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Alcohol Leads to Sex!

Finally! Scientific proof!
Teens, Drinking, Drugs and Sex

Now, you can find whole blogs dedicated to the idea that all scientists are elitist, atheistic, immoral people who are destroying the world. I happen to like science and understand that there is a need for basic science. This will often seem silly, or a waste of time and money to the non-scientist. Hence, I usually do not engage in sniping at those studies. Still, I am not sure we needed to use precious research funds to prove the Ogden Nash theorem:

“Candy is Dandy, but Liquor is Quicker.”

Steve

P.S. I think we need a corollary to the Nash theorem which will also work in drugs and rock and roll. Any ideas?

I meant to post this yesterday but here it is.
Abu Aardvark on analyst firings

Pretty much everyone in the military knows that “winning” in Iraq/Afghanistan and the Global War on Terror (GWOT) will require a political solution. Yes, politics includes war and killing sometimes, but we really cannot kill our way to victory. Many in the military are not sure we can really win in Iraq if we define winning as having a stable, democratic country that supports U.S. interests (I believe that is how Kagan defined winning).

For the sake of discussion let us assume it is possible to win in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let us assume that we want to win the GWOT. The terrorists we oppose tend to be rather small groups that are not very well funded. Spreading their ideas and gaining recruits is a constant struggle for them. Beyond gaining recruits, it is important for them to spread their message to gain the passive support they need from the general public. If they cannot get new recruits or donations they need to at least make sure that people will not turn against them. They need to be able to hide.

Given that this is the kind of war we face, why then would we not value Arabic speaking/reading analysts who can give us insights about how AQ and others are working on the net? Are we that short of money in the Defense budget? Anything is possible, but it worries me in the context of other U.S. actions when it comes to Information Ops (IO). When we first invaded Iraq we conceded IO (or just forgot about it) to Al Jazeera. For the first several months that was the only information source initially available in Baghdad. To this day, the COIN guys who follow Afghanistan bemoan our ineffective IO there. I hope this was a mistake, or just one of those cases where one budget was placed ahead of another. If so, I would expect people like this to be working for us again soon.

Steve

While Sigaliris’ feminist review of Iron Man continues to draw mixed reviews over its candidacy within the action comics movie genre, political feminists continue to wrangle over their respective support of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

My title element, McDreamy, is not intended to be entirely mocking, because it seems to me that, to step over the opportunity to nominate a female Presidential candidate in order to nominate a male one, the male obviously must be offering something more politically seductive than the chance to place a woman in the highest political office on the planet.

As Ariel Garfinkel, a sophomore at Mount Holyoke College, put it in the AP piece linked above, “This pattern of old-style politics and adherence to un-feminist values is part and parcel of the campaign Hillary Clinton has run. In this race, Barack Obama is the true feminist.”

Although I think our Red Emma of our Wired Sisters has already said something in passing on this matter, this opportunity to back a female Presidential candidate foregone by those women that have done so remains a mystery to me. While I by no means think of female voters as some sort of mindlessly bovine feminist herd, I was certain that the Hillary candidacy was going to be the roaring fireball of a feminist historical event, and it just seems not to be by a long shot.

Is it because, as Garfinkel suggests, in this matchup Obama is really the more feminist candidate? Is it just the generational age split: older women (backing Clinton) who were denied what younger women (backing Obama) now might take for granted? Has the fact just that Hillary has run been enough in itself to have provided historical political satisfaction for women, feminist and non, so that in some sense she is seen as subjunctively already having won the office, but then having been rejected for it because she is not the right one (i.e., subjunctively already elected female President)?

This really isn’t something I or any of the other guys here can answer; we’re going to need to hear from women themselves, and across as large a spectrum as possible. Maybe the female President thing just in itself is (was) just a novelty whose time has come and gone. Seems that way now.

McCain’s Income

It appears that Cindy McCain has vowed to not release her tax statements.
Cindy’s Vow

This is very troubling for me. People choose friends for all kinds of reasons, some of which are not politically correct and do not represent their beliefs. You can make temporary alliances in which you are fooled and then need to get away. People are always trying to get things from politicians. Politicians will sometimes be fooled (or want to be fooled) by crooks. How you make your money over the course of your lifetime is something different. I think that says something about a person’s core beliefs.

