I was interviewed by someone from Q 13 Fox news this morning while waiting for the bus at the Northgate Park'n'Ride.

A man came up to me with a camera and long padded microphone, and asked if he could interview me for the news.

Fascinating article in Asia Times Online. Apparently right now in certain states of India, a special kind of bamboo is in flower. Sounds lovely, right?

The problem is that the seeds are devoured by rats, and the high protein content causes a massive explosion in rat population. The rats devour all the crops, leading to famines, unrest, and rebellions.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the fate of governments can hang on the flowering cycle of a certain species of bamboo.

Plastic grocery bags banned...

... in China.

Hooray, China! Way to lead the world in environmental matters! (wait...)

Honestly, it doesn't surprise me; plastic bags are a horrible, horrible problem there, or at least that's what I observed in "my" little corner of China when I was there 10 years ago. Blowing across the street, snagged in almost every tree -- piles of them mounded up against every fence by the wind, shreds and tatters of white and brightly colored plastic bags everywhere. Truly horrible.

I bet we generate just as many plastic bags per capita, only ours are sturdier and higher quality and so tend to get reused more. Also, they're recyclable, at least here in King County, if you stuff a whole bunch of them inside another bag and recycle them in a big bunch all at once. That, and maybe our landfills are better segregated, meaning that the bags don't blow free and look obnoxious, the way I saw in China. At least that's my guess.

Link to reusable grocery bags from Amazon.

I thought this New Yorker article was pretty fascinating stuff.

A Reporter at Large: Big Foot
In measuring carbon emissions, it's easy to confuse morality and science.
By Michael Specter
February 25, 2008

Three paragraphs from the middle

Another quotation: "How do we alter human behavior significantly enough to limit global warming? Personal choices, no matter how virtuous, cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money."

Thanks to krblack for the link to this Esquire article about the worst building ever -- a monstrously ugly, unfinished, evil-looking hotel in Pyongyang.

Wow. A modern-day Tarot deck should use this debacle as "The Tower" card.

Haiti is really in trouble right now.

From this article by Jonathan M. Katz:

The problem is particularly dire in the Caribbean, where island nations depend on imports and food prices are up 40 percent in places.

I can't imagine eating dirt cookies. Or, more accurately, I can imagine it, but as a nursing mother, it depresses and outrages me to imagine another nursing mother trying to sustain both herself and her baby on them.

The woman in this article has a baby who weighed 6 lb. 3 oz. at birth; my two weighed 5 lb. 9 oz. (the hypermuffin) and 6 lb. 7 oz. (the wren).

Only, I have the benefit of as much healthy, yummy food as I can eat, and she doesn't.


We're doing something about it, though. One of my company's Gifts That Give More is "Feed a Haitian Student for a Year," 100% pass-through to Partners in Health. It costs $50 to feed a student in Haiti a hot lunch every school day for a year. (Is this a messed-up world, or what?)

Since we launched it in March 2007, we've raised almost $16,000 for this cause.

I'm happy to be part of a solution, even if it's just a small, limited program that's not going to solve all the world's problems. But it's certainly solving something for those 319 students in central Haiti.


 On the bright side -- cute pictures!!!!

The Checklist
If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do?
by Atul Gawande for The New Yorker

Excerpt:
"We now live in the era of the super-specialist—of clinicians who have taken the time to practice at one narrow thing until they can do it better than anyone who hasn’t. Super-specialists have two advantages over ordinary specialists: greater knowledge of the details that matter and an ability to handle the complexities of the job. There are degrees of complexity, though, and intensive-care medicine has grown so far beyond ordinary complexity that avoiding daily mistakes is proving impossible even for our super-specialists. The I.C.U., with its spectacular successes and frequent failures, therefore poses a distinctive challenge: what do you do when expertise is not enough?"

I couldn't read this article fast enough, I found it so interesting. 

Another big oil spill last Friday, this one off the west coast of South Korea. This is right across the Bohai Sea from Penglai, China, where I taught English in 1998. :-(

This makes me happy to be alive.

Yanked from Slog... original article here:

"A secret society of French mechanics snuck into the Panthéon after hours, built a workshop, and spent a year fixing an antique clock that had been abandoned.

Slipping in at closing time every evening – French television said that they had their own set of keys – they set up a workshop hidden behind mock wooden crates at the top of the monument. The security guards never found it. The Untergunther used a professional clockmaker, Jean-Baptiste Viot, to mend the 150-year-old mechanism.

When Untergunther announced they’d fixed the clock, French officials decided to prosecute.

Klausmann and his crew are connaisseurs of the Parisian underworld. Since the 1990s they have restored crypts, staged readings and plays in monuments at night, and organised rock concerts in quarries. The network was unknown to the authorities until 2004, when the police discovered an underground cinema, complete with bar and restaurant, under the Seine. They have tried to track them down ever since.

