Time for a new Mac
Last night, as I checked this blog, all of a sudden everything froze. Now and then that might happen. I turned it off, and rebooted. Nothing.
You know that feeling of sheer panic when you think you might be cut off?
I let it rest – sometimes when you walk away, it fixes itself. And sure enough it came back on, and I could log on and even picked up some e-mail. Maybe four minutes in, it froze again.
I bought this Mac in April of 2004 – I know, because I was back in the US for Sporty Diamond’s wedding, and I uploaded my first photos into iPhoto. I was IN LOVE. iPhoto lets me manage all my photos so easily, lets me organize, helps me in so many ways.
I have never had a moment’s problem with this computer. I’ve upgraded the operating system a couple times, tweaked things here and there, and never had a problem.
When the new Macs came out recently with the new operating system, I was feeling envious, but honestly, my current Mac is running so well . . .
Now, however, Adventure Man says “hey, this sounds like a great time for a new computer!”
He he he he he – I think so, too!
I hate to leave my current Mac behind – he has worked so hard, we’ve been partners, we’ve had so much fun together! Seems like he’s had enough, though, and it’s time to move on.
Wind Up Lights for African Homes
My husband gave me a wind-up flashlight (British English = torch) and I love it. In movies like The Blair Witch Project or crime movies, the flickering and dying of a flashlight always foretells something really really bad is about to hapen. I love it that I have a flashlight I can keep winding up.
In our national legends, we have Abraham Lincoln doing his schoolwork on the back of a shovel, next to a flickering fire. That must have taken real dedication. Imagine what your own life would be like if we had no light after sundown. . .
From BBC News AFRICA:
The technology behind the wind-up radio could soon be helping to light up some of the poorest homes in Africa.
The Freeplay Foundation is developing prototypes of a charging station for house lights it hopes will improve the quality of life for many Africans.
The Foundation said the lights would replace the expensive, polluting and unhealthy alternatives many Africans currently use to light their homes.
Field testing of the prototypes will start in Kenya in the next few months.
Light and life
Kristine Pearson, director of the Freeplay Foundation, said few Africans in the continents most vulnerable areas had access to electricity to light homes.
“Their life stops or is very narrowed when the sun goes down,” she said. “Two extra hours of light would make a big difference to their life.”
You can read the rest of this article about developing this technology for Africa HERE
(Gasp!) I Lied!
I didn’t mean to lie, and I sincerely apologize.When I printed Gas Tank Mystery Solved I believed what I was saying was true. It would be cool if it were true – but it’s not.
I didn’t even bother checking. It made such good sense, you know?
So when I hit the gas station yesterday, just for grins, I took a look at the little gas tank symbol, which looks EXACTLY like the one in the gas tank article. That would indicate my gas tank is on the right.
It is NOT on the right. It is on the left.
I was so embarrassed. I lied to you! I am so sorry! What it shows on your gas guage may NOT be where your tank is.
There is only one good thing. Kinan shared a tip from his Dad – pop your gas tank using the inside lever, and use your side view mirrors to see which side opens. Pretty easy, huh? and you still don’t have to get out of the car.
Gas Tank Mystery Solved
Thank you to my good e-mail friend for sharing this secret!
In and out of many countries, as you lug your bags to the car, do you make it a point to figure out which side of the car the gas tank is on? Or do you get to the service station and then realize that you don’t know?
I am one of those who forget, until it is time to gas up. I get to the gas station, and then when I go to fill the tank (yep, there are no friendly helpers there, so I have to do it myself) and often I have to back up or drive out and drive in again so I have the gas tank facing the pump.
There is a secret on your dashboard, one I never noticed and I bet you haven’t, either.
If you look at your gas gauge, you will see a small icon of a gas pump.
The handle of the gas pump will extend out on either the left or right side of the pump. If your tank is on the left, the handle will be on the left. If your tank is on the right, the handle will be on the right. It is that simple!
Am I the only one who didn’t know this secret?
UPDATE: On my car, this is NOT TRUE! On my car, the gas tank is on the opposite side of the car. My bad!
