The Citizen, 2015-12-03, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2015. PAGE 5.
Are you mysophobic? Donald Trump
certainly is. So is the annoyingly
manic TV bobblehead game-show
host Howie Mandel. The Trumpet, for all
his brutish aggressiveness, would sooner
say something humble than shake your
hand. Mandel wouldn’t touch you at all.
He greets guests on his TV show with fist
bumps.
Mysophobia is a pathological fear of germs.
It’s also called verminophobia, bacillophobia
and bacteriophobia. The most common
manifestation is a repetitive washing of
hands, and for mysophobics it can really get
out of, er, hand. In 2012, a woman in England
wore socks on her hands (when she wasn’t
washing them) and showered up to 20 hours a
day. She died of dehydration and a skin
infection.
Who says the gods don’t have a sense of
irony?
That said, if you want to worry about germs,
there’s enough raw material to go around. The
only upside of visits to my doctor’s office used
to be the chance to catch up on those rumpled
copies of Maclean’s magazine from the 1980s.
No more. All reading material in the waiting
room has been replaced by an aerosol hand
sanitizer. Same story with grocery store
shopping carts. Now I get a container of
Handiwipes to swab down the handles in case
the previous user was a Black Plague carrier.
Handrails? Don’t touch ‘em. Doorknobs?
Crawling with microbial creepy-crawlies.
Elevators? The other day I saw a guy – empty-
handed but obviously germ averse – trying to
press the sixth floor button with his elbow.
Public washrooms? Only if you’re wearing a
full-dress Hazmat suit.
Do you have school-age kids in your life?
Vaya con dios, amigo. Schools are veritable
petri dishes of infection. They turn your kids
into walking artesian wells of viral potential.
Wouldn’t it be nice to just fly away from it
all? Yup – but don’t fly commercial. Recently,
a website called Travelmath.com did a
worldwide hygiene survey of airports and
airplanes. Not pretty.
Airport washrooms actually come off rather
well. The surveyors found only 70 of what
they euphemistically called ‘colony-forming
units’ (read ‘infectious germs’) on the
washroom stall locks. The seatbelt buckles
aboard the planes were four times as
contagious.
And you may want to bring your own water
supply. The survey found enough virulent
agents on the drinking fountains (1,240 per
square inch) to make dehydration look like a
plausible alternative.
But the germiest place by far on your
average airplane? Here’s a hint: the next time
you hear the announcement to ‘bring your tray
tables to the upright and locked position’, put
on a pair of rubber gloves before you comply.
The average airplane tray table – you know,
the one you eat your inflight meals and snacks
on – contained an astonishing 2,155 colony-
forming units per square inch.
That said, how much of this germ phobia is
legitimate and how much is media-induced
hysteria?
I know what dear old mom would say (as she
retrieved a cookie that fell on the floor and
brushed it off on her apron). “Son, you’ll eat a
peck of dirt before you die.”
Now the old man, he was more into riddles.
“Which runs faster,” he’d ask us. “A cough
or a cold?”
The answer? A cough, of course.
Anyone can catch a cold.
Arthur
Black
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
Over the weekend I was cutting open a
bag of milk when it occurred to me
that drinking milk isn’t exactly the
most normal thing in the world for humans to
do.
Don’t get me wrong, I love milk. I lived on
two meals of cereal a day for a good chunk of
my teens and into my early 20s when I was at
school. So this isn’t me hating the dairy
beverage.
No, this is me just realizing that a lot of
things we take for granted could have some
pretty unique (or some downright disturbing)
geneses.
While scientists have discovered that the
first group to be able to process dairy
beverages was from central Europe and
developed that ability some seven millenia
ago, it certainly doesn’t explain who first
looked at a cow and said, “I wonder how that
mammal’s milk tastes.”
At least I hope that was the thought process,
I guess it could have been something far more
disturbing that would have me eating my
cereal with water from here on out.
It got me thinking about other things like,
who was the first person to decide to try and
bake bread?
Did some serendipitous fire occur close
enough to some ground-up plants aeons ago
and result in some lucky primitive finding
what would be the greatest thing until sliced
bread?
There are enough tales about how things that
are common today came into being – like
cereal, for example.
Cereal, in its modern incarnation, owes its
creation to the Kellogg brothers who created
the first packaged cereals as part of their
sanitorium’s diet program.
Potato chips were, allegedly, created when a
chef got tired of a patron asking for thinner and
thinner cooked potatoes until he made them so
thin that they could not be eaten with a fork.
The tale goes that the patron loved the dish, so
I guess that the chef didn’t exactly make his
point.
Beyond that, however, look around your
home or your office or your kitchen and ask
yourself, who first came up with the idea to do
that and how.
Take to the internet and you might find some
interesting stories. I will warn you, however,
that you may never be able to look at some of
the things that make up your daily routine the
same way ever again.
Take the bean brew (coffee) as an example.
The origin of coffee as a beverage is thought
to be in Ethiopia in the 10th century, though
the only credible evidence that exists dates
back to the 15th century.
Coffee started in religious practices and
several legends tell of its creation. Some say
that a mystic saw birds with high energy and,
after tasting the berries of the plant they were
feasting on, discovered it energized him as
well.
Another states that a Sheik’s disciple,
discovered a coffee plant and in true
Goldilocks-style, found the berries too bitter.
