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Time for some more food related news items to chew upon:

• Best Oils for Frying. Here’s something you don’t see everyday: Me using a link that someone sends me in email based on an old post. But this link was sufficiently interesting to pass on, and I thank Sebastian Beaton of Two Kitchen Junkies for doing so. It concerns the best and healthiest oils for frying, listing their pros and cons. The site itself looks interesting: a father-daughter duo looking into cooking and cookware.
• Demonization of Gluten. My wife is gluten-free. She has to be for medical reasons; she has celiac. But there are many many others for whom this is the fad of the day, and they have gone on gluten free diets for no discernible benefit other than the placebo effect.  Freakonomics, a podcast I used to subscribe to but didn’t have the time to listen to, had a recent episode on this subject. By the way, it turns out there is also a Celiac Project Podcast.
• Food Waste. One of the reasons I could never run a restaurant is all the food waste. But households waste even more; the amount is staggering. Much is perfectly good, more would have been good had we not forgotten about it in the back of the refrigerator. Here’s an article that puts a number to just how much food Americans waste, including what type of food is most wasted where.
• Less Nutritious Food. When you think about climate change, what worries you? Rising sea levels. More intense weather. How about less nutritious food. It seems that the increase in carbon dioxide is making our food have less nutrients.  From the article: “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,” Loladze said. “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history―[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.”

P.S.: I also have a fascinating post on the history of Cinnabon that I thought about including, but decided to save it for an origins post, combining it with a post on the history of Powerpoint and a yet undiscovered origin post.

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Let’s move away from the Trump posts for a bit, to something else that might make us feel good, or make us sick. Food. Glorious Food. Hot Sausage and Mustard. I’d go on, but I’d walk into a copyright lawsuit…

• Getting Glazed. I have a friend of mine who posts this incredible porn on Facebook, uhh, I mean food porn of these incredible meals that he and his daughter prepare. One such meal was a maple-glazed salmon. So when I saw this recipe for a Maple-Dijon Glaze for Salmon, I just had to save it for future reference.
• Turning Yellow. Turmeric is an amazing substance. It can have incredible anti-inflammatory effects, and can bring significant relief for arthritis sufferers (by the way, so can cactus, especially tuna roja juice). So when I saw that the LA Times had a whole article devoted to Turmeric, again, I had to save it for future reference.
• Buttering You Up. When it comes to fats, the choice is wide and varied, and we often don’t pick the best. Olive oil is wonderful, but butter can add a great flavor to things. Did you ever wonder who first came up with the idea for butter? NPR did, and they recently posted a very interesting history of butter.
• UnGlutenAted. There are those who avoid gluten out as the fad-diet-of-the-week, and those who are gluten-free for other, more serious reasons. Here’s a fascinating article on the completion of a first phase 1b trial of Nexvax2, a biologic drug designed to protect celiac sufferers from the effects of exposure to gluten and the gastrointestinal symptoms that can result such as diarrhea, abdominal pain and bloating. The big idea behind this drug is to use a trio of three peptides as an immunotherapy that it hopes will encourage the T cells involved in the inflammatory reaction in celiac disease to become tolerant to gluten. After a first course to induce tolerance, the company hopes that it can be maintained by periodic re-injection with the vaccine.
• Allergic to Meat. The  other day, we listened to a fascinating episode of The Sporkful, a podcast not for foodies, but for eaters. The episode we listened to was about a woman who loved meat, but suddenly was deathly allergic to it. The culprit was a sudden allergy to a sugar that was found in all animal products, and what triggered that allergy was even more fascinating. Well worth listening to.
• Allergic to Modern Society. In a larger sense, however, we may increasingly be dealing with allergies and reactions to modern society. Spending large amounts of time indoors under artificial light and staring at computer screens has helped produce a “myopia epidemic” with as many as 90 per cent of people in some parts of the world needing glasses. Industrial food production has also turned primates’ taste for sugar — which evolved to persuade us to gorge on healthy fruit when it was ripe — into one of the main causes of the soaring rates of obesity in the Western world. And our sense of smell is under attack from air pollution, producing an array of different effects, including depression and anxiety.  In addition to what is discussed in the article, I’ll opine that many more problems (I believe) arise from the damage we’ve done to our internal biomes through germ-o-phobia and overuse of antibiotics, and that this eventually will be discovered to be responsible for many of our immunity-compromised diseases, food sensitivity, obesity, addiction, and yes, even the increase in autism spectrum disorder and similar issues (i.e., not vaccines).

