A a staple part of the “Mediterranean Diet”, the listed health benefits of olive oil are many. From its high antioxidant count to its ability to protect against heart disease, aid in the prevention of many types of cancers and lower blood pressure, this oil – actually more of a fruit juice than an oil - is one of the chief secrets to the success of the Mediterranean diet. So why should you worry about using your olive oil? Because what claims to be extra-virgin olive oil in your kitchen cupboard may in fact be a blend of many oils from hazelnut, soybean and canola to the illegal lampante oil (“lamp oil”) made from spoiled olive fruit that has fallen from the tree and can not be legally sold as food. Companies looking to stretch their profits – and many of them very common supermarket names in the United States – cut good oils with these inferior oils, oftentimes simply substituting one for the other, then color the concoction with industrial chlorophyll, flavor it with beta-carotene, package it and sell it as quality Italian-made extra-virgin olive oil.

The unexpected success of the WordPress to Myspace Crossposter has left me delighted and happy that, when I have downtime, I still have a fun little pet project to work on that is actually of some use. Of course, the continued development of the plugin wouldn’t happen if it weren’t for the many people who have begun using the code. So, in thanks to some of those who implemented it early, left insightful and useful comments or otherwise tossed in their two cents, I’m providing a short list of some of the blogs that I’ve managed to scare up that have contributed by being great users and testers.

The Summer 2007 issue of Cabinet Magazine features an article by two London-based authors, Sally O’Reilly and Ian Saville, entitled I Can See Your Ideology Moving. From the start it grabs the reader with its droll humour, setting the scene as follows:

The scene: A windy seaside town in England. An arts festival (entitled, perhaps pretentiously, The Windy Seaside Town Biennale) is in full swing. An audience of skeptical locals, theater-seat-radicals and bloodthirsty performance-art lovers, sated after fish and chips and lashings of warm ale, is watching a man speaking to a picture of Karl Marx. More unusually, the picture speaks back to the man, for this is Ian Saville, socialist magician and ventriloquist, demonstrating his revolutionary art.
At the back of the hall, the art critic Sally O’Reilly watches curiously, almost unable to contain the questions that crowd her mind. The audience is laughing …

“In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.”

There is a struggle inside me each and every day. On the one hand, I feel that I should continuously dumb-down my performance material so as to appeal to the masses - an artist has to make a living after all. Yet on the other, I believe strongly in my conviction that one should not pander to the masses for fear of perpetuating the sickness. It’s a difficult struggle - I enjoy my expensive coffee and organic food - and it’s challenging not to lose sight of your own standards when thrown into a world that so highly values and rewards reality television, pop icons and stupid stunts. Then I see things like the above clip from The View and I’m reminded why I hold a commitment to education and reason in such high regard.

Appearing in the Boston Globe on Sunday (link via boston.com) was a wonderful article by Anthony Kronman, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale and author of Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.

The article explored - as presumably does the book - the reasons for which exploration of the most important questions in life have been abandoned by virtually all modern colleges and universities.

In a shift of historic importance, America’s colleges and universities have largely abandoned the idea that life’s most important question is an appropriate subject for the classroom. In doing so, they have betrayed their students by depriving them of the chance to explore it in an organized way, before they are caught up in their careers and preoccupied with the urgent business of living itself. This abandonment has also helped create a society in which deeper questions of values are left in the hands of those motivated by religious conviction - a disturbing and dangerous development.

Coffee makes us severe, and grave, and philosophical.

Coffee has been a love interest of mine for many, many years, but it wasn’t until my first trip to Italy that I truly discovered how rich and divine a beverage these beans can yield.

Upon waking for breakfast my first day in Venice, I was served a steaming pitcher filled with espresso and a second with steamed milk. My own fault, really, because I wanted coffee, asked for caffè and then, fearing that it wouldn’t come with milk, followed it up with an “uh… latte“. Little did I know that what I was getting was actually what they always serve and so not out of the ordinary at all.

Version 2.0a of the surprisingly popular WordPress to MySpace Auto Crossposter plugin is now released.

Click to DOWNLOAD NOW

The old project page for all 1.x versions is located here.

What It Does
The WordPress to MySpace Auto Crossposter is a WordPress plugin that publishes all of your WordPress blog entries to your MySpace blog at the time of publication. This allows you to publish as usual on your WordPress blog, but to also capture and retain your MySpace audience without any extra effort.

Each time that a new WordPress post goes live it will automatically be sent to MySpace for publication.

Users of the plugin have the option of publishing a notification or a whole story to MySpace.

The 18th and 19th centuries saw a huge surge in the popularity of safety coffins – coffins designed to allow the interred to alert the living in the event of a premature burial – and so great is the fear of being buried alive that even today, with all of our medical technology, patents are still being filed for such devices.

