from borggrrl:

An industrial chemical that led to a nationwide recall of more than 100 brands of cat and dog foods has been found to contaminate a second pet food ingredient, expanding the recall further. The chemical, melamine, is believed to have contaminated rice protein concentrate used to make a variety of Natural Balance Pet Foods products for both dogs and cats, the Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday. Previously, the chemical was found to contaminate another ingredient, wheat gluten, used by at least six other pet food and treat manufacturers. Natural Balance said it was recalling all its Venison and Brown Rice canned and bagged dog foods, its Venison and Brown Rice dog treats and its Venison and Green Pea dry cat food. The Pacoima, Calif., company said recent laboratory tests showed the products contain melamine. It believes the source of the contaminant was rice protein concentrate, which the company recently added to the dry venison formulas. Natural Balance does not use wheat gluten, which was associated with the previous melamine contamination, it said. full article

It never seems to end. As purpleglitter said to me in response to this most recent expansion: a lot of this stuff may have contaminating the food all along, they're only finding it now because of the closer scrutiny the media attention has brought.

I posted this meme a little over a year ago. The program has been improved to allow you to exclude your own and anonymous comments from the result, which I have done. Here are the results:

Top Commenters on neitherday's LiveJournal
(Self and anonymous comments excluded from rankings)

	Top 10
1	purpleglitter	185
2	strangedoll	185
3	biker_boi_dhane	181
4	lady_babalon	167
5	circebe	160
6	dykestar	130
7	borggrrl	128
8	ruakh	107
9	lusciousdame	106
10	azurelunatic	101
	( 11-100 )

Total Commenters: 968 (868 not shown)
Total Comments: 10399
Report generated 8/10/2005 2:57:33 PM by scrapdog's LJ Comment Stats Wizard 1.6

So far I've received holiday cards from borggrrl, cobweb, and wicketgate. Very exciting! Thank you.

Did some catching up on reading my friends page at purpleglitter’s house. Haven't been able to read it much lately. I’ll try to keep up more regularly when my new apartment gets an internet connection.

-----

I went to the post office today, and found that the scanner borggrrl sent me had arrived. I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but I’m very excited to be able to scan again.

Thank you, borggrrl.

prettyshygrrl came over. We sat and talked for some time. She helped me blow off steam and get my bearings. I hope I did the same for her. She's a wonderful person, I wish the stormy seas could part for her, as well as for so many of my other friends. Far too many of my friends are struggling to weather tempests right now.

-----

prettyshygrrl gave me her old computer, a 300Mhz P2, which is 33% faster than my current computer. I'm going to have to do a bit of hard drive swapping before I can use it. With borggrrl sending me a scanner to replace the one that was headbutted, I'll soon be moving ahead computerwise. Many many thanks to prettyshygrrl and borggrrl!