About 18 months ago, I sat on a bench in Brisbane and my iPhone 7 fell out of my pocket.
Someone picked it up.
Two nights ago the Queensland police e-mailed me and said they found it.
We had traced the phone using findmyphone, but it was an apartment complex about 2 km away and couldn’t get a specific signal.
I had filed a police report with the serial number, but insurance wouldn’t cover it, so I figured it was just another technology tragedy (also why I use a computer from 2012 because I’ll just drop it, why I used an iPhone 5 for years, because I’d just drop it, why I have to concentrate when I walk, because I’ll just fall over).
And then, after 18 months, the phone shows up at the West End police station.
They wouldn’t or couldn’t tell me how they came into possession of it, my beautiful wife drove me to the police station, and daughter Sorenne now has a nice upgrade to her iPhone 5.
And since this is personally weird post, here’s a picture of when I was about 3 on Grandpa Homer’s tractor (the asparagus baron) that my mother sent along. She’s 77 and flying to Australia to be with me for a week.
I had this dream, where I was coaching on the ice in Brisbane for a few hours, helping do evaluations of kids – male and female – and running them through drills.
As the kids got changed and the girls were mixed in with the boys, I explained we had enough girls in Guelph that they had their own league, and as a coach, I wouldn’t go into the dressing room until they were all dressed, and after the game would debrief for a couple of minutes, and then say good bye outside.
After 3 hours of on-ice training I said I’m going home for an hour and would be back in an hour.
I started to put on my street clothes, realized it was dark outside, looked at my iPhone and saw it was 2 a.m.
I miss coaching, but my brain is doing too many weird things.
To win the Stanley Cup, a team needs 16 wins, 4 best of 7 rounds of hockey.
Half the teams have been golfing since Feb.
There’s a game 7 on right now, St. Louis is winning against Boston, attempting to avenge their 1970 loss where Bobby Orr scored the winning goal in an iconic photo. All Canadians know that pic, and we all know Paul Henderson scoring against Russia in 1972.
We got out of grade school to watch the game in the gym.
Hockey matters, and now that my French professor wife has been playing for 4 years, she’s an expert.
Me, I’m retired due to brain and physical injuries, but 50 years of taking pucks to the head will do that.
Dr. John, a six-time Grammy winner who in his incarnation as the “Night Tripper” brought the New Orleans voodoo vibe to America’s music scene and became one of the most venerated pianists in the city’s rich musical history, died on Thursday at age 77.
The New Orleans native, born Malcolm John Rebennack into a family of amateur musicians, including an aunt who taught him to play piano, died “towards the break of day” from a heart attack, his family announced on his official Twitter account.
Immersed in music from a young age, he was an avid radio listener, and his father, who sold records in his appliance store, sometimes took his son along to nightclubs when he worked on their sound systems.
In grade school he began hanging around clubs, and by the time he was a teenager, Rebennack was playing in rough bars and strip clubs. Along the way, he absorbed a blend of rhythm and blues, cowboy songs, gospel and jazz, as well as New Orleans’ Mardi Gras music, boogie, barrelhouse piano and funk – or “fonk,” as he pronounced it.
Early on he was principally a guitarist, but errant gunplay in 1961 led him to change course. One of his fingers was nearly blown off when he intervened to help the singer in his band, who was being pistol-whipped by another man.
The finger did not heal sufficiently for proper guitar playing right away, but was less troublesome on a piano, and eventually Dr. John would become an heir to the New Orleans keyboard tradition of Jelly Roll Morton, Professor Longhair, Huey “Piano” Smith and Fats Domino.
Dr. John recorded some 35 albums, and three of them won Grammys – “Goin’ Back to New Orleans” for best tradition album in 1992; “City That Care Forgot” about the destruction and heartbreak of Hurricane Katrina; and 2013’s “Locked Down,” which touched on his prison time, drugs and efforts to repair his relationship with his children.
He also picked up Grammys for a 1989 duet with Rickie Lee Jones on “Makin’ Whoopee” and his contributions on the songs “SRV Shuffle” in 1996 and “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t (My Baby)” in 2000.
He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011.
Dr. John was married twice and told the New York Times he had “a lot” of children.
There’s been some changes in technical stuff at barfblog.com, and I don’t really understand what’s going on, I just write for free to delay the inevitable decay of my brain.
If you want to follow us on facebook, you need to sign up to the barfblog group, because that’s where the postings show up.
I don’t know if subscribers are receiving posts in a timely manner in their e-mail — I’m not, but I’m just a writer — but you can let Chapman know because he’s in charge.
But I’m still barfblog and barfblog is still me, so here is Sorenne, who scored the winning touch to take the final in their inter-school division this afternoon (they call everything grand finals here, and they’re not grand, they’re finals; no one calls the NHL Stanley Cup the grand finals), and a couple of recent pieces of art.
As I said when I started the other newspaper at the University of Guelph in 1988, you don’t like it, start your own paper and stop complaining.
Of course Heston I-didn’t-sicken-550-people-wth-Norovirus Blumenthal would be vain enough to sign up to have cheese made from his skin – his groin area.
