Eat Your Onions!
(And carry breath mints!)
From today’s BBC Health News comes proof that those helpings of vegetables and fruits cut the risk of early heart disease.
Onions ‘cut heart disease risk’
Eating a meal rich in compounds called flavonoids reduces some early signs of heart disease, research shows.
An Institute of Food Research team focused on one of the compounds, quercetin, which is found in tea, onions, apples and red wine.
The Atherosclerosis study examined the effect of the compounds produced after quercetin is broken down by the body.
They were shown to help prevent the chronic inflammation which can lead to thickening of the arteries.
You can read the rest of the article HERE.
One Thing Too Many
I was tempted to volunteer for something yesterday, something I KNEW was wrong for me, but I just wanted to help so badly. Volunteer work can do that – how can you say no? You WANT to help. I have to remind myself that I want to do the things I must do WELL, that taking on commitments and making promises I end up not able to keep is not helpful. It doesn’t help the person I promised to help, and it makes me feel terrible about myself.
I already have a full plate. I really cannot take on more.
Sometimes we get a sign. If we are very lucky, if we have the eyes to see, we recognize it.
Some tomatoes had become overly ripe and I needed to toss them. I could easily hold four, but wanting to do it all in one swoop, I picked up all five, and one fell. When I saw the splat pattern on the floor, my first thought was that it had some artistic merit, and my second thought was that I needed to photograph it as a reminder of what happens in life when we take on one thing too many.
Science Exam Answers
When my son was in school and we would talk about school and grades and tests, I told him “tell the teachers what you know, even if you don’t know the answer to the question, sometimes you get partial points. Don’t leave a question blank, especially on written exams.” Rarely are you penalized for guessing, or for wrong answers.
Here are some delightful answers children came up with on science exams. (Thank you, KitKat, for passing these along to me.)
Subject: Science Exam Answers
If you need a laugh, read through these
Children’s Science Exam Answers.
These are real answers given by children.
Q: Name the four seasons.
A: Salt, pepper, mustard and vinegar.
Q: Explain one of the processes by which
water can be made safe to drink.
A: Flirtation makes water safe to drink
because it removes large pollutants like grit, sand,
dead sheep and canoeists.
Q: How is dew formed?
A: The sun shines down on the leaves and makes
them perspire.
Q: How can you delay milk turning sour?
A: Keep it in the cow.
Q: What causes the tides in the oceans?
A: The tides are a fight between the Earth and
the Moon. All water tends to flow towards the moon,
because there is no water on the moon, and nature
hates a vacuum. I forget where the sun joins in this
fight.
Q: What are steroids?
A: Things for keeping carpets still on
the stairs.
Q: What happens to your body as you age?
A: When you get old, so do your bowels and you
get intercontinental.
Q: What happens to a boy when he reaches
puberty?
A: He says good-bye to his boyhood and looks
forward to his adultery.
Q: Name a major disease associated with
cigarettes.
A: Premature death.
Q: How are the main parts of the body
categorized? (e.g., abdomen).
A: The body is consisted into three parts –
the brainium, the borax and the abdominal cavity.
The brainium contains the brain; the borax contains
the heart and lungs, and the abdominal cavity
contains the five bowels, A, E, I, O, and U.
Q: What is the fibula?
A: A small lie.
Q: What does “varicose” mean?
A: Nearby. (I do love this one…)
Q: Give the meaning of the term “Caesarean
Section”
A: The Caesarean Section is a district in
Rome.
Q: What does the word “benign” mean?’
A: Benign is what you will be after you be
eight.
Rape in Dubai
I saw this in ChillNight’s blog yesterday with a link to the Herald Trib, which wouldn’t work for me. Today, my niece,Little Diamond, sent me the same article with a link to the New York Times which did work. This is the third most e-mailed article this week; it is attracting a lot of attention world wide. About time.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Oct. 31 — Alexandre Robert, a French 15-year-old, was having a fine summer in this tourist paradise on the Persian Gulf. It was Bastille Day and he and a classmate had escaped the July heat at the beach for an air-conditioned arcade.
Just after sunset, Alex says he was rushing to meet his father for dinner when he bumped into an acquaintance, a 17-year-old native-born student at the American school, who said he and his cousin could drop Alex off at home.
There were, in fact, three Emirati men in the car, including a pair of former convicts ages 35 and 18, according to Alex. He says they drove him past his house and into a dark patch of desert, between a row of new villas and a power plant, took away his cellphone, threatened him with a knife and a club, and told him they would kill his family if he ever reported them.
