The only time my bike ever got stolen – or picked up – was after I left it for four days outside the plant agriculture building at the University of Guelph.
Those four days?
That’s another story.
The inventors of SkunkLock say they were so sick of having their cycles stolen, they decided to give robbers a taste of their own medicine.
Daniel Idzkowski from San Diego realized there’s pretty much no solution to the problem of bike theft because you can cut through nearly every type of lock in a matter of seconds. So he decided to fill a U-Lock with a cannister of smelly gas instead.
“It’s pretty much immediately vomit inducing, causes difficulty breathing… A lot of similar symptoms to pepper spray.”
The lock hasn’t been tested out on thieves yet but Idzkowski and Skunklock co-founder Yves Perrenoud say their own experiments have shown the gas “makes 99% of people puke.”
Canada has enough musical embarrassments to apologize for.
Now my home and native land is apologizing for cheese wheels.
Jason Proctor of CBC News reports an out-of-control five-kilogram wheel of aged farmhouse cheddar is being blamed for breaking an infant’s leg in a B.C. Supreme Court lawsuit arising from a Whistler cheese-rolling competition.
In a notice of civil claim filed by her guardian, Juli Nonaka claims she was injured on Blackcomb Mountain in August during the ninth annual running of the Great Canadian Cheese Rolling Festival.
“As the plaintiff was watching the event from behind a safety net on the premises, a cheese wheel came rolling down the hill and stretched the safety net colliding with the plaintiff, causing her to be knocked to the ground and sustain injury, loss and damage,” the claim reads.
Nonaka is suing the Dairy Farmers of Canada, Smak Media and Promotions and Vail Resorts, the U.S. Company which owns Whistler Blackcomb.
According to cheese-rolling historians, humans may have been chasing wheels of cheese down steep slopes since pagan times. Written accounts of cheese-rolling date back nearly 200 years.
The most famous event is held at Cooper’s Hill, near Gloucester in England, where competitors chase a wheel of Double Gloucester down an incline as sharp as a 40-year-old block of cheddar.
An orange-hued cheese with a natural rind, Double Gloucester gets very hard as it ages, which is thought to be why it became associated with cheese rolling. Cheese speeds can reach more than 100 kilometres an hour.
Not surprisingly, the history of cheese rolling is replete with tales of injury.
According to cheeserolling.com, 22 people were injured at Cooper’s Hill during the “cheese chase chaos” of 1990, including a 59-year-old woman knocked unconscious.
And in 1997, more than 33 people were wounded when things went awry, leading to a delay — but not the cancellation — of the women’s event.
A bromate at the daddy crowd at school pickup yesterday sheepishly admitted that until two years ago, he thought the band Queen was from the U.S.
I asked him, where were the Beatles from?
Liverpool, UK.
Rolling Stones?
Detroit, Michigan, Rock City USA (he was joking).
Regardless of where you’re from, Whole Foods still sucks at food safety.
The Detroit Health Department is investigating two cases of Hepatitis A in connection with the prepared foods section at the Whole Foods Market at 115 Mack Avenue in Detroit, officials said.
One case was diagnosed in an employee at the store who handles and prepared food at the store.
The second case was diagnosed in a Detroit resident who ate at the prepared foods section of the store.
It’s unclear how either case was contracted, officials said. It’s possible the second case might have been contracted from the food handler, health officials said.
The Detroit Health Department recommends anyone who ate prepared foods from the Whole Foods in Detroit between Oct. 6 and Oct. 12 to speak with a doctor.
“While it remains unclear exactly how either of these individuals contracted Hepatitis A, and we know that Whole Foods Market Detroit has a comprehensive food safety protocol, we want to do our best to protect our residents and those of surrounding communities who may have been exposed. Whole Foods has been nothing but cooperative throughout this process,” said Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, executive director and health officer at the Detroit Health Department.
Leave it to the urban chic of NPR to ask, Rocky Mountain oysters are what?
They’re skinned, sliced, battered, deep-fried bull testicle into a cup of cocktail sauce.
Protein comes in many forms, in many climates.
Get over it.
After slicing, dicing, breading and deep-frying, Guffy brings out the basket with a side of cocktail sauce. It’s a sampler: bison, lamb and beef oysters.
I go with the more exotic bison oyster as my first taste.
There’s no good way to say this: They were surprisingly juicy. And I know this is cliche, but the bison tasted like chicken. The lamb was similar in taste and texture. But the beef were in a league all their own, chewy and meaty and full of a unique flavor somewhere between liver and gizzard.