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This week, a large number of articles related to food and gluten-free diets have come across my RSS and news feeds. These articles are of interest because my wife is celiac and gluten-free, and we know a number of friends and relatives that need to be gluten-free for similar reasons. We’ve often discussed the growing “gluten-free fad” (which has now become the butt of comics), and whether it is good for Celiacs — on the one hand, there may be more places where it is safe to eat; but on the other hand, if they view it as a fad and not a medical necessity, they may not be as clean in their handling and true Celiacs will get poisoned.

Let’s start with the grown of gluten-free. An article came out this week on Vox looking at the growth of the number of Americans who say they are gluten-free vs. the number that are actually Celiac. The article noted:

The number of Americans who say they are gluten-free has more than tripled from 2009 to 2014.

But the number of Americans who have celiac disease, or the inability to digest gluten, has stayed pretty much same.

This means more people are simply choosing not to eat gluten, even when there is no good scientific evidence to support cutting grains from their diets.

New research in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that the percentage of Americans practicing a gluten-free diet rose from 0.52 percent in 2009 to 1.69 percent in 2014. But the percentage of Americans with celiac disease actually declined slightly from 0.70 percent in 2009 to 0.58 percent in 2014 (although the study said this decline wasn’t statistically significant).

USA Today had a similar report, derived from the same research:

About 2.7 million Americans avoid gluten in their diet, but 1.76 million have celiac disease, according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week.

Data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys showed from 2009 to 2014, participants who reported having celiac didn’t exceed 0.77%. During the same period, participants who didn’t have the disease, but avoided gluten more than tripled.

A study released in July, said those without celiac who experience abdominal pain, bloating and fatigue after eating wheat and related products could have a weakened intestinal barrier, another reason they might go gluten-free.

Why could this be? Why are people who don’t have Celiac seemingly feeling better off gluten? Here are two more articles that might bring the pieces together. First, there is a report that birth by Ceasarian section appears to increase obesity risks, seemingly because such newborns are not exposed to bacteria in the vaginal tract. Next, there is a report that a common bacteria is showing promise for treating Celiac disease. Now, add into that mix the info in my previous post about soap — namely, that the FDA is requiring manufactures to pull common anti-bacterial agents out of soap — and you might have the answer.

Our Microbiome, and more specifically, how we are screwing it up.

Consider this: There has already been research showing how the intestinal microbiome can influence our mood and our tendancy to obesity (or our ability to lose weight). We’ve also seen the growing use of antibiotics everywhere — not just as prescribed medicine, but in soaps and animal feed. We’ve seen more and more people trying to correct things with pro-biotics. I think it is conceivable that we’ve mucked up our guts, and created — through damage of the microbiome — guts that do better on a no gluten or low gluten diet.  This would explain why more and more Americans are going gluten-free and feeling better while doing so, while those diagnosed with an actual disease haven’t increased.

How is society reacting to the increased desire for gluten free? Not always in the right way — no big surprise there.

• Doing it right is Kent State College, which has opened an entire gluten-free dining hall. The cafe was certified by the Gluten-Free Food Services Certification Program, which is a nationally-recognized food safety program. They did this to serve the students, more and more of whom are indicating a gluten-intolerance.
• Doing it wrong is the White Moose Cafe, which is now demanding a doctor’s note from gluten free diners. As my family said when I mentioned this: a doctor’s note isn’t required when you order sugar-free because you are diabetic. A rabbi’s note isn’t require to order Kosher food. So why a doctor’s note here?

As I said: a collection of GF related articles. Something to certainly chew on (unless you’re sensitive to the subject).

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While I’m on vacation, I’m attempting to clear out the backlogs of links accumulated over the past few weeks of work-crazy. This first post is a collection of articles related to gluten-free and celiac, and it focuses on the problems that the gluten-free diet faddists have created for the truly Celiac and those with true non-celiac gluten sensitivity.

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In “The Celiac’s (Gluten-Free) Lament” (if you’re caught by the WSJ paywall, do this search and click on the WSJ link), Thomas Swift relates his wife (Hania)’s relationship with gluten-free food since her diagnosis in 2002. He talks about how the food landscape has changed:

But gradually we discovered gluten-free versions of almost everything—except pierogies and Chinese food. Some substitutes were better than others; we got hooked on corn penne and brown rice fusilli. A friend, having discovered the latter, served them to her healthy teenage sons, who never suspected they weren’t devouring Italian wheat. Tasty gluten-free cookies and crackers also appeared, first in health-food stores, then on supermarket shelves, while flourless chocolate cakes became de rigueur on dessert menus. Breads popped up, usually frozen and sliced.

