North Coast Cafe, South

Golden's Can Dance

While I continue to work on the choreography for my Ballet avec Dog Leashes,  check out this number.  Got to admit, that dog's got talent!

Is Blogging Journalism? Yes !

A South Carolina court has ruled a blogger practices journalism and is thereby protected by freedom of the press law.

Told you so !

Read more here and here.

Smoking As Mental Illness

Ever wonder about those people one sees standing outside entrances to public buildings and offices smoking?  No matter what weather or time of day they isolate themselves to toke tobacco.  What a hold nicotine addiction has on its victims.

Almost half of all cigarettes sold in the United States (44 percent) are consumed by people with mental illness. This is because so many people who have mental illnesses smoke (50 to 80 percent, compared with less than 20 percent of the general population) and because they smoke so many cigarettes a day -- often three packs.

...smoking is concentrated among people with mental illness, often compounded by substance-abuse disorders such as alcoholism.

Go to most AA meetings, and the room will be so full of smoke that you can cut it with a knife.

Ask the members, and they will tell you that it was much easier to stop drinking than to stop smoking. Indeed, nicotine, the addictive component of tobacco smoke, is as habituating as cocaine or heroin, and it has a similar effect on chemical receptors in the brain. More

Nuclear Power: A Solution?

For years I've been hiding my suspicion that nuclear energy,  so derided and opposed by my fellow environmentalists, especially those affiliated or following the lead of Greenpeace--an organization I have worked for and admired--might be an answer to the perilous price and dwindling supply of oil.

While it may still be arguable that we've reached peak oil,  that point at which known, accessible deposits of affordable oil have been fully exploited, the specter of global warming spurred by burning fossil fuels is enough to re-examine the benefit of nuclear power generation,  problematic though it may be.

Happily I have discovered that in this too heretical belief I am not alone.

Power to Save the World is a picaresque, flat-out love song to the bad boy of the great American energy debate -- as good a book as we're likely to get on a subject mired in political incorrectness, general unfathomability and essentially limitless gut fears.

It's also the latest plot point for one of the few unassailably positive byproducts of global-warming mania: the quiet emergence of pro-nuke greens, led by such impeccable apostates as Whole Earth founder Stewart Brand and James Lovelock, the British chemist best known for his Earth-is-a-living-organism "Gaia hypothesis."

WSJ review of Power to Save the World

WSJ article on Peak Oil

Interview with Greenpeace co-founder

An Attitude of Gratitude

Thanksgiving this year brought with it the usual  admonitions to be grateful.  Listeners to NPR heard about recent studies by UC Davis psychology professor Robert Emmons wsho has made a science out of Thanksgiving.

In the past decade, his research has shown that people who count their blessings -- not just on the fourth Thursday of November each year, but in daily gratitude journals -- exercise more regularly, complain of fewer illness symptoms and feel better about their lives overall.

Compared with those who chronicle daily hassles, people who take time instead to record their reasons for giving thanks also feel more loving, forgiving, joyful, enthusiastic and optimistic about their futures. Their family and friends report that they seem happier and are more pleasant to be around.

"Gratitude is literally one of the few things that can measurably change people's lives," Emmons says.

The following  video presents in a poignant way some of the things many of us have to be grateful for....and some of the things so many of us still must suffer.  View

Ron Paul

Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee have released a report on the total costs of the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan , including "hidden costs" such as interest on the money we're borrowing, and long term healthcare for vets.

The bill comes to $3.5 trillion.

If $3.5 trillion is the true cost of these military adventures, $11,500 is the amount every man, woman and child in this country pays.

So, a family of four would pay $46,000 just for this war.

What about the impact of these costs on education, the very thing that so often helps to increase earnings?

$46,000 would cover 90% of the tuition costs to attend a four year public university in Texas for both children in that family of four.

But, instead of sending kids to college, too often we’re sending them to Iraq , where the best news in a long time is they aren't killing our men and women as fast as they were last month.  More

American Accents

This simple quick quiz located my North American accent precisely.  Try it and let me know if it pegged you too.

American accent quiz

Gulliani's Fragile Candidacy

Desperate Republicans frantically looking for a presidential candidate with even a faint chance of holding the White House despite the mess made by the Bush/Cheney cabal seemingly have allowed Rudi Gulliani to assume the lead at this early start of the 2008 race.

I'm impressed with the focus my former TV colleagues at UK Channel 4 have taken on Rudi's supposed front-runner status.  If the GOP masterminds think they can win with this tainted sow's ear they are in for a surprise.

Have a look.

Washoe

Washoe, the female chimpanzee whose use of American Sign Language opened the first studies  of non-human use of language has died of natural causes at the research institute on the campus of Central Washington University.

Washoe, who was born in Africa about 1965, was thought to be about 42 years old. According to Roger and Deborah Fouts who first introduced Washoe to ASL she died Tuesday night.

The Fouts are co-founders of The Chimpanzee and Human Communications Institute.

Washoe knew an estimated 250 words and taught sign language to three younger chimps.

Primate researcher Jane Goodall, in Roger Fouts' book "Next of Kin," noted the importance of the work with Washoe.

"Roger, through his ongoing conversations with Washoe and her extended family, has opened a window into the cognitive workings of a chimpanzee's mind that adds new dimension to our understanding."

 

Honeybees

Eva Crane, English expert on the world's bees died recently at age 95. For more than a half-century Dr. Crane worked in more than 60 countries to learn more and more about the human use of honeybees from prehistoric times to the present.

She found that ancient Babylonians used honey to preserve corpses, that bees were effectively used as military weapons by the Viet Cong, and that beekeepers in a remote corner of Pakistan use the same kind of hives found in excavations of ancient Greece.

Dr. Crane wrote some of the most important books on bees and apiculture, including “The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting” (1999).

In a review in The Guardian, the author Paul Theroux, himself a beekeeper, called the book a masterwork “for its enormous scope and exhaustiveness, for being an up-to-date treasure house of apiaristic facts.”  (NYT)