DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Another interesting link came in the mail today, courtesy of Jacque Harper, who found a great story I’d missed in my own local newspaper. He even found the best pullquote for me:

The problem is that bananas have not had sex for 10,000 years.

I avoid GMO foods, to the degree that I can. Packaged food labels only advertise when the food does not contain genetically-modified ingredients, which should give you an idea of the public’s perception of same. Even products labelled “certified organic” are likely to contain GMO ingredients.

Or, as Cornell University’s Public Education Project claims,

Am I eating genetically engineered foods?

The simple answer is yes.

Here’s a bleak link for a dreary Monday: motorcycle tour of Chernobyl.

The tone is somber yet matter-of-fact.

Usually, on this leg of the journey, a beeping Dosimeter inspires me to shift into high gear and streak through the area with great haste. The patch of trees in front of me is called red — or “magic” wood. In 1986, this wood glowed red with radiation. They cut them down and buried them under 1 meter of earth. The Dosimeter readings on the asphalt paving is 500 -3000 microroengens, depending upon where you stand. That is 50 to 300 times the radiation of a normal environment. If I step 10 meters forward, Dosimeter will run off the scale. If I walk a few hundred meters towards the reactor, the radiation is 3 roengens per hour — which is 300,000 times normal. If I was to keep walking all the way to the reactor, I would glow in the dark tonight. Maybe this is why they call it magic wood. It is a dark magic with the power to turn biker leather into shining armor.

The accompanying photos seem random and somewhat uninteresting, but I guess this is appropriate: radiation is invisible.

Thanks to Bim for the link. (Bim’s motorcycle trip to Turkey was much less bleak!)

I shot this without looking, holding my hand out of the car window as we passed a trolley on Market Street in San Francisco. The picture appeals to me because the tilted perspective seems appropriate for this town. Also because the composition is accidental, yet turned out better than most of my photos.

A 22-year-old woman had eaten most of her lunch salad at a Red Robin in Jackson Township, Ohio, Tuesday when she put a morsel into her mouth that turned out to be the tip of a human thumb.

Here’s the best line: “The health department says the woman actually consumed part of the fingertip, thinking it was a piece of gristle.” Do salads normally have gristle? Except in Germany, I mean.

This story made the rounds a few weeks ago, but I just heard about it last weekend — over dinner, natch. I found two versions of the story online; the quotes above are from the second:

• Want a chopped thumb salad?
• Woman Finds Thumb In Salad

David Lazarus wrote a special report for the Chronicle on the risks of using “offshore” employees for processing sensitive (private) medical and financial data. He appears to have caught one of the parties in a lie. The transcription is riveting.

The story, in brief, is that a sub-sub-subcontracted medical records transcriber in Pakistan threatened to release private medical records if her past-due invoice wasn’t paid immediately. This triggered an investigation, which revealed that UCSF had contracted its records transcription out to a company called Transcription Stat, which subcontracted the transcription to an independent worker named Sonya Newburn, who subcontracted the transcription to another individual named Tom Spires, who subcontracted the transcription to the Pakistani, Lubna Baloch.

Everyone down the chain expressed shock and indignation about the threatened privacy breach. Of course they did — their reputations are on the line. The common criticism of everyone about the next person down the chain: “They’re not supposed to be subbing this out!” Heh. Watch as American industry digests its own stomach lining. People moan about exporting American jobs, but when it comes down to actually doing the work, these Americans would rather pay some poor foreign person $7/hr to do it.

Anyway, the story ends with a great caught-in-the-act phone interview between Lazarus (I assume) and one of the subcontractors. I don’t want to spoil the surprise; it’s worth the 10 minutes it will take you to read it. Here’s the full story: Outsourced UCSF notes highlight privacy risk: How one offshore worker sent tremor through medical system