Savvy Saving Bytes

Early in their careers it’s perfectly easy to imagine young Jennifer Aston working as a waitress, Harrison Ford as a cabinet maker and Queen Latifah as a Burger King server (though I pity any customers who tried to give her any lip).

1. But there are some famous people I have a hard time visualizing in their early pay-the-rent jobs. Whoopi Goldberg for instance. Can you see her as the bricklayer she apparently once was for awhile? Can you imagine her, trowel in hand, scrapping hunks of cement off brick walls? And standing there like a statue in silence all day slapping together brick walls? I can’t.
2. Before he made it as an actor, Christopher Walken is listed as having worked as a lion tamer in a small circus. Though he claimed the lion was very old and more like a dog. Right. And maybe the lion was purple and Walken shoved his head in the lion’s mouth in nightly acts of bravado. Either way, it’s good that actors have vivid imaginations.
3. Speaking of coming up in the world, the highly dignified Madeleine Albright who rose to global prominence as the secretary of state under Bill Clinton, once worked in a department store selling, of all things, the rather undignified item of bras.
4. Jon Bon Jovi, the ageless rock star, once worked at a job making Christmas decorations, a job I know something about since I too put in an early stint in the Christmas glitter and glue racket. Unless his decorations were a lot clunkier looking than mine, a fair amount of dexterity and finesse were needed to assemble those products. Somehow I don’t see the rocker with that wispy, feather-like touch.
5. Joan Crawford working in a Laundromat? That’s what her bio says. I can’t buy it. Raw ambition was wired into Crawford’s DNA, along with the rock-hard certainty she was going to be a star. While I can see her operating a store elevator to pay the rent I somehow can’t imagine her exalted-idea-of-herself stooping to washing anyone’s dirty laundry to make ends meet.
6. As a teenager Dan Aykroyd was planning to become a Catholic priest. Three cheers that he didn’t. A born actor, his fine Oscar nominated performance in Driving Miss Daisy would never have happened and delighted audiences worldwide.
7. Of all Ellen DeGenere’s many early gigs as painter, oyster shucker, paralegal and vacuum sales person, the one job I find most preposterous is her selling those vacuum cleaners. Can you visualize her standing there demonstrating those vacuums while earnestly explaining their finer points to housewives with a straight face. I can’t.
8. Johnny Depp a Tele-marketer? No offense, but I see Depp falling asleep over a phone far more clearly than him coming on like a gangbuster Tele-marketer with a scripted sales pitch. And he sold pens, of all things. When was the last time you or anyone you know purchased (or even thought about purchasing) a pen over the phone?
9. I am sure one day long long ago when Keith Richards worked as a tennis ball boy at some private club, he had a sweet, smooth teenage face with not a wrinkle on it. But all these long, hard-partying years later it’s difficult to imagine — to exchange Richard’s deep cratered, gaunt face with that innocent, fresh-faced kid he probably once was.

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More than 1600 great American museums have opened their doors in welcome and offered free admission for all active military personnel and their families from Memorial Day through Labor Day.

A collaboration between the National Endowment of the Arts, Blue Star Families and the Department of Defense, the program encompasses all active duty military forces, the National Guard and Reserve members along with five family members per visit. The exhibits include children’s museums, history and science museums, fine art museums and nature centers.   Participating Blue Star Museums are in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and American Samoa.

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Just after pink slime (ground-up beef trimmings) was banned at McDonalds and school cafeteria lunchrooms, along comes another dicey sounding item called ‘tuna scrape’. Scraped off bones after the fillets are removed, tuna back-meat is combined with other fish, then minced, frozen and shipped to retailers and distributors who further truck the stuff to grocery stores and restaurants where it ends up in inexpensive sushi, mostly spicy tuna rolls. And these rolls are where the trouble started. Over 80 people in 250 diagnosed cases and 6000 undiagnosed cases of an illness caused by a rare strain of salmonella chowed down on these spicy tuna rolls. The tuna scrape in them came from a factory in India owned by Moon Marine of Taiwan. Identified by the FDA as the salmonella culprit, Moon Marine has recalled 30 tons of their  product labeled Nakaochi scrape.

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It all started in western Scotland when 9-year-old Martha Payne took a photograph of her school “lunch” (above), a dicey concoction of orangy, dried out items that looked as though they’d been sitting out on the Sahara for a day or two. She posted it to her new blog, NeverSeconds, adding ratings for the food’s overall appeal, health value, amount consumed and accompanying pieces of hair (a rarely mentioned but always compelling statistic). As she continued publishing photos and rating her grim school lunches, people sat up and noticed and her blog traffic took off to the tune of one million visitors by the second week, according to Wired.

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If your home is in Maryland, you live in the first and only state in the country to ban the use, sale and distribution of arsenic, a known carcinogen, in poultry feed.

