Martha's Blog

I like making lists. This one is about the biggest lies we hear almost every day. Most of us don’t believe these lies, but a few really naive folks may believe at least some of them.

“Your call is really important to us”.  The truth is they just wish you would hang up.

“We take this issue very seriously”. The truth is one of the following; they got caught doing something unethical, there was a
product failure or someone made a big booboo (like putting a lizard in your salad) and they wish no one had found out.

“Get a $xx rebate!”  The truth is you will forget to mail it in the time frame allowed (some as few as 5 days), they will claim they didn’t receive it if you did mail it or they will lie and say you didn’t send in all the required documents. (Disclaimer,some companies will do the right thing, not all of them are crooks.)

“I promise” The biggest lie of all. Politians promise anything to get elected. Once they are elected, all of the promises turn out to be fairy dust. (Fairy dust doesn’t exist.)

“We care”. Any statement by politians, companies or large corporations starting with these words is a blatant lie. What they do care about is your vote, either by going to the polls or making a purchase.

“Ask your doctor” The drug manufacturers know you probably don’t need this outrageously expensive drug. They have bribed your doctor with food, merchandize and other goodies so when you “ask your doctor” he will prescribe this drug that may not
have been thoroughly tested and probably has some very unpleasant side effects up to and including death.

I know there are more of these big lies, if you know of some more, let me know!

Martha

Sometimes I wonder about stuff, like why does my pimento cheese spread have egg yolks as one of the ingredients? Cheese and pimentos yes, but egg yolks? But at least I understood ‘egg yolks’ even if I can’t figure out why they put them in my cheese spread. Some of those other ingredients are a complete mystery!

I know most people don’t read the list of ingredients that are in the products they buy. I understand why they don’t read those lists; most folks don’t have a degree in chemistry. I don’t have a degree in chemistry either, but I feel compelled to read the ingredient lists anyway.

I am slowly but surely removing products from my ‘buy’ list. The first list of things I removed have a nasty ingredient, ‘partially hydogenated oil’. This stuff is poison! Artery clogging poison! This made my ‘don’t buy’ list get a lot longer as a bunch of food processors seem to think they have to put this artery clogger in just about everything. Bakers put it in cookies, companies like Kraft put it in everything! And just because the ingredients say ’0′ transfat, don’t believe it! Check the ingredients. If partially hydogenated oil is listed, the product contains transfat. (Lies!)

Somewhere I read that if Grandma wouldn’t recognize an ingredient, you shouldn’t eat it. I don’t remember where I read that, but I have decided that’s a good thing to remember. The upside of changing my buy list is my grocery bill has gone down. (I don’t go down the cookie aisle any more.)The downside is I have to cook almost everything from ‘scratch’ and I really don’t like to cook!

You would think that not buying all that stuff would make me lose weight. Not true, even though I am not fond of cooking, I am fond of eating what I cook! Sigh!

Martha

Could have fooled me!

According to my latest issue of Consumer Reports, “spam, spyware and virus have declined ‘significantly in the past few years”. They got this information on their new ‘State of the Net survey’.

Consumer Reports has in the past been considered by me to be a reliable source of information about just about everything. But this little tad of information has me totally bewildered. What kind of folks were taking this survey? This statement makes me wonder about all of the other reports they publish.

On the contrary, Consumer Reports! Spam, spyware and virus have NOT declined significantly in the past few yeas, but are more and more prolific all the time! Since 2006 the total amount of spam in email has increased from 56% to 80%! Anyone who has used the same email address for any length of time can vouch for that. (Unless they have a really industrial strength spam filter. Even then spam gets through.)
Source: Spam Report

Spyware has changed it’s face so maybe some folks think it’s down. The ‘change’ has involved more rootkits, key loggers, Trojans and worms, all designed to steal your money and identity. New virus are being intoduced every day. I suspect the folks who took that survey probably are mostly behind corporate firewalls with an IT department working feverishly to prevent all of the bad suff from ever reaching the work stations of clueless users.

They should have sent the survey to those techs working behind the scenes!

All of the above reinforces the old saying ‘Don’t believe everything you hear or read’. (And now with PhotoShop you can’t believe everything you see either)

Martha

We have this little mimosa tree in our back yard.

I grew it from a seedling. Fate keeps trying to discourage it from surviving, but it just keeps chugging along. In April this year we had a hail storm. A bad hail storm. In fact, at the time of this writing, the roofers are on top of the house now removing the hail-damaged shingles and replacing them with new un-damaged shingles.

The hail really beat up this little tree. It had big gouges in the bark. Nature being the survivor that is, caused a new tiny bud to sprout in each of the gouges and before long the little tree was really showing new growth in a wonderful way.

