On the perils of paying attention when driving.

Now ordinarily, paying close attention to what's around you is a Good Thing while driving, but this past weekend, some might say that I carried it a bit too far. On the way home from my daughter's apartment, I spotted a little ball of fluff cowering next to the wheel of a car parked on a street in her neighborhood. A kitten-sized ball of fluff. And in passing, it looked like it was, indeed, a very small kitten. So I turned around, and went back.

My daughter got out and checked; the kitten was alive, not apparently injured, but obviously hungry and cold (The temp was around 42F at the time.) It was also very obviously fully socialized to people; it didn't try to run away when she approached it. The people standing around a vehicle across the street stated that the kitten had been dumped, but they were vague about when. They were, however, emphatic about our being welcome to take it, and that they wanted none of it. (I wasn't surprised about the latter; the cultural bias against cats is strong in most Hispanic neighborhoods.) The kitten had a green collar with a bell, but was a bit disheveled and not in the best of shape.

Now, a lot of people would have been able to leave the little critter there. Fortunately for the kitten, and unfortunately for us, I wasn't one of them. So we brought it home and installed it in the usual isolation ward; the front bathroom. Given food (inhaled), water (ditto) and warmth, its demeanor improved immediately. But it was quite apparent that it had fleas, it was sneezing, and one eye was watering. (All of its whiskers on the same side as the watering eye also showed signs of either singeing or breakage; we're still not sure what caused that.) So we took it to the vet on Monday.

As expected, it had the usual suite of outdoor-kitten parasites plus one that we've not previously had to deal with, but at least it didn't have ringworm; meds were issued, and instructions received. Three days later, the sniffles have abated quite a bit, the kitten has developed the "I'm well fed" bulge, and it's even more demanding of cuddles than when we found it. It has shown a remarkable ability to ignore the pro-forma you're-a-stranger hisses of the other three cats, and finds the rest of the house intriguing on those occasions when we bring it out for a supervised foray.

We're pretty sure that it's got some Turkish Van in its heritage, based on the markings and the consistency of the fur; we haven't tested to see what it thinks of water yet, though that will happen at some point. We're also pretty sure, based on the timing of when it was dumped, and the fact that it had that new, bright-green collar with a bell, that this kitten was most likely a Christmas present to a child whose parents were not on board when the decision was made, and who then vetoed the gift retroactively, probably telling the kid that the kitten "ran away". They probably congratulated themselves for not having taken it to an animal shelter (where, in truth, it would not have been likely to live long), and for having instead just dumped it... in a neighborhood where its likelihood of finding a receptive new family was small.

And, of course, there's also the fact that if the postulated scenario is correct, then they lied to the kid, too.

That's all speculation, of course, but it's speculation based on decades of direct observation; I've seen this play out too often. One of our other cats came to us under similar circumstances (dumped on a neighbor's doorstep on Easter morning), so the unwelcome-holiday-gift factor is one we've seen before.

This one doesn't have a name yet, but the chances are good that it's going to end up staying with us. This is not what we'd planned, but with as much as we'll have invested in her, we're going to insist on some pretty specific requirements for anyone who's going to adopt, so we'll probably end up with our fourth.

Worse things have happened.

Welcome to the New Feudalism

If you have any doubt that the very rich have decided to do away with the relevance of the middle class, you need look no farther than the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 and the current S510 bill in Congress.

The former effectively made it illegal for any individual or small-scale manufacturer to produce anything for sale for use by children, through demanding such absurd testing that no small producer can possibly afford to meet the requirements - and ANY breach allows the producer to be hauled into civil court and slapped with a million dollar fine. It applies to anything sold for use by children, including books, and it makes no exception for used, hand-made, or unique items. It has been used already to shut down thrift stores - places that sell NOTHING new! - in my own state. I have ceased to offer to produce anything in my own shop that is not in adult sizes, and many others in my position have done likewise. Do you really think that having only suppliers of the size of Wal-Mart will make your children safer?

It gets worse...

S510, which has not yet passed but shows signs of getting to the President's desk too soon, effectively makes it illegal (through grossly impractical or factually impossible paperwork requirements) for local small farmers to sell anything direct to the consumer, or sell it at all in most cases; it will also severely degrade the quality of produce available to restaurants, many of which rely on nearby small farms to obtain supplies of the quality of vegetables that you just can't get any other way. It takes the current privilege-of-monetary-power of hyper-abusive giants like Monsanto, to run roughshod over the production end, and enshrines those unconscionable practices as rights under the law; in some cases, it enlists the government itself in visiting those abuses upon the farmers. And it denies access to the market to any who dare try to simply continue the old, traditional ways of food production that have served humanity well for millennia.

Many links are out there about this; here's just one: http://hartkeisonline.com/food-politics/s510-may-mean-10-years-in-prison-for-farmers/

If this passes, it can be fairly said that we no longer have a government of, by or for the people; it will have passed to a tyrannic rule of the corporations and moneyed few, and will remain so unless WE get off our collective asses and vote in some people who have the integrity and unpurchasability to restore the government's true role as the protector of the RIGHTS of the people. This is NOT the goal of the Tea Party, whose dupes of the rich are simply seeking to dismantle the only remaining mechanism that might have a chance of being reformed to serve us again - the government itself. This is NOT the goal of the Republican Party, which is funded by those same corporations and moneyed few. This is also, sadly, NOT the goal of the current Democratic administration, which has utterly failed to meet any of the reasonable expectations that came from its win in 2008. But I see no party other than the Democrats which might be possible to direct toward this end; the Tea Party makes a joke of itself at every turn, and the Republicans...are Republicans, dedicated to precisely the opposite goal from what is needed.

