Butter Side Down

Tiffany, a 17-year-old senior from a small Wisconsin town, was struck by a drunk driver earlier this spring when she was out walking with a friend. She’s a fighter, and even managed to graduate with her class last week despite horrific injuries that left her at first only able to communicate by blinking.

She’s now at a special hospital in Colorado, working hard to gain enough function that she can talk, use a sip-and-puff system and perhaps even breath on her own without a ventilator.

If you have a moment, take the time to visit Tiffany Pohl’s blog today, and leave her a message wishing her the best. Her family reads her the messages every day, and says they really brighten up Tiff’s day! You’ll have to register your email address before leaving a message (it’s a protected blog on CaringBridge.org), but that just takes a minute and you won’t get spammed or bothered by doing so.

I’m not one for hyping products, but with Mother’s Day sneaking up, I can heartily recommend as a gift something my brother and I gave our Mom a while back.

It’s called a “CEIVA Digital Photo Frame” and there isn’t anything else out there like it.

Basic idea: a CEIVA lets you share digital photos from anywhere in the world with a family member who isn’t Internet connected or isn’t even computer literate.

How great is that?

It’s easy to set up and use.

1. Buy a CEIVA (you have a few options as to the size of the flat panel display you want - but all are under $200), and buy a “Picture Plan” (about $100/year). You can buy them locally at places like Sam’s Club, order one through Amazon.com, or buy a frame directly from CEIVA at http://www.ceiva.com.
2. Designate an internet-connected family member to administer the CEIVA account. Administering the account is a piece of cake - it takes five minutes to set everything up on the Internet side.
3. Plug the CEIVA Digital Photo Frame into the recipient’s existing phone line.
4. Tell family members who are Internet connected how to upload photos to the CEIVA account (it’s as easy as sending an email). You can also upload photos from your camera phone.
5. Let the CEIVA receiver do its thing.

Each night (you can set the time for when it does this), the CEIVA silently dials a local number to pick up new photos sent to the frame. And then, starting in the morning, the CEIVA displays the photos in a continuous full-color slide show.

My Mom now starts every morning by watching new photos that have come in from all over the world to her CEIVA, sent by her children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews. It lets her share in all our lives, very close to real time, even though she lives far away from many of us and isn’t herself part of the ‘digital revolution.’

She loves it to bits.

Hands down, I think it’s one of the neatest gifts you can give.

Yesterday, one of my friends sent me Joel Stein’s trolling commentary from this week’s Time magazine, where he advocates eating horse meat. Mr. Stein says,

I decided not to let a bunch of horse freaks… prevent me from eating meat enjoyed in Japan, Belgium, France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.

Let’s see, we have eight countries in the world that eat horse meat, so therefore the rest of us that don’t condone eating the likes of Barbaro are “horse freaks?”

Huh. Guess this is one of those times where you can count me in with the “freaks.”

Mr. Stein then went on to say,

It’s not that I don’t think killing horses is cruel. It’s just that I think killing chickens, pigs, sheep and cows is equally bad. Morality based on aesthetics is pretty shallow.

Do you now? Personally, I find journalism based on opinion yet presented as fact not only shallow, but contemptuous.

Here’s just one fact - among many - not based on the “aesthetics” Mr. Stein sneered at. Slaughtering horses isn’t the same as killing animals bred and raised for human consumption. The American Humane Society (hardly a radical group of “horse freaks”), points out that

horses are different from cattle (and other animals specifically bred, sold, and transported for human consumption) due to their instinctive flight response in stressful conditions, making it difficult to accurately stun them prior to slaughter. Undercover footage has demonstrated that many horses are dismembered while fully conscious, underscoring the need to ban this utterly inhumane process.

Ah, but Mr. Stein believes that objections to horse slaughter equates us to being “a nation that thinks like a 14-year-old girl.”

Oh, puh-leeze.

Even if I could agree with Mr. Stein’s position (which will happen when pigs sprout wings and fly), I somehow can’t find it in me to respect someone who brags in print about lying on their customs forms so they can illegally import such a “delicacy” as horse meat.

Cultural taboos and humane considerations aside, if Mr. Stein wants to chow down on an animal that has been pumped full of pesticides and insecticidal wormers, injected with antibiotics that aren’t approved for meat animals, or given pharmaceuticals like Lasix, and doused daily with fly spray - all standard practice and allowed under current regulations, as a horse isn’t a meat animal for human consumption in the USA - then, hey, he should go for it. He richly deserves precisely what he’s injesting.

But first, Mr. Stein, move to Japan, Belgium, France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany or Austria. This is the United States. We don’t eat horses here.

Bon appetite.

Every now and then I see an article that makes me feel a tad less like Sisyphus rolling his rock up that hill. This one, in the January 20, 2007 issue of Science News, made my day.

“For decades, researchers largely assumed that a poison’s effects increase as the dose rises and diminish as it falls. However, scientists are increasingly documenting unexpected effects—sometimes disproportionately adverse, sometimes beneficial—at extremely low doses of radiation and toxic chemicals.”

For too many decades, the mantra of toxicologists, especially from within certain industries, has been that “the dose makes the poison.”

Indeed, it does not.

The peer-reviewed research on low-dose toxicological effects of chemicals has finally reached such a critical mass that an unbelieving and often — sadly — closed-minded scientific community has to rethink this erroneous assumption.

We know the truth: the dose does not make the poison. So let’s start afresh, and, instead of assuming we understand how things work, study them and see!

To all the scientists who have fought for this day, and especially for Dr. Warren Porter, a most principled and brilliant friend who has sacrificed much to ensure that the truth is heard: this one’s for you.

One of the hot new words of 2006, according to an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, was “pretexting.”

Pretexting, the article pointed out, was the term certain individuals at Hewlett-Packard used to describe “the practice of calling telephone companies to obtain people’s phone records, generally under the pretext of claiming to be those individuals.”

I thought we already had a simple verb to describe that behavior: lying.

Let me check… yes, I think I’m onto something here… Webster’s says:

Main Entry: lie
Function: verb
1: to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive
2: to create a false or misleading impression
transitive verb : to bring about by telling lies (lied his way out of trouble). “Lie” is the blunt term, imputing dishonesty (lied about where he had been).

That’s what I recall being taught.

Here’s an idea for CEOS, executives and managers who want to clean up corrupt corporate cultures in the United States: explain your company’s actions in words every five-year-old understands.

Want to bet that “pretexting” isn’t on the kindergarten vocabulary list?