Scribal Terror

Where the hell is everybody?

Honoring the Sabbath Day and keeping it holy or something? Jeez.

Liberals vs. conservatives

A study on the cognitive differences between liberals and conservatives has decisively demonstrated that liberals are more averse to the letter W than conservatives are. Snort. Via Ace and Dr. Helen

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Come on in and talk.  Or drop off one of your random bursts of verbal energy -- poem, limerick, story, top ten list, clerihew, essay, alliterative poem, rant, Surrealist or Dadaist poem, parody, cento, dirty joke, amusing  syllepsis, haiku, dirty haiku . . . to share. 

Riding mower

From Street Use

Holy jumping Japanese frog robots!

These things are scary...

-- Via Miss Cellania at Neatorama

The door is open . . .

Come on in and talk.  Or drop off one of your random bursts of verbal energy -- poem, limerick, story, top ten list, clerihew, essay, alliterative poem, rant, Surrealist or Dadaist poem, parody, cento, dirty joke, amusing  syllepsis, haiku, dirty haiku . . . to share. 

Braised pork chops with apricot sauce

This was my dinner creation this evening:

Heat some olive oil in a deep, heavy, lidded frying pan
Brown 3 pork chops and remove from pan, drain excess oil, leaving enough to cover the bottom of the pan. Scrape the browned bits loose.
Toss a tablespoon of fennel seeds and a clove in the hot oil and return the pork chops to the pan
Add salt and pepper, 1/2 cup orange juice, juice of one-half lemon, and a couple pieces of orange zest. Add enough water to cover.
Bring to a boil, then lower heat to simmer covered at least one hour. The pork chops should be easily pulled apart with a fork. Keep adding water if needed.
When the pork chops are finished, remove the lid and boil down the sauce until thick.
Add about a cup of lightly sweetened apricot puree, mix with the sauce and cook till warm

I served this with homemade bread and sweet potatoes. It was UNBELIEVABLE. The cloves and fennel and orange zest made the apricot spicy and tangy.

Liiiiice in Spaaaace

Ok it's a tardigrade, or water bear, not a louse, but it still makes me itch to look at it. Deep Sea News reports that these things can live in just about any conditions and therefore some researchers want to see if they can live in space. I just hope the highly intelligent advanced civilizations that watch us with such interest (according to certain websites I've seen) don't catch wind of it or we might find ourselves swimming in a giant bath of RID.

Pipe dream

News in Science reports:

A series of giant pipes in the oceans to mix surface and deeper water could be an emergency fix for the earth's damaged climate system, says the scientist behind the Gaia hypothesis.

Professor James Lovelock, whose hypothesis says earth is a kind of superorganism composed of living and non-living elements, has fuelled controversy for three decades.

He thinks the stakes are so high that radical solutions must be tried to fix our climate, even if they ultimately fail.

In a letter to the journal Nature, he proposes vertical pipes 100 to 200 metres long and 10 metres wide be placed in the sea, so that wave motion pumps up water and fertilises algae on the surface.

This algal bloom would push down carbon dioxide levels and also produce dimethyl sulfide, helping to seed sunlight-reflecting clouds.

I always thought the point of the Gaia hypothesis was that the Earth is a self-regulating organism and humans should stop mucking with it. After all, it isn't the Earth that's being harmed by getting hotter or colder or whatever, it's people who would presumably suffer Gaia's revenge if their contributions to the atmosphere were considered undesirable by the superentity. Apparently Lovelock feels he has a special dispensation. Either that or he  just can't keep his fingers out of the pie.

The door is open . . .

Come on in and talk.  Or drop off one of your random bursts of verbal energy -- poem, limerick, story, top ten list, clerihew, essay, alliterative poem, rant, Surrealist or Dadaist poem, parody, cento, dirty joke, amusing  syllepsis, haiku, dirty haiku . . . to share.