Honest Dad

Honesty.  The best policy.

Lasssie-Bot

The Russians have been developing cold war, border collie battle cyborgs since the 1950's.  The project was shut down because the Lassie-Bots chase and retrieve when you throw a grenade.

 

Measuring The Burn

I've had four conversations in the past three weeks involving chilli and chilli sauce, so I decided to do a blog post that includes an example of the Scorville scale. 

The Scoville scale is a measurement of the spicy heat of a chilli pepper. The number of Scoville heat units indicates the amount of capsaicin present in a chilli or chilli sauce.  Capsaicin is the chemical compound that stimulates the nerve endings in the skin and create the burning sensation. The Scorville scale measures chilli peppers and their products by how much water is required to dilute the capsaicin.  Due to variations in growing conditions, soil and weather, etc, the heat scale can vary between harvests.

Here's a small selection of chilli peppers and their Scorville rating.

Sweet Bell pepper  0
Pimento  100 - 200 
Tuscan peppers  100 - 500
New Mexico pepper  500 - 1,000 
Jalapeño  2,500 - 5,000 
Hot Wax pepper  5,000 - 10,000 
Tabasco pepper   30,000 - 50,000 
Thai pepper   50,000 - 100,000
Habanero  100,000 - 350,000
Caribbean Red  120,000 - 400,000
Ghost Chilli   800,000 - 1,041,000
Common Pepper spray  2,000,000
Police grade Pepper spray  5,300,000
Homodihydrocapsaicin  8,600,000
Nordihydrocapsaicin  9,100,000
Pure Capsaicin  16,000,000

Capsaicinoids are not soluble in water, but very soluble in fats, oils and alcohol, this is why drinking water won't stop the burn.  To get some relief from a chilli burn, drink milk or eat ice-cream. Milk contains casein, a substance that surrounds and washes away the fatty capsaicin molecules the same way that soap washes away grease.

When you eat chilli you experience the burn as the capsaicin binds to receptors in your mouth, but the rest of the gastro intestinal tract are not lined with the same receptors and hence you do not experience burning as the hot meal makes its way through you.  Capsaicin is not broken down completely by digestion so what exits through the back door still contains a reasonable amount of the chemical. 

Where the intestinal tract ends (you know which part I'm talking about) there are large numbers of nerve receptors which is why you get ring burn the following day.  If it gets too bad you could make yourself an icecream enema.  But the important thing is that  you don't start dragging your arse around on the dining room carpet like your pet.

Xmas Movie

I think said mostly everything I wanted to about Santa in last years post.  Except that Santa gives more and better presents to rich kids than he does to poor kids.

Here's something you can think about when you sit down to eat your Christmas pudding:

That's what the sequel should be.

Eel Invasion

Discovered an unusual incident involving an eel that was reported in The Daily Telegraph a couple of months ago (September 17).

A man in the Hubei province of China was relaxing in a spa bath with live eels to let them feed on his dead skin when one started travelling up his urethra!  He's quoted saying: "I tried to hold it and take it out, but the eel was too slippery to be held and it disappeared up my penis."

After three hours of surgery to remove the 15 centimeter eel from his bladder, it was found dead.  The surgeon who extracted the eel explained: "The diameter of the urethra in a man's penis is just a little narrower. But because eels are quite slippery, its body worked as a lubricant and got into the penis smoothly."

He probably shouldn't have peed in the bath. Reminds me of that line from The Hitchers song: "Eels up inside ya. Finding an entrance where they can."
 

(I couldn't resist reposting the song)

Here's the link to The Daily Telegraph story.

The Medical Uses of Urine

OK so this is part two of the post a couple of weeks ago regarding The Domestic Uses of Urine.  There's also a wee bit of an update to that here.

Urine has been used as a healing substance, both externally and internally in all parts of the world through history. Urine contains vitamins, minerals, proteins, enzymes, hormones, antibodies, and amino acids, steroids, thousands of compounds in all.

One of the prescriptions the Damar Tantra, an ancient Sanskrit text is massaging one's skin with fresh, concentrated urine.  The Sahih Bukhari Islamic text, quotes the Prophet Muhammad advocating drinking camel's urine as a medicine in several verses.

In Roman times, there was a tradition among the Gauls to use urine to whiten teeth, both as a rinse and a tonic.  In 17th century France, wrapped urine soaked stockings around their necks to cure strep throat.  Aristocratic French women reportedly bathed in urine to beautify their skin. The details as to who's urine this was is open to speculation, aristocratic French women reportedly did a lot of things.

