Bee Venom Destroys HIV And Spares Surrounding Cells.
Wouldn’t it be just the way. The cure for HIV and Cancer is flying around collecting pollen and MAKING HONEY.
It would be hilariously appropriate for the cure to have always been there. Just minding it’s own business. Visiting flowers. Pollinating crops. helping humanity by… oh yeah, this too. *smirk*
The recent news of the Salmonella-tainted Eggs is bouncing around the 24 hour news cycle. My mom told me about Davidson’s Pasteurized Eggs, they are still raw, but rendered completely safe to consume because they’ve been treated with heat, not enough to coagulate the yolks and set the whites but enough to kill any potential infections of Salmonella that might be lurking within the egg. I am of course wanting to explore the MAFC, and a good portion of that is mastering the Sauces section, for which under-temperature eggs are a fundamental component.
I discovered that I could pasteurize my own eggs by raising an amount of water to 150 degrees and holding eggs suspended in this water for 5 minutes. To overcome this annoying inconvenience I thought I would write to my local supermarket chain, Meijers. I suggested that they carry Davidson’s Pasteurized Eggs and basically got a rebuff throwaway message from a Meijers representative who claimed that none of the eggs that Meijers sells was involved in the recall. As it may be, Meijers, that your eggs weren’t recalled does not necessarily mean that they are safe. Pasteurized eggs are safe. I would pay more for eggs that I knew were safe so I could feel okay with exploring the Sauce section of the MAFC. I can’t really just target Meijers, as WalMart, D&W, and Hardings, all the markets in our area do not carry pasteurized eggs. This isn’t the first time that I’ve contacted Meijers, so far it’s the third request I’ve made over the years for products that would do very well in our area. I’ve decided that contacting Meijers is a fool’s errand.
I suppose that if enough young and elderly die of Salmonella poisoning then Michigan will legislate to force egg pasteurization and Meijers will turn a tidy 180 and then aggressively pursue and market it to their customers. What bothers me deep down is that expanding customers choice for truly safe foods isn’t on the radar for any of the local food marketers in our region. Then again, I’ve said time and time again that restaurants and food markets have no interest in public health or safety – filthy food from monstrous sources is perfectly fine as long as the balance sheet remains in the black. Because I don’t trust anything I buy from Meijers, D&W, Hardings or WalMart it is important to cook everything thoroughly, select against raw foods, and when there is no choice but to buy raw foods from these providers, make a weak bleach solution to sanitize what you bought because nobody is going to care for your health but you, yourself. I couldn’t imagine having a live-in elderly family member or an infant, that we don’t have more of a body-count from tainted and monstrously sourced foods is an absolute blessing.
When something really horrible occurs everybody reacts and begins to cope with the situation. Everyone copes in their own ways. I have noticed that there are clear differences between the genders when it comes to coping. I’ve seen how women cope but I can only speak from my own experiences and how men cope.
It came to me tonight while talking with Scott over some drinks. Men cope by doing, Women cope by feeling. Not to say that either gender can’t cope like the others, Men can feel and Women can do, but in every situation I’ve been in it seems to follow the pattern above.
Men cope by doing. We fix things, we tend to things, we prepare. In many ways, men are like rescue dogs. We are very good in the thick of things with the practical angles but relatively retarded as a gender when it comes to simply feeling the situation out. Men would rather struggle, fight, act, or do, to cope. Men as rescue dogs goes further, if we go too long and we don’t rescue someone we seize with hopelessness and eventually just plod along seemingly desensitized to our surroundings. I have experienced that myself during the entire situation here in New York. I can’t DO anything, so I launch upon any situation that allows me to DO. I covet the little places where I can help, where I can do things to assuage pain, perform some needful action, do some task. Standing around crying has its place, but in almost any situation you’ll see a man retrieving tissues to give to his loved one – that’s an act of doing, how we cope when those we care about are suffering.
Today I was coping. Helping my family cope with the manifold complications that arose today. I met new family, extended family, and a member of that new family (pack?) had a problem with a bit of technology. I found myself acting without thinking, mindlessly responding. I popped out of my seat and offered to help fix the technological problem. I was playing out this theme of do’er, I was helping and that was my coping. It was an unusual feeling, I was bolt upright and swinging into action before I even really gave it any thought, it wasn’t something I had to weigh or even consider, it felt like a reflex. Someone had a problem that I could help with and up I went, reacting, doing, helping, fixing.
This has its uses, but it’s also a source of consternation and eventually conflict between the genders and even among ourselves. Men don’t feel. I like to pin the blame on the fact that in general, most men have very weak corpus callosums, while women tend to have bigger and more well-defined corpus callosums. This bit in the brain helps the two hemispheres communicate. The theory goes that the more nerve fibers between the hemispheres, the more overall cooperation between the hemispheres. Women can access and manipulate more of their emotional power because they have the hardware to do so, while men are running around, coping with the situation and coping with brains ill-suited to handling the highly integrative needs of a crisis. We can’t feel as well as women can, we have the emotions, but we can’t really ever do the same mental tricks that women can because the hardware wasn’t ever meant to actually do that. It gives me a cold comfort to know that my difficulty with expressing, harnessing, and controlling my emotions might be a purely mechanical matter. Instead of a comprehensive approach like women can achieve, men tend towards whichever their dominant hemisphere is. I am right-handed, therefore my dominant hemisphere is on the left. The left hemisphere specializes in mechanical things, matters of language and taking things apart and repair. I would bet money that when a male is stuffed in a fMRI scanner and forced into a highly stressful situation where coping is absolutely required the left side of their brains lights up like a christmas tree and the right side sparkles like blinking individual strands of christmas lights.
All this biology and psychology boils down to how we cope. Women want us to stop, to not do, to sit and cry and grieve and to feel with them. Rescue dogs want to find people, they don’t want to sit and take a moment, take in the totality of what happened and feel. Rescue dogs want to dig, tug, find people, do things.
I find myself giving advice and thinking about how we all react to stressful situations that demand coping. Males have to give women time to cope in their own way, and women need to understand that we, the rescue dogs, cope best by being able to act. I’ve found that once I understand my own gender-based deficiencies that understanding even stress between people who are attempting to cope is more clearly understood from my vantage point. Someday I may have enough mental fortitude to sit back and feel, but not really yet, I’m a boy, and quite firmly a rescue dog.