hysteria

Comes the word now from our professional governmental nannies that fist bumps, in the style of the somewhat younger (than me) set are a safer greeting than the old fashioned handshake.  I suppose this is because the palm carries more e-coli than the knuckle skin.  Somehow, it doesn't occur to these types that slowing down our homeless human drifting around across the globe, carrying with us our microbes as well as other fauna and flora would do more to arrest our drift toward serial epidemic hysteria than any amount of worry about which method of human greeting carries with it more risk.

And a butcher block came up yesterday in our endless conversation among ourselves here at Pastures.  I remembered one from my childhood sixty years ago that I greatly admired just for the amount of human effort that had been expended over it.  I claimed that it was sufficiently dished on the top from years of wear due to an endless series of knives cutting meat that it would hold without spilling a drinking glass of water.  Now, of course, such a tool is not allowed in any food production area due to the porousness of the wood.  Somehow, we do not worry about the integrity of the private inspectors hired by the chicken killing companies to substitute for the public inspectors they claim to no longer need.  Wood, in the service of cutting meat is suspect, but companies hiring their own inspectors is not.  Progress, I guess.

Jim