Future bread and cookies...
Wheat is the third most produced cereal, after rice and maize, and it’s used for all sorts of things: bread, noodles, cakes, beer, etc.
What’s your favorite wheat product? Favorite wheat story? Recipes? Jokes?
Don’t hold back!
Photo by Zooey
Sickening, eh?
This is your weekly cesspool party. There’s no theme, no dress code, and no rules.
Knock yourselves out…
Palouse Falls, Washington
From the Wiki:
The canyon at the falls is 115 meters (377 feet) deep, exposing a large cross-section of the Columbia River Basalt Group. These falls and the canyon downstream comprise an important feature of the channeled scablands created by the great Missoula Floods that swept periodically across eastern Washington and across the Columbia River Plateau during the Pleistocene epoch.
The ancestral Palouse river flowed through the currently dry Washtucna Coulee to the Columbia River. The Palouse Falls and surrounding canyons were created when the Missoula Floods overtopped the south valley wall of the ancestral Palouse River, diverting it to the current course to the Snake River by erosion of a new channel.
Down river from the falls...
Much of Washington, Oregon, and parts of Idaho are located on the Columbia River Basalt Group — the largest flood basalt group in this country. I find basalt formations so very beautiful and interesting.
Twisting and turning basalt columns
It was 95 degrees at the falls yesterday, but some of the green is still holding on. Makes for some nice contrast. The heat kept the rattlesnakes in their hidey holes, thank goodness.
All photos by Zooey
Christian Science Monitor, Global News blog
Thousands of Iranian protesters defied threats of a severe crackdown on Thursday, taking to the streets on the 10th anniversary of the 1999 student demonstrations.
Braving batons and tear gas, they chanted “death to the dictator” and set up burning barricades, reports the Associated Press. Tehran’s governor promised to “smash” anyone who dared show up. Witnesses told the AP that they saw security forces beating protesters with clubs on Valiasr Street, a major thoroughfare.
Thursday’s rally broke a nearly two-week stretch of quiet after a series mass protests against the official June 12 election results. This resurgence heightens speculation that this is a movement that will not be easily quelled – even by the state’s heavy hand.
On the 10th anniversary of student uprising in 1999, the Iranian dictatorship is cracking down with an iron fist, but they seem to have forgotten the passion of their own revolution. The nighttime cries of “Allah-o-Akbar!” are a telling sign of revolution yet to come.
Oscar G. Mayer, retired chairman of the Wisconsin-based meat processing company that bears his name, has died at the age of 95.
Mayer’s wife, Geraldine, said he died of old age Monday age at Hospice Care in Fitchburg.
He was the third Oscar Mayer in the family that founded Oscar Mayer Foods, which was once the largest private employer in Madison. His grandfather, Oscar F. Mayer, died in 1955 and his father, Oscar G. Mayer Sr., died in 1965.
Died of old age…I guess he didn’t eat Oscar Mayer wieners. 
Loved your car, Mr Mayer. Rest in Peace.
When I bought my condominium six years ago, I had a lovely, quiet view of a hillside. Sometimes it was planted with wheat, sometimes with hay, and sometimes it was just sitting there. It took a toll on my allergies, but watching quail marching single-file, listening to the pheasant’s squawking flirtations, laughing at the little brown bunnies chasing each other, and being able to walk my dog in the field were a source of relaxation and happiness.
Here is my hillside last winter:
Pretty...
Here is my hillside being cleared for apartment buildings…or something:
Evil giant backhoe thing
Evil giant backhoe thing's friends...
My poor hillside is being destroyed in the name of “progress.” Many new apartments and too few parking spaces are the order of the day. There’s money to be made!
We’re paving over more and more prime farmland everyday, while hundreds of apartments in this town go un-rented every year. Notice that the topsoil is at least 20 feet deep. It’s a crying shame…
All photos by Zooey
Three days before Christmas, a barrier broke and toxic sludge spilled across 300 acres in Roane County, Tennessee. Now much of this land is under six feet of sludge. This Tennessee coal plant created, for the United States, the largest environmental disaster.
A forty-acre pond containing toxic coal ash has collapsed, spilling out millions of gallons of coal ash. Environmentalists say the spill is more than thirty times larger than the Exxon Valdez, but the story has received little national attention.
2.6 million cubic yards of coal ash spilled out of the retention pond, burying homes and roads. The sludge has flowed into the Emory River, a tributary of the Tennessee River, which provides drinking water to millions of people downstream in Tennessee, Alabama and Kentucky.
