Tag: food

Lox and Eggs

Seth Anderson0 comment

I woke up this morning at 6 AM to the decidedly non-dulcet sounds of 3 or 4 M80s being exploded seemingly directly outside my window. Oy. On top of that, I feel like Thomas Jefferson, i.e., slightly hungover from too much wine the night before.

Share photos on twitter with Twitpic[click to embiggen photo]

Luckily, as I sat on my porch, reading the Sunday papers and saturating my blood stream with coffee, a kind soul prepared a new-to-me treat, Lox and Eggs. Yummy, I’m nearly human again.

Reading Around on July 2nd

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading July 2nd from 13:49 to 19:05:

  • Travel With Your Mind: Sky Saxon Remembered – Sky Saxon, lead singer with 60s garage punk legends the Seeds, died on the morning of June 25, 2009 (or as his official web site put it, he “passed over to be with YaHoWha”); as it happened, he died the same day as both Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, ensuring that the entertainment press, who might have been expected to treat his passing like a one-line filler item, didn’t even give it that much attention. But Saxon hadn’t been a celebrity in the traditional sense for a very long time. Sky may have been a rock star for about two years on the strength of the singles “Pushin’ Too Hard” and “Can’t Seem To Make You Mine,” but after those twenty-four months as a bargain-basement Mick Jagger, he evolved into Flower Power’s Last Man Standing, a guy who let his freak flag fly with a wild-eyed sincerity that made most of his peers from the Sunset Strip scene look like weekenders, and transformed his story into something far more interesting than the typical two-hit wonder and cult hero.
  • The Perfect Burger and All Its Parts – NYTimes.com – While some chefs have groused quietly about the insatiable demand for burgers, most are philosophical. “All chefs can be frustrated by the buying public sometimes,” said Clark Frasier, a chef with restaurants in Massachusetts and Maine. “In this economy I’m happy to sell anything they want to eat.”

    All this high-powered attention has produced some new ways of thinking about and cooking burgers. Interviews with 30 chefs provided dozens of lessons for the home cook that aren’t terribly difficult and don’t cost much money. And it all yielded the ideal burger.

  • Daily Kos: How a Kos diarist helped spark McCain-Palin infighting – Schmidt put the matter to rest with an breathtaking reply to Palin:

    "Secession," he wrote. "It is their entire reason for existence. A cursory examination of the website shows that the party exists for the purpose of seceding from the union. That is the stated goal on the front page of the web site. Our records indicate that todd was a member for seven years. If this is incorrect then we need to understand the discrepancy. The statement you are suggesting be released would be innaccurate. The innaccuracy would bring greater media attention to this matter and be a distraction. According to your staff there have been no media inquiries into this and you received no questions about it during your interviews. If you are asked about it you should smile and say many alaskans who love their country join the party because it speeks to a tradition of political independence. Todd loves his country

Reading Around on June 30th through July 1st

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A few interesting links collected June 30th through July 1st:

  • MenuPages Blog :: Chicago: Feasting on Flickr – Aren't those pictures up there pretty? They're from our new Flickr pool, and they are, from left, a luscious-looking burger from Feed taken by ehfisher, some New Tokyo takeout from D. Majette, and a spinach salad at Mia Francesca by Swanksalot
  • One in four U.S. Internet users 'snacked' on entertainment news in May | Technology | Los Angeles Times – Snacking on celebrity gossip online is on the rise. Credit: swanksalot via Flickr.
  • Todd S. Purdum on Sarah Palin | vanityfair.com – In dozens of conversations during a recent visit to Alaska, it was easy to learn that there has always been a counter-narrative about Palin, and indeed it has become the dominant one. It is the story of a political novice with an intuitive feel for the temper of her times, a woman who saw her opportunities and coolly seized them. In every job, she surrounded herself with an insular coterie of trusted friends, took disagreements personally, discarded people who were no longer useful, and swiftly dealt vengeance on enemies, real or perceived. “Remember,” says Lyda Green, a former Republican state senator who once represented Palin’s home district, and who over the years went from being a supporter of Palin’s to a bitter foe, “her nickname in high school was ‘Barracuda.’ I was never called Barracuda. Were you? There’s a certain instinct there that you go for the jugular.”
  • Create spoken caller ID ringtones for iPhone via AppleScript – This AppleScript will generate a spoken name file, optionally looking for first, last, and nicknames, for selected Address Book Contacts. For example, "Jennifer Frickin' Connelly is calling….". It will optionally add a traditional (or other) ringtone of your choice to either the beginning …

