'Use by' Dates Mislead. San Diego Bay. Ted Williams. New Computer Woes.

For “Foodie Friday”: 
Masses of food wasted - 'use by' dates mislead
Washington – “Americans throw away 40 percent of the food they buy, often because of misleading expiration dates that have nothing to do with safety, said a study released Wednesday by Harvard University Law School and the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.
"The date labeling system is not a system at all," said NRDC staff scientist Dana Gunders, co-author of the report, the first to assess date labeling laws nationwide.
The report said 90 percent of Americans toss good food into the garbage because they mistakenly think that "sell by," "best before," "use by" or "packed on" dates on food containers indicate safety. One-fifth of consumers, the report said, "always" throw away food based on package dates.



In fact, "sell by" dates are used by retailers for inventory control. "Best before" or "use by" dates usually reflect manufacturer estimates of peak quality. While some labels are intended to indicate freshness, none of them reflects edibility or safety, said Ted Labuza, a food science professor at the University of Minnesota who collaborated with the authors.
"If food looks rotten and smells bad, throw it away, but just because it reaches a certain date does not mean the food is unsafe," Labuza said. "I don't know of any food poisoning outbreak that came from people eating food that was past its shelf-life date."
The report estimated the value of food tossed away at $165 billion a year.”  More at: http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Masses-of-food-wasted-use-by-dates-mislead-4825974.php
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On This Day:

Cabrillo discovers San Diego Bay, Sep 28, 1542:

“On this day in 1542, the Spanish explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo discovers San Diego Bay while searching for the Strait of Anian, a mythical all-water route across North America.
Cabrillo was not the first to search for a water passage across the North American continent, and he would not be the last. Ever since the voyages of Columbus, Europeans had dreamed of finding a shorter trade route to the Orient. Once it became clear that North America was not India, as Columbus had believed, but an entirely new continent, explorers hoped that an all-water route through the New World might still be found. Vastly underestimating the breadth of the continent, early 16th and 17th century explorers like Cabrillo believed that one such route might be the elusive Strait of Anian, a navigable passage some sailors claimed linked the Pacific with the Gulf of Mexico.
In June 1542, Cabrillo departed from the West Coast of Mexico and sailed northward to probe the complex broken coastline of the Pacific. Repeatedly turning east to follow any inlet that held the promise of being the Strait, Cabrillo was the first European to explore many of the Pacific Coast bays and inlets. Though San Diego Bay--as well as all the other inlets he subsequently explored--never led to the mythic Strait of Anian, Cabrillo did succeed in mapping many of the most important features of the California coast, though he missed discovering San Francisco Bay.
Despite the failure of the Cabrillo mission, other explorers continued to search for the Strait of Anian and its northern cousin, the Northwest Passage, for many years to come, though with no more success. Ironically, a passage across the continent actually did exist, and in 1905, the Arctic explorer Roald Amundsen became the first man to make an all-water crossing of North America. But Amundsen's cold and treacherous far-northern route was hardly the shortcut to the Orient Cabrillo and countless other explorers had dreamed of, and died for, over the course of more than five centuries.
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Ted Williams becomes last player to hit .400, Sep 28, 1941:

“On this day in 1941, the Boston Red Sox's Ted Williams plays a double-header against the Philadelphia Athletics on the last day of the regular season and gets six hits in eight trips to the plate, to boost his batting average to .406 and become the first player since Bill Terry in 1930 to hit .400. Williams, who spent his entire career with the Sox, played his final game exactly 19 years later, on September 28, 1960, at Boston’s Fenway Park and hit a home run in his last time at bat, for a career total of 521 homeruns. 
In 1942, Williams won the American League Triple Crown, for highest batting average and most RBIs and homeruns. He duplicated the feat in 1947. In 1946 and 1949, he was named the American League's Most Valuable Player and in June 1960, he became the fourth player in major league history to hit 500 homers. He was selected to the All-Star team 17 times.
Williams played his last game on September 28, 1960, and retired with a lifetime batting average of .344, a .483 career on-base percentage and 2,654 hits. His achievements are all the more impressive because his career was interrupted twice for military service: Williams was a Marine Corps pilot during World War II and the Korean War and as a result missed a total of nearly five seasons from baseball.
Williams, who was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1966, managed the Washington Senators (renamed the Texas Rangers in 1972) from 1969 to 1972. In 1984, the Boston Red Sox retired his uniform number (nine). Williams died of cardiac arrest at age 83 on July 5, 2002, in Florida. In a controversial move, his son sent his father’s body to be frozen at a cryonics laboratory.”
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Yesterday:
After Misty and I had our walk down at Jay’s, Jay and I went back to Rich, the computer man, and he showed me what was wrong with my HP.  It was either pay him for all his time, or get another computer from him. It only took Rich a couple of clicks to unlock whatever Jay had done to his tablet!!
So I came home with an e-machine, with all new innards, and Windows 7.   I am having trouble finding my way around Windows 7, which it is very frustrating for this old lady.  So everything is taking longer than it did when I had Windows XP Pro.  Even the format for Live Writer is different, I don’t know if it is because of the Windows 7, or because I never upgraded to this new version.  Anyway, I don’t like it!  I might even go back to my old Dell.
I don’t think this e-machine is any faster than my old HP, but maybe it will settle in, in a few days.