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Greetings everyone.

Finally back to sea level from our long Boulder excursion. Boulder is a weird place. Not the actual setting. The scenery in and around Boulder is magnificent what with the Flatiron Mountains looming over everything in the valley below. It would be difficult to find a more gorgeous place. It’s the people who are kind of weird.

MD and I lived there half time from 1997 until ~2005. We thought some of the people were a bit strange then, and nothing seems to have changed.

For instance, in Texas you virtually never see anyone wearing a mask any more. When we’re in SoCal, we might see a masker occasionally. In Boulder, they’re all over the place. And it’s not just the masks, but I don’t want to dwell on the weirdness. Just go there sometime for an extended visit, and you’ll know what I mean.

I did learn one thing in Boulder I had never heard of. And leave it to folks in Boulder to come up with something like this. The friends we are staying with own a spectacular condo in a beautiful condo complex. We lived high on the hog staying there.

They also have a most well-behaved Chocolate Lab. I noticed that almost everyone I saw walking around the condo complex had some kind of dog. I asked our friends if it cost extra to have a dog in the condos. It does, but what else they told me about it, I almost couldn’t believe.

It costs $100 per year to have a dog. When you first move in, you pay another 50 bucks to have your dog’s cheek swabbed for DNA.

Then—and this is the part I had never heard of—if your dog takes a dump somewhere on the condo property and you don’t scoop the poop and someone finds it, they report it to the condo offices. Those folks scoop it and then send it off for analysis, and if the DNA in the poop matches the DNA in your dog’s cheek swab, you get a nice $150 ticket. Which makes most people more diligent in picking up after their dogs.

I don’t like to step in dog crap any more than anyone else, but I asked myself, what if I were out walking on the condo property and found some dog poop. Would I notify the authorities at the administrative offices? Odds are probably not…unless, of course, I did step in it and got pissed.

But from my experience with stereotypical Boulderites, I would bet that everyone to a man (or woman) would take the time to stop, probably snap a photo, and report the miscreants. Some of them might go so far as to retrieve a poop baggie or something (hell, for all I know, they always have baggies on them for just such occasions), go back and pick it up and turn it in.

Has anyone else heard of this dog DNA patrol set up? For all I know, these are everywhere, and, never having had a pet in a condo, I’m just ignorant.

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One more Boulder experience just to give you a flavor of what I mean by stereotypical Boulderite. Back in the late 1990s my folks came out to visit us in Boulder. My dad (RIP) was in the near terminal stages of senile MS. He couldn’t walk other than with a walker, very slowly, and with some difficulty, and he had to give that up and be wheelchair bound not too long after what I’m going to relate happened.

He wanted to see the town, so I toured him around in a little convertible I had at the time. We had been out for about an hour and a half or so, and he had to pee. Fortunately, we were close to a grocery store at the end of a strip mall that I knew had restrooms right inside the front door.

I wheeled into the parking lot and saw six handicap spots right up front. I did not have a handicap sticker for my car as neither MD nor I were handicapped. But I figured if my dad didn’t qualify as handicapped, no one would. I parked in the nearest handicapped spot and started the process of getting him out of the car, which was indeed a process given the size of the car and the size of him (he was 6’3”).

I had to get his walker all unfolded and ready for him, then literally pull him from the car. As he leaned against the car, I scooted his walker over in front of him and helped him get his hands on the grips so he could push himself along.

Just as we’re standing there in the middle of this operation, a Boulderite walks by and says, “Hey, you can’t park there. You don’t have a handicap sticker.”

I told him he could jump up a fat dog’s ass, then he could call the police, and I would deal with them.

He gave me the finger and told me he was going to report me to the authorities in the store. I figured once anyone with good sense saw the condition my dad was in, they would understand. I walked him on in, he did his thing, then we hobbled back to the car. No police came. No store authorities came. But it was just another typical encounter with the holier-than-thou segment of Boulder.

I case you’re wondering, our friends in Boulder are definitely not weird. True salt of the earth folks. They live in Boulder because it is close to their business. And, just to further clarify, everybody in Boulder isn’t like these Boulderites I highlighted. There are some really nice, friendly, not weird people there, too.

