy in Verizon’s network, and they’re getting it fixed.

In the meantime, I’m gonna stop trying to upload files and validate websites, and go make some glass. (yeehah!)

Afternote: Someone forgot to turn the juice back on after the final tests (i.e., my connection needed renewal on Verizon’s end when I finally reattached the router). Called Verizon again to do that, and the new rep suggested that if I went to fioshelp.verizon.com I could do it myself. Went there, and the site crashed.

Well, at least I’m not the only one with Web problems today.

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Pambiche

• Website

• Area: Northeast (around 28th)

• Price to fill up two people: $15-$25, depending 

Linda Ethier introduced me to this really cute and tasty little Cuban restaurant; on the first day of a week-long glass casting class she said “if you don’t mind I’d like to go to the Cuban restaurant across the street today, and after that we can go wherever you want.” After that lunch, none of us wanted to go anywhere else. Tiny, tiny, tiny, only a few tables…but inexpensive and absolutely delicious.

There were eight of us, and we pretty much ran through the whole menu that week, except for the desserts (this place is also a bakery, and if we hadn’t been so stuffed after lunch we’d have made serious inroads on the cakes, especially this foot-high banana thing that looked dreamy).

Word to the wise, though: Hit up Pambiche on a Friday night (or most of the weekend) and I can almost guarantee there will be a line. The last Friday night I was there, it went around the block. Much, MUCH better to try this at lunch.

Tip: order the special, or anything on the menu that sounds like it has citrus in it.

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Skype. Rhymes with “swipe”

(WARNING: RANT AHEAD)

Remember this old jape?
We’re the phone company. We don’t care. We don’t have to.

Well, say hello to the new phone company, Skype.

I’m helping with a promotion that involves giving 100 people a free 1-year Skype Unlimited subscription. While discussing the design of a mini-site for customer conversions, I innocently asked, “So how will you get the subscriptions to the winners?”

Next thing I know, I’m saddled with figuring out how to buy a $30 Skype gift certificate. Two weeks later, I still don’t have one and have come to the conclusion that it would be easier to turn penicillin back into bread mold.

Skype, for those of you that don’t know, is a VoIP (PC to PC) calling service that lets you make free calls to any Skype user, or paid calls outside that network, just by plugging a headset into your computer and downloading some free software. It’s based in Luxembourg, has a bouncy, friendly-looking site, tens of millions of users…and absolutely no customer service.

I won’t bore you with the details, but this is what I’ve found:

Skype, a phone company, doesn’t have a phone number. You CANNOT call them, not even using Skype. At best, you e-mail them and hope for a response within 72 hours. I e-mailed them three times over the last two weeks and have yet to receive a response.

The company I’m working with is a SKYPE PARTNER, integrating their service into the software they sell. They can’t call them, either.

You are not allowed to buy Skype gift certificates unless you are already spending money with Skype and have had at least two successful financial transactions with them. When I try to buy gift certificates even after fulfilling those requirements, I’m told I don’t qualify.

Even when you ARE allowed to buy Skype gift certificates, you are limited to $100 per month (or you can do some financial trickery to up the ante to $700). We need $3,000 worth and apparently the only way to do that online is to spend the next 6.5 months buying them in increments.

Gift certificates and Skype credit expire after a period of non-use or in six months, whichever comes first. Fail to use it and –poof– it’s gone.

You CAN buy Skype cards, worth either $8.85 or $20, at 1800 different Walmarts, according to the Skype site. We called every Walmart in Oregon and most of Washington state–only one carries these cards, they only had 24 of them and when I drove 30 miles to buy one…they had vanished.

I finally managed to lay my hands on a $20 Skype card, used it to buy “Skype Credit” for my account, and spent another $10 on my Visa to have enough to buy a 1-year Skype Unlimited subscription ($29.95). In the interval between those purchases, Skype debited my account by 55 cents (to $29.45), so I was now 50 cents short.

Gritting my teeth, I got out my Visa again, planning to add another $10 to my account to actually complete the transaction. Surprise! I can’t. Skype won’t let me buy more Skype Credit until my balance dips below $10. This is apparently to avoid the possibility of fraud.