Belching Out the Devil

Seth Anderson1 Comment


Belching Out the Devil

New exposé of Coca-Cola that you probably won’t hear much about. Coca-Cola spent approximately $450,708,000 on advertising in the U.S. last year, that buys a lot of silence in the struggling corporate media

The company, Thomas contends, looked the other way as some bottlers in Colombia and elsewhere intimidated and attacked union organizers, who “walk with a gravestone” on their backs. Pressured to audit Colombian plants in 2005, Coke helpfully noted a substandard number of fire extinguishers at one, but didn’t address the charges.

Coke often doesn’t make its own Coke. It relies on a vast web of subcontractors, bottlers and distributors. Most have loose or no ties to the company, and are in countries where workplace laws are underdeveloped at best.

In India, Coke drained water from local villages but gave them fertilizer in return—which contained lead and toxins, according to a BBC investigation. A leading British poisons expert warned of “devastating consequences” for the local population, but Coke called the fertilizer “absolutely safe.”

The concentrate for 70 percent of Coca-Cola’s 1.5 billion drinks served each day originates in the tax haven of Ireland, where enough concentrate for 50,000 Cokes costs $2.60—including labor. The concentrate’s main ingredient? Caramel.

[From We Read It: Mark Thomas’s ‘Belching Out the Devil’ | Newsweek Books | Newsweek.com]

Coke Truck

The Amazon review:

Coca-Cola and its logo are everywhere. In our homes, our workplaces, and even our schools. It is a company that sponsors the Olympics, backs US presidents and even re-brands Santa Claus. A truly universal product, it has even been served in space. From Istanbul to Mexico City, Mark travels the globe investigating the stories and people Coca-Cola’s iconic advertising campaigns don’t mention such as: child labourers in the sugar cane fields of El Salvador; Indian workers exposed to toxic chemicals; Colombian union leaders falsely accused of terrorism and jailed alongside the paramilitaries who want to kill them; and, many more. Provocative, funny and stirring, “Belching Out the Devil” investigates the truth behind one of the planet’s biggest brand

I haven’t had a coke in many, many years: no need to consumer high-fructose corn syrup unless absolutely necessary.

Reading Around on June 3rd through June 6th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected June 3rd through June 6th:

  • Paying For Coffee by digby This post… – Those coffees and the Lincoln Bedroom were among the stupidest of the Clinton scandals — The DOJ said that the two events were unrelated, but that’s very hard to believe. If you were around during that time, we were in the grip of an hysteria not sen since the Salem Witch Trials. As far as the Village was concerned those coffees were worse than Watergate. I don’t believe for a minute that that the withdrawal of Tiller’s protective service was related. The prevailing narrative was that anyone who contributed to Clinton and attended those coffees had no legitimate claim to government services. It was automatically corrupt.

    You can’t blame Tiller’s assassination on this, of course. It was over ten years ago. But it underscores the fact that the culture wars are inherently political and that you can’t separate the conservative movement from the fringe. It’s a seamless system.

  • MenuPages Blog :: Chicago: Kevin Pang And The Infinite List Of Dick Jokes – [Pictured: Not the penis pho at Tank Noodle; rather #47; swanksalot / Flickr]

  • Pho - Number 47 and Rice Number 125

  • Thomas lawyer: court must ban all MediaSentry evidence – Ars Technica – “MediaSentry found Jammie by (1) using KaZaA to request a file transfer from Jammie’s computer to a MediaSentry computer; (2) using a separate program or programs to intercept the Internet packets being sent from Jammie’s computer to the MediaSentry computer as a result of this request; (3) reading the IP address of Jammie’s computer from these packets; and (4) tracing this IP address back to Jammie. This kind of investigation of network traffic is lawful only after certain procedures are followed: when there is prior approval by a court and when the person conducting the investigation is properly licensed. When these procedures are not followed, such investigation constitutes criminal wiretapping and the illegal collection of evidence by an unlicensed private investigator.”