Postscript: The Tester Amendment to S510 exempts only the smallest farms - those with a gross revenue of under $500,000 per year, who are no threat to Big Farma - from the documentation requirements of the bill and from some of the USDA-backed meddling in their operational practices which results from it. This does not really change the impact of the bill very much; although the kind of semi-pro small-scale farmer who sells direct to the public at a small-scale farmer's market in the town square would probably be exempt, the kind of farmer that's running an operation large enough to reliably supply a dozen restaurants with fresh vegetables, eggs and other products would almost certainly fall under the regs - and probably succumb. It's fair to say that the *average* family farmer is still directly under threat from this bill, and it is certain that the bill does more to erode the overall long-term safety of the food stream than to bolster it; the idea that forcing agriculture to be done only via the methods used by the largest industrial farms (where quality control is nothing more than a very bad joke, and the only thing that matters is the appearance and quantity of product that goes out the gate) is what needs to be struck down, and that basically means that this bill needs to be soundly defeated. Just look at who's really supporting S510; the same Big Farma outfits that essentially created it. This is a case of the fox demanding that only foxes be allowed to guard a henhouse, folks. It's NOT good for any of us. If you think letting the huge agribusinesses run the show is a good idea, think back to the last time you bought one of those huge, perfect-looking peaches in late summer...and it turned out to be lovely on the outside, and tasteless (and often half-rotten) on the inside. That's the kind of food that comes from following USDA "Best Practices", and NO farmer should be forced to follow them!

That's not an auction.

Lots of people will not have run across this particular scam, so I think it's worthwhile blowing a whistle here. A large number of sites have popped up with what they claim is an "auction" service; biddi.com, quibids.com, swoopo.com... the list is much too long already, and keeps getting longer. They all share one essential characteristic, however: they are NOT auctions.

In a real auction, the bidder selects the amount that they wish to pay, and bids it explicitly; when the highest bid has been posted (as indicated by the fact that no higher bid comes in), then the auction ends and the item is sold for that amount, which represents the bidder's entire outlay (possibly plus an auctioneer's fee that is fixed and knowable before the bidding begins). But the so-called "auctions" on these sites just increment the "price" by a fixed amount for each "bid", so the bidder never has the option of simply placing his bid for the amount he'd be willing to pay, and being done with it... and the advertised final "auction price" of any given item does not include the amount that the winning bidder had to spend on "bids" in order to be that eventual last bidder, so the "price" is fictitious in fact.

In these competitions, the "bidders" drop out only due to exhaustion of patience or money to buy more "bids" (possibly after they've spent a ludicrous amount fruitlessly), not due to the auction's "price" having exceeded their limits... though dropping out may very well cost them every bit as much as they'd have bid or more, without producing a win as a result! That's because of the second striking difference between these sites and actual auctions; even if an actual auction requires a cash deposit prior to participation (which is very, very rare), there is never a fee for placing a bid. On these "penny auction" sites, every bid requires payment of a fee. So "bids" aren't free, and "bids" are not actual BIDS, they are just tokens; places in line. And that brings me to the next point: These are more like a lottery, in that you have to buy bid packs (like jar-drawing tickets), but they differ from a jar drawing in that the last ticket dropped in the jar is ALWAYS the winner.

Do you see the problem yet? Perhaps it will become clear with the addition of one more detail. During the final countdown period of these "auctions", if a "bid" comes in, the countdown timer resets to a fixed value (typically 20 seconds) and restarts. This means that you CANNOT just wait until the timer is at 1 second, and try to flip your bid in last; others will ALWAYS have the option of being last "bidder", because your "last" bid will give them more time to flip another one in.

I looked at the bids on several of these sites, and it became obvious that the site owners are making a huge profit, with what amounts to a lie. They may say that (for instance) an $800 Canon digital camera went for $43 (in a process where each "bid" increased the price by just one cent), but what they aren't saying is that the actual amount that the "winning bidder" paid in order to "win" is higher - probably MUCH higher. To place the bids at all, the bidder had to buy "bids" - probably lots of them - and may have spent hundreds of dollars more on "bids" than on the final "price" of the item. In order to wear out the competition and take that final-bid spot, a lot of other folks had to drop out along the way; they, too, may have already spent quite a lot on "bids". In the Canon camera example, if bids cost 50 cents each (not unusual; some sites require more, some less) and there were 4300 "bids", the site received $2,193 for that $800 camera: 50 cents for each "bid", plus the $43 that the "winner" still had to pay to complete the transaction. Oh, and unless the other bidders were given the option of converting their bids to cash against the purchase of the same item as a "buy it now" deal, they got NOTHING, despite having put over a thousand extra dollars into the site's coffers.

Also, consider the time factor. If that Canon camera required 4300 "bids" to be "sold", and all but 150 of them were placed during that seemingly-endless "final 20 seconds" at the rate of one every 10 seconds (which isn't far off, based on my observations), then that "final 20 seconds" lasted a whopping ELEVEN AND A HALF HOURS.

So, what amounts to a rigged raffle is being passed off as an auction. Unless the Buy It Now price is really attractive to you (and you had best read the fine print about shipping charges and other fees first... if you can find them!), these "auctions" offer you only a way to lose substantial sums of money and time.

I call them a scam, pure and simple. And I suspect that they probably violate both the auction and lottery statutes of multiple jurisdictions, but I haven't seen anything being done about them by the legal system so far.

Inkjet, Laser, or FedEx Office?

Getting your document (or webpage, or whatever) printed out attractively on paper seems, intuitively, like it should be one of the cheaper things that you can do with your computer. And for some people, it is. But there are some interesting and/or infuriating exceptions.

The inkjet printer market used to be dominated by models that shared a common design feature; the widgetry that actually sprayed the ink was built into the replaceable ink cartridge. On the one hand, this meant that if everything worked as designed, the most crucial working parts wouldn't clog, and you'd never have to worry about their wearing out. On the other hand, the cost of replacing them with every cartridge change was much higher than for just tanks of ink. To make matters worse, those early printers often didn't work as designed, and often had to have the cleaning cycle run several times if the last page printed was more than a day previous. Since each cleaning cycle discarded a bunch of ink, it could easily mean that an infrequently-used early inkjet could have a per-sheet cost of printing that exceeded 50 cents per page. (In one particularly memorable case for me, an HP 855c managed to have a per-page cost of over $5 per properly-printed full-color-output page over the three years I had it. I still use their lasers, but I don't buy their inkjets at all.)

