Canine Forensics

The Society for California Archaeology is holding their annual meeting in Ventura this week. In conjunction with that, Connie and I attended a presentation last night from the Institute for Canine Forensics. This group trains and promotes the use of dogs to locate dead humans both of recent and long-buried vintage. It is an outgrowth …

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Designer Grits

Just so we can be ethnically diverse here, I have to put up this companion post to Steve’s on risotto from earlier this week. He gets to honor his Italian heritage – I get to honor my Southern redneck Scots-Irish heritage. This LA Times article says that grits are starting to move into high-end cuisine …

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Aussie Speak

A young lady who works in my office is Australian, a transfer from our Melbourne office. She is a geologist; very bright, capable and funny. It is interesting to talk to her about her impressions of this strange country she finds herself in. Of course, the fact that her experiences here are mostly in California …

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How To Interest A Big Publisher

Society is not breaking down. Society is broken. I caught this bit at Yahoo news, about a college student who spent his spring break in Wal-Mart (or should we spell that, W@L-M*RT?). Skyler Bartels haunted the fluorescent interior for 41 hours in a row, watching movies, playing video games, eating from the snack bar and …

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Girls With Guns

The incomparable Tam, queen of snark and Mistress of Coal Creek Armory, deconstructs a breathless and idiotic piece on female shooters. “Why is it that when some bright spark in the marketing department at Apple, Cannondale, or Pontiac notices that slightly more than 50% of the planet’s population is setters rather than pointers, it gets …

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Risotto and Rice Fetishism

Reid sent this LAT food column on risotto (which I still call “risott’ ” in the mountain dialect of my grandparents) for my comment. What did I think? Well, you’d certainly get a good dish if you followed the cook’s advice. But he sure takes it solemnly (not at all the same as seriously). I …

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Scarier than Flu..

I share Pluvialis’s mixture of dread and fascination with various high- tech military innovations. Here is uber- blogger Glenn Reynolds over at TCS with some terrifying new info on biowar bugs. And, on a slightly (perhaps) lighter note: insect cyborgs.

Flu Update

It seems most scientists are a lot less panicked by Bird Flu than the press or, worse, European governments are. Here is the latest by the NYT’s invaluable Nicholas Wade on why the number of mutations needed for H5 to become pandemic is less than likely to occurr. Most likely we’ll eventually be attacked by …

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“Foodies” vs AR?

I don’t particularly like the pop term “foodies”, but when a phenomenon involves New York and Berkeley, I am tempted… Even as the coursing battle heats up, no fewer than three books defending hunting and “scavenging” (to use the author’s own term) in the strongest terms are being published, virtually simultaneously. Pehaps the wildest of …

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Update

I know my posting has been patchy of late. Part of the problem is that I have been very involved in the approaching showdown over California coursing ban. I am also spinning my wheels trying to get a novel started. But part of the problem is simply this: it is spring, after one of my …

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