Reading Around on May 30th through May 31st

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A few interesting links collected May 30th through May 31st:

  • Our Man In Chicago: Alderman Carothers, allow me to educate you on James Brown lyrics – “Now, I’m not well-versed in matters of fraud and bribery – or no moreso than most people in Chicago and Illinois, which is to say “more than most of us would like to be” – but I do consider myself one of the top 20 experts on James Brown (Caucasian division). And I’m here to tell Alderman Carothers that, no, there is no “prominent” song by James Brown called “You’ve Got To Deal With It” (or even “You Got To Deal With It” as he was quoted by the Sun-Times).”Amused me as well – I’m only a top 50 expert in James Brown related matters, but was befuddled at this reference as well…

  • Should You Put Oil in Pasta Water? : Only if you want slimy spaghetti – CHOW – Despite a popular belief that adding oil to pasta water keeps the noodles from sticking together, Laura Schenone, author of The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken, says that adding oil does nothing to prevent pasta from clumping.
  • Confessions of a Non–Serial Killer – Michael O’Hare – “he mail was from an amateur sleuth in California named Gareth Penn, who had been trying for some time to interest the police in the idea that I was the Zodiac killer. Perhaps he was trying to alarm me into confessing or doing something incriminating. Who knows. Even today, I know little about the man, beyond the odd detail I’ve picked up here and there—like the fact that he is a librarian and surveyor by trade, that he has (or had) a wonderful Jesus beard, and that he is a member of Mensa.”

Reading Around on May 21st

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Some additional reading May 21st from 10:35 to 17:13:

  • David H. Murdock: A Recipe For Longevity: 33 Of The Healthiest Foods On Earth – No pills, not even aspirin, and certainly no supplements ever enter my mouth — everything I need comes from my fish-vegetarian diet, which incorporates 30-40 different kinds of fruit and vegetables every week. Even though I am Chairman and Owner of Dole Food Company, I do most of my own grocery shopping, and even took Oprah on an impromptu trip to Costco, in a day that included bike riding, exercise in the gym, and juicing vegetables in the kitchen. Oprah marveled at how much I eat, and yet never gain a pound. In fact, I expend a lot of energy in my 50-60 minutes of cardio and strength training every day. Plus there’s the fact that fruit and vegetables tend to be lower in calories, but higher in filling fiber and other nutrients that help you feel satisfied.
  • Expert Tips on Photographing Your Pets – Gadgetwise Blog – NYTimes.com – “Back in the day when I was obsessively photographing just my own cats, I’d wait for them to do something interesting or cute before I actually brought the camera up to shoot. Of course by that time, 1 or 2 seconds have elapsed, and they’re doing something less interesting, and I’ve missed the shot.Now, I sort of treat my still camera as a video camera. Even if I’m not actively shooting, and even if the subject is not doing something “capture-worthy,” I continue tracking through the viewfinder and recomposing. Because soon enough they will do something capture-worthy, and I’ll be ready to press the shutter the second it happens.”
  • Data.gov – The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data. Visit today with us, but come back often. With your help, Data.gov will continue to grow and change in the weeks, months, and years ahead


Swanksalot’s Geek Chart

Reading Around on May 7th through May 8th

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A few interesting links collected May 7th through May 8th:

  • Barack Hussein Obama’s un-American mustard choice – The latest blogospheric brouhaha? When President Obama ordered a burger earlier this week, he asked for it without ketchup — and with Grey Poupon. No, seriously. Not that this should be surprising by now, but even Sean Hannity has picked up on the story and broadcast it to millions of Fox News viewers. Naturally, in response, various liberal outlets are responding with equal fervor.…Why, then, am I writing about this? Well, because it gives me an excuse to link to a really fascinating article Malcolm Gladwell wrote for the New Yorker a few years back about the science of taste — why people like certain kinds of things like ketchup, spaghetti sauce, soda and mustard. Turns out that those store brand colas really aren’t very well-made, that Heinz really might be the platonic ideal of ketchup and that almost everyone prefers Grey Poupon to patriotic and manly (but lousy) American mustard. From the piece:

  • The Seattle Traveler » Waterfront Fun at Seattle Maritime Festival – Seattle puts its maritime prowess on display this weekend with the annual Seattle Maritime Festival.