Later versions of inkjets arrived on the market using just a replaceable ink tank; the better ones used individual tanks for each color. Although the cost of the ink remained high, the per-page printing cost was reduced...and if generic ink tanks were available, the cost could drop to under a penny a page. To reduce the competition from generic ink, the printer manufacturers switched to ink tanks with a small, inexpensive (but proprietary) chip in the end; without the chip, the printer failed to recognize the tank's presence, and often wouldn't work at all. If that chip was actually measuring the ink usage instead of just keeping a theoretical tally of it, this might have been laudable...but in reality, the chips tend to tell the printer that replacement is required even though there's still plenty of ink left. And as before, each cleaning cycle uses up a bunch of extra ink. Individual chipped tanks can cost $60 for a set, and may last for as few as 30 pages or as many as 1200, depending on what's being printed and how often the printer is used. For people who print things multiple times per day, every day of the week, the newer inkjets usually aren't a bad deal...but if you often go for days at a time without generating any hardcopy, even these later inkjets can be much too expensive to operate.

Laser printers, on the other hand, have a cost per sheet that's pretty much determined by how much toner is used for each page. Text doesn't use much, and typical lasers can print a page for at most a few cents. Laser cartridges don't remain functional forever, even if they still have plenty of toner left; the user who prints just a single page infrequently may still find that in the long run, a laser's output isn't really cost-effective.

On the other hand, if there's a FedEx Office store nearby, one additional option is to just ditch the whole printer-ownership thing, and upload documents to their printer. The per-page cost still isn't cheap, and you really need to carefully preview what's going to be produced, but it has the distinct advantage of not requiring space on your desk, and not requiring that you keep consumables around that, in the case of inkjets in particular, end up getting wasted more than used.

My recommendations:

For daily, heavy use, if color output isn't needed, get a laser.
For daily, heavy use, if color is needed, get an inkjet that uses separate tanks.
For daily, moderate use, both inkjets and lasers are suitable.
For daily, light use, stay with a laser unless color is required.
For less frequent use, stay with a laser unless color is required.
For occasional use, abandon trying to have color output, and get a laser...or just print out your hardcopy at a nearby FedEx Office if that's a viable option. (You may spend less, even in the long run, than you would by buying a "cheap" printer.)

Color lasers have a high per-page cost regardless of how much they're used; unless you need their specific qualities, I can't say that I would recommend them at all.

There you have it. Kill some trees.

Product Review: H-E-B Pomegranate Black Tea

Short version: Eeeeewwww!

For those who live outside Texas, H-E-B is a grocery store chain that serves much of the central and eastern part of the state; it's generally a reliable source for comestibles of all types, and their store brand items have tended to be pretty good in the past. This, sadly, is not one that I can recommend.

For the sake of accuracy, the item is sold under UPC 041220648030, and it's a box of 20 bags with a total net weight of 1.27 ounces. The price was less than $2, which seemed like a relative bargain given the much stiffer tabs for the majority of the boutique brands. At best, this means that I have lost less than the price of a hamburger, and will only be discarding 1.21 ounces of product, plus packaging. (Yes, I could take it back and get a refund, but it's hardly worth the effort for this small amount, and I didn't keep the receipt anyway.)

One would hope that a pomegranate black tea would have some fruitiness about it, including perhaps a bit of the aroma, flavor and color of the presumed ingredient. What presented itself upon brewing was a light-colored non-reddish cup with a pronounced crushed-snails aroma that was not improved in the least by the added slight minty note. It was distinctly reminiscent of the cough syrups containing guaifenesin, a mucus-loosening medicine. I took one experimental sip to discern whether the flavor might redeem the brew, but alas, the taste proved only slightly less offensive than the bouquet, with not a hint of fruit about it in any way.

Recommendation: Serve this brewed very strong, to people who you prefer never to have visiting you again in the future. Use boxes of it as a gift in the annual Secret Santa ritual if you're planning on swapping to a new job in January anyway. Give it to the obnoxious loon next door who's been going on at length about how proud he is to be a teabagger. But don't drink it yourself.

Artificial Sweeteners - They are, and they aren't.

Over the past year and a half, I've pretty much stopped drinking things that have added sugar of any kind. I'll still grab a little OJ with breakfast sometimes, but otherwise I even avoid most fruit juices. In that time, I've pretty well adapted to drinking things that aren't sweet, but once in a while I still miss the flavor. So I decided to try some of the artificial sweeteners, just to see what might work.

Mostly: Ugh. "Artificial" is definitely the word in the majority of cases. I tried Splenda, Stevia, plain old saccharine (though I pretty much knew it would be a Fail), and a couple of the boutique blends, as well as some commercial products containing things that aren't readily available by themselves. There wasn't any point in trying aspartame (a.k.a. Nutrasweet) because I have known for years that even small doses of that stuff leave me with a raging headache in short order. (Oh, and since Monsanto's patent has finally expired, it can be listed under new names as well; beware.) Various websites in the US and elsewhere have reported on the facts about aspartame adequately enough that I won't go into them here; suffice it to say that I wouldn't feed it to the roaches under my neighbor's trash can. (Okay, I might, but I don't think roaches are likely to eat the stuff.)

But that still left me with the rest.

Splenda (the most common brand name used for sucralose) is currently first and favorite among the people who want their sweet tooth polished without sugar or aspartame. The packages proudly proclaim that it tastes like sugar because it's made from sugar. The chemical process involved in the conversion is such that this is akin to claiming that potassium-based salt substitute tastes like hydrochloric acid...and in my estimation, is about as accurate. Splenda's flavor is sweet-ish, like all of the artificial sweeteners, but it has an even more persistent aftertaste than average, and though some find that it is the closest to actual sugar from among the readily-available alternatives on the market, I feel that this is like saying Boston is close to New Hampshire. (By comparison to Atlanta, sure, it is...but that doesn't make it close in absolute terms.) After trying both the sweetener itself (in things of my own concoction, such as tea and limeade), and a variety of commercially-produced beverages and drink mixes containing it, I concluded that I'd prefer to avoid it.

