So maybe you’ve been hearing about this new “Grain Berry” food additive and wondering, “What the heck is a grain berry?”

The relatively new term “Grain Berry” refers to a new brand of cereals, mixes and crackers being put out by a company called Silver Palate Kitchens, Inc. On 10/16/2008 Silver Palate Kitchens, Inc. filed to trademark the term “GRAIN BERRY” as a food staple that is generally in the same category as coffee, sugar, flour, breads, salt and other spices. The trademark was registered on 9/22/2009 and It is essentially a type of natural bran that is said to contain more dietary fiber and antioxidants than most other berries or grains.

The health claims around grain berry suggest that it’s “healthier” than all those other antioxidant diet fads such as acai berry anything and pomegranate juice. To be fair, Silver Palate Kitchens, Inc. actually hasn’t made any such health claims, but the general buzz around “grain berry” has repeatedly pointed out the antioxidant levels. The advertising for Grain Berry foods read “Now-Grain with the Antioxidant Power of Berries!” which is meant to lead you into thinking that this is some sort of miracle food which combines the “good” parts of grains and berries into a magical super food.

Turns out, “Grain Berry” is just a fancy name for sorghum bran, a type of grain that has been grown for hundreds of years, but appears as though it could serve as an antioxidant with anti-inflammatory properties. The interesting thing about grain berry/sorghum bran is that it has much higher levels of the antioxidant polyphenol procyanidins in it. What’s unclear is whether or not these high amounts can actually be absorbed and used in the human body or not. A recent study put out by the Arkansas Children’s Nutrition Center found that, in their words, “Sorghum Bran in the Diet Dose Dependently Increased the Excretion of Catechins and Microbial-Derived Phenolic Acids in Female Rats.” Yummy!

The National Institute on Aging in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) rates the antioxidant amounts in foods and confirms that sorghum bran is indeed high in antioxidants. Oxygen radical absorbance capacity (ORAC) of sorghum bran is about 100,800 micromoles of Trolox Equivalents per 100 grams while the equivalent ORAC rating for Acai berry is 102,700 micromoles of Trolox Equivalents per 100 grams. Foods with a higher ORAC rating include ground turmeric, dried oregano, ground cinnamon and ground cloves.

Pretty amazing stuff, huh?

Yeah, I don’t understand a lick of it, either. Sounds pretty scientific, huh?

So, Grain Berry may or may not be a super healthy type of bran, but how do their products taste?

When I can find some, I’ll let you know!

Our nine month wait is almost over. In just a few more days my wife and I, along with our son, will be meeting the new addition to our family. We don’t know if our baby will be a nervous one or a calm one, if our baby will enjoy being bounced on a knee or held tightly or if our baby will like mushed sweet potatoes or peas. Among the many things we don’t know about our new baby is the gender.

There’s a surprise in my diaper. Guess what it is…

My wife and I didn’t find out the gender of our last child, either. And while it drove our friends and families absolutely crazy and even sparked betting pools (90% said girl, the 10% minority won with the opposite guess) my wife and I remained resolute: we didn’t want to know until our baby could actually be held in our arms.

The people who “had” to know cited all the usual reasons and we shot down every argument:

Decorating The Nursery: This was one of the easier things to do. By avoiding the usual pitfalls of buying everything in pink or blue we were able to put together a nursery that didn’t immediately dictate what sort of person our baby would be. We initially had a lot of fun coming up with decorating ideas for a nursery and it helped us come up with a theme we both liked. We stuck with neutral colors like yellows and browns and greens. We picked bedding with little jungle animals in pastel colors that could easily be the nursery of a junior Tarzan of the Apes or a young Jane Goodall.

Clothing for the Baby: Again, we stuck with neutral colors that didn’t immediately indicate a boy or girl at first glance. Let’s face it: boy and girl babies pretty much look like little Cabbage Dolls that have been shriveled and melted in a microwave for the first month or two anyway. There’s plenty of time to move into high baby-fashion clothes before the little one even thinks about solid food.

Picking A Name: By not knowing the gender of our child before birth we’ve been forced to come up with not one but TWO names that we like, which has spurred a bit of creativity on both of our parts. Our 3 1/2 year-old son has even gotten in on the naming action. His top picks? If the baby is a girl he want to name her “Chair” and if the baby is a boy his top name choice is “Eyeball.”

“Don’t You Want To Know?”: Ahh, the obvious question. Yes, of course we want to know the gender of our baby. It would be extremely awkward trying to raise a child to the age of 18 without knowing if it was a boy or a girl. But we also want to know if our child is going to look like my wife or me, if it is going to like chocolate or vanilla and whether or not it will get into Harvard or Princeton. But just because we want these things doesn’t necessarily mean we can get them exactly when we want them, if at all. There is a time for everything, and the time for knowing if we’re having a son or a daughter is when the lower half of that kid comes out.

