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.