Some beverage mixes and commercial drinks blend sucralose with another sweetener, acesulfame potassium. I was unable to buy Ace-K (as it is reportedly called) separately, so all I can report is that it failed to make sucralose dramatically more palatable. The strongly-artificial sweetishness and long-lingering aftertaste remained, though the initial hit on the tongue was slightly less jarring. Conclusion: Still worth avoiding.

Saccharine has been around for ages; it proved no more pleasant today than it did when I was a kid in the late '50s and early '60s. No surprise here.

Next up was Stevia in its many guises and combinations-with-other-things. Once again, the pure form is more sweetish than sweet, and it has a peculiar mint-like aftertaste that I find unpleasant. The brands which mix it with other sweeteners have varying levels of success in improving palatability in my estimation, but none rose to the level of something that I could actually say I liked. Score: Only tolerable if there was some strong reason to need to mask something INtolerable...in which case, the intuitive move would seem to be avoidance of both, no?

Then there's the class of things known as "sugar alcohols", including xylitol, mannitol, sorbitol, and maltitol (among others). Despite being classed as alcohols, they are neither capable of producing intoxication nor do they exist as a liquid at room temperature. Getting the pure form of any of them in convenient quantities isn't easy or cheap; a few boutique-level suppliers carry some of them in small packages, but for the most part they're used as ingredients in finished products instead. If you want a truckload, no problem. They all share several characteristics. First, for the most part, they don't taste all that artificial, which might be a good thing. Second, they are NOT calorie-free, but their effects in the body are far less than that produced by glucose or fructose; as a result they are sold for use by diabetics on this basis in some areas. Third, they all tend to have a laxative effect if overconsumed, as is warned on the labels of many products that contain them (including a couple of fairly decent-tasting ice-cream-substitute products from Breyer's and Dreyer's). Although it has been reported that one eventually adapts to their presence, and can achieve a reduction in the associated problem, I'm not sure now much of such disruption I want to accept in exchange for the privilege of being able to consume larger quantities of something that's sweet but still has caloric content. I will not, however, avoid these when encountered, as long as the amounts involved are fairly small.

The bottom line, for me, seems to remain mostly unchanged. Although I've found a few sweetened-without-sucrose/fructose/HFCS products that I find acceptable, I'll stick with unsweetened for the rest.

A side note: I've run across research which indicates that the body may exhibit a pre-adaptive reaction to encountering certain sensory input, specifically smells and tastes; the reaction in question prepares the digestive system in anticipation of food, and enhances hunger. It operates by stimulating a rise in the insulin level in the blood when sweet tastes or certain smells are detected, so that the presumably expected sugar can be processed right away. One of the other effects of rising insulin levels is a shutdown of the lipid cycle, which causes fat to cease to be pulled from storage for use as fuel; this shutdown is part of what makes you hungrier as you begin eating a meal. If this observed reaction to taste sensations is common, there is reason to avoid causing it if one is trying to control or reduce weight; anything that stops the lipid cycle is working against the system that uses fat from storage to fuel your body. And in particular, given that sensory input may not always distinguish between fake sugar and real sugar, it seems that there is cause to suspect that this insulin release could be happening when you consume artificially-sweetened foods or beverages that are otherwise calorie-free. In that case, the insulin release will block out the fat-for-fuel mechanism, but there won't be any sugar coming in to use up the insulin or to provide alternate fuel, so you'll end up starving yourself while NOT losing weight. (Several years ago, I remember seeing other research which indicated that diet sodas had the effect of increasing hunger, but I don't recall if they established the mechanism involved, and it's possible that the same actual effect may have been observed in both studies.) Of course, without more specific research to confirm the effect and determine its severity and full implications, the potentially counterproductive nature of artificial sweeteners in this area remains at least partially conjecture at this point...but it's conjecture based on observed results, not just something pulled out of thin air.

Back in the '60s, there was a cola-wars ad in which one of the major brands had a fake Russian saying "Put water in mouth, is sufficient!". All in all, I have to say that this is probably the best advice available, though I'll continue to leaven mine with a dash of lemon or lime, thank you.

Unsweetened, please.

Back in December of 2008, faced with a waistline that had slowly expanded to the point that I was on the verge of either developing an overlap or buying new pants, I decided that the time had come to shed some excess pounds. I knew that the process would not be easy; although I'd been able to tolerate the kind of self-starvation regime that's usually promoted by our benighted medical and nutritional establishments for such purposes, I was less than thrilled about doing it. Instead, I decided to engage in an intuitively attractive alternative.

I stopped consuming anything that contained high fructose corn syrup, and reduced my intake of sugar in other forms as much as was easy and simple. Period. No sudden increase in exercise, no counting calories, no rice-cake-and-low-fat-cottage-cheese lunches, no prepackaged meals of questionable virtue, NOTHING ELSE out of the ordinary.

And in the following 9 months to a year, I dropped about 30 pounds, slowly and painlessly.

Along about that time, a friend of mine (who'd been afflicted with a multitude of ailments that caused him to be on a daily diet of pharmaceuticals that would have bankrupted someone with my income) was diagnosed with the early stages of diabetes. The immediate response of his physician at the time was to prescribe yet more drugs in addition to those that he was already taking...and when he looked up their side effects in the Physician's Desk Reference, he had a fit. The stuff was next to deadly. After confirming his suspicions via second and third opinions rendered by professional contacts he trusted, he went looking for a new doctor...and found one whose approach to the situation, after reviewing *all* of the meds he was on, was to stop all of them and let his condition stabilize before evaluating which, if any, of the meds would be continued. To control the effects of the diabetes in this period, a limit of 30 grams of total carbohydrate intake per day was imposed. (Before the discovery and synthesis of insulin, this was the only practical treatment for diabetes...and it worked just fine for most.)

