Are you feeling lucky still?

As follow-up to the CBS Colonoscopy Sweepstakes story, here’s a piece from NPR: healthcare insurance companies are squawking at paying for anesthesia during the procedure.

No surprise there that carriers are looking for ways to cut costs wherever they can. I’m just wondering if CBS will fork over for the anesthesia if you win the sweepstakes?

Sweet sourdough

One of NPR’s science writers takes on the foundations of making sourdough bread, which makes me think of a couple of things.

I’m a good baker of cakes, pies and cookies, but I’ve never had luck with making bread. (Well—I did manage monkey bread, but it was under someone’s direct tutelage and it was in the last millennium.) I think one of the major issues is the temperature in our kitchen—I just couldn’t get anything to rise.

But back in the 70s, when my dad was an engineer for the Wolf Range company, he studied the science of heat distribution in ovens, and took up bread baking. He got to be quite adept at it, and was making whole-wheat sourdough bread before you could find it anywhere else.

He solved the temperature issue by rigging a 75 watt light bulb in one of the cabinets. It gave off just enough heat to effect the rising of the dough. For him it was an engineering problem.

(He also, after consulting the county agricultural expert, used to bake dirt for potting soil, to get rid of nematodes. But that’s a different story.)

The other thing NPR’s story reminds me of is the advantage of living in California—there’s almost no restaurant that won’t give you the option of sourdough toast with breakfast. They have varying degrees of sourness, of course, but it’s really nice to have that tooth enamel-cleaning sensation of chewy sourdough toast.

Yum.

Rocky road to Padua (Minn.)

Another “America, goniff” story from Saint Patrick’s Day—this time a celebration in Padua, Minn.

Seems they were setting up the town parade (and, let me just say—only in America will there be an Irish parade in an Italian-named town), and a pick-up truck caught fire.

So far, a dog-bites-man story, yes?

But when the time came to put out the conflagration the responding fire squad was helped out by a few local volunteer firefighters who’d been part of the parade. In drag:

Seriously—where else on the planet would the confluence of Irish-Italian-firefighting-hunks-in-evening-gowns-manning-(er)-fire-hoses happen?

A worm in the Apple

So, I thought this was amusing; but, of course, I'm one of the 67 people on the planet who don't own any Apple products:

The title is, "So, Dad, how do you like the new iPad we bought you?"

Justice delayed

John Demjanjuk’s long and mostly prosperous life finally came to an end Saturday. He died in Bavaria, not in prison (as befits a convicted war criminal), but in a nursing home, age 91.

The retired autoworker has spent the last30 years denying his work in Nazi death camps, fighting extradition for trial and then claiming ill-health as a reason to avoid prosecution. Prior to that, he’d had quite a tidy life, arriving in the U.S. in 1952, taking up work and raising a family in suburban Cleveland.

NPR’s story about Demjanjuk’s death has one element that just sticks in my craw. It quotes Professor Michael Scharf as saying that Demjanjuk was probably conscripted into Nazi service but “spent the rest of his life as a model citizen trying to atone for that.”

It’s clear that Demjanjuk did nothing that even approaches the time zone of atonement. The past 70 years were an exercise in hiding, denial and dodging justice.