My philosophical ranting aside there is a basic question of honesty and integrity here. If there is one job in this country where we want our employee to work for us, it is the President. Running for President means giving up the right to privacy on how you have earned your money. It is too important for there to be unknown conflicts of interest. Release the information or get out of the race.

Steve

Viagra is Too Slow

Some weeks are better than others. The 20 something Jehovah’s Witness who came in with a post in his abdomen lived in spite of big blood loss and no transfusions. The 15 y/o with a horrible looking cervical fracture on his CT scan woke up and moved his arms and legs immediately (nothing quite like a mother’s tears of joy). But, the thing that really warmed the cockles of my heart was a conversation with a 75 y/o man.

This lovely young couple with 52 years of marriage were cracking jokes with me as we waited for the nurses to prepare the OR. On the way back to the OR he says “Hey Doc. You think I could get one of those things put in my penis for sex?” I told him “We don’t really do those anymore. Now that we have Viagra and those others it has been years since I saw one of those put in.” He replied “Well, sometimes Viagra is just too slow.” 75 y/o and Viagra is too slow. God bless that couple.

Steve

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/05/07/style/23103537.JPG
Many involved in the steampunk culture take the technology and accessories of today, left, and redesign or adjust them to incorporate touches of the past. Then they show off their inventions to kindred spirits on the Web.
As Eddie Munster liked to say, “Neato!” As Thomas Dolby’s blinded scientist couldn’t resist exclaiming, “Good Heavens, Miss Sakamoto - you’re beautiful!”; as the Moody Blues saw shining down upon them now:
Listen to the tide slowly turning…
From the ashes we can build another day
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif Fashion & Style
<> Devotees of the [steampunk] culture read Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, as well as more recent speculative fiction by William Gibson, James P. Blaylock and Paul Di Filippo, the author of “The Steampunk Trilogy,” the historical science fiction novellas that lent the culture its name. They watch films like “The City of Lost Children” (with costumes designed by Jean Paul Gaultier), “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and “Brazil,” Terry Gilliam’s dystopian fantasy satirizing the modern industrial age; and they listen to melodeons and Gypsy strings mixed with industrial goth.

<> And, in keeping with the make-it-yourself ethos of punk, they assemble their own fashions, an adventurous pastiche of neo-Victorian, Edwardian and military style accented with sometimes crudely mechanized accouterments like brass goggles and wings made from pulleys, harnesses and clockwork pendants, to say nothing of the odd ray gun dangling at the hip. Steampunk style is corseted, built on a scaffolding of bustles, crinolines and parasols and high-arced sleeves not unlike those favored by the movement’s designer idols: Nicolas Ghesquiere of Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen and, yes, even Ralph Lauren.

<> If steampunk has a mission, it is, in part, to restore a sense of wonder to a technology-jaded world. “Today satellite photos make the planet seem so small,” Mr. Brown lamented. “Where is the adventure it that?” In contrast, steampunk, with its airships, test tubes and time machines, is, he said, “sort of a dream , the way we used to daydream. It’s like part of your childhood’s just bursting forward again.”

<> There will, of course, be a clothing line with vintage and new looks modeled on Mr. James’s own neo-Edwardian sartorial signature. “I’m so sick of baggy pants hanging off your bottom,” he said. “This is more refined. It goes back to a time when people had some dignity.

“It’s a new day.”

Some of us may soon find ourselves back to the future/forward into the past in a James West/Artemus Gordon minute [YouTube]:http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:KU3KCUuGEOy5LM:http://jchriscampbell.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/www_theseries.jpghttp://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:khfKbYWScNKsOM:http://www.briansdriveintheater.com/beefcake/robertconrad/robertconrad27.jpg video

James West and Artemus Gordon are two agents of President Grant who take their splendidly appointed private train through the west to fight evil. Half science fiction and half western, the Artemus designs a series of interesting gadgets for James that would make Inspector Gadget proud.

