Save yourself the trouble - Don't travel with pressure cooker!

If you plan to travel abroad, it's wise to skip the pressure cooker.

Sound weird huh? But you'll be in a lot of of trouble if you travel to the US with one packed in your luggage because pressure cooker is now considered a dangerous weapon. Two pressure cookers were used in last month's Boston Marathon bombing.

Seriously though, who would want to take all the trouble to bring that bulky cooker in his suitcase and trouble to the States? Don't they have one there. If you intend to bring one, that can only mean you are planning to stay there for sometime. Why not just buy one?

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The following is an extract from what AP reported on Monday, but you can read more at at Yahoo News:-


(AP Photo/Carlos Osorio) - File photo shows jets outside Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Saudi man, Hussain Al Kwawahir was arrested Saturday at the airport after lying about why he was traveling with a pressure cooker.

Saudi man traveling with pressure cooker arrested

A Saudi man was arrested at Detroit Metropolitan Airport after federal agents said he lied about why he was traveling with a pressure cooker, but his nephew said Monday that it was all a misunderstanding about a device he simply wanted for cooking.

Two pressure cookers were used in last month's Boston Marathon bombings.

Hussain Al Khawahir was being held in Detroit on allegations of lying to Customs and Border Protection agents and of using a passport with a missing page. He was arrested Saturday.

His nephew, Nasser Almarzooq, told The Associated Press that he had asked his uncle to bring him the pressure cooker so he could make lamb. The college student said two pressure cookers he bought in the U.S. were "not good at all," and said the ones available in Saudi Arabia are higher quality.

Almarzooq said his uncle was coming to visit him for a couple weeks.

A criminal complaint alleges that Al Khawahir arrived at the airport Saturday on a flight from Saudi Arabia via Amsterdam, and that he told agents he was visiting his nephew.

He originally said he brought the pressure cooker with him because pressure cookers aren't sold in America, then later said his nephew had bought one but it "was cheap" and broke after one use, according to the complaint.

Agents said they also noticed a page was missing from Al Khawahir's passport from Saudi Arabia. He told them he didn't how it had been removed, and said the document had been locked in a box that only he, his wife and three children have access to in his home, according to the complaint.

Longest word in the world (in any language)

Why not start your Monday by reading the world's longest word?

The other day we were at one of KPJ's hospital by chance and I chanced upon a pamphlet showing a long word - Oesophagogastroduodenoscopy. The A to Z alphabet has 26 letters in total.

27 letters in a word, long enough for you?

Oesophagogastroduodenoscopy or simply pronounced OGD is a clinical procedure to look into the esophagus, stomach and duodenum to find the cause of:

• Upper abdominal pain
• Indigestion and heartburn
• Nausea and vomiting
• Swallowing problem
• Bleeding from the upper gastrointestinal tract
• Inflammation, ulcers and tumors of the esophagus,

among others. I learnt something there.


27 is long but what about the longest one?

Google around further and you will find that the longest word in the English language is a 189,819-letter, chemical name of a protein known as titin.

Here is a video grab of a man trying to pronounce it loudly and according to the video clip, it took him more than 3 hours to complete the task.

Video source

The word is “Methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylarginyl …. isoleucine”, but seriously, don't waste your time reading (or pronouncing) it. We are not even sure if it is a word.

You might also be interested in what are the other long words at wikipedia.

Cheers!

What's for dinner: Zimbabwe's mopane worms!

I read an interesting stomach-turning diet coverage by Associated Press' Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi. The writer wrote about people consuming worms, or to be exact, caterpillars. But like what people say - one's cure is other's poison. so, let's not pass the verdict indiscriminately.

That's for today's dinner. Wikipedia photo

Pretty big guy!

Mopane worms are large edible caterpillar found in much of Africa.

A mopane worm hatches and as it grows, it sheds skin 4 times in its five larval stages, after which the mopane worm is considered most suitable for harvesting.

Otherwise it goes into pupal stage and transforms into giant moth, commonly called emperor moth due to it size.

The worms can be eaten dry, as crunchy as potato chips, or cooked and drenched in sauce to enhance the taste.


