The Best Hraka Around
Back in the early days of Hraka, September 2002, I wrote a post called The Silflay Hraka Theory of Self-Vaccination, and the world laughed at me.
Today I am vindicated by science.
I now await my phone call from the Nobel people.
link via Insty, who should know that toddlers get sick because they have yet to ingest a critical mass of germ fighting snot.
Laurence has vowed to surpass the Carnival of The Vanities. I though I’d give him a leg up.
A father a boy can be proud of.
Years ago, prior to a Parents’ Day appearance at an elementary school, Henderson was introduced to the class by his son.
“This is my dad,” said the boy proudly. “He drinks nine quarts of whiskey a day.”
The Rise and Fall of the Atlantic Sturgeon fishery.
Photos of the Bayside wharves ca. 1890 show an endless row of floating cabins and shacks, with three railroad cars at the wharf ready to haul away the caviar and meat.
At the peak of the harvest, 15 railroad cars a day carried those products to New York.
Roe, or egg sacks, as large as 30 pounds and more were found when the huge female carcasses were opened. The meat was smoked and a large amount was sent to Albany, N.Y., causing it to be called “Albany Beef.”
One picture shows a man holding a sturgeon twice as long as he is tall, the tail end hanging over the side of the wharf.
Nothing was wasted. From the refuse, oil and fertilizer were made. The roe was sold in 135-pound wooden kegs. As the fishery began to dwindle, the price of roe rose. In 1885, it sold for $10 a keg. By 1900, it was bringing $105 a keg. Fishermen were catching less but still making the same amount of money because of the demand. Some became millionaires.
“Females only come in every three or four years to spawn. That’s why the decline was over a period of years,” Brown said.
If the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons for the next 7 generations, then we’ve got seventy-five years on the Atlantic Coast before sturgeons are common again.
And Russia has longer than that, if indeed the Beluga sturgeon ever recovers.
Making the Exxon Valdez spill look like the work of amateurs.
A faint smell of sewage and brine gave way, in alternating turns, to sulfur and burning rubber and, occasionally, just plain gas station, depending on the changing ingredients: diesel, No. 2 home heating oil, naphtha.
Was it true, someone asked, that the creek was flammable? ?I wouldn?t smoke near it,? Seggos said.
Maker’s Mark turns fifty.
To signify the new beginning, the sixth generation bourbon maker torched the family’s 170-year-old bourbon recipe — essentially the one used to quench the thirst of George Washington’s revolutionary army.
The ceremony produced some unintended pyrotechnics. The fire, which Samuels set in a long-neck bucket, sparked an explosion that burned a hole in the ceiling and singed his daughter’s hair.
It was under such inauspicious beginnings that Maker’s Mark bourbon whiskey was born 50 years ago.
Sounds nice, and the company produces a decent product, but to put the brand in perspective, Maker’s Mark sells less whiskey than Old Crow, Ten High and Wild Turkey, though it is closing ground fast.
Maker’s Mark is still catching up with its popularity. The brand has been pressed to keep up with its torrid sales of the past three years. Projecting volumes six years ahead to allow for aging requirements is tough, said brand icon Bill Samuels, and the company has had to squeeze its export markets a little to keep pace.
Made at the brand’s small distillery in Loretto, Ky., Maker’s Mark has set the pace for premium, small-batch bourbons and can sell just about every drop it bottles for at least the next six years.
A survey of the best worm hooks for trout. Circle hooks are mentioned, of course. Not mentioning them would be like leaving Liberace out of your gay pianist survey, but they don’t get quite the smae amount of extravagant praise they have elsewhere.
Over the past two seasons, I tested various circle-hook sizes and styles in worm fishing for stream trout. If I allowed the fish time to swallow the bait, about 50 percent of the trout were jaw-hooked. The remaining fish were gut-hooked even though I followed the manufacturers? directions carefully?making no hard hooksets and letting the pulling fish hook themselves. Granted, these were small-stream trout, and my testing extended over a few dozen rather than several hundred fish. Circle hooks, I found, were a big improvement over standard bait hooks in terms of reduced gut-hooking, but they aren?t as fail-safe as I?d been told.
I don’t know how many books we have devoted to the alphabet, but they must be doing some good. She’s still two months shy of four years old, but for the first time tonight Ngnat correctly pointed at all 26 while singing the alphabet song.
As a reward, she got to pick an extra story to read–The Gingerbread Man, from the My Book House series that I had lugged from apartment to apartment all the years of my singlehood against just such a day.
Tomorrow I’m going to start her on counting to thirty.
After that: Non-Euclidean geometry.