We expect to have a pretty good crop of vegetables in our garden this summer. There are several kinds of squash growing (pumpkin, crookneck, zucchini), our usual green beans, hot peppers and several varieties of tomatoes including these heirloom tomatoes. The heirlooms are especially flavorful in salads or slices in sandwiches.

If you’re not into global warming doom and gloom, you could lose your standing among the best tropical weather climatologists and be cut off by the greenbats at your local liberal university, even though your hurricane forecasts and tropical weather expertise is legendary.

A pioneering expert on hurricane forecasting says he may soon lose funding due to his skepticism about man-made global warming, according to a report in the Houston Chronicle.

Dr. William Gray, who once said that pro-global warming scientists are “brainwashing our children,” claims that Colorado State University will no longer promote his yearly North Atlantic hurricane forecasts due to his controversial views.

Gray complained in a memo to the head of Colorado State’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences that “this is obviously a flimsy excuse and seems to me to be a cover for the Department’s capitulation to the desires of some (in their own interest) who want to reign [sic] in my global warming and global warming-hurricane criticisms,” the Chronicle reports.

. . .

Gray contends it’s all a hoax contrived by scientists hungry for research funding, media professionals thirsting for Pulitzer Prizes and foreign powers seeking to create a single world government.

In fact, he says, the warming cycle will soon end, and the Earth will begin a period of temporary cooling.

Via Fox News

One of the drills we like to practice when we go to the range is to fire at silhouette targets while trying to avoid letting any rounds fall outside of the body mass. We do pretty well when firing at the center of mass of a target. This assumes that you have a shot at the center of mass.

What if the target is partly shielded by an object, like a fence or an automobile? It’s a little more difficult if all you can see is the head and shoulders. So, I like to practice shooting at the nose of the target and try to keep the rounds close while firing about one round per second. I’m getting better at it, but I always seem to have a couple of outliers. One of these pierced an ear and could probably be considered a “to whom it may concern” round.

Today’s gourmet dinner consists of Hula Chicken with Pineapple Barbecue Sauce, roasted acorn squash and blended wild and long-grain rice. The chicken is prepared with boneless, skinless chicken breasts butterflied, pounded and rolled with prosciutto and Havarti cheese. These are then floured and pan fried in extra-virgin olive oil.

The pineapple BBQ sauce was the big hit here. The ingredients for the sauce are fresh chopped pineapple, chopped red onion, brown sugar, apple cider vinegar, tamari sauce, tomato sauce and dried Bing cherries.

The dish is served with portions of rice, squash and the rolled chicken topped with a generous helping of the sauce. It was just wonderful. It just might qualify to compete with some of the gourmet meals that our Hawaiian friend Kini has on his site.

Damsel modified the Hula Chicken recipe from one that Rachael Ray had on her show last week. Click on the thumbnail for a bigger image.

We took a great walk through the botanic garden today. Spring flowers were in bloom - so many flowers and so many colors. The rose garden was magnificent and the lilies were doing their spring thing.

This yellow bearded iris was one of the prettiest flowers in the garden. It was hard to pick out which one to post, but this seemed unique. Bearded iris only flower for a few days at most and the timing was fortunate to see it at it’s peak.

Click on the image for the full-sized version.

I took this out of the truck window last week on the way home from the shooting range.

Click for the 800×600 image.

This is a map of the country from the 2004 presidential election where states carried by Bush are colored red and blue if carried by Kerry. The map of “red states” seems to dominate the country, since they cover far more area than the blue ones. However, this is a little misleading because it fails to take into account the fact that most of the red states have small populations and most of the blue states have large ones. The blue may be small in area, but they are large in terms of numbers of people, which is what matters in an election where the majority wins.

However, the Federalists designed the Electoral College to mitigate domination by states with great population over those without. Constitutional scholars know that this is an important concept the Founders handed down.