The Skype help system kinda reminds me of a user manual with half the pages missing (i.e., it’s not particularly helpful). And while they do frequently show up on Skype’s user forum, Skype support reps spend most of their time explaining why the customer is a fault and should stop bothering them.

So I’ve spent $30 and a lot of gas and phone time to almost buy a $29.95 item. My only option is to spend $20 on some Skype thing to drop my balance so I can bring it back up to $30, or buy the $30 service without using any of my Skype credit (you can’t combine payment methods)….or just wait and Skype will automagically make my money vanish without giving me a nickel’s worth of anything.

Hmmm….I do believe Skype has perfected information highway robbery.

Afternote (9/29/07): Yesterday (Friday), got a call from a Walmart manager who had managed to find the missing 24 Skype giftcards and was combing the west coast for more to fill our order. (I must say that–despite my great antipathy to Walmart in general–the Walmart managers have really gone out of their way to help.)

Turns out that each Skype giftcard must be individually activated at a Walmart cash register to work properly, and the one I purchased had taken three tries before activation worked…which was the final straw. The program manager wanted 700 of these cards. Plus, the math didn’t work–giftcard denominations ($20 and $8.85) don’t support a $29.95 Skype unlimited subscription in any configuration.

Given Skype’s poor customer support and confusing website, we could just see our own support center call volume skyrocketing when (not if) something went wrong.

So…we opted for plan B: Heartfelt thanks but no thanks to Walmart, but we’ll send the customer a $30 credit on his order and let HIM figure out how to work with Skype. (And remind the product managers that it’s smart to dry-run a promotion BEFORE you announce it.)

–sigh–

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Ads

I absolutely love this ad but suspect that unless you’ve stood in a LOT of cab lines in strange cities you won’t get it:

It’s from Norway, on veryfunnyads.com, a great way to waste an hour or so if you’re a connoisseur of fine advertising.

Which I am. In fact, for a lot of TV shows, especially prime time, the ads are better than the show. If you think about it for a sec, for an ad to really sell it MUST be better than the content it interrupts:

• You have 60 seconds or less to get your entire message across
• Your audience is strongly inclined to do something else (eat, talk, eliminate, snog) until the content comes back on
• Many countries prohibit you from screwing around with the volume (getting LOTS louder was a common attention-getting ploy in the old days)
• There’s a built-in antipathy, almost a shame, to admitting you watch commercials, and technology (such as Tivo) now allows you to eliminate them
• Unless your product/pitch is incredibly generic (or beer), the percentage of audience who would be interested is relatively small and catching them at the right moment is somewhat akin to shooting flies with a BB gun

I would submit, in fact, that the guys making ads and commercials are probably better storytellers than the real storytellers. They have to be. The only thing a story needs to do is get people to listen, and the storyline is whatever the storyteller can imagine. Advertising must sell, and what it’s selling often makes for a lousy story.

Could Hemingway write copy that would make you WANT an upset stomach, just so you could try Alka Seltzer? I doubt it.

So here’s to great advertising and a big thank you to some of the companies that have paid (and approved) some great ads: Volkswagen. Apple. Enzyte. Alka-Seltzer. Guinness. Pepsi (and Coke). Nike. Visa. Canal Plus. FedEx. Annheiser-Busch (although they’ve gone downhill lately).

And now, back to our regularly scheduled program.

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Top 20 frit colors

Kilnforming offers amazing opportunities to build more storage into your home, because you’ll need to stock frit and rod and billet and cullet and stringer and vitrigraph stringer. Plus, it should be stored where (a) you can easily see and reach it, (b) it doesn’t break and (c) it doesn’t kill you.

I’m thinking of this now because somebody asked me what I’d recommend to stock a new studio with an adequate supply of frit. My first impulse was to suggest that such a question was rather like asking which letters to buy for your laptop keyboard.

Then I got to thinking about it, and it really is a good question. Not sure it has an answer, but it’s still a good question.

For just Bullseye glass alone, you can purchase 412 different jars of frit. If I’m counting correctly, they produce frit in 103 of their glass colors. Each color comes in four sizes: powder (08), fine (01), medium (02) and coarse (03). Each frit size produces different textures, coverage, and sometimes colors, so it’s not really one-size-fits-all.

