Twelve years after Chapman and I set out for Prince George, B.C., where Chapman announced his fears of both bears and jello-swim nights at the local college, and then went to Kansas State University, where I met a girl (who’s still my best friend and wife), where I got sexually advanced upon in an unpleasant manner by a professor dude, where I had lunch with the president, got a job offer, and enjoyed a great career, my former boss sent me this:
KState has changed its handwashing recommendations.
They disconnected the blow dryers in those groovy all-in-one handwashing units.
One reason I was offered the job is because I took the prez to the bathroom and showed him how shitty their handwashing recommendations were.
But that story is old.
No one should be recreating their past glory days (and if I ever quote a Bruce Springsteen song again, put me out of my misery).
Change does sometimes happen: usually not as fast as any of us would like.
Claudia Tanner of the Daily Mail reports that an idyllic holiday turned into a health nightmare for a couple when they were struck down with salmonella poisoning at a luxury resort.
Paul Gallagher, 45, and wife Lesley, 48, were looking forward to a sun-drenched break in Sinemorets, Bulgaria, but their joy was short-lived when they both fell ill.
Three days into their stay, the pair suffered extreme vomiting, diarrhoea, sweating and stomach cramps in September last year.
Paul, a HGV driver, revealed how he spent the remainder of the week-long holiday going to the toilet 40 times a day.
The pair, from East Kilbride, in South Lanarkshire, Scotland, claim food was left out for hours which attracted flies and the pool was dirty at the four-star Bella Vista Beach Club, where they had paid £620 for an all-inclusive stay.
Back home, Paul’s stools tested positive for salmonella – which is usually caused by eating contaminated food. Lesley was suspected of having the same.
Health types advise Canadians not to use or eat any Robin Hood All Purpose Flour, Original sold in 10 kilogram bags with a code containing BB/MA 2018 AL 17 and 6 291 548 as these products may be contaminated with E. coli. For additional recall details, please consult CFIA’s recall notice. Restaurants and retailers are also advised not to sell or serve the recalled product, or any items that may have been prepared or produced using the recalled product.
This outbreak is a reminder that it is not safe to taste or eat raw dough or batter, regardless of the type of flour used as raw flour can be contaminated with harmful bacteria such as E. coli.
Free from the shackles of government PRery, someone from Health Canada told ProMed a few days ago, a sample of Robin Hood flour was collected from one case’s home. The sample tested positive for E. coli O121 and had matching PFGE to the clinical cases. Subsequently, a sample of Robin Hood flour collected from a retail location also tested positive for E. coli O121. Several cases reported contact with Robin Hood flour. Isolates from the 2016 U.S. outbreak have been compared to the current outbreak in Canada by whole genome sequencing (via PulseNet International); the Canadian outbreak strain is not similar to the U.S. outbreak. Comparisons will continue to be made on an ongoing basis throughout the outbreak investigation in Canada.
Profs. Keith Warriner and Jeff Farber of the University of Guelph told CBC uncooked flour, such as that found in raw cookie dough, can host E. coli bacteria, and we may need to handle flour in the same way that we handle uncooked meat.
The Auckland Regional Public Health said this afternoon that of those cases, three people remained in hospitals around the city.
All patients – including children – are connected to the Mt Albert Samoan Assembly of God church congregation which holds its Sunday services at Wesley Primary School in Mt Roskill.
“More cases may come to light as a result of the work ARPHS is doing to trace those who have been in contact with people confirmed as having typhoid,” a statement said.
“Typhoid has a typical incubation period of eight to 14 days, but incubation can be up to 80 days.
This means cases may emerge over the course of several weeks.”
Health officials are urging anyone who has close contacts to those affected by the disease to take extra precautions.
“Public health services have asked close contacts of typhoid patients who are in settings where there is an increased risk of transmission, such as food handlers, to stand down until they’re cleared.”
Pech Sotheary of the Khmer Times reports that 27 monks and nuns from Battambang province’s Bavel district were struck with food poisoning after consuming large amounts of soy milk.
District police chief Oeum Tith said yesterday that 14 monks and 13 nuns from the Bavel pagoda started showing symptoms of food poisoning after an ordination ceremony. They are all in a stable condition after being sent to the commune’s health center.
“The main cause is likely the homemade soy milk because about 10 to 15 minutes after they drank it, they started displaying symptoms of food poisoning. However we’re still waiting on the official results from the experts,” Mr. Tith said.