You may want to try your hands on these:

During harvest season, the compounds are covered with thousands of worms, laid out to dry in the hot sun. AP photo through mail.com


Nutritional value

Mopane worms are high in healthy nutrients and contain 3 times the amount of protein as beef. Eating worms is less taxing on the environment than consuming beef because it takes far fewer leaves to produce worms than it does feed to produce the same amount of beef.

Dried mopane worms have even been exported to other countries and can be found in African restaurants in Paris.


A useful recipe

This is a recipe that AP says "is one of the tastiest":

Ingredients (Mopane Worms for 4 persons):
500 grams dried mopane worms; three tomatoes, diced or 1 can of tomatoes; two onions, diced; 1/2 teaspoon turmeric; three fresh green chilies, finely chopped; three cloves of garlic, finely chopped; tablespoon of fresh ginger, finely chopped.

Cooking it:
Soak dried worms in water for 3-4 hours to reconstitute. Fry onions in groundnut oil on medium heat until translucent. Add turmeric, chilies, garlic and ginger. Fry for about five minutes. Add tomatoes and cook on low for about 20 minutes until spices are well blended. Add drained worms and cook until they have softened a bit but still are a little crunchy. Salt and pepper to taste.

Serve with pap, called sadza in Zimbabwe.



This article was derived from AP

Ten fascinating facts about Spiders

If you ask me which critters are better looking: the South American tarantulas or the Falling Sky's critters, I would definitely choose tarantula.

You may disagree with me and I can't really blame you because most people would not welcome spiders in their homes. But put aside their scary reputation, spiders are actually one of the most useful and friendly critters on earth. Here, take a look at this and let's appreciate the fascinating fact about them:

Kasih Sayang Resort spider, Kota Kinabalu. Taken with Nikkor DX lens 18-200mm

Focal length 200mm | f/5.6 | ISO-200 | 1/125s |

1. The word “spider” comes from the Old English word “spinnan” which means “to spin.” Not sure if they spend their spare time spinning though.


2. Spiders are not insects. They are arachnids. Insects have three body sections and six legs; spiders have two body sections and eight legs.


3. Despite the fact that most spiders have 6 to 8 pairs of eyes, their eyesight is very poor. They use the fine hairs on their bodies to sense movement and signal when they should run or attack.


4. Most spiders live for less than six months, but the female tarantula can live up to 25 years!


5. Spiders digest their food before they eat it! They inject digestive enzymes into their prey which turns the captured critter into liquid and allows the spider to suck up the mush through a special “straw.”


6. Each year, spiders eat so many insects that the combined weight of their pray exceeds the weight of the entire global population of humans.


7. Despite its scary appearance, the tarantula is no more poisonous than a bee sting.


8. The spider’s web is made out of protein. When it’s time to spin a new web, the spider will eat the old web.


9. The golden spider spins silk that is as strong as a steel wire of the same size.


10. The black widow’s venom is 15 times more powerful than the venom of the diamondback rattlesnake.  However, because only a tiny amount is injected when she bites, very few people die from the black widow spider’s bite.

Oh, and if you live in the UK, you are lucky. The UK tops the list of countries whose populations most fears spiders! Half of all women and one in five men have an aversion to spiders.

Girl found alive under corpses of slain family in France

No one should give up on anything but should keep going. Not until one's number is up.

In the case of life and death, there's this famous Malay quote: 'Berpantang maut sebelum ajal'. That's exactly what happened to a 4-year-old girl when her family members (including her father, mother and grandmother) were brutally killed in a close range shooting. It happened at a popular camping site near Chevaline, France.



Viewed from air, beautiful Chevaline is very popular among campers. Photo: The Sun, UK


Girl, 4, found alive after shooting in French Alps
France, September 6, 2012

AFP - A four-year-old girl miraculously survived a shooting in the French Alps that left four people dead by curling up under the bullet-riddled corpses of her mother and grandmother, officials said Thursday.

The little girl spent eight hours concealed on the back seat of her family's car following a mysterious and brutal gun attack which also left her elder sister seriously injured and killed a passer-by.