The Olive Oil Scandal
A good friend gave me a subscription several years ago to The New Yorker, and at the time I didn’t know how lucky I was. First, I loved the cartoons. A couple magazines later, I got pulled in by some of their excellent travel and political writing. Later, the fiction issues pulled me in and introduced me to authors I had never read before. In no time at all, I was totally addicted.
Now, when The New Yorker arrives, Adventure Man and I fight to see who gets to read it first! Often he wins; he skims it. He knows I will take too long getting through it.
It was the New Yorker magazine who informed me about the great olive oil scandal.
I love olive oil. I only use other oils in baked goods, where the olive oil might give an odd taste, we use olive oil almost exclusively. Or so I thought.
In the August 13 Issue of the New Yorker, Tom Meuller starts like this:
On August 10, 1991, a rusty tanker called the Mazal I docked at the industrial port of Ordu, in Turkey, and pumped twenty-two hundred tons of hazelnut oil into its hold. The ship then embarked on a meandering voyage through the Mediterranean and the North Sea. By September 21st, when the Mazal II reached Barletta, a port in Puglia, in southern Italy, its cargo had become, on the ship’s official documents, Greek olive oil. It slipped through customs, possibly with the connivance of an official, was piped into tanker trucks, and was delivered to the refinery of Riolio, an Italian olive-oil produce based in Barletta. There it was sold—in some instances blended with real olive oil—to Riolio customers
Between August and November of 1991, the Mazal II and another tanker, the Katerina T., delivered nearly ten thousand tons of Turkish hazelnut oil and Argentinean sunflower-seed oil to Riolio, all identified as Greek olive oil.
Riolio’s owner, Domenico Ribatti, grew rich from the bogus oil, assembling substantial real-estate holdings, including a former department store in Bari. He bribed two officials, one with cash, the other with cartons of olive oil, and made trips to Rome, where he stayed at the Grand Hotel, and met with other unscrupulous olive-oil producers from Italy and abroad. As one of Italy’s leading importers of olive oil, Ribatti’s company was a member of ASSITOL, the country’s powerful olive-oil trade association, and Ribatti had enough clout in Rome to ask a favor—preferential treatment of an associate’s nephew, who was seeking admission to a military officers’ school—of a high-ranking official at the Finance Ministry, a fellow-pugliese.
However, by early 1992 Ribatti and his associates were under investigation by the Guardia di Finanza, the Finance Ministry’s military-police force. One officer, wearing a miniature video camera on his tie, posed as a waiter at a lunch hosted by Ribatti at the Grand Hotel. Others, eavesdropping on telephone calls among Riolio executives, heard the rustle of bribe money being counted out. During the next two years, the Guardia di Finanza team, working closely with agents of the European Union’s anti-fraud office, pieced together the details of Ribatti’s crime, identifying Swiss bank accounts and Caribbean shell companies that Ribatti had used to buy the ersatz olive oil.
The investigators discovered that seed and hazelnut oil had reached Riolio’s refinery by tanker truck and by train, as well as by ship, and they found stocks of hazelnut oil waiting in Rotterdam for delivery to Riolio and other olive-oil companies.
The investigators also discovered where Ribatti’s adulterated oil had gone: to some of the largest producers of Italian olive oil, among them Nestlé, Unilever, Bertolli, and Oleifici Fasanesi, who sold it to consumers as olive oil, and collected about twelve million dollars in E.U. subsidies intended to support the olive-oil industry. (These companies claimed that they had been swindled by Ribatti, and prosecutors were unable to prove complicity on their part.)
You can read this entire fascinating article here: Tom Meuller: Slippery BusinessGive yourself plenty of time. It is an article well worth reading.
There is another good reference here: The Great Olive Oil Scandal from PalestinianOliveOil.org
Investigators have gathered evidence indicating that the biggest olive oil brands in Italy — Bertolli, Sasso, and Cirio — have for years been systematically diluting their extra-virgin olive oil with cheap, highly-refined hazelnut oil imported from Turkey. [1]
A 1996 study by the FDA found that 96 percent of the olive oils they tested, while being labeled 100 percent olive oil, had been diluted with other oils. A study in Italy found that only 40 percent of the olive oil brands labeled “extra-virgin” actually met those standards. Italy produces 400,000 tons of olive oil for domestic consumption, but 750,000 tons are sold. The difference is made up with highly refined nut and seed oils. [2]
EVEN THE BIGGEST OF THEM WILL MISLEAD THE PUBLIC…
“In 1998, the New York law firm Rabin and Peckel, LLP, took on the olive oil labeling misnomer and filed a class action suit in the New York Supreme Court against Unilever, the English-Dutch manufacturer of Bertolli olive oil. The firm argued that Bertolli’s labels, which read “Imported from Italy,” did not meet full disclosure laws because, even though the oil had passed through Italian ports, most of it had originated in Tunisia, Turkey, Spain or Greece. “Bertolli olive oil is imported from Italy, but contains no measurable quantity of Italian oil,” according to court documents.”
