Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
Rampaging red squirrels in France Kashmiri militants, meet bear. Bear, eat militants. Dead bison stink really bad: South Dakota meat producer abandons meat storage locker full of 44 tons of kosher bison, and the power gets cut for nonpayment.
I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all. But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to [...]
Due to overload on the family (and that I’m unable to handle the mower at present) we depend on a mowing service to come over and do the lawn – a very nice operation, really, and we recommend them to any locals that might need it. But the dogs have been plagued recently with some [...]
One thing that struck me at the hospital, by the way, listening to the news rolling in about the rapid advance of swine flu, is the issue of sheer, blind panic. I remember at various times in my life when people blindly struck out at Those People as representatives of Some Other People that they [...]
From the ChiTown Daily News and Chicago Journal: on work towards rehabbing the Cafe to meet the standards laid down for re-opening, and also on on the past history of the Cafe’s health violations from a FOIA of the Chicago Health Department. One local very right-wing and abrasive blogger, who really can’t stand the owners [...]
The Heartland has a big reopen-soon-better-than-ever sign out front, as they clean out the joint, and the health department sign is obscured so that passers by can’t see it and know what happened. Other nearby similar violations at an Einstein Bagels.
Health inspectors closed down the Heartland Cafe, a Rogers Park institution (Chicago), for serious health code violations. The Cafe’s website, on the other hand, claims: HEARTLAND CAFE CLOSED FOR SPRING CLEANING We apologize for any inconvenience Please check back for our re-opening celebration Some spring cleaning. Here’s some negative recent postings on this issue.
Camembert fanciers have pushed back on laws that require it to be made with pasteurized milk only. Bristol Palin, teenaged mom, now says that abstinence-only sex-ed courses are not realistic at all…no kidding! The US Postmaster General, who says the US Post Office needs to cut services one day a week and raise prices for [...]
The Peanut Corporation of America, the slimeballs responsible for the salmonella cases (and deaths) nationwide, has gone into Chapter 7 bankruptcy (liquidation of assets). My guess is that the corporate veil is about to riddled full of holes and that the people in charge there are going to be broke one way or another via [...]
The new Secretary of Agriculture is calling for changing the focus of USDA away from ‘anything the regulated community wants’ to serving the consumer of the food. I’ll believe it when I see it, considering USDA’s past track record on meat and poultry inspection in particular (my mom was a very conscientious inspector for 30 [...]