by the Night Writer

Dang, I loves me some hydrolyzed vegetable protein! (My emphasis in bold, below.)

Ingredient Used in Many Processed Foods Recalled
Associated Press
March 05, 2010

A wide range of processed foods – including soups, snack foods, dips and dressings – are being recalled after salmonella was discovered in a flavor-enhancing ingredient.

Food and Drug Administration officials said Thursday that the ingredient, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, is used in thousands of food products, though it was unclear how many of them will be recalled. The FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said no illnesses or deaths have been reported.

The officials said the recall, which dates to products manufactured since Sept. 17, is expected to expand in the coming days and weeks. It only involves hydrolyzed vegetable protein manufactured by Las Vegas-based Basic Food Flavors Inc., which did not return a call for comment Thursday.

…

Jeffrey Farrar, associate commissioner for food protection at the FDA, said Thursday that many of the products that contain the product are not dangerous because the risk of salmonella is eliminated after the food has been cooked. Many of the foods involved in the recall are ready-to-eat items that are not cooked by the consumer.

“At this time we believe the risk to consumers is very low,” Farrar said.

A list of more than 50 recalled foods on the FDA Web site include several dips manufactured by T. Marzetti, Sweet Maui Onion potato chips manufactured by Tim’s Cascade Snacks, Tortilla Soup mix made by Homemade Gourmet and several prepackaged “Follow Your Heart” tofu meals manufactured by Earth Island.

The FDA said the contamination was discovered by a new tracking system implemented to improve tracing of foodborne illnesses.

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by the Night Writer

More protestors against increased government spending were left out in the cold on the Michigan state Capital lawn this week…but that’s probably how they liked it.

A group called Common Sense in Government organized the “rally”, building some three dozen snowman protestors and equipping them with signs to protest the governor’s proposal to close Michigan’s $1.7 billion deficit by raising taxes.

There was no word on whether the snowmob would be protesting global warming later in the month.

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by the Night Writer

In case Tiger Lilly’s previous post wasn’t enough to lighten up your Thursday, you might want to consider the Strib’s laughable expose from earlier this week, What’s Killing Minnesota’s Moose? Then go over to Powerline’s devastating rebuttal, which perhaps ought to have been entitled “What’s Killing the Star Tribune’s Credibility?”

Personally, I give moose a lot of credit. Nobody, however, gives them more credit than Monty Python:
Continue reading →

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by the Night Writer

According to Gregg Easterbrook in his Tuesday Morning Quarterback column at ESPN, the New York Times has had its hands full just in fact-checking itself.

In the past six months, the Times has, according to its own corrections page, said Arizona borders Wisconsin; confused 12.7-millimeter rifle ammunition with 12.7 caliber (the latter would be a sizeable naval cannon); said a pot of ratatouille should contain 25 cloves of garlic (two tablespoons will do nicely); on at least five occasions, confused a million with a billion (note to the reporters responsible — there are jobs waiting for you at the House Ways and Means Committee); understated the national debt by $4.2 trillion (note to the reporter responsible — there’s a job waiting for you at the Office of Management and Budget); confused $1 billion with $1 trillion (note to the reporter responsible — would you like to be CEO of AIG?); admitted numerical flaws in a story “about the ability of nonsense to sharpen the mind;” used “idiomatic deficiency” as an engineering term (correct was “adiabatic efficiency”); said Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride occurred in 1776 (it was in 1775 — by 1776, everybody knew the British were coming); “misstated the status of the United States in 1783 — it was a country, not a collection of colonies” (dear Times, please Google “Declaration of Independence”).


The Times also “misidentified the song Pink was singing while suspended on a sling-like trapeze;” confused the past 130 years with the entire 4.5 billion-year history of Earth (see appended correction here); misused statistics in the course of an article complaining that public school standards aren’t high enough (see appended correction here); said Citigroup handed its executives $11 million in taxpayer-funded bonuses, when the actual amount was $1.1 billion (in the Citigroup executive suite, being off by a mere two zeroes would be considered incredible financial acumen); said a column lauding actress Terri White “overstated her professional achievements, based on information provided by Ms. White;” identified a woman as a man (it’s so hard to tell these days); reported men landed on Mars in the 1970s (“there was in fact no Mars mission,” the Times primly corrected).


The Times also gave compass coordinates that placed Manhattan in the South Pacific Ocean near the coastline of Chile (see appended correction here); said you need eight ladies dancing to enact the famous Christmas song when nine are needed; said Iraq is majority Sunni, though the majority there is Shiite (hey, we invaded Iraq without the CIA knowing this kind of thing); got the wrong name for a dog that lives near President Obama’s house (“An article about the sale of a house next door to President Obama’s home in Chicago misstated the name of a dog that lives there. She is Rosie, not Roxy” — did Rosie’s agent complain?); elaborately apologized in an “editor’s note,” a higher-level confession than a standard correction, for printing “outdated” information about the health of a wealthy woman’s Lhasa apso; incorrectly described an intelligence report about whether the North Korean military is using Twitter; called Tandil, Argentina, home of Juan Martín del Potro, a “tiny village” (its population is 110,000); inflicted upon unsuspecting readers a web of imprecision about the Frisians, the Hapsburg Empire, the geographic extent of terps, and whether Friesland was “autonomous and proud” throughout the Middle Ages or merely until 1500; inexactly characterized a nuance of a position taken by the French Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (philosophy majors must have marched in the streets of Paris over this); confused coal with methane (don’t make that mistake in a mine shaft!); on at least three occasions, published a correction of a correction; “misstated the year of the Plymouth Barracuda on which a model dressed as a mermaid was posed;” “mischaracterized the date when New York City first hired a bicycle consultant” and “misidentified the location of a pile of slush in the Bronx.”

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by Night Writer

There was a remarkable incident in the Boston subway Friday night when two alert MBTA (formerly the MTA) employees — one on the platform and the other driving — brought a subway car to a screeching halt inches from a woman who had fallen onto the tracks.

Boston Subway Train Stops Short of Woman on Tracks

In this image made from a Friday, Nov. 6, 2009 surveillance video provided by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, a subway train comes to a stop just before running over an unidentified woman who fell on the tracks at Boston's North Station. The woman suffered some scrapes and was taken to a hospital for evaluation. She told authorities she had been drinking. (AP Photo/Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority via AP Television Network)

Unlike the classic Kingston Trio song about the man who never returned (follow the link and click the iLike.com mp3 at the top of the page) this one has a happy ending. Well done, MBTA!

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