Links in the Odds and Ends…and Bread

I have to apologize for a couple of broken links in the Odds and Ends last week. MD usually sends me a few entrants for the Odds and Ends every week. Last week I was running a bit behind, when she told me she had sent me a couple. I asked her if she could just go ahead and put them up for me.

Unfortunately, one was a long article from the NY Times about why bread is better in Europe than in the US. And it was behind a paywall. I have a subscription to the NY Times, so I can provide such articles without a paywall. She just put the link up as she found it, so most of you—those at least who aren’t Times subscribers—missed the article. I fixed the link, so it’s now available, but I’m going to put it here as well, because it’s an interesting article and you won’t have to flip back.

I agree with most everyone else that the bread is significantly better in Europe. I rarely eat bread in the US, but indulge more often when across the pond.

According to the author, there are 5 theories why European bread is better.

• The wheat is different. They use more soft wheat in Europe

• The dough is fermented longer

• Bread in Europe contains fewer additives

• European bread is less likely to contain glyphosate

• Everything is better on vacation

Other than the last one, which is totally subjective, I believe the first four are on the money.

I’ve griped forever about American flour being enriched as it all pretty much is. Unless you seek out unenriched flour, you’re going to get the following additives:

• Thiamin (Vitamin B1): 2.9mg

• Riboflavin (Vitamin B2): 1.8mg

• Niacin (Vitamin B3): 24mg

• Folic acid: 0.7mg

• Iron: 20mg

• Sometimes calcium is added at 960mg per pound

These amounts are added per pound of enriched flour. Since most UPF are made with enriched flour, you can get a lot more of these enrichment factors than you might need if you eat a lot of snack or convenience foods. Especially niacin, which I’ve discussed numerous times as an obesogenic agent.

Pellagra is a disease of the past. Almost everyone in the US today consumes a diet with plenty of the above vitamins and minerals included. Europeans don’t enrich their bread, and they don’t come down with all the diseases these factors are added to prevent. In my view, we should ditch them all.

Remember, it’s not just bread; it’s all products containing enriched flour, so if you look at any of the labels of snack food and find it’s made of flour, you are getting the enrichment whether you want or need it or not.

Personally, I would rather get my vitamins and minerals from sources in which they come naturally, not by Big Food enrichment.

You can get non-enriched flour from Amazon and a lot of places, if you’re of a mind to eat things made with flour. To make sure you don’t get the enriched version, simply check the nutritional label on the back. It will tell you whether you’ve got enrichment or just plain flour.

These are the Nutrition Facts of the product linked above. As you can see from the red box, there are no added vitamin enrichments in this product. Bread is pretty simple to make. All that’s required is flour, water, yeast, and salt. If you start surfing the net, you’ll find that most people add some oil, or butter, or honey, sometimes sugar, and a host of other additives. But you can make decent bread with just the four ingredients mentioned above.

Just to add on to this section (which has got me asking myself why I’m writing about bread in what is basically a low-carb newsletter), I’ve got a couple of articles saved from the Wall Street Journal that some may find interesting. Just click on the headlines for the full article.

Before we get away from the bread section, I want to leave you with another bit of info. After I read the NY Times article above, I decided to take a look at the comments. The Times lost me long ago when it started pandering to its readers instead of simply reporting the news. The readers themselves are probably worse than the Times in terms of believability. But I did come across a comment by some rando that I’m going to pass along, just because I thought it was interesting. I can’t test the validity, but I’ll pass it along out of interest.

Okay, my luck being what it is, I could not find the frigging comment when I went back to look for it. According to the Times, there are 1.3k comments on this article. Both MD and I went back through and could not find the comment. I should have copied it when I first found it. [The Bride concurs.}

Basically, what the commenter said was that he (I think it was a he) came back to the US after a number of years in France. He brought with him as many bags of French flour as he could pack. He stacked them in his pantry next to a bag of US flour. When he opened his last back of French flour, he found it was crawling with weevils. He sifted it all carefully and used some kind of filtering device that apparently gets rid of all the parts of weevils and their detritus as well. After all this, he decided he would check the bag of flour from the US, figuring it would be filled with weevils as well and need to be discarded. All he found were a few dead ones around the mouth of the bag. Upon opening the bag, he found a few more dead ones inside the sealed paper flaps on the opening. But none in the actual flour.

Take that for what it’s worth. It’s from a NY Times commenter.

