Weekly Meanderings, 24 July 2021
Game on! The Olympics in Tokyo, marked and marred by Covid, will always remind us of the goal of international cooperation and striving toward unity.
Photo by Erik Zünder on Unsplash
Ice cream favorite flavors (excluding vanilla):
(NEXSTAR) – Just in time for National Ice Cream Day on July 18, Instacart claims to have the scoop on the country’s favorite ice cream flavors.
Using data from online grocery orders in the United States, Instacart has determined each state’s most-purchased flavor — or more specifically, each state’s most-purchased flavor relative to the national average. In other words, the results don’t technically reflect the most popular flavors in each state, but the ones that residents tend to prefer a bit more the rest of the country.
It’s also worth mentioning that Instacart took vanilla completely out of the equation, seeing as it’s “hands down” the most purchased flavor in every single state.
Findings indicated that a whopping 12 states prefer Moose Tracks (i.e., vanilla ice cream with chunks of peanut butter cups and fudge), making it far and away the most-preferred flavor in Instacart’s study. Runners up included rocky road, coffee, green tea and birthday cake-flavored ice cream, each of which earned top marks from five states.
Three states, meanwhile, were alone in their preferences for ice cream: Delaware, which purchases more cherry ice cream than the national average; Pennsylvania, which loves a good mint chip cone; and New Mexico, which can’t get enough chocolate ice cream with chocolate chips.
SMcK: What in the world is “moose tracks” for a flavor?
What to call it? Parent brain fog:
(Study Finds) — It’s no secret being a parent can leave many adults desperate for sleep, but a new study finds parents also walking around in a daze even when they’re wide awake. The average American parent loses nearly 4,000 hours to “brain fog” while raising their child.
A survey of 2,000 American parents over 30 reveals this breaks down to about 219 hours for every year of parenting. The average respondent gets so distracted that they lose focus in up to three tasks a day — resulting in a loss of 36 minutes daily. Six in 10 blame “the blur” of not getting enough sleep and having low energy as the reason they don’t always properly hydrate (44%), miss meals (33%), and even forget birthdays (28%).
Two in five rely on their kids’ activities just to keep track of which day of the week it is. On an average weekday, respondents feel most energized around 11 a.m., but their energy begins to crash just three hours later. Two-thirds find their energy levels are usually depleted around the same time each day — 2 p.m.
Conducted by OnePoll on behalf of MitoQ, researchers also explored the links between energy and productivity for working parents.
Let’s say you’re working from home. Your morning was jam-packed with meetings and wrangling kids and all that jazz. Now it’s the middle of the afternoon and you can barely keep your eyes open. You could reach for another cup of coffee, but that means you’ll never get to sleep tonight. So you contemplate a nap. A sweet, glorious, horizontal reprieve from the stress and fatigue of the day. But is that really the best idea? How long should your nap be? Will you be able to fall asleep tonight? We checked in with Dr. Rebecca Robbins, PhD and sleep expert to Oura, a personal health tracking device, to answer all of our questions about a midday snooze, including the best nap length and why insomniacs should probably skip naps altogether. …
Timing is everything, and Dr. Robbins points to studies (like this one published in the journal Sleep) that have concluded ten to 20 minutes is the perfect nap length. “Napping for less than ten minutes can’t guarantee you the stimulating effects of napping, and snoozing for 30 minutes or more may send you into that deep sleep zone, making it harder for you to wake up,” she notes. A so-called “power nap” of about 20 minutes should be just enough rest to allow you to get over the afternoon slump without reaching for caffeine or other stimulants that will damage your nighttime sleep.
How to slow down or stop the sting of a mosquito bite?
Chances are, you've already had a handful of mosquito bites, and you'll have even more by the time warm weather draws to a close. But while bug bites might be a summer rite of passage, you can do without the swelling, pain and itch, thank you very much.
If you've ever been up all night scratching and slapping at a particularly bad nip, you may have wondered what you could do to find relief.
Go to link for answers.
What are the traits of those who live long lives?
Look, I fully grasp why this 107-year-old woman credited her long, healthy life to being single, as well as the rationale of this 102-year-old woman who says she's thrived so long because she minds her own business. But many of us cannot put all of our eggs in one particular longevity basket—which is why I've turned to the ways of the Blue Zones to help me live a longer, happier, healthier life.
What are the Blue Zones, you ask? This term refers to the five regions in the world—Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Ikaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California—where people not only regularly live into the triple digits, but their minds and bodies are both still working well. National Geographic journalist Dan Buettner has been reporting on these regions extensively for years, and dubbed them Blue Zones. Each region has (of course) its own distinct habits, cuisine, and culture, but all five places share a few values: Maintaining a strong sense of purpose, eating mostly plant-based, and moving every day are three such examples. Another is valuing low levels of stress, which naturally means restful sleep is a top priority.
Go to link for answers, then come back and make a comment.
What about that four day work week in Iceland?
It almost seems too good to be true: a major trial in Iceland shows that cutting the standard five-day week to four days for the same pay needn’t cost employers a cent (or, to be accurate, a krona).
Unfortunately it is too good to be true.
While even highly reputable media outlets such as the BBC have reported on the “overwhelming success” of large-scale trials of a four-day week in Iceland from 2015 to 2019, that’s not actually the case.
The truth is less spectacular — interesting and important enough in its own right, but not quite living up to the media spin, including that these trials have led to the widespread adoption of a four-day work week in Iceland….
Read on to the third paragraph and you’ll learn the study “involved two large-scale trials of shorter working hours — in which workers moved from a 40-hour to a 35- or 36-hour week, without reduced pay”.
A four-day week trial would have involved reducing the working week by seven to eight hours. Instead the maximum reduction in these trials was just four hours. In 61 of the 66 workplaces it was one to three hours.
Which is not to say the results – no adverse effect on output or services delivered – is unimpressive. Nor is the upshot. As a result of the trials, unions and employers have formalised country-wide agreements to make reduced working hours permanent.
But these have provided for a reduction of just 35 minutes a week in the private sector and 65 minutes in the public sector (though larger reductions are available for shift workers). That’s a long way from making a four-day week the norm.
Question: Is a hot dog a sandwich?
(NEXSTAR) – If there are two things America loves to do, it’s eat hot dogs and argue about trivial things. Lucky for us, the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council are fueling both of our beloved passions on National Hot Dog Day.
The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (NHDSC) has decided to celebrate 2021’s National Hot Dog Day by dredging up a dispute that has raged between opposing factions of foodies since the dawn of the internet: Is the hot dog a sandwich?
No, it’s not, according to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council.
The NHDSC first decided in 2015 that the humble hot dog inhabits “a category unto its own,” despite previously siding with the USDA’s vague definition of a “closed-face sandwich” that placed hot dogs in the sandwich category.
“When it first arrived on American shores from Europe in the late 1800s, it was often referred to as a ‘Coney Island Sandwich’ or ‘Frankfurter sandwich,’” the NHDSC wrote of its decision in 2015. “But much like an ‘ice cream sundae’ is simply referred to as a sundae, terminology changes.”
Now, six years later, the NHDSC is once again reiterating its stance on hot dogs — and the majority of Americans apparently are in agreement.
On Tuesday, just one day before National Hot Dog Day, the NHDSC revealed the results of a self-commissioned survey (in partnership with the Cattleman’s Beef Board and its Beef Checkoff campaign) that found that 57% of respondents agreed with the NHDSC that hot dogs are not sandwiches.
Well, it’s worth recording here just in case you missed the goofiness: the so-called biblical comma.