    Saturday’s Family Fun Day is always a big treat, and the highlight is the Tugboat Races. These are the largest Tugboat Races in the World = with over 40 boats expected to participate.
    Photo credit: swanksalot @flickr

  • Lawmaker Defends Imprisoning Hostile Bloggers | Threat Level – “Rep. Linda Sanchez responded Wednesday to Threat Level’s tirade against her proposed legislation outlawing hostile electronic speech. Her answer: “Congress has no interest in censoring.”Sanchez, with the introduction of the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, clearly has a great interest in censoring.”

Reading Around on May 6th through May 7th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected May 6th through May 7th:

  • Amazon.com Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game – Waxy.org – “Kenny G., for instance. His rythmic session is much more regular, whereas Coltrane’s session seems sometimes to loose the beat.”

    FAIL!!

    Umm, for one, “lose the beat” instead of “loose the beat”. And for second, bhwah-ha-ha-ha, Kenny G!!

  • MenuPages Blog :: Chicago: The Green City Market Is Open! Celebrate at Bonsoiree – “The Green City Market opens for outdoor business today! ”

    photo by me

  • BLDGBLOG: How the Other Half Writes: In Defense of Twitter – “Again, I fail to see any clear distinction between someone’s boring Twitter feed – considered only semi-literate and very much bad – and someone else’s equally boring, paper-based diary – considered both pro-humanist and unquestionably good.
    Kafka would have had a Twitter feed! And so would have Hemingway, and so would have Virgil, and so would have Sappho. It’s a tool for writing. Heraclitus would have had a f***ing Twitter feed.”

Reading Around on April 17th through April 24th

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A few interesting links collected April 17th through April 24th:

  • FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: Messing with Texas – “What Texas could choose to do, however, is to divide itself up into as many as five states, a privilege given to it as a condition of its annexation to the Union in 1845. What would Texas look like if it chose to do this? Would dividing a large, red state into five smaller, reddish states benefit Republicans in the Senate? In the Electoral College?The answers are not so clear. But first things first, we need to come up with a logical way to divde Texas into five parts.”

  • Fritinancy: Ms. Dowd Interviews the Inventor of the Telephone – MoDo “sat down with Mr. Bell, 39, and his assistant Thomas Watson, 22, and asked them to explain why they shouldn’t be condemned to a slow, painful death.

    ME: The telephone seems like letter-writing without the paper and pen. Is there any message that can’t wait for a passenger pigeon?

    BELL: Possibly the message I’d like to deliver to you right now.”

  • Gapers Block : Drive-Thru : Chicago Food – Wait, No Need to Soak Those Beans – “One revelation, to me, was the idea that beans need not be soaked before cooking–provided that they are cooked slowly for a long time. In a recipe called Gloria’s Pork Ribs and Red Beans, the red beans are rinsed, and are thrown right into the pot. The beans slowly rehydrate as they cook with the other ingredients, for about 2 hours.”

    This recipe looks quite tasty: I’m making a variant as soon as I can get into my kitchen.

Reading Around on April 16th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading April 16th from 17:21 to 20:40:

  • Chicago Reader | The Works | Ben Javorsky for Mayor! Responses to your responses to our story about Chicago’s parking meter lease deal By Ben Joravsky – I heard Daley on the radio say, “You have to monetize your assets or else they become liabilities.” What an idiot. Never took an economics or accounting class at the U. of C., that’s for sure. Vote the idiot out. —South Looper

    Now, now, don’t harsh on Mayor Daley. He didn’t have time for economics or accounting—he was too busy studying for that bar exam for the third time.

  • Daily Kos: Why yesterday's protests were stupid – What was the message? Too much taxes? I didn't see many bank executives and Wall Street types out on the streets. And coming on the heels of the biggest tax cut in American history, almost entirely directed at the middle class, this message didn't have much salience. Furthermore, the theme of these protests "taxation without representation", was pretty silly considering that these people did have representation. It's just that they lost the elections, which sort of happens in a democracy. "Representation" doesn't mean you always get your way, it means that you have a vote. So it was an indefensible frame to base the protests around.

    That's probably why the crowds didn't easily rally around it, deciding to freelance it instead. So there was talk about pork barrel spending! And bail outs! And wanting to stick a knife in Obama's eye! And secession! And Obama's birth certificate! And Obama taking away their guns! The American taxpayers are the Jews for Obama's ovens! Obama is Hitler!

