A FEW NOTES OF IRREVERENCE

There are 73 days left this year.  This has not been a good one for me, so I'm looking forward to 2014.    By the way, if you are following my tribulations, my night #2 on Garcinia Cambogia produced no dreams I could remember.  Historically, nothing much happened in history today.  The best I could find are:

• University of Heidelberg in Germany held its first lecture in 1386.
• Mother Theresa was beatified in 2003, which means she is one step away from sainthod.  However, in 2009 it was revealed she had lost her faith, so this could become a problem.  No Pope has ever won a Nobel Prize.  She was awarded this medal in 1979.  (A photo when she was younger.)

The only national holiday today is Mother Theresa Day in Albania (her birth country--although she was born in former Yugoslavia Macedonia).

A few other notes of near irreverence:

• Andy Warhol's Coca-Cola (3), painted in 1962, will go on sale next month, and the expectation is a bid of $60 million.  This sum can educate two thirds of a million children in Africa and provide 60% of the daily food requirement.  However, the odds are high that not a penny will be used for this purpose.

• If you don't like your cabbage to turn blackish, just store it in a zip-loc bag in your refrigerator.  It will stay green for weeks.

• Half of the daily calories for half the world's population come from rice.  People are more and more eating brown rice because it is perceived as being more healthful, for example, lowering the risk of type 2 diabetes and cholesterol.  Both brown and white have the hull removed.  To get white rice, the outer layer, which contain most of the nutrients, is polished off.  The more expensive sakes polish off a lot more and only use the core.  Many think that brown rice has some of the outer fiber still attached.  Not so.  What is becoming a growing concern, though, is that arsenic also can be found in brown rice (not white).  Arsenic causes cancer!  U.S. long rain rice has the HIGHEST mean arsenic level, except that California rice appears to be okay.  If you mostly eat only white rice, get reassured by reading:

                FDA’s Reassurance On Arsenic In Rice Not So Reassuring

Am I then recommending that you eat white rice?  No, but I plan to continue sticking to white because it just tastes and/or feels better.  I might, though, get a small bag of non-American (or, maybe, California) brown rice known to have low arsenic and try a blind taste test.

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The strongest ocean storm of the year, Super Typhoon Francisco, is now at 160 MPH and still strengthening:

AccuWeather shows this projection:

Based on computers models I've seen, it seems probable that the eye will move between the red arrow and right orange arrow.  I would thus avoid being on a ship along the east coast of Japan this week.

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