Canthook

A little old Jewish lady gets onto a crowded bus and stands in front of a seated young girl.

Holding her hand to her chest, she says to the girl, "If you knew what I have, you would give me your seat."

The girl gets up and gives up her the seat to the old lady. It is hot. The girl then takes out a fan and starts fanning herself. The woman looks up and says, "If you knew what I have, you would give me that fan." The girl gives her the fan, too.

Fifteen minutes later the woman gets up and says to the bus driver, "Stop, I want to get off here." The bus driver tells her he has to drop her at the next corner, not in the middle of the block. With her hand across her chest, she tells the driver, "If you knew what I have, you would let me off the bus right here." The bus driver pulls over and opens the door to let her out. As she's walking out of the bus, he asks, "Madam, what is it you have?"

The old woman looks at him and nonchalantly replies, "Chutzpah."

Heeb magazine has published the first Jewish swimsuit calendar. It's a pullout in their current issue.

Yes, there really is a magazine called "Heeb". And it's jewish year 5769, so they're calling it the "The Girls of '69". The model depicted here is Esti Ginzburg.

Not every reader is appreciative. One comment on their website says, Do you really need a pull out calendar of super skinny Israeli women deemed the “most beautiful Jewish women in the world” to get people to buy your magazine. What happened to the edgy alternative, question and make fun of pop culture attitude of this magazine? Just indulging in a little fetishizing of Israeli women – how original. Shame on you! Your clearly far from your grassroots, alternative, start.

A guy offers to buy a drink for an attractive young woman seated at a bar.

She gives him the green light, so he goes to the end of the bar and whispers to the bartender to make up a Martini for her and to put some Spanish-fly in the drink. The bartender whispers back to say he's all out of Spanish-fly and all he has left is Jewish-fly.

"Jewish-fly?" Shrugging his shoulders, the guy says, "OK, put some of that in her drink."

As she sips on the drink, she gets more and more cozy, really warming up to the guy. Finally, she finishes the drink, leans over and whispers in his ear, "Let's go shopping."

There are so many jokes about Jewish sex. It's not bad enough that the faith requires that they lop off from male babies, the ounce of flesh closest to the heart. It's not bad enough that the number of Monica jokes has already exceeded 100,000. It's not bad enough that fathers advise their sons to have sex with a jewish girl. (Why, the son asks. "It'll lasts forever", the father says, "or at least, it'll seem that way." It's not enough that Radio TelAviv is 1520 on the radio dial - but for you, 1190.

You know how many pages there are to the Jewish swimsuit calendar? Six. Talk about getting a poor bargain!

There has been speculation among the neocons of the Republican for years. What if John McCain isn't a "maverick" but instead is a sleeper agent for the Communist Party?

After all, he spent years emprisoned in North Vietnam.

It only took 4 days before he had confessed to war crimes by the US; he even signed the confession.

He admits that the Communists treated him better than other prisoners. He didn't leave when he could have, either.

Since he's been back, he's displayed some pretty bizarre behavior.

He abandoned his faith. He's an atheist now.

He abandoned his wife and children as well, for a rich young heiress, who didn't really marry him. She may have been a heavy drinker, heir to a beer distribution fortune, who eventually had to be treated for her drug addictions, but she was alert enough not to trust him with her assets. She still keeps his hands away from her money, and she lives in Arizona, while he lives in Washington.

There was some discussion last year in the least tabloid of all newspapers, the New York Times about staffers trying to keep him being caught together in public with Vicki Iseman, his mistress. The GOP leaders are bewildered that a Republican might engage in heterosexual relations, but as long as it isn't with his wife, they unite behind him.

Fellow senators, members of his own party, have raised questions as to his mental health, suggesting that he spent too much time in the Hanoi Hilton. On the campaign trail, he demands that nobody talk about his time with the Communists, but constantly brings up the topic himself.

First they claimed that McCain called his wife a cunt who plasters on the makeup like a trollop, and McCain declined to refute the allegation.

Tuesday, he was in Sturgis, where he suggested his wife compete for Miss Buffalo Chip, a beauty pageant that includes a wet t-shirt contest, and a banana-eating contest. If wet t-shirts aren't enough, contestants often become topless, and once in a while, bottomless as well. Last year, when a deluge of rain sent everyone flying, one of the contestants ended up dancing nude atop a bar until her boyfriend (husband?) physically hauled her off, over her protests (But it's only one week, and it only comes once a year!)

And now there's this. This photo doesn't come from some newsman, or from some Democrat. It comes from his own daughter, Meghan, who blogs of the campaign. It's little chocolate candies that are aboard the McCain campaign airplane - ad for McCain on the front, and quotation from Chairman Mao on the back.

How cute.

As if there wasn't already enough to keep the tinfoil hat brigade busy with their conspiracy theory....

Paris Hilton responds to that campaign ad from that white-haired old man featuring her. That seems to makes her a candidate, right?

Her energy policy? Well, part of it is not working up a sweat, but simply just sitting there reading a magazine, which is pretty close to this country's energy policy for the last half century.

