Silflay Hraka

Rick Dove, the original Neuse River riverkeeper, comes out swinging against Bush’s environmental policies.

Rick undercuts his case by admitting that, in the only concrete instance of federal wrongdoing that actually cites, the weakend federal regs he’s complaining about don’t impact affect NC waters at all.

In 2001 Bush instructed the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance to stop filing new cases against the hog industry unless approved by him. Later, in 2003, the Bush administration passed a rule that allowed industrial hog producers to write that part of their permits that limit spraying of toxic hog waste on fields without state or federal approval, and without notifying the public. While our North Carolina hog regulations are tougher than the weakened federal rules, the important questions is, for how long?

The answer to which is, “practically forever.” Hog farmers have been persona-non-grata in NC for years. Rick acts like George is gonna sneak down to Raleigh in the middle of the night and hypnotize the governor and legislature in one fell swoop.

“You will relax hog waste regulations.”

We will relax hog waste regulations.

“You will call Elizabeth Dole a foxy lady.”

We will call Elizabeth Dole a foxy lady.

“Act like a chicken.”

Cluck. Cluck. Pah-cock!

Something fishy going on in Ocracoke. Don-Lee alumnus Seaborn Blair is tangentially connected.

Homebrewing has made at least one guy rich.

“The common saying is if you can boil water, you can make beer,” said Olin Schultz, founder of Beer, Beer and More Beer.

In less than a decade, the 32-year-old Concord resident and entrepreneur has turned his college hobby into the nation’s largest home-brew supply company.

A review of New Belgium’s Sunshine Wheat.

New Belgium’s very carbonated witbier pours a frothy white head, imparts a refreshing citrusy taste and leaves a crisp, refreshing finish. Instead of the cloudy, warm, translucent yellow color one expects from a witbier, this one is golden and crystal-clear.

Whatever the case, this is a drinkable beer. It might not pass muster with purists, but we’re talking enjoyment and flavor here.

New Belgium is offering four brews for tasting at the festival. Sunshine Wheat does not appear to be one of the,

Good God, a 10.75 pound flounder.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

“Next, we made reels out of some rollers and bearings. We used wire to hold the reels on the rods. We found some line and hooks in a pilot’s survival vest. It took us three or four days to put everything together. When we finished working, we had outfits that would cast up to around 35 feet.”

“We also made lizards and spinnerbaits,” Sgt. Curiel continues. “We braided some nylon cord together to resemble lizards, and we cut out some thin aluminum spinner blades and made skirts by pulling threads out of some red cloth.”

Fishing innovations that actually work. Bleeding bait hooks are among them.

The idea for Bleeding Bait Hooks came from a bait shop operator who observed that minnows would rise and bump the red side of a plastic float dropped into the bait tank. When the bait dealer dropped in floats of other colors, the minnows ignored them.

“We’ve got all this on video,” Campbell continues. “Bass, bream, crappie, a bowfin and a turtle all tried to eat the red jig, but they never touched the other two jigs. This was a revelation to me. I knew red was a big hook color for steelhead and salmon in the Pacific Northwest, but I didn’t know it had any attraction to fish in the Southeast.”

Guns don’t kill people. People who don’t follow safety precautions on the gun range kill people. (lvtbifoc)

I wonder what his mental target looked like?

Kerry, a gun-owner and hunter, quipped: “I thank you for the gift, but I can’t take it to the debate with me.”

Postscript: In John Kerry’s America, John Kerry would be an outlaw. Now there’s a nuanced postion on gun control for you.

Five thousand gigabytes of storage, on a hard drive the size of a postage stamp.

Mr. Robinson: I just want to say one word to you — just one word — ‘Google.’

It need not be Google that inherits the search future, but some search engine surely will. Storage capacity is increasing at such a pace that demand for more efficient search algorithms is only going to increase.

I can’t find the link, but I read somewhere that all of the data generated/processed by a person in a year adds up to about a terabyte of information–so the drive described above would hold five years worth of an individual’s experiences. Get cameras down to a small enough size, allow them to be networked, and there’s no reason a person couldn’t record and store the entirety of his life to disk–or online, for that matter. You think some bloggers are tedious and dull now, just wait till they can record the minutia of the day in all its detail from multiple camera angles.

What happens to society, one wonders, when every person is able to function more or less as a 24-hour security camera?

Well, you might wonder. I actually do not wonder, for I have read up on the future already.

As for the cameras themselves, from an ease of use standpoint they would necessarily need to be worn in order to fulfill the “record a life” scenario. Call them “Bodycams.” There’s no reason they would need to be any more obtrusive than, say an individual sequin, though in the early-adopter stages they might need to be more obtrusive as a security measure. Obvious cameras sever the same function as obvious guns–they urge the potential criminal to look for an easier target elsewhere.

An early Bodycam network for a single individual would likely be wireless and encrypted, so the fashions they generate may not look much different from what we wear today. However, if the Riemann hypothesis has indeed been proved, then the wireless world may be a dead end, as personal camera transmissions to a hard drive (also worn–it’s the size of a postage stamp, remember?), could be hijacked or jammed. In that case, fashion would be caught in the nexus generated by the desire to look good versus the desire to record as much as possible of one’s daily life–and one wouldn’t want a fold of clothing getting in the way of important data.

Which of course brings us to the sci-fi geek’s dream world, where everyone walks around in form fitting unitards–a dream that will certainly end up as a nightmare in some cases.

I wish I could have been in the crowd when Bush said this. Actually, an old camp friend of Silflay Hraka’s became an OB-GYN, and unsurprisingly, he said the occupation was not the dream job that adolescent males think it is. I imagine that is true.