After trying one of each, my stomach settles a bit. Assimilating to a new place isn’t an overnight transition. It takes months, years to fully embrace customs and traditions that the people who live in a place take for granted, or roll their eyes at.
After a day at Bruce’s, I feel like I’m more of a Coloradan than I was before.
I ask Guffy if he has any parting words.
“Other than just, come to Bruce’s and have a ball. What else can I say?”
We have four beautiful daughters who are all exploring the world in their own way.
I also have no doubt she would kill a cat for practicality.
Me and my dairy farmer friend Jim are all for that.
But I often lay in bed, wondering, if she could castrate cats at the kitchen table, what fate might befall me?
“Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.”
The Texas Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners ruled Tuesday that Kristen Lindsey, the veterinarian who posted a photo of a dead tabby cat named Tiger with an arrow through its head on her Facebook last year, will have her license suspended for one year where she will not be able to practice.
After, she will be able to practice under conditions of probation for four years.
Tuesday’s hearing was the last in a string of debates on what action to take, if any, against Lindsey, after her photo incited international uproar from animal activists.
Lindsey, a veterinarian since 2012, was fired from her position at the Washington Animal Clinic in Brenham and put under investigation by the Austin County Sheriff’s Office last April after she posted a photo holding a dead tabby cat named “Tiger” with a arrow through its head with a caption reading:
“My first bow kill, lol. The only good feral tomcat is one with an arrow through it’s (sic) head! Vet of the year award… gladly accepted.”
The clinic that fired Lindsey, 33, released a statement shortly after that saying: “We are absolutely appalled, shocked, upset, and disgusted by the conduct.”
Illnesses started on dates ranging from June 27, 2016 to September 10, 2016. Ill people ranged in age from 1 year to 74, with a median age of 32. Forty-five percent of ill people were female. Seven ill people were hospitalized. One ill person developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a type of kidney failure, and no deaths were reported.
This outbreak appears to be over. However, the recalled beef, veal, and bison products may still be in freezers. Consumers who don’t know about the outbreak could continue to eat recalled products and get sick. Read the Recall and Advice to Consumers, Restaurants, and Retailers.
Humphrey Errington is seeking a judicial review to prevent Food Standards Scotland (FSS) from destroying all his stocks of Dunsyre Blue, which it claims lay behind the outbreak that affected 22 people and led to the death of a three-year-old girl.
Mr Errington said that unless the court rules in his favour his Lanarkshire firm Errington Cheese is “finished” and will have to close.
The company has gone to the Court of Session to ask for a suspension of instructions from FSS ordering enforcement officials to “seek out and destroy” all stocks of the product.
It is also seeking details of tests carried out by the agency which linked the cheese to the outbreak, after the firm’s own tests were unable to find the bacteria.
Mr Errington said: “We had no choice but to take this to court, otherwise we would have been shut down for ever.”
Sorta like the 3-year-old.
After the outbreak last summer the FSS banned sales of five brands of cheese sold by Mr Errington’s company: Dunsyre Blue, Dunsyre Baby, Lanark Blue, Lanark White, Maisie’s Kebbuck and Cora Linn. Customers who had bought the cheeses were asked to return them.
Professor Hugh Pennington, an expert on E.coli has questioned the proportionality of the food watchdog’s decision to issue a blanket ban on the sale of all cheeses from Errington.
The emeritus professor of bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen, said FSS had come down “very heavily” on Errington Cheese, stating there is a “real possibility” the organisation was “over-interpreting scientific evidence”.
He said that the “jury was still out” and while there may be a “moderately strong” case on Dunsyre Blue, there was “no scientific evidence” on any of the firm’s other cheeses.
FSS deny this, saying all all results from samples were shared with Errington and insist decision take to recall Errington Cheese Ltd products are “evidence-based and informed by interpretation from experts including legally designated food examiners”.
The FSS also intends to take further action to clamp down on any manufacturer using unpasteurised “raw” milk and has issued a letter to all local authorities requiring them to apply new and stringent tests on the presumption that any cheese made this way is unsafe.
The order applies to hundreds of cheesemakers, including some famous brands, and has led to some claiming they are being made subject to regulations far more severe than other food producers.
Amy has Spam in her blood, being spawned in Albert Lea, Minnesota.
Ted Genoways, a writer whose book “This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Farm” will be published next year by W.W. Norton writes in the N.Y. Times Magazine that it was still dark when Jay hit the highway. At 6 o’clock that morning, he would be starting his first shift at Quality Pork Processors, part of the Hormel Foods complex in Austin, Minn., almost an hour’s drive down Interstate 90 from his rented apartment in Rochester. He’d applied for the job on the meatpacking line barely a week earlier and was still mentally preparing for it. “When you’re in the car,” he told me recently, “you have to go over everything again.” He had to remember his story: where he was from, why he was there. He had to remind himself what he could and couldn’t say. He was going to be meeting a lot of new people that day, and it would be essential not to arouse suspicions.
