With the end of the National Hockey League regular season last night – people in Kansas will have no idea what I am talking abooooout – it’s fitting Canadian Ben Chapman gets top billing in the small market of Raleigh, North Carolina – they used to be the Hartford Whalers – where the Carolina Hurricanes have proven they can suck as bad as the Toronto Maple Leafs.

General Manager Jim Rutherford, from Beeton, Ontario, what went wrong? Is it because Chapman moved to Raleigh?

The Charlotte Observer features Chapman this morning and has a few nosestretchers, beginning by billing Chapman as a molecular biologist: yah, me too, except neither of us has run a gel in the past decade.

Ben Chapman, a molecular biologist (right, sorta as shown, with a lot of photoshop), considers it a distinct honor to publish some of his academic findings on barfblog.com and post scholarly writings in restaurant kitchens.

The N.C. State University assistant professor, who also publishes academic findings in peer-reviewed journals, is a food safety expert. …

Chapman was inspired by flyers posted above urinals in an Ontario sports bar near where he did his graduate work. Then he washed dishes in a university restaurant for three months (nosestretcher alert – it was one month) and learned that food handlers care about celebrities, music and pop culture.

He replaced statistics with narratives and wrapped the information sheet in plastic, because in a kitchen that indicates something is important.

When he posted the information sheets in kitchens where video cameras monitored how often 47 food handlers washed their hands and switched knives after cutting raw chicken, it turned out that "telling stories about foodborne illnesses and the consequences to food handlers makes a difference," he said.

Since he conducted the study and moved to North Carolina, he’s learned about other tools he plans to tap to get his message across – YouTube, mommyblogs and Twitter.