I’m a big fan of fermentations but am also a big fan of using knowledge and experience to improve on basic biological phenomena.
Bettina Makalintal of Vice writes that people have been fermenting for at least 9,200 years, and yet, not everyone’s convinced. The process requires bacteria, which can result in funky sights and smells, squicking some people out. Still, it’s safe to say that fermentation advocates have done a good job of turning people on to the magic of microbes: dry-aged beef is on high-end restaurant menus, and more and more people reap the illness flavor rewards of raw-milk cheese.
A new exhibit at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum called “Food: Bigger than the Plate” shows off not only a toilet made of cow manure and an edible water bottle, but also “human cheese.” The latter is made using human bacteria. And not just any human bacteria, but celebrity bacteria
Most cheese is made using starter cultures, bacteria that curdle the milk, and often, those starters come from a packet. For the V&A’s five “human cheeses,” however, that bacteria came from celebrities, who had their skin swabbed in the name of science and truly funky cheese: from baker and food writer Ruby Tandoh to chef Heston Blumenthal to Blur’s Alex James, a cheesemaker himself. (British rapper Professor Green and Suggs of the ska band Madness also contributed.) It’s “like a celebrity selfie in cheese form,” reads V&A’s blog.
The point, the museum says, is to challenge people’s “squeamishness” and to enhance “our appreciation of the microbial world.”
As I’m about to watch game 4 of the Stanley Cup final between St. Louis and Boston (that’s ice hockey for my Australian friends, and it’s on in background) I think of the Finnish trend of young girls prancing – pretending to ride horses.
According to a story in People, many young girls in the country have taken up the craft of “hobbyhorsing,” which sees them use a stick equipped with a toy horse’s head to dance and show off their riding skills at events.
While it may seem like the girls are simply pretending to ride their horses, it becomes as genuine as it can get at competitions, where they’ll learn how to care for their hobbyhorse just as if it were a real animal. They even pick its breed and gender.
Becoming a part of the country’s growing hobbyhorse community reportedly allows the girls to express themselves without fear of ridicule in something they may not find in school or in their neighborhood.
“The normal things, that normal girls like, they don’t feel like my things,” 11-year-old hobbyhorse enthusiast Fanny Oikarinen told the N.Y. Times.
“Some are sports girls,” added Fanny’s friend, Maisa Wallius. “Some are really lonely girls. And some can be the coolest girl at school.”
Enthusiast Alisa Aarniomaki found online stardom thanks to her hobbyhorsing, but despite her popular videos, she was unsure about revealing her skills to kids at school.
“Little girls are allowed to be strong and wild,” Vilhunen said of hobbyhorsing. “I think the society starts to shape them into a certain kind of quietness when they reach puberty.
If it works for these girls, great. My five daughters all played or play (ice) hockey – the real kind.
It’s a morning ritual for millions: a couple of cups of coffee followed by a couple of poops.
Pranjal Mehar of Tech Explorist reports that one study found that 29% of participants needed to use the bathroom within 20 minutes of drinking a cup of coffee.
But why?
In the search for the appropriated answer, scientists in Texas fed rats coffee with gut bacteria in Petri dishes. They found that coffee suppressed bacteria and increased muscle motility, regardless of caffeine content.
Scientists additionally examined changes to bacteria when the fecal matter was exposed to coffee in a petri dish, and by studying the composition offeces after rats ingested differing concentrations of coffee over three days. The study also documented changes to smooth muscles in the intestine and colon, and the response of those muscles when exposed directly to coffee.
The study found that growth of bacteria and other microbes in fecal matter in a petri dish was suppressed with a solution of 1.5 percent coffee, and growth of microbes was even lower with a 3 percent solution of coffee. Decaffeinated coffee had a similar effect on the microbiome.
Xuan-Zheng Shi, Ph.D., lead author of the study and associate professor in internal medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston said, “When rats were treated with coffee for three days, the ability of the muscles in the small intestine to contract appeared to increase. Interestingly, these effects are caffeine-independent, because caffeine-free coffee had similar effects as regular coffee.”
After the rats were fed coffee for three days, the overall bacteria counts in their feces were decreased. According to scientists, further study isrequired to determine whether these changes favor firmicutes, considered “good” bacteria, or enterobacteria, which are regarded as negative.
Muscles in the lower intestines and colons of the rats showed increased ability to contract after a period of coffee ingestion, and coffee stimulated contractions of the small intestine and colon when muscle tissues were exposed to coffee directly in the lab.
I’m so proud of my parents for staying in contact with the Canadian kids and their great grandchildren.
This is my mom and dad on the left, and mom’s sister and her husband on the right, at the occasion of their 60th wedding anniversary. Everyone in the pic is in their 80s, except my mom, but she’ll be there soon. (I love uncle Dave’s shirt, I own several)
When did 80 become the new 50?
The girls are the daughters of Homer the Canadian asparagus king (100 acres) and my cousin is crafting a living on his farm now that they are in full asparagus season.
