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Here’s a very cool web site that allows you to select any two cameras and compare them for size and weight, mano a mano. A very useful tool when you are thinking of buying a new camera and want to perhaps compare it to what you currently use, or to another competitive model.

Thanks to Mr. Dario for the find.

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From the MIL. I remember some of these. She remembers most of them! Click on each ad to see the larger image version and read the text. Most are embarrassingly hilarious. We’ve come a long way, baby (or is that Ms, person, ????)!

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It turns out that fried food, so long as it’s fried in olive oil, is pretty benign if not downright good for you. This may seem strange to those of us brought up in the dietary ethos of the last 40 years, but it’s not so peculiar to me. While the Mediterranean diet has long been promoted as a paragon of healthy virtue, growing up in a traditional Greek home, that diet often meant delicious foods fried in olive oil.

Here’s the latest story, this time on fried foods, long the whipping boy of the healthy-eating school. The original research published the day before yesterday in the British Medical Journal is here.

Contrary to popular belief, Science rarely advances through serendipitous, momentous discoveries (like penicillin). Most of the time, Science advances through many, often contradictory studies done over time, each study gradually improving its methodologies until consistent results can demonstrate a pattern that is acclaimed as representing “truth”.

Human nutrition is one of the most complex and difficult things to study because it is so replete with genetic, cultural, psychological, interpersonal, and ethical variables, that controlling for all these variables is virtually impossible. So, we have the Inuit living quite healthfully almost exclusively on blubber and seal meat, while the Asian diet produces astonishing health and longevity on a high carbohydrate, low protein regime.

And every day, the media produce another story emanating from the research and showing that what we previously thought was good is now bad…and vice-versa. Oat bran, Vitamin-E, Beta-carotene, and Vitamin-C have all come and gone. Fat was bad, now it’s good. Carbs were good, now they’re bad.

Thanks to Mr. Italo for the find.

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It’s a common experience that when you see someone frequently, you are less likely to notice changes than if you see them infrequently. Hence, we don’t tend to notice changes in ourselves until we see a picture from several months or years earlier. And friends who we haven’t seen in months or years appear so much older and grayer, that we are socked by the change.

I have many food vices; fortunately, doughnuts is not among them. When I travel, I’ll eat at Tim Horton’s from time to time, but it’s the bagels that tempt me, never the doughnuts; I’m savory rather than sweet in my taste preferences. As a result, I haven’t had a commercial doughnut in about 10 years; since the Krispy-Kreme craze came to town and people lined up for hours to get one of their fresh confections (they eventually went pretty much bust in Canada, victims to the low-carb movement as well as Tim Ho’s dominance of the market).

Last night we took Roxie to the vet for her first check-up (she’s 15 weeks old and has gained 6 pounds in the 10 days we’ve had her, for a total of 36 pounds). Everything was good; staff at the clinic oohing and aahing her – Briards are pretty rare and she is only the 5th one in this large clinic’s practice history. On the way home, we passed a Tim Ho’s and I had a sudden desire for a doughnut. I fought the urge, but by the time we passed the third store in as many kilometers, I succumbed. Unfortunately, my wife is very indulgent of my whims and went along with the idea of getting one doughnut each.

I went into the store alone and emerged with a six-pack of assorted doughnuts. She glared at me disapprovingly in the car. At home we opened the box and looked at each other with surprise: Man, these doughnuts had really gotten much smaller in the intervening years! They were about half the size of a regular Timmy from the last time we had one. Believe it or not, we didn’t see this as a bad thing, especially when you already feel guilty eating one. But, if I were a regular doughnut-eater, this would qualify as a real example of “product shrinkage”; a classic marketing maneuver to squeeze out more margin by ever so subtly making products smaller over time.

But the move seems to also fly in the face of the “supersize” mentality so prevalent in the fast-food industry. Interesting. And, BTW, the doughnuts really weren’t very good…it’ll be another 10 years before we do it again. By then, the doughnuts may be the size of the Timbits “holes”.

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I revised my title for yesterday’s post: I had titled it Dog Food Ripoff, but I realized that a rip-off is a type of fraud, and clearly, dog food, even if very poor value for money from a quality perspective, fulfills peoples’ needs for speed, convenience, low-odor, minimum time investment, etc. , when it comes time to feed their animals. So, it was a misnomer to call it a rip-off.

Many things that appear to be of poor value to some, are great value to others; fast food being an excellent example. In my opinion, it’s shit; but others love it for it’s speed, taste, convenience, and low cost. It’s all a matter of how you define “value”.

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Roxie (the name is now finalized according to She Who Must Be Obeyed) was brought up by the breeder on BARF – no not vomit – Biologically Appropriate Raw Food. This is a huge movement in the world of pet feeding, based on a philosophy of feeding animals foods appropriate to their genetic design and evolution.

So, as descendents of wolves, dogs should be fed raw meat with fruits and vegetables (which would be found naturally in the entrails of their prey). No grains, no pasta, no pizza, no cheese. Hmmm…sounds a lot like the Paleo diet and its kin for humans, i.e. we should eat in the hunter-gatherer mode.

My own view is more moderate. Dogs evolved alongside humans. They are unique among species in that they are the only one known to have intentionally crafted a symbiotic bond with human beings, based on protection in exchange for food and affection. This largely also explains our unique attachment to them, unlike other domesticated species which were taken against their will and proclivities and held captive from man’s benefit.