Curezone lists manufacturers of adulterated olive oil and marketers of the same oil. It is disgusting. We pay high prices for junk-olive oil. From Curezone.com/forums
The Guilty
Below is a list of known adulterated brands and dishonest distributors with links to information about their cases.
Adulterated brands of extra virgin olive oil
with country of origin
Andy’s Pure Olive Oil (Italy)
Bertolli (Italy)
Castel Tiziano (Italy)
Cirio (Italy)
Cornelia (Italy)
Italico (Italy)
Ligaro (Italy)
Olivio (Greece)
Petrou Bros. Olive Oil (California)
Primi (Italy)
Regale (Italy)
Ricetta Antica (Italy)
Rubino (Italy)
San Paolo (Italy)
Sasso (Italy)
Terra Mia (Italy)
Distributors caught selling adulterated olive oil
Altapac Trading
AMT Fine Foods
Bella International Food Brokers
Cher-Mor Foods International
D&G Foods
Deluca Brothers International
Gestion Trorico Inc.
Itaical Trading
Kalamata Foods
Les Ailments MIA Food Distributing
Lonath International
Mario Sardo Sales, Inc.
Petrou Foods, Inc.
Rubino USA Inc.
Siena Foods Ltd.
Vernon Foods
So who do we trust? How do we know that we are getting a quality, unadulterated product? This is fraud in an international scale!
Staph Fatalities Alarming
This is from AOL Health News but it is also featured on Good Morning America today. The government says there has been “an alarming increase” in staph infections, and the number of deaths due to these common infections could soon be overtake death from AIDs infection.
My own father spent a year dying, fighting of MRSA, which is common in many hospitals – even here in Kuwait. The old are particularly vulnerable, but so are all those with open wounds, recent hospitalizations, and compromised immune systems.
CHICAGO (Oct. 17) – More than 90,000 Americans get potentially deadly infections each year from a drug-resistant staph “superbug,” the government reported in its first overall estimate of invasive disease caused by the germ.
Deaths tied to these infections may exceed those caused by AIDS, said one public health expert commenting on the new study. Tuesdays report shows just how far one form of the staph germ has spread beyond its traditional hospital setting.
The overall incidence rate was about 32 invasive infections per 100,000 people. That’s an “astounding” figure, said an editorial in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association, which published the study.
Most drug-resistant staph cases are mild skin infections. But this study focused on invasive infections – those that enter the bloodstream or destroy flesh and can turn deadly.
Researchers found that only about one-quarter involved hospitalized patients. However, more than half were in the health care system – people who had recently had surgery or were on kidney dialysis, for example. Open wounds and exposure to medical equipment are major ways the bug spreads.
In recent years, the resistant germ has become more common in hospitals and it has been spreading through prisons, gyms and locker rooms, and in poor urban neighborhoods.
The new study offers the broadest look yet at the pervasiveness of the most severe infections caused by the bug, called methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. These bacteria can be carried by healthy people, living on their skin or in their noses.
Your best protection? Wash your hands frequently, and stay out of hospitals.
You can read the rest of the article HERE.
Paranoia: Locked Out
Yesterday was bizarre. The blog has become a part of my routine – I get up, grab a cup of coffee, pick up my e-mails, take care of any business that needs be taken care of, read my daily Lectionary readings (see blogroll) and then – I get to visit with YOU!
Imagine how I felt when I could see my blog, but couldn’t log on to it. I don’t know what the problem was.
I tried it on my computer. It kept telling me my password was wrong. Since I have worn the letters off many of the keys on my keyboard, it COULD be wrong, but you know your fingers have this kind of mechanical memory, you know how you can type and your fingers know where the letters are and you don’t even think about it, just think about what you want to say?
