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As I wrote nearly one month ago, the Medicare prescription drug benefit (read: pharmaceutical company give-away) recently enacted by Congress is DBIEA (Dead Before It Even Arrives).

The Cheney^H^H^H^H^H^HBush Administration no longer mentions the Medicare drug benefit in campaign speeches. It seems that senior citizens generally have a very dim view of the Legislation, and they remember quite well who helped to ramrod it through Congress.

As I revealed in a previous post, in the past I’ve been unfortunate enough to find glass in my food.

Yesterday, I found glass in my food again.

UPDATED: 04 Jun 04It was a typical (of late) Madison morning, with steady rain and a temperature approaching the south side of fifty degrees.

I rolled out of bed, took a shower, got the dog ready, put on my rain gear, and headed out for a little strip mall a mile or so away from home. I was heading for the little strip mall because it has a branch of the local library (I wanted to return some items I had checked out) and it contains our favorite bakery, La Brioche. Dalla and I walked through the rain, got to the mall, deposited items in the library’s after-hours deposit box, and headed to the bakery.

At the bakery, I purchased two cut-out cookies (sugar cookies cut in shapes and covered with an oh-so-delicious frosting) and two day-old morning buns (cinnamon rolls, but without the noxious white frosting).

Another walk through the rain back home, and breakfast could begin.

After some fruit and cereal, I had coffee (with chicory, of course) and a morning bun. About two thirds of the way through the morning bun, my back teeth crunched down on something hard that felt like it shattered in my mouth. Of course, I wasn’t about to swallow anything that was:

1. The consistency of sand or stone
2. Freshly shattered, and probably sharp

So, when I finally removed the freshly chewed bun from my mouth, I found several bits of glass in amongst the bun’s leavings. That was very disappointing.

So, once again I’ve found glass in my food. Perhaps this is the universe striking back at me for ruining a particularly irreplacable piece of glassware in a previous life. Perhaps this is just a string of bad luck. Regardless, if I went the rest of my life and didn’t find another piece of glass in food I was eating, I could die happy.

Update: La Brioche was completely not at fault for the above. As it turns out, the glass came from our butter dish, and not the Morning Bun. A small chip came out of the butter dish and must have stuck to the butter. When I applied the butter to the Bun, the glass transferred to the food.

I’m glad I discovered that the glass came from the butter dish rather than from the Morning Bun. I’d hate to stop eating baked goods from my favorite bakery due to something that wasn’t their fault.

Linux Journal just published a story I wrote for them about the recent release of ipfilter on Linux.

Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend have special meaning around our house, and not just because there is a holiday involved.

No, both weekends are BratFest weekends.BratFest is put on by one of the local supermarkets. One dollar gets you a bratwurst and a soda. Fifty-cents gets you a hot dog and a soda. There are plenty of condiments (the annual usage of condiments for BratFest is measured in gallons) and napkins to go around.

Local celebrities man the cash registers. Local groups and organizations volunteer to cook the food, police the tables, and generally keep the place sanitary. In return, they get all the proceeds of the Fest.

To give you some idea of the volume of food served at BratFest, try these stats on for size (all of which apply to just one of the two weekends per year):

• Brats served per minute (average): 77
• Gallons of mustard used: 153
• Gallons of ketchup used: 201
• Pounds of sauerkraut consumed: 5,580 Lbs. That’s over two tons!

We’d been to three BratFests before this year. Two last year, and one the year before that.

The first one had the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile, tables, chairs, umbrellas, and a local radio station van pumping out classic rock.

The next two had the Weinermobile and whatnot, but they also added the Johnsonville Big Taste Grill, which is a semi tractor-trailer rig that is nothing more than a giant, mobile, gas grill. It can cook 2500 bratwurst per hour and it is quite a sight to see.

2500 bph (brats per hour) sounds like quite a few, but even the Big Taste Grill isn’t enough to satisfy the BratFest hordes. There are only thirty-two hours of BratFest per Fest (eight hours per day for four days). The current record is over 148,000 brats consumed in four days, so that means that over 4625 bph (on average) were cooked and consumed last Memorial Day weekend when the record was set.

