Category: In the News

brewing tea reduces heavy metals from water

glass of sweet, iced tea, plate of fried chicken and sides

You really don’t need any extra reasons to drink tea other than it tasting good. Having a glass of sweet tea is a great experience and makes your day better. But fortunately, tea is good for you in numerous ways, like providing antioxidants. This is already known.

New research has shown that brewing tea reduces heavy metals like lead and cadmium from the water, making it safer for you. That’s convenient! A quote from the article:

“Across a population, if people drink an extra cup of tea per day, maybe over time we’d see declines in illnesses that are closely correlated with exposure to heavy metals. Or it could help explain why populations that drink more tea may have lower incidence rates of heart disease and stroke than populations that have lower tea consumption.”

If it makes me healthier to drink an extra cup of tea per day, I can do that!

It’s nice to hear good news once in a while…

a giant straw Christmas goat… ON FIRE!

Have you ever heard of the giant straw Christmas goat? In some parts of the world, it’s a thing.

In Gävle [pronounced “yeah-vleh”], Sweden, they build a giant straw goat for Christmas every year. It’s big — at least 43′ high, up to 49′ some years, and it weighs 3 tons. I don’t know why they do this. One news article said the association of a straw goat with Christmas goes back centuries there, and now some residents don’t even know why. In some stories Christmas elves would ride the Yule goat door to door to deliver gifts to sleeping children. Another site associates this Yule goat with Thor, god of thunder, and sacred trees and fertility. Considering the modern take on Thor from The Avengers, it’s hard to see how a straw goat fits in. (Leave a comment if you can think of anything.)

Just a straw goat by itself is not so special (at least to people not familiar with the traditions), but there’s more to the story. There is a tradition that’s not supposed to be part of the tradition — burning the goat down. They have been building these giant ones since 1966, yet only 16 have survived past beyond Christmas day. I don’t know how the residents there feel about this, so no offense intended toward them, but the burning of it has happened before the internet existed, so it’s probably not just tourists wanting in on the action.

One year some people dressed up as Santa Claus and gingerbread men and they shot flaming arrows at the goat to burn it down. In 2010, someone attempted to bribe a guard so they could steal it with a helicopter, but their offer was rejected. (I’m against stealing, but it would be surreal to see it flying through the air.) One time someone ran into it with a car which made the legs collapse.

The staff here at Buffet o’ Blog have discussed the idea of building our own giant straw goat numerous times. It hasn’t happened yet, but here’s a highlight of a few of the ideas:

  • Have a big one-night festival with it, selling burgers, hot dogs, hot chocolate, memorabilia, etc. Have live bands playing music in exciting styles. Then for the big finale, set the goat on fire for a giant bonfire. Could roast marshmallows and make s’mores. Sell tickets or parking fees to raise money for charity.
  • Make the straw goat over 50 feet tall, to set a new Guinness World Record.
  • Fill the butt of the goat with fireworks and smoke bombs, activated by remote, to start the bonfire. Picture that! It would be a memorable evening for everyone there!
  • In a previous discussion, someone left a comment suggesting the belly of the goat be filled with fireworks and manure, so when the burning is almost done, it will be raining poop and everyone will know to go home. While it’s a creative idea, I am totally against this. That would certainly be memorable, but people would not come back the next year.
  • The idea of our own festival is not to mock the tradition. It would just be fun to have a party and burn a 50-foot straw goat.

If you want to read more of the original discussions years ago, it was here, originally, and more here.

If you have any ideas to make this idea even more random and/or awesome, leave a comment. And if you can think of any connection between Thor and straw goats, share that too.

breaking news about Thanksgiving

I was visiting some family over the Thanksgiving break, and someone turned the TV news on for a few minutes. One of their “Breaking News” stories was that there was a lot of holiday travel on Thanksgiving. That’s not really news, since everyone knows it will happen, and it’s not breaking news because it was already predicted and known.

I’ve seen a lot of other mundane things be called “breaking news” before. One time the President’s plane was landing in Philadelphia. I don’t keep up with his travel schedule, so I wondered if something was wrong. Nope, that was where he was going. He was just traveling to a meeting. So I don’t see how it’s even news. Does anyone need to know? Was there nothing more relevant happening that day?

I understand that the news networks want to keep their viewers “engaged” [i.e., glued to the TV / radio / stream all the time] so they want “breaking news”, and they sometimes manufacture drama, but instead of all that, why don’t they actually report interesting and/or relevant news? There’s a lot of good things that happen in the world each day. It seems like these days some of the most popular mainstream news sources just try to incite anger toward a particular political party by blaming all the problems on that one group of people. (I’ll stop the rant on that before it gets going, but let me remind you that biased reporting like that is called propaganda. News is reporting the facts of what happened, not casting blame on that “other party”. Look to see if your preferred news sources do this. Both sides do it.)

Whoops! Started to rant there. My bad! Back on topic, here’s some “breaking news” about Thanksgiving — many people ate a lot and had a good time doing it! 🙂

Here’s some Thanksgiving-related news… at a family get-together I attended, someone brought cheese dip with sausage in it. I think there was some slight befuddlement at that, since it’s not a traditional side dish at Thanksgiving. But it’s not like green beans and corn are anything special on their own. Besides, cheese dip proved to be beneficial since the turkey was on the dry side. (I’m not complaining — it’s hard to cook a turkey well, and it was still good — especially with the cheese dip.)

Here’s another point along those lines. There’s nothing inherently wrong with tradition and having the same foods for Thanksgiving each year. I’m glad we always have dressing/stuffing, since it’s rare and delicious. But it’s better to not let tradition keep us from making things better. It’s good to ask, “How can we make our Thanksgiving meal more awesome?” Keep what’s already great, but don’t be afraid to add new items or change things up if it improves the experience. The holiday meal is not great just because of tradition — it’s great because of good-tasting food and enjoyable fellowship with family. So make it awesome!