He roasted the berries to make them more
palatable, but found they became very hard.
After boiling them, however, and drinking the
liquid they were boiled in, he was energized.
Yet another tale tells of an Ethiopian goat-
herder who noticed that his flock became
energized when chewing on certain bushes.
The thought of how the first gulp of milk
was discovered got me thinking about other
products in the fridge as well though, the first
of which, another dairy product, might not be
the best tale to tell if you’re about to eat lunch.
It’s assumed, according to the great
information source Wikipedia, that cheese was
first created when milk was transported in
ruminants’ stomachs. (Ruminants are any
animals that glean their nutrition by
fermenting plant matter in their stomach, like
cows.)
Because there is no definitive history, it’s
tough to say if that’s how the first cheese
wheel was discovered (or if it was
even a wheel.)
The Greeks (or Greek Mythology) credit
the minor god Aristaeus with making
cheese and the dairy product is mentioned in
Homer’s Odyssey as something that the
cyclops makes.
Either way, I’m glad that, today, cheese isn’t
brewed up in the stomach of the animal that
produced the milk necessary to make it. I
might not be able to look at it the same way.
However, mentioning that gets me on to
another question I had – who was the first
person to create a sausage?
Turns out, there is no mythical legend
behind meat and organs being stuffed in
stomachs or intestines, it’s just logic.
Apparently any butcher worth their salt
would use various tissues and organs and salt
them, stuff them into casings made from clean
intestines and, voila, sausage.
I was hoping for a tale that would be a little
more memorable to be honest or at least a story
that left something to the imagination. Kind of
like eggs.
Seriously, who was the first person to watch
an animal drop their young, encased in an egg,
out of their nether-parts and think it looked
good enough to eat.
Again, no hate here. I love eggs. My wife
and I have a couple devices for the sole
purpose of cooking eggs to fit them on an
english muffin for breakfast.
But looking at the egg, where it comes from
and the fact that the first egg eaten likely
wasn’t an unfertilized egg like the ones found
in kitchens across the world today, who would
have thought that would make a good meal?
Especially when there was a chicken
presumably near-by waiting to be caught and
turned into a good, roasted meal.
I guess, until we figure out time travel, we
will never know who first thought it was a
good idea to chow down on an egg, or where
the first loaf of bread came from or who first
thought that milk from a cow’s udder would
taste good.
Then again, maybe not knowing what was
going through those culinary pioneer’s heads
is for the best.
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
In or out... all of you
When Jess and I finally, after many
years together, bought our dream
home in Blyth, this joyous event
was followed closely by a housewarming
party. Having said that, I know all of you
weren’t invited to that housewarming party,
and for that I’m very, very sorry.
I’m sure most of you will understand that I
know some of you better than others (there are
even some readers out there I don’t even know
at all) and that, due to the logistics of a home
and the limited space it provides, the entire
community – and beyond – simply couldn’t
have been there.
I say that, of course, because of a story that
was in the news last week that flies directly in
the face of my housewarming party strategy –
and the strategy employed by most people
planning any type of a social event. That
outdated, dinosaur of a concept is, of course,
inviting to your event only the people you
happen to like and whose company you enjoy.
It’s true. Ask Wolfgang Van Rosan, the father
of a seven-year-old girl who goes to school in
Oakville.
One day in November, Van Rosan’s daughter
came home from school a little “depressed”
and he eventually found that the culprit was a
student at the school who handed out
invitations to her birthday party and Van
Rosan’s daughter, and a handful of other
students, didn’t receive one.
The father did the reasonable thing, he went
on CBC Radio and complained about it.
“Especially at this age, [the birthday girl] is
giving invitations to some and not to others.
This creates a two-tier classmate system: those
invited and not invited,” he told the show.
“This is a privilege, not a right, to hand out
invitations in a public place.”
I freely admit that Jess and I don’t yet have
children and that it will no doubt be hard to
explain the concept of rejection to my child,
but should it not be explained?
If Van Rosan has his way, everybody should
be included in everything – an even more
unreasonable extension of the age of the
participant trophy, a way of life in which
nobody wins or loses, nobody passes or fails
and everybody gets everything they want.
I have written about this before – a number
of times, actually – and my comment has
always been the same, that rejection, losing or
failing are actually character-builders and to
shield your child from these eventualities is to
really do him or her a disservice in the later
years of his or her life.
When this young girl is an adult, she’s going
to need to understand that she won’t be invited
to everything, just as every child needs to
understand that in the adult world of real
competition, not everybody wins and not
everybody is at the top of the class simply to
save hurt feelings.
So, back to my housewarming party – no, I
didn’t invite people I went to school with who
called me names and I didn’t invite readers
who have threatened to sue me before and I
didn’t seek out everyone who’s ever given me
the finger on the 401 and I didn’t attempt to
find addresses for all of my ex-girlfriends. Do
you know why? Because I don’t want to spend
my time with them.
At what point can we do anything for
ourselves? Perhaps this young girl, take her to
court if you so choose (although I shouldn’t
joke, maybe that’s next) wanted to spend her
birthday party with her friends, and people she
likes to be around – creating a pleasant day for
herself, rather than doing a community service
to everyone she’s ever met.
Other Views
Infectious (literally) behaviour
Sometimes the world needs a weirdo