Lift Up Your Hearts!

Researchers in England have determined that tea inhibits the activity of brain enzymes linked to Alzheimer's disease. They don't know yet if the effect works in vivo, but the report nontheless puts an extra feeling of satisfaction into my morning "cuppa." Both green and black tea have this salubrious effect, although green tea's benefits are more enduring.

Did you know that? Do you care? Probably not, unless you live in Boston.

A senator from Boston, with a name like Kerry? Of course he's Irish! At least that's what everyone thought, and—Boston politics being what they are—Kerry did not dispel the illusion. It was only when the Boston Globe hired a genealogist to look into Kerry's ancestry that it was revealed that he is not Irish at all, and that the Kerry name is only as old as his grandfather, who changed it from Kohn.

When the story broke, Kerry handled it well, pointing out that he had never actually claimed to be Irish, and took advantage of the opportunity to endear himself to another part of his constituency, proudly acknowledging his Jewish ancestors.

What difference does it make? Certainly none in this election. Boston voters can easily understand how someone might want to appear Irish, and as easily forgive him for the sake of his political views. Nonetheless, in a political culture that ferrets out, dissects, analyzes, and trumpets every insignificant detail of a candidate's history, proclaiming by word and action the triumph of trivia over larger truths—in such an atmostphere I'm astounded that I haven't heard more on the subject. I know about it because we lived in Massachusetts when the story broke, and it was a big event at the time.

Even Christianity Today, in an article on Kerry's eclectic religious background and beliefs, failed to mention the family's conversion to Catholicism, which surely must have played a part in the formation of his world view.

Merely asking the question is my own contribution to the trivialization of politics, but the silence still puzzles me.

Being originally a New Englander, Porter has been a Boston Red Sox fan since before he learned that those things he put on under his shoes were actually spelled s-o-c-k-s. He loves the team so much that he usually refuses to watch them play. (We lived near Boston for nearly two years, and never went to Fenway Park.) Demonstrating that paganism can still lurk in the deep recesses of a Christian's life, he is (or pretends to be) superstitious enough to believe he can jinx them just by watching. And I must admit that the anecdotal evidence is pretty strong. He has the opposite effect on the Yankees, too. During the first round of the playoffs this year, he watched seven seconds of a Yankees-Twins game, with Minnesota well ahead—just in time to see Rubin Sierra hit a three-run homer to tie the game, which the Yankees went on to win. Chastened, he watched not one second of the Boston-New York playoffs.

The Boston Red Sox are in the World Series! Will he let his intellectual knowledge that the universe is not run in such a way that his viewing habits can really affect the outcome of a baseball game overcome his gut feelings? Not tonight, anyway: we have a concert to go to.

I'm rooting for the Sox, too. How can you pass up a personal connection? Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek was in Porter's Sunday school class, and he graduated from our own Lake Brantley High School.

I've added a statistics section for the blog (thanks, Jon!). It's not as accurate as I would like, as apparently it only considers a post read if you've clicked to it directly: clicking on "more," "comments," "permalink," or one of the direct article or comment links on the sidebar, or coming from a search enginge -- anything that gets you to the article itself. For some reason, the computer can't tell if your eyes are scanning an article on one of the pages that shows you several at one time. :)

Thus articles that can be read completely from the main page are underrepresented in the count. But I still think the statistics will be interesting. Another useful thing is being able to tell how many visitors are online. So when I see that it's only one (that would be me), I know I can experiment with the format without driving someone else crazy.

Are you as annoyed as I am by the omnipresence of blaring television sets? It's bad enough to spend time waiting in a doctor's office or mechanic's lounge without the incessant television noise that splinters your concentration, so that you read the same passage in your book four times. (Maybe that's why those places are stocked with fluff-filled magazines.) How many times have you sat down to a nice restaurant meal with friends, expecting pleasant conversation, only to have everyone's eyes automatically swivel to the large-screen TV? The Orlando International Airport plays peaceful classical music throughout its terminals, surely designed to calm the nerves of frantic and impatient travellers. Too bad you can't hear it without the risk of missing your flight, because at the gates it's drowned out by clamoring television sets.

Mitch Altman to the rescue! The 48-year-old Silcon Valley inventor and entrepreneur finally turned his attention to one of his greatest annoyances, and invented the TV-B-Gone, a tiny universal remote control. Altman's black plastic keychain fob looks innocent enough, but wherever he goes, TV sets mysteriously darken. Here's a form of guerilla warfare I can sympathize with! Altman considers this the most helpful tool he's worked on, though he admits it isn't a cure-all:

Watching people staring past their beers in bars, spacing out behind the wheel at red lights and ignoring one another on the bus, it was clear that it would take more than a gadget to snap people entirely back to reality.

"What I really want," Altman said, "Is Life-B-Here."

Don't count on placing your order for the $14.99 device just yet. Existing stock sold out in two days, and the website was temporarily shut down, overwhelmed with traffic.