Anyway, back to the feeding of dogs. We were concerned about making the transition from Roxie’s BARF diet of 14 weeks, to a more convenient one for us. Before her arrival, we bought a bag of premium dog food in the form of the usual dry pellets. This one is supposedly made from “freshly de-boned chicken” (sounds like marketing-speak to me), without grains as fillers. It cost $23 a bag.

As a scientist, I like to assess things based on the facts and not on some marketing gimmick. It also pisses me off when manufacturers specify servings in cups, but what’s in their bag on weight. This is of course purely intentional, the idea being to prevent you from knowing what value you are getting for your money.

The bag calls for 3 cups/day for a dog of her size. I weighed one cup and it came to 112 grams/cup, or 336 grams in one day’s serving. The bag contains 2.72 kilos of dog-food, so the math is quite simple: Divide 2270 grams by 336 grams per day for a value of 6.75 day’s worth of food in one bag. We would need almost 5 bags per month to feed the dog, or app. $115 worth of food based on $23/bag.

Next, I went to our local grocery store. They always have some meat on sale as a lost leader. Some enormous chicken breasts were on sale and I bought 4 for $12. Stewing beef was also on sale at $3.50 a pound, so I bought another $25 worth. Veal tails (the dog should eat cartilaginous bone) was also available and I bought $25 worth of that. In the end, for about $62, I bought a month’s worth of real human grade meat. True, I have to actually cook the chicken breasts (boiling them provided us with 10 liters of chicken broth for my cooking as a bonus), and I have to cut up the meat. That took about an hour, saving me about $73 in dog food. Not bad for an hour’s work.

And I’m sure the dog will be very happy too. She hoovers down the meat and leftover vegetable cuttings. With the occasional piece of pizza crust, of course.

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You’ve got to see this.

We got our new Briard puppy two days ago. She’s only 14 weeks old. Yesterday, I put her in her large X-Pen for the first time. I went to work in my home office and within 5 minutes, there she was at my side! I couldn’t figure out how she had gotten out. I put her back in. Two minutes later, there she was at my side again. I set up the camera and my wife and I watched her in action. Finally my wife chickened out and was too afraid to let her jump out in case she got hurt.

The dog is 30 lbs. and the pen is three feet high!

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Our Briard puppy arrives today from Vancouver. She has a tough day ahead: 4 AM presentation to WestJet Animal Cargo, for a 6 AM flight to Calgary where the dog will change planes for the 5 hour flight to Montreal. She is scheduled to arrive in Montreal at 5:35 PM and will then be transported to another facility off-airport for pickup around 6:15. With the time differences between the two coasts, this makes for an 11 hour day in a carrier with no food or walk, sitting in her own pee and poop. No fun.

She will then exit her carrier into the cold and snow (compared to balmy Vancouver), and meet these weird strangers (us) and a home filled with strange smells and sounds. The breeder has warned us that the dog will be very upset and not too friendly.

Thus begins the new life of a family pet. Pictures to follow.

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There’s such a vast assortment of shaving soaps and creams on the market today (mainly through on-line vendors), that it’s easily possible to use a different product every day of the year before coming back to an old favorite.

I used to be a “cream man”, preferring them to soaps since they almost always lather up more easily and have a thicker, more protective texture. But then I got better at using the soaps and found myself all but ignoring the creams. Pity, because one of the best shaving creams on the market is also the only truly unscented one I have ever used: The Gentlemens Refinery UnScented Shave Cream.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve also found myself increasingly disliking scented products, especially when used in the inevitable combinations required in performing one’s daily “toilette”: Shampoo, face soap, body wash, shave cream/soap, moisturizer, deodorant, and after-shave. I remember, depending on the combinations, starting my day smelling like a cheap bordello from all the conflicting perfumes.

These day, I prefer to use everything unscented, and let the after-shave lotion define my scent for the day. Fortunately, it’s becoming increasingly possible. Here’s what I use:

• Shampoo: Neutragena Anti-residue Shampoo
• Face soap: Clinique or Neutragena (both unscented)
• Shave cream: The GR UnScented
• Body wash: Dove Men+Care Sensitive Clean Unscented
• Moisturizer: The GR Standard After Shave Balm (I also like Clinique’s M-Lotion)

The GR products are outstanding. While I’m not a big fan of pre-shave oils, their After Shave Balm may well be the best men’s facial moisturizer on the market, and their shave creams are tops for both performance and hypo-allergenicity. The product line is very “rational”, i.e. it doesn’t have the dozens of products that appeal to “metros”, but it does have all the products a man actually needs.

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We are struggling to choose a name for our new Briard puppy, expected to arrive from Vancouver this week via WestJet.

Top candidates so far are: Roxie, Rosie, Koukla (doll in Greek), and Leica. We had briefly dallied with the Yiddish word, Kishka, until Mr. Italo informed us that it meant “guts” or tripe.

Mr. Italo also suggested a contest on this blog, to solicit potential names that fit this breed and gender. The winner will get a free subscription to this blog . Please submit your entry via the Comments. Wikipedia has a good description of the breed. The name should be short and “sharp” in sound.

Our pup’s grandad, is pictured above. From the web site for Triann Briards, our dog’s breeder.