Speaking of flour, I’ll give you a helpful, but not particularly healthful, hack I’ve used countless times.

Remember, there are two kinds of processing foods can go through. One is by adding all kinds of crap to it; the other is mechanized pulverization of the contents.

Scones are often made with more mechanically processed flour than, say, bread. The scones Starbuck’s sells are coated with a glaze made, I’m sure, of powdered sugar.

When MD and I used to split our time between Montecito, CA and the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, we drove back and forth. When we left Montecito, we knew from brutal experience that we had to leave before 10 AM or after 2 PM to avoid the Bay Area traffic.

We found a little hotel we loved that was right across the street from a favorite restaurant in Yountville, a little town in the NAPA Valley area. We would have a nice dinner, bed down there for the night, then it would take us just a few hours to drive to Tahoe.

We almost always left before 10 AM, and when we did, I took off with a cup of coffee. It takes about two hours to get from Montecito to San Luis Obispo, where where we would always make a pit stop. By the time we got there, I was ready to break down the door to the restroom.

We would order two Grande Americanos, and I would get a small scone. Then we would head out for the rest of the trip to Yountville, which took about six hours or so.

I would drink my coffee and eat the scone, which drove my insulin up, made me retain fluid, and kept me from having to pee for six plus hours. It has worked like a charm over and over and over again.

A coffee in the morning, and I’m desperate to go after two hours. A coffee and a scone, and I can last over six hours. Ain’t biology grand when you know how it all works. (I hasten to add that I’m not advocating it on a regular basis, but sometimes it comes in handy.)

One of my favorite quotes is by Francis Bacon: “Nature to be commanded, must be obeyed.”

But what about MD? Who cares? MD doesn’t have a prostate. [The Bride laughed aloud at this, because prostate or no, she does have a bladder with a finite capacity. And to be fair we had to stop for gas.]

Okay, one more from last week.

Recall that I came across an article by someone advocating for the lone star tick that spreads Alpha-gal syndrome, which is disorder that makes whoever suffers from it have allergic reactions to eating meat. The symptoms can run from mild all the way to anaphylaxis, with the latter being pretty rare.

The nimrods who wrote the article thought that the spread of Alpha-gal would be a good thing because it would make people consume less meat, and so save our planet.

I intended to write about this article, but could not find it. I tried everything, including AI, to track it down with zero success. As it turns out, my readers and even my aviator kid are smarter that AI, because they were all able to find it.

Without further ado, here is the abstract of the article.

This has got to be one of the stupidest papers I’ve ever read, and I haven’t even read the whole thing. I could have written the authors for a copy of the paper, but then they might think I was as stupid as they.

I’m sure the argument in the actual paper is that climate change is an existential threat to the world. And thus anything that minimizes an existential threat has got to be a good thing, even if it makes many people sick and even kills a few here and there.

Let’s look at the first bolded line above.

“Herein, we argue that if eating meat is morally impermissible, then efforts to prevent the spread of tickborne AGS are also morally impermissible.”

This could just as easily be applied to pasteurization. Every year a number of people in the US become ill or die from drinking non-pasteurized milk. If people quit drinking milk, it would ultimately mean the end of dairy cattle. So then efforts to forbid the pasteurization of milk would be morally permissible, because it would end up reducing the number of dairy cows, each of which emits as much methane as beef cattle.

(Note: Before I get a slew of comments apprising me of the benefits of raw milk, I’ve got to tell you that our own kids were raised on raw milk, at least a good part of their early lives. I drank it, too. I don’t have a problem with raw milk when it is sourced properly.)

The entire premise of this paper is absurd and, in fact, almost beyond belief. Just shows you the world is filled with knuckleheads, and it seems there is always a journal ready to publish them.

My kid sent me a short X video of a discussion of this. I don’t know if the discussant is one of the morons who wrote the paper, or just someone advocating it. Beggars belief.

While were on the subject of last week’s Arrow, I’ve got one more video to show you. The same son sent it right after the video above. Remember when the ER doc, Doug McGuff, talked about the twelve things you want to do to stay out of the belly of the medical beast. One of the things he said to do was to stay away from ladders. During my days in the ER, I treated many serious injuries in people who got crossways with ladders. So much so that I won’t get on one unless it’s maybe a relatively short step ladder. The short video below, shows just how quickly something can go wrong. And this isn’t even a particularly bad one.