He also makes an important point about how the faddists have made life more dangerous for those with medical needs for eating gluten free:

Not long ago, we visited a restaurant known for its gluten-free fried chicken. Our waiter, on hearing of Hania’s disease, explained that, while technically gluten-free, the chicken was fried in the same oil as all the other chickens. That meant it was contaminated. This would be fine for most of the restaurant’s diners—the fashionably gluten-free—but not for celiacs. Without a knowledgeable waiter, we wouldn’t have known.

The gluten-free fad has corroded the meaning of the phrase, creating a playground for dabblers and a minefield for the minority of strict doctrinarians. Not only has the label become spurious, but many food-service workers have understandably grown lax, seeing the demands for gluten-free food as a passing fancy and not the requirements of a serious medical condition.

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In “I Was Gluten-Free Before It Was Cool“, Laura Bennett expresses some similar points. Diagnosed with celiac about the same time as my wife (1990s), she talks about how eating gluten free has moved from a niche diet to a fad to a punchline:

In two decades since I first heard the word gluten, it’s evolved from the obscure scourge of the small population of people with celiac disease into a fad-diet obsession for carb-phobics. Along the way, it’s become a nutritional bogeyman, a shorthand for a kind of phony asceticism, a pop-cultural joke. It started with a few scattered articles about “gluten sensitivity” and some scientific papers speculating about whether American wheat had become less digestible. Then there was the surest sign of mass-cultural anointment: Gluten coverage migrated from the health and science pages to the style section. With growing awareness of gluten came a surge in self-diagnosed allergies to it. South Park skewered the alarmism of the anti-gluten set by devoting an entire 2014 episode to the imaginary plague of Gluten Free Ebola. A Tumblr called Gluten Free Museum went viral by Photoshopping out the wheat products from famous works of art. A real dating website launched called glutenfreesingles.com.

We are now in a golden age of glutenlessness. Gluten-free food sales grew by more than 60 percent from 2012 to 2014, and by 2019 the number is projected to increase by 140 percent. A 2013 study claimed that only 2 percent of shoppers who buy gluten-free goods do so because they have been diagnosed with celiac disease, while 59 percent buy them because they think gluten is unhealthy. That’s 59 percent of gluten-free shoppers who are willingly subjecting themselves to rock-hard bagels and cookies that—in the absence of the springiness that characterizes normal dough—crumble to nothingness when touched by a breeze.

She talks about those who have to eat GF have formed a community, bound together by the days of styrofoam bread. The early adopters have to clearly distinguish themselves from the faddists, as she writes:

I imagine that being an ur-gluten-intolerant is a bit like loving a band no one has heard of and then watching it climb the Billboard Hot 100: the mix of puzzlement (“how did everyone find out about it?”) and possessiveness (“they don’t even really get it”), the slight internal reshuffling required to disentangle it from your self-image, the chip that materializes on your shoulder whenever you hear its name. For most of my life, though, being allergic to gluten had been a quirk that was at once specific to me and, unlike most quirks, safely meaningless—in no way a symptom of my character or my tastes or my brain. Now, when I turn down a beer at a party, I try to arrange my face in a way that says “I know, right.” When I ask a waiter if there’s gluten-free pasta in the kitchen, I offer a sympathetic little grimace.

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One problem, of course, is that eating gluten free isn’t necessarily more healthy. You’re just replacing the wheat with other starch, and adding more fats and sugars to make up for it. This article from the Daily Mail highlights this: “Doughnuts and pizzas on the NHS: £116million of food for special diets including junk food was handed out in prescriptions in the past year” . Evidently in the UK, the health service covers the food for special diets (unlike the Affordable Care Act). According to the article:

The NHS is handing out tens of thousands of prescriptions every year for custard creams, doughnuts and pizzas. Other calorie-rich treats issued to patients on special diets include Italian-style biscotti, cake bars and muffin mixes. The Health Service spent almost £116million last year on gluten-free products and other foods – twice as much as a decade ago.

This reflects the growth of the awareness of medically-necessary GF diets, but the growth of the GF junk food market. If you walk through a supermarked, you’ll see (if they have GF at all) loads of GF cakes, muffins, and cookies — but little awareness of whether the food in their prepared meal sections are gluten free. The problem for GF eaters is not the junk food, but finding safe healthy food that hasn’t had a bit of soy sauce for seasoning, or wasn’t cross contaminated.