This year, they finally dumped the lame radio station van and installed a small stage. Local bands and singers get to play the stage, which is a nice change from hearing the same old classic rock tunes yet again.

For the first two hours of BratFest today, it rained, so there was only six sunny hours of Brat consumption. And yet, they still managed to sell 49,302 brats today alone. That’s just a bit over 6,162 bph!

I’m really fascinated by how many brats are eaten at this affair, if you haven’t noticed. The premise is so simple: cook brats, serve them cheaply, watch the crowds appear. There is no stuffiness about the affair. There is no hidden agenda. It’s just people eating bratwurst in prodigious quantities.

Dalla and I have been going on Bunny Patrol in our yard the last few weeks. Since all of our plants are sprouting the bunnies are back in business.The bunnies initially chewed up some parsley we planted, so that got a cage of chicken wire. Then, they went after some native plants we bought at a native plant sale, so those got chicken wire cages, as well.

Recently, we noticed some damage to leaves on the raspberries bushes we planted this year, so two days ago we put of a chicken wire fence around those, as well.

We have several types of hostas in our back yard, and the green ones have been ravaged by the bunnies of late.

So, whenever I see a bunny outside, I leash up Dalla, and we sprint out of the back door, screaming like Vikings raiding a French sea town. I yell of revenge; the dog yips of bloody, furry murder. This generally suffices to keep the bunnies out of the yard for a few hours.

We’ll probably end up putting a fence in eventually. Then, I can just let Dalla out to chase the bunnies without our 180 lb. anchor.

I want the bunnies to think twice before entering our yard. I want the bunnies to wonder when the High-Velocity, Furry, Large-Canine-Equipped, Yipping Bunny Disposal Squad is going to be loosed upon them. I want the bunnies to see our yard as far less green than the others in the neighborhood.

I’ve eaten plenty of breakfast cereals in my time and I can say without reservation that there is no worse breakfast cereal than Grape Nut Flakes.Sure, Cheerios smell awful and Uncle Sam cereals taste like they’ve gone rotten in the box, but for sheer tactile disfunction, nothing beats Grape Nut Flakes.

To whom did Post test market that product? Those without teeth? Did the testers say, "Could you make the cereal turn to mush when I just wave the milk near the bowl?"

Grape Nut Flakes turn to mush as soon as they even sense a liquid nearby. And, once they turn to mush, they also lose any flavor they once had (not much to begin with). So, once you pour a bowl of the cereal and add milk, you end up with a gelatinous mess of milk and sludge with no flavor beyond that of the milk. Mmm…..

I eat great mountains of cereal for breakfast. It takes me, on average, two and one half-days to empty a box of cereal. It took me six days (!) to get rid of a box of Grape Nut Flakes, though. It was like my own personal version of Breakfast Hell. Every day for nearly a week I got the chance to relive my horrible decision to try a new (to me) cereal.

From now on, I’m sticking to old, reliable, Frosted Mini Spooners. They’re sweet, high-fiber, cheap, packaged in a bag (no enclosing box; less waste), and tasty.

Confidential to the guy I unfortunately witnessed at the supermarket deli the other day:

None of what you see in the deli display case could be strictly classified as “homemade.”You were standing at the far end of the deli display case, ogling the available salads. You were probably in your mid-fifties with a similarly aged woman standing near you.

Svetlana, the deli employee trying to help you, is not from this country (if the name wasn’t enough of a tip-off). Her command of the English language might be best described as “a work in progress.” However, she is pleasant, hard-working (she worked her way up from being a bagger), and generally one that tries to please the customer. I have a soft spot in my heart for Svetlana because she always tried to fit the maximum number of groceries into a bag, while limiting the weight of the bag and minimizing the chances the bag might break. When the groceries were all paid for and bagged, she always gave Sarah and I a little nod of the head and the tiniest smile. For some reason, we always found that to be more genuine than “Have a nice day” delivered by a sullen teenager.