A study of German babies showed a higher risk of food allergies and diarrhea for those born by Caesarean section. The healthy, full-term babies were all exclusively breastfed for the first four months, during which time no such effect was seen. However, blood samples taken at 12 months showed that C-section babies were twice as likely as vaginally-delivered babies to have allergies to five common food allergens, including eggs, cow's milk, and soy protein. They were also 46% more likely to suffer from diarrhea during the first year.

These findings are consistent with previous research which demonstrated the importance of intestinal bacteria in the development of a healthy immune system. Babies who experience a normal delivery pick up vaginal, intestinal, and perianal microbes from their mothers. The risk to babies born by C-section includes not only deprivation of normal microbes, but also exposure to the unnatural microbial ecosystem peculiar to a hospital environment.

...to make a man. Or at least it improves the odds significantly, according to a study by Dr. Karen Norberg, a clinical associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "When parents were living together before the birth of one child, that child was 14% more likely to be male than when the parents were not living together before the birth," she reported, according to an article in today's Guardian.

Charles Darwin noted similar findings in 1874, giving some credence to the article's statement that this "is certainly not an effect of any bias from parents against daughters." Otherwise one could easily imagine single mothers preferring to raise daughters; not everyone, but enough to skew the statistics. Sex-selective abortion is frowned upon, but that doesn't prevent it. And it can have a huge impact.

Just ask the Chinese.

A study of premature infants suggests that delaying the clamping of the umbilical cord can reduce the need for blood transfusion in babies who are born too soon. A delay of only 30 seconds to two minutes was sufficient to provide significant benefit.

This news led me to search out a much more exhaustive discussion of umbilical cord issues, covering everything from conditions where immediate separation is necessary, to cord blood collection, to the "lotus birth," in which the placenta stays attached until the cord falls off the baby. Parents, midwives, and a few doctors speak out on issues that I had no idea were issues when I gave birth a quarter of a century ago. The concensus of this group is that delayed cord cutting is beneficial for full term babies (and their mothers) as well. Most of the debate seems to be between cutting the cord after the placenta stops pulsating, and waiting until the placenta is delivered.

With the nonchalance of season passholders, we spent the day at EPCOT’s International Food and Wine Festival. The park was not crowded by their standards, but it was by ours; we prefer to go when time spent waiting in line is minimal. Today, however, we found ourselves in line again, and again, and again…each time at a small booth with a long queue, that featured a different country’s food and drink. Portions were appetizer-sized, and prices were Disney-sized, but the idea was great. If the portions had been any larger, we wouldn’t have been able to enjoy so many tastes. It helps to have a partner in this situation: you wait in this line, I’ll wait in that one, then we’ll meet and share the food. It was a strategy that worked well.

Waiting in line was a social event, too. Floridians seem to have made an easy transition from exchanging hurricane preparation tips while in line at Home Depot, to exchanging food recommendations while waiting at EPCOT.

The food itself was variable. Between us, we experienced

• New Zealand: Green Lip Mussels (so-so; the preparation was good, but the mussels themselves were not, and certainly not up to the quality of the dish of the same name we enjoyed in Auckland.
• Ireland: Guiness Stew (a rather ordinary beef stew, but the flavor was quite good, and somehow comforting)
• Scandinavia: Cold Poached Salmon (one of the best, with a delicious lemon cream sauce)
• China: Dan Dan Noodles (all right, but bland); Chicken Sha Cha with Peanut Sauce (almost tasteless; were there any peanuts in the sauce at all?); Akadama Plum Wine (good, made the food more interesting)
• South Africa: Durban Spiced Chicken (wonderful! best dish of the day; lots of flavor)
• Italy (regular pavilion, not a Festival booth): tiramisu and chocolate mousse (both good, but the mousse triumphed)
• New England: free taste of Vermont Cabot sharp cheddar cheese (just about worth the price, not sharp at all)
• France: Escargot Provencal (almost as good as the Durban Spiced Chicken), Crêpe au Fromage et Jambon (not bad but nothing special)
• Poland: Nalewka Babuni Cherry Wine (recommended to us by someone who obviously never had to take cherry-flavored cough syrup as a child)
• Canada: Cheddar Cheese Soup (delicious, at least in a small portion, with detectable wine, bacon, and onion flavors in addition to the cheese)

Having run out of meals and appetite, we saved some other interesting pavilions (Southeast Asia, India, Morocco, and more) for another trip. Next time we’ll know to sign up early for the Twinings tea tasting.

We went to a high school football game tonight. It was a great night for it, cool enough for long pants and a sweatshirt, our first cool weather in months. We actually went to see the halftime show, which I understand is pretty good despite the efforts of four hurricanes to thwart practice. But there was no halftime show: the Marching Patriot Band played their music from the stands. Why? I'm not sure, except that it's technically Fall Break, and a significant portion of the band was elsewhere. (Why the sports teams, band, cheerleaders, and associated people should be deprived of their Fall Break time is another issue.) Even so, it sounded pretty good. Too bad those people at the gate thought we paid our $12 to see the football team.