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The last article was posted by a Facebook friend, and it questions the existence of non-celiac gluten sensitivity:

For a follow-up paper, 37 self-identified gluten-sensitive patients were tested. According to Real Clear Science’s Newton Blog, here’s how the experiment went:

Subjects would be provided with every single meal for the duration of the trial. Any and all potential dietary triggers for gastrointestinal symptoms would be removed, including lactose (from milk products), certain preservatives like benzoates, propionate, sulfites, and nitrites, and fermentable, poorly absorbed short-chain carbohydrates, also known as FODMAPs. And last, but not least, nine days worth of urine and fecal matter would be collected. With this new study, Gibson wasn’t messing around.

The subjects cycled through high-gluten, low-gluten, and no-gluten (placebo) diets, without knowing which diet plan they were on at any given time. In the end, all of the treatment diets — even the placebo diet — caused pain, bloating, nausea, and gas to a similar degree. It didn’t matter if the diet contained gluten. (Read more about the study.)

But if only a tiny number of patients who report NCGS have a gluten-related condition, what’s going on with everybody else who complains of digestive woes?

They probably fall into several groups. Some may be in the early stages of celiac disease and the disease hasn’t yet produced any of its telltale signs, Guandalini said. Others are likely allergic to wheat.

Many may be sensitive to FODMAPs, or fermentable oligo-, di-, and monosaccharides and polyols, which are certain types of carbohydrates including wheat, lentils, and mushrooms that can draw water into the intestine and potentially ferment, causing digestive problems for some people.

This is what the second influential study on gluten sensitivity found. The 2013 study suggested that intolerance to the carbohydrates in wheat might account for what many believe is a bad reaction to gluten.

The Australian research team behind the study had previously shown that patients who self-identified as having NCGS did better on a gluten-free diet even when they didn’t know if they were eating gluten or not. When they launched a second study, they expected to confirm these results.

But they didn’t. This time around, the researchers first reduced FODMAPs from the participants’ diets. Then they reintroduced gluten or a placebo. There was absolutely no difference in participants’ reactions.

The Australian team concluded that most patients who thought they couldn’t tolerate gluten were in reality sensitive to FODMAPs. Once they had cut consumption of these carbohydrates below a certain threshold, gluten posed no problem for them.

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So where does this leave us? I think it makes it clear that diagnosing food sensitivities is difficult, misleading and tricky. It also makes clear that if someone says they cannot eat a particular food, play it safe and keep the dish clean. It might not make a difference to a large number of faddists, but if it significantly hurts one person, is it worth it?

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It’s been stewing on the stove for two weeks because I’ve been so busy. Let’s hope it is still tasty and flavor-right. Here’s your news chum stew for the last two weeks:

• Going For a Ride in my Car-Car. As you probably know, I’m in a vanpool. So when I saw a headline that read “Long commutes make you fat, tired, and miserable“, I was curious. The article notes that spending more than two hours of your day commuting — as 8.3 percent of American workers now do — will probably make you miserable. But there’s research that suggests doing it with other people will make it far less unbearable. As for the “fat”, it isn’t the commute that does it. Rather, it was the fact that commuters were less likely to get exercise. When you get home after a long commute, you’re too beat to exercise.  Now, add to the fact that the touted “driverless” cars may mean we will be willing to commute longer — alone — and… well… you do the math.
• Sorting it Out. Penn and Teller once did an episode of Bullshit noting that people really want to recycle, even if it is meaningless separation. It turns out that our not sorting — that is, putting all recyclables into a single blue bin, is leading to recycling stalling in America. The cost to separate is so high, and the value-return for recyclables is so low, that it is cheaper to make new. What a waste… but then again, we often forget we need to waste a lot of energy to recycle. There is a better solution. Use less in the first place.
• Out, Out, Damn USB. Have you ever tried to get Windows to eject a USB device, but it keeps refusing. Here’s a list of what to do when Windows is recalcitrant.
• Graphic Subtleties. You may not have noticed it, but Facebook is sporting a new logo. Look closely. Its subtle.
• Celiac Disease Riddles. Here’s an interesting article about celiac disease, where they may have found the underlying culprit. It turns out that it is an immune response, and the heredity pattern with celiac disease is very similar to the pattern with other autoimmune diseases.
• Food and Fun. Three interesting food related articles. The first explores how to cook ribs in the pressure cooker. The second talks about high fat foods that might be healthy for you.   The last looks at outstanding mom and pop restaurants in the San Fernando Valley.
• Drought Landscaping. If you live in California, you’ve probably seen a major visual effect of the drought: people replacing their lawns with either plastic grass or gravel. We know plastic grass is bad — you can’t smoke it it is isn’t porous, and prevents water from being absorbed into the water table. But it turns out gravel is equally bad. What’s worse is one company, Turf Terminators, has made a business taking rebates and making yards ugly. If we go to xeriscaping, I’d like something prettier than gravel, except perhaps in selected paths.
• Bubble Wrap No More. Do you enjoy popping bubble wrap? Soon you might not be able to do so. The company behind Bubble Wrap, sealed air, is exploring a new wrap that is shipped flat and inflated on site. There’s a major advantage to this: shipping costs depend on size of the package, and inflated bubble wrap rolls are too expensive to ship distances.
• iPod Solutions. Why, oh why, can’t Apple make an iPod with an SD slot. 200GB storage is getting affordable.
• Underwriters Lab for Cybersecurity. Mudge has left Google to try to create an Underwriters Laboratory for Cybsersecurity. The problem is: we already have one.  What’s worse is that most people don’t know about it.