Then we had another storm, this time it was wind. Wind gusts up to 70 miles an hour and this ferocious wind lasted all day! It blew and blew and blew the fence almost down. The wind didn’t hurt the tree, however the consequences of the wind certainly did!

We share fences with our neighbors in this area. The folks behind us have dogs. Well everybody in this neighborhood has dogs, but the folks behind us have big dogs. One is a curious husky. He managed to get through the half blown down fence and explored our yard.

“A tree! What’s this stuff on the tree? Yummy! “This curious pup pulled the bark off one whole side of the tree! I saw him do it from the kitchen window. My neighbors chose this time to be gone of course and the pup being a suspicious canine would not let us get close to him. So we spent the next three hours trying to coax him back to his yard and keeping him from eating the rest of the bark from the tree.

Eventually the neighbors returned home and so did the pup. A temporary fence fix kept him at home until more permanent repairs could be made.  In the meantime we watched our little tree wondering if it would make it. Many of the new branches slowly turned yellow and died. Slowly several brown spots showed on the stark white left after the bark was ‘liberated’. Is it a fungus? Or is it new bark? The yellowing leaves are not as many now and the tree even bloomed.

I have heard it is hard to kill a mimosa tree and I believe it. It looks like the tree will make it. Unless something else happens.

Martha

I did something today I haven’t done in years. I mowed some of the lawn and I used a push mower. Not a gas powered push mower either, an old fashioned push mower.

Yep, I now know for sure, I’m not as young as I used to be. That’s obvious every time I see myself in the mirror. But for some reason that didn’t really make me KNOW.

Notice I said I mowed some of the lawn. I decided I wasn’t ready to die, so I quit while I was still breathing, although I was still breathing hard!

But since I don’t want to be a quitter, I got a cold wet washrag, washed my face and back to mowing. I decided to take a break and went back in the house. My son decided to finish the job so I wouldn’t kick the bucket. (I was almost through, he needn’t have worried!) So now the lawn needed trimming and away I go trimming. This wasn’t bad at all and I am not as hot as I was mowing.

I finished up and came back in the cool house and looked for my wet washrag to mop my face.  I looked everywhere and couldn’t find it. Then I remembered where it was. It was on the back of my neck, keeping me cooler.

I told you I am not as young as I used to be and neither is my memory!

Martha

I learned something new yesterday. You can buy pasteurized eggs!  When I saw a recipe for silk pie in the newspaper that called for pasteurized eggs, I thought it was a hoax or someone who just didn’t know better. Wouldn’t a pasteurized egg be boiled? After all I think the definition of ‘pasteurize’ is to heat something, usually milk, to a temperature high enough to kill bacteria.  Heating an egg to that temperature would surely boil it, right? Maybe not.

Apparently, so goes the theory, you can heat the egg long enough to kill the bacteria and it still won’t be cooked. Since a lot of recipes call for ‘raw’ eggs, this should be a great way to avoid the wicked salmonella that keeps popping up in everything these days.

You can even pasteurize your own eggs yourself! Recipezaar has the method on their site.

There are a lot of entries in Google about pasteurized eggs. Most of them are asking questions about them.  But I did find several interesting articles about milk and shell eggs with extended shelf lives.

This article, ULTRAPASTEURIZED & PASTEURIZED FOOD, on Chemical & Engineering News was really the most informative and makes more sense than most.

I buy ultrapasteurized milk. It is also organic and rather pricey, but since the regular milk goes bad long before I use it all and has to be thrown away, I think it is cost effective. But I have never seen pasteurized eggs for sale in any of my local markets. I think it is a good idea though, and maybe they will eventually sell those ‘safer’ eggs.

Have you ever bought pasteurized eggs?

Things that have fine print usually/may have stuff you need to know.  Most people don’t read the fine print because it’s too hard to read. Some manufacturers/programers hope you won’t read the fine print. I suspect that’s why it’s written in fine print. Sometimes the print is so small you can’t read it without a high powered magnifying glass.

Popular Drugs have a lot of fine print. Mostly about the side affects. On TV they tell you about the side affects, but apparently people don’t listen to the ‘fine print’ either.
The fine print with the things they have to tell you about.

A lot of software has fine print as well. Usually it’s a disclaimer telling you they are not repsonsible if their software trashes your computer. Makes you wonder if it has trashed someone’s computer.

One thing that really gets to me is all of the warnings that are printed in fine print on a lot of consumer products.
Some of those warnings.  Apparently the reason for some of these ‘fine prints’ are because some idiot did just what the warning says not to do. The manufacturers have to protect themselves from lawsuits by stupid people.

So be sure to read the fine print! I try but I don’t always have the magnifying glass handy.

Martha

As a general rule the assumption is that change is usually good. Notice I said ‘assumption’.