[indie-music fans, cf. also Montreal's superb Victoriana-flaired band The Arcade Fire http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:yDMD0HDf8YdLuM:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/3a/Arcade_Fire_on_TIME_Cover.jpg/454px-Arcade_Fire_on_TIME_Cover.jpg http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:EN-Mga8lewJJeM:http://www.ba-reps.com/artists/593/2817/opener-.jpg]

Update:

Ran Prieur, whose “100 things about me” had me howling in self-recognition (#1, 2, 3, 7, 11, 18, 22, 52, 60, 69 and 91, with 86 and 96 as non-intersecting ribticklers extraordinaire, esp. the Ripley’s-style incredulous italics-with-exclamation closing 96), modifies the NYT take on steampunk:

“The other day the NY Times had an article about Steampunk, but you can tell they failed to understand it because they put it in the fashion section. The correct and more radical category is technology. If you look past the Victorian frippery, Steampunk is a technological ethic that trades the factory for the garage, standardization for uniqueness, and “progress” for a mix of tools from every age.”

Taking it away from the style thrust of the NYT article, unto the technological plane - and by implication, to the sociopolitical, not really touched on or quoting the protagonists on, which could link to, e.g., Blake, Ruskin, Morris, Chesterton, Belloc, Gill, Schumacher, &c., and the whole decentralist/appropriate technology schools. The yeoman ethos of Longfellow’s “Village Blacksmith”

And he looks the whole word in the face

For he owes not any man

and the Wright Bros. also came to mind.

Meanwhile, in the Great Minds and So Do We Dept., commenters over at the Reason “Hit & Run” blog are all over the Wild, Wild West connection, recalling the series’ opening-theme sequence, above, to which my nine-year-old heart thrilled c. 1971, and does still thirty-seven years on.

I’m going to try to upload my thoughts on “Iron Man.” Yes, I know everyone else in the known universe loved this movie. I did not. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, you might prefer not to read this. Warning: language, feminism, spoilery snarling.

I wanted to love this movie. It was well-made. The visuals were snappy and there was acting. Robert Downey was hot, with the exception of that baffling, shoe-polish mustache that made me think of the mask of V. Gwyneth Paltrow kept her dignity insofar as one could. Unlike “Fantastic Four,” it did not go over the edge into campy fantasy, and unlike “X-Men,” it did not take place in an alternate world fantasy universe. It presented itself in a straightforward manner as something that could have happened in the same world we inhabit. Or, at least, the world as we see it presented on TV, where premieres and galas, wars, trips to Malibu, and other events to which we are not invited are displayed for our edification.

However. So many misogynistic and racist fantasies were embedded inextricably into its worldbuilding that I could not enjoy it. I felt that my mind was divided–half unquestioningly agog at spectacle, like the fangirl I used to be, and half wincing violently at every blatant instance of the dominant paradigm smudging every scene with its dirty bootheel.

Yes, in a way it sucks to inhabit a consciousness that has been raised to such exospheric levels. But then, it always sucked to be disincluded in the structures of power and control. It’s just that I felt that suckage less painfully when I could still numb myself by false identification with the male protagonists. 

Iron Man’s putative hotness died a-borning because he was such an asshole. Case in point: He has hot monkey sex with a reporter–the film even descends to the stale, tiresome trope of having them fall off the bed to show hot it is–and then has her rudely ejected by Pepper, come morning. “Sometimes I take out the trash,” says Pepper. Come to think of it, I don’t like Pepper that much either. What a lackey. So, a (presumably) highly qualified, talented and intelligent professional woman becomes “trash” once Tony Stark has finished dumping his semen into her. This is the opposite of a pity fuck. It’s the contempt fuck, in which sex is used to dominate and invalidate a female who has dared to question the hero. She’s not invalidated, of course–except insofar as her willingness to be fucked by Tony Stark shows a pitiable weakness of mind. In spite of that, her questions were right on target. But the fact that the movie panders to those who would think that she could be invalidated by Tony Stark’s Little Iron Man shows what a piece of trash the film is.

Another character who is invalidated by the sheer overwhelming Power of the White Penis is Terrence Howard, totally wasted in the role of an Air Force officer who lets Stark treat him like a servant. Howard’s character, Rhodey, is also right on target with his critique of Stark as a pathetic, self-indulgent jerk with no sense of discipline or self-respect. But how deficient must Rhodey be in essential self-respect, when he allows this playboy to make a shuck ‘n jive, Sammy Davis personal sidekick out of him? Rhodey refers to Stark in a speech as “my great mentor.” WTF? Isn’t a mentor someone who has vital wisdom to impart? Stark has no wisdom for Rhodey, or anyone.