On this date in 1962, the first trans oceanic television transmission occurred. The Telstar Satellite relayed the first signals between Britain and the United States. The first formal broadcast ocurred on July 23rd when JFK spoke. I remember that event. They also whipped Queen Elizabeth into that broadcast though I haven’t been able to find a complete copy. Telstar was the first privately owned satellite to go into orbit.
Telstar was also the first artificial moon to get its own instrumental:
Alternate link.
And but five years later a tribute to its composer was produced (Verbage starts at about the 2 minute mark.).
For you whipper snappers who wonder what we old farts had to put up with in the day of 45 RPM fidelity, listen here:
Alternate link.
Tonight Bill Moyers interviews Wendell Potter who left his position as Head of Corporate Communications at CIGNA to become a health reform advocate.
This is the preview where Mr. Potter tells why he decided to speak out on the industry.
In this clip Mr. Potter explains how the industry set out to destroy the credibility of Michael Moore’s film “Sicko” because they knew it would be hazardous to their bottom line.
Find broadcast times here or if you miss it the show will be available here beginning Saturday.
In honor of our great lady Z…
I know she likes the Stones 8)
Zooey – we miss you, you sexy thing.
If even half of members of the House & Senate had his passion and commitment – what a different place the USA would be. I am so proud to have him as a representative of my state.
Wingnuttia is all abuzz over President Obama ogling a young girl. Good Morning America addressed the issue by showing the full video. It appears that the President may have been trying to give a hand to the woman behind him but he does not appear to be gawking at the woman in question. I guess the right wing has never seen a gentleman before.
H/T spencersmom
Mediaite ranks the top ten most influential columnists in America. Can’t say I’m happy to see Michelle Malkin and Maureen Dowd ranked so high, but I do find it interesting that many of these journalists are left of center even if some — Thomas Friedman — are total idiots:
1. Paul Krugman
2. Thomas Friedman
3. Maureen Dowd
4. Michelle Malkin
5. Christopher Hitchens
6. Malcolm Gladwell
7. Charles Krauthammer
8. Mark Bitman
9. Ariana Huffington
10. Glenn Greenwald
So, does that mean it would be a sin to waste the LIES!?
Or, is it a sin to waste the LIVES..?
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Anti-terrorism training materials currently being used by the Department of Defense (DoD) teach its personnel that free expression in the form of public protests should be regarded as “low level terrorism.” ACLU attorneys are calling the approach “an egregious insult to constitutional values” and have sent a letter to the Department of Defense demanding that the offending materials be changed and that the DoD send corrective information to all DoD employees who received the erroneous training.
“DoD employees cannot fully protect our nation and its values unless they understand that a core American value is the constitutional right to criticize our government through protest activities,” said ACLU of Northern California attorney Ann Brick. “It is fundamentally wrong to equate activism with terrorism.”
Another great informative video by CollateralNews.
Wendell Potter, former VP of CIGNA, gives an inside look at the insurance industry practices of eliminating sick people on healthcare plans – while the rest of us are robbed and cheated so that insurance company can make ridiculous profits.
Hmm. I’m thinking this is going to make some waves. Huffington Post has the story:
CIA Director Leon Panetta told lawmakers in a recent briefing that the intelligence agency he heads misled Congress on “significant actions” for a “number of years,” a group of Democrats revealed on Wednesday.
In a letter written to Panetta on June 26 by seven Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee, the CIA chief is urged to “publicly correct” an earlier statement he made in which he insisted that it was not agency policy to mislead Congress.
As the letter details, Panetta apparently acknowledged in an earlier briefing that this statement was not, in fact, true.
Not that this comes as a surprise or anything. I love — in the most horrible sense of the word — the final sentence: this statement was not, in fact, true. But I guess publishing the word horse shit might come across as less than objective.
From a diary at Kos. There are simply no words needed to describe this video in which Brian Kilmeade offers his theory that Swedish people have lower rates of Alzheimer’s disease because of their “pure genes,” and that we here in America “keep marrying other species and other ethnics.”
You know you’ve gone off the deep end when the obligatory cute, conservative, blonde co-host looks at you like you’re crazy. I mean, good lord, that woman’s job is to be the craziest one of the bunch. She took over for E.D. Hill following the “terrorist fist jab” debacle. So, Ms. Carlson can be pretty damn crazy without crossing the line. Kilmeade didn’t just cross that line, he jumped over the damn ocean.