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Here are a few posts from the last few weeks related to what you eat, and its effects. This is timely, as the CDF Food Fair and Convention is this weekend.

• Countering the GF Craze. While I was on vacation, there was a Vox article that implied that everyone who is GF is scientifically impared. I called them on that, and the author indicated there would be a better replacement article. Here it is. I pretty much agree with it: A gluten-free diet is really only appropriate for those with Celiac disease or a demonstrated wheat allergy.
• The Next Progenitorivox. Find a problem, and the pharmaceutical companies will try to find a solution that they can put you on… for life. It’s no different for Celiac, and they are working on a “solution” to Gluten Sensitivity. Just take this little paisley pill twice a day for 60 years.
• The Gut Controls Us. Here’s an article that relates the microbiome in the gut to brain diseases. In particular, inflammation of the digestive system could have a role in Parkinson’s disease and ALS. You’ll see this theme in the next link as well: inflammation is a major culprit in loads of problems. Of course, what can a sensitivity to any food create?
• More From The Gut. Scientists don’t know what causes rheumatoid arthritis, but many suspect that the microbiome—the bacteria that live in our gastrointestinal tracts—may be to blame. Here’s an article that explores the connection between RA and the microbiome. Yet again, diseases that affect the gut — or the biome in the gut — may lead to…

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The “clearin’ of the links” post seems to be increasingly moving from Friday to Saturday, so let’s just go with it. There is some slight connection between these stories, but not enough to make a full themed article:

• Gluten Free Waste. My wife is gluten-free, for a reason. She’s dealing with Celiac, and there’s a medical basis. But for many people, going GF is the latest food fad. A recent Time article posits that we are wasting billions of dollars on GF food unnecessarily. They cite a new survey from market research firm the NPD Group that found America is cutting gluten out of its diet in a big way, with just under one-third of 1,000 respondents agreeing with the statement: “I’m trying to cut back/avoid Gluten in my diet.” Time notes that is the highest level since the company added gluten consumption to the surveys it does about Americans’ eating habits in 2009. TIME labeled the gluten-free movement #2 on its top 10 list of food trends for 2012. Time’s contention is that many of those paying a premium to avoid gluten are doing so without any legitimate medical reason. From what I’ve seen of fad diets, I’d tend to agree. As always, we’re heading towards a GF bubble here.
• Foot Pain. Another article that hits close to home deals with Plantar Fasciitis. This is something I dealt with recently — it impacted my ability to exercise tremendously, and it took me almost a year to get rid of it. They recommend shoe fixes, but I haven’t seen that my fancy insoles made a big difference. More important, to me, was a “boot” I wore at night that prevented the Plantar from relaxing, so it didn’t get re-inflamed when I stood up in the morning. That, combined with anti-inflammatory medicine, seemed to make the biggest difference.
• Remember Market Basket. Curbed LA had an article this week about a sad Pavillions at Wilshire and Stoner being closed, and talking about redevelopment that might occur at the even sadder (but open) Santa Monica and Barrington Vons. This caught my eye because of the location. You see, many many years ago (back in the 1970s and 1980s) the Wilshire and Stoner location housed the Market Basket where we did most of our shopping. My parent’s accounting office was in the Barrington Plaza next door, and I was always picking up stuff there for them (either there or Westward Ho on San Vicente). Wilshire and Stoner was also the location of the Crocker Bank where I got my first credit card (which I still have). In the 1990s, they “redeveloped” the parcel putting in an office building, but with a covenant that they retain a market there for the Seniors living in the Barrington Plaza. They put in a fancy Ralphs… which died. Then came the Pavillions, which died. Meanwhile, the really old Marina style Vons on Santa Monica stays busy.
• There’s Profit in Everything. We often think about the big parts of business, not the little parts. For example, when we talk GF bread, we think about the bread itself not the bag… or how they close the bag. Well, Businessweek did that thinking. They have a really interesting article on a big battle between the clip-on bag closer and the twist-tie closer manufacturers to gain market share. As I said, big business… and not something you commonly think about.

