The sheer joy of reuniting with your dog

Nina Pham, the nurse who contracted Ebola after treating Thomas Eric Duncan in Dallas, was cured of the disease and released from her quarantine. It looks like one of the reasons that US patients seem to be recovering at such high rates is that they receive immediate and extensive treatment, such as IVs and anti-viral drugs, to maintain whatever bodily fluids they lose due to the disease, enabling them to survive long enough to create their own antibodies to the virus.
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Attacking your own advertisers

For some reason, the businesses run by the Koch brothers started advertising on The Daily Show and this gave Jon Stewart the opportunity to launch an attack on them and the way they are using their money to buy politicians. That is an interesting thing to see. Usually broadcasters tend to give the sponsors of their show kid glove treatment, something that businesses know and take advantage of to buy the silence of news organizations, as media watcher Jeff Cohen noted some time ago.
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The joy of soft, spreadable butter

I wrote a post some time ago about whether butter should be refrigerated, triggered by my annoyance that butter taken from the fridge was so hard to spread. I linked to an article that said that butter keeps for weeks outside the fridge, something that surprised me.

Many people commented that they too kept butter outside for weeks with no ill effects and commented on the desirability of doing so and suggested various ways to set about it. On your recommendations, I got a Butter Bell in which I can keep up to one stick (1/4-lb) of butter outside and now I enjoy the pleasure of having soft, spreadable butter at any time, a true delight. When it finishes, I take out another stick from the fridge.

Thanks to all of you for the suggestions.

Are you ready for some Rapture?

Andrew Brown, writing in the Guardian, says that dissatisfaction with pope Francis’s moves to make the Catholic Church less overtly hostile to gays and divorced people while not actually changing doctrine has caused consternation among traditionalists because what’s the fun in viewing some practice as sinful if you cannot shun the sinners and also condemn them to a lifetime of torment in hell?
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Muslims and dogs

Muslims tend to shy away from dogs, viewing them as unclean. I was not aware of this attitude when growing up in Sri Lanka, but looking back I don’t recall any of my Muslim friends having a dog as a pet. Maybe I did not notice it because my own family did not have dogs either and I viewed that as the norm. I became aware of the antipathy of Muslims for dogs as pets fairly recently but thought that it derived from cultural history. But it appears that it can be viewed as actually going against Islamic doctrine.
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Walking While Woman

To the categories of Driving While Black and Flying While Muslim and similar ones that highlight the way some groups are targeted for engaging in activities that would pass unnoticed if done by others, we now need to add Walking While Woman. The secretly recorded video of a woman dressed in ordinary street clothes walking through the streets of New York for 10 hours in one day, and the various types of unwanted attention she received has garnered much notice providing evidence, if anyone still needed it, that the world inhabited by women can quite different from that inhabited by men, as is the case with people of color versus white and rich versus poor.
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