Just found this poem I scrawled in a notebook March 20, 1989 while looking for a home in the Colorado Rockies near Glenwood Springs, after being hired to establish and man a Western news bureau there for the Denver Rocky Mountain News:

We like the scenery
so we pull it all out
flatten the hills
& scrape the landscape clean
& put up matchstick condos with rustic cedar siding
& sell them for too much, unit by unit,
to people eager to live
in: The Forest
a project whose name
evokes only memories
of the majesty of
what once stood in its place.
– ken winston caine

by ken winston caine

I have just made the most remarkable 3,000-year-old discovery that instantly soothes aching, inflamed muscles and nerves and relieves pain and inflammation.

And can’t believe that it’s taken me all this time. I must have first read about this technique at least 30 years ago and “learned it” again in numerous herbal medicine courses over the years.

The forgotten, ancient medical miracle used thousands of years ago in India and China and in other folk-medicine traditions in more recent centuries?

The ginger compress.

Just a hot, moist pack of ginger placed over acutely inflamed muscles and nerves.

I’d never tried it, having lost faith in herbal compresses years ago when I found that most I experimented with seemed to have no discernible healing power beyond the effect of the moist heat. Not so with the ginger compress. It really works. REALLY works. Fast.

It costs pennies, takes seconds to make. You probably already have the makings on hand in your house if you raid the spice cabinet and improvise a bit. And it instantly draws away the swelling and pain… Even better, the effect is lasting.

I’ll tell you how I made it in a moment. (more…)

by ken winston caine

Are you getting the kind of gas mileage many people were getting in 1984?

I’ll bet you aren’t.

The sporty 1984 Honda Civic CRX coupe was rated at 51 mpg city and 67 mpg highway in U.S. Environmental Protection Agency tests.

It was a gas-burner. (A stingy gas-burner.) And it was peppy and comfortable and fun to drive.

This was more than two decades ago. Long, long before hybrids.

That same year the Pontiac Fiero 4 cylinder, 2.5 liter, stickshift got 27 mpg city, 47 mpg highway in EPA tests… The Chevy Camaro got 40 mpg on the highway. The Nissan Sentra got a whopping 50 mpg city and 66 mpg highway…

Those were official figures, but they didn’t tell the whole truth. They didn’t (more…)

A report on a couple studies — one published in Chinese — suggests a strong link between bra wearing and breast cancer.

Other studies report a link between bra wearing and breast cysts and breast pain. The cancer link has not been medically established, but has not been scientifically disproven either.

The first and largest study that suggested such a link was by Sydney Singer and his wife Soma Grismaijer. They conducted a five-city survey of 4,500 women in the U.S. While that’s a large sample for a study, the work has been criticized as not meeting high medical research standards. The couple’s alarming findings are summarized on the website 007b.com as follows:

• 3 out of 4 women who wore their bras 24 hours per day developed breast cancer.
• 1 out of 7 women who wore bras more than 12 hour per day but not to bed developed breast cancer.
• 1 out of 152 women who wore their bras less than 12 hours per day got breast cancer.
• 1 out of 168 women who wore bras rarely or never acquired breast cancer.

That tallies to a 125-fold increase in the incidence of breast cancer among women who wore bras around the clock versus those who rarely or never wore bras.

The American Cancer Society dismisses the study and its conclusions as not being scientifically rigorous and says, “There is no other, credible research to validate this claim in any way.”

However, it appears that is not quite true. (more…)

“Make more mistakes faster.”
– Michael Cage