Add in Uroboros 90.0 Fusion frit, that’s another 235 jars. Even eliminating obvious duplicates (such as clear glass), you have around 625 possible frit choices. How do you figure out which of those to buy?

The obvious answer–it depends on what you want to do with it–doesn’t always help someone just starting out. I know it was something a friend and I agonized over when we hit up the glass store for the first time. We split the contents of ten frits jars between us: Black, marigold yellow, cobalt blue, cranberry, emerald green, grenadine red, white, peacock blue, plum, orange. It was mostly powder, with a smattering of fine and medium frit, primarily because that’s what the store had.

In other words, we pretty much duplicated a small crayon box. I believe I used all of them on my very first kilnformed piece:

(Yeah, yeah, I’m sentimental. And it makes a great candy dish.)

If I’d known then what I know now–without considering casting supplies which is a whole ‘nother ball o’wax–I’d probably up the ante to 20 and pick these (and I’m trying to be as company-generic as possible on color names):

 

Neutrals
Amber powder: Incredible for warming up cold colors and toning down hot colors–this is probably my most all-purpose color and I use a LOT of it. I use it mostly for frit painting, but it’s also great as a field for some kinds of tack-fusing, and to give an aged or subtly shaded look to whites and creams.
Amber coarse: If you’re into tack-fusing, amber makes gorgeous, glittery golden nuggets. If you’re into full-fuse you can get a golden mottled effect that is extremely effective in frit-painting.
White powder: Invaluable for providing an opaque neutral underlayer when you want one transparent to pop out over another.
French Vanilla powder: French Vanilla is the queen of reactivity, which makes it a fun color to exploit. I personally think it makes a better black than black when mixed with Salmon Pink and/or Turquoise.
Woodland Brown: Ultimate shading tool, one I frequently use to tone down color when amber’s not strong enough.
Crystal Clear (powder, fine, coarse): I use so much of this stuff that I buy it in 40lb buckets. I prefer Crystal Clear because it keeps colors clearer, although that might be just my perception). The powder is great for reducing the intensity of a color without dulling it. The fine gives sparkle to tack-fuses and is needed for frit tinting. The coarse is a tack-fuse delight that gives you extra control over mottled color effects.
Black powder: I’m using pure black less and less; I prefer mixing my own from reactive powders and–at most–adding only a little to deepen the tone. But it’s still useful for sprinkling (extremely lightly) over pieces to give an aged, flyspeck appearance.

Warm colors
Marigold Yellow powder. This is probably the single most versatile color I’ve ever worked with. Full-strength it’s a bright, hot orangey-yellow. But it mixes with Crystal Clear to make gorgeous jewel-toned saffrons and golds, and it starts doing really funky things mixed with other warms (and amber).

Some of the tints you can get with Marigold Yellow powder…

Sienna powder. A newer Bullseye color, it’s both neutral and warm. Tack-fusing the powder in large quantities gives a really rich array of earthtones.

The marvelous versatility of a Sienna tackfuse…

Cranberry Pink powder. Ages ago, this was my favorite ruby tone. I’m less thrilled with it now–if you’re not careful it overwhelms just about anything you mix it with. Still it’s invaluable for enriching purples and warming up blues.
Orange Red powder. I choose this over a real red or orange because I like the scarlet tones, and it can go in a lot of directions when mixed.
Pimento Red. A yum color. Also fun to mix with and a great frit-tint option. Makes some lovely chocolate browns, too.

Cool colors
Deep Cobalt powder. You can get everything from sky blue to violet out of this color, depending on how it’s mixed. Very reliable.
Plum powder. This probably belongs in the neutrals because I rarely use it as a purple. It’s better than any grey for adding cool shadows, especially with light applications over white and other pale neutrals. It tends to give a slightly aged, somewhat darker tone to the color it sits over–it’ll warm cool tones and cool warm tones.
Neo-Lavender powder. This is the cooler, somewhat lighter complement to Plum as a shading tool. It slightly cools and “blues” anything I put it over, and is a lot less harsh than black or grey if you’re working with black tones.

