Ticks are turning hundreds of Americans into vegetarians. The Lone Star tick contains alpha-gal, a sugar not found in the human body. It IS found in red meat and some dairy products, but people have no trouble eating it. However, when the Lone Star tick bites you, an immune response sends antibodies into your bloodstream. The next time your body encounters alpha-gal, it triggers a severe allergic reaction which may well land you in the hospital.

The tick is spreading across the US, helped by the warming climate. One Long Island specialist alone has seen nearly 200 cases over the last 3 years. A hospital in Virginia sees 2-3 new cases every week.

How would you like to discover that, for probably the rest of your life, you can’t have a steak or a hamburger? I can’t imagine life without an occasional ribeye.

July 4 seemed like a superb opportunity for some soda-related Americana. So for our family’s July 4 gathering at my brother’s rural home in Convoy, Ohio, I took along an ice chest filled with about 25 bottles of soda from Antiqology.

Antiqology is a great little store in downtown Huntington. They have a wall containing about 300 different types of sodas–lots of root beers, birch beers, cream sodas, and sundry other flavors. I have a variety of root beers, Fentiman’s Curiosity Cola, several Jic Jac flavors, and more.

Everyone loved picking through the ice chest to find a bottle to try out. The Hippo Size drinks seemed to be the most popular. The photo shows seven different kinds of root beers I’ve gotten from Antiqology.

Chili’s is doing away with waiters and waitresses, replacing them with tablets. You order from the tablet, and pay with it. It’s a business decision, a money-maker. Tests show:

• People order faster, since they don’t need to wait for a server. That cuts an average of 5 minutes off the meal…meaning a quicker turn-around of tables.
• The pictures on the tablets are much bigger than in a traditional menu.
• People order far more appetizers–20% more. It’s an impulse thing. If you come hungry and you’re greeted with a picture of nachos, you may well order it.
• Pictures of desserts appear as you’re eating. Chili’s has seen a 20% increase in dessert sales. Hit a button, and somebody will bring it.
• The tablets set a default tip amount of 20%, which people tend to go with. They can change it, but it requires a conscious action. I’m not sure who you’re actually tipping, of course, since you don’t have a server.

So we may someday say, “Yeah, I remember when people actually came to your table to take your order.” Is this a good thing?

In Pakistan, a man set a world record by smashing 155 walnuts with his head in one minute. Smashing walnuts with your head–that’s among the saner things that happen in Pakistan.

The deadliest air raid of World War 2 occurred on March 10, 1945, when 300 American B-29s fire-bombed Tokyo–three streams of bombers over a three-hour period, dropping bombs packed with phosphorous and napalm. Bomber crews toward the end said they could smell burnt flesh as they flew over Tokyo. The conflagration killed over 100,000 people, and destroyed nearly 270,000 buildings (most Japanese buildings were made of wood).

By the end of the war, over 60 Japanese cities received similar treatment.

The goal was to break the enemy’s morale, but as in Germany with the firebombing of such cities as Hamburg and Dresden, that didn’t happen. All it did was kill hundreds of thousands of non-combatants–men, women, and children.

A Japanese photographer named Ishikawa Koyo captured the carnage in some stunning photographs which are just now coming to light. Three of them are above. Click on the photos to enlarge them.