Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
“Turkey gobbled up in 12 minutes,” as reported at CNN.com. Here’s a quote:
Sonya Thomas, 37, who weighs just 105 pounds (47.5 kg), beat seven men in the annual Thanksgiving Invitational: a race to eat a 10-pound (4.5-kg) turkey.
The smallest in the field, Thomas put her victory down to “swallowing fast.”
Interestingly enough, tonight’s CSI apparently features a crime involving competitive eating. Coincidence? I think not.
While at school the other day, a colleague of mine noticed the vinyl Spiderman lunch box I was carrying. And yes, that is my lunch box; Will’s has a Yu Gi Oh! theme to it. Anyway, this colleague of mine said “You know, a lot of these soft-sided lunch boxes contain lead.”
“What?!”
“Yeah, they passed around a notice at the EMU Children’s Institute,” where said colleague’s children attend pre-school.
To get to the point: according to studies done by the Center for Environmental Health, there are some soft-sided lunchboxes out there that contain way too much lead. Furthermore, according to Snopes.com, this is not a hoax.
Now, as even the Center for Environmental Health web site makes clear, it’s not like the lead-containing lunch boxes are as dangerous to kids as eating or inhaling paint particles or something. Still, Will and I like to stay on a low-lead diet, so we swung by Home Depot and bought one of the lead testing kits suggested by the CEH web site. Happily, we are carrying around lunch boxes free of lead and made of pure vinyl/petrochemical plastic-like products.
Annette and I stopped by the Food Whole on Thursday after a nice morning walk. I for one like to stop and get a cup of coffee, perhaps something for breakfast (depending on what I had eaten before the walk). This semester I teach on Thursday nights, so I also usually get a frozen dinner to heat up for a pre-class meal at school.
Anyway, whenever I go to Whole Foods, even if it is just for a cup of coffee, I always make the rounds of the store in order to enjoy the various samples. The way I figure it, if I’m going to be paying a premium on my groceries (and actually, the extent to which Whole Foods is “over priced” is debatable, I think), I might as well enjoy all the perks. I had made my way over to the coffee area after picking out a ginger scone (sorta like a breakfast but sorta like a dessert, I guess), and there was a sample station set up for some kind of coffee. “Hmm, I’ll try that,” I was thinking, and as I was fixing myself a tiny cup from the pump thermos, I read the description of what I was about to try and I began to second guess myself.
The product I had poured myself was “Teeccino®,” a caffeine-free herbal coffee. I picked up one of the brochures they had there about this stuff. Here’s a quote from it:
Teeccino® (tea-chee-no) is the first herbal coffee belnded from herbs, grains, fruits and nuts that are roasted, ground and brewed just like coffee. Dark, rich, and full-bodied, Teeccino® brings you all the satisfaction of a robust brew with no caffeine reaction. Teeccino® tastes mildely sweet from dates and figs, but only has 15 calories per cup! Teeccino® contains 65 mg of potassium to give your body a natural energy lift.
Worse yet, Teeccino® comes in a series of flavors, including “Java” (ah, coffee flavored caffeine-free herbal coffee?) and “original.” On sample that morning was Almond Amaretto. Now, to be fair to the Teeccino® people, I don’t like flavored “non-herbal” coffee, so my impressions of their product may be a bit skewed. Nonetheless, I came away thinking that Teeccino® tasted a) absolutely nothing like coffee and b) icky.
And I guess the problem I have is the basic premise of the product: why would you want to give up coffee? I mean, sure, maybe you want to cut down on caffine. But that’s what decaf is for. They’re trying to make a comparison between this stuff and “herbal tea,” but the basic difference seems to be that herbal tea tastes good while herbal coffee tastes bad.
BTW, after bitching about this crappy stuff to Annette, I picked up the brochure I am looking at right now. Annette sighed and said “You’re going to blog about that, aren’t you?”
From a blog I read once in a while in my “official” blogging/teaching role comes this entry about conservative Christian churches sponsoring “Hell Houses.” Basically, some conservative Christian churches in places like South Carolina (where else?!) have been setting up these elaborate haunted houses –er, “Hell Houses” that are a lot like haunted houses in their churches. With one big difference:
Welcome to the creepiest stop in the afterlife — complete with real fire, demonic characters, a heavy metal soundtrack and unfortunate souls bound by clanking chains. In the knick of time, visitors are whisked away to a heavenly realm of redemption.
Under 15,000 feet of black plastic sheeting, the church has been transformed into a dark, twisting maze where visitors can witness scenes of death and destruction — from the living room of a Hurricane Katrina victim to the beheading of an American civilian in Iraq. Then, there’s the judgment scene where Christ invites Christians into heaven and banishes others to hell.
Personally, I think this is the kind of thing that is likely to backfire on these folks. Anyone who has ever read things like Pardise Lost or The Divine Comedy know that hell and the devil are the most interesting parts of the story.
Anyway, we’re all getting ready for the old-fashioned candy ‘n costumes sort of Halloween celebration around here tonight. This year’s celebration has been quite similar to last year’s: we went to a “Day of the Dead” party this past weekend, Will is wearing his knight costume again (check out the picture from last year to see what I mean), and I will be wearing my “This is my costume” T-shirt while passing out candy.
I want to be rid of all of this candy, too. Basically, when it comes to sneaking and eating candy, even though it really is pretty crappy candy all in all, I seemingly have no self-control. I feel like I’ve gained 20 pounds in the last two weeks just from tootsie rolls. Well, it needs to be outta here tonight, and Will will need to guard his candy haul carefully from me.
And I need to get back to the gym, too.
There’s a nice little write-up about Bombadill’s Coffee House in Ypsilanti in EMU’s student paper, the Eastern Echo.