Ah, well, it was a fun night anyway. We had friends to talk with during the first half, and the second half had several exciting plays, exciting even to me, whose interest in football is something less than one of those mathematical epsilons.... Besides, there's nothing quite like a Band Booster hamburger.

This is the first year there is no one in the band who was there when we were involved. Some siblings, though. And they still play the same songs.

Finally, researchers are beginning to pay serious attention to the frightening rise in allergies and asthma among children. For too long it has seemed to me to be something that was just accepted and dealt with. We can ban peanuts from airplanes and peanut butter from school snacks; we can turn once again to the drug companies in our search for relief for our children's problems; but better than palliative measures would be to discover and eliminate the cause of this scourge.

What has changed for children, that their immune systems are compromised? Why has peanut butter, that staple of childhood, suddenly become deadly? Could it be pollutants in their environment? Side effects of the greatly-increased number of childhood vaccines? The lack, for so many children, of the immune system boost provided by breastfeeding? Hormones, antibiotics, and other chemicals unnaturally introduced into our food? The rise of day care and preschool, exposing infants and young children to a barrage of disease germs? Or—the "hygiene hypothesis"—is our children's environment too clean, too sterile, for proper development of their immune systems?

Whatever the answer—and it's bound to be something complicated, rather than a single solution—it's a question that hasn't had the priority it deserves.

One recent study suggests a link between food allergies, asthma, and vitamin supplements for infants. The increased risk was greater for blacks than for whites, and for formula-fed babies than for those who were breastfed.

The article mentions the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommendation that exclusively breasfed infants receive vitamin D supplements. It seems to me that if breastmilk does not contain adequate vitamin D for infants, it must mean that our children were designed to receive vitamin D from exposure to sunlight—a much more pleasant, and natural, solution to the problem. But the AAP doesn't like sunshine, either....

I have been working on a project that involves gluing two sheets of cardstock together, then laminating the result with clear contact paper. It's a bit of work, but seemed more reasonable than purchasing a $200 laminating machine.

Maybe not. I had been pleased with the results, but noticed that the rubber cement seal was coming apart in some places. No problem, I thought, I'll just slip in a little extra rubber cement. That appeared to be a fine solution, until I returned to my work an hour later and discovered that the solvent from the rubber cement had apparently penetrated the card stock and dissolved the adhesive on the contact paper, leaving a mess of wrinkles and bubbles. :(

Time to figure out Plan B.

Research by a team of Italian researchers suggests a genetic link between homosexuality and fertility.

A study of 98 homosexual men, 100 heterosexual men, and their relatives (4600 people) indicates that female maternal relatives of homosexual men tend to have more children than female maternal relatives of heterosexual men. This was not true of female paternal relatives.

The lead researcher, Professor Andrea Camperio-Ciani, of Padua University, attributed to his 15-year-old daughter the idea that there is a genetic factor linked to both homosexuality and high birth rates. This, she suggested, could help explain the anti-intuitive persistence of genes, such as the so-called "gay gene" (Xq28) that apparently contribute negatively to the production of offspring.

Prof. Camperio-Ciani stressed that his study explained only 20 per cent of the variance in sexual orientation of males; otherwise homosexuality would be much more common. "The remaining 80 per cent has yet to be understood," he writes. "It could—and in fact partly is—due to cultural and individual experience, or even by undiscovered biological factors."

Most intriguing is the conclusion that the incidence of homosexuality can be expected to be greater in societies with declining birth rates, because the influence of this genetic factor is more significant.

I'm experimenting with different colors and styles for my blog, so don't be shocked if it feels a bit like a boat in rough seas for a while.

No Christian can rule out the possibility that he may be called upon to be a martyr. Be that as it may, I don't believe any of us is called to be a masochist.

In today's sermon we learned that God intends worship to be—among other things—fun. I'm not quarrelling with that, only mentioning it to make the point that I do not, in general, consider pain to be fun.

At the service we usually attend this is rarely a problem, but today we went to the later service because it was Porter's turn to close up afterwards. Alas, I had forgotten to bring the earplugs that are of necessity my nearly constant companions these days. I survived until the offertory, during which I observed an interesting psychological phenomenon. At first I felt claustrophobic, as I was trapped in the middle of the pew, bombarded with increasingly painful sound. Then I started to shut down, closing off as much as possible all awareness of the world around me. It almost worked—until I decided that that wasn't a very sane thing to do, and was certainly no way to worship. At that point, I stopped caring what other people thought, and simply put my hands over my ears until the song was done. Then I was safe until Communion, after which I was conveniently able to slip outside until the drums and guitars ceased.

I will certainly be glad when Porter's locking-up duties are over, and we can go back to the "old folks' service." It used to be the elderly who were hardest of hearing, but these days I find that the volume of a church service tends to be inversely proportional to the average age of the congregation.