So, there you stood, in your navy blue Lands End jacket, asking over and over again “Which of these are homemade?” while pointing at the deli display case. Svetlana did not understand your question (apparently the word homemade is not in her English vocabulary yet), but she was trying gamely to figure out what you wanted. However, since she could not answer your question, you just kept getting more and more agitated and making a truly stupendous mountain out of a non-existant molehill.

So, I’ve got news for you, dummy. None of them are homemade. It’s a supermarket deli. The very word “homemade” implies that something was made in a home. Everything you saw in the display case was made in batches where the smallest ingredient was measured in gallons. Have you tried the cookies? They are not homemade. They were made in gi-hugic batches in the bakery next to the deli. How about the rotisserie chickens? Nope. Not homemade either.

Did you happen to look up from the display case and see the industrial/institutional kitchen just beyond the deli? That is where all the deli foods are made (or even just defrosted after their journey across hundreds of miles from a factory somewhere else). Did that kitchen look like the place you would find homemade food cooking?

You see, the deli does not make homemade food. The deli sells food already prepared to people who either cannot cook, do not have time to cook, do not like to cook, or are too lazy to cook. To maximize profits while keeping prices low, everything is prepared using reasonably low-quality ingredients purchased in large quantities and prepared as quickly and efficiently as possible.

If you want a homemade pie, you’re going to need to visit aisle five where the baking ingredients are kept. Once there, you can find flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and pie filling. If you need a fruit salad, perhaps you could have turned your lazy ass around and chosen some fruit from the produce section directly behind you. Ten minutes with a decent quality knife and a cutting board would have produced a homemade fruit sald.

Of course, none of that would short-circuit the whole process of getting homemade food any more than yelling at Svetlana did.

So, Mr. “Which of these are homemade,” I’ll be looking out for you from now on. Clearly, you don’t quite grasp the concept of mass-produced foods, supermarkets, and what is homemade. That makes me wonder what other basic concepts of modern living have also escaped your tiny mind.

We watched the much-heralded Disney movie Miracle the other night.

What a snoozer. The movie is perhaps only interesting to those who don’t already know the outcome of the game. For those who know how the game ends, all the drama seems highly artificial and hardly worth the price of admission.

If you wanted to see real hockey drama, you’d do better to visit your local ice rink during hockey season and watch a game live.

For the last two years, all the talk in Wisconsin has been about weather conditions bordering on drought. “Too little rain” this and “too little groundwater” that. This year, we have the exact opposite problem.Sarah and I were scheduled to be at Effigy Mounds National Monument today to gather information for her graduate work.

The plan was to meet several other people at the park, put a couple of canoes in the Yellow River, and paddle downstream a half-mile or so. At that point, we’d come ashore, unload the equipment from the canoes, paddle back to the vehicles, and do the whole thing again. Once we had all the equipment in place, we would construct this relatively large tripod (made of very thick aluminum) in a wetland on the border of a pond.

Using the tripod, we would take four-inch core samples of the mud. These core samples would then be analyzed by a lab. Sarah needs the lab analysis for her graduate work.

To arrive at the park bright and early this morning, we needed to leave Madison at oh-dark-hundred. To that end, we got the canoe on the car last night. Sarah rented a van on Saturday morning and she loaded it up with coring equipment yesterday while I worked on an article due today.

When we got back to the house last night after taking the dog out for a run, we got a message from the park naturalist at Effigy Mounds telling us that the park was closed due to extensive flooding. The Yellow River was also flooded and spilling over the land where we needed to work.

So, all our preparation was undone by the massive amounts of rain we’ve been getting this month. Madison is currently 9 inches above normal for rainfall in the month of May. We’ve gotten so much rain, that when we got forty-five minutes of very gentle mist on Saturday, we had standing water in the yard.

We’ve gotten maybe twelve hours of sun in the last week. This morning has been overcast. This afternoon will be overcast. Tonight, we’re going to get more thunderstorms. Tomorrow, more rain. If you call our house and we don’t answer, it’s most likely because we’re out canoeing on the city streets.