Trump, OWS, and the Covid Vaccine

I think it is safe to say, and I don’t believe anyone on either side of the political aisle would disagree, that Donald Trump has a massive ego. That doesn’t mean I believe it’s bad or good; it’s simply the truth.

And I’m pretty sure one of the things The Donald covets the most is a Nobel Prize. I think he thought he was going to get one thanks to Operation Warp Speed (OWS) and the mRNA Covid vaccines.

OWS was a spectacular achievement in terms of getting the federal government off its rear end and getting something accomplished. I think the last of the traditional vaccines that went through the works was the mumps vaccine, and it took several years.

The problem with the mRNA vaccines (if you want to call them vaccines) is that they didn’t really work. On a best case basis, they provided some protection for some people part of the time. The 95 percent efficacy was just so much BS, and had we had a media not in the pocket of Big Pharma, hustling reporters would have figured it out.

Studies continue to roll in showing an increase in all-cause mortality and all kinds of adverse events attributed to these mRNA shots. The government, it seems, continues to promote them. Yet RFK has promised to put an end to it all.

The political pressure on RFK, Jr. must be enormous. Imagine heading up an agency the size of HHS when the vast majority of people (i.e., entrenched bureaucrats) who work there hate your guts and want to be shed of you. And try all sorts of subterfuges to undermine you. It’s got to be miserable, but he’s fighting the good fight as much as he can.

I think Big Food has turned out to be much less of a stumbling block than Big Pharma, whose spending on media dwarfs that of Big Food.

RFK, Jr. is getting flak from both below, i.e., the thousands of HHS bureaucrats who hate him, and from above. Trump has to corral all the GOP members who have their hands in Big Pharma’s pockets. In order for Trump to get done what he wants to get done, he has to compromise some. Big Pharma is throwing money at him along with half the Republican party.

Early in the election cycle, I watched a couple of Trump’s rallies and noticed that in running over the list of wonderful things he did during his first term, he always mentioned OWS and the mRNA shots. And he always got booed. I caught another rally a few weeks before the election and noticed he didn’t mention OWS and the shots. It surprised me, because Trump isn’t one who ever says, I’m sorry or admits to a screw up.

A few days ago, I stumbled onto a YouTube video of country music singer John Rich and friends, who had traveled with Trump, and had the answer as to why there was no more mention of the vaccines.

Just a couple of days ago, I heard Trump in one of his impromptu news conferences say the OWS was a unbelievable achievement, but the vaccines, they weren’t so good. I almost couldn’t believe it. But both are true.

But still he is under great pressure from all sides on this issue. Trump doesn’t want Big Pharma money flowing to the Dems, so he’s got to play ball with them. Which has got to put him into conflict with the goals of RFK, Jr, who I think does truly want to clean up the mess.

And he’s taking some major steps. Trump appears to be not interfering.

Here is a recent video of a talk RFK, Jr. gave on why HHS canceled $500M in mRNA contracts with BARDA.

The way RFK, Jr. pushes back on all those who would love to see him gotten rid of is one sentence he uses over and over. He says it at 3:41 in the video above.

I don’t think for a minute that he believes that all the vaccines in the vaccine schedule are safe or effective. [Nor do I.] But who wouldn’t support safe effective vaccines if they existed. And he says every American who wants them can get them. He’s depriving no one who wants to get one from getting a vaccine.

It’s a brilliant one liner that no one can argue with.

Odds and Ends

• Anchovies are America’s least favorite food; Liver is the most hated. I love both.

• The 50 best-selling musical artists of all time based on album sales and streaming. Some big surprises for me here.

• An amazing statistic from any major city. Almost impossible to believe. Helsinki goes a full year without a traffic death.

• NASA’s Perseverance Rover captures spectacular Mars vista as clear as day.

• New study finds Maya civilization had 16 million people at peak—twice the population of modern-day NYC.

• Odd “dark comets” could imperil Earth—but a Japanese spacecraft is headed toward one to check it out. Fingers crossed.

• Research shows human connection to nature has declined 60% over the past 200 years. I’m surprised it’s not more than that. I spent a large part of my youth roaming in the woods. Maybe it’s time to get back to that.