If you've never tried to limit your carb intake, I will point out that the bun for a typical hamburger has more than 30 grams of carbs. If you've ever shopped for low-carb prepared food items in most of the parts of a typical grocery store, you'll understand why meeting his new limit was not easy, but it wasn't something my friend felt that he had a lot of choice about, so he started eating a lot more meat and non-starch vegetables. To his immense surprise, in a couple of weeks, it was like he was a different person. Nearly all of his long-term maladies had either vanished or dropped in severity to a tolerable point and were still abating. He'd started losing weight (something he'd never been able to do previously at all) and his stamina and appearance had both improved. The change was remarkable...and although he was sure that the cessation of all of the conflicting drugs had played a large part in the changes, he was still very curious indeed about just what part the low-carb diet might be playing.

What he found out was enlightening, infuriating, and promising.

It was enlightening because he discovered that the low-carb lifestyle was neither hazardous nor unhealthy, as was loudly proclaimed by certain parts of the medical establishment, and was, in fact, far healthier overall than the dietary regime that was followed by anyone who adhered to the "official" guidelines.

It was infuriating because he discovered that there was a large, powerful and entrenched establishment within the medical and nutritional fields which refused to accept the valid, persuasive and conclusive research that demonstrated the fallacy of promoting a high-carb diet (such as the one he'd been following unintentionally for decades) as being healthy in any regard.

And it was promising, at a personal level, because some of the the results he'd already seen appeared to be just the tip of a beneficial iceberg that had been appearing through the fog of misinformation as he delved deeper into the subject.

When I related to him that I'd been able to shed much of my excess weight via the simple expedient of nixing everything that contained HFCS and a lot of sugar, he was understandably not surprised. Over the subsequent months, he shared some information he'd collected along the way which caused me to add starches to my proscription list, and which persuaded me to increase the amount of fatty meats I consumed. My weight loss accelerated, and other benefits started to appear. My stamina improved, my allergies became less troublesome, and my blood pressure (which had been a bit high, but never dangerously so) started to fall back very slowly.

When I started this, I weighed over 210 lbs, which was far from being considered obese for someone who's 6'3" tall. Today, I appear to have stabilized at around 163 lbs, I have lost 5 inches off my waistline, and I feel much better on a daily basis than I did when I was carrying the extra pounds around. By many standards, I am now considered underweight for my height. Well, the folks who think so can just keep their opinions to themselves. This is working really well for me, and I'm sticking to it.

Meanwhile, for anyone who's actively curious about the subject, I can heartily recommend "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes as a long but exceptionally informative read that covers not only the facts and the history of how we got into the dietary mess we're in, but why there's so much information around which is dead wrong...and what that misinformation is still causing as a result.

Just reduce the price, dammit! I HATE REBATES!

This rant pertains mostly to commerce at it is done in the U.S. Elsewhere, the relevance and reasoning may vary.

Reasons why I hate rebates:

1. You're never 100% sure that you'll actually get it. Between documents lost in the mail going to the processing center, checks lost or stolen in the mail coming back, processing errors, claims lost at the processing center, and checks misplaced or mistaken for junk mail (see item 6 below), the chances are good that a significant percentages of the rebates you request will never make it back into your pocket. No matter where the loss occurs, you usually can't get the rebate replaced; it's just gone for good. Businesses Benefit From This; It's Good For Profits, Even Though It's Bad For YOU.

2. It requires extra time on the part of the buyer, and particularly if the purchase is made at a time of urgent need, there's a good chance that events (including merely being distracted at the wrong moment) will cause the window of opportunity to close, or something required for the rebate claim to be thrown away by mistake, before the rebate gets sent off. In many cases, even if you keep everything (receipt, proof of purchase, etc.), by the time you find the paperwork and realize what it is, the perhaps-as-short-as-5-day period to file for the rebate is over. (Yes, I have seen periods for filing which were that short, or shorter.) Businesses Benefit From This; It's Good For Profits, Even Though It's Bad For YOU.

3. You have to pay sales tax on a larger amount than you would if they just discounted the item. If what you want has an $80 rebate, for instance, you're paying sales tax on the $80, and you won't get that back. If the price were simply discounted by that amount, you'd save the extra sales tax; where I live, on $80, that's another $6.60 out of my pocket. Businesses get to keep a trivial fraction of the sales tax they collect, usually a fraction of a percent, but it adds up, so once again, Businesses Benefit From This; It's Good For Profits, Even Though It's Bad For YOU.

4. You're getting no interest on this loan...and that's effectively what it is. They're asking you to hand over the money now and maybe get it back later; essentially, to loan *someone* that money, interest-free, with significant risk and no guarantee, for as much as 180 days. (That's the longest delay I've seen; your mileage may vary, but 90 days is pretty typical.) Businesses Benefit From This; It's Good For Profits, Even Though It's Bad For YOU.

5. If the rebate demands that you have to deface the packaging and/or send back the original sales receipt as part of the terms of the extortion, you may be surrendering your right to return the defaced item and/or to collect on the receipt-required warranty in the process. Although some states protect the consumer's rights to some extent in this area, not all do, and some manufacturers and businesses will try to avoid honoring warranties using any pretext at all, legal or not; wherever the rebate process creates such a problem, it's yet another instance in which Businesses Benefit From This; It's Good For Profits, Even Though It's Bad For YOU.

6. When it arrives in the mail, the typical rebate check looks more like a scammish promotion come-on for a timeshare sales track than something with a valid depositable value. As a result, it's likely to get tossed in the trash unopened. While making it nondescript reduces the likelihood of its being stolen, making it look like unwanted junk mail takes extra effort, and the only reason I can see to do this is that they understand that it will increase the number of checks thrown away unopened in error. Once again, Businesses Benefit From This; It's Good For Profits, And IT DOESN'T MATTER TO THEM ONE BIT THAT IT'S BAD FOR YOU.

I really, really HATE rebates.

What we can measure sometimes misleads us.

