More Grist for Your Mill....

I belong to Daily Challenge, an online exercise group.  Their "Well-Being Wire" often prints items of interest regarding health.  Today they offered this:

Another Major Study Debunks Vaccine-Autism Link

by Bob Curley on April 24, 2015. Filed under: Healthy Behaviors

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, some still believe that vaccines for diseases like measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) increase their children’s risks of developing autism. Yet another study shows that simply isn’t the case, the Guardian reports.

Using data on nearly 100,000 kids, researchers led by Anjali Jain of the health care consulting firm The Lewin Group found that there was no link between MMR vaccines and autism rates.

There is a higher risk of autism among children in families where an older sibling has an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) — 6.9 percent compared to 0.9 percent in non ASD families. But these families are actually less likely to vaccinate their younger children after their older ones received an ASD diagnosis. If there was any link between vaccination and autism, scientists would expect to see the opposite be the case.

This study marks merely the latest of many to discredit supposed links between vaccination rates and autism risk. Most notably, the progenitor of the autism-vaccine link, gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, not only had his research thrown out but was disbarred from the medical profession.

In other words, don’t let the myths stop you from vaccinating your kids.

The study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

 If you have been following XE Xpress this past week, you'll know faithful reader Stuart Savory
and I have gone back and forth about polio vaccines in the comments, and he claimed at one point to be making a "point for the Anti-Vaxxers you have in the USA."  They're not mine, Stuart.  This is a big country, and there are oddballs aplenty making headlines (they hope).  I assured Stuart that I doubt very much whether any Anti-Vaxxers read XE or its offshoots, especially this one.  I know all three of XPress's readers, and they are impeccable thinkers. (Even you, Stuart.)

So I'm posting this, thanks to Daily Challenge. 

(Photo © iStockphoto/CTRPhotos)

Burpees for Oldies????

https://youtu.be/JZQA08SlJnM

Can you do this?  Ha.  I can't, but I'm trying.  Supposed to be wonderful exercise.
What does "burpee" mean?  Try it once.  If you're still alive to burp, you're on your
way!!

reshelving books!

What fun it is to reshelve my books!  Now they're sitting so I can READ the TITLES easily!  What a bunch of books I have.  found a great book that I didn't even know I had:
1,001 ways to Relax by Mike George.  Here's way #995: Meet a friend in a dream.  What fun!  I'm gonna meet my friend Cathy, who right now is in Luxembourg.  Maybe we can meet on the Moselle  River and sail along, enjoying the lovely spring air, scented by the vines. 

Fun with Relatives, Part 3!

1.  On Friday (Good Friday),  Mary and I got up very early and drove the 300+ miles to a little town in Eastern Iowa.  It took longer than the 4 hours she had planned--5 and a half hours--even with "shortcuts."  There was, compared to East Coast driving, almost no traffic, and the weather was clear and beautiful.  We were on our way to meet with my son, Tom, who still lives and works there, and Mary's oldest sister and her husband, who were driving over from Chicago, and two of my dear old friends from Iowa City, who were driving up.  We were all to meet "at the bank," of which there used
only one, back in the day.  My son now tells me there are more--maybe four or five? We were supposed to meet at 12N, but of course, Mary and I were an hour and a half late.  Try killing that much time on the main street of a small town in a bank. 

With the delay, my son and Iowa City friends moved to a small cafe within eyesight of the bank,
and when Mary and I parked and called, we discovered we were right in front of the cafe.  Bingo! My oldest niece and her husband had taken the extra time to sneak into the Big Town down the highway to buy some oil-based housepaint, which apparently cannot be had in Chicago, but the others were there--relieved/exasperated/starving, and we gave the friendly waiter our orders that appeared in about 10 minutes. Slow customers, fast food.  After lunch, we walked the very short distance to our
former dwelling and inspected the town sliding hill, which ran down the street in front of the house,
the new garage out back, the cherry tree by the alley--all the important sites.  The house of our dear late neighbor, Mrs. B., has been converted to an antique store.  They had a big bowl of Scrabble tiles for sale--5 for 25c--which the Chicago folks thought was outrageous.

The main street is much more varied than it used to be:  at least two women's clothing stores--instead of just one.  two or three cafes instead of just one (and that doesn't count what's on the other side).  Tom has worked for the biggest grocery store since he was 14 years old and bagged groceries after school.  He was gone for 5 years when he was in the Navy, and now he's back.  He loves the place, has wonderful friends there.  He's a friendly, laid back kind of guy (if we're worried about something, his response is "no problem"), and knows just about everyone he meets there by name. 

On the way back to Minneapolis that, I took a photo of the moon rising over Iowa. I can't figure out how to get it away from my iPad, as my Apple "keepsake" won't connect to anything significant other than email.  Like the Cloud, for example. The software is irreparably unupgradable.  Uff da.  Nice photo, though. This was the same moon that caused the partial solar eclipse the next morning. (Wait for it).