So far this year I have noticed a number of changes and most of them are not good.

I guess the biggest change is known by the local news pundits as ‘pain at the pump’. Since I am retired and pretty much a stay at home person, that change hasn’t affected me as much as the folks who have to drive to work in order to be able to pay the bills. Where I live public transportation is not generally an option as it is either very limited or not available. This is mostly due to urban sprawl and the fact most of the American people have long had a love affair with the automobile.

Another change is how much the interest rates have gone down. I guess that change is good for some folks, but I suspect it is good mostly for big business and not for the ‘little guys’. The people who carry a lot of credit card debt don’t seem to be benefiting any from the interest rates as not many credit card companies are lowering rates for those folks.

I don’t carry debt on credit cards so that doesn’t affect me. But what does affect me is how much less money I earn on my savings. Another change I could have done without.

A huge unwelcome change is how much more money it takes to buy groceries! Every time I shop for food something or several somethings have gone up in price and not by just a little bit either.

The big box retailers are trying to cut costs and most of them are doing that by cutting employees and as for customer service, that’s practically non-existant now. So the poor customers are left with no one to help them make purchases and sometimes it’s even hard to find someone to take their money. I wonder if those big box retailers realize that all of this ‘saving money’ is costing them more money in the long run?

Now the politicians are promising ‘change’. So far all I have heard just makes me wonder, ‘what kind of change?’ I have always laughed at the old joke about ‘how you can tell if a politician is lying, his lips are moving’. I am beginning to think ‘change’ is a bad joke, and the joke is on us.

Martha

I don’t usually like commercials. I suspect most of the viewers of the boob tube feel the same way. However we have all come to realize that commercials are the price we pay for free viewing content.

One of the biggest gripe about commercials is the fact they are so much louder than the programs. Some of them really blast out so that the mute button gets hit immediately. You would think the advertisers would have realized that by now, but it is very apparent they haven’t. I don’t know for sure who is to blame for this blasting of ads, the TV stations or someone else.

Some commercials can be quite entertaining, like some of the Geico and Capitol One ads. Some of the time I even watch those, except after awhile they begin to pall.

But some commercials just go a bit too far and fall into the ‘Quick, hit the mute button’ for most of us. Most of the ‘quick hit the mute button’ are the really obnoxious commercials like ‘Head on’ and there was a Vonage commercial that was really bad. Some more fit this category, but the ones that come to mind now are those terribly annoying commercials that want me to call now and order those junky products. What bargains they are! They will make my life so much easier! And just about all of them are only $19.95 (plus
shipping and handling). But Wait! If I order now, I will get a second product free! (In small print, plus shipping and handling. That makes it NOT free. Most all charge $7.99 for shipping and handling.)

The majority of these products are being touted by a guy named Billy Mays who must think we are all hard of hearing because he is shouting all during this spiel.

I think the mute button has to be one of the better inventions for the television industry. I sure use mine a lot!

Martha

Here’s more proof I was born 40 years too soon!

People under 30 don’t just sleepwalk, they use their cell phones in their sleep. If you don’t believe me just ‘Google’ sleep texting.

That’s something that I find hard to believe, but apparently it’s true. The experts seem to think it’s true. I am not so sure. I have heard that people have been know to drive, eat and do a lot of other things in their sleep. Since I don’t have any of those problems as far as I know, it’s hard for me to understand. (If I do those things in my sleep, how would I know?)

I just don’t understand the need to be ‘connected’ at every waking moment. I do have a cell phone, but it’s turned off most of the time. I have it for emergency use only.

The local news stations tell me I can access the weather news on my cell phone. Sounds handy, but I can do that on my computer. They say I can access the weather on my cell phone when the power goes off. I have a laptop and it runs off a battery when the power goes off.

Personally I don’t want that phone to become like a third part of me. I already have a third extension; my computer! However, when I leave the house I leave the computer at home. If I decide to work in the yard (I do occasionally), the computer is in the house, not attached to my body.

When I go shopping I concentrate on shopping. When I go to bed I certainly don’t take the cell phone to bed with me. I hear a lot of folks do that as well. When I am driving I need to be focused on where I am going and the traffic around me, not yapping on the phone.

Some jerk yapping on his phone changed lanes right in front of me once and I nearly hit him. He didn’t use signals, just pulled over. I hit my brakes and horn at the same time. He just kept yakking. It’s a good thing no one was tail-gateing me or I would have been hit from behind.

I don’t have a problem with other people using cell phones where ever they may be, but I think they shouldn’t use them while driving.

I told you I was born 40 years too soon. If I had been born 40 years later, I probably would have a cell phone attached to me somewhere, more than likely my ear!

Martha