In the early 1800s, a book titled One Thousand Notable Things describes the use of urine to cure scurvy, relieve skin itching, cleanse wounds, and many other treatments. An 18th century French dentist praised urine as a valuable mouthwash and tooth whitener. In England during the 1860-70s, the drinking of one's own urine was a common cure for jaundice. Alaskan Eskimos used urine as an antiseptic to treat wounds.

Peeing on a hand towel and applying the urine directly to the face has been known to reduce acne. Some sports professionals and even dancers have used urine to treat athletes foot, simply by urinating on the feet will cause the athletes foot to reduce or even cure completely.  Madonna has admitted to using this method, apparently it worked like a prayer.  Dolores O'Riordan from The Cranberries admitted on a music TV show that when she was first learning to play guitar she had a serious problem with calluses on her fingers which she treated with this method under instruction from her band mates.  This may have been the influence in deciding the title of their 1993 album "Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?".

Urokinase, an enzyme extracted from human urine, is being used to treat victims of heart attacks.  But where is all this medical pee coming from?  Well it is being collected by pharmaceutical companies in association with porta-loo companies. That's right, the ingredients for the pill millions pop on their tongue is collected from those reeking portable toilets that we all hate to use.  When you take a wiz at your favourite outdoor concert you may be making a donation. The Porta-loo features a filtering system that collects the pee proteins for later manufacture into urokinase.

Horse urine from pregnant mare's has high amounts of estrogens, which is isolated and sold as Premarin hormone therapy for women.  Ingestion of urea has been found to increase the antibacterial activity in urine itself against urinary tract infection.  Other compounds in urine used in medication are gastric depressants for ulcers and allantoin in ointments to promote wound healing.

The tonic of first morning urine is prized widely by pee-drinking advocates many of which believe that because the resting body uses less vital nutrients than during the daytime, it releases the unused excess into the morning urine.  Kind of like a do it yourself vitamin supplement with your breakfast toast.

The hormone melatonin is present in morning urine in significant quantities but much less during the day due to its secretion being shut off by the eyes exposure to bright sunlight.  Melatonin, when ingested, provokes tranquillity and heightened visualisation, working as a mild analgesic.  Why bother with finding an opium dealer when you could be drinking pee.

Despite the positive fizz of urine therapy, urine's ability to concentrate substances is not always a beneficial one. A diet high in salt leads to urine high in salt. And slurping down extra salty piss will give you diarrhoea.  In a similar but more deadly vein other toxins can become harmfully concentrated in the urine and pee recyclers with toxins creeping into their diet will soon find them selves on a much faster downward health spiral.

Know your supplier! You may be guzzling down a great deal more than you bargained for.  If the pee you choose to drink is your own, wash down below thoroughly and then collect the urine mid-stream.  If the urine belongs to another person, consider that there are certain viruses and bacteria that can be carried in and transmitted through the urine (such as Hep-B).  Drugs and hormone pills (birth control) leave traces in the urine, so feel free to accuse anyone with man boobs of being a pee drinker.  Taking a drug test after drinking the urine of someone taking performance enhancing drugs could cost you your victory.  Then again if you fail your next sports competition drug test you could try blaming your wee lifestyle choice.

Faecal Transplant

While some bacteria is bad, and makes us sick, there's other bacteria that wriggles around inside us and helps us digest food. Regardless of how much Disinfectant you want to spray around the house, the fact is that without these germs you're not going to be in good health at all. On rare occasions it's possible for these bacteria within us to die off, raising all sorts of medical issues. Usually from things like high levels of antibiotics or poisoning.

But not to fear, medical science has the solution in the delightful form of a faecal transplant, wherein faeces of a donor loaded with healthy new bacteria is injected into the patients colon with the plan to make a new home for themselves in the intestine. The procedure is the easy part the hard part is finding a suitable donor. You have to ask around your family and friends if they could help you out with a crappy favour you need. If you don't have any family or friends you could try putting an ad in the paper.

Once the donor has been found, they need to collect around five days supply of their feces and store it properly by putting it in their fridge during the five day period. After that, generally the donor transports their entire collection of excrement to the hospital. Because their donated supply can't be frozen, if they are travelling long distance they will need to check it in as carry-on luggage, not cargo, and explain everything to the airport staff.

The donors excrement is then mixed with saline to create a supply of five to ten days worth of enemas administered at the hospital. The donors payload can also be administered through a nasogastric tube, delivering the bacteria directly to the small intestine. Or in other words a tube is inserted through the nose, down through the stomach and excrement is pumped in. Occasionally both methods are used to increase effectiveness, attacking the problem from both ends as it were.

These days everything's about awareness, so I'm thinking I should set up a booth in the mall and make everyone purchase brown ribbons and soft toys. With a bit of support it could become a movement.