  • GO TO 2040 Blog -Edible Change is Enticing at 4th Annual Food Policy Summit – "In its fourth year the summit Edible Change! Building Networks for Policy Action, hosted by the Chicago Food Policy Advisory Council (CFPAC) reached full capacity bringing together over 250 people from the Chicago area and around the region with amazing diversity of geography, ethnicity, and age to talk, learn, and share stories about food. "

    photo of produce by me

Reading Around on March 31st through April 1st

swanksalot2 Comments

Chortle At Joker’s Boner
A few interesting links collected March 31st through April 1st:

  • ESPN – OTL: Gotham’s Savior – E-ticket – Then I ask whether he’s driven to build a new thing here that will prove Phoenix was no fluke, that will show everyone that his system really works, that will silence the naysayers once and for all, and he says that until he has won it all, they can say anything they want about him and he can’t say boo back.I say Yeah, but aren’t you burning to shut ’em up?

    He says it doesn’t consume him.

    I say I get that, but wouldn’t you relish it?

    And he leans forward in his chair and reaches across the desk to wipe up a little mess of popcorn kernels with his left hand.

    He cups the bits of shell in his right hand, then pours them casually into the nearby wastebasket, and looks up with a sly grin and says, “You’re asking if I’m human?”

    Wish Mike D’Antoni would have accepted the Bulls job, oh well.

  •  
  • AIG Exec Whines About Public Anger, and Now We’re Supposed to Pity Him? Yeah, Right | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet – DeSantis has a few major points. They include: 1) I had nothing to do with my boss Joe Cassano’s toxic credit default swaps portfolio, and only a handful of people in our unit did; 2) I didn’t even know anything about them; 3) I could have left AIG for a better job several times last year; 4) but I didn’t, staying out of a sense of duty to my poor, beleaguered firm, only to find out in the end that; 5) I would be betrayed by AIG senior management, who promised we would be rewarded for staying, but then went back on their word when they folded in highly cowardly fashion in the face of an angry and stupid populist mob.I have a few responses to those points. They are 1) Bullshit; 2) bullshit; 3) bullshit, plus of course; 4) bullshit. Lastly, there is 5) Boo-Fucking-Hoo. You dog.

    AIGFP only had 377 employees. Those 400-odd folks received almost $3.5 billion in compensation in the last seven years…averages out to over $9 million of compensation per person.

  •  
  • One Killer Smoked Brisket Recipe | Meaten – Anyway, that is how I do it, I hope that it made sense, and let me know how yours turns out.Viva Meat!

    Image courtesy of swanksalot1

 

Footnotes:
  1. is it so fracking hard to give proper credit?? Still disappointed that TreeHugger is such a corrupt website. Meaten.com, which I imagine has a lot less traffic than TreeHugger figured out how to properly give credit to my photo. [↩]

Reading Around on March 17th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading March 17th from 13:38 to 14:12:

  • Taste of a thousand lemons – Los Angeles Times – On a wiltingly hot late summer evening, when all the plants are fainting and there’s not a breath of wind, you pour a tiny glass of limoncello straight from the freezer. It’s colder than ice, and it explodes in your mouth with all the freshness and optimism of lemon. Each sip seems to say, “Poor kid! Poor kid! What a scorcher that was! But everything’s all right now — your old friend night is on the way.”They know a lot about hot summer evenings in Sicily, where limoncello was invented about 100 years ago. It might just be the most sympathetic after-dinner drink there is, as bracing as a gin and tonic but more cheerful and fragrant. Limoncello’s fans have found a lot of other uses for it too: spiking lemonade, flavoring cocktails and splashing onto ice cream, poundcake or fresh fruit

  • Pallini Limoncello

  • Seattle Food – After Homemade Limoncello, You’ll Accept No Other – page 1 – Limoncello, the southern Italian after-dinner treat, is an invigorating refresher with an aroma and flavor unmatched by any citrus-flavored vodka or dessert wine. It’s the sensory equivalent of eating lemon meringue pie on a lazy Sunday picnic in the middle of Paolo’s lemon grove. It’s a potion that gets you to stop and live in the sun-drenched moment, even when it’s cloudy outside.

    The Luxardo brand that your state liquor store may carry is all fine and well, but once you’ve had homemade limoncello, you’ll accept no other. This recipe is a monthlong project that yields huge rewards for just a little patience and hardly any work.

