Disgusting Things You'll Be Eating Less Of

Over the past decade or so, more and more attention has been given to ammoniated beef. If you're not yet aware, ammoniated beef is beef trimmings which are treated with ammonia hydroxide in an effort to kill bacteria, and then sold to consumers as hamburger filler when it would otherwise be placed into pet food. The USDA termed it as "pink slime" in 2002, and since then, word has slowly trickled out to the general public in various forms, who in turn became increasingly disgusted (although no less fat) as they were informed by such chefs as Jamie Oliver and Anthony Bourdain, and the 2008 documentary Food Inc., exactly what was going into that fast-food burger.

We should single out Oliver and his short-lived ABC show Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution. This is how he taught this particular lesson:



Well, not anymore, at least if you eat at McDonald's, Burger King or Taco Bell. Those three restaurants have announced that they will no longer be using ammoniated beef. Yes, you were eating this stuff at those places. You won't be anymore.

That still, however, leaves the National School Lunch Program, which you'd have thought, hoped, would be ahead of the fast-food places on this. In fact, at least one former USDA employee blames Oliver for the fact that this is even an issue. While the fast-food chains didn't mention Oliver in their statements explaining their decision, Dr. Richard Raymond, the USDA's former Under Secretary for Food Safety, rebuts:

"This move, although not exactly described as such by the three fast food chains, was because of the 'ick factor' as revealed by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver... I guess after the two prior attacks, the Oliver video must have been over the top, and it is scary that an activist can potentially take away one of our interventions that makes our food safer. That is not how food safety policy should be determined... If consumers and restaurants are up in arms about the use of ammonia and can potentially drive a company out of business by their actions, I can only wonder what they are going to do when they look at the other chemicals in use to try and protect us from foodborne illnesses, chemicals like liquid chlorine and lactic acid just to name a couple... There are just certain unpleasant realities of how meat is processed in this country. Those of us with farm backgrounds maybe can accept them a little more readily than someone who has led a life sheltered from these realities."

Yeah, Raymond. What ARE we going to do when you tell us about the liquid chlorine that goes into the beef alongside the ammonia. I eat steak- beef that presumably hasn't been through that process- and I'm fine. For God's sake, I eat sushi- raw, uncooked fish- and I'm still here. I've got an immune system. What do I keep it around for?

Also, I may live in what amounts to suburbia, but it's still Wisconsin, America's Dairyland, and you've got farms ringing this town on all sides. I've taken my fair share of field trips to farms. I've watched my share of videos of slaughterings and the aftermath thereof, the entire process from which the animal goes from living being to corpse to separated animal parts to food product. I'm a big boy. I can take it.

I'm not sure I could take watching ammonia and chlorine go into my food, though.

Words You'll Never Use Even Once

At some point in your life, you probably were told that some words had no rhymes. This isn't really in dispute. For example, orange and purple. You were probably also told that only a few words end in 'gry'- angry and hungry. They don't rhyme, so they can't have rhymes, right?

Well, first off, there are more than a few words that end in gry. They're just not commonly used. Several of the words counted in the link cheat by being two words that end with a hyphenated -angry or -hungry, but a lot more count legitimately, including 'gry' itself, which means either a small measurement, or anything of little value. Other words, such as scavengry, meagry, and managry, take the same approach angry and hungry do: use 'gry' as a suffix to say that someone or something is acting like the base word: anger, hunger, scavenger, meager, manager. Angry and hungry are just the only words that avoided falling into the realm of the archaic.

One of those words, 'rungry', rhymes with hungry, although that list appears to be the only place 'rungry' even counts as a word and not a part of someone's Scooby Doo imitation. Angry still has no rhyme, though.

As for orange and purple, they both have rhymes too. Orange has 'sporange', a form of sporangium, which is where spores get formed. Purple has two. There's curple (which is, to put it bluntly, a horse's ass), as well as hirple (walking with a limp).

A lot of other common words with obscure rhymes can be found at this Wikipedia page. Silver, for instance, rhymes with chilver, a female lamb. Circle rhymes with hurkle, a word meaning to pull in all your limbs, as if to cower. Pint rhymes with rynt, a word milkmaids use to order a cow to move after they're done milking them. Month goes into the realm of the mathematical to find its rhyme with 'oneth', as in something like 'hundred-and-oneth', which is obscure because you'd just say 'hundred-and-first' instead. Music has, among a couple others, ageusic, which means someone who doesn't have a sense of taste. Plankton rhymes with Yankton, a branch of the Sioux tribe.