She thinks she's a totally hot candidate for president, and she expects to win, saying she'll "see you at the debate, bitches."

If you've never heard of phylloquine, you're not alone. I probably have heard of it, but I didn't take much notice.

It's also known as Vitamin K-1.

Yesterday, I would have told you that Vitamin K was for clotting, and unless you don't clot easily, you don't need Vitamin K in your diet. Today, I don't know if that's true or not, but it's definitely not the whole story, due to some research I've been doing on Medline.

Medline is a database maintained by the US Government, of most medical research by reputable scientists. It has a dot-gov URL. Government agencies aren't always truthful with us, but in this case, the database contains every article published in a wide variety of respected scientific journals.

To many users, it's not particularly useful, because most of the articles are presented as abstracts - think "reader's digest condensations - of the scientific research, and they use all sorts of $5 and $10 words. That's because the abstracts are written to explain the research to other researchers. It's pretty dense reading.

But if you search on the right keywords, you can see whether there's a lot of interest in a given subject, and what people are finding. Some studies are preliminary, trying to decide if further research is justified. When it is, a bunch of scientists typically do more focused studies, reporting the results, and when those studies are reported, still other scientists repeat the most interesting studies under slightly different conditions, trying to determine if the results are solid, or if they are flukes.

There's a lot of research on phylloquine, and it looks pretty interesting. One recent study from Germany looked on phylloquine and at menaquinone (vitamin K2) on prostate cancer. It turns out that K2 may fight prostate cancer, and for some reason K2 from dairy products works better than K2 from meat. (That alone should tell us that generics aren't necessarily as good as other meds. On the other hand, they might be better....) Phylloquine, on the other hand, has absolutely no effect on prostate cancer.

Another study, in Hong Kong, looked at use of phylloquine to treat poisoning. A 40-year-old woman swallowed four bags of rat poison, and showed up at a hospital four days later. (Pete Seeger said "I don't know why she swallowed the fly; perhaps she'll die.") They apparently saved her life, but they were mostly curious about how to tell when they were through treating her with K1. They decided that more research was necessary. (If you'd like to volunteer to swallow rat poison so that they can do more research, I suggest you need to head for Princess Margaret Hospital in Hong Kong.)

The bulk of the research has to do with the effects of K1 in less dramatic situations than cancer or suicide.

T. Neogi, et. al, from Boston University School of Medicine looked at hand osteoarthritis and vitamin K. They gave vitamin K versus placebo to patients, and found a 47% improvement rate with vitamin K, as measured by joint-space narrowing on X-rays. That's inconclusive; they suggest more research is needed.

Jean Mayer of the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center at Tufts did a lot of tests on people, questioning what they ate, and the state of their diabetes. Those who consumed more K1 had greater insulin sensitivity. Results were conclusive: potential beneficial role for phylloquinone in glucose homeostasis. That means you should eat your broccoli if you have diabetes.

A group led by CR Tirapelli in the Department of Psychiatry Nursing and Human Sciences at the College of Nursing of Riberirao Preto in Brazil injected K1 into male Wistar rats. They found that it reduced mean arterial blood pressure. Well, actually, it shot up immediately, but afterwards it settled down to a lower blood pressure. Maybe it went up because the rats didn't like getting poked with a needle? In any case, it might help your blood pressure if you eat your broccoli - assuming you're male, and you're a rat.

D. Drury and coworkers at McGill University's Montreal Children's Hospital assert that cystic fibrosis patients always have subclinical deficiencies of vitamin K. They were trying to decide how much K1 to give as a supplement. Their research came to the startling conclusion that giving either 1 mg daily or 5 mg daily helped improve the "Vitamin K status". Wow. Vitamin K is water-soluble, and you need it daily. It turns out that 100% of their test subjects rose to the normal range with supplementation within a month, so 1 mg daily is sufficient.

The first 24 articles in the search have 2008 publication dates on them. It appears K1 research is "hot". You're likely to read quite a few articles in women's magazines about vitamin K1 and health next year.

But what can you do with these results? Increasingly, studies tell us that if you want vitamins, you need to get them from vegetables, not from pills. In fact, some studies indicate that people are healthier if they don't take vitamin pills.

Just for kicks or maybe because hope lives eternal in an idiot, I went looking for K1 pills online. You can get 100 500-mcg pills for $3.19 at Outlet Nutrition, if you can get their website to work. I ended up phoning them; there's a $5 minimum order, and postage adds another $5. I decided against ordering the pills.

It turns out that spinach, Brussels sprouts, Swiss chard, green beans, asparagus, broccoli, kale and mustard greens are all very good sources of K1, as are green peas and carrots. Vitamin content drops rapidly after a plant is picked, so your best bet might be buying frozen green peas in loose form (as opposed to a solid block), and thawing them a little at a time, for use on salads. Cooking isn't going to help vitamin content.

I really like broccoli, but I usually cook mine, and often it's 3 days between the time I visit the farmer's roadside stand and the time I eat them, which isn't going to do me much good. Good luck!