How could a self-respecting armed forces member fail to be offended by the portrayal of airmen in a Humvee sucking up to drunken Tony Stark like a bunch of fanboys? In a war zone, too, where they know that their lives are at stake. And I see Stan Lee is pleased to be playing Hugh Hefner now. Couldn’t they get the real Hef to do his own product placement? I suppose this killed two birds with one stone–identifying the stale cheapness of the Playboy philosophy with Stan’s comics empire. That’s a pretty clear statement that the Hefner mindset made this movie. It was only a moment in the movie, but a moment that crushed another of my illusions. Ah, but the comics themselves were not always corrupt. There were better stories to tell than the one they picked for this travesty, this betrayal of a true sense of wonder.

Oh, but Iron Man CHANGES, right? Stark has an epiphany! Yeah, right. Here’s where the movie’s approximation to reality becomes a pair of cement galoshes to drag this fantasy confection into a murky grave. The sum of Stark’s metanoia is to go back to the unnamed desert war zone and kill some more people–different people, this time. But still victims of his choosing. You don’t have to go all the way back to Viet Nam and the famous photo of a naked little girl screaming in pain and running in panic from American bombs to feel queasy about an invincible white “hero” raining down fire from on high. Images of blackened Iraqi corpses swelling in the desert sun are closer. Yes, we burn people alive in large numbers. That makes us GOOD, I guess. Works for Tony Stark, anyway.

Well, let’s see . . . doesn’t he use some of those justly famed “surgical strikes” to take out bad guys who are threatening women and children? Yes–but does he spare a moment’s thought for them once he’s done shooting? No, the scene doesn’t focus on the safety of the innocent. Instead, it lingers gloatingly on the opportunity for a large crowd of men and boys to beat another bad guy to death. Fun. What’s being defended here is not women’s and children’s right to live. The important thing is men’s right to kill. Even funky brown men can have the mandate to kill, provided it’s handed to them by a white guy.

Another brief cameo by women and children shows up in the final, laughable Battletech-style robot slugfest. A soccer mom in her SUV is dandled like a toy. She’s both comic relief and a pawn in jeopardy. Never a human being. Women in this movie are plot devices, as are non-white men. All power to the rich pale male. I sure hope Samuel L. Jackson will whup Stark’s narrow white ass. But I fear he’s doomed to be a lackey as well.

Build me an Iron Woman who works with the UN to stop arms sales and warfare and to provide refuge for displaced civilians, who has meaningful sex with equals, and who treats her employees with respect. I’ll go see that movie.

From my appendix to Spy magazine’s old “Separated at Birth” archives, two characters you won’t see in the same room any time soon:

1. Hasan Elahi, the gold-dyed Bangladesh-born Rutgers prof and artist whose exonerative response to being added erroneously to a federal terror-watch list came in his photo-documenting his cross-country surroundings for the FBI, and his web site hundreds of times daily, along with dutiful notification of local FBI field officers throughout; using Elahi’s own web site, TrackingTransience.net, Comedy Central web-reconaissance last night traced him to the studios of The Colbert Report:

Hasan Elahi

Wednesday May 7 2008
Episode: #04062 Views: 21457
After being accused of terrorist activities, Hasan Elahi decided to create a website documenting his daily activities. (05:17)

AND -

2. Boris Johnson, peroxide-shocked Tory-eccentric new mayor of London:

And if Colbert continues to subject himself to finger-shocking exercises in obscenity-laced controlled pain - courtesy of veteran NYT science hand George Johnson, his guest last night -

George Johnson

Wednesday May 7 2008
Episode: #04062 Views: 18988
George Johnson and Stephen re-create one of the 10 most beautiful experiments. (04:57)

he, too, might soon greet the cameras with citrus-singed scalp.

This link

Gloria Steinem is wrong. There are some very basic, intrinsic differences between men and women. Chief amongst these is the male ability to shamelessly, nay proudly and noisily, pass gas from either bodily orifice that has that capability. Freedom of speech is a constitutional right guaranteeing that we have the right to laugh endlessly when we do this, much to the chagrin and disgust of the fairer sex.

So, go ahead and modify that cow food. If it works less methane is good. However, if my wife brings home gastronomically correct beer or “special” beans they will have gone too far.

Steve

Really?