Over the course of the past century (plus a bit), a large number of tools have been added to the scientific box for measurement of things chemical and physical. In medicine, we have seen the capability for blood analysis go from merely testing for type compatibility to being able to precisely measure the levels of a number of hormones, antibodies, proteins, lipids, and other nominally-important substances. As each new measurement tool has been added, the importance of some branch of the medical art has risen with it, and new guidelines for treatment of various conditions (or their lack) have been proposed and adopted. One would assume that this is a good thing, but in retrospect, the evidence says that's not always the case.

The problem is that while we may know what we're measuring, we may not know what the importance of that measurement really is. The history of science is littered with the debris of discredited theories about how something worked, as based on the knowledge of the day, and that knowledge was usually based on the measurement techniques available at the time. If that history really teaches us anything in this regard, it's to be cautious about overgeneralizing the importance of what we can measure; it always need to be evaluated in the light of whether what we think we know matches up with what we can prove.

Take, for example, the levels of certain minerals in drinking water. Every passing decade has allowed us to add both to the number of substances we could identify in ever-smaller quantities, and to the precision with which we could measure them. The effects of high levels of these substances has often been well known, and as the capacity to detect them at low levels has improved, we've often seen alarms being raised about their presence in water around the world. In some instances, it has been possible to demonstrate that these minute levels are new developments traceable to contaminated water from mine tailings or other human activity...but all too often, it's been discovered that these low levels of supposedly-deadly elements have been present all along with no apparent ill effects. Our ability to finally measure the "contaminant" merely added to our knowledge of the natural world's composition; the misinterpretation of that measurement, however, has often led to panic.

As a second example, look at that much-heard word from the realm of nutrition, the "calorie." Measurement of the caloric content of foods is a tool that has been around for over a century, but the ability to make sense of what it was telling us has taken a lot longer to be developed...and still hasn't been fully recognized. As often happens, when the method of measurement of dietary calories was devised, the ability to perform the measurement itself caused the importance of the information to be overstated. The possession of a new tool tends to have this effect; that which can be measured is a source of certainty, therefore it must be important. Indeed, it even engendered a fundamental misconception, that "calories are calories" and that the body could not tell the difference between caloric input from any source. This misconception has hamstringed the efforts of those who are trying to reshape our nutritional guides to correctly reflect the actual state of our understanding of the subject, which is far more complex.

For a third example, consider serum cholesterol, once touted as the absolute predictor of heart health hazards. When the ability to measure it was developed, the medical community raced to embrace the test, and drug companies began looking for substances which would act to reduce the measurement to "safe" levels. A lot of money was spent developing cholesterol-lowering drugs before enough analysis of the measurements (and correlation of them to real-world results) revealed that cholesterol levels were not as important as first believed; instead, there were two other markers (of a related nature) which were shown to be more important, and the drug companies began chasing after ways to chemically alter those as well. Unfortunately, that, too, is proving to have been the wrong approach, as expanded understanding of the interlocking nature of the actions of several bodily systems has demonstrated that once again, the item being measured was only an indicator of a different problem, and trying to "fix" the "abnormality" with a drug merely masked the effect of a different, more fundamental problem.

In each case, the ability to measure something has caused a race to find ways to change the results, "treating" an "abnormality" which was thought to be the cause of a specific condition when in fact it was itself only a symptom. The same error has been made for a variety of other measurable chemical levels; we have drugs to lower and raise various levels of things that exist normally at varying concentrations in our tissues, but we often don't actually know why the levels are out of the "normal" range, nor do we necessarily always know what the actual causative underlying problem really is. Furthermore, sometimes we don't know precisely how a drug operates to achieve the changes in the measurable item's level; more than one pharmaceutical has been discovered to be doing more harm than good in attempting to treat various maladies.

Medicine is not the only field in which incomplete-toolkit-based misconceptions are seen, though it may well be the deadliest. The decades of the 1960s, 70s and 80s saw many engineering tasks moved from the practical and physical design methods of the 1950s and prior to the entirely math-based, computer-aided methods that dominate the field today. Computer simulations of stress on a structure were measurable more inexpensively and immediately than could be achieved with prototypes and physical gauges, so they were embraced wholeheartedly in the quest to get better products into production faster. Unfortunately, the shift began before our understanding of the nuances and complexities of system stresses had been adequately developed, and as a result, many computer-designed products of the 1970s were, to be blunt, completely rubbish.

New tools for measurement of the physical world come into being every day; we're a curious bunch, and we like to know what happens when we poke things with a metaphorical (and sometimes literal) sharp stick. The problem is that we don't always know whether the information we're collecting means what we think it does.

Zion Canyon By Bike - Ohhhhh, yeah.

Zion National Park, in southwest Utah, is a real gem. Massive, sheer cliffs line both sides of the deep gorge, and unlike Grand, Bryce or Black Canyon, your visit to this one is primarily along the bottom, where the weather tends to be much nicer than out in the nearby desert. It's not terribly close to a major population center, but it gets a lot of visitors and is not far from an Interstate highway...which means that budget-rate accommodations can often be had in the nearby town of Hurricane, UT. Most of the accessible-by-road portion of the park is at a moderate altitude (4000 ft or below), and even the upper end of the tunnel road (whose tunnel is off-limits to cyclists, alas) is not up into the exhaustion-inducing thin air of Bryce Canyon or Cedar Breaks...and that means the potential for fun is definitely present.

Until its visitor population overran its parking capacity some years back, you used to be able to drive everywhere in Zion Canyon that was reachable by car. Now, except during November through March, the road that runs up the canyon past the main lodge is off limits to most private vehicles. Instead, you get around via free propane-powered shuttle buses...with bike racks. Each bus has a two-bike rack on the front. You can ride a bike both ways on the canyon road, but because that rack's presence means that you don't have to ride uphill if you don't want to, a bike is both fun and practical even for people who aren't particularly athletic - and better than the shuttles alone.