• Swedish archaeologist spends three years traveling in Viking vessels built like those from 1,000 years ago. He discovered lost sea routes, hidden trade harbors and new respect for Viking seamanship.

• I can’t imagine what kind of BS will be packed into it, in the quest to make an ice cream that doesn't melt. What could go wrong?

• You recently lived through the shortest day in history. Did you notice?

• Archeological find leads to the facial reconstruction of a Mycenean warrior from 3500 years ago.  And he’s a handsome devil.

• It's becoming a lost art, properly writing a personal thank you note, but IMHO it should be resurrected. There's nothing nicer than getting one. Don't know what to say? Here's the  template.

• The kind of unknown stuff that keeps you up at night: a black hole 36 billion times larger than our sun has been discovered. 

• Longing for a little island adventure but hate to fly? You can see these islands in the USA in your Chevrolet. America is asking you to call!

•  And for those of you of a certain age, if the link above triggered a wave of nostalgia, here’s Dinah singing the jingle. And those under 50 can click to see what America used to be like in what your folks call ‘the good ole days’.

• Want to give the Fed your two cents on what constitutes UPF? Here's your chance to have your voice heard and help solidify a uniform, workable definition of it.

• A drug for a rare genetic disorder found to be deadly poison to insecticide-resistant Anopheles mosquitoes. Remains to be seen what the second order consequences might be, but if it proves safe, I'd buy it by the carload lot.  

• From the jingtinglers and tartinkas played by the Whos in Whoville on Christmas morning to the mimsey borogroves and outgrabe mome raths of Jabberwocky, some authors have a knack with coining made up words. But some words that sound made up are legit.

• In 1992, back when GHWBush was President he took flack for being out of touch with America because he was amazed at a supermarket barcode scanner that had been around for nearly twenty years; so they had a point. It had been introduced in 1974, in fact, when the first product ever scanned registered that familiar cash register beep.

• This article on prodigies who changed the world brought to mind a birthday card I once saw that said on the front: on your 40th birthday, compare yourself to these five people selected entirely at random and see how you stack up. And inside it was all child prodigies, such as these.

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

In the summer of 2008, MD and I were traveling in Italy and Bavaria on an international performance tour with her chorus (Santa Barbara Choral Society). One highlight performance stop was their opportunity to sing mass at the high altar of St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican, which was an unforgettable experience for her as well as for me. The chorus sang several motets, integrated into the service, one of which was Maurice Duruflé’s Ubi Caritas. After the mass, a priest who’d been in attendance came up to one of the singers and with tears in his eyes thanked her. He was French, he said, and it was such an honor that the music of one of his countrymen should be sung so beautifully in this sacred place. Made the day even more meaningful for them all.

I don’t have a recording of that one, but I do have a way to give you access to hear a recording of another of the motets the Bride and her fellow choristers sang that day in Rome: Giovanni Palestrina’s Sicut Cervus.

Click on the image below and it will take you to a ‘Listen’ page on the Choral Society’s website, where you’ll see this cut (shown with a red arrow in the image below) and a number of others from various performances over the years. Once on the page, just click on the ‘start arrow’ on the thumbnail of one you want to hear.

Though not after the mass performance at the Vatican, of course, but in every other performance on all her European tours their conductor would cap the evening with an encore or two, usually an American Spiritual/Gospel, which European audiences absolutely love. You can get the flavor of the chorus singing one of these high energy numbers in the Rollo Dilworth ‘Listen to the Rain’ cut toward the bottom of the page. It’s one to tap into any time you feel the need to just clap your hands, stomp your feet, and feel uplifted. All the rain sounds, BTW, are being created by the chorus and the audience with snaps, claps, thigh slaps, and foot stomping.

(The Bride adds a note here: The ‘How Can I Keep From Singing’ cut at the top left was done virtually during Covid lockdowns when choruses couldn’t meet together to sing or perform. Every singer recorded his/her own solo vocal track at home, and they were all synced up digitally into a free virtual performance that was posted online for our audience to tap into. It was the only way we could keep singing during a miserable, dark time for live performance.)

MD is singing in the soprano section in every one of these recordings on the site. Enjoy!

Time for the poll, so you can grade my performance this week.

That’s about it for this week. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back next Thursday.

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This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and should never be relied upon for specific medical advice.

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