So I asked for a new password, thinking oh well, I could change it back to something I might be able to remember. The new password didn’t work. Three times I tried with new passwords, and nothing worked.
I went back and used Adventure Man’s computer, and still couldn’t access.
I have a life, so I went on with my life, and later in the day tried again, with the same results.
Paranoia kind of kicked in. I wondered if I was being blocked? If WordPress was being blocked?
This morning, same story, except this time I prayed and tried all the passwords, promising God if he would just help me get on, just once, I would post my problems (in case it happens again) and change my password, (in case someone has messed with me) and do all the admin work I need to get done.
I haven’t backed up the blog for a long time. I don’t really have time to do it today. Aaaarrrrgh.
But my first, paranoid though was wondering if I had annoyed someone and if I was being blocked.
Then common sense kicked in, thank God, and I figure it was just some kind of technical anomaly. . . it’s like medicine, and political “science”, and all this computer wizardry – there are a lot of black holes, information we just don’t have yet, and I am guessing that this was just one of those anomalies.
I thank you all for bearing with me, and continuing to comment and check on me!
And no, I am not blogging from Syria. The visa never came through. 😦
EnviroGirl on Tap Water
Welcome, EnviroGirl, our Guest Blogger on Blog Action Day, and thank you for being our Guest Blogger!
Thanks, Intlxpatr, for inviting me to be your guest blogger.
Intlxpatr knows that I am passionate about drinking tap water, as well as encouraging others to do the same. I’ve almost always chosen to drink tap water over bottled water, primarily because it’s cheaper that bottled water, and it’s readily available (just turn on the faucet!).
Over the last year I’ve learned that there are even more reasons to drink tap water (at least in the U.S.). So I’ll quickly share with you a few reasons why you should save your money and drink tap water. If you want to do more research on the topic, I’ve included a few links below.
Why you should choose tap water over bottled…
1) Tap water is tested stringently for chemical and microbiological contaminants. It is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and must comply with the Safe Drinking Water Act. Bottled Water is often regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and does not fall under the Safe Drinking Water Act. (All water in the U.S. falls under the Safe Drinking Water Act.) This means that it is not tested as rigorously as tap water. In addition, your community water provider is required to send you a Consumer Confidence Report (CCR) every year. The CCR should inform you of the quality of your tap water and if any contaminants have been detected. Try finding this information on the label of a bottle of water.
2) Bottled water is not only more expensive to purchase, the environment costs are greater too. Bottled water must be shipped to your location, which means more fossil-fuel emissions into the air. After the water is consumed, the plastic bottle must be disposed of. If the bottle is not recycled, it will be tossed in a landfill where it will take about 700 years (plastic bottle recycling facts) to decompose.
3) Clean drinking water is a valuable resource. Recently, droughts and pressures from population growth have created water shortages. In communities experiencing water shortages, bottling water has become a hot topic because it depletes local drinking water supplies. Water use restrictions may be imposed on the community, while the bottled water company is still packaging and selling the amount of water it was permitted to use (For example – http://www.orlandosentinel.com/orl-bottledwater1307oct13,0,6642058.story). This also leads into the importance of conserving drinking water resources and implementing creative strategies such as water reuse (Info on water reuse – http://www.epa.gov/region09/water/recycling/index.html ).
Again, the information above regarding water quality is for tap water in the U.S. In countries that do not have adequate sanitation it is not advisable to drink tap water. If you live outside of the U.S., the World Health Organization (WHO) and the European Commission are two organizations that have water quality standards that many countries choose to adopt. You can search online to determine if your country follows any of these standards and if your tap water is safe to drink.
Links:
U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act:
http://www.epa.gov/safewater/sdwa/basicinformation.html
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – Drinking Water:
http://www.epa.gov/safewater/
World Health Organization – Drinking Water:
http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/en/
European Commission – Drinking Water:
http://ec.europa.eu/environment/water/water-drink/index_en.html
Website for Water in the Middle East:
http://www.al-bab.com/arab/env/water.htm
National Resource Defense Council – Bottled Water Q & A:
http://www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/qbw.asp
Plastic bottle recycling facts (U.S.):
http://earth911.org/recycling/plastic-bottle-recycling/plastic-bottle-recycling-facts/
Idiot Custom Paint Job
I couldn’t resist. I carry my camera with me, and this was too good to pass up.
