Flea Fever

It's that time of year again (depending on where in the world you are) that spring has hit and the fleas are out in full force. Fleas have been blamed for many health problems including the plague, and also carry tapeworms which can be transmitted to your pets and to people. The best way to prevent fleas is to use a monthly flea preventative on all of your pets regardless of whether your animals go outside. If you have very young pets that cannot have monthly preventatives, you can bathe them with Dawn dishsoap- works great! Popular and effective flea preventatives are Frontline, Revolution, and most recently Comfortis. There are many others, but these are the newest, most effective, and safest products out there. Many of the cheap products from Hartz and Bio Spot have been known to cause extreme illness, seizures, and death in cats and smaller dogs. You also have to be careful where you buy your good products. Many stores and internet companies are now selling Frontline and Revolution and claim they are the same as what you get at the vet. Surprise, surprise, they are not. The companies that make and sell the product sell only to licensed veterinarians and have no idea how these other places are getting these products. Are they from rogue veterinarians selling excess stock? Perhaps counterfeit product? Or foreign products that are made by the same counterpart companies but go through testing different from the FDA? Afterall, just because it's good enough for Europe are we sure we trust the safety tests they have done on it (and vice versa)? All of these situations have been discovered at one time or another.

Twinkie Ingredient #1 Enrichment Blend

Ferrous sulfate, or iron comes from the United States- the only ingredient in the enrichment blend that comes from the United States. At the steel mills, iron ore is baked into steel and squeezed into long sheets up to 1,400 feet long, and rinsed with sulfuric acid to remove the crusty oxide scales that automatically form on the new steel. After several sheets of steel have been through the sulfuric acid, it becomes saturated with iron and is pumped out to be separated. Iron sulfate crystals drop to the bottom of the tank and the sulfuric acid is poured off to be reused later. The crystals are ground into a fine dust and used to enrich Twinkies or in a number of other ways such as fabric dyes, inks, water purification, or weed killer. When cheaper, the food companies will use reduced iron instead of ferrous sulfate. Reduced iron is made when iron has reacted with carbon monoxide and/or hydrogen to get ferric oxide (better known as rust) which is ground to an ultra fine powder and used as ferrous sulfate. This product is less expensive and not as strong as ferrous sulfate and comes from India or China.

Niacin (B3) is made in Switzerland from 3 basic materials: water, air, and petroleum. The petroleum is processed under extreme heat and pressure into methane, ethylene, and hydrogen (among a multitude of other things). Air is liquefied and distilled to separate the nitrogen from the oxygen and the nitrogen is mixed with the hydrogen under high heat and pressure to make ammonia. The ammonia is mixed with oxygen to make nitric acid. Ethylene and Acetylene are mixed under pressure with water and a rare platinum catalyst to make acetaldehyde, a flammable liquid which is processed and mixed with ammonia. The ammonia/acetaldehyde blend is mixed with some of the nitric acid and niacin is the result.

Thiamine Mononitrate (B1) was the first vitamin to be discovered in the late 1800's by Dutch scientist Christiaan Eiijkman. There are a variety of ways that the vitamin is made and each company closely guards their secret. In most cases, thiamine mononitrate is made with coal tar (yum!) that may (depending on the company) be treated with hydrogen peroxide, active carbon, ammonium nitrate, nitric acid, and washing alcohol. Believe it or not, they say it is edible at this point, but they do let it dry into crystals and turn it into a fine powder before mixing it with our flour. Some overachieving companies further react it with methanol, hydrochloric acid, and ethanol to make thiamine hydrochloride, another version of the vitamin found in manufactured foods.