My Mom’s been dead awhile, so I’m not faced with updating Mom from carpet to hardwoods for Mother’s Day, but it seems that many may be and that salons advertising on the radio right now are considerately determined to give them the best price possible to achieve Mom’s dream on her special day.

Of course, the options offered are not limited to genital depilation, just as the customers targeted may not necessarily be adult male sons. Surely many of those taking advantage of these bargains are those like young Jed, blinking owlishly and projectile spitting his food emulsion while his 23-year-old dad buys a gift certificate in his name for Jed’s 22-year-old mom. Surely many others are thoughtfully intimate gifts from daughters to mothers, and of course many are just all-purpose certificates bought by sons as well to pamper Mom’s desire for hairlessness in any ole way she wants.

Still, it’s a bit unsettling to hear the firms that daily advertise rendering your girlfriend as frictionless as a porn star or your boyfriend as metrosexually slick as a giant termite grub coughing up an offering for Mom. Then again, it’s probably not about forcing Mom to be gifted with anything she doesn’t want but instead about liberating Mom and the holiday itself from the tired and limited options of yesteryear, options that in the past forced Mom into deadly cardiac and endocrine traps such as boxed chocolate.

Today’s Mom might very well be just the sort that favors gifts such as professional grooming, or equally such perfectly sensible gifts as a table saw to trim and a planer to professionally thin those custom natural wood covers she favors for her scrapbooking hobby.

In fact, doggoneit, the more I consider what an entirely sensible idea it is I’m going to go out and get my Mom one of each of the latter today.

Ode to, uh,

swimming.

After a long and nasty day of deviltry involving automobiles and the demon spawn of men, something a bit more refreshingly triumphant, like diving headfirst into an ice-cold beer, is surely needed:

The Swimming Song

This summer I went swimming!
This summer I might have drowned!
But I held my breath, I kicked my feet
I moved my arms around
I moved my arms around!

This summer I swam in the ocean
And I swam in a swimming pool
Salt my wounds, chlorined my eyes
I’m a self-destructive fool
I’m a self-destructive fool

This summer I did the back stroke
And you know that that’s not all
I did the breast stroke, the butterfly
And the old Australian crawl
The old Australian crawl

This summer I swam in a public place
And a reservoir to boot
At the latter I was informal
At the former I wore my suit
I wore my swimming suit

Oh, this summer I did swan dives
And jack knives for you all
And once when you weren’t looking
I did a cannonball
I did a cannonball!

This summer I went swimming!
This summer I might have drowned!
But I held my breath, I kicked my feet
And moved my arms around
I moved my arms around!

Take a fair use splash here

(Lyrics and music by Loudon Wainwright III, originally from the album “The Earl Scruggs Revue - Anniversary Special Volume One” (1975), featuring Earl Scruggs on banjo; Gary Scruggs on bass; Randy Scruggs on acoustic guitar, electric slide guitar, & banjo; Reggie Young on electric guitar; David Briggs on piano; Kenny Buttrey on drums; Doug Kershaw on cajun fiddle; & Loudon Wainwright III on vocals.)

Apropos of nothing, the trivia geek in me turned to a typically unbidden inquiry, “Whatever happened to _____?”

So there I was, wondering after the fate of, of all people, Hugh O’Brian , whose trail, I assumed, had seen him gallop from Wyatt Earp to Wyatt AARP long since. His name resides in an occasionally-dusted wing of my halls of memory whose other members, willy-nilly, crowd the screen on the same back channel: Robert Culp, Doug McClure, Fess Parker, James Franciscus, Lee Majors, George Maharis…I think back to the sort of tanned, open-shirted hairy-chests-with-sideburns one used to see among the celebrity couples on the late Bert Convy’s marginally less tacky answer to The Newlywed Game, Tattletales. Vague memories of seeing O’Brian as a regular guest, decades ago, at the Playboy Mansion had me wondering how long the playboy in O’Brian held out.

Quite a while, as I see, providing moral support for all those bachelors determined to hold out until they have themselves put in enough years of “research” to ghost a shelf of dissertations; return with us now to those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, June 26, 2006, as -

TV’s ‘Wyatt Earp’ marries for first time


The Associated Press

Eighty-one-year-old actor Hugh O’Brian married for the first time at a cemetery in what the couple described as “a wedding to die for.”