Mr Kunstmann said that les UX had 150 or so members divided into about ten branches. One group, which is all-female, specialises in “infiltration” – getting into museums after hours, finding a way through underground electric or gas networks and shutting down alarms. Another runs an internal message system and a coded, digital radio network accessible only to members."

"Is Alzheimer's disease actually a kind of diabetes? New research is starting to support that idea."

Article here

Excerpt:
"In normal brains, brain cells process insulin, allowing memories to form. Klein explains that in people with Alzheimer's disease 'what's happening is insulin is there but it's not effective—the receptors have become insensitive.'

That's similar to type 2 diabetes, 'where insulin is being made at least at the beginning but the body doesn't respond well to it and that's throughout the body,' explains Klein.

So while type 2 diabetics suffer from insulin resistance in the body, Alzheimer's patients have insulin resistance in the brain.

'This is a brain-specific form of diabetes,' he says."

I'm sorry, but at a certain point we are all going to have to admit that THE KOREANS ARE CRAZY.

From http://community.livejournal.com/saintolaf/10432.html:

A recent graduate of St. Olaf College,  Katherine Ann Olson ('06) was murdered answering a job ad posted on Craigslist.com.

And another funny animal story for today.

From http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070828/D8R9Q0T00.html:


Wayward Emu Corralled in Parking Lot
Aug 28, 12:09 AM (ET)

(AP) Rick Takacs hugs his emu Myron in West Bend, Wis., Monday, Aug. 27, 2007 afternoon. Myron escaped... Full Image

WEST BEND, Wis. (AP) - Attention, Wal-Mart shoppers: The emu in the parking lot is not for sale.

Employees of a Wal-Mart Supercenter used shopping carts to corral a wayward emu outside the store Monday about 6 a.m., West Bend police said.

A manager fed the emu grapes and apples in an attempt to calm the bird inside the makeshift enclosure.

Richard Takacs, the owner of 3-year-old Myron, speculated the bird had been chased from his nearby farm by a coyote.

Emus can't fly, but Takacs said he wasn't surprised when police contacted him from the store, about two miles north of his Meadowbrook Market and Pumpkin Farm.

"They can run 40 miles an hour, so that was just a quick sprint for Myron," Takacs said.

Two other emus from the farm also bolted from their pen but were found unharmed in a nearby pumpkin field.

Takacs retrieved the apparently frightened Myron from the 24-hour Wal-Mart and placed the bird by itself in a pasture so it could feel safe and relax.

Emus can grow up to six feet tall and weigh as much as 100 pounds.

West Bend is in southeastern Wisconsin, about 35 miles northwest of Milwaukee.

As seen on splagxna's LJ, a cute hedgehog story. Awwww.

Recent odd news: Chinese couple tries to name their baby "@"

As the article explains, " While the "@" simple is familiar to Chinese e-mail users, they often use the English word "at" to sound it out -- which with a drawn out "T" sounds something like "ai ta", or "love him", to Mandarin speakers."

Reminds me of a light poem I wrote for Vivian in June, 2006...

Don't get between a woman and a child, especially if you are small enough to strangle.


From http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070810/D8QTTH200.html:

Woman Kills Raccoon With Her Bare Hands

CHESHIRE, Conn. (AP) - A woman killed a raccoon with her bare hands Thursday when the animal attacked a young boy. Officials with Cheshire animal control say the woman was walking in the woods around 11 a.m. with a group of children when the animal bit the 5-year-old son of a friend.

She pulled the raccoon off the child, told the children to run home and strangled the animal, authorities said.

"She had the presence of mind to choke it," animal control officer April Leiler told the Record-Journal of Meriden. "She is one tough lady."

The carcass was taken to a state laboratory in Hartford where it tested positive for rabies.

The woman and the boy are undergoing rabies treatment. Their names have not been released.

A section of 35W spanning the Mississippi River just collapsed!

http://hotair.com/archives/2007/08/01/breaking-horrific-bridge-collapse-in-minneapolis/

HOW did this happen??

Has anyone else heard about this? I found it on the LJ of a UK author, but I certainly haven't heard this story being reported in the U.S. media, and I think there are enough Irish-Americans out there that it might raise a bit of a fuss.

To quote from mevennen's blog:

"- the Irish government has, in its infinite unwisdom, approving the routing of the new M3 motorway straight through one of its oldest monuments, the site of Tara and the Gabhra Valley, seat of the ancient Irish kings. Archeological evidence will be permanently destroyed.

- there are alternatives to this route which would prove considerably cheaper and one has to question why this expensive and ill-considered option has been put through (fill in your own blanks).

- no one is against the road per se, but they question its location.

If you want to know more, visit:

http://www.tarawatch.org/

or

http://www.savetara.com"