NeoLav and Plum block in shadows and define shapes in a white-on-white (mostly) frit-painting…
Peacock Blue powder. I just have this in here because it’s a gorgeous color. I tend to use it in larger sizes, but it’s a good drawing powder as well.
Turquoise Blue powder. This opal is a marvelous reactive color, also a good drawing powder. In fact, I like using this as a base and putting Peacock Blue over for shading…makes some very subtle tints.
Spring Green powder. In the powder, I prefer the opal. But in larger frit sizes, this is quite possibly one of the prettiest transparent colors I’ve seen, and it is stunning with either Turquoise Blue or Peacock Blue. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of those combinations.
Olive Green. I like the smoky tones of this color, and it overlays the Spring Green very well. I tend to mix a lot of greens, adding NeoLav and Deep Cobalt to get the tones I need, and Olive Green makes a nice, rich base.
Gold Purple. Of all the shades in glass frit, I’m probably least happy with ready-made purples. But between Gold Purple, Plum, Cranberry and Cobalt, I can usually mix up exactly what I need. And Gold Purple powder makes a great “black” in cool compositions.

Variations possible with a mix of deep cobalt, gold purple and neolav…

And that’s 20. There are some I left off that would probably come next on my list: Marzipan (which has become my off-white of choice), Salmon Pink (the ultimate in reactive colors), Violet Striker, Grenadine Red, Egyptian Blue, Steel Blue. But if you eliminated casting and tack-fusing from my repertoire, I could probably do 80 percent of my current work with just those 20 colors.

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Food odyssey: Week 1

Embarking on the “only local, sustainable eating” journey this week, with the following discoveries:

This ain’t gonna be cheap. My first impression, after comparing, say, beef raised in a grassy pasture vs. feedlot beef, is that this ain’t a sport for poor people. I’m hopeful, though, that when you eliminate all the waste, packaged food, meals out and stuff like that the cost will come close to parity. (Of course, there’s also the old-fashioned alternative: Save beef and chicken for special occasions and use every scrap in stews and stocks.)

Sustainable and tasty aren’t always the same thing. Tried a stuffed bell pepper from locally grown foods. Yuck. Ditto for the almond chocolate bar, which I couldn’t distinguish from Hershey’s. As for organic lentil bread, you can HAVE it–not even the birds want it.

That said, there’s a discernible plus in the taste of the produce and dairy. Wonderful artisanal cheeses around here, and the sour cream doesn’t even taste like sour cream. But either I’m not eating the right poultry or my “free-range” expectations have come to naught. I’ve eaten free-roaming chickens in France. These ain’t it.

The best farms are full-up. Assuming they’re charging enough to make a profit, there’s no need to have a Farmer’s Aid Relief Concert around here. Buying a subscription to one of the farms near Glassland is proving a challenge–I can’t get them to return my calls, and I may wind up reserving a spot for 2009, not 2008.

I will be shopping more often. The upside to preservative-laden, feedlot-produced, “fortified” food is that you can leave it on the counter for a month and it’s still as fresh as the day you bought it. Not gonna happen with this organic sustainable stuff. EVERYthing seems to spoil more quickly. This stuff may taste better because if it’s three days old, it’s too fuzzy to taste.

My freezer has decided to help. The fridge freezer did a meltdown on Monday, sending assorted frozen chickens, stews, chops and such to the trash. Gave it a good scrubbing, and am now free to fill it up with good stuff, I suppose.

The freezer (and possibly the food dryer) looks to play an important role in this–the only way I can figure to have a life and food at the same time is to cook in batches and save stuff for future meals.

I am but a babe in the sustainable food world. I don’t know if it’s the fact that I’m living in Oregon or just what, but I feel as if I’m about 90 years behind the curve. Mentioning this experiment to colleagues, friends and neighbors has so far produced the sort of expressions I’d get if I announced I’d discovered how much brighter the room is when I turn on the lights.

So, baby steps for now.

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Tableau: Mondo cool data manipulation

I’m filing this one under gadgetry, even though it’s all about business.

Secret shame: I’m a pivot table fanatic. Love ‘em to death. They take all those incomprehensible rows of numbers and words and turn them into short, sweet, MEANINGFUL tables.

And yeah, I’m one of those closet data mining freaks, too. Give me 100,000 rows and 200 columns filled with numbers, and you’ve given me POWER…

Anyway, just tried out Tableau, a data mining and reporting tool that is essentially pivot tables on steroids. With charts. And I think I’m in love. I’ve used a lot of data analysis tools, but this one is really simple, drag-and-drop kinda stuff.