On Saturday, more kin arrived to say hello:  Mary's sister Cindy, brother Bob's daughter Fran, brother John's sons Paul and John (and John's two young daughters), Mary and Cindy's sister Paula, who prepared a lovely buffet, Paula's son Elliot and his wife, Annie. Who else?  Delaney was working, Alan was playing his weekly Saturday am basketball game with his cronies.





After the visitors left, Mary and I went for a walk to the local creek/pond, and the trees (including paper birch) and birds (cardinals, red-wing blackbirds) and ducks (mallards) were enchanting.  I'd
forgotten just how incredibly beautiful it is. 

Before supper, Alan played his banjo as he does every Saturday night while the steak grills.  The first song is always the same, the second one he dedicates to Mary, and then he plays various songs that he's downloaded from the internet or from what I know as the Quaker Song Book, which has everything:  folk songs from all over, hymns, spirituals, you name it, that book probably has it. Mary
picked up her guitar and sang along in her lovely, clear voice.  When it was time to eat, they lit candles and shared the steak and salad.  Wonderful!

Fun with Relatives, Part 2

1.  After Birchbark Books, my next request was to go to the American Swedish Institute (ASI), over on Park Avenue and 26th St.  The glorious old Turnblad Mansion, which housed the ASI back in the day when I lived in Minneapolis, has acquired a modern addition.  This cultural center houses the FIKA cafe (offering, according to some), "the best lunch in Minneapolis,"* the ASI gift shop with its Swedish and other Nordic design treasures, and various other rooms for meetings and classes.
*not counting Kramarczuk's?

What I learned from the current Nobel exhibit is that SWEDEN awards Nobel Prizes for Chemistry, Economics, History, Literature, Medicine, and Physics.  NORWAY awards only the Peace Prize. 

2.  Next we stopped at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), which is close to the

Minneapolis Art Institute (MAI). I took a "Saturday Studio" class from MCAD some 45 years ago, and I still have my second painting:  my son sitting on one of our dining room chairs at the age of 3.  He was naked when I painted the picture, but after we moved to Iowa and the neighborhood kids snickered, I painted some britches on him.












 More to come......stay tuned.

Fun with relatives!!

1.  My niece Mary and her husband, Alan, sent me a plane ticket to Minneapolis for the first 4 days of April.  Mary is the 4th of my brother Paul's seven children:  Susan, Cindy, Mark, Mary (!), Paula, Lisa, and Tom.  I was a new teenager when Mary was born, and she and her siblings were the first babies I'd ever met. I babysat for them occasionally, and entertained them when Paul and his beautiful wife, Gertrude, brought everyone over for Sunday dinner with Mom, Dad, brother Gene, and I.  After the meal, Gene or I'd do the dishes, and the adults would play a few games of bridge.

2.  My plane arrived late Tuesday night, and Mary picked me up at the airport.  I was surprised to wake up at 8 a.m. to sun shining in the window. At home, my room faces west, so it's always kinda dark when I get up.  Everyone else was gone to work, so Mary and I went grocery shopping at Trader Joe's, and then took a LONG walk along their road while the neighborhood school kids arrived home on their big yellow buses. Supper was a delicious creamed chicken casserole and salad. We all had seconds, and there was enough left over for the next day. 

3.  On Thursday morning, I mainly stayed out of the way of Mary's friend who came to clean their big rattan table, which gathers an unbelievable amount of dust in the crevices, and I also worked crossword puzzles, which Mary and Alan generously shared from the three major US dailies to which they subscribe.  At noon, Mary, her friend, and I drove to NE Minneapolis to meet Al for lunch at Kramarczuks, the renowned Polish butcher shop and deli on East Hennepin. I had split pea with ham soup, half of which went home with me in a little tub,  but I regret not having Kramarczuk's famous cabbage rolls with the tangy red cabbage on the side.  Al said his mom used to make cabbage rolls every weekend, varying the composition and flavoring for fun. We all passed up K's famous Easter sausage--a main component of which is ground ham.  It's pretty much a sin not to have cabbage rolls when you are at Kramarczuk's.  I was just a bit shellshocked to find the renovated Deli at the old butcher store I remember.  It's been a long time since I lived and dined in NE Minneapolis.

4.  After lunch, Mary and her friend took the leftovers home, and Al offered to take me museum hopping.  My first stop was author Louise Erdrich's Birchbark Books over by Lake of the Isles. Erdrich runs the store with several of her daughters and her sister, poet Heid E. Erdrich.  Birchbark Books is not like any other bookstore I've ever been in, except maybe for Politics and Prose in this town, but Politics and Prose does not have a real confessional in it, and the workers are not owned by dogs, as they are at Birchbark.

To be continued.....(photos to come, too, after I figure out how to get them off my iPad)