If you ask the wife, there's something seriously wrong with a class calculator that thinks we're in the top fifth of American society. (via dustbury)
I, on the other hand, simply assert that God meant me to be a rich eccentric, and this is his way of doing so on the cheap.
Found a box turtle digging a nest in the garden a week or so ago. Naturally I waited until she had finished her business, then dug up the eggs and relocated them to a nest in the garage I'd made for them. It was either that or let them take their chances with the local raccoon. I've estimated the hatch date to be sometime around August 20th. SW was not that enthused at the idea of incubating turtle eggs in the garage, but I suspect she decided that debating the idea wasn't worth the trouble.
Of course, that was before turtles became deadly.
Turtles and other reptiles are reservoirs of Salmonella and have long been a recognized source of Salmonella infection in humans (1). Small turtles have posed a particular danger to young children because these turtles might not be perceived as health hazards and can be handled like toys. Salmonella infections in children can be severe and can result in hospitalization and occasionally in death (2). The association between Salmonella infection in children and exposure to turtles led to a 1975 law prohibiting the sale or distribution of small turtles (i.e., those with a carapace of <4 inches in length) in the United States (3). That prohibition led to a substantial decline in human salmonellosis cases associated with turtles (4). However, because the prohibition is not fully enforced and contains exceptions (e.g., sales for educational purposes), human turtle-associated cases continue to occur. This report describes several recent cases of turtle-associated salmonellosis reported to CDC by state and local health departments since September 2006, including a fatal case in an infant. These cases illustrate that small turtles remain a source of human Salmonella infections. Although ongoing public education measures aimed at preventing reptile-acquired Salmonella infections are helpful, prohibiting the sale of small turtles likely remains the most effective public health action to prevent turtle-associated salmonellosis.
Still, I'm not planning on tossing the eggs. In my defense, most of the cases cited in the study above came from aquarium-based turtles, water-dwelling sliders and the like, not box turtles. I figure the educational value of helping me take care of the eggs and watching the hatch far outweighs the risk of any infection. Second, I already let them handle any reptiles we happen across, assuming they want to. Sometimes I have to bribe them with promises of ice cream in order for them to "want" to, but that's another story. They can avoid salmonella infection by washing their hands afterwards.
No bird pics yet, but he does have email.
The adventure of OIF 07-09 is now underway.
On Monday 2 July we began our trip by drawing weapons at 0900. After weighing in on the big scale at Pope AFB, we waited for our ride. It showed up at 1500, North American Airlines 767, #N760NA. I lucked out and got a 1st class seat. Takeoff time was 1630 for our first leg to Shannon, Ireland where we landed at 0300 local time. After a 3.5 hour layover, we departed at 0630, arriving at Kuwait City International at 1455 local on 3 July. Temp at KCIA was 116.
We moved by bus to Camp Beuhring, in the far northwest corner of Kuwait. One morning we went out to the range to test fire weapons, one of the "requirements" before heading north. It was actually pretty nice at 0530 when we got to the range.
Attached picture is of MAJ Mark Quander, me, SFC William Hui, CPT Matt Wagoner and SFC Steve Kelly at the range after shooting our 10 rounds.
On the 6th we flew from KCIA to Baghdad International via USAF C-130. Flight was full, 63 pax, and hot, but otherwise uneventful. We arrived in Baghdad on about 1700.
Since then we have been pretty much taking it easy, doing in processing and so forth. Minor dust storm today, not bad really, just dust and not much wind.
If you are looking for first hand reporting rather that the latest spin on "why we are failing" or "why we must leave Iraq", I highly recommend you read the most recent article by Michael Yon.
Yon has covered the war from the beginning and is one of a very few reporters who actually stay in the field and report, rather than staying in the hotel and making up stories.
Compiled with the assistance of Brooklyn Local 1
Oliver spent more than a year picking the right bottling line, getting it in place, designing a separate temperature-controlled warm room and running test batches. The whole project cost more than $300,000.
He knew going in that the bottles would be 750ml and finished with a cork and wire closure. He decided on the largest "still fill" bottler in the country, meaning sugar and yeast are added to beer that has virtually no C02 in it, then the beer is naturally carbonated in a warm room. Even in Belgium, most breweries add some C02 at bottling and before warm conditioning.
"We asked ourselves, 'Are we going to do it old school or do it the modern way?'" Oliver said. "In the end, we thought we got more complexity (this way)."
The beer is excellent, but the website is absolute shite.
