I guess I misunderstood the concept. Create a little swimming pool and jump in.

Environmental Grafitti offers up several new uses for a trash Dumpster. Office space, living area, swimming pool, garden, etc.

The Green Made Simple website has a search tool to see what’s available in your Zip Code area for home energy rebates and credits. The answer for here is “not much.” It’s mostly just the standard federal assistance and nothing “local” other than insurance discounts on hybrid vehicles. It’s the same for Northwest Ohio with two exceptions: grants and loan through a state program.

Let me try a southern California Zip: up from 11 here to 19. Oregon: 29 choices. Virginia: 12. Maine: 11.

Good news for the boy; bad news for gator.

An alligator bit a boy’s arm off in an Louisiana lake, but the gator was killed the arm was retrieved.

Can England still claim to be a nation of animal lovers? Some people aren’t sure. An animal rights group says abused animals are “hapless victims of our affluent throwaway society.”

Pets are no longer purchased solely for companionship, but as a disposable accessory indicating a lifestyle choice. Williams gives the examples of the influence of celebrity pets such as Paris Hilton’s dogs, photographed hanging out of handbags, or grizzly dogs on chains, brandished as a symbol of aggression.

Still no Google Street View for Morenci, but filming is underway in Britain. Filming? They’re probably digitaling.

The Googlemobile was briefly detained in Bradford. It was driving in the bus lane, of course, to get a good view of the stores.

At a recent Model T convention in Indiana, visitors learned about the mash up of the early automobile:

Yet the gathering in Indiana showed another facet of the Model T’s history — how much owners tinkered with and modified the car. Among the 800 vintage automobiles brought by collectors were ones that had been converted to snowmobiles, racing coups and tow trucks. That was only a glimmer of the many innovative changes made by Model T owners, for uses Henry Ford never had in mind. They transformed the cars into tractors, pickup trucks, paddy wagons, mobile lumber mills and power plants for milling grain. An itinerant preacher converted his into a four-wheeled chapel.

Take the link above to the New York Times story and watch a slideslow of innovations - even a side car for a goat. Good stuff.

I haven’t heard much about climate change in South America, but here’s a brief report on receding glaciers in the Andes:

Climate change-induced glacier melts have cost northern Peru’s mountains 26 per cent of their surface area in the last 33 years, satellite images have confirmed.

There’s a concern about the availability of fresh water in the future when the glaciers aren’t there to provide it.

Now that Toyota’s plug-in hybrid development is no longer a secret, the company is putting plug-in prototypes on the road in Japan and California to further improve the technology.

This new Prius has a larger battery to give an all-electric range of about eight miles.

Take at a look at this Mitsubishi model:

The car features Mitsubishi Motors’ unique in-wheel motors in the front plus the company’s vehicle dynamics control system - S-AWC (Super All Wheel Control) to achieve high maneuvrability and environmental performance.

Or maybe it’s a collector of the stupid. Anyway, I had a Google Alert for State Line Observer from the TrogBlog. From what I can make of it, the owner of the site collects items via Google that include the word “stupid.” Since this blog mentioned the summary of the Iraq war by David Kilcullen as “the biggest stupid idea,” it was mentioned on his stupid stupendous site.

Take a look at the TrogBlog and see if you can figure anything more out of it.

Rueters reports that big dollar bankruptcies are at a five-year high. That seems like big news, all right, but what’s more surprising to me is to look at those previous highs:

A total of seven U.S. companies with more than a billion dollars in assets have filed for bankruptcy protection so far this year.
…
The last year in the previous bankruptcy wave was 2003, when there were 15 billion-dollar bankruptcies filed. The number of billion-dollar bankruptcies peaked in 2001 when there were 25, according to BankruptcyData.com.

We ended up with a lot of photos this week. I’m sure you appreciate that. It makes for easier reading. The one shown here is from the Lyons festival last weekend.

In this week’s print edition:

That’s the brief rundown; there’s lot more in this week’s print edition.

Last week we published an article about the battling blood donors, John Van Havel and Wayne Carpenter. John got a call from Wayne after the paper was published. Wayne is at the 22-gallon donor level and he got started the same way John did: Donate a pint and get out of ROTC drill for the week.

The previous post mentioned Google. Why not follow that with mention of Cuil, a new search engine built by some former Google employees. Try it out here.

According the Cuil people, their engine searches three times as many search pages as Google. But as we all know, Google still rules our lives. It’s everywhere, into everything.

From the Official Google Blog:

We’ve known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we’ve seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

Anyone closely following the Iraq war has run across the name David Kilcullen, an Australian who helped Gen. Patraeus develop the counter-insurgency practices now in use. Kilcullen is writing a field manual for the Pentagon that takes his ideas far beyond the field and right up into the national policy level. It’s interesting to read his summation of the Iraq adventure:

“The biggest stupid idea,” Kilcullen said, “was to invade Iraq in the first place.”

He believes following his manual would avoid future Iraq-like episodes. The New Yorker published an interesting profile of Kilcullen in 2006.