Month: March 2010

Another FDA Recall

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

This stuff is in almost everything: soup mixes, spices, dip mix….

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced a recall of a common flavor enhancer that could be contaminated with salmonella bacteria.

The product, called hydrolyzed vegetable protein or HVP, is potentially in thousands of food products, including soups, sauces, chilis, stews, hot dogs, gravies, seasoned snack foods, dips and dressings. HVP is manufactured by a Las Vegas company.

No illnesses have been reported, said Dr. Ian Williams, acting chief of outbreak response and prevention branch for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Men of God

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

I think the institutional Catholic church has an awful lot to clean up in their own house if they’re going to say opposing gay marriage is a principled stand:

“Put on some music, swallow a Viagra, and adelante!”

That’s the headline in Europe today following reports that a papal aide used an intermediary in an elite Vatican choir to solicit young male choristers and seminarians for prostitution.

Police wiretaps are expected to result in charges against Angelo Balducci, 63, a Papal Gentleman, as lay attendant are called, and the former chairman of the Holy See’s Public Works Department, which is itself caught up in a corruption investigation.

According to police, Balducci regularly contacted Chinedu Ehiem Thomas, a Nigerian man who sings in St. Peter’s Cappella Giulia, to engage the sexual services of young male members of the choir, along with seminarians and undocumented immigrants seeking residency status.

The Cappella Giulia is the official choir of the St. Peter’s Basilica and performs at many solemn Vatican functions not involving the pope, who is accompanied by the Sistine Chapel choir.

Ehiem, 40, who goes by the nickname Mike, and his assistant Lorenzo Renzi, 33, allegedly arranged for prostitutes for Balducci several times a week. The two men are said to have operated a network of aspiring young priests, choir members and sometimes recruited foreigners seeking to secure their immigration status.

The scandal now envelops Balducci, a well-known and powerful local figure who is married with two children, who despite all this is said to have taken remarkable risks in setting up sexual liaisons even in Chigi Palace, home of the Italian prime minister, or immediately after a private audience with a cardinal.

In 72 pages of transcribed wiretaps, Ehiem tells Balducci about one possible candidate: “Angelo … I’ll say no more. Two meters (6-foot-7), 97 kilos (250 lbs.), 33 years-old and completely active (top).”

Go read the rest, so you can remember it the next time the pope wants to lecture us.

Teeth Tales

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

It’s never boring at my dentist’s office.

There was only a little drama with the permanent cap yesterday when the dental assistant tried to take off the temporary cap.

See, it’s what they call a “live” tooth – no infection, no earthly reason for why touching the tooth or drinking cold water sends an exquisite pain shooting up into my brain. The dentist told me the pain would die down after he put the temporary cap on some six weeks ago, but it didn’t get even a little better.

I mostly trust my dentist, though, and he told me he thought he could fix it by using a special non-conducting cement on the permanent cap. So that’s what he did, and so far, it seems much improved.

Anyway, so there I was with my live tooth and the assistant trying to yank the cap off with a pair of pliars. Finally she said sympathetically, “Do you think you’d like some Novocaine for this?” Through gritted teeth, I said I thought that would be a good idea. So she did, and the cap finally came off with only a little pain, and we were fine.

While waiting for the cement on the new cap to set, my dentist told me he just read Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” and he really, really liked it. “Boy, that guy is just brilliant,” he said. (Dr. W. is a geek, with excellent taste in music as evidenced by his office iPod selection.)

He told me about a patient who was a very famous musician, who was shocked to find out Dr. W. listened to some experimental atonal music. “He told me, look, you just need to know it exists, you’re not supposed to actually listen to it.” (Since I was married to someone who listened to a lot of Steven Reich, I agreed.)

He also told me about a patient who was a professional psychic, and how every time they worked on her, she told people “really interesting stuff.” Once my cap was set, he brought me over to talk to one of the other dentists, who’d gotten to be friends with her.

“I hired her as the entertainment for my daughter’s bat mitzah, and everyone was there – my wife, my parents, my in-laws, the ex-wife, the ex-in-laws, my daughter and all her friends. I told her to come early and eat, but she said no, she didn’t want people saying she overheard conversations and was a fake. So she shows up one minute to two, she starts telling the kids this one’s dating that one, but she really likes this other one, and so on. The girls were riveted.

“Then she says to me, ‘Would you like to know about your past life?’ I said sure. She said, “You were a silk trader in Japan and you love the fabric. That’s why, since you were five years old, you’ve always insisted on wearing wool pants lined with silk.’

“My mother heard that, she almost had a heart attack. Because she was right.”

The Battle Goes On

~ susie ~ 12 Comments

Another day, another dozen or so outraged emails from the Sestak campaign!

Look, Sestak staffers, if your main beef with Specter is what he did when he pitched for the other team, you need newer, more interesting material.

He screwed us because he was working for the team that screws us, and now he’s working for ours. You’re calling him a mercenary, and my response is, “So?” Show me a member of the Senate who isn’t. (All right, Feingold. But still. UPDATE: Yeah, and Bernie Sanders.)

The Sestak team has churned out so many emails in which Joe Sestak proposes so many solutions to so many problems, how can I take any of them seriously? I look at all this and can’t help thinking about mud, and throwing it at walls to see what sticks. No one can get that much legislation passed. This is a really amateurish campaign tactic.

But then again, Joe seems to have trouble hanging on to good campaign staffers, probably because he’s so cheap. It might be easier to believe he’s an actual progressive if he paid his people a living wage.

Complete Waste of Time

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

The thing I don’t really get about the liberal blogosphere is the amount of time they spend painstakingly rebutting Republican allegations.

Think back: When was the last time the Republicans made an outrageous accusation about Democrats that was actually true?

Tap tap tap….

Still waiting….

Yeah, I couldn’t think of one, either.

Nothing you or I say or do or prove will have any impact whatsoever on the people who are predisposed to believe them. (With the very occasional exception of the media.)

The problem we have is, there’s a large segment of underinformed voters who simply won’t – or can’t – take the time to inform themselves. I think those people are the ones largely swayed by those chain emails – you know, the ones sent by your wingnut relatives about how much more money Michelle Obama spends on her staff than Laura Bush, or that Obama was making the post office put Muslim symbols on stamps? That sort of thing. The ones where they take a tiny grain of fact and simply make shit up to surround it.

And I kind of think that’s what we all should start doing. Whatever outrageous things we can say about Republicans (you know, even more outrageous than the things they actually do?), we need to get out as viral emails.

WHY I’M NOT A REPUBLICAN

“Did you know that….

“Republican Sen. Jim Bunning says people on unemployment are too lazy to work, and suggests that medical science use them for guinea pigs?”

“The Texas Republican legislature recently passed a bill that will allow stoning to death any pregnant unmarried women?”

“The NRA lobby is gathering support for a bill that will actually tax people who can’t afford to own a gun?”

“The Republicans have almost enough votes to change the tax laws so that only families making less than $100,000 a year will have to pay taxes?”

“Newt Gingrich tells friends he plans to run for President, and one of the first things he will do is institute a mandatory draft, including young women?”

“I don’t support any of those things. Do you?”