Urine smells throughout Ontario at this time of year.
Canadian daughter 2-of-4 had a birthday party for her 4-year-old son, so here are some pics.
Daughter Courtlynn wasn’t there because she lives in B.C. and that’s like flying from Australia to anywhere.
Here’s the slide show, courtesy of my mother, and my contributions to the world:
Madelynn, 32, 1 boy:
Jaucelynn, 29, 2 boys (that’s a Doug stare, both of them, depending on my mood.
The birthday boy and family, followed by Madelynn and Braunwynn.
West Coast Courtlynn, Amy and Sorenne, and one of the reasons I can’t play hockey anymore, but can still write (not exactly as shown). I will not go gently into that dark night.
Don and Ben are joined by longtime friend and colleague, podcast downloader (and sometimes listener) Linda Harris. The three nerds talk about other podcasts, Kardashian indices, Erdos numbers, berries, and the long and progressive food safety story of raw almonds. The almond story touches on what should happen when an industry has a major outbreak, how working with extension and research academics can lead to solutions and ripples of managing food safety risks.
For almost 20 years I’ve tried to connect the things I know about. Today it worked.
Matt Shipman and Chris Liotta, my buddies and colleagues in NC State Communications and our college communications independently hit me up with a question about if we could connect food safety and hockey as Raleigh was in the midst of NHL playoff fever.
Here’s what we came up with:
A lot of traditions have developed around the Stanley Cup since it was first awarded to hockey champions in 1893. One of those traditions is for members of the winning team to drink from the Cup, which raises the question: could the Stanley Cup spread disease?
To get at that question, we should discuss the history of the “common cup.”
Shared Cups and Public Health
In the early years of train travel in the United States, travelers were expected to share a common cup, or a dipper, when getting water in their train cars. This eventually raised public health concerns, which led to a spate of state and federal laws barring the use of common cups in train travel.
“We now know that whenever someone places their hands or mouth on a cup, or other eating utensil, that person can deposit bacteria or viruses on the surface,” says Ben Chapman, a food safety researcher at NC State University (and avid hockey fan). “The next person to use that utensil may then ingest the bacteria or virus.
“This form of cross-contamination is well established, and has been identified as a vector for disease since studies of diphtheria and tuberculosis in the early 20th century – which is what led to the common cup laws in the first place.”
That’s good general background, but what about the Stanley Cup in particular?
Drinking From Lord Stanley’s Cup
The bowl part of the Cup, which is what people actually drink from, is made of silver – not dissimilar to a silver chalice your grandparents might own, if your grandparents own a silver chalice that’s been photographed with Wayne Gretzky. And the fact that it’s made of silver actually matters.
Silver is inert. That means it won’t react chemically with most of the substances you put into it, like the acidic fruit juices. Silver also has antimicrobial properties. However, given the circumstances we’re talking about (a bunch of hockey players drinking out of the Cup), those antimicrobial properties won’t reduce the risk of cross-contamination in any meaningful way.
What About Booze?
Everyone knows alcohol is a disinfectant. But does the presence of alcohol eliminate the risk of disease transmission for people drinking out of the Cup? No.
“There are two big factors here,” Chapman says. “One factor is the amount of alcohol in the beverage. For example, beer has a lower percentage of alcohol than champagne, which has less alcohol than hard liquor.
“An alcohol percentage of about 3% appears to be the threshold for making a difference in regard to contamination. And the higher the alcohol percentage, the more effective the beverage will be as an antimicrobial agent.”
However, this first factor is largely irrelevant, because of the second factor: time.
“In order to kill off pathogens, the alcohol has to be in contact with the pathogens for a specific period of time,” Chapman says. “The higher the alcohol content, the shorter the contact time needs to be.
“But, as we’ve noted in the past with eggnog, even strong liquor won’t significantly reduce microbial contamination in an hour or less. And nobody’s waiting an hour between sips when it comes to the Stanley Cup.”
What Increases Risk?
People have put all sorts of things into the Stanley Cup, from dogs to caviar. But the riskiest behavior comes when people put things in the Cup that are likely to be contaminated, such as raw eggs (that’s happened) or babies that are about to poop (that’s happened too).
Beyond that, basic health guidelines suggest that any time someone is drinking from the Cup, you want to make sure they’ve washed their hands first and haven’t thrown up recently. Players who are playing through an illness, for example, could potentially pass it on to the rest of the team. (Players who barfed due solely to athletic exertion likely don’t pose an increased health risk.)
What Is The Biggest Risk?
“If someone is going to contract a disease by drinking out of the Cup, my best guess would be norovirus,” Chapman says. “There are more than 19 million cases of norovirus each year in the U.S., and it is incredibly hardy. In addition, it only takes a little bit to make you sick – on average only a few virus particles are necessary to cause an illness.
“If norovirus got onto the Cup, it could survive there for months. What’s more, you have to take very specific steps to sanitize a surface contaminated with noro.”
However, it’s important to note that cross-contamination can only occur if one of the people handling the Cup is a disease carrier.
Someone picked it up.