And why was arsenic–that longtime favorite of murderers– fed to chickens and turkeys in the first place? Mainly because of “coccidiosis” –a nasty parasitical disease that attacks chickens confined to cramped cages on large industrial farms. It all started in the forties when multi- food corporations wiped out many small farms along with the practice of raising chickens in the free open air. In addition to treating coccidiosis, it turned out arsenic also made chickens grow faster and bigger and colored their flesh a rosy hue.

For those worried about possible negatives (wasn’t arsenic after-all a POISON?) Pfizer explained that their first big arsenic product, Roxarsone was organic– completely inert– unlike the more dangerous inorganic form. Plus only the merest fraction of arsenic was actually consumed by the birds. The stuff  was totally harmless they said.

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Sizzling summer days call for revitalizing frosty drinks. Here’s a luscious fruit based collection from Rodale, Prevention and Dr. Weil featuring 13 of their healthful summer beverage recipes:

From Rodale, the 7 Best Drinks of Summer include a Metabolism Charger Smoothie, a creative mix of green tea, vanilla yogurt, mango and honey. Their Watermelon Health-Booster Smoothie is packed with phytonutrients, natural compounds that trigger healthy reactions in the body. At the end of a frazzled day in the heat, this drink is an easy snap to prepare. Just toss in chopped watermelon, fat free milk, ice and blend. A refreshing (and slimming) 56-calorie drink.

Prevention highlights 5 drinks to beat the summer heat. With tropical overtones, Passion Fruit-Pineapple Punch blends delicious passion fruit nectar, pineapple juice, lime juice (fresh, of course) and coconut milk topped off with a spritz of lemon or lime seltzer.   Basically strawberry lemonade, their Strawberry Shag with a twist of basil can be combined with either vodka and soda water or you can hold the vodka and add a bit more soda water instead.

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This week the FDA gave their blessing to the first robotic system to drive wires, catheters, balloons and stents from groin incisions all the way up to coronary arteries. This procedure called PCI, percutaneous coronary interventions (better known as angioplasty), restores blood flow to patients with coronary artery disease.

Cardiologists were delighted with the announcement. Up till now they had been weighed down by heavy lead aprons and vests to guard against fluoroscope exposure to radiation during the x-rayed procedure.  With this new robotic system by Corindus Vascular Robotics, however, doctors were now transported to the safety of lead-lined cockpits where they could comfortably control PCI devices using touch-screens and joysticks.

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Strictly for health reasons, I’ve been drinking watery, gray-colored, low fat milk for years, pouring it over my breakfast cereal with zero enthusiasm. But now, thanks to an article by Andrew Weil, M.D. that I just stumbled on, I’ve finally gotten the happy message that low fat dairy products are not only not better for your health, but may even be detrimental to it.

In Rethinking Saturated Fats, a prime catalyst for changing Dr. Weil’s position was a scientific analysis of 21 earlier studies that showed no evidence saturated fats were in fact associated with high blood pressure, heart or vascular disease. One of the most influential of those studies by nutritionist Ancel Keys was controversial from the start. Rather than use available dietary information from 22 countries, Keys cherry-picked diet info from only seven countries to include in a report that suggested a strong correlation between diets high in saturated fat and heart disease (had he used all 22 countries, no correlation would have occurred). Yet Key’s doubtful findings were the basis for the Senate’s report in 1977, Dietary Goals for the United States, that urged Americans to eat less fat and more grains.

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This updated post is about living a debt free life that was shaped perhaps by echoes of the Great Depression.

A contented apartment renter in New York City, I have never bought, nor considered buying, a co-op apartment, a country house, a beach house or any other ritzy extravagance like a fur coat or showy, jeweled bauble. It’s true I once owned a car when I got out of school, but it was an old cheapie  (but still snappy convertible), for which I of course paid cash. So consequently during my many years waltzing around this planet, I have never taken out a loan or borrowed money. Years ago I was advised by a broker friend to take out a loan and pay it back just to establish a good credit rating and prove I was credit worthy for any big ticket items I might consider purchasing further down the line. But taking out a loan would have chained me to monetary shackles and my inner frugal master protested, “No way! Ain’t no way I’m owing a bundle of dough to any pile of financial bricks!”

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This is an updated repost from early blog days when my biggest readers were frequently bots.

When I was an illustrator, one of my models, looking as usual like a million bucks, told me that she usually shopped for clothes in thrift shops. With that knockout recommendation, I finally ventured into a Goodwill thrift store in my neighborhood, plucked a navy blue Christian Dior blazer with a $6.00 price tag off a jam packed clothes rack and silently yelled “WOW”!

Shown here are some of the goodies I have unearthed in thrift shops over the years — some with original price tags still attached:

• Bracelets fashioned of vary-colored twisted metals – more refined versions of bracelets I saw in African markets. $2.00 each.
• One of three different Portuguese hand painted dishes that hang on my kitchen wall. $3.00.
• White cotton shower curtain sprinkled with multi-colored flowers in original package. $4.00.
• A box of coasters From the Museum of Metropolitan Art – a steal at a tiny fraction of their original cost.

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