Category: Tips & Tricks

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Worst Advice to Ignore

Science and common observation have proven time and again that a low-sugar, natural, mostly vegetarian diet gives you the most energy, longest life and most mental clarity. Leonardo Da Vinci was a vegetarian who ate all-organic, low sugar content foods (as did everyone back then), and was known not only for his intelligence, but for his strength. People used to come from miles around to witness his physical demonstrations.


Leonardo DaVinci on eating

There are obstacles in learning to eat well. It is difficult to eat with less-well informed friends. There are few restaurants that cook with good ingredients. However, if you can eat well for a couple of months, you will feel a transition occur. You will actually seek out the good food by choice. Sugar and salt become less important automatically, and after a while, you will no longer seek them. You will start to feel a confidence when conversing with friends about food, and maybe even help them to eat better and live longer. Soon you will feel a pride in knowing that you have done something good for yourself, and will learn that you can more easily make the major changes you want.

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Worst Small Business Decision

What the Ski Mechanic Did Wrong

Consider one rule which is the most often violated by the people who fail: You must bring in more money than you spend!

I knew a guy who was an expert ski mechanic. He bought some waxes, some plastic, an iron, some files, all the things he would need. He rented bench space in a store and put up a sign in the store window. Sure enough, skis started coming in. At the end of the first day, he earned $160. Did he spend it on advertising? Or maybe on more materials, or tools to expand his available services? No, he bought himself a pair of fancy cowboy boots and went to a party. His business lasted about a week. When it was time to pay the second week’s bench rent, he didn’t have it! Now that’s just plain bad business! You laugh, but it’s a true story, and variations of it are surprisingly common.

You might enjoy knowing the crazy story of the shop where this happened. It was a bike shop in an eastern city, looking for some kind of business that would bring in people during the winter. The amazing and unexpected true story of that bike shop is here: 5 Years In The Bike Shop.

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Worst Warning to Ignore

If there is time, a skunk will warn you before spraying. The warning has two phases. First the skunk pats his front feet on the ground several times. Then he shakes his head from side to side. He may even raise his tail and hiss. If you aren’t gone by then, too bad!

Skunk Facts

Their Spray Can Reach Up to 10 Feet Away

Skunks release their foul-smelling liquid from two glands under their tail with impressive precision. They can accurately target an intruder’s face from 10 feet away, and the scent can be detected by humans up to a mile downwind.

They Use Their Spray as a Last Resort

Skunks only carry about 5 to 6 tablespoons of spray (thiols) at a time, and it takes up to a week to replenish a depleted supply. Because leaving themselves defenseless is risky, they will give fair warnings first.

They Are Immune to Snake Venom

Skunks are natural predators of snakes, including poisonous species like rattlesnakes and copperheads. They possess a natural immunity to snake venom, allowing them to hunt and eat venomous snakes without harm.

Great Horned Owls Are Their Primary Predator

Most mammals quickly learn to give skunks a wide berth, but Great Horned Owls are an exception. Like most birds, owls have an exceptionally weak sense of smell, making skunks one of their favorite primary food sources.

Tomato Juice Doesn’t Neutralize the Odor

The popular urban legend that tomato juice removes skunk scent is false; it merely masks the smell temporarily by overwhelming your nose (olfactory fatigue). To chemically neutralize the sulfur-based thiols, a mixture of hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and dish soap is required to oxidize the chemical compound.

They Have Terrible Eyesight

A skunk’s vision is extremely poor—they can barely see objects more than 10 feet ahead of them. This poor eyesight, combined with their instinct to stand their ground rather than flee, is the primary reason so many skunks are struck by cars on highways.

They Are Natural Pest Controllers

Skunks are opportunistic omnivores whose diet consists heavily of insects. They spend their nights digging up grubs, beetles, wasps, scorpions, and garden pests, making them highly beneficial for local ecosystems and agriculture.

Spotted Skunks Do Handstands to Threaten Predators

While striped skunks simply arch their backs and stomp, the smaller Western and Eastern spotted skunks perform an elaborate acrobatic handstand on their front paws to look larger and aim their scent glands directly at a predator before spraying.

They Belong to Their Own Unique Family

For a long time, skunks were classified in the weasel family (Mustelidae). However, genetic research in the late 1990s revealed they are distinct enough to warrant their own separate family, Mephitidae, which translates from Latin to “foul stench.”

They Don’t Formally Hibernate

During severe winter cold, skunks enter a state of torpor—lowering their body temperature and sleeping for long stretches—rather than true hibernation. To stay warm, females often huddle together in shared underground dens, while males typically remain solitary.

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Worst Thing to Give to Children

If you filled trucks with all the candy American kids eat in one year, they would line up bumper to bumper from San Diego to San Francisco.

