The worst recipe? - I don’t know about it being the worst, but it is odd:

Italian salad
1 pint cold cooked macaroni
½ pint cooked or tinned pears
½ pint grated raw carrot
French dressing to moisten
2 heaped tablespoons minced onion
½ pint cooked or minced string beans

Mix the chopped macaroni and vegetables; moisten with French dressing, flavouring with garlic if liked. Serve on a dish lined with lettuce leaves. Decorate with mayonnaise and minced pimento or chives.

Biking with a dress - I see this Guardian Blog post about the perils of biking while wearing a summer dress and I notice there are an uncommonly large number comments - 67 at the moment. OK, let’s dig in:

My skirt gently fluttered as I cycled to work this morning, the sun was shining, the temperature sizzling. I felt I was in a François Truffaut film. But then the wind caught my skirt, it flew upwards, and little was left for the imagination for passers-by. Not very classy.

The comments go from the practical to the amusing. Give them a reading.

Alcoholic suppression - Bartenders in Utah claim the suppression has ended: private member status has ended:

Utah, whose population is mostly Mormon, has ended a decades-old requirement that forced bar patrons to fill out an application, pay a fee and become a member of a “private club” before entering establishments serving alcohol.

“It’s 40 years of oppression come to an end,” said Dave Morris, owner of the bar Piper Down in Salt Lake City.

The winning loser - David McKenzie wrote the winning bad opening sentence contest this year:

Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the ‘Ellie May’, a sturdy whaler captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”

A new power line will be erected from east of Fayette into Williams County to sell power to the municipal systems in Pioneer and Holiday City. The details are in this week’s print edition.

Other highlights from the Observer include:

Those are the highlights. Get the rest in print. Or, if you like to read on a monitor and see the photos at their best, buy a subscription and download a PDF every Tuesday afternoon. It’s only $18 for a year and you can pay right here on the website.

I learned today that Rhode Island isn’t exactly that. Here’s the Wikipedia explanation:

Despite the name, most of Rhode Island is in fact on the mainland. The name Rhode Island and Providence Plantations derives from the merging of two colonies, Providence Plantations and Rhode Island. Providence Plantations was the name of the colony founded by Roger Williams in the area now known as the City of Providence. Rhode Island was the area now known as Aquidneck Island, which now comprises the city of Newport and the towns of Middletown and Portsmouth, the largest of several islands in Narragansett Bay.

There are some state legislators who want to ditch the Plantations and simply go with the name Rhode Island. Like I always it was.

Here are three quick items, but I have to go make a newspaper now.

Going down - Before you embark on your next flight…wait a minute, why not wait until you return to read this chart listing the world’s most popular airliners (and their crash rates). No use worrying about it ahead of time. And have a nice flight.

Sounds familiar - Here’s a story about what’s billed as the last hot-lead newspaper in America. That’s the old style where lead is melted in the Linotype to form lines of type. We still have ours in the back of the Observer, but a broken heater prevents it from operating, fortunately:

“I’ve always said I’m the editor and the publisher and the owner and the janitor,” Coombs said surveying his cluttered office. “Then I look around and say, ‘If I’m the janitor, I should be fired.’”

Northern octopus - The key to serving octopus is tenderness. Here’s a discussion on the topic:

It’s long been said that octopus and squid are migrating north with warmer temperatures, but they’ve rarely been spotted beyond the English channel. This spring lobster fishermen on Skye have been catching several each time they lift their creels.

Tom Angleberger suggests that Pa Ingalls (of Little House on the Prairie fame) was a real pioneering GeekDad. He - and thousands of others - did amazing things without a hardware store.

One more on Father Geek. Kathy Ceceri lists 10 indications that you might be married to a GeekDad. From Wired:

1. You spend your honeymoon at a theme park. (Sadly, Legoland wasn’t built then…)

2. You never know when you’ll walk into the dining room to find the table covered with a computer broken down into all its component parts.

3. He installs stilts under the legs of your bed so his comic book boxes can fit underneath.

Read the rest of this entry »

Grass is greener - It’s not only the grass that might be greener on the other side of the fence. We’re talking the green of dollar bills here. CNN Money has a calculator that lets you know how much it will cost to live in another city.

I tried to find someplace that might be cheaper than here. I used Kalamazoo at $50,000. After a dozen tries here and there, I found there’s not much difference, unless you choose someplace like Fairbanks, Alaska, where my $50,000 would need to grow to $71,000 or San Jose at $82,000 or Manhattan where I would need to work a little harder to reach the required $115,553.

Good old peanut butter - Have you been avoiding this staple of life for health reasons? All you had to do was wait long enough the release of a new study. Now it’s health food again:

Snacking on peanuts or peanut butter at least five days a week can nearly halve the risk of a heart attack.

