Month: December 2006

Spicing up Puget Sound

I’m not sure what to think of this story:

Researchers: Baking impacts Puget Sound[*1]

SEATTLE – Researchers at the University of Washington say all that holiday baking and eating has an environmental impact — Puget Sound is being flavored by cinnamon and vanilla. “Even something as fun as baking for the holiday season has an environmental effect,” said Rick Keil, an associate professor of chemical oceanography. “When we bake and change the way we eat, it has an impact on what the environment sees. To me it shows the connectedness.”

Keil and UW researcher Jacquelyn Neibauer’s weekly tests of treated sewage sent into the sound from the West Point treatment plant in Magnolia showed cinnamon, vanilla and artificial vanilla levels rose between Nov. 14 and Dec. 9, with the biggest spike right after Thanksgiving.

Natural vanilla showed the largest increase, “perhaps indicative of more home baking using natural vanilla,” Keil and Neibauer wrote.

Maybe it was all those vanilla and cinnamon lattes being churned out by Seattle-area Starbucks?

What about Christmas?

Beyond all the wrapping paper and football games, beyond the food and drink, what’s it about?

How about:

Humility?

Charity?

Doing unto others as you’d have them do unto you?

Hope?

Mercy?

Forgiveness?

Outrage in Illinois

Buy your kid some decongestant, go to jail[*1] .

“(I was) made to feel like a criminal — Made to feel low, dirty. Just totally degraded,” recalled Tim Naveau, who says he’ll never forget the hours he spent in Rock Island County Jail — he says all because of his allergies.

“They searched me, made me take my shirt off, my shoes off,” he recounted.

Tim takes one 24-hour Claritin-D tablet just about every day. That puts him just under the legal limit of 75-hundred milligrams of pseudo ephedrine a month. The limit is part of a new law that Quad Cities authorities are beginning to strictly enforce.
. . .
The only problem is, Tim has a teenaged son who also suffers from allergies. And minors are not allowed to buy pseudo ephedrine.

“I bought some for my boy because he was going away to church camp and he needed it,” he said.

That decision put Tim over the legal limit. Two months later, there was a warrant for his arrest.

Do I even have to comment on how utterly ridiculous this is?

Via Reason Hit & Run[*2] .

How hard can YOU roll your eyes?

Time Magazine has chosen as its “”Man” of the Year” . . .

YOU.

Only, not really you, you. Not folks who get up, shower, grab a bite of breakfast, hurry along to work, put in a good day, then come home to a beer and whatever’s on ABC or Fox that night. Them. Like, you know, those wacky Facebookers. OpinionJournal[*1] approaches Time Magazine’s selection thus:

And yet, there is something uniquely demented about this year’s choice. It claims to celebrate You, the reader, the YouTuber, the amateur, the activist. Editor Stengel goes so far as to compare You to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. So then what does Time choose to highlight as examples of greatness in action?

Leila is a 20-year-old single Muslim woman who lives in Maryland and posts diary videos on YouTube: “She says um and ah a lot. She has been known to drink and blog. Sometimes she doesn’t speak at all, just runs words across the screen while melancholy singer-songwriter stuff plays in the background.”

Megan Gill is a 22-year-old senior at the University of Portland who just broke up with her boyfriend and changed her status from “dating” to “single” on her Facebook page. She has 708 registered “friends” who check back for regular updates on her site, such as “Megan is so over first semester,” “Megan is bummed about the election results,” “Megan is tired of letting people down.”

I have seen the present, and it is vapid.

The Iraq Study Group

I downloaded the ISG report, and intend to read it in depth real soon now. But I suspect my reaction will be much like Mark Steyn’s[*1] . And he’s a much better writer than I am. So:

So there you have it: an Iraq “Support Group” that brings together theArab League, the European Union, Iran, Russia, China and the U.N. Andwith support like that who needs lack of support? It worked in Darfur,where the international community reached unanimous agreement on theurgent need to rent a zeppelin to fly over the beleaguered regiontrailing a big banner emblazoned “YOU’RE SCREWED.” For Dar4.1, they canjust divert it to Baghdad.

Oh, but lest you think there are no minimum admission criteria to JamesBaker’s “Support Group,” relax, it’s a very restricted membership:Arabs, Persians, Chinese commies, French obstructionists, Russianassassination squads. But no Jews. Even though Israel is the onlycountry to be required to make specific concessions — return the GolanHeights, etc. Indeed, insofar as this document has any novelty value,it’s in the Frankenstein-meets-the-Wolfman sense of a boffo convergenceof hit franchises: a Vietnam bug-out, but with the Jews as thedesignated fall guys. Wow. That’s what Hollywood would call “highconcept.”

So, from what I’ve read, the solution to the Iraq problem is to hand Israel to the Palestinians. I guess there’s a reason why I don’t understand “foreign policy.” I’m insufficiently nuanced to understand that surrender is victory.

The Itch

Snookums and I have been on vacation.  Well, two vacations–to the Bahamas, then to St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The Bahamas weren’t so bad, bug-wise, but St. Thomas had mosquitos.  And no-see-ums.  They took to Snookums immediately (must be the sweetness) but they took a while longer to find me.  But when they did, they certainly made up for lost time.  My right ankle has a ring of welts all the way around it.  And, they itch.

So, I read the article Giving in to the urge to scratch:  Researchers find not all itches created equal[*1] at Science Daily with some interest:

While there are extensive commonalties between allergen- andhistamine-induced itch, perceptions about the intensity and the partsof the brain that are activated by allergens differ when compared tohistamine. As a result, mothers who admonish their children to stopitching may now be rightly told “I can’t.” For mold and grass-relateditches, it appears that science is on their side.

So far, I’ve avoided the urge to pop a couple of Benedryls.  So far.