Baby Shower Troubles: Because so many baby toys, clothes and even diaper pails are all “gender specific” these days, it is a bit difficult for people to attend a baby shower without purchasing some overly pink or overly blue items. This drives a lot of people nuts, which amuses me to no end. The positive upshot of all this? The new parents-to-be end up with a LOT more gift cards, which are about a million times more useful than the 50 baby washcloths and 4 baby bathtubs most parents seem to be given.

And, of course, by not finding out the gender of our baby we are spared from the chance of actually being proven horribly wrong. We’ve all heard of stories people who have decorated the nursery in bright pink, invested a small fortune in pink and frilly and tiny clothing pieces all to be surprised when “Emma Isabella” popped out and turn out to be “Jacob Michael” instead.

In the end, I think my wife and I are of like mind on this: There are so few real and big surprises in the world anymore that it’s actually kind of nice to have something completely unknown and anticipated for nine full months. We desperately want to meet our new baby, but we don’t want to go into without preconceived notions of who that new little person is. It’s almost a liberating experience, being able to imagine our future with either a boy or a girl, at almost the same time.

Of course, all this is easy for me to write about now: our wait will be over in just a few more hours if all goes well… And then the real fun begins!

When you hear the phrase “The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Weather Service (NWS)” you have probably already stopped reading or fallen asleep before you even get to the first joke. In case you aren’t familiar with them, the good pocket-protector-wearing people at weather branch of the NOAA are responsible for some of the most accurate, most up-to-date and most mind-numbingly boring weather reports you’ll ever read.

I know most weather reports aren’t exactly spine-tingling fare, but the NOAA perfected the art of being succinct back when Twitter sounded like the name of some character in a Disney cartoon. Here’s the typical text for an NOAA weather forecast:

Wednesday: Sunny, with a high near 95. Calm wind becoming east southeast around 5 mph.

That’s it. No “brilliant sunshine” or “hot and humid” or even “very sunny.” A grand total of 86 characters. Adjectives are for the weak. Oh, and I added the italics myself. The NOAA would never try to stoop to that level.

The weather people at the NOAA aren’t robots, of course. They know that most people are too lazy to read actual words about the weather, so they also use the time-honored method of posting little weather symbols on their website, to let you know what the sky will look like over the next several days. Instead of a little sunshine with sunglasses or a cloud holding an umbrella the always literal National Weather Service sticks to the these realistic expectations of what you can expect to see if you ventured outside and looked upward.

So far, so good, right? They even have little icons which show what the sky will look like at night if, God forbid, there was nothing good on TV or all the power on the East Coast blew out. Of course, it wasn’t good enough to just have one little icon for the weather at night. They actually have different icons for “Mostly Clear” and “Partly Cloudy” evenings. The icons are so realistic that people have actually navigated lost ships back to port safely using just those little pictures.

WTF NOAA?

Based on all this information, you can surely understand my alarm when, in the midst of a heat wave here in my part of the United States I went to visit the website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service and instead of the usual staid, boring, almost soothing scientific description of the weather, I found the symbol you see here on the right:

Exploding sun with blood-red sky! Armageddon is upon us! Repent as all human civilization melts and burns under the oppressive heat of the fires of Hell! This morning was partly sunny and warm, but the planet Earth become a roaring ball of flame and liquid magma This Afternoon!

It’s that hot outside. It’s so hot the sky and the seas are turning red and boiling away.

But surely the end of the planet couldn’t be so close! I hadn’t read about it on any community calendars or heard it talked about at any of my monthly staff meetings. Just to be sure I had to check around at some other weather sites. Most just mentioned that it was going to be extra hot for the next few days. Some told me “stay indoors” and to “get to a pool” or even “take frequent breaks during the day if working outside” but none of them mentioned red skies and melting mountains. That is, until, I read the weather report from the New York Times:

On Tuesday the sun will be slightly larger.

Yep, on really hot days the sun actually gets larger and even becomes a little less yellow. The forecast does not mention if Superman’s powers will be negatively affected by this strange weather.

It’s at times like this, when I’m spending a lot of time looking at various websites, that I’m reminded of an old seaman’s adage about the color of the sun at different times of the day. I think it goes something like this:

Or, as the NOAA’s National Weather Service likes to say: Tuesday: Sunny and hot, with a high near 100. Calm wind becoming south southeast around 5 mph.

94 characters.