Just a car? Look again. You may not be able to see all the pink sparkles sprayed on, but they twinkle and sparkle in the sun. And this is a GUY driving a pink sparkly car.
But whoever he hired to do this – or did he do it himself? – was a genius. He also sprayed the tail lights and the back windsheild – did you see that?
Idiots!
Picoult and My Sister’s Keeper
I don’t know where I got the idea that Jodi Picoult wrote girly books, maybe because when you go to a bookstore there are so many of them? I just assumed they were romance and passed right by until several months ago, in a small used book store, I found one that was in the book club section, and those are usually pretty good reads. I bought it, but put off reading it, assuming it was an easy read, maybe I would read it on an airplane one day.
For some reason I moved it up, maybe I had heard a review or something. It moved to the bedside group, the “in line for immediate reading” group. At a time when we were particularly busy, I finished my other book and this was next, and I thought “Oh well, yes we are busy, but this will be light reading.”
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
This book, My Sister’s Keeper, is not light reading. It is a book a lot like We Need To Talk About Kevin one of the most terrifying and unforgettable books I have ever read. It is a book about motherhood, and parenting and tough choices. It is a book about how sometimes your entire life is yanked, and all the focus is on one area, to the detriment of others. It is a particularly tough book if you are a mother.
The main character, Anna, was conceived so that her stem cells, from the umbilical cord, will be used to help her sister, Kate, who has leukemia. Family life is chaotic, to say the least, as the vigilant parents’ attention is constantly on Kate, who suffers frequent relapses.
Picoult uses the voices of Anna, Kate, Jessie – the brother, a pyromaniac, Brian (the father), Sara (the mother), Campbell (Anna’s lawyer) and Jesse (Anna’s guardian ad litem) to tell the story.
Anna has approached Campbell, a lawyer, to achieve medical emancipation. She loves her sister, she has shared a room and her entire life with her sister, she has given stem cells, she has given bone marrow, she has been through several medical procedures to keep her sister’s cancer in remission, but at 13, she balks when expected to give one of her kidneys is a last ditch attempt that even the doctors have little expectation will succeed. She hires a lawyer.
Sara is a mother you would love to hate. You would love to grab her by the shoulders and say “Pay attention! You have THREE children, and two of them need your attention, too!” but something holds you back, and that something is the serious doubt you have about how you would handle the same situation. In extreme circumstances, people make the best choices they can, and when you are in extreme circumstances day after day, things start to fray, and then they start to fall apart. This family is past the fraying part, and we hold our breaths hoping they won’t fall apart.
It’s not a hard read because of the technical terms; this is a book where a 13 year old knows all the vocabulary of cancer, and we learn it, too. It flows naturally in the book.
Kate has acute promyelocytic leukemia. Actually, that’s not quite true – right now she doesn’t have it, but it’s hibernating under her skin like a bear, until it decides to roar again. She was diagnosed when she was two; she’s sixteen now. Molecular relapse and granulocyte and portacath – these words are part of my vocabulary, even though I’ll never find them on any SAT. I’m an allogeneic donor – a perfect sibling match. When Kate needs leukocytes or stem cells or bone marrow to fool her body into thinking it’s healthy, I’m the one who provides them. Nearly every time Kate’s been hospitalized, I wind up there, too.
None of which means anything except that you shouldn’t believe what you hear about me, least of all that which I tell you about myself.
Aha! We are reading a book with an unreliable main character!
It is a hard read because we all have families, and we all face tough decisions. There is a part of us that says “thank God we are not in this situation” and another part that says “there but for the grace of God . . . ” It is a tough book because we don’t know who we will become when life-changing circumstances hit us, we don’t know what choices we would make, because we are afraid, and because we don’t want to find out.
There are some surprises, though, and you will want to keep reading. There is a lot of love here, in the cracks between the tragedies. My Sister’s Keeper has three sets of sisters, and a lot of focus on that very special relationship. The men, too, come off well at the end.
Not an easy read, but a book that will stay in your heart for a long time.
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