Spitting Into the Wind

This is what the Dalai Lama has to say for 2006.

Instructions For Life

1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.

3. Follow the three R’s:
       Respect for self,
       Respect for others and
       Responsibility for all your actions.

4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.

5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

6. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great relationship.

7. When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

8. Spend some time alone every day.

9. Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.

10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

11. Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.

12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.

13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.

14. Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.

15. Be gentle with the earth.

16. Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.

17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.

18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

19. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

This is some very good advice that we can all use. It's not hard to work it out.

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1. No plastic containers in microwave.

2. No water bottles in freezer.

3. No plastic wrap in microwave.

Johns Hopkins has recently sent this out in its newsletters. This information is being circulated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center as well.

• Dioxin chemicals causes cancer, especially breast cancer.
• Dioxins are highly poisonous to the cells of our bodies. Don't freeze your plastic bottles with water in them as this releases dioxins from the plastic.

Recently, Dr Edward Fujimoto, Wellness Program Manager at Castle Hospital, was on a TV program to explain this health hazard. He talked about dioxins and how bad they are for us.

He said that we should not be heating our food in the microwave using plastic containers. This especially applies to foods that contain fat. He said that the combination of fat, high heat, and plastics releases dioxin into the food and ultimately into the cells of the body.

Instead, he recommends using glass, such as Corning Ware, Pyrex or ceramic containers for heating food. You get the same results, only without the dioxin. So such things as TV dinners, instant ramen and soups, etc., should be removed from the container and heated in something else. Paper isn't bad but you don 't know what is in the paper. It's just safer to use tempered glass, Corning Ware, etc.

He reminded us that a while ago some of the fast food restaurants moved away from the foam containers to paper. The dioxin problem is one of the reasons.

Also, he pointed out that plastic wrap, such as Saran, is just as dangerous when placed over foods to be cooked in the microwave. As the food is nuked, the high heat causes poisonous toxins to actually melt out of the plastic wrap and drip into the food.

Cover food with a paper towel instead.

It’s not clear why so many people are uneasy about microwave ovens. “Maybe it’s because there’s no obvious reason why the food cooks,” offers physicist Louis Bloomfield of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who answers questions about microwaves at howthingswork.virginia.edu.

There's plenty of debate concerning this issue, eg, Microwave ovens: A recipe for cancer. and Microwave myths: fact vs fiction.

And concerning plastic wrap:

E-mails widely circulating around the Internet warn that plastic wraps release the carcinogen dioxin when microwaved. “It’s a chemical impossibility because the precursors for dioxin are not in the plastic wrap,” says George Sadler, a professor of food packaging at the National Center for Food Safety and Technology in Summit, Illinois. The center is a consortium of scientists from academia, the Food and Drug Administration, and the food industry.
“We are not aware of any plastics that yield dioxin as a breakdown product, absolutely none,” adds Kristina Paquette of the FDA’s Office of Food Additive Safety in College Park, Maryland.

My microwave gets little use and I've never used a microwave cookbook though I have a few of them. I tried to make a cake once and it came out a flat, pale, sad-looking lead-weight. I do, however, use it for re-heating and defrosting food. After reading the above links, I'm not going to lose sleep over it.

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Australian Steve Irwin, of the TV show 'The Crocodile Hunter,' holds a nine-foot female alligator in company with his wife Terri, who is from Eugene, Oregon, at his 'Australia Zoo' in Beerwah, Queensland, Australia, June 18, 1999. Steve Irwin was killed on Monday, September 4 2006, by a stingray barb during a diving expedition where he was filming off the Great Barrier Reef.

Irwin was at Batt Reef, off the remote coast of northeastern Queensland, shooting a segment for a series called "Ocean's Deadliest" when he swam too close to one of the stingrays, which have a poisonous barb on their tails that pierced his heart.

It didn't take long for the jokes to start coming about the death of Steve Irwin. I got an email today with a couple of funny pictures that I'm sure even Steve would have got a laugh out of.