By using the shuttle, you can travel easily (if not always speedily) throughout the most popular part of the park and visit all of the principal interesting sights. Parking is free inside the park (though getting in requires a fee, of course), and the shuttles stop at every legal parking lot. Regardless of whether you bring a bike, you really don't need to drive any farther than the Visitor Center that's just inside the main gate at Springdale. If you do bring a bike, that's the logical place to leave your car. From there, it's an easy and pleasant (and scenic - did I mention scenic?) ride to the Canyon Junction shuttle stop, at which you can easily toss your bike aboard the rack on the front of the next bus, and loaf your way up (literally) to the Shinawava Temple stop at the upper end of the canyon. Once there, it's almost all downhill to get back to Canyon Junction. There's one short uphill stretch between Weeping Rock and The Grotto, but even that's not too bad; no worse than a freeway overpass. On the other hand, if you're riding a one-speed cruiser and don't feel like mashing the pedals that hard, or you're suffering from the cumulative effects of too many pizzas over the years, just stop at the Weeping Rock parking lot and grab the next shuttle to The Grotto to get past that climb.

For most of the downhill sections, it is easily possible for an experienced cyclist to outrun the shuttle buses, but they will occasionally catch up to you on the slower and straighter bits even if you aren't stopping to take pictures. The buses are not permitted to pass a rider in motion, so the cyclist needs to keep an eye (and ear) open for shuttles overtaking from behind, and should be prepared to pull over and stop to let them by. The shuttles are neither excessively noisy nor completely quiet, so if you hear one, it's probably close enough that you need to look for a flat shoulder quickly. Fortunately, that's usually not hard to find, and you can often dodge to the other side of the road to stop if your side's a bit precipitous at the point that the bus catches up to you since there's an amazing lack of traffic. For most of my first run down the canyon, I tried to make sure that I was well and truly between shuttles when I left a given stop, but that may not always be the best approach. Although the buses caught up to me handily on some segments, particularly when I stopped to look at things a lot, I was still easily able to outpace the shuttle bus between Court of the Patriarchs and Canyon Junction. You might not be as swift. On the other hand, you also might be a lot faster; don't worry, you can figure out your best approach to the "ahead or behind" issue in short order. The important thing to remember is that it's not a race; the point is being there and having fun while staying safe. And if you zoom down the canyon too fast, you may get stuck behind a bus anyway; the entire route is a "no passing" zone, so you can only go around them when they're stopped at the scenic points.

The easy downhill running is only the icing on the scenery cake, however. The real fun part (for me, at least) was being able to stop anywhere and everywhere I wanted to look at things and take photos. There are a number of scenic turnouts that the shuttles don't serve, and most people never get to stop at them as a result, but those are hardly the only places of interest. On a bike, the entire road is your turnout, and you can stop for photos wherever you please. Just don't park on the road surface itself!

Bike lockup racks are available at all shuttle stops and at every trail head I visited. The scenic road up through the canyon is open to bikes during the entire year, but the only off-road place they're allowed is the fully-paved Pa'Rus trail which crosses the Virgin River three times (and Pine Creek once) between the Visitor Center and Canyon Junction. Using the trail instead of the road for this section is recommended due to heavy traffic including some large trucks; Utah State Road 9 runs through the park over this route, and some of its traffic is commercial.

You'll almost certainly want to use some of the foot trails as well as riding; there's a lot more of the park than what can be seen from the road, though you'll probably want to spend most of your first day just enjoying the stuff you can do on wheels. The foot trails are mostly far too narrow to either ride or walk a bike along even if that was permitted...which it emphatically is not, so bring a lock; theft can be an issue wherever there are people, and Zion is very popular.

No one was using a bike helmet when I was there, probably due to the lack of threat from drivers on cell phones and otherwise-common hazards. Summer temperatures can be up into the 90s(F), but the humidity is low and there are shady, cool spots aplenty in which to shed the heat. Sunscreen is still a good idea, since skin damage is no joking matter. All of the major shuttle stops have fresh spring water available to refill your water bottle(s) or Camelback, and they actively encourage people NOT to use disposable bottled water in the park; they even sell their fountain drinks in compostable cups. Spring and Fall temps can get downright frosty; plan accordingly!

Can you hear me YET? Can you STILL hear me?

Verizon Wireless makes a big deal of their "Can You hear Me Now?" advertising slogan, using it to emphasize the fact that they have a reasonably decent cell phone coverage area in the US. What they don't say is that for a lot of folks (myself included), their calls often take an extra 4 to 6 seconds to actually connect after flipping the phone open (or mashing the appropriate button) on an incoming call. It's not an annoyance at the screaming-at-the-sales-rep level, but it's enough to make me think that maybe I should shop around when the current contract ends.

And when I'm on the road, I frequently find their service dropping the connection even when there is at least one apparent cell phone antenna tower in direct line-of-sight. Sometimes, it's pretty obvious that I've just crossed a tariff boundary, which probably makes handoff of the call from one local segment to the next a bit tricky; other times, the call just goes dead for no reason at all. I won't say that the frequency is noticeably worse than it was when I was with AT&T, but it definitely seems worse than it was prior to AT&T's reduction in the number of towers they kept in service after they borged the various companies that they ate on the way to reassembling themselves. (And who was the regulatory idiot that thought it was a good idea to let AT&T put itself back together, anyway? Hello? Monopolies are BAD! And now they're trying to quietly buy Sprint, which would cut the competition level for nationwide service that much more. This is NOT a good thing.)

New! Improved! 50% less costs 20% more!

It's not a new trend, but I remain amazed that people fall for the repackaging of things as Whipped and Moussed and "Ready To Use" and stuffed with fillers and stretchers and glop that hides the lack of what ought to be present. In far too many cases, with way too many products, what the consumer is really getting is less of the product for a higher price per real unit.

Take Dannon's La Creme Yogurt Mousse. It's been around since 2003, and apparently remains popular; since I don't eat yogurt anyway, I don't know if it's something that just any yogurt consumer would like on its apparent-to-the-palate merits. (I can't stand yogurt myself; it tastes like spoiled milk to me, which is the same objection I have to the majority of cheeses.) What's the difference between the mousse version and the regular one in terms of ingredients? Well, one thing's definitely present in the moussed version which isn't on its list: AIR. That's how you make something into a mousse; whip it mechanically (usually after adding something to make it a bit stiffer so that it will hold the tiny bubbles created) until the volume doubles or triples (or more), making it "lighter" and "creamier"... and making the same actual amount of product stretch across two or three of the previous size of container instead.