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Speaking of shite sites....If ya want ta roll wit da tea partay. I think i just threw up a little bit in my mouth....well, more than a little bit, to be honest.
I'm at a loss as to who Smirnoff thinks the traget audience for this drink is. As best as I can tell, it's aimed at people who want to become ironic hipsters but aren't sure how the whole process works.
via hail the ale
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Lagering
Modern IPA brewers should perhaps pay attention to the purpose of lagering pale beers - smoothing out the rough hop flavour. Here's a hint. If you want to brew an authentic 1842 Burton IPA, try maturing your beer for 4 months not just in wooden barrels, but also in a wooden sailing ship, making sure to vary the temperature between 5 and 50º C and to rock it around a lot. Then you have authentic. And fiddle around with the magnetic field. Maybe that doesn't have any effect. I'd still do it just to be on the safe side.
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Where da Wiedemann?
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A guide to converting the ignorant.
Saying that you don't like beer is akin to saying that you don't like any white food. There are simply so many types out there, there is without a doubt one that fits your taste. The "I don't like beer" crowd can be roughly divided into two groups (I've met many members of both). There are the people who don't like the bitterness of beer, and the people whose only contact with beer has been the beer flavored water cranked out by the likes of Coors and Budweiser.
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Memorabilia auction.
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One from Kehaar: The Search For Noble Hop Aroma Chemicals
For years, scientists have been trying to identify the chemicals that give the best beers a noble hop aroma. Using sophisticated lab equipment, three researchers have identified several chemicals that may be responsible for a spicy scent. This is no small task since hops contain as many as a thousand different smelly chemicals and the ones that are most abundant are not responsible for the characteristic aroma. Some chemicals smell much stronger than others. The most potent chemicals are often responsible for the finer points of an aroma even if they are only present at very low levels.
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Don't you hate it when your fingers start to freeze from holding an ice cold beer?!? THEN PUT IT IN A DAMN GLASS LIKE IT WAS MEANT TO BE!
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Pledge a Pint for John.
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The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!
To... Chile?
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Brew Reviews
Red Cuillin
The beer pours a deepy orange chestnut with a fine cream tan clingy head. Definitely a Scots ale with nutty raisin malt cut with black malt for a smoky effect. Light in the mouth with semi-soft water. A light tea astringency in the end with a hint of red current fruit in the malt. While it may be a bit lighter than many of the tartan-ed ales you find in North America, it is right there in the middle of the BJCP style "9C. Scottish Export 80/-", that last symbol being for "shilling" the traditional measure for the grades of Scots ales.
Black Cuillin
The second in the series on the beers of the Isle of Skye Brewing Company, this 4.5% brew is described by the brewer simply as "the dark one, brewed with rolled roast oatmeal and honey." It pours the greyish mahogany of cola under a quickly dissipating mocha head. In the mouth a nice chalky creamy mid-weight mouthfeel with burnt toast black malt roastiness sitting above plum and raisin malt. Tobacco in the finish. Hints of unsweetened cocoa and peat on the nose. Very nice.
Four Magic Hats
Magic Hat uses the magic theme to promote its products, starting with the slogan, "Where ancient alchemy meets modern-day science," and billing its summer seasonal 12-pack as "The Summer Variety Show — the greatest 12-pack on earth!"
You won't be a P.T. Barnum sucker for buying into the hype.
Magic was not the only common theme to all four of the beers I tried — Circus Boy, No. 9, Hocus Pocus and the Mystery Beer — they all shared a golden color and a smooth, creamy, malty body with hints of grain and floral hop aromas. There were significant variations, however, in the individual beers.
Duck Rabbit Imperial Stout
Insane! head. First taste like clean, tasty, spicy dirt (okay bad description). Reminds me of an excellent steak served with a spicy cocoa cabernet sauce (odd description but hey, it's what I tasted!) Simply put, this beer is an awesome Imperial Stout for the price and if it's available outside of North Carolina, get some.
Lagunitas Maximus IPA Ale
It's not often that one is born a possessed idiot, but such is my life. While shopping for books and beer glasses at the local Salvation Army I thought to myself, "I wonder where my Monday Night Brewery glasses are that I won." Sure enough, they arrived today safe and sound and gleaming. I was going to drink a weak little Vanilla Cream Stout in them but I thought that their sheer brilliance deserved a heavy hitter, thus this beer. As far as IPAs go it is very good. I hate the overly-hopped variety and this falls well short of that and into a mildly robust hop with a great and aiding malt. Top notch flavor with mild citrus and the tempered grains. Quite brilliant on both accounts.
Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy
The seeds for this beer were sown during the launch of Leinie's Hefe-weizen nine years ago. The brewery suggested serving it as a shandy to customers, with lemonade instead of the standard lemon slice that comes with most weiss beers. this proved popular with people who like their beers on the sweeter side - those "hard lemonade" people. Summer Shandy is replacing Leinie's Berry Weiss as its summer seasonal selection. It's a bold move. We like the Berry Weiss, but this is a tasty beer. We actually enjoyed its prominent lemon flavor, which isn't so powerful that it masks the flavor of the beer.
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Industry News: Greene King, Scottish & Newcastle
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Fosters: Australian for cheap bastards.
The alcohol content of Victoria Bitter is to be cut as brewer Foster's tries to slash millions of dollars from its tax bill.
Foster's will also raise the wholesale price of all its packaged beers by about 2 per cent next month.
Industry experts say the VB alcohol content reduction – from 4.9 per cent to 4.8 per cent – could save Foster's $20 million in beer tax a year.
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Recipes: Beer Can Chicken
Olympia Beer Pancakes
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Mmmmmm, beer jelly.
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Bad beer. Good shutter speed.
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Why brown bag it, when you can just bag it?
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Guess what the hot new drink is in Australian wineries?
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A philosopher visits the wasteland.
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Podcasts:
Craft Beer Radio - Chain Smoking
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One man. One straw. It's the law.
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Win a trip to the Great American Beer Festival.
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The other carnivalesque beer post collection: The Session.
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No one can tell the American macro-brews apart.
Oh, sure, beer drinkers will swear they can taste the difference between the brand they're loyal to and Bud and Miller and Coors and Michelob and Pabst and Rainier and a dozen more beer brands. They can't -- which accounts for the success of the craft brews and microbrews, as well as the imports.
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The previous Carnival of Beer may be seen here.
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The Carnival of Beer appears every Tuesday and Friday. If you've an item you like to see appear, let us know via bigwig AT nc.rr.com
Yellow journalism takes on a new hue.
Often as sensationalistic as its yellow predecessor, green journalism tends to appeal to our emotions, exploit our fears, and pander to our vanity. It places a political agenda in front of the quest for journalistic truth and in its most demagogic forms tolerates no criticism, branding all who question it as enemies of the people.
Not all green journalism harangues, but even the gentlest variety sermonizes, cuts logical corners, and substitutes good intentions for problem solving. For an example of creepy gentle green journalism, there's no better example than the "Slate Green Challenge," a series that Slate started publishing last fall in conjunction with TreeHugger.org.
I've got no fundamental quarrel with TreeHugger. They're propagandists who are "dedicated to driving sustainability into the mainstream" and don't really pretend to be journalists. My bitch is that Slate, which ought to know better, boarded the trendy greenwagon to publish the group's flawed, if well-meaning, guide to reducing carbon dioxide from one's "diet."
As part of my own crusade to save the planet, I've stopped exhaling. Nothing but inhaling for me from now own.
Ice-covered Greenland really was green a half-million or so years ago, covered with forests in a climate much like that of Sweden and eastern Canada today.
An international team of researchers recovered ancient DNA from the bottom of an ice core that indicates the presence of pine, yew and alder trees as well as insects.
The researchers, led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, say this is the first proof that there was forest in southern Greenland.
Included were genetic traces of butterflies, moths, flies and beetles, they report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
....
But the new research shows it hasn't always been so cold there.
"These findings allow us to make a more accurate environmental reconstruction of the time period from which these samples were taken, and what we've learned is that this part of the world was significantly warmer than most people thought," Martin Sharp, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta, Canada, and a coauthor of the paper, said in a statement.
Zod: Say no more! That's good, that's good! A nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat!
A Carnival of Beer has been delayed for a day, as Kehaar has flown in from Georgia to see his new nephew and drink my beer.
He says to tell you the Carnival of the Vanities has been delayed as well.
In case you hadn't noticed.
More from the guy in the video below.
Bottom line: Boomers simply suck as politicians. Born of Watergate and Vietnam, they replay these shows over and over again to no useful leadership outcomes. I want them off-stage so bad it hurts.
Frankly, that's what scares me most on Hillary: this will simply continue for another fruitless four or--God forbid--eight MORE YEARS!
Is more sysadmins.
One corner turned.
