Nearly half a million Americans (as of 2025) are now afflicted with Alpha Gal Syndrome (AGS) which causes an allergic reaction to mammal meat and dairy products, with symptoms like hives, nausea, breathing difficulties, or anaphylaxis appearing hours after consumption. It can also be triggered by products derived from mammals (dairy, glycerin, gelatin, etc.) that are contained in household products such as toothpaste, soaps, and even medicines. Most doctors have never heard of AGS, and of those who have, virtually none offer any kind of cure - their only recommendation being to avoid mammal meat and their derivatives in your diet and on your skin, although people's reactions and sensitivity does vary widely. Some people can go into anaphylaxis from the mere smell of burgers being cooked. AGS starts when a lone star tick (among some others) bites and injects alpha-gal into the skin, prompting the immune system to produce IgE antibodies against it. However, we now ...
I was listening to my favorite podcast today, This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, John C. Dvorak and others (pretty much the old TechTV gang when it was an awesome cable channel, before they were bought by G4 and subsequently run into the ground). But I digress... anyway, they were discussing an awesome service called OpenDNS , so of course I decided to check it out when I got back from lunch. Sure enough, this is a very cool, completely free DNS (domain name service). For those of you who don't know, DNS is what converts Internet name addresses (i.e. www.google.com ) to it's actual IP Address (i.e. 208.67.219.230). DNS was created in the early days of the Internet because humans can remember names a lot easier than number combinations. Typically, when you type an address into a web browser, for example, it goes and runs to your Internet Service Provider's DNS server to say "where the heck is google.com?" to which your ISP's DNS server...
We travelled for four and a half months in the summer of 2021 in an RV through 17 states throughout the heartland of America. We travelled from Indiana through Illinois and Iowa to South Dakota where we stayed for three weeks, then onto Wyoming where we stayed a week, two weeks in Montana, a week in Idaho, two weeks in Utah. We drove through Nevada and down the Vegas strip before literally stepping foot into California, which was about as much time as we wanted to spend there. We then spent a week in Arizona, two weeks in Colorado, two weeks in New Mexico, three weeks in Texas, drove through Louisiana, a week in Arkansas, a week in Mississippi and a week in Tennessee before returning to Indiana. We learned that, in general, Americans are still united and eager to help one another. Nearly everyone we met was friendly, particularly in the RV spaces, but that's always been the case with RVers who tend to look out for each other. While p olitical and medi...
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