Tableau, which bills itself as “visual analysis for everyday data,” works with Excel spreadsheets or accepts data from most sources, i.e., SQLServer, MySQL (my feed of choice), Access, etc. You toss in the data, it registers and imports your info and field relationships, and then…you get to play.

There’s something really addictive about grabbing a row or column, dropping it into your workspace and seeing what the numbers look like. I kept coming up with all kinds of patterns I wouldn’t have suspected. And, ultimately, that’s the point of data mining.

Anyway…highly recommend this tool. It’s expensive–$1000–but if you’ve got a lot of number-crunching to do, it’s worth a look.

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Food fright: The odyssey begins

Apparently I’m eating sludge.

I’m just finishing Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and having a lot of duh moments. Also a lot of eeeeeeeeuw moments. And this is compounded by discussions with colleagues, grocery store produce managers and a nice lady at the train station, all of whom seem to have read this book and have at least one gruesome, gory anecdote to support its conclusions.

Remember The Jungle by Upton Sinclair? Kinda like that.

I can say with some confidence that the less you know about the production side of the US food chain, the better. Otherwise you’re pretty much obliged to change your ways, i.e., find alternatives to highly industrialized agriculture, which appears to be a daunting task.

But that’s what I’m going to be doing for awhile. Like Pollan, I want to know where my food came from. Unlike Pollan, I’m not going to travel across the continent to find out. If a food’s origins are murky (or unsatisfactory) after a reasonable investigation, out it goes. Into its place goes stuff I can trace and trust, stuff that’s hopefully sustainable.

I’ve been warned that this is not easy, it’s more expensive and requires a lot more time than just running to Safeway, and it requires a lot more prep. I’m told that I’m like 90-gazillion others who’ve also read this book and suddenly decided they need to think as much about what goes into their mouths as what goes on their hair, so I may need to go on a waiting list to buy groceries. This will be a novel experience.

I don’t want to be unreasonable about it–I’m not going to insist that friends and family only serve me “good stuff,” which, knowing my friends, would likely be met with a laugh anyway. And I’m going to eat in a nice restaurant every once in awhile, whether or not I get to meet the farmer who raised the chicken. Also, if it looks like my only option is berries and grubs from my own backyard, I will acknowledge defeat and head for Taco Bell.

But I’m also counting on a very big ace up my sleeve: Oregon. Oregon is one of the most earth-conscious places I’ve ever encountered (an ex-hippie friend calls it “the place where the hippies went to die…and didn’t”). I’m counting on enough of that consciousness being around to sustain sustainable agriculture, sufficient to meet my needs.

I’ve also got a second ace, New Seasons Market. It’s a local grocery store chain that appears to strongly support local, sustainable farmers. There’s a New Seasons within driving distance, the people are fantastic, the food’s good, and I already enjoy going there on “market day.”

That’s when the local farmers come out with their produce, spread it out in front of the store, cook it and pass out samples. They’re fun to talk to, and I can HEARTILY recommend the pink grape tomatoes. Best tomatoes I’ve ever bought, so good that masking them with salad greens is probably blasphemy. And with a bit of balsamic vinegar, a little olive oil, maybe some home-made mozarell…

Ahem.

So. First thing to do is draw up a set of rules. Then I’ll assemble my resources, and see where they lead.

Rule #1: No more fast food, or food processed to the point that I need a dictionary to understand the label.

Rule #2: I will confine my food buying to products harvested within a day’s drive from my refrigerator.

Rule #3: I will eat a completely balanced diet. No cheating by living on rutabagas simply because they were the only thing that fit rules 1 and 2. No additional complications, i.e., no diets, sudden-death vegetarianism, etc.

Rule #4: No food out of season unless–like olives and tomatoes–it’s been appropriately preserved. Appropriately does not mean came off the tin can assembly line at Del Monte.

Rule #5: I will make an exception for the necessities of life, i.e., chocolate, popcorn (unless it’s grown locally, which I doubt), lemonade, and other stuff as I think of it.

Rule #6: I will spend no more than an hour of my day (hopefully much less) in researching, collecting and preparing food.