While I was out and about the other day, I saw an SUV that had the following bumper sticker affixed to it:

LOVE>FEARMost people might decipher that message to mean “Love is greater than fear.” I’m sure that is what the original author of the bumper sticker meant.

However, those of us who spend nearly all of our waking time working with Unix look at that message and think “Execute the program/script LOVE and write its STDOUT to a file named FEAR in the current directory.”

Last week I bought a bread machine at a garage sale. It’s not a particularly fancy model, but it was in good shape and lightly used.Since then, we’ve been baking up a storm of carb-filled loaves. I’ve been working on a sourdough starter mix so I can start making sourdough bread in a few days or so.

It’s not clear to me how anyone could own a bread machine and not use it. The process of making bread becomes so easy (measure, dump, depress button), that there is no excuse for eating store bought bread any more.

Why is it that American restaurants insist on placing so many foreign objects in their offerings?While Sarah and I were still living in Massachusetts, we visited a sports bar/pub near our home one night. She ordered…something. I don’t remember what. I ordered some sort of pasta and chicken with alfredo sauce.

The food arrived, and we started to eat. I had eaten about five or ten forkfuls when I encountered about a one-inch square, jagged piece of broken glass in my food. I brought this to the attention of the manager and he offered me half-price off the cost of my entree(!) and a replacement dish.

Suffice it to say that I let the manager know in no uncertain terms that his offer was…not acceptable. I explained to the manager that things were going to happen a bit differently. Sarah and I left, didn’t pay a cent of the bill, I contacted the health inspector first thing in the morning, and we never went back there again.

I offer that story as prelude to the items below:

• A woman found a mouse in her soup after she started eating the soup at a Cracker Barrel restaurant. It’s one thing to find a dead mouse in your food before you start eating the dish. It’s another thing entirely to find the mouse after you’ve been chowing down. Who knows what sort of nasty diseases the dead mouse has helpfully transferred into the food.)
• A Costco customer somehow manages to get a pair of 9mm bullets with their hot dogs. My advice to that customer is to try chewing the food, before swallowing it. That will make the detection of the bullets easier.)
• A woman found a live frog in her airline salad. No, it’s not an American restaurant, but it does demonstrate that the problem of generally undesirable toppings to pre-made food is not an exclusively American problem.

If you woke up this morning and found yourself wondering, “Just where can I see disturbing medical imagery taken by amateur photographers of their onw wounds?”, you’re in luck. To those needy souls I recommend Show Me Your Wound.

Perhaps you remember the big, expensive, confusing Medicare reform bill of the not too distant past. The bill that added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare? The one that was just a big give-away to the pharmaceutical industry?

Even though the bill only recently took affect, the government has all but conceeded that it doesn’t do nearly enough to help those on Medicare, and it doesn’t do a damn thing for those of us who aren’t on Medicare (thankfully).On Tuesday, Tommy Thompson (the head of Health and Human Services) acknowledged that it was just a matter of time until the US allows importation of drugs from Canada and other nations and that he would press GeeDubya not to stand in the the way of such actions.

By doing so, Thompson all but acknowledged that the much bally-hooed Medicare drug benefit was a worthless broken down cart-horse already. Thanks, Tommy. That was a great multi-million dollar give-away to the pharmaceutical industry.

So, people using the almighty Medicare drug discount cards still can’t afford their medications. Those of us fortunate (unfortunate?) enough not to have Medicare coverage also suffer from obscenely high drug costs. Of course, the drug industry always claims that high drug costs are necessary to support continued R&D into new, exciting (and expensive) drugs. If drug prices were to fall, the industry titans proclaim, the pharmaceutical industry could no longer afford to persue fabulous numbers of new drugs and treatments and everyone would suffer.

This, of course, is a huge load of big business horse-shit.

First of all, as anyone with a chronic medical condition will tell you, the drug companies have zero interest in curing chronic conditions. Diabetics, people with high blood pressure, or those with chronic pain, for instance, are much more profitable customers for the drug companies when they are simply taking medication to control their diseases. If the drug companies were to cure these folks somehow, they would no longer be steady, reliable sources of income.