Riboflavin (B2) is my personal favorite. Often yeast or bacteria is fermented, with candida yeast being a commonly used variety. Makers of monistat must be proud. Ashbya gossypii fungus and bacillus subtilis, or spent beer grain recycled from beer companies can also be used. The vitamin is taken out of the fermentation broth by many complex processes including: concentration, purification, crystallization, drying and milling. Once created riboflavin is a deep orange color which is used as a natural yellow food coloring. People who eat excessive amounts of riboflavin will have a bright yellow urine. Riboflavin is necessary to allow us to grow and convert food into energy. Insufficient amounts of riboflavin also lead to cracks and sores around the mouth and nose, light-sensitive eyes, and a sore tongue.

Folic acid was naturally discovered by the British. Never having been known for their great culinary skills, English and Australian people often use marmite on their toast. Marmite is a dark, yeast based substance similar to jelly that tastes (I've heard) like a salty, bitter, awful form of molasses. In the 1930's Dr. Lucy Wills discovered that a certain kind of anemia could be cured with marmite. Folic acid is the manufactured version of B9 or folate, and is better absorbed by the body when in the synthetic form. This vitamin was added to the enrichment blend in 1993. Though discovered in England, folic acid is made in China using both fermented and petroleum products. The fermentation is done in cane molasses, tapioca starch, or cornstarch. The rest is made with glutamic acid (the one that makes MSG when mixed with sodium), a form of acetone (found in nail polish remover), pteroic acid, benzoic acid, paraffin and butyric acid (butyric acid is also used in the Twinkie artificial butter flavoring). This mix is refined, reduced in acidity, purified with zinc and magnesium salts, crystallized, dried, and sterilized until only a fine dark powder is left over.

All of these ingredients get mixed together and added to all of our flours by law. With Twinkies, we get to add many more products as well including everyone's favorite, sugar, which we'll talk about next time.

The Wonderful World of Webkinz Farming

Designed for children age 6-13, Webkinz are stuffed toys that come with a secret code which allows the child to enter them onto a website and have a fully-functional cyber pet that lives in Webkinz World and wants nothing more than to interact with the child. It is a perfect environment for teaching children how to use a computer, especially one with a windows feel in a flash environment, learn the value of money as they need to earn kinzcash before being able to buy clothes, food, furniture and toys for their pets, and interact safely with all other members of Webkinz World. While I said the site is designed for children, honestly only 38% of the people I know on it fall within the above age range. Regardless, the site does do an excellent job of keeping people safe by not showing any full names (even though all names are supposed to be made up) and allowing chatting between people to be done only by a list of preset statements and questions- no typing your own messages allowed. Sometimes I think they went a little bit in the wrong direction in some areas (customer service is also done by a drop down menu of preset questions). My biggest beef with them is money. The most common way of earning money in Webkinz is by playing games. Seriously- who wants their kid thinking they can go to the arcade for a few hours and come back loaded with extra cash?
I didn't want to set a bad example for my Webkinz pets (I have 10), so I set up a new system for earning money. We farm. The site has made it possible to plant your own vegetable garden and harvest from it. You can plant pumpkins, watermelons, carrots, cabbage, corn, strawberries, and tomatoes. Each vegetable needs to be checked for weeds (if not done within a few days the weeds will kill your plant) and watered (if not done you will get 20-25% more weeds in the garden) daily until you can harvest in 7-12 days.
Most people have a small patch, but deciding to earn my money the hard way, I bought 6 outdoor yards and completely filled them with vegetables of different varieties giving me a total of 619 individual plots of vegetables which we harvest daily and sell. I've been working on this project for about a month now and have learned a lot about the Webkinz way of farming. Here are some facts I learned the hard way.
The vegetable seeds cost different amounts and each type of vegetable grows at a different rate of speed, yields a different amount (or range of possible amounts) at each harvest, sells for a different price, and will satisfy the hunger of your pet to a different degree if fed to them. Based on the above criteria, the crops are in order from best to worst value are: strawberry, corn, carrot, watermelon, cabbage, pumpkin, and tomato. In fact, the tomatoes are such a bad deal that I ripped all of mine up to replace with strawberries. To give you an estimate of the difference, a single plot of strawberries will, in the average month, produce $63 in saleable goods where a single plot of tomatoes will, in the same time, produce $30 in saleable goods. It may seem like it isn't worth it to spend the time to care for the vegetables but in this past month I've earned an average of $930.11 per day in my vegetable sales for a total of $17,672 to date (keep in mind I had to wait over a week for my first harvest and I'm taking my average counting only from my harvest days, not all days from planting). On the other hand, I still haven't begun earning a profit as it cost me $37,155 to buy the land, the original seeds, and the new seeds to replace my tomato plants. Twenty-one more days like this and I will be debt-free. It will then be pure profit, Baby. Pure profit! I have been supplementing my income by sending one of the pets to the employment office each day where they can earn $100-$250 up to twice a day if I time it right.
I guess the moral of this blog entry is: Some people have too much time on their hands, and others have WAY too much time on their hands. As you're reading the random ramblings of a stranger, who are you to judge?

