Don’t Tell Gary’s Wife September 23, 2014July 27, 2015 WORST DAY OF MITCH McCONNELL’S POLITICAL LIFE Listen, I don’t hate a lot of people and I don’t even hate Mitch McConnell. He’s just entirely and completely awful. I once actually testified before a Senate committee he chaired — on his side of the issue — and he was still awful. I’ve already mocked his recent ridiculous prepared statement that, “By any standard, Barack Obama has been a disaster for our country.” But have you seen what he called “the worst day” of his political life? Give President Clinton five minutes to tell you that story. iPHONE 6 So here’s the first really dramatic difference: speech recognition is just so much faster and more accurate. I can now dictate in rapid conversational English and it nearly keeps up with me, and with so many fewer needed corrections. And the fingerprint protection seems to work fine and will spare my having to type in my Apple ID every time I buy something. And the battery life seems longer. I’m sure I’ll find more to like — it’s been just two days — but already I’m a happy camper. THINGS +NOT+ TO WORRY ABOUT Gary: “Thank you for posting the letter about Climate Corporation and Monsanto, with reference to the fake article about the dangers of eating kale. Have you seen the ones about ‘dihydrogen monoxide’? It seems like many readers take food hazard warnings much too seriously. Consumer Reports (my favorite magazine) has published articles that I feel are alarmist, so I’ve written an essay criticizing them. Basically, I want to get the message out, ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ when it comes to food health warnings in the media, even from scientifically accurate organizations like Consumer Reports, never mind the flaky ones. One of the worst is Environmental Working Group (EWG). Don’t tell my wife I said that. She believes everything they say, so she won’t let me buy vegetables on their ‘dirty dozen’ list unless they’re organic, threw out all our cleaning products on their hazard list (practically everything you can buy), uses only shampoos and sunblocks they say are OK (very few), won’t let me cook with a Teflon pan (’causes cancer’), and so on. She makes me maintain a water filtration system in the kitchen, even though our supply comes from the ultra-clean Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park. . . . If readers would just follow the practical, common-sense advice in ‘Box A’ at my website, they would have no need to be concerned at all about health-related news items, which are insignificant by comparison. I originally intended to have a ‘Box B’ listing things that I think are unimportant: GMOs, pesticide residues, BPA, terrorism (in the US), commercial airline crashes, etc. But then I thought some people would be offended or ‘turned off’ if their favorite hazard was listed, so I dropped that idea.”