I was doing some googling on trichinosis and discovered that according to FDA regulations, the larvae are killed instantly at 144F.
So despite what people have been taught, there’s no need to cook pork to the consistency of shoe leather.
I nominate this for post of the month in misc.legal.moderated:
I recently lost a friendly wager to my wife. If I’d won, she had to take my car for its next oil change. Not too bad, right? Unfortunately, I lost. Now, I’m supposed to go to a local convenience store wearing a French maid’s outfit, handcuffs and leg irons with a note offering me up to do some light cleaning. Basically, the idea is that I don’t get the keys to the cuffs unless I come home with a note from the clerk at the store telling my wife that I made good on the bet.
My wife is going to call the store first to make sure they don’t mind my coming in, so I’m not worried that management will complain that I’m causing a disturbance or anything like that. I’ll probably go late at night, when there are likely to be fewer customers anyway. As for the maid’s outfit my wife bought for this occasion — as embarrassing as it is, it isn’t in any way revealing, so I can’t imagine there’s anything illegal about wearing that in public. And I’m assuming there isn’t a legal problem with me wearing the cuffs.
But, put it all together and it’s likely to be a pretty strange sight. So, my concern is what happens if I’m at Sunoco or wherever my wife sends me and a police officer shows up just to get a cup of coffee or whatever. Would I be in violation of any laws that I may not be aware of? Or, in other words, do I need to be worried about being arrested simply because this is so far out of the ordinary?
Aside from the bizarreness, I wouldn’t want this guy doing any negotiations for me. Win and your wife has to take the car for an oil change, lose and you have to do that? Not particularly comparable outcomes.
EDMOND, Okla. — Tasha Henderson got tired of her 14-year-old daughter’s poor grades, her chronic lateness to class and her talking back to her teachers, so she decided to teach the girl a lesson.
She made Coretha stand at a busy Oklahoma City intersection Nov. 4 with a cardboard sign that read: “I don’t do my homework and I act up in school, so my parents are preparing me for my future. Will work for food.”
(via)
This has been around forever, but I’ve not heard it for a while:
The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country, the Washington Post is read by the people who think they run the county, the New York Times is read by the people who think they should run the country and the Boston Globe is read by the people who used to run the country!
Though I’d say that way overstates the importance of the readers of the Globe. And speaking of the Globe, is there any paper in the country with such an inflated sense of self-importance?
I’ll prefix this by saying I believe pirates should be dealt with very harshly and that I view most of the “information wants to be free” crowd as lamers trying to develop a high-falutin’ rationalization for their thievery.
Despite all that, Sony has gone way too far. They are putting out so-called “copyright-protected” CDs which can only be played on a computer if you use the player that’s on the disc. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the player patches the Windows kernel to hide itself from spyware programs and disables your optical drive if you uninstall it (looks like you’d need to reinstall Windows to fix the damage).
Here’s the Washington Post blog entry on it and here’s the excellent forensics at the Sysinternals blog.
UPDATE:
You don’t need to re-install windows. You can delete the driver filter (see the Sysinternals blog) and get the optical drive working again.