Provincial health department officer Voeung Bun Reth said a preliminary investigation showed the tainted soy milk to have been the cause, coupled with the fact that the recently-ordained monks had consumed it in large amounts as a food substitute.
“Young monks aren’t used to skipping dinner. So they drank too much soy milk after they were ordained yesterday morning,” he said.
“Once they are ordained, they cannot have dinner based on the rules of the religion, so they drank too much soy milk instead, which caused them to vomit. But now they’re better and there is no problem.” He also urged anyone producing or consuming food products to pay special attention to food safety guidelines to avoid making consumers ill.
It all started a few years ago with a conversation about recipes and cooking, and just how little was said in recipes about handling food safely. I mean, “cook until done”? What does that even mean?
So with Chapman’s support, I set off on a mission – to look through recipes in cookbooks (29 books and over 1700 recipes) for evidence of safe food handling guidance – giving a safe internal temperatures and ways to avoid cross-contamination.
It took about a year to collect the data (remember, 1700+ recipes…), and another couple to finish the article, Evaluating Food Safety Risk Messages in Popular Cookbooks, just published in the British Food Journal.
Then the press release went out, and something notable happened. Someone, somewhere, decided it was worth sharing. So it got shared – and talked about – a lot.
And there was an opportunity here: Talking with the media and posting about our study has never been about bashing celebrities, but about a chance to get our messages out there while we are being listened to.
I’ve done a few interviews and while the journalists may want to talk about Gwyneth, and who was the worst, I get to interject stuff into the pop culture conversation like, use a thermometer; follow safe endpoint temperatures; and, keep your hands and food surfaces clean and sanitized.
This is a researcher’s dream – to have your work noticed, discussed, and sometimes understood – by lots of people.
Putting in the work was worth it because what we did got noticed. And people are talking about it. Maybe they’ll be changing what they do because of it.
I’m fortunate to have a partner for 11 years now who has repeatedly told me she loves me – just the way I am.
And she’s smart, and main breadwinner in our Brisbane household.
She also swears a lot more than she used too: blames it on being married to a Canadian hockey player, and taken up hockey herself.
Check your e-mail settings, I often go to your trash because I swears a lot.
Thirty years ago I had this feeling.
My hands felt just like two balloons.
By the summer of 1987, I was bored out of my mind studying Verticillium wilt in resistant and susceptible tomato lines – so much so that I would listen, not even watch, but listen, to Toronto Blue Jays games on the radio at night while I infected tomato plants in the lab and then extracted DNA.
It was a non-pharmaceutical sedative.
I decided to immerse myself in finding a bigger audience — newspapers, at the time.
When I was a gradual student back about 1986, I had started writing about science for the University of Guelph student newspaper.
Canadian daughter one was born and the next month I went to a scientific meeting to present some results about my Verticillium findings.
I spent most of my time in an outdoor patio at Carleton University, reading all I could about media and newspapers, and came up with a plan to start an alternative newspaper when I returned to Guelph.
Then I got hired as a section editor at the existing paper.
Then I became editor-in-chief.
And then I quit, and put my alternative paper plan into action.
Thirty years later, I’m going to revisit history and do sorta the same thing.
Not for ego, not for repetition, but for the same reason people wanted me to lead that other paper 30 years ago: a whole bunch of people asked me to do it.
For 25 years I have published barfblog.com and FSnet.
I openly shared this with everyone because that’s what I thought profs at public universities did.
But they had no trouble getting rid of full-professor me.
Lesson learned.
Amy and I had a visit a few months ago from a former student of mine from Ireland, who now lives in Sydney.
She told me later that I wasn’t in the right space to hear what she had to say those few months ago.
She was right.
But she recently told me, what you do is unique, people use your stuff all over the world, can you really just turn your back on all that?
Probably not.
People love food safety as long as it is free.
Universities have been good to me.
But what worked in the time of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (the first empiricist) may not work today.
Just like we don’t want medical treatments from 2,000 years ago, providing information and the notion of the commons should also fit today.
If you see any adverts on barfblog.com, please let us know. We don’t accept advertising. We’re idealistic that way (until we go broke).
Someone will eventually pay, but until then, I’m happy to embrace the Grateful Dead model of entrepreneurship: Build it and they will come.
Oh, and I am fully aware of the hypocrisy of Neil Young singing this note’s for you, after making millions.