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I received an email today with warnings about new date-rape drugs that had me truly horrified. It's a Metropolitan Police Announcement, and warns women especially about the newest drug to hit the date-rape scene.

A woman at a night-club on Saturday night was taken by 5 men who, according to hospital and police reports, gang raped her before dumping her. Unable to remember the events of the evening, tests later confirmed the repeat rapes and along with traces of Rohypnol in her blood, was Progesterex, which is essentially a small sterilization pill. The drug is now being used by rapists at parties to rape AND sterilize their victims. Progesterex is available to vets to sterilise large animals. Rumour has it that Progesterex is being used together with Rohypnol, the date rape drug. As with Rohypnol, all they have to do is drop it into the girl's drink. The girl can't remember a thing the next morning, of all that had taken place the night before. Progesterex, which dissolves in drinks just as easily, is such that the victim doesn't conceive from the rape and the rapist needn't worry about having a paternity test identifying him months later. The drug's effects ARE NOT TEMPORARY- They are PERMANENT!

Progesterex was designed to sterilise horses. Any female who takes it WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO CONCEIVE. They can get this drug from anyone who is in vet school. It's that easy, and Progesterex is about to break out big everywhere. Believe it or not, there are even sites on the Internet telling people how to use it.

Be careful when you're out and don't leave your drink unattended. This has now been reported to have been used on 360 women around London.

Girls keep your drinks safe at all times and blokes look after the girls you are with.

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UPDATE (26/7/2006) The Red Planet is about to be spectacular.

Here are the facts: Earth and Mars are converging for a close encounter this year on October 30th at 0319 Universal Time. Distance: 69 million kilometers. To the unaided eye, Mars will look like a bright red star, a pinprick of light, certainly not as wide as the full Moon.

Disappointed? Don't be. If Mars did come close enough to rival the Moon, its gravity would alter Earth's orbit and raise terrible tides. Read more of what Dr Tony Phillips has to say on the NASA site.

This is the Hoax

This month and next, Earth is catching up with Mars in an encounter that will culminate in the closest approach between the two planets in recorded history. The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287. Due to the way Jupiter's gravity tugs on Mars and perturbs its orbit, astronomers can only be certain that Mars has not come this close to Earth in the Last 5,000 years, but it may be as long as 60,000 years before it happens again.

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It was all over the news and the internet the last couple of days about the Australian Big Brother TV Show eviction of two housemates.

According to Behind Big Brother, at approximately 4.30am Saturday morning Ashley and John jumped onto Camilla's bed. John held down Camilla while Ashley knelt over her, apparently slapping her in the face with his penis. At one stage John was holding Camilla down by her head. The incident went to air over the internet streams and several users recorded screen captures which are now circulating the internet. At the time Camilla was quoted as saying "thats not cool".

The news headlines were rampant:

• 'Big Brother' evicts pair amid sex claims
• Alleged assault rocks BB
• Calls for Ten to abandon 'Big Brother'
• Uproar over Big Brother footage
• Boys booted over sex claim
• The Ash/John incident: a complete rundown
• Updates: What happened after the incident
• Gretel attacks media outlets

The Big Brother forum was shut down because people wouldn't stop talking about the "Incident". Here's the official blurb from their website:

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A NEW species of dinosaur has been named in honour of J.K. Rowling and her Harry Potter books.

The 66 million-year-old dragon-like monster has been given the title Dracorex hogwartsia because it resembles the kind of fantastical creature encountered by the teenage wizard. The nearly complete skull of the previously unknown dinosaur was found by three friends during a fossil-collecting trip in Albuquerque in the US.

Paleontologist Robert Bakker said the beast, now on display at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, would not look out of place in a Potter book: "(It) carried an armour-plated head of almost magical configuration, covered with knobs and spikes, horns and crests. I was staring at the skull last summer and the name just popped into my head, hogwartsia."

The newly described horny-headed dinosaur Dracorex hogwartsia lived just a million years short of the extinction of all dinosaurs. But its flat, almost storybook-style dragon head has overturned everything paleontologists thought they knew about the dome-head dinos called pachycephalosaurs.

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