Just before the exit off the Interstate, Jay passed an illuminated billboard for Austin’s Spam Museum: “Find slavation.” He steered down the winding road along the plant perimeter, past the high wall guarding the loading docks, until he came to the Q.P.P. employee entrance on Hormel Century Parkway. The factory was already enveloped in steam; overnight cleaning crews had hosed down the stainless-steel cutting line, and now the compound’s six-story hydrostatic Spam cooker was warming for the day shift. The steam billowed and swirled in the lights of the plant. Jay shuffled into the line of workers making their way through the employee turnstile. He swiped in and headed through the glass doors to where the day’s freshly laundered uniforms were being handed out, color-coded according to department.
“What station?” the person at the window asked.
“Gam table,” Jay said. His job would be slicing open the rear legs of hog carcasses, loosening the tendons of the trotters and inserting a gambrel. “It looks like a clothes hanger, but with hook tips that point up,” he told me. The gambrel attaches to a trolley that carries the carcass on a chain conveyor system as it is broken down into “primal cuts,” before being sent to the Hormel Foods side of the plant for final processing and packaging.
Jay knew that the job would be physically grueling. To keep up with the speed of the line, a carcass had to be cut and hung in about six seconds. But more than that, it was going to be psychologically — even morally — taxing for him. Jay had been a vegetarian since he was in college. He couldn’t say why he quit eating meat, really, only that he always loved animals and that his vegetarian younger sister convinced him.
But in recent years, Jay’s commitment had grown. He became a vegan. When he was online, he found himself drifting toward websites of animal rights groups, pulling up footage of abuse shot by undercover investigators. One day it occurred to him that he should try to find such work. On a job site, he found an opening at Compassion Over Killing, or C.O.K., an advocacy group intent on ending cruelty to animals in agriculture and promoting vegetarianism. And just like that, he entered the shadowy world of undercover video activism, where no one around you knows whom you really work for and few people, not even your family and friends, know where you are or what you’re doing for months at a stretch. (To protect his identity, Jay uses only his middle name when speaking to reporters.)
Now, as Jay dressed in the locker room, put on a hard hat and picked up gloves in the equipment room, he could feel a weight descend on him. Once you’re inside, he said, you realize how alone you are. “You’re going to be out there pretty much by yourself,” he told me. “You’re going to be working these really long hours and seeing animal abuse on a day-to-day basis.”
His manager at C.O.K. had warned him that it would be months before he could transfer to the kill side of the plant, where live animals are handled, and weeks more before he would have enough video to complete the investigation. Every day for five or maybe six months, Jay would have to walk past posters reminding employees that all cameras were strictly prohibited inside the plant and to immediately report any suspicious individual, even if that person was a co-worker. The isolation and paranoia can be consuming, he said, coloring every sidelong glance, every passing conversation.
The story goes on to document how futile the mantra of USDA-inspected actually is.
So some spamalot, and Albert Lea’s own, Eddie Cochran.
Epidemiological investigations following the initial notification on 30 December 2014 of five cases of salmonellosis (two confirmed S. Enteritidis) in young children residing in the Somme department revealed that all cases frequented the same food bank A. Further epidemiological, microbiological and food trace-back investigations indicated frozen beefburgers as the source of the outbreak and the suspected lot originating from Poland was recalled on 22 January 2015. On 2 March 2015 a second notification of S. Enteritidis cases in the Somme reinitiated investigations that confirmed a link with food bank A and with consumption of frozen beefburgers from the same Polish producer. In the face of a possible persistent source of contamination, all frozen beefburgers distributed by food bank A and from the same origin were blocked on 3 March 2015. Microbiological analyses confirmed contamination by S. Enteritidis of frozen beefburgers from a second lot remaining in cases’ homes. A second recall was initiated on 6 March 2015 and all frozen beefburgers from the Polish producer remain blocked after analyses identified additional contaminated lots over several months of production.
Outbreak of Salmonella Enteritidis linked to the consumption of frozen beefburgers received from a food bank and originating from Poland: Northern France, December 2014 to April 2015
Eurosurveillance, Volume 21, Issue 40, 06 October 2016
The only time my bike ever got stolen – or picked up – was after I left it for four days outside the plant agriculture building at the University of Guelph.