Now, if we were to re-map the country using a cartography technique to distort state boundaries to account for the population of that state, we get a much different picture. Each state now has a hypothetical area in proportion to its population. Regardless of this distorted view, however, the Electoral college selected President Bush for his second term. The actual nationwide popular vote also went to Bush by a plurality of over six million votes.

An interesting observation of the distorted map is that many of the blue states appear bloated and overweight. In real life, it seems, the governments of the ‘bloated’ states are as bloated and overweight as the hypothetical boundaries.

Sadly, California, the most bloated of the re-mapped states, is one where government overtaxes, over-regulates and repeatedly invests public funds in failed government programs, the educational system being the most paramount among them.

Maps prepared by Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman of the University of Michigan.

As a veteran, I am outraged by Time Magazine’s desecration of Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of the U.S. Marines raising the American Flag on Iwo Jima.

We never cease to be amazed by the inability of the left to feel shame and its lack of reverence for America and those who defend its freedoms, including the right to be stupid. The cover of the April 21 issue of Time, taking the famous Joe Rosenthal photo of Marines planting our flag on the blood-soaked island of Iwo Jima and replacing our flag with a tree, qualifies for obscenity of the year.

It echoes the greenie theme first advanced by Al Gore in his book Earth In The Balance that the internal combustion engine is the greatest threat in the history of mankind. Gore and Bill Clinton have both said that global warming is ultimately a greater threat than terrorism… This trivializing of the sacrifice of American blood and treasure to defend freedom ignores the fact that in World War II we faced a real enemy with a terrible agenda. The bombs that fell on Pearl Harbor were quite real, not the output of some badly fed computer model.

‘Global warming may or may not be a significant threat to the United States,’ Tim Holbert, a spokesman for the American Veterans Center, [said]: ‘The Japanese Empire on February 1945, however, certainly was, and this photo trivializes the most recognizable moment of one of the bloodiest battles in U.S. history’.”

—Investor’s Business Daily

I call on veterans and others outraged by this to boycott Time-Warner Corporation! If you subscribe to Road Runner, get another high-speed carrier. If you get cable from Time-Warner, it’s time to look into DirecTV, which, by the way, is owned by the parent company of the Fox News Channel. Most of all, never, ever buy another copy of Time.

Hat tip to The Patriot Post.

I wrote a post last May about cosmos flowers that included a little background; I’ll repeat it here:

Sometimes called Mexican Asters, cosmos were grown by Spanish priests in their mission gardens in Mexico. The evenly placed petals led them to christen the flower “Cosmos,” the Greek word for harmony or ordered universe. Cosmos, like many of our warm weather annuals such as marigolds, originated in Mexico and South America.

These are currently flourishing on the patio. Click the image to enlarge.

Damsel takes photos of our arsenal before, during and after the weekly cleaning and maintenance session. She took a photo of the Remington 870 trigger plate assembly; when I looked at the photo, it reminded me of something completely unrelated.

Is it just me, or does the assembly resemble the profile of an airborne Canadian honker?

I stated on our not-very-political personal blog that I was a daily reader of the on-line Dilbert cartoon. Recently, the folks at www.dilbert.com upgraded their site to a nice new interactive format. One of the many new features is an animated cartoon strip. Another feature challenges the reader to produce a better punch line than Scott Adams, the artist that produces Dilbert.

Which brings me to this little animation, “The Knack,” that pokes a little fun at some of us who are a bit on the nerdy side. I’m not sure where this originated, since I got it in an email from an associate. At any rate, I think it’s worth the one-minute run time to learn about little Dilbert’s “Knack.”

After today’s target practice, we did the usual strip and clean routine for all the guns. I took this photo of the Remington 870 broken down into pieces. After looking at it later, it occurred to me that this is the way they would have you store your long guns in Washington, D.C. According to the regulations there, you may own a shotgun but it must be stored disassembled while in your home.

“‘Scuse me, Mr. intruder, while I go and put my shotgun together so I can defend my home.”

Hopefully, the Supreme Court will rectify the D.C. gun insanity in the near future. I also am hopeful that some of that goodness will rub off on some similar gun insanity in other places, especially California.