The drug companies will gladly try to find cures for cancer (at least the cancers that affect many, many people) because dead people can’t possibly buy drugs from drug companies. So, by finding ways to keep cancer patients alive longer drug companies benefit because they can sell more drugs.

Of course, it goes without saying that most drug companies are only interested in treating the most common diseases. If a disaease affects something like 1000 people per year in the US, most drug companies have little or no interest in developing, testing, and bringing to market a drug to treat those people. The cost of doing so, most drug companies will tell you, would make such a drug unaffordable for 999 of the 1000 afflicted people.

So, drug companies will develop drugs to treat (not cure) chronic conditions. They will develop drugs to cure common deadly conditions. But, they only do this to make a profit, not out of the good of their heart.

What hope do those of us with chronic medical conditions or with unusual medical conditions have for finding a cure? Well, those hopes lie with those folks conducting research in universities and medical research labs.

Unfortunately, many of these labs are growing more and more dependant on funding from drug companies as government funding for basic science is cut time and time again. So, even these labs are forced to spend more and more of their time doing work for the drug companies on the drug companies’ agendas, rather than research that might benefit the public directly.

What would be the net effect of lowering drug prices across the board by government mandate? Well, Americans would spend less on prescription drugs. Since Americans would spend less on prescription drugs, more money would be available in the economy to fund independant research at universities and medical labs. So, the amount of money spent on drug research might not change, but Americans would get more control and accountability over how drug research dollars are spent.

If those working in labs and universities were able to conduct research without the harness of industry directing them in particular directions, we might see some truly amazing breakthroughs in drug research.

Of course, there would be some side effects (can anyone talk about drugs without a side effects disclaimer? See my ad in Men’s Health magazine for more information.) to lower drug prices and smaller drug companies.

Doctors would no longer get to take drug industry sponsored vacations. Sorry doc, you’ll have to dig deep into your six-figure salary to go to Bora Bora this year.

Golf courses would have to find other customers to pay their midday greens fees as drug companies would no longer have the money to take doctors out on the golf course for eighteen holes of golf and six drinks on the nineteenth hole.

Doctors would no longer be all but paid outright to prescribe particular medications for their patients.

Sure, there would be some side effects, but I’m sure that Bora Bora, golf courses, and doctors would muddle through somehow.

"What are the proceeds of a four hour garage sale we had on Saturday?"

Of course, the vast majority of items we had for sale ended up in Goodwill’s hands after they didn’t sell. I’m astonished that no one wanted to purchase a roll of gag toilet paper for $0.50.

While watching Master and Commander: Far Side of the World over the weekend, Sarah and I started talking about the origin of the word vegetarian.In the movie, which is set in 1805, a character describes lizards that live on the Galapagos as ‘vegetarians.’ This immediately set my nerves jangling as the idea of people being vegetarian in 1805 just didn’t sound plausible. Some research uncovered the fact that the word vegetarian wasn’t used/coined until 1842. So, the anachronistic color of the word in that setting was true.

Sarah and I tossed around the idea that in 1805, animals that only ate plants would mostly have been described as ‘herbivores,’ especially by scientists of the day (as the character in question was).

That got us wondering if someone could be an herbivorian. If a vegetarian eats vegetables, wouldn’t an herbivorian eat herbivores? That is, would your diet be limited to cows, goats, pigs, chickens, and other animals that eat plants?

Of course, the problem is that we took our cue from the word vegetarian. If the suffix -ian meant “consumer of,” then Christians would literally eat Christ (and depending on your religion, this may actually be the case). However, the suffix -ian means “follower of” or “of or belonging to.” So, an herbivorian would actually literally mean “someone who follows the way of herbivores” or “belonging to the category of herbivores”.

Given that, vegetarian is actually an incredibly incorrect word construction (all hail English!). Those who practice vegetarianism then literally “belong to the category of vegetables.”