Twinkie Ingredient #1 Continued

We have already seen how the flour is created from the grains, but now we need to prematurely age the flour to whiten and oxidize it. Back in the "good old days" after flour was made it was left to sit for several months before use. This settling whitened the flour by letting the natural pigments break down and let the protein in the grain also break down to make a lighter, fluffier flour for use in cakes.Frankly, in our modern society of instant gratification, we can't wait that long. Instead of letting the process happen naturally, we help it along, also without the bleaching process, adding the same amount of sugar to the flour would make it the consistency more like a pound cake In order to get nice, white, light flour, we need bleach.
Yes, that's right. Chlorine, the same chlorine used to keep our pools clean and our whites bright is what they use. It might sound scary, but chlorine is the tenth most common chemical made in the United States, it is used in 85% of all our pharmaceuticals, purifies 90% of our drinking water, and is used in about half of all chemicals made in the United States. Granted, due to security reasons the locations of such plants are not easy to discover and no one is allowed to just walk in and visit casually. That's because chlorine is highly toxic and potentially explosive and would make a terrorist piddle himself with glee to think he could damage one of these plants.
Chlorine is found in many places naturally, but always mixed with another substance, such as NaCl, or salt. This is what they use to make the chlorine gas used for our Twinkies. A large tub of salt water is given a huge jolt of electricity and the particles separate, just as it was first envisioned by Michael Faraday (English chemist in case you were wondering) in the 1800's. The electricity hits the water and the chlorine separates from the sodium while the hydrogen separates from the oxygen and luckily each of these elements go to different sides of the enclosure because if the chlorine and hydrogen get together they will explode. The left behind sodium hydroxide, or caustic soda, will be used in a bunch of other food products like sodium caseinate, sodium stearoyl lactylate, artificial coloring, corn flour, soybean oil, vegetable shortening, and soy protein isolate.
For safety's sake, chlorine is usually shipped in large pressurized tanks that are bullet proof. They also like to say accident proof, but ask Graniteville, S.C. about that. Once these tanks arrive at the flour mill they are hooked up in an airtight, high-security, hazardous materials bungalow and allowed to trickle the chlorine into an agitator in the mill while the flour passes through, pushed along by 5 in. long maple paddles. The reaction occurs instantly, and our Twinkies flour passes out of the agitator in just seconds.
Now we have the white oxidized flour we needed, but due to legislation we have to enrich it. Enrichment is adding back in to foods nutrients which were destroyed during the processing. This is completely different from fortification in which they add nutrients to foods that never had nutrients to begin with. Odd to think with Twinkies that we are using the process of enrichment. Regardless, the enrichment blend includes ferrous sulfate and B vitamins, niacin, thiamine, mononitrate (B1), riboflavin (B2), and folic acid. Each of these were chosen in the enrichment blend to aid in fending off certain diseases like pellagra and beriberi- I don't know anyone who's had one of these diseases, so they must be doing a good job. Most of these vitamins are created rather than taken from fresh fruits and vegetables because it is more cost effective, easier to regulate the strength of the vitamin, and to regulate the quality. Unfortunately it is very hard to manufacture these chemicals without a lot of pollution, so we often have the enrichment blends created in places like India or China- looks like lead may be in there too! I'll come back to the particulars of the blend- much sooner than I got back to the bleaching process at a later date.