  • Swanksalot’s Solipsism: Fifth Ward – Milwaukee, with biker – “As a billionaire, there would be a lot of buildings I would purchase in Milwaukee. This was one, for some reason. I’d turn most into art collectives – cheap studio space for artsy-fartsy types”

Reading Around on February 19th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected February 17th through February 19th:

  • CBS Falsely Portrays Stanford as Democratic Scandal – But as Public Citizen, Huffington Post, ABC News and Talking Points Memo all reported, Stanford and his Stanford Financial Group PAC contributed to politicians and political action committees of both parties (including $448,000 in soft money contributions from 2000 to 2001 alone) to advance his agenda of banking and money-laundering deregulation. Many others journeyed on Stanford's junkets to Antigua and elsewhere, prompting TPM to brand his company "a travel agent for Congress." (TPM has a slide show of one of those of Stanford getaways.)

    As it turns out, the list of Stanford beneficiaries is long – and bipartisan.

  • Remembering Gene – Roger Ebert's Journal – Gene died ten years ago on February 20, 1999. He is in my mind almost every day. I don't want to rehearse the old stories about how we had a love/hate relationship, and how we dealt with television, and how we were both so scared the first time we went on Johnny Carson that, backstage, we couldn't think of the name of a single movie, although that story is absolutely true. Those stories have been told. I want to write about our friendship. The public image was that we were in a state of permanent feud, but nothing we felt had anything to do with image. We both knew the buttons to push on the other one, and we both made little effort to hide our feelings, warm or cold. In 1977 we were on a talk show with Buddy Rogers, once Mary Pickford's husband, and he said, "You guys have a sibling rivalry, but you both think you're the older brother."
  • TidBITS iPod & iPhone: iPhone to Add Location Logging? – Could the iPhone soon be able to track your location in the background as you walk around? A hint that such a capability is in the works at Apple comes from a programmer friend who spent some time spelunking around inside iPhoto '09, which shows traces of being able to associate such GPS log data with photos.
  • Daily Kos: Chocolate Covered Cotton – billmon – The fatal innovation…was the rise of so-called collateralized obligations, in which the payment streams from supposedly uniform pools of assets (say, for example, 30-year fixed prime mortgages issued in the first six months of 2006 to California borrowers) could be sliced and diced into different securities (known as tranches) each with different payment characteristics.

    This began as a tool for managing (or speculating on) changes in interest rates, which are a particular problem for mortgage lenders, since homeowners usually have the right to repay (i.e. refinance) their loan when rates fall, forcing lenders to put the money back out on the street at the new, lower rates. This means mortgage-backed securities can go down in value when rates fall as well as when they rise. By shielding some tranches from prepayments (in other words, by directing them to other tranches) the favored tranches are made less volatile and thus can be sold at a higher price and a lower yield.

  • An old habit dies… hard. « chuck.goolsbee.org – "I stumbled across a likely little application that seems to fit the bill: Gyazmail. It has a very flexible UI that allows me to make it behave very Eudora-like when I want it to. It has very good search, rules, and filters. It can import all my old mail(!)

    I’m test driving it at the moment and liking it so far. Switched my work mail to it late last week, and my personal mail is still coming over one account at a time. So far so good. If you regularly contact me via email be patient while I work through this transition period."

    I'm still using Eudora on three of our most used Macs (since 1995 probably -only 14 years), but the writing is on the wall. Have to check out Gyazmail.

  • Hands on: Drop.io's private, easy file sharing with a twist – Ars Technica – Sharing information online is getting more complex than it sometimes should be. If you want to share pictures, files, plain ideas, or even faxes with friends or businesses, you can try the old e-mail standby, but you may end up joining a social network, agree to a dense privacy policy, and then track down an app made by who-knows-who to get the job done. Even starting a simple blog usually involves more time than most users can afford‚ and more features than they'll ever need. Drop.io is an intriguing, but simple, new service that is part wiki, part file sharing, and part personal secretary, with an emphasis on privacy and ubiquitous access, requiring no signup or account activation.

    Upon visiting Drop.io—pronounced as a seamless single word: "drop-ee-o"—the site presents a basic elevator pitch about its services and a short form with which to get started uploading files.