Sugar is highly addictive. Some have said it’s more addictive than cocaine. Speaking of cocaine, some have said that overcoming an addition to sugar is even more difficult than an addition to cocaine.

Sugar is strongly implicated in numerous scientific studies covering a wide range of diseases from high blood pressure to cancer and especially diabetes.

The number of children and young adults afflicted with diabetes and blood pressure has skyrocketed since the increase of sugar in the standard American diet.

Starchy foods aren’t much better. If you eat bread, pies, cake or anything of that sort, your digestive process converts it to sugar.

Soft drinks have an amazing 10 or more teaspoons of sugar dissolved in every can.

What about fruit juice? Nope, not good either. Although natural juices don’t contain sucrose – table sugar – fruit sugars without their roughage are nearly as deadly.

Yeah, deadly. The problem is most people don’t recognize sugar as deadly because it isn’t a quick acting poison. People don’t eat a fudge brownie and fall over dead. It’s insidious because the death cames slowly yet painfully, usually, but not always after 40 or more years.

How about sugar substitutes? Things like corn syrup or honey have the same effect as other types of sugar.

However, there are two products that can satisfy in the same way as sugar, yet they are not sugars and contain no calories. Those are stevia and monk fruit.

You’ll find stevia often served in little packets in restaurants and cafes where the management is trying to think of their patrons’ health. If you read the small print on the packets of stevia, you may be shocked to discover the actual amount of stevia is slight. The packet mostly contains fillers such as Erythritol. Some manufacturers even mix their stevia with dextrose or sucrose – sugar.

Why would they do that? Because stevia is 200 to 300 times sweeter than table sugar. Although rare, you can buy pure stevia on Amazon and elsewhere. You would be amazed at how little is needed to sweeten a food or beverage.

The taste of stevia or monk fruit is so close to sugar that if you use it as a sugar substitute, children will not detect the difference, but they are likely to live longer and healthier.

As one who has overcome a sugar addiction, it wasn’t as hard as they say, I have noticed that I have more consistent energy. I used to get suddenly tired, sometimes even dizzy after short bursts of exertion. For instance, I might have to sit out every other game of pickleball. Now, I can play for hours at a time with no sugar bonk.

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Worst Battle With a Cat

If you need to give liquid medicine to a cat, don’t try to feed it to the cat. This would only result in a battle. Instead, spill the medicine on the kitty’s fur. The cat will lick it off in the process of cleaning.

Some Facts About Cats

Cats can make over 100 different sounds. While dogs only produce around 10 distinct vocalizations, cats use a vast repertoire of meows, purrs, chirps, trills, hisses, and snarls. Intriguingly, adult cats rarely meow at other cats—they developed the meow primarily as a custom frequency to communicate with humans.

They have a extra scent organ on the roof of their mouth. Known as the vomeronasal or Jacobson’s organ, this system allows cats to “taste” scents in the air. When a cat curls its lip and sneers after smelling something strong (a reaction called the Flehmen response), it is routing molecules to this organ for deeper analysis.

Cats cannot taste sweetness. Due to a genetic mutation that occurred early in the evolution of the feline family, cats lack the functional taste receptor proteins required to detect sweet flavors. As obligate carnivores, their palates are strictly wired for amino acids and fats.

Their purr frequency may promote bone and tissue healing. Domestic cats purr at a frequency between 20 Hz and 150 Hz. In human medicine, sound frequencies within this exact range are known to improve bone density, repair tendons, and ease muscle strain, suggesting a purr might double as an internal self-repair mechanism.

Cats spend nearly 70% of their lives sleeping. An average domestic cat sleeps between 12 and 16 hours a day, and older cats can sleep up to 20 hours. This trait is inherited from their wild ancestors, who needed to conserve energy for explosive bursts of high-speed hunting.

A cat’s nose print is as unique as a human fingerprint. The pattern of ridges, bumps, and slits on a cat’s nose pad is entirely unique to that individual. No two cats share the exact same nose print design.

They walk like camels and giraffes. Cats are “direct register” walkers and share a rare gait pattern known as pacing with camels and giraffes. They move both right legs forward together, followed by both left legs. When stepping forward, a cat’s hind paws land almost perfectly in the exact footprint left by its front paws, minimizing noise and visible tracks.

Cats do not have collarbones. Unlike humans, a cat’s clavicle is not anchored to other bones; it is suspended in muscle. This floating collarbone allows their shoulders to collapse inward, enabling them to squeeze through any opening that is wide enough to fit their head.

They have an extra eyelid. Cats possess a translucent “third eyelid” called a nictitating membrane, located in the inner corner of each eye. This thin layer sweeps across the eye to protect it from debris and keep it moist without requiring the cat to fully close its eyes.

A group of cats is called a “clowder.” While a group of kittens born together is a litter, a gathering of adult cats is known as a clowder (or alternatively, a glaring or a pounce).