Unqualified Offerings

May I state that I personally will not be happy until everything in the country – every road, building and airport, every bridge and dog park – is named after The Troops? Or, failing that, Ronald Reagan. You may think that we already live in a country where everything is “Veterans Memorial” This or “American [...]

By Thoreau
Big company has safety problems.  Big company lobbies for safety  regulations.  Regulations are passed.  Company then gets special permission to do safety testing in-house while smaller competitors have to hire independent labs to do it.  This just proves that we need more regulations and more of the right people in charge.
In other news, dog [...]

By Thoreau
In analyzing the hiring of Jenna Bush by NBC, Greenwald also explains why I refuse to say anything nice about Ted Kennedy.  I mean, whether you think he was a great Senator or a bad Senator or whatever, surely in all of Massachusetts there must be some other liberal politician who could have done [...]

By Thoreau
If Obama wants to do a total mind-fuck on us, the next time somebody gives him a hard time he should just say ‘It’s because I’m white, isn’t it?  Some sort of affirmative action thing, right?  Look, just because half my family is white and my sister is part Asian and I went to [...]

Following up on yesterday’s food item, here’s a good explanation from Dana Velden at The Kitchn of the differences among the terms “cage-free,” “free-range” and “pasture-raised” when it comes to chickens. Now, $7.50 a dozen is more than I could (would) pay. Around here pastured eggs go for $4-5 for twelve. Apparently you can get [...]

Courtney at the Food for Real blog helped my friend Julie Bolton of Groff’s Content Farm kill a bunch of chickens, then cooked up a roaster and the eggs and proto-eggs of a stewing hen. Actually she used the proto-eggs to coat frittered eggplant, but you get the idea.
* Processing
* Cooking
* Science! [...]

Alex Knapp quotes the President’s own words trying to twist the meaning of the September 11 anniversary into some kind of “service” thing.

By Thoreau
There’s an article at Salon blaming social factors for the absence of a male contraceptive pill.  My knowledge of the science behind reproduction doesn’t go much beyond basic intro biology, so I will refrain from declaring that the obstacles are all in the science, but I will ponder whether stopping 1 egg cell from [...]

By Thoreau
The Onion is debating whether it’s torture to let prisoners wander a maze and get gored to death by a minotaur.
Sadly, Ninth Circuit Appellate Judge Jay Bybee would rule that hearsay testimony is admissible if the minotaur heard it from a detainee in his dying breaths.

By Thoreau
High muckety-muck:  There’s no way a cell could do that!
Me:  Sure it could.  Easiest thing in the world to write down an equation for a mechanism that would give that behavior.
High muckety-muck:  OK.  But do cells actually do that?
Me:  I don’t know.  But you didn’t say they don’t do that.  You said there’s no [...]