  • Fat Tire Ale Downed Near Load Of Burgers – A Good Beer Blog – Motorists on Interstate 15 were impeded by a piles of hamburgers after a truck spilled a load of the patties, blocking the northbound lanes for four hours. The driver of a tractor-trailer carrying 40,000 pounds of hamburger patties dozed off around 5 a.m., said Utah Highway Patrol trooper Cameron Roden. The truck driver's rig drifted to the left side of the freeway near 2300 North and crashed into a wall and an overhead sign, which ripped open his trailer, spilling hamburger over the north and southbound lanes of the interstate…A second truck spill east of Morgan caused minor delays. Before 7:30 a.m., a truck was heading westbound on Interstate 84 about a half-mile east of Morgan… The truck slipped off to the left, hit a guardrail, and flipped over on its side. The impact split the truck open, spilling Fat Tire Beer being shipped from Colorado, Roden said.
  • The Associated Press: Chimp owner begs police in 911 call to stop attack – Police said that the chimp was agitated earlier Monday and that Herold had given him the anti-anxiety drug Xanax in some tea. Police said the drug had not been prescribed for the 14-year-old chimp.

    In humans, Xanax can cause memory loss, lack of coordination, reduced sex drive and other side effects. It can also lead to aggression in people who were unstable to begin with, said Dr. Emil Coccaro, chief of psychiatry at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

    "Xanax could have made him worse," if human studies are any indication, Coccaro said.

  • Facebook | Home – Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog.

    If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

  • Big Tuna – Chicago — Anthony 'Big Tuna' Accardo, reputed crime syndicate figure, and his wife are shown as they arrive at the St. Vincent Ferrer Church in suburban River Forest to attend wedding of their son Anthony Jr, who was married to the former Janet Hawley, 1961 Miss Utah. Many top gangland bosses and other underworld figures attended the wedding under the watchful eye of law enforcement agencies
  • Home | Recovery.gov – Recovery.gov is a website that lets you, the taxpayer, figure out where the money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going. There are going to be a few different ways to search for information. The money is being distributed by Federal agencies, and soon you'll be able to see where it's going — to which states, to which congressional districts, even to which Federal contractors. As soon as we are able to, we'll display that information visually in maps, charts, and graphics.
  • George Will: Liberated From the Burden of Fact-Checking | The Loom | Discover Magazine – In an opinion piece by George Will published on February 15, 2009 in the Washington Post, George Will states “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”

    We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

    It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts.

  • Wonk Room » George Will Believes In Recycling – Will’s numerous distortions and outright falsehoods have been well documented by Joe Romm, Nate Silver, Zachary Roth, Brad Plumer, Erza Klein, David Roberts, James Hrynyshyn, Rick Piltz, Steve Benen, Mark Kleiman, and others. They recognized that George Will is recycling already rebutted claims from the lunatic fringe, and offer the excellent suggestion that Washington Post editors should require some minimum level of fact-checking.

    But I haven’t seen anyone comment that Will is also recycling his own work, republishing an extended passage from a 2006 column — which Think Progress debunked — almost word for word. Take a look:

Reading Around on February 16th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading February 16th from 14:41 to 16:17:

  • U.S. Food Policy: Evidence on declining fruit and vegetable nutrient composition – found that fertilized plants contained larger absolute amounts of minerals than the unfertilized plants, but these amounts were sufficiently diluted by the increased dry matter that all mineral concentrations declined, except for phosphorus, which is the common fertilizer.

    Next, Davis looked at historical food composition data derived from three quantitative reports. While these studies are limited by their ability to be compared due to variation in methods, they found:

    apparent median declines of 5% to 40% or more in some minerals in groups of vegetables and perhaps fruits; one study also evaluated vitamins and protein with similar results.

  • I’m Done With Facebook : Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits – But the Facebook language clearly dictates that you are giving Facebook an irrevocable and perpetual right to distribute and make derivative copies of content you upload to Facebook for any purpose. ANY. Whether it be a book, a film, or whatever other options Facebook may have cooked up. … (If you’ve already granted Facebook the irrevocable right to give up your content and likeness, then how can you still have “all rights and permissions?” Perhaps an IP attorney can sort out this thorny language.) Since Facebook has demonstrated no reservations in sharing private data with developers, the company’s history suggests that this same recurring invasion of privacy will carry forth under the new Terms of Service. The only difference is that Facebook now intends to profit from the content you upload, and they can now use it in any way they want, because you’ve capitulated all your rights to it.