The most recent pieces, notably by artists Zineb Sedira who was born to Algerian parents in France, and Katia Kameli who has a French mother and Algerian father, show layering of colonial memory into contemporary images of the Algerian people and landscape. The exhibit, which in title wants to show the origins of the Algerian territory, is created primarily in France, for a French audience, and is built upon French imagination. By assessing the lines, grids and other marks that are still visibly mapped onto Algeria in the exhibit, this paper explores how what is in name “Made in Algeria” remains heavily marked by France.
As Europe continues to face the largest wave of refugees pouring into its borders since World War II, past influxes of migrants across the continent offer important lessons about national identity and integration. With Germany receiving the vast majority of refugees, and France ranked in the top three destinations, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar Germany and France is particularly timely. The goal of this book is to compare how the estimated 12 million expellees from Germany’s European Empire were reintegrated within Germany’s shrunken borders after World War II, and how France’s nearly 1 million colonial citizens of Algeria were received in France after Algerian Independence was recognized in 1962. Both the expellees and the Pieds-Noirs were full-fledged citizens who had been fulfilling a national duty for their motherland in its outlying territories. However, when the borders shifted with the fall of the German Empire, and Algeria became independent from France, notions of colonial grandeur waned and died. How the motherland dealt with these living reminders of a failed mission had to fit carefully within the myths of the nation, both present and past. For Germany, this was complicated by the two Germanies, East and West. Where expellees decided to resettle impacted directly on how they would be reintegrated. France, trying to hush up its colonial failures, wilfully silenced the war story, leaving the Pieds-Noirs struggling to share their experience as they banded together in a newly homogenised community. Some quietly integrated, but many today still proudly strive to keep their memories of Algeria alive. Both Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs have negotiated national ideas of victimization and forgetting, silencing, integrating, and assimilating back into their so-called homeland.
The two populations shared various challenges, one being that unlike “repatriates,” many had never before set foot in the homeland, and some spoke different languages altogether (Polish, for example among the expellees or Spanish for many Pieds-Noirs). For the Pieds-Noirs who had been implanted in the settler-colony of Algeria for more than 130 years, they were distinct from the French because of their diverse heritages (Spanish, Italian, Maltese, Jewish and even German communities existed in colonial Algeria, all made citizens of France) and their specific cultural backgrounds. The expellees, running counter to this ethnic diversity, were part of a program meant to create homogenous communities abroad. Nonetheless, when “returned” to the motherland, it was not immediately obvious how to integrate these representatives of unsuccessful expansion.
In Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs, the editors Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen draw useful comparisons between the German expellees post World War II (Vertriebene) and the former French citizens of Algeria who repatriated to France in 1962. The book’s pretext is compelling: these two groups carried a similar amount of stigma related to lost territories during eras of expansion; the two groups represent a large postcolonial diaspora that have not often been addressed because of the sense of “homecoming” involved in their returns to Germany and France respectively. Pieds-Noirs and Vertriebene, in many instances, had to quickly take what they could and flee to the motherland. The trauma of this exile was not easily mitigated because it was often not addressed. With losses pinned to their identities and unfavorable political sins enmeshed in their existence, both groups (responsible or not for these sins) went through difficult integration into the motherland even when support was offered.
The editors have gathered research from the most prominent scholars in their fields: Jansen, Savarèse, Shepard, Baussant and Eldridge, have long been studying the Pieds-Noirs and the memory of the Algerian War, and are each suited to provide authoritative commentary. Likewise, Baranowski, Bösch, François, and Troebst are highly regarded scholars in German studies. Borutta and Jansen have equally established a clear and pedagogically sound structure for their book by pairing studies focused on Germany and France on roughly the same topics: nation-building after the empire, repatriation and integration, community organization and identity, commemorative practices, and politics, and remembrance. Each of the six parts of the book builds on the previous section, which manages to bring even the uninformed reader up to level through the progression of articles. The book represents a vast array of topics ranging from culturally specific Vertriebene culinary practices to Pied-Noir pilgrimages in France, from economic plans for resettlement and reintegration to the place of memory in each community.
