Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Last Thursday, the sidewalk by a step-cracked building lifted up off the ground when the water main under it  broke .  I turned on my faucet and got nothing. All the water was running down the streets a few miles away, waist deep in some places.  Water main break, March 27, 2025. Source: Indianapolis Fire Department .  A man who supervises the building at the corner of the recent water main break in East Indianapolis shared a video with me, capturing the scale of the situation. Coverage on @93wibc pic.twitter.com/mUEkc2P78C — Ryan Hedrick (@suretocover) March 27, 2025 Later that day, after fixing the main, the water company issued a boil-water advisory for the next two days. If you wanted to drink it, cook with it, or wash your dishes in it, it had to be boiled.  As usual, I had a sink full of dirty dishes. No problem, I thought--I'll boil water in my canner. But it takes a long time to bring so much water to boil, then it has to cool down enough to put your h...

There's a push in Washington and ten states to ban soda (and other junk food) from SNAP, a program for low-income people to buy groceries. This seems like a no-brainer: the N in SNAP stands for nutrition, and soda doesn't have nutrients. It's liquid sugar, the last thing we need in a country full of diabetics. People can drink water for virtually nothing and save their SNAP money for actual food. Yet a number of posts from otherwise sensible accounts have opposed this.  Reporter Nick Sorter says that a company called Influenceable has been paying influencers to post these opinions. (Click on the link for the full thread.) 🚨🧵 EXPOSED: “INFLUENCEABLE” — The company cutting Big Checks to “influencers” on behalf of Big Soda Over the past 48 hours, several large supposedly MAGA-aligned “influencers” posted almost identical talking points fed to them, convincing you MAHA was out of line for not… pic.twitter.com/PpPwH9lHGe — Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) March 22, 2025 Sorter adds...

 My latest video on YouTube: Real food is generally cheaper than junk food--the pictures prove it. I took these at Kroger and from their website in March 2025. Prices are either straight from the tags or calculated based on product weight.  Music: On We Go (ClipChamp)  First photo by AS Photography: https://www.pexels.com/photo/vegetables-stall-868110/

A lady recently went off about how little food $115 buys, complaining that the pile of (mostly) junk food she bought wouldn't make a week's worth of lunches and snacks for her children. Sad to say, but this looks like what I see in a lot of grocery carts.  Fat pic.twitter.com/qbM23ydaOq — shellshock (@shellshockkk) March 7, 2025 Coincidentally, I paid almost exactly the same amount today on groceries that would make lots of healthy lunches. It's filling food that won't leave you hungry every few hours for snacks. If we want to make America healthy again, this is the way.  

Heaven knows America needs to be healthier. No citation needed--you can leave your house and see that lean, fit people are the exception. But our new Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, wants to change that. His plan includes (according to GROK, X's AI feature) investigating the root causes of chronic disease, scrutinizing food and water additives, revising the dietary guidelines, tackling environmental toxins, ensuring vaccine schedules are based on sound science, addressing the revolving door from health agencies to big pharma, and banning ultra-processed food from school lunches and SNAP (food stamp) eligibility. Some Americans eat like this every day. Maybe that's a problem. Photo from Pexels . All of these are good things--especially ending the pipeline of regulators who go on to work for the companies they were supposed to be regulating. But it ignores the elephant in the room: 60% of America's diet is ultra-processed food. That's compared to 1...

MAHA may be a great idea, but what you do at your house is more important for your health than what's happening at the White House. Growing your own vegetables provides food that's fresher and tastes better than store-bought and helps you get some fresh air, sunshine and exercise. If you grow enough, you can even can your own sauces and soups that don't have any franken-food ingredients. My first time growing celery from seed.  Here in central Indiana, it's time to plant celery from seed since the average last frost date is 10 weeks away. In a few weeks, it'll be time to plant tomatoes. There are a couple of ways to figure out when to start various seeds where you live: You can find out when it's time to plant things by 1) looking up your average last frost date, 2) getting a seed packet and looking at the instructions for starting the seeds indoors, and 3) counting backwards on a calendar by the number of weeks indicated. You could also ask Grok (X's AI fea...