Going broke - The U.S. Postal Service is scheduled to go broke this year, according to a story at MSN.money. I written before about plans to knock out a day of mail delivery to save $3.5 billion, but there’s also talk of closing 3,200 of the nation’s 34,000 post offices and retail centers. A survey shows that people go along with the changes as long as it keeps the price of delivery from increasing - unless it’s their post office at risk.

New ag - So you always wanted to be a farmer…. Here’s something new. Algae farming. Even Dow Chemical is getting into this one:

Because algae does not require any farmland or much space, many energy companies are trying to use it to make commercial quantities of hydrocarbons for fuel and chemicals. But harvesting the hydrocarbons has proved difficult so far.

Excellent coverage - True/Slant tells the story of how a Bolivian TV station was tricked into broadcasting actual footing of the French airliner crash, with wide-screen action filmed from the cockpit. And it was actually from an old episode of “Lost”:

In their rush to air exclusive photos of Flight 447’s destruction, no one in this newsroom stopped to ask the logical questions, such as: 1) How did the camera survive? and 2) Why are the photos in wide-screen format?

The answers, of course, are: 1) Because the footage is from Lost. And, 2) because the footage is from Lost.

Look in the left hand side of the page for a link to a few Town & Country Festival photos. More will be added later. If there’s anything you’d like to buy, let me know.

The slideshow requires the Adobe Flash Player to be installed in your web browser. If you have problems viewing the slideshow you can download the free plugin here-

I was just asked if I have my camera ready for the festival parade. That’s probably my least favorite part of the festival, photographically speaking. I figure everybody wants me to publish a picture of their parade entry, so how do I pick and choose? I can’t use them all or it would be an extremely boring photo page.

I’d rather get something with a little more action, such as the arm wrestling event where people tend to do a lot of spitting. I had to keep moving my camera bag out of the way.

Festival weekend is a busy one for me, so I’ve gotta go.

The band scheduled to play Sunday afternoon at the Town & Country Festival has canceled out. Instead it’s going to turn into a free-for-all, or I guess it’s called jam session, with anyone invited onto the stage to perform anything. Maybe it’s a hootenanny. I’m hoping for some Bollywood and here’s a little something to get you in the mood.

Gawker is posting a computer generated photo of what Michael Jackson might have looked like had he not dove into so much facial surgery:

It’s a well done imagining, a believable cross between Usher and Billy Dee Williams, rather than the ghost of Joan Crawford that you see on the left. A rare vision of one’s life had a different turn in the road been taken.

I expect to hear some MJ tributes at the Battle of the Bands tonight in the park. Some Michael Screamo, perhaps.

M. Jackson - Salon has a collection Michael Jackson videos here, including his Motown audition in 1968 at the age of 9. Poor quality, but still most amusing.

Google works over time - I’ve never before clicked More Options on the Google page. Type in your search words and you get a miscellaneous pile of returns. Suppose you’re looking for the most recent items. Click on the link at the top called “Show Options.” Several new choice appear on the left. Choose Recent Results or Past Year, depending on your needs. Once Google makes that adjustment, another option appears. Choose Sort by Date.

Also check out Wonder Wheel and Time Line. Thanks, Mr. Google.

Thinking? - A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices - William James

Casting demons - This video of demon casting in a Connecticut church is getting a lot of You Tube play. Not only is there demon casting, there’s soul murdering.

Now I understand - Improbable Research caught wind of this item explaining population growth:

Sex, not religious or cultural beliefs or the quest for economic security, is what increases family size and drives world population growth, according to one of the UK’s leading authorities on family planning.

Fascinating study.

Crescent City boneyards - I posted some photos of a cemetery near my daughter’s house in New Orleans after I visited last year. Here’s a good overview of the city’s unique cemeteries, along with several links for more info.

Go here now and look at the pumpkin sculptures (images 24 and 25). OK, now you can look at the remainder. Very interesting stuff from Yayoi Kusama.

What’s a credit card charge-off? It’s the credit card loan that isn’t repaid. There’s an index that measures the amount that banks don’t expect to receive and it hit another record last month:

The U.S. monthly credit card chargeoff rate surpassed 10 percent and hit a sixth straight record high in May, Moody’s Investors Services said on Wednesday …

The chargeoff rate index — which measures credit card loans the banks do not expect to be repaid — rose to 10.62 percent in May from 9.97 percent in April.

“We expect the chargeoff rate index to continue to rise in the coming months but at a slower pace, as it peaks at around 12 percent in the second quarter of 2010,” Moody’s senior vice president William Black said in a statement. (Reuters)

Big day Saturday at the library when author Elizabeth Berg visited. Her appearance at the Morenci library drew people from Toledo, Detroit area, Pickney, Albion…even Fayette. Pam Hollstein is the one in the photo having a book signed.

In other news from this week’s print edition:

There’s your overview. There’s much more to read and look at in the print edition. You can order an electronic version or paper right here on the website.