Financial Milestone Exceeded

I am pleased to announce that this website has now earned over $25! The third of nine milestones on my quest for $1 million has been reached, so, in a sense, I am one-third of the way to my goal.

As always, thanks for your support.

$1 - Exceeded!

$5 - Exceeded!

$25 - Exceeded!

$100

$500

$1000

$50,000

$250,000

$1,000,000

What's Become of Ask.com's Jeeves?

I was lately discussing one of my favorite topics, search engines, with a colleague, and the conversation turned to everyone's favorite information butler, Jeeves. He formerly had his own website, AskJeeves.com, but had apparently been snubbed when the site changed to simply Ask.com in February, 2006.

According to Ask.com (or at least the British version of this site, which Jeeves is presumably more involved with), Jeeves is in retirement and is cruising around the world on his much-loved boat. I, for one, am quite relieved, as I feared that he may have become another victim of layoffs or perhaps even age discrimination.

I wish Jeeves all the best in his retirement!

(On a related note, Ask.com has just this week changed focus and will no longer be competing directly against Google or Yahoo!. Instead, according to MSNBC, it has presumably fine-tuned its algorithm to focus on a "narrower market consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives.")

141 Years Late Is Better Than Never

Congratulations are in order to Alexandre Dumas for his new book released only 141 years after his previous books. Dumas, famous for novels such as The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Man In The Iron Mask, had nearly completed this final novel, The Knight of Sainte-Hermine at his death in 1870. The manuscript was discovered in 1988 and has now been finished by Claude Schopp and recently released in the U.S. (It has been available for a few years in France already).

Twinkie Ingredient #1

Just for fun I decided that periodically I will update the blog to tell you about the ingredients in a Twinkie. Why Twinkie ingredients? Well, first off they are some of the most common ingredients used in processed food and second Steve Ettlinger already did all of the footwork in his book Twinkie, Deconstructed. Where creativity lets off, laziness sets in. I could give you all of the information on all of the ingredients at once, but we all know that that would just have you desiring a Twinkie so badly that you would have to leave the blog site to get one. Therefore, have patience. And if you can't summon up the patience, go buy the book. Keep in mind that Interstate Bakeries Corporation (they own Hostess and a number of other brands) was not very forthcoming with information to Mr. Ettlinger so he had to dig it up in a roundabout fashion, therefore some of the information may not be 100% how a Twinkie is manufactured (created? baked? assembled?), all errors contained within are strictly the fault of Mr. Ettlinger.

Enriched Bleached Wheat Flour [flour, ferrous sulfate]:

Flour. Sounds simple, right? Well where Twinkies are concerned nothing is simple. Let's begin our journey on a farm in Maryland. Most of the wheat for Twinkies come from farms in either Maryland, Virginia, or Delaware. Many of these farms are also run by the Amish- cool to think how they, as nonconsumers, supply all of us American super consumers. This particular farm must also grow the right type of wheat a low-protein high-starch variety of grass that is harvested by a combine once it has grown tall and is in full seed. The seeds, called wheat kernels or wheat berries, are what is harvested and sent to a mill where it is separated (from sticks, stones, and other debris), aspirated (to remove dirt), scoured (to remove the outer husks), sent through a washer-stoner (to again clean it and remove those pesky clingy stones), travel through a series of seed separators and into water-filled tempering bins that soften the inside but harden the outside, and finally into the 12-step program to grind and sift it into flour.

Fun fact no. 1: flour dust particles are highly explosive. It's the American version of the Chinese fireworks factory. Next time you're on a mill tour, remember not to smoke.

Later we will travel to Niagara Falls and follow our flour through the bleaching process. Until then. Enjoy your Twinkies (you may not enjoy them as much after our next session).