Whipping something is far from the only way that products get stretched and made cheap-and-more-profitable. Take waffle syrup. Look at a few labels, and you'll see "cellulose gum" listed over and over again. What the heck is that, you ask? Basically, processed tree. While it's been pretty well established to have no negative effects, the undeniable fact that it very cheaply thickens stuff a lot while adding no nutritional value at all is a clear indicator that the point of employing it is to make the product seem richer, fuller, better, without actually improving it at all. In the case of waffle syrup, of course, there's no positive nutritional value to laud in the first place; the stuff's supposed to be thick sugary syrup. What the inclusion of cellulose gum allows the manufacturers to do is use less sugar - a lot less in some cases - and still have the stuff pour at the expected slow rate. Is that bad, given that sugar's something that you'd probably be better off reducing anyway? Well, maybe...but I doubt that anything other than simple profit margin boosting has driven the inclusion of this item.

Food's far from the only place where such commercial shenanigans are possible. Consider the "Ready To Use" dodge. The single most common example that I run across daily is antifreeze. In its pure form, the stuff is a terrible coolant; filling your car's cooling system with pure antifreeze (and no water) will induce overheating in traffic in a big hurry. And lots of people seem to be pretty bad at following the package directions about this...so the manufacturers started packaging half a gallon of antifreeze and half a gallon of water in a one gallon jug...at 75% to 80% of the price of a gallon of the pure stuff. Once again, it's not necessarily a bad thing, until you go to the store to buy a gallon of the pure stuff, and end up paying far more because all they had was the premix, in which you paid for extra packaging and very overpriced water.

There are lots of other examples out there; a little research will amaze or appall the interested investigator, and for the rest...well, did you really care anyway?

Sometimes, you have to use what works. This time, it isn't Epson's printer driver.

I sell stuff at conventions. I don't make a lot doing it, but that's where the bulk of my income comes from...what there is of it. One thing I try to do in an effort to save money is buy used equipment wherever possible. Much of it comes from eBay. Recently, though, I decided to splurge on a refurbished receipt printer instead of yet another whatever's-available used one. So I picked up an Epson TM88IIIP for what seemed like a decent price. This one, to be exact:

It arrived a couple of months ago, and sat in its box waiting to be deployed. A few weekends back, we had events to staff in two different locations, so I concluded that the time had come to put the Epson to work. I set up the drivers on a spare laptop at home, verified that the printer could send the signal to kick the cash drawer open, and packed it (and the spare drawer) up for the trip. (The older, fully tested setup went to the other event.) At the convention, I successfully installed Epson's "Advanced Printer Driver v4.07" on my aging Dell C610 laptop, and immediately encountered the SLOWEST performance from a receipt printer that I have ever seen. It was DISMAL. I could literally count out the customer's change and bag their purchase in the time it took for a two-item receipt (with no logo) to print. I didn't want to risk disabling the setup entirely, however, so I put up with it through the course of that weekend.

In retrospect, that may have been both smart and unnecessary.

Late this past week, I decided to look more closely at the printer's driver settings in an effort to try to speed up the printing. I noticed that it was set up to use the Windows Truetype fonts instead of substituting the printer's own native fonts. I suspected that this might be part of the lack-of-speed problem, since that likely meant that the various lines of the receipt were getting converted to graphics before being sent to the printer. After a little futzing around, I had every Truetype font set to be replaced by the printer's first listed native font (FontA, to be specific...whatever that was). Lo and behold, the receipts printed instantaneously! Problem solved...I thought.

Emboldened by my success, I decided to extend the printer's usefulness by installing the official Epson drivers on my other laptop, an even older Dell L400. That's when things got Interesting.

On every attempt, the drivers took about 10 minutes to unpack and install themselves. I believe I tried it a total of nine different times; that's an hour and a half of my time that I'll never get back. And the installation time was just the beginning. When you add in the hours spent testing various bits of the setup, and discovering that it was perfectly possible to print things on the Epson as long as the Epson's driver wasn't used, it ate the better part of a very frustrating afternoon.

I could go on at length about the various blind alleys I chased along in the vain hope of getting the Epson printer to work with the Epson driver. And at one point, I actually managed to make it work...briefly. In going over the difference between the setup I'd used on the road and the setup I was working with to try to get the printer working with the L400, I noticed that I wasn't using the same cable as I had employed at the convention. A little metaphoric light flashed on, and I dug out and installed the cable I'd used with the C610. A miracle! Suddenly the Epson driver worked! But not for long. After another hour of configuration testing in search of a way to get it to stop wasting way too much paper (ultimately concluded to be yet another problem in the Epson Advanced Printer Driver) it once again quit working with the Epson driver...and another reinstall didn't change that outcome.

In the process of all of this, however, I discovered that the drivers for my also-aging Ithaca Series 80 receipt printer, which is designed to emulate an Epson TM88, would work just fine with an actual Epson TM88. And they provided the hoped-for solution to the wasted-paper problem as well...since it simply didn't happen with the Ithaca driver.

Bottom line Part 1: The Epson TM88III printer with a Parallel interface would work OK (but take a lot more config fiddling than I really liked) with my Dell C610 using the Epson drivers. It would not work reliably at all with the Epson drivers on my Dell L400, but it worked just fine with the drivers for an Ithaca Series 80 on the L400. Now, admittedly, the Ithaca's driver's don't support the fancy features like the use of a graphic logo, but I don't use those anyway; they're no loss as far as I'm concerned.

Bottom line Part 2: If you need a fast, reliable receipt printer, and you don't care about including graphics on the receipt, the Epson can probably be made to work one way or another...but there are other choices which might be a lot less frustrating. If you need to be able to print a graphic logo or other image on your receipts, I'd suggest looking at the Star Micronics line instead. I occasionally have used a borrowed TSP100, and its drivers have never exhibited the least bit of hardware finickiness with any of the laptops I've tried...including the L400.