Then they stripped off his pants and one by one sodomized him in the back seat of the car. They dumped Alex across from one of Dubai’s luxury hotel towers.
Alex and his family were about to learn that despite Dubai’s status as the Arab world’s paragon of modernity and wealth, and its well-earned reputation for protecting foreign investors, its criminal legal system remains a perilous gantlet when it comes to homosexuality and protection of foreigners.
You can read the rest of the article at The New York Times.
Of course, I am sick for the victim, sick for his parents, and sick for a nation that can’t and won’t prosecute the rapists, even with evidence, and warns the victim to leave the country because he is about to be accused of the crime of homosexuality.
Rape is an invisible crime. You can’t look at someone and see they have been raped. Many, many rape victims never report the crime. This 15 year old kid has the courage to go public with probably one of the most humiliating crimes that can happen to a person and HE is threatened with prison?
NY Cover Giggle
I can’t help it, this just gave me such a giggle.
From The New Yorker
The cartoon refers both to an American senator, Larry Craig, caught playing footsie with the cop in the next stall in the Minneapolis airport and Ahmadinajad playing footsie with nuclear power.
YouTubers had a field day with Craig’s guilty plea, and then reversal. Here is one:
Al Fresco in Kuwait
I have had several requests to know what we were eating when we eat in the open courtyard at the Mubarakiya. You Kuwaitis can skip this entry; to you this is not exciting or exotic. To my stateside, European and African readers, this is how it goes:
As soon as you are seated, the waiter brings a little charcoal stove to the table with a steaming hot pot of tea. There is a row of restaurants behind you, one of which has huge gold colored pots of tea brewing at all times. Our Kuwaiti friends tell us that the reason the tea is so strong is that they never wash the pots, just keep brewing tea in them. The tea is STRONG, served in tiny glasses on saucers, and is usually drunk with a good amount of sugar.
Then a plate of greens and onions arrive. The greens taste a lot like basil, very licorice-y, but they don’t look like basil.
You order. We don’t always have the same thing, but what you are seeing here is an order of shish ta-ook (chicken chunks, marinated and grilled, served on a skewer), fresh bread (comes with every order) tabouli ( a salad made mostly of chopped parsley and lemon), muttabel (a salad/dip made of roasted eggplant, tahina and olive oil), roasted lamb with rice, and a sauce made of okra, with a great big ball in it that is some kind of spice we don’t usually use, but enjoy in this sauce.
There are people at all the surrounding tables; usually one adult comes first, or maybe two, and tables get moved together or apart, depending on the size of the family coming. Then more women come drifting in, laden with shopping bags. They all greet one another and sit, and finally when the food comes, the children show up, eat a few bites, and then are up playing while the adults finish and drink their tea.
Adventure Man has a little black cat friend who likes the fatty pieces of the lamb he doesn’t eat. When he is finished with one offering, he will pat AM’s leg with his little paw, and AM will give him another piece. This is not a skinny, scrawney little cat, but a plump little cat with shiny fur. Guess he gets enough to eat!
At some point during your meal, you will hear the call to prayer, which we like even better now that we know that the muezzins (the ones who do the call to prayer) are all live, not recorded.
A lavish meal for four – more food than you can eat – with tea, and with excellent service, comes to around 8KD – around $30. How is that for a night on the town?
WoooooHooooooo CO-OP!
It’s hot. It’s humid. I drive to the co-op for a few small things and holy smokes! I see a spot to park, and it’s near the door! I start to park, and I see the handicapped sign, so I go around again, and find another spot about a million miles away. It’s ok, the walk is good for me.
But as I pass the handicapped spots, a car drives in and out pops a perfectly non-handicapped young woman and her two non-handicapped, fully capable daughters!
If looks could kill!
I don’t want to waste a lot of my time on resentment, so I move on.
This week, here is what I see at the co-op:
Wooooo Hoooooooo! Handicapped spots RESERVED for those who have special needs! Blocked off, so as not to tempt the rest of us! Wooooo HOOOOOOOOO, way to go, Co-op!
Accident Aftermath
This time the crunch was different. This time, the initial BLAM crunch was followed by a heart-sickening series of crunches. I was on the phone dialing 777 even before I got to the window.