Her father, who was found dead in the driver's seat, was identified Thursday as Saad al-Hilli, a 50-year-old born in Baghdad but resident in Claygate, Surrey in the southeast of England.

The fourth man who died is believed to be a local who happened to be cycling past the scene of the crime.

The girl's elder sister, who was found shot next to the car, was in a serious but stable condition in hospital after being flown by helicopter to the nearby city of Grenoble where she was visited Thursday by a British consular official.

Eric Maillaud, the prosecutor in charge of the investigation, said the four-year-old had emerged unscathed.

"She stayed, curled up under the bodies for eight hours and didn't move in all that time," he said.

The first police to arrive on the scene did not spot the girl and, with the car being left untouched and the area sealed off pending the arrival of forensic experts, she was left to endure a traumatic ordeal until she was finally discovered around midnight.

"It was only once we had access to the scene of the crime that we found her," Maillaud said. "The little girl spoke English. She heard noises, shouts but she can't tell us any more than that. She is only four years old.

"She is being looked after and we are doing everything we possibly can to care for her."



Gendarmes block access to the killing site on Wednesday, Sept 5, 2012. Photo by The Straits Times


You can read the rest of the story at France 24 International News.

Weird: Squid injects woman's tongue with sperm bag

Really?

In a bizarre incident, sperm was an unexpected side dish for a 63-year-old woman in Korea. She was eating partially cooked squid when a sperm bag was injected into her mouth, leaving her tongue essentially inseminated with squid spermatophores.

By all accounts, she is not pregnant with baby squid. She did have to make a visit to the hospital though, to check a "foreign-body sensation" and pain in her mouth after spitting out the nasty sperm bag. But I don't suppose the sensation is anything near to the prickind caused by aliens emerging from human host. (Of course that happens only in Hollywood movies). What happen to the Korean woman is true.

Nothing's wrong with the squid here. Image credit: wikimedia

Sensational story goes viral

The Huffington Post reported that a woman in Seoul, Korea was eating semi-boiled squid when the cephalopod injected its sperm bag into her tongue, according to research published in February.

The unidentified woman reportedly experienced a "pricking and foreign-body sensation" while she chewed and spat the squid out. She had to go to the hospital when she felt severe pain and several "small, squirming" creepy crawlies in her mouth.

Doctors found that the squid had left "twelve small, white spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms" in the mucous membranes of her tongue and cheek. Indeed, the woman's mouth had been essentially inseminated.

Researchers think that the squid's sperm bags came out while the woman chewed her food. Squids have "sperm bags," which are ejaculatory apparatuses that attach themselves to a female's body before slowly secreting sperm, according to Fairfax New Zealand News.

It's not the first time a squid has tried to fertilize a human mouth. There have been several incidents in Japan where people have complained of oral stings by their food, the news site reported.

When consuming raw squid, diners should remove their internal organs, or boil the tasty treat long enough to kill its sperm bags, researchers warned.

The research was published by the American Society of Parasitologists in the Journal of Parasitology.

TheGreenMechanics: That's the reason I don't take raw foods. Not even 'medium'.

Sources:
The Huffington Post - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/15/squid-sperm_n_1599591.html?utm_hp_ref=weird-news
American Society of Parasitologists in the Journal of Parasitology - http://amsocparasit.org/

Dead cat turned into helicopter

You read that right.

An artist (surely some wouldn't call him that) found a way to keep his dead pet longer by turning it into a remote-controlled helicopter. The cat, named Orville after the famed aviator Orville Wright (brother of Wilbur) died after being hit by a car last year and instead of burying it, owner Bart Jansen decided to stuff it, and make a helicopter out of it.

Poor cat. Photo: Reuter



He called it 'work of art'. Photo: Reuter

So, what's next? Stuffing your loved ones and put them in a display cabinet to make them 'immortal'? Some people think this is funny and can't stop laughing. I don't. In some societies cats are not just pet, they are considered as pars/members of the family and are given proper burial. You don't have to treat them that way; a little respect will do.

We don't have cat at home currently but I don't fancy having our future cat or our neighbour's being stuffed and turned into toys.