Each of the articles are supremely researched, compelling, and enjoyable to read. I read from the position of knowing a lot about the Pieds-Noirs but almost nothing about the Vertriebene. Articles on both topics are clear and engaging for the newcomer and expert alike. For example, the first chapter, “Legacies of Lebenstraum: German Identity and Multi-Ethnicity” by Shelley Baranowski, clearly situates the Vertriebene within German histories of migration and follows them through the histories of both East and West Germany (and the flux between the two) as well as post-unification. This is an eloquent article that is delightful to read. The paired chapter by Todd Shepard, “The Birth of the Hexagon,” offers thoughtful insight on the position of the Pieds-Noirs across history (and their near disappearance in seminal works like Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire) and how the community has been positioned in broader notions of French national identity. The conclusion of the book written by Etienne François relates the memories of exile on a personal level. François recounts his family’s unique position of being attached to both Algeria and Germany before the fall of the empires. He sensitively compares the similarities and differences as well as the impact of exile and the traumatic context of departure, on these two communities.
This book provides a rich comparative study, the first of its kind, and certainly the first in English (featuring four French articles that were superbly translated by John Tittensor) to address two lesser known populations of migrants who had and continue to have an important role in the national identities of France and Germany. Specialists in migration studies, diaspora and memory studies, as well as the unversed in the history of the Pieds-Noirs and Vertriebene, will find this book useful. It is clearly and cogently written so that both scholars and general readers will gain insight from the texts and perhaps also better understand the complexities and suffering associated with exile and integration even for those who are said to be coming home.
But through the contributions of more experienced coaches, I’ve come to appreciate the value of the 24-hour rule.
It means think about it, and is it really so important?
I had my first parents’ meeting of the new ice hockey season (because I have to say ice hockey in Australia) and stressed the 24-hour rule: Don’t talk to me during practice or games, don’t talk to me afterwards, give it 24 hours.
In turn, I will wait 24 hours until I say something.
Sure, this sounds like trivial maturity, but when adults and kids go to arenas, and put all that gear on, crazy things happen.
I’m the coach – and have put in the 40 hours of training, just like the 7 years of PhD training — and I am to be calm, like supervising PhD students who are freaking out.
According to Elizabeth Henson of The Advertiser, a top Adelaide restaurateur, embroiled in a fiery keyboard stoush with a customer he called “dimwitted”, says it’s time eateries “give as good as they get” when the butt of scathing online criticism.
Victory Hotel and Star of Greece owner Doug Govan let rip on Facebook after patron Jodie Clarke described the hotel as “rude and obnoxious” and “so unaccommodating” — and another, Emma-Jade Fowler, described “terrible customer service” after a booking mishap at the weekend.
Mr Govan branded Ms Fowler “dimwitted” and argued that businesses should be able to defend themselves on social media.
But disgruntled Ms Fowler described the attack as bullying behaviour and said the Sellicks Hill hotel’s response was shameful and “disgusting.”
Let’s just accept that we’re all dimwitted to varying degrees.
The Victory Hotel’s Facebook page was forced to temporarily shut down after Ms Clarke wrote about her experience at the hotel on Saturday night after the eatery was unable to accommodate her and her friends.
“You are rude, obnoxious and so unaccommodating,” she wrote on Facebook.
“We had a group booking of 17 people, yes 17 people, and every single one … has walked away disgusted.
“And every single one of us will tell every person we know our story of your terrible service and unhelpful, rude staff. We will never be back.”
Ms Fowler wrote “terrible customer service, you should be ashamed Victory Hotel” in reference to the booking problem.
This comment elicited an outburst from Mr Govan, which he says he now regrets.
“Terribly dim-witted Emma-Jade not-sure-what-my-first-name-should-be Emma or Jade, don’t get involved in something you don’t know anything about,” he wrote.
“Imagine one of your friends told you the sun wasn’t going to come up tomorrow. Would you agree just because they were a stupid, dim-witted friend? No, you wouldn’t. If one of your friends said I went to a restaurant with 17 people and they couldn’t find my booking? Yes, if you were a dim-witted imbecile, yes, possibly.
“But if they told you the truth and said that they had screwed up their booking, maybe you wouldn’t be wasting your time writing crap. But maybe you just love seeing your name on social media.”
Ms Fowler fired back. “At the end of the day, this is bullying and it will be taken further,” she wrote.
“You should be ashamed of the way you have responded, it’s disgusting.”
The hotel shut down its Facebook page on Monday night after a barrage of comments from those involved, as well as others, were posted about the incident. It came back online yesterday and offered an apology “for any offensive comments made on Facebook”.
A link to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission complaints portal was included in the post.
KState has changed its handwashing recommendations.