They have lovely women working for emergency services now, women who can stay calm and switch languages easily. Just hearing her voice calms me down as I report the accident, tell them to send an ambulance. The upside down car door is flipping open, and people are running to help the victim out. It’s a woman, and she is beautiful. She is also bleeding, and once they get her out, she is very still, too still.
The traffic police call me back and I tell them where the accident is, but thank God the woman is still on the phone and when he doesn’t understand, she fills in efficiently and accurately.
It takes them 21 minutes to arrive. The traffic police send one car, and on a busy street, they all gather around the woman and stare. The MOI also send a car. Not one of these police set up any kind of traffic control, cars on both sides of the road are stopping, people come running, just to look.
The ambulances take 22 minutes. When they leave, there are no sirens. I don’t think she survived. The medics appeared knowledgeable and efficient.
It’s the aftermath that bothers me now. On the ground, they left all the medical waste.
The last thing the medic did as he got into the ambulance was to throw his bloodied gloves on the ground:
And then . . .the traffic cops left! There are two wrecks on one of the busiest thoroughfares in town, and no protection from the next speeding car! The wrecks are in the fast lane!
Don’t get me wrong. You know how I feel – police, ambulance medics, firemen – they are all heroes in my book. They risk their lives every day for the common good. The save lives, and they take pride in what they do.
They need a little training in accident management. When there is an accident, there needs to be a priority on getting there fast, and controlling the crowd, and routing traffic by efficiently. The medics need to pick up their waste.
There needs to be after-accident care, ensuring that someone stays until the wreckage is removed.
I had a house guest once who sat in my window and said “Oh my God. Oh my God! Oh! Oh! Oh!”
There are three separate u-turns we can see. Each one is another accident just waiting to happen. When the turn lanes back up, sometimes some people start honking, putting pressure on the lead person to make an unsafe turn. Please – resist the pressure. Take your time. Wait for a safe, truly safe interval.
Please, my friends, do one thing for me. Please, buckle your seat belts. And please, buckle up your children, put them in car-seats made to protect them, teach them from an early age to buckle-up, help it become so automatic they don’t even think about it.
“Can You Help Me Get to Bangladesh?”
I have a dilemma. I don’t know how to handle it.
I carry small bills with me, because I am often asked for money. I keep it so I always have money to give to the people who help me get groceries to my car, the people who deliver propane, people who give good service – I don’t mind. Part of the blessing of having work is the obligation to pass that blessing along to others. We know that God Almighty knows where there is real need, and he moves us to give where giving is needed; he gives us a little shove in our hearts.
Yesterday, a well dressed man with a steady job told me he wants to go home to Bangladesh to see his parents. Could I help him?
I understand about aging parents. I’ve made a few trips myself. I totally understand what it is like to be far away when crises strike. We have always had funds set aside for emergency trips, and, by the grace of God, we haven’t had to dip into those funds often.
“How can I help you?” I asked.
“I need money,” he responded.
Money for a ticket to Bangladesh – that’s not small change. Along with that thought is the thought that were I to “help” this man, word would get around, and I would have many people knocking on my door for serious help with funds.
I don’t think he wants the kind of help I could easily give – showing how to set up an account and contribute to it faithfully, letting the money accumulate until you reach your goal. I don’t think he wants to do what my parents did with me, and what we did with our son – matching funds. (You save up half and we will match your savings dollar for dollar.) He wants an outright big gift.
In our church, we sing a song that says “Freely, freely, you have received, Freely, freely give.” I’ve always believed that with all my heart, it is like a magnified spiritual Locard Exchange Principal especially for blessings; what you have received you give, and it comes back to you doubled, tripled, magnified.
We tend to give larger charitable donations to organizations that make the money work hard – Medicins Sans Frontiers, African schools, our church fund. I consider a ticket to Bangladesh a relatively large charitable donation, large especially for one individual, one individual who is well employed.
So I ask for your prayers for clear guidance. I am not feeling that shove in my heart.
Why Skidboot?
On November 18 of last year, I published a short item, very short, four lines, on Skidboot. At the time, I was so new to blogging, I didn’t even know how to embed a YouTube video in the blog, so I just referred readers to the YouTube site.
For the last two weeks, it has been my top stat getter. I have Googled, I have tried everything I can think of to figure out why Skidboot? Why now, almost a year later?
If anyone coming here to read the Skidboot article will take a minute to tell me why, I would sure appreciate it. It’s not going to kill me not to know, but it is a mystery to me!
Here is the original video:
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