Rule #7: I will not become a food bore, and annoy my friends with smug little factoids such as “Did you know that your steak came from a cow standing in its own waste, chewing food that made it so sick it had to be pumped full of antibiotics to keep the pus levels down?” (Actually this won’t be a problem, as my friends would have knocked me unconscious by the second prepositional phrase.)

The rest I’ll make up as I go along. More later.

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If we are what we eat, we’re in serious trouble

As a newlywed, I needed a job. Badly. My new hubby was still in school in hyperexpensive Santa Barbara and we were living on whatever I could make. Trouble was, employers weren’t exactly beating down doors with offers for fresh-out-of-school journalism majors like me.

I finally found work as an Orkin commercial pest control rep. Now, I was the chick who slept in the cook tent rather than risk a buggy sleeping bag at camp. But 800 bucks a month was enough to pay Santa Barbara rent and gas with $50 left over for groceries, so I plunged into the world of supersized cockroaches, rats and other creepy-crawlies in LA Chinatown.

In many ways that job was a first: First brush with sexual harassment (a 20-year old coed in high heels was not exactly the norm on the LA warehouse circuit), first encounter with ex-cons (most of the “pest technicians” I worked with were just-paroled felons who tended to regard me as a not-too-bright daughter), first awareness of rats bigger than my cat, first discovery of the delightful habits of the Oriental cockroach, etc., etc.

I also developed a unique skill, the ability to instantly identify cockroach hideouts. (Hint: Look for the moistest, darkest, warmest crevice in a refrigeration unit, generally next to the motor) It was a huge hit with supermarket managers and restaurant owners, although I don’t recommend it as a party trick. No matter how many times you explain to your host that it’s perfectly normal for cockroaches to live under his refrigerator, you can kiss subsequent party invitations goodbye, and there’s a high likelihood that the cleaning lady will be fired.

Anyway, after visiting a dozen Southern California restaurants and viewing the pest pantheon munching on, living in and leaving waste in the cuisine, I gave up restaurant eating for several years.

(And, BTW, these weren’t the archetypical filthy greasy spoons, either. The worst pest problem I encountered was in a VERY chi-chi French restaurant in Montecito, selling $200 dinners and thousand-buck bottles of wine. I was called in because the extremely expensive chef threatened to go back to France when he discovered he couldn’t tell the capers from the ….never mind).

The restaurants didn’t get cleaner, but I eventually resumed eating in them because it was either that or cook. And, I reasoned, if all that restaurant-eating prior to Orkin hadn’t killed me, how bad could it really be?

I’m bringing this up now because I’m reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History in Four Meals, and so far I’m deciding I’d rather eat cockroaches than some of the stuff the author says is part of my regular diet right now.

The book’s primarily about corn and its role in the US food chain. I’m only halfway through the book–so maybe it has a happier ending than I think–but at this point the cockroaches are looking mighty wholesome.

Here’s what I’m getting so far:

• The vast majority of food in US grocery stores has its origins in corn, petroleum and/or soybeans, not whatever the label says
• “Organic food” ain’t necessarily organic, at least not as you and I think of it, and free range essentially means that the chicken (or whoever) was given “access” to a lawn at some point in its life
• Corn-fed beef is an oxymoron; the only way that cows can eat corn without getting sick is if you stuff them full of antibiotics
• There are measurable differences in nutrients (and taste) between food grown on a modern commercial farm and food grown almost anywhere else
• The twin epidemics of obesity and type II diabetes track almost perfectly with the introduction of high-fructose corn syrup in place of sugar

Yuck. When you can’t trust your Big Mac, what can you trust?

Proof positive that you need to pay attention to EVERYthing, I guess. So here I go, into the wide world of old-fashioned food.

More on this later.

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Thanks

Thank you, all of you who posted, sent private e-mail, sent cards and flowers, etc., regarding my cat Chinni. I was astonished and moved by the support. (People I hadn’t heard from in years, in fact, wrote–I guess Chinni’s caterwauls through the speakerphone were a bit louder than I thought.

Anyway, it was greatly appreciated. Much thanks.

And for those of you who asked, yes, Rajah is still around, as food-obsessed as ever. He’s chewing away right now, in fact, and has expressed great disappointment that Chinni’s food bowl is no longer with us.

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