I'd go on, but even to me this is starting to become very gry.

Wisconsin Recall Update

While there's no official word on the signature-gathering effort against Scott Walker (keyword: official), a concurrent effort against state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald has, according to organizers, gathered the necessary signatures. This comes on the heels of Fitzgerald claiming that the organizers were given a few too many days, and that the true deadline for signatures against him was today at 5 PM. The organizers have announced their initial victory in relation to his deadline.

Walker's effort, of course, ends in the next few days. The verification process, meanwhile, is scheduled to last 60 days, but is expected to last beyond that. Any final recall elections are currently expected to take place around June, and the Government Accountability Board is hoping to ensure that all recall elections happen on the same day.

Who The Hell Is Robert Sobukwe?

Tiny entry's all we're going to really be able to guarantee will get posted today. My dad fell off a ladder yesterday, broke two ribs and an ankle, and so the rest of the family's going to have to play nurse for a little while.

That established, I was going to link you to a Journeyman Pictures video which notes the 100th anniversary this year of the Pan-Africanist Congress in 1912. The video, 23 minutes long, commemorates Robert Sobukwe of South Africa, who in 1960 kicked off a nonviolent movement against the apartheid system's "pass laws", a key feature of apartheid that you'd probably better know as a "papers, please" law. Nonwhites had restricted movement, and had to carry around pass books when not in their designated home areas; failure to have the pass book on hand could mean arrest.

However, YouTube doesn't want to let me embed the video. So we'll link it from the original source instead, which isn't an embed either but it's the original source: the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory. The director is Kevin Harris.

Rapid-Fire Book Club: Ready, Aim Edition

I seem to have forgotten a book that I need to include in the Rapid-Fire Book Club, gained from, as so many others were, Downtown Books in Milwaukee.

Although Downtown Books is no longer the massive two-story spend-hours-browsing place I loved going into. They've recently moved into a much more modestly-sized location around the corner, which when I went in they were still in the process of stocking. They said it was because the old location was so big they were losing track of their customers and couldn't help them out as efficiently as a smaller store would let them do, and I respect that. It was still a hell of a shock to see, though, and given that the size was my favorite part, a bit of a disappointment.

It's still better than Milwaukee's other major used bookstore has made out, though. That's Renaissance Books, which when I mention Downtown Books is the place that keeps getting brought up by locals. I was in there once a year or two ago and I did not stay long. It is hands-down the messiest bookstore I've ever seen and ever hope to see. Maybe half the books were actually on shelves. The other half were either in stacks on the floor or, more commonly, giant piles on the floor. Piles up to my shoulders. I couldn't find a damn thing in there, and yet I almost wanted to buy something anyway if only to save the poor defenseless books from the bad, bad man that did this to them.

After my stop at Downtown Books, I swung by Renaissance Books a second time. I did not go in. I was not permitted to go in. Why? Because the police had declared the building unfit for human habitation. A look inside the front window revealed the piles of books, if anything, in even higher piles than the first time. It was almost painful to see. I know nothing about the physical state of the building itself, but I could only agree with the cops as I walked away.

But as it stands, I have one book to log, and in an unusual development for the Rapid-Fire Book Club, I've actually read this one before logging it. (Standard procedure is to log it as soon as it's in my possession. The point is mainly to just log the books I buy.)

The book is Some Girls: My Life In A Harem by Jillian Lauren. In the early 1990's, Lauren, who was at the time, for lack of a better term working as a high-class call girl, was invited to Brunei for two weeks to be eye candy at parties thrown by Prince Jefri Bolkiah, part of the Sultanate of Brunei. It turned out she'd stay on for a lot longer than that; as the book's title implies, she'd be part of the prince's harem-- though she, like the vast majority of the girls in the harem, would have to figure out on their own that they were in fact in one. She would, it turns out, have a couple fleeting encounters with the sultan himself.

Are you at all familiar with the phrase 'Sultan of Brunei'? Then you know how much money is going to be thrown around over the course of the book.

