Why I had the other four daughters when I was young.
Tag Archives: Barfblog
Bye-bye bites-l, hello dailybarf
The barfblog.com brain trust decided a few months ago to get rid of bites-l and centralize around barfblog.com.
American Independence Day seems apt, so welcome to dailybarf-l.
Although it probably won’t be daily; the brain trust will figure it out as it goes.
Any immediate stuff will be on barfblog.com, twitter and facebook. When there’s enough stuff, a dailybarf will be distributed, along with additional items that were not blogged – dailybarf is like the daily digest with bonus tracks.
For those of you who signed-on-or-off for bites-l in the past month, sorry, you’ll probably have to do it again.
To sign up, go to barfblog.com and enter your e-mail in the receive newsletter box visible after scrolling down on the right side.
To unsubscribe, click the button at the bottom of dailybarf.
Don’t mess with my cat, don’t mess with my Pillow Pet
Smartest contribution to barfblog today; cooks know crap
Change is afoot.
Over the next couple of weeks, the bites-l listserv will be changed to something else. We haven’t had the resources to archive all the stories, so we needed to come up with something different.
barfblog.com will continue with musings from me, Chapman, Hubbell and various food safety friends.
Probably not as often.
bites-l will be converted to a new daily listserv – the dailybarf — with new formatting.
If you want your food safety news fast and furious, subscribe to barfblog.com, facebook, twitter, whatever.
If you want the daily summary of all barfblog.com posts, plus all the food safety stories we didn’t have time to blog about but are still of interest, subscribe to dailybarf.
Some may want both.
You don’t have to do anything, this is just an advisory of things about to happen; I’m not sure when, and am interested to see the outcome.
But I am encouraged by the increased dialogue on barfblog.com, which will become the hub of all our food safety and child rearing activities.
From today:
“At culinary school, we were taught to gauge the doneness of beef by touching it. As a food safety consultant, I believe you are foolish if you don’t use a thermometer.”
American citizen, eh
barfblog.com 25; top 30 public health blogs of 2012
I generally ignore those endless polls that purport to rank blogs, especially if you’ll put their endorsement sticker on your blog.
This one is a little different, because I actually care about public health, and especially the inspectors who work in a largely thankless job.
So according to BestPublicHealthSchools.com – and I’m quite proud of my association with the School of Public Health within the veterinary college at Kansas State University – barfblog.com comes in at 25.
I’m especially proud we do all this with minimal resources. We’re not CDC or the Wall Street Journal. But we do have Amy to fix all our mistakes.
And this is no list of wannabes.
“The field of public health is wide ranging and varied. There are many perspectives on the field and as public health by definition affects everybody, there are many stakeholders. This list consists of the top thirty blogs in the field of public health from experts in many portions of the field. Readers will find that the list consists of a wide variety of perspectives including medical, economic, national, global, corporate, and governmental.”
Will foul language help reduce rates of foodborne illness?
I swear a lot.
Nothing compared to Australians, but I raised all five daughters to be comfortable with swearing so they could be comfortable being hockey players, engineers or whatever they wanted to be.
Still, some people are shocked, like a middle-aged woman whom I read a brief e-mail exchange with my 20-year-old daughter that went something like, “why didn’t you answer my fu**ing facebook message”, to which I said “I don’t like chatting over fu**ing facebook, just send fu**ing e-mail. I’m old like that.”
Good times.
You may not have noticed, but barfblog.com has become pretty much independent, so you can expect more swearing. It won’t appeal to everyone, but after seven years of no real declines in foodborne illness rates, maybe someone should be swearing more.
Which sorta feeds into this parable.
On my 90-minute walk to meet my Dean today, I had to jump a creek that flowed off the Big Blue River.
By the time I got to the restaurant, I realized I had lost my reading glasses.
I got a ride home, had a nap, and then decided to recreate my route in the vague hope I may stumble across my lost glasses, or buy a cheap set of reading glasses at Wal-Mart until my next optometrist appointment.
I again jumped the same creek and again got a wet foot and scraped shins. But as I raised myself from the shame of age, there they were – my glasses, exactly where I had landed previously in the day.
What once was lost has now been found.
I used to sing Tennessee Stud to my 25-year-old when I was changing her diapers.
Return of the Oak King
The barfblog.com editorial team had its annual meeting on Anna Maria Island in Florida this week where we spent long days strategically stratergizing future food safety strategies. We also had a strategic shiga-toxin producing E. coli (STEC) think session.
But it wasn’t all work as our families joined us for sunset on the Gulf.
Happy Yule Day on this, the winter solstice, welcoming the return of the sun, with much merrymaking and debauchery, drinking, eating and sacrifice.
Chapman left before we could throw him in the pit at sunset tonight.
Alban Arthan to all.
Nosestretcher alert: me?
I did not invent the phrase “nosestretcher alert.”
Anyone who knows me long enough soon begins to realize I have about 187 snappy comebacks or phrases, primarily borrowed from sophomoric movies.
So while I’m grateful to Vicky Boyd of The Packer for saying barfblog.com is one of her must-reads, I have to clarify the phrase “nosestretcher alert” originated with Frank magazine, a must-read for me in Canada in the 1990s.
Frank, modeled after Private Eye in the U.K., skewered and mocked the rich, political and supposedly media savvy.
From wiki:
Frank often incorporates custom jargon and phrasing in articles. Examples include referring to news readers as “bingo callers,” public relations staff were referred to as “bum boys” and “fartcatchers.” When the magazine alluded to two famous Canadians having sexual relations, it would refer to them as “horizontal mambo partners.”
Frank also referred to many of Canada’s elite in a derogatory manner based upon their personalities, name, or other unique characteristics. Prime Ministers were always referred to by nicknames such as Byron Muldoon or Jean Crouton rather than their real names.
I had forgotten about bingo caller and fart catcher; I’ll have to start using them again – in honor of Frank.
Spam attack: barfblog.com comments shutting down, site may as well
Thank you, spammers, for adverts promoting generic penis enlargers. Your 300-500 comments per day have forced me to close all comments on barfblog.com.
We have been preparing a new site, with new software, over the summer, but it isn’t ready yet.
We will be moving as soon as we can.
In the meantime, barfblog.com will be of limited functionality, but news will continue to be available through the listserv at bites.ksu.edu.