Read about it here.

Only in Sabah - Funny words

You can see this along Jalan KK Bypass near Bulatan Capital. This road sign is still in use today and you can stop by to have a clearer view of the faded alphabets.

Old signboard still in use

"KERETA SABLLA KANAN JALAN DAHULU"

English: "GIVE WAY TO THE VEHICLES FROM THE IMMEDIATE RIGHT".
Catchy word: SABLLA KANAN (immediate right)
Wrongly spelt: Sablla (correct word: Sebelah)

It makes me wonder why it is still there after so many years of modernisation works in the city. Perhaps it has some historical value like the Atkinson Tower Clock which stands not far from it. LOL

Slick, naughty leech

It's a blue (pun intended) Monday, especially if you are United fan. The reason? The noisy blue neighbours - Manchester City - won the EPL title. In a nail-biting, dramatic fashion!

Anyway, due credit must be given to the deserving victors. Congratulations City. For us, let's set some sparks this otherwise blue Monday.

The following is a snapshot of a local tabloid in Malay language, so that would give me reason to repeat the story in English (and make this article appear longer than it is):

Daily Express, 14.5.2012

It talks about a terrifying experience of a 7-year-old boy who was warded to remove a leech which had entered his anus while fishing at a swamp. The boy, Mohd Farhan, only noticed the big leech when he suffered rectal bleeding while 'doing his business'.

It stated that the leech measured about the size of an adult thumb.

That is monstrously big compared to the tiny forest leech that usually enter and feed in your nose while you go hiking or jungle trekking. It can be easily removed though, by snipping the old-trusted Axe Brand oil; the leech would just fall off.

But in the rectum? This one has got to be the hungry, aggressive water-buffalo leech! Auchh!

Totally Focused on Studies

I was about to write something on the much delayed construction of a secondary school in the Nabalu (along Ranau Road) but I have to slip this one in between. I thought many would be shocked to know that in this IT age there are still 'doctor/s' that know little about things.

Here, have a dose of something - hope it keeps us pondering and reflecting on a thing or two:-

Chinese married couple clueless about sex

By News Desk in Kuala Lumpur/The Star | ANN- Wed, Jul 6, 2011

Kuala Lumpur (The Star/ANN) - A highly educated couple, in their 30s from Hubei, China, thought that the wife would get pregnant by sleeping on the same bed, Malaysia's largest selling Chinese language newspaper Sin Chew Daily reported.

Prior to their marriage, the couple did not dare hold hands and kiss as they thought the woman would get pregnant by doing so, reported a China newspaper Chu Tian Jin Bao.

However, the couple decided to seek medical advice after the wife, who holds a masters degree, could not conceive.

They have been married for three years.

The doctor was shocked to learn about their "sex life".

The husband, who has a doctoral degree, said they were too focused on their studies.

..and I thought "only" art stream students were taught biology in high school/secondary school?

apa macam tu boss?

Renewable, or Is It?

Renewable energy is a term used to describe a source of energy that has the capacity to replenish itself; it's the kind of energy that can be used over and over again, and it will never run out. I am a green technology enthusiast and renewable energy is one of the areas that I am passionate about.

What others interprate as renewable and evergreen gives new dimension to what I've understood all this while. The interpretation is so dynamic, a green mechanic may struggle to associate things to his circumstances. Let me give an example:


Few days ago The Jakarta Post reported the following:

JAKARTA: The controversial dang-dut singer  Dewi Persik feels like
a brand  new  woman.  She has just  had  hymenoplasty, or surgical
restoration of the hymen, popularly known as virginity surgery.

The 25-year-old told kompas.com recently  that she had undergone
the surgery after going on a pilgrimage.

“I may  be a divorcée,  but physically I am still a virgin,”  the two-time
divorcée said proudly.

Dewi added she went through with the surgery because she did not
want to disappoint her future husband. The procedure took place in
Egypt, she said. The singer is currently single after breaking up with
her boyfriend, actr Nicky Tirta. She divorced her previous husbands,
singer Saiful Jamil and actor Aldiansyah Taher. - JP


Just wondering what others think about that.