An Italian watchmaker named Fabrizio Caselli, as recently as 1995 (RISK-FREE BURIAL, PEDIATRICS Vol. 98 No. 5 November 1996, pp. 960), patented a coffin that includes a flashlight, oxygen tank, intercom system, heart monitor and, from the looks of the photos, a video camera and flashing lights.

I suspect that we’re a bit more proficient than we were two hundred years ago at determining a persons living-or-dead status, so Caselli’s invention may be better aimed towards those above ground who simply don’t want to let go – or perhaps those that have a strange fetish for watching the dead.

Casey just recently (re)posted his decade-old skydiving video on Maison Bisson, Cliff beautifully chronicled his own first jump at Z-Hills (Skydive City) over on Spiralbound, so I figure, as I was third to jump, it would only be fitting if I were third to post as well. So here you go!

Each of the three videos has its own unique stand-out features – Casey’s, for those who know him, stands out for how young he looks. Cliff of course was the only one lucky enough to do the AFF program for his first jump, so his stands out for the fact that it really was his jump. Mine? The funny hat! Yes, yes… the Jumptown padded helmets look ridiculously funny on everyone, and I’m no exception.

What better way to kick off the new semester than to tie a guy up, light him on fire and shove swords down his throat? That’s exactly what the students at Juniata College in Huntingdon, PA did last Friday with me, and what a show it was!

An amazingly interactive, fun and outgoing group they are, and they turned out in droves to completely pack the venue!

Never was I short of volunteers (actually had to turn some away!) or enthusiasm, and they were kind enough to give me a standing ovation at the end of the evening.

The funniest part? Well, there were many, but the guy who threw his clothing on stage after the sword swallow takes the cake. Some things you expect. That one I didn’t.

“We’re just in a band. That dude swallows swords!”

listen to the audio clip

I’m a very far cry from what you’d call a country music aficionado – I don’t think that Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies count – but for various reasons I can sometimes be found associating with people affiliated with the industry, and as a music-lover in general I can certainly appreciate great musicianship, regardless of genre.

More than that, I appreciate when someone does something nice, and “nice” does not begin to describe the country music band Whiskey Falls and how they gave up a huge portion of their own promotional appearance on the Bill Breakfast Show (Bill Country, 95 FM, a Clear Channel station) to plug me, my work and my website a few weeks back.

My dear friend Melissa sent along a link to this article:

Coney Island ‘geek’ aspires to be ‘freak lawyer’
‘It was just time to go,’ tattoo-covered performer says of his sideshow days

which is a short AP article about another friend, Eak the Geek (aka Eduardo Arrocha) who until recently was a performer at Coney Island’s Sideshows by the Seashore and is now studying to be a lawyer at the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing, MI, after graduating last year from Marymount College in Manhattan with a degree in political science.

Eak is an exceptionally warm and friendly man, and undoubtedly the most unusual individual in his class. At age 45, he’s an imposing 6 foot tall man with dark tattoos of planets, stars and the like entirely covering his face (he tattooed his face with space!). He also stands as testament to the fact that one can achieve anything that they set their mind too, regardless of circumstance. He’ll have hard work ahead of him in breaking down social constructs and stereotypes, but he’s off to a hell of a start and, given his success so far, should have no trouble in the future.

The public outrage regarding high gasoline prices may have died down some since the initial push past $3.00 a gallon that consumers saw two seasons ago, but there is no doubt that drivers still grimace and curse the oil companies as they march to the pump to fill up their cars, trucks and SUVs.

While there is still much debate surrounding whether high gasoline prices are good (and here) for American consumers or not, one thing is certain – we’re all interested in better fuel economy.

Be it a financial concern, desire to lessen your environmental impact and carbon footprint, or simply an attempt to “stick it” to the oil companies, we’d all love to pay less at the pump – but not all pumps are created equal! A recent experiment in my own vehicle led to some interesting surprises.

Following up the recent story on mechanical arms, I bring you the Vanderbilt Arm, the DARPA-funded, Vanderbilt University-developed prosthetic arm that is powered by rocket fuel, steam, valves and springs.

From the Vanderbilt project page:

…[the] power source is about the size of a pencil and contains a special catalyst that causes hydrogen peroxide to burn. When this compound burns, it produces pure steam. The steam is used to open and close a series of valves. The valves are connected to the spring-loaded joints of the prosthesis by belts made of a special monofilament used in appliance handles and aircraft parts.

It’s truly a wondrous development, promising to be the most human-like prosthetic arm ever created, weighing in at about half the weight of a real arm, mimicking 21 of the natural arm’s 26 motions and with the goal of being so thoroughly integrated into the nerve structure of the wearer that it can be controlled by thought alone.