The events of the book took place prior to 1997, when former Miss USA Shannon Marketic unsuccessfully attempted to sue the Sultan for being held against her will in the process (it was unsuccessful due to the fact that the Sultan had diplomatic immunity), and it was a tad more relaxed when Lauren was there. Not by much, though, and this was by design.

In 2004, there was a show on FOX that shot 25 episodes but was cancelled in seven, called Forever Eden. The way they billed the show was that a number of single people would stay at the show's luxury resort, hook up, and engage in whatever dramas are presented by the show. Participants would be regularly kicked out, to be replaced by new faces. The longer you managed to remain on the show, the more you would earn, and theoretically, you could stay, well, forever, or at least as long as the show aired.

The harem, at least at the time of Lauren's presence, worked much the same way. The underlying thread behind everything was that Prince Jefri could keep four wives according to local law, but had only three at the time. Which meant he had room for one more. Fresh-faced, beautiful young women from all around the globe would be brought to Brunei, eventually realize what was going on, and hopefully, they'd be attracted enough to him- or, failing that, the money- to want to make a play for him, and compete against each other for his affections. Failing that, the longer you stay, the more money and gifts you rack up, and the more you endear yourself to Jefri, the faster you rack them up. Manage to get him to ask for your hand in marriage- or get impregnated by him- and you win. You get to spend forever in Eden as a royal princess, or at least as close as Brunei comes to that. In the process, you have to stay ahead of the other women who are vying for the same thing, and may be trying to get Jefri to send you home. Of course, someone going home doesn't necessarily get the others any closer to the grand prize. It just means someone new will be showing up, someone who may be a bigger threat than the someone that's gone home.

To operate such a thing these days, to say the least, requires a delicate hand, even if you're royalty. A properly-functioning harem requires that all the women a man keeps, however many that is (and Lauren notes somewhere in the range of 40 at a time), are kept, if not joyously happy, at least content enough to be willing to continue to participate at his pleasure. The whole point of a harem is that all the women want, ultimately, to please the man running the harem. If the women aren't happy, they're not going to want to make the man happy either. And with a harem full of women from countries that are not your own, the stakes increase higher, especially in modern times and women from more socially progressive nations. It only takes one woman from some other nation to be unhappy enough, to want to make an international incident out of things- say, Shannon Marketic- for the whole operation to fall apart, which over the following few years is exactly what happened. We're not endorsing harems here by any stretch of the imagination. That's just the operative logic behind them.

Obviously, Lauren didn't get Jefri's hand. She did get something else, though. In the 2010 Press Freedom Index, compiled by Reporters Without Borders, Brunei ranks 142nd out of 178 nations. And that's what Lauren got.

She got her book banned in Brunei.

Random News Generator- Haiti

We were updating Haiti about a month ago, noting that maybe half the rubble from the earthquake of two years ago has been cleared, basic living conditions remain difficult to obtain, aid has about dried up with recovery efforts slowing accordingly, and that many Haitians are opting not to wait around and to try and rebuild their lives anywhere else that will have them.

As Haiti comes up on the RNG, two days prior to the second anniversary of the quake, that's all still true.

In the meantime, another group in the country, Partners in Health, believes they've located the origin of the cholera epidemic that struck the country a few months later and is only now showing signs of subsiding; their report in the American Journal of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine is here (though it's a pay-per-view). They've traced the origin to the Meye River, where the water was contaminated by raw sewage from a group of Nepali peacekeepers from the UN. The researchers think an unnamed 28-year-old man known in the village as the "moun fou"- crazy person- was the first victim; he had mental problems that had gone untreated. Those mental problems led him to eschew the clean water his family had access to in order to drink from the Latem River, which is fed into by the Meye. After he died, the people who handled his body became sick themselves, and the epidemic took off from there.

Despite this, the researchers note that the river is still used by many families, and that if it wasn't him, it would have been someone else.

Meanwhile, any promises of actually rebuilding anything, for now, ring hollow in the ears of the locals, half a million of whom still live in camps and many more of whom can't even say that. The various plans to move people into real housing have been haphazard, half-assed, leaderless, uncoordinated, bogged down in political bickering, overambitious, underfunded, or a combination of several of those things. What meager arrangements and shantytowns that have resulted are increasingly regarded by the locals as the homes that they're just going to be ending up with.