I’m actually in Bombadill’s right now, certainly the best coffee shop in all of Ypsilanti and my choice of a coffee shop destination when:
But I still don’t have Ypsi in my veins the same way that Pete does.
Anyway, c’mon down and check the place out.
So, I was at Whole Foods yesterday afternoon to pick up a few things before heading home. While walking down an aisle, I saw someone who I vaguely recognized as also working at EMU. He made eye contact with me as if he were going to say something like “hey, don’t you work at EMU too?” But instead, as I got closer, he pointed at my chest and his face lit up. “I know what that means,” he said with glee, “and no one else here does.”
“That” was the T-shirt I was wearing, which was promoting the University of Okoboji. And I immediately knew what he meant. See, there is no “University of Okoboji;” it’s sort of an inside joke and a weird marketing scheme for the Spirit Lake/Okoboji area in northwest Iowa, the so-called “Iowa Great Lakes.” And really, I think it’s mainly a way for a store called The Three Sons to sell t-shirts and such.
Anyway, we had a nice “Iowa moment,” talking a bit about where we were from and all of that. This guy had never been to Okoboji, but I’ve been out there on a “extended Krause family vacation” we had there a few years ago. It’s pretty nice; I mean, it’s not near as posh or as pretty as the Traverse City area, but it was simple and certainly a lot cheaper that TC, too.
Ah, we missed it, we MISSED it!
On our way back from South Dakota this summer, we drove right though Austin, MN, which is the home office of Hormel meats, the maker of the infamous luncheon meat SPAM. We just didn’t have time, and really, by that point of the trip, we wanted to be home.
Ever have SPAM? I bet ya haven’t. To be honest, I can’t remember ever having SPAM until we went to Hawaii last year. There, SPAM is a local and traditional favorite, I think because the canned meat was brought by the U.S. military a long time ago. I didn’t try the SPAM sushi, but I did have SPAM as part of a traditional breakfast platter that included SPAM, Portuguese sausage, scrambled eggs, and white rice. And you know what? SPAM is pretty good.
Some day, I too hope to tour the SPAM museum. In the meantime, I’ll just have to live through the photo memories of someone else…..
I went to the dentist today to get a crown. I have kind of bad teeth, but fortunately, I have a good relationship with my dentist. He does good work.
Counting this new one that is in temporary form, I have six crowns. For me, getting a crown is not really that much worse than getting a filling. Getting a root canal (I’ve had that done twice), well, that’s an entirely different thing.
Things went as well as can be expected, but there was one torturous moment when the dentist and the dental assistant made small-talk– with me, in theory, but since my mouth was numbed and filled with some kind of epoxy that takes an impression of the tooth being repaired, I was more of an observer than a participant– about Twinkies, Ho-Hos, and the Atkins diet. Awful.
Well, I guess you had to be there.
Anyway, I used that and the pain to justify an extra-special post-dentist treat. It always includes some kind of chocolate, but today, it was a Lake Champlain bar, Dark Chocolate with Almonds. It didn’t quite make up for it, but close.
Now I had better do some sit-ups or something.
Here’s a link to Alex Halavais’ blog (he’s someone I read on the “official blog” side of things), “The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink,” which is 1652 handbill about that wacky new drink.
On ABC’s nightly news last night, I heard that Atkins Inc., the late doctor’s company who brought us the “low carb craze,” is bankrupt. I like how these opening paragraphs from The San Francisco Chronicle characterizes the war between Atkins and the “carb industry” (actually, it’s an article that first appeared in the LA Times, but…):
In Boise, staff members of the Idaho Potato Commission gave each other gleeful high-fives when they heard the news. In Houston, the folks at the U.S. Rice Producers’ Association declared “good riddance.” And fruit farmers in the Central Valley said they were “happy to see them go.”
Across the United States, producers of carbohydrate-laden food exulted at the decision by Atkins Nutritionals Inc., the Ronkonkoma, N.Y.-based designer of the once popular low-carbohydrate weight-loss program, to file for bankruptcy protection.
You can practically hear the Star Wars battle sound track behind all this, can’t you?
I don’t know personally to what extent the “low carb craze” is really over or not and I am no business expert, but I think the Atkins folks had a business problem that did not have a whole lot to do with their diet: they expanded way too quickly and into too many areas. Instead of sticking to diet books and cook books, Atkins Inc. started to make low-carb foods, particularly low-carb versions of things like pasta. And have you ever tasted that stuff? Nasty shit.
If you’re going to eat low-carb foods, eat low-carb foods. But if you’re going to eat high-carb foods, then eat the real thing. Though aim for the whole wheat.
Annette and I are currently on our own version of The South Beach Diet, which is somewhere between “phase 1” and “phase 2.” We’re avoiding carbs, not eating starches like potatoes, white bread, and white rice, eating lots of veggies, and not drinking alcohol. But we are eating some things like yogurt, fruits, and high fiber/wheat grain breands (things that are no-nos during “phase 1”), and I for one will probably have a beer after golf tomorrow (and probably a hot dog, too– what else are you going to eat on a golf course?) and some wine with dinner over the weekend.
We’ve only been doing this in earnest for a few days and I think I’ve already lost about four pounds, though I think that most of that weight is just post-travel bloat as opposed to real diet losses. I’d like to lose about another seven or ten pounds before school starts in September, but that might be a bit optimistic. We’ll see.
Incidentially, I received an email the other day from a former student of mine (and apparently a regular reader of the unofficial blog here) named David Brandt. David, who took a couple of classes from me in his last years at EMU (I think he graduated), is now studying to be a personal trainer and nutritionist, and he has the diet plan on his web site that he uses when training and body building. It’s worth checking out, and I guess I have two observations about it:
Which reminds me that I need to walk the dog and get at least a little exercise this morning before I get to work on the textbook….
