As an aspiring writer for money and other good reasons, this Yahoo News piece caught my eye: Scrushy Said to Pay for Positive Stories. I’m unfamiliar with the court case it hinges on but gather the defendant managed to swing some good press from a freelance writer. A public relations firm and an influential local …
Malaria Watch!
No, not watching out for Malaria; but, courtesy of Peculiar, a wristwatch that detects Malaria. I could have used one of those in Zimbabwe years back, as he well remembers…
More Flu- anoia
Everyone continues to lose it over H5N1. The Economist opines that the Turkish government should stop allowing villagers to raise their own chickens, apparently preferring that they confine all chicken raising to industrial breeds in the kind of industrial chicken concentration camps that are breeding factories for diseases, then SELL them to the peasants. Yeah, …
Fretmarks
I can’t believe I didn’t know anything about this blog. Its proprietor, “Pluvialis”, just shyly told me of it, though apparently she has been linking to us for a while. The title is a falconry term– the marks made on a growing feather by stress or lack of food. But though Pluvialis does indeed deal …
“What Questions Have disappeared?”
This post from Steve Sailer on an essay by evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller caught my eye for several reasons. It is on questions about your child’s prospective mate that, for (PC? ) reasons, we no longer ask or even admit to thinking about. Some of the difficulty is that we legitimately resist social stereotyping– I …
Doom and Gloom: the Continuing Series
Does Iran want to hit us with a nuclear pulse and destroy all our electronics? Gloomy enough for Derbyshire!
Artificial Elephants
Perhaps the oddest things to buy I have ever seen. I saw this in one of the high- end sporting mags, the ones Libby calls “gun porn”. The ad copy is even odder: “KR reproductions are completely bug resistant and guaranteed not to crack, split or have any other problems associated with the use of …
Winter Rituals
What happens when it snows? One thing that happens is that people are absolutely compelled to build snowmen. I have posted here before on the strange compulsions people have in certain situations. So what happens if you live in a place where it doesn’t snow and you are hit with the snowman compulsion? You build …
Suburban Wildlife
These two pictures of bobcats appeared in today’s Santa Barbara News-Press. The article is subscribers-only so I haven’t bothered to try to link. They were taken last week in the backyard of a house that adjoins Tucker’s Grove County Park, which is a quarter-mile north of where we live. Our neighborhood really is pretty classic …
La Conchita
I have been wanting to write something about the La Conchita landslide for some time, and anniversary of its occurrence last week as recounted in the LA Times gave me something to hang it on. La Conchita is a hamlet on the Ventura/Santa Barbara County line along US 101 just south of here. Last January, …