The presidential palace sits pretty much like it did when it fell in during the quake. It's rather fitting that political bickering be part of the problem. The bickering started after a contentious election brought in Michel Martelly as president; after he won election in April 2011, the musician formerly known as "Sweet Micky" overstepped authority to a degree that turned the legislature against him. They've been acting to obstruct his progress since then, and questions have been raised about Martelly's citizenship. Haiti doesn't recognize dual citizenship, and opponents charge Martelly with being an American, which would disqualify him from office.

UNICEF is still in Haiti; here's a donation link if you're inclined to keep things moving, though be advised that you may not even be able to help that way; about half the donation money hasn't even been distributed yet, much of the governmental money was never given in the first place, and the locals are beginning to question whether the rest of us are actually serious or if the donations were just to make us feel better about ourselves.

Occupy The Spin Room

Last night, there was a Republican debate in Concord, New Hampshire. It went a lot like all the others: Mitt Romney remained the frontrunner while the others tore each other apart. What specifically happened is not our focus, although highlights included Rick Perry expressing a desire to send troops back into Iraq, and Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul getting into it over service in Vietnam. (Both Gingrich and Paul are correct in their stories, though Paul left out one little bit of info- Gingrich had a paternal exemption, and Paul did not have it available to him, plus Gingrich already had his father serving at the time- but Paul absolutely came out the better of the exchange.)

No, our focus is on what happened afterwards. As you probably know, after every debate the media proceeds to a 'spin room', where staffers of the candidates and perhaps the candidates themselves tell the media why they won the debate. (Because nobody's ever going to claim that they lost.) The media goes there, listens to the spin, and then files their stories in the most blatant, brazen example of bad journalism there is.

So the media, so used to the trappings of the spin room, was miffed when their passage into the room was blocked and delayed by a "security issue", which turned out to be the Occupiers, who delayed the media enough to cause them to miss being able to talk to Rick Santorum before he had to be off to South Carolina.

This isn't really about the Occupiers (although rock on, Occupiers). This is about the spin room. Jon Stewart, on the night in 2004 he essentially got Crossfire cancelled, made note of this. Here's the transcript of that:

JON STEWART: But let me ask you guys, again, a question, because we talked a little bit about, you're actually doing honest debate and all that. But, after the debates, where do you guys head to right afterwards?
TUCKER CARLSON: The men's room.
STEWART: Right after that?
PAUL BEGALA: Home.
STEWART: Spin alley.
BEGALA: Home.
STEWART: No, spin alley.
BEGALA: What are you talking about? You mean at these debates?
STEWART: Yes. You go to spin alley, the place called spin alley. Now, don't you think that, for people watching at home, that's kind of a drag, that you're literally walking to a place called deception lane? (LAUGHTER) Like, it's spin alley. It's -- don't you see, that's the issue I'm trying to talk to you guys...
BEGALA: No, I actually believe -- I have a lot of friends who work for President Bush. I went to college with some of them.
CARLSON: Neither of us was ever in the spin room, actually.
BEGALA: No, I did -- I went to do the Larry King show. They actually believe what they're saying. They want to persuade you. That's what they're trying to do by spinning. But I don't doubt for a minute these people who work for President Bush, who I disagree with on everything, they believe that stuff, Jon. This is not a lie or a deception at all. They believe in him, just like I believe in my guy.
(CROSSTALK)
STEWART: I think they believe President Bush would do a better job. And I believe the Kerry guys believe President Kerry would do a better job. But what I believe is, they're not making honest arguments. So what they're doing is, in their mind, the ends justify the means.

And this is why I cheer the Occupiers here. Whether or not it was their goal to do so, they blocked off the spin room, if only for a little while. The mere existence of the spin room is bad journalism. Here you've just sat through a whole Presidential debate, the thing you're here to cover. You at that moment have all you need to start filing your report. Why in the world would you want this report colored by going into a room that announces, up front, 'This room is full of people who are at best biased and at worst attempting to deceive you', and then incorporating what those people say into the report, very possibly without even fact-checking or disputing what they say? What good comes of that?

And why does it take a protest movement to even delay them from going there again?