“This is my first, and most definitely, my last trip down the aisle,” O’Brian said in a statement announcing his marriage Sunday afternoon to his girlfriend of 18 years, teacher Virginia Barber, 54, at Forest Lawn Memorial Park.

It was the bride’s second marriage.

Some 300 guests — including John Wayne and Pope John Paul lookalikes — witnessed the ceremony at the graveyard’s Hall of Crucifixion-Resurrection, publicist Monique Moss said Monday.

The Rev. Robert Schuller of Orange County’s Crystal Cathedral officiated and the couple was serenaded by close friend Debbie Reynolds. Dubbed A Wedding to Die For, the ceremony concluded with a cocktail reception…

What gave O’Brian the strength to hold fast to the mast of the married-last, I wondered, steeling the fortitude of the single dude?

Now I know what Paul Harvey has called, since Larry King was but a unicell in media’s primordial soup, the Rest of the Story.

Thanks to a link from Bathhouse Addict (”NSFW”, as the kids say, which I assume means, Not So Fast, Willie!; Googlery will take you everywhere; say, who dropped the soap?), to a spread from 1950 in Modern Screen, “Stag Night at the Steam Room“, I learn with no small ration of ethnic pride that Hugh O’Brian was, within a full cohort of rising Truman-era beefcake, an early adopter of the ancient and noble tradition of the Finnish sauna, my people’s answer to the tribal sweat lodge of the AmerIndigenes, and hellfiring forge of all-round hardihood.

Time to splash some more water on the hot Rocks, eh, Mr. Hudson?


Hugh O’Brien, Scott Brady, John Bromfield, Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis sit on hot shelves of various tempertures at the Finlandia Baths.


“You should be in the gambling racket, son,” Scott tells Tony, who is beating him soundly at gin rummy. Hugh kibitzes while Rock gets a salt rubdown in the next room so he can go back to the steam room and sweat some more.

Last night, She Who Must be Obeyed, announced that she wants to grow some tomatoes upside down in a hanging basket. She needed me to make an 8 foot high device from which she could hang her basket. My initial thought was “what was wrong with the tomatoes we have grown for the last 15 years without such a device?” Now, I know I am not going to win this argument. She has already bought her special basket and she is nothing if not persistent. Besides, I really do love her and would do most anything to make her happy anyway. So, I put up the usual token resistance and give in.

I grab my son and we head to the basement. I try to turn these kinds of things into father/son bonding/learning events. My son’s first question as we headed to the basement was “what kind of power tool can we get out of this?” I realized my chickens have come home to roost. I was the one who taught him that all projects are really a great excuse to acquire new power tools. During our latest excursion into cabinetry we bought a biscuit joiner. “Dad, do you really know how to use one of those?” he asked. “Umm, sort of. We will figure it out. Besides, if men confined themselves to buying only those power tools they really know how to use the economy would tank. It would be worse than the dot.com bubble bursting.”

I explained to him this project was so simple even I could not find justification for a new tool. We went to the corner of the basement where I keep the wood from leftover projects. I love wood and working with it, even if I will never be confused with Norm from This Old House. I hate to throw any out because you never know what you will need. If my son has a friend over sometimes we make bird boxes or little tables or whatever they think of. A lot of kids have never even used a hammer before so for them I will take a few scraps and drill pilot holes. Gives them a lot of confidence pounding those nails w/o bending them. Some of the neighborhood yuppie moms are aghast when we use power tools. They really seem to think you can’t use power tools until you are 16 or something.

We found some 8 foot 2×4’s and mitered off the ends. We made a head block and put a hook into it. Put it all together with galvanized screws. Tested it by having my son hang from the hook. It held. Hurray for scrap wood! You really can hammer out a better marriage.

Steve

Fun Facts

One staple of my resolute march into Old Coothood I may have previously referred to is the always infomative “Ag PhD” hosted by the Hefty brothers, Brian and Darren, on cable/satellite RFDTV.

In this week’s episode we learn that only a few blister beetles ingested by a horse or cow in their sileage are enough to be fatal because of the cantharidin they contain, comparable to cyanide and strychnine in toxicity.

Who knew?

At least now you do, so when you wish for that pony, be sure to wish for alfalfa uncontaminated by blister beetles in the bargain.

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