Music: The Legendary Josh White (Josh White): “Trouble in Mind”

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Well, it’s Friday at lunch, and you know what that means–it is time to clear out the bookmarked links that didn’t quite form into themes (although, as I type in the times, there does seem to be a general transportation/travel theme). So here we go… (and as a reminder, I’m still looking for thoughts regarding use of iTunes 11 with the iPod Classic):

• Three-Cylinder Power. This article from the LA auto show caught my eye. Evidently, Ford has a new 3-cyl. Fiesta, and the engine is designed in such a way as to give more power than a conventional 4-cyl. engine. The trick is to turbocharge the engine, combined with patented engine mounts and with weights installed outside the engine, on the pulley and flywheel to address the inherent unbalance of 3 cyl. If this approach works, I’m guessing we’ll see some revolutionary strides in small car efficiency.
• Subway Problems. We all know how Super-Storm Sandy knocked out the NYC Subway system. What you probably don’t know is the work involved in getting it running again. Here’s an interesting article on why it is going to take a long time to restore the R train tunnel between Brooklyn and Manhattan. One of the longest tunnels, it saw all of its electrical equipment coated in salt water. Not good.
• Busing It. Megabus is returning to California, with low-price tickets between Vegas, Sacramento, San Francisco, and Oakland to Union Station. This is of particular interest to me, as it provides an easy way for my daughter to get from Berkeley to Los Angeles (and then Red Line or Metro-Link to the valley). However, as the service is run by Coach USA, I’m unsure it will last (given Coach USA’s problems — they used to run the Flyaway). Still, I hope it succeeds.
• The Cost of Hotels. LA Observed has an interesting discussion on why hotels cost so much, working off an article from Slate. There are a number of basic reasons: travellers tend not to bargain (especially when on expense accounts), and hotels don’t need to discount all rooms (they can discount the unsold few at the last minute). [By the way, this may be similar to the demand pricing Megabus uses to discount tickets -- a few tickets purchased really early may be cheap, and tickets purchased at the very last minute may be cheap.] The Slate article itself talks about the excessive taxes, location costs, and high level of services, but concludes “Hotel customers tolerate these marked-up amenities because they generally aren’t very interested in driving a hard bargain. The business traveler is likely to feel that he “needs” appropriately located accommodations and isn’t going to be interested in exhaustive research about the costs and benefits of staying someplace cheaper and more remote. What’s more, he’s generally not paying out of pocket. A responsible employee will of course try to be reasonably frugal, but even so frugality is benchmarked to local costs. “
• Costs of Secession. We’ve all be reading about the secession petitions, and even humorists have addressed the subject. But here’s a more interesting question: Suppose you have a DOD Security Clearance and sign a secession petition. Does that affect your security clearance? This article explores the question. When you think about it, it is a real issue: you have an individual who has just publically advocated working against the US government. Is that adverse information, and does it bring into question their loyalty to the US. As Ben Franklin once said, “Oh sure, harmless. I know how these things happen. You go to a couple of harmless parties, sign a harmless petition, and forget all about it. Ten years later, you get hauled up before a committee. No, thank you, I’m not going to spend the rest of my life writing in Europe.”
• Gluten-Free Wheat? An intriguing article in the LA Times about some scientists who believe it is possible to engineer a wheat variety that goes not contain gluten. It might be possible, but I’m not sure I’d trust it… for a number of reasons. First, I would be far too afraid the processing would contaminate it with other wheat; secondly, I’m still unsure about engineered food.
• Finishing With the Hat. And lastly, an interesting story about a woman who lost her hat while traveling. It was a hat her mother wore during her last days of chemo. How is she solving the problem… she’s putting the request on social networks.

P.S.: Received my first challenge coin today. Cool.

Music: Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me (Martin Short): “Glass Half Full”

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