Most Iraqis I talk with acknowledge that if it was ever about the oil, it’s not now. Not mostly anyway. It clearly would have been cheaper just to buy the oil or invade somewhere easier that has more. Similarly, most Iraqis seem now to realize that we really don’t want to stay here, and that many of us can’t wait to get back home. They realize that we are not resolved to stay, but are impatient to drive down to Kuwait and sail away. And when they consider the Americans who actually deal with Iraqis every day, the Iraqis can no longer deny that we really do want them to succeed. But we want them to succeed without us. We want to see their streets are clean and safe, their grass is green, and their birds are singing. We want to see that on television. Not in person. We don’t want to be here. We tell them that every day. It finally has settled in that we are telling the truth.
If you're on the Outer Banks over the next couple of weeks, keep an eye out for Greater Shearwaters.
State and federal wildlife officials are investigating the deaths of hundreds of seabirds turning up on the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.
Wildlife biologists say more than 1,000 shearwaters - large, gull-like water birds that spend most of their lives far offshore until they nest - have been found dead over the past two weeks on Southeastern beaches. Since last week, more than 160 of the dead birds have been found in South Carolina, including at least 22 on Hilton Head Island.
Officials remain uncertain about what's causing the mass casualties, but they say most of the birds recovered seem to have died of dehydration and malnutrition during migration.
Most of the birds appear to be juveniles that starved to death, similar to a similar die-off in 2005. This article suggests that weather conditions may have affected the fish populations the birds feed on, pushing them away from where the shearwaters would normally expect to find them. There was a moderate drought in the Texas/Arkansas/Louisiana area in 2005--there's a severe drought in much of the deep South now. Correlation isn't causation, but I wonder if the conditions that produce the drought might also affect the location of the fish the shearwaters are expecting to feed on.
U.S. Signal Corps Photo
Photo copyright Michael Yon. Used with his permission.
Some Things Do.
We proceeded to the small courtyard. The wall adjoined what had been a stable or garage. We entered. It was floored with concrete. There were two rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood. They were thin and very white. Some of the bodies were terribly bruised; though there seemed to be little flesh to bruise. Some had been shot through the head, but they bled but little.
Murrow's Ostensible Heirs
But for those publications who actually had people embedded in Baqubah when the story first broke and still failed to cover it, their malaise is inexplicable. I do not know why all failed to report the murders and booby-trapped village: apparently no reporters bothered to go out there, even though it’s only about 3.5 miles from this base. Any one of the reporters currently in Baqubah could still go to these coordinates and follow his or her nose and find the gravesites.
Given a finite amount of dollars, there's only so much they can be spent on.
But making global warming the world’s top priority means that we shuffle other major challenges down our “to do” list. Some climate change activists actually acknowledge this: Australian author Tim Flannery recently told an interviewer that climate change is “the only issue we should worry about for the next decade”.
Tell that to the four million people starving to death, to the three million victims of HIV/AIDS, or to the billions of people who lack access to clean drinking water.
Human-caused climate change deserves attention — and it has gotten it, thanks to Gore, Flannery, and others. Even before a single note has been played in the “awareness-raising” concerts, much of the developed world believes that global warming is the planet’s biggest problem.
Yet, the world faces many other vast challenges. Whether we like it or not, we have limited money and a limited attention span for global causes. We should focus first on achieving the most good for the most people.
...
If America and Australia are somehow inspired by the Live Earth concerts to sign the Kyoto Protocol, temperatures would rise by slightly less. The number of people at risk of malaria would be reduced by about 0.2% by 2085. Yet the cost of the Kyoto Protocol would be a staggering $180 billion a year. In other words, climate change campaigners believe we should spend $180 billion to save just 1,000 lives a year.
...
When we look at the evidence, we discover again and again that the best solutions to the world’s biggest challenges aren’t the ones we hear about the most. We could save many more lives during extreme weather events, for example, by insisting on hurricane-resistant building standards than we would by committing to Live Earth’s target of a 90% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. This would be easier, much less costly, and ultimately do far more good. Indeed, the Copenhagen Consensus experts discovered that for every dollar invested in Kyoto-style battling climate change, we could do up to 120 times more good with in numerous other areas.
It’s honourable that the Live Earth organisers are so concerned about the far-off future, but you have to wonder why there is so little concern about the much-worse present.
The God Squad at the camp I once worked at had a saying; "Don't be so focused on the afterlife that you're no damned* use in this one." The words might need to be changed slightly to address the Carbonites, but the sentiment still seems apropos.
*It's possible they didn't use the word "damned."
