Lazy Sunday

It's a tough job, but someone has to do it: Smoke keeps the chair warm while your servant slaves away over the laptop. [Click for bigger.]

Let's give Heather a pullet surprise

It's Little D! OMG, he's been plucked, er... snatched, somehow or other, from the loving environment of Room 1-208 and now his captors are calling him "Dale" and threatening to... OMG, I can't even bring myself to type it! [Links, though — links we can do!] From this:



To this:


Unless... What's that up in the sky? SoCal to the rescue...!!!


OMG, how I suck at Photoshop. For those lacking faith in the San Diego Chicken, please donate here to save the world's cutest little chickenbird and not so incidentally help dogs in need. Little D and a whole lot of the rest of us, including Heather's mom, thank you for your support.

Bring it on! [I'll be in the fallout shelter]

If Americans can think up a "we go to eleven" method that works against plagues of locusts, we should be able to come up with a defense against a measly bunch of sub-microscopic swine flu agents, shouldn't we? I mean, how hard can it be?

"Unnecessary preparation beats being caught unprepared by a flu pandemic." [Hilzoy]

But seriously, folks, we all know that a stitch in time saves nine, fortune is infatuated with the efficient, etc., so unless you've already stocked up in preparation for Armageddon or the Give All The White People's Guns To The Black People Program, this is a great time to stockpile everything from Acetaminophen to Pedialyte®. Water, check... manual can opener, check... And don't forget the dogfood!

From dKos via Obsidian Wings, here is an excellent [pdf] Pandemic Influenza Preparation and Response Guide. Check out the Appendix:

A. World Health Organization and Pandemic Phases - 48
B. World Health Organization Advice for Travelers - 49
C. Items to Stockpile for an Influenza Pandemic - 50
D. Items for Treatment of Severe Influenza - 51
E. Homemade Oral Rehydration Solution - 52
F. Possible Roles for Community Volunteers - 53
G. Example: Home Patient Medical Record - 54
H. Overview of Influenza Surveillance in the United States - 55
I. A Doctor’s Letter during the Height of the 1918 Pandemic - 57

It's as thorough and sobering as I suppose a guide for citizens in a pandemic ought to be, and I am totally printing it all out for when the Intertubes go down. Off to the fallout shelter —



[Drawing by Marc Johns via Flickr.]

Wonkette for the win

The new BFFs. [Click for bigger.] Photo by Chief White House Photographer — and American of Portuguese descent — Pete Souza.

Money quote [bowdlerized version]:

Hmm let’s see should Obama maybe not 100% please every [gosh-darned] animal fanatic in America or should he just look right into Ted Kennedy’s eyes — yes this is the same Ted Kennedy currently dying of brain cancer — and say, “You know, Ted, I just don’t want your [darn] dog, right?”

From the totally not PG-rated Rescue-Dog Fanatics Hope Obama Will Kill Ted Kennedy’s Elitist Water Dog over at Wonkette, via the most excellent YesBiscuit!

First Best Photo Blog of 2009

I've died and gone to heaven: visit Logcabineer and click on Joakim Simonsson's photos for big. That is all.





[H/T: Materialicious, via A Continuous Lean.]

Factory farmed pork safer than free range? In a pig's eye

Maybe you saw the NY Times op-ed by James E. McWilliams, author of Just Food: How Locavores Are Endangering the Future of Food and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly.

"[S]cientists have found that free-range pork can be more likely than caged pork to carry dangerous bacteria and parasites," warns Professor McWilliams:

Free range is not necessarily natural. And neither is its taste. In fact, free range is like piggy day care, a thoughtfully arranged system designed to meet the needs of consumers who despise industrial agriculture and adore the idea of wildness.

To equate the highly controlled grazing of pigs with wild animals in a state of nature is to insult the essence of nature, domestication and wild pigs.

I wasn't under the impression that anyone was equating wild pigs with domestic pigs raised in a free range environment. But if McWilliams is suggesting that the choice is between the very real horrors [moral and environmental] of factory farms and "piggy day care," I'll vote for "day care," thanks. For anyone truly hell-bent on insulting pigs and domestication and the essence of nature, factory farming is the way to go.

And those dire warnings about "dangerous bacteria and parasites"? Marion Nestle to the rescue:

The study on which McWilliams based his op-ed is published in Foodborne Pathogens and Disease. The investigators actually measured "seropositivity" (antibodies) in the pigs' blood. But the presence of antibodies does not necessarily mean that the animals--or their meat--are infected. It means that the free-range pigs were exposed to the organisms at some point and developed immunity to them. The industrial pigs were not exposed and did not develop immunity to these microorganisms. But you would never know that from reading the op-ed. How come?

Guess who paid for the study? The National Pork Board, of course.

Read all about it here: "Sponsored Science" Strikes Again, by Marion Nestle at the Atlantic Food Channel blog.

And yet I plan to blog all afternoon

Renny Gleeson would like to see tech that makes us more human. As opposed to, I guess, whatever we are now. An R-rated, yet strangely wonderful road sign appears briefly in this video.



[H/T: swissmiss.]