Instant Rice

Also known as minute rice, is rice that has been precooked and dehydrated so that it cooks rapidly. Regular rice requires approximately 20 minutes to cook while instant rice usually needs between five and 10 minutes, or 90 seconds in a microwave. Because it has already been cooked, all that is necessary to prepare instant rice is to re-hydrate it with hot water.

Instant rice is made by using several methods. The most common is similar to home cooking. Rice is blanched in hot water, steamed, and rinsed. It is then placed in large ovens for dehydration until the moisture content reaches approximately twelve percent or less. The basic principle involves increasing moisture of the milled white rice by using steam or water to form cracks or holes in the kernels.

The fast cooking properties happen at recooking. Water quickly penetrates into the cracked grain.

Kellogg's Cocoa Krispies

The nation's largest cereal maker, is being called to task by critics who object to the swine flu-conscious claim now bannered in bold lettering on the front of Cocoa Krispies cereal boxes: "Now helps support your child's IMMUNITY."  What a load of rice that is, unless it means the chocolate covering, which is good to cure most everything.

Dagwood and Bacon

A friend of mine, John Chapman sent me this from Monday's paper. Seems even Dagwood likes bacon. Of course the clock is not as sophisticated as the one I mentioned last year that actually cooks a slice of bacon, so you wake up to the wonderful aroma.

PS - Chapman is the author of "Men are from Mars, Women are from Hell." Hilarious book available on Amazon.

Limerick

There was a Young Person of Bantry,
Who frequently slept in the pantry;
When disturbed by the mice,
She appeased them with rice
That judicious Young Person of Bantry.

Health Insurance Myths

On the Fortune 500 list of top industries, health insurance companies ranked 35th in profitability in 2008; their overall profit margin was 2.2 percent. They lagged far behind such industries as pharmaceuticals,  profit margin 19.3 percent, railroads (12.6 percent), and mining (11.5 percent). Among health insurers, the best performer last year was HealthSpring, which showed a profit of 5.4 percent. “That’s a less profitable margin,’’ AP noted, “than was achieved by the makers of Tupperware, Clorox bleach, and Molson and Coors beers.’’

For the most recent quarter of 2009, health-insurance plans earned profits of only 3.3 percent, ranking them 86th on the expanded Yahoo! Finance list of US industries. Makers of software applications, by contrast, are pulling in profits of nearly 22 percent.

Bread Shoes

True - Not to be outdone by the above. Here are a pair of bread shoes. They can be made to size and can be shipped to the US at a cost of 17 Euros. Looks like they are soft. No, not going to waste your time with this link either.

Target

Check out Target's Black Friday sales for $3 toasters, coffee pots, crock pots, and sandwich makers. Digital picture frames for $29. HDTV LCD 1080p 40 inch $449.  Wow, it is really pushing for traffic this year.

Picnic Truck

Who couldn't use one of these for the ultimate tailgater. It has a BBQ grill, a beer tap, an ice box, a 42″ HDTV and a kick butt sound system.  Toyota is at it again.

Fun With Words

Here is a fun sight for those who like anagrams, crossword puzzles, or just word games. Type in a word and you get a definition, words found within the word, anagrams, words beginning and ending with the word, words beginning with the same letters, etc. Handy reference site to put in your bookmarks.

Here is another site, Ninja - a dictionary for your iphone.

Bus Stop

Here is a unique bus stop. It is in England. Seems the woman did not like the looks of the stop in front of her house, so she decorated it herself.

Quotable

Men do not make beds when they get up for the same reason they do not tie their shoes when they take them off, to make it is easy to get back into.

Healthcare Bill

I just finished reading the healthcare bill, HR3962 or the Affordable Health Care for America Act.

Have attached a link to my 19 page summary for those who might be interested in a snapshot view that you won't get from TV or the newspaper.

Click on the link below. It is best viewed in full screen mode. Comments welcome.


Shubnell_latest_healthcare_bill_summary

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

Most people think that a coin toss is completely random and the odds of it landing on heads or tails is equal.  Recently, a three-person team of Stanford and UC-Santa Cruz researchers produced a study that challenges conventional wisdom.

The researchers concluded that a coin is more likely to land facing the same side on which it started. If tails is facing up when the coin is on your thumb, it is more likely to land tails up.

They used a high-speed camera that photographed people flipping coins and found that from 51 to 60 percent of the time, depending on the flipping motion of the individual, it landed on the side that was facing up when the flip began.

Most people count how a coin lands, but do not check how it started and that has led to some common misconceptions. It is also not how high a coin is flipped or other variables, such as wind speed, air temperature, phase of the moon, or size or the weight of the coin. Knowing how it starts slightly increases the odds in your favor.

The researchers used the camera to show that coins flipped from a thumb don't just rotate around their axis, but they also spin like a Frisbee and that is caused by the motion of the thumb. They found that there is always bias and some people have more bias than others due to the way they flip, but the bias is always toward the side facing up before the flip.

The landing surface also has an influence, like a hard surface changes the equation. Bottom line call it as you see it and always for a soft surface, like grass. I wonder how many coins they spent paying for this 'scientific research'?

Quotable

Did you ever stop to think that worrying works? 90% of the things you worry about never happen.