Silflay Hraka

The Russians are running out of vodka.

A serious deficit of legally produced vodka will arise in late August unless the government moves fast, the newspaper Noviye Izvestiya says.

“With a delay of resolute measures, a serious deficit of legal vodka will arise in many regions of Russia as early as in the second half of August, which will cause a sharp increase in the incidence of poisoning with different alcohol substitutes in the country’s population,” it said.

A brown ale: Swiss Mister Hazelnut Brown.

The Bar Bot only wants one thing from you.

The Bar Bot is driven by self interest. Its aim is to drink beer. In order to achieve this goal in bars, the social beer consumption localities of human society, it also deals with money. It asks people for coins and spends them as soon as there is enough for a beer. The Bar Bot is not beneficial for humanity. Rather, it maximises the advantage for itself, like humanity. But to pursue its own, highly selfish objectives, it depends on others: somebody has to give it coins, somebody has to hand it a beer. This is where it engages in communication, in social interaction with human beings.

Thanks to the Boogie Scarecrow for the link. I chortled.

“Hot beer! Getcher hot beer right here!”

The results of 200 mystery shopper-style pub visits revealed 53 per cent of punters receiving a bad beer above the brewers’ recommended temperature of between 11 and 13C.

Bars in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and Keswick, Cumbria, were spotted pulling pints as warm as 23C. And in one extreme case in Dartford a Cask Marque inspector was presented with an undrinkable 30C pint, something more akin to bathwater than beer.

Let’s see…carry the one….that’s beer as hot as 73 to 86 degrees. Ick. Had to have been skunked at those temperatures.

Ethiopian troops ‘enter Somalia to stop attack by Islamists’ - World - Times Online

Jonathan over at The Head Heeb has a more thorough analysis.

Golden Leaf Wheat, from the City Brewery of La Crosse.

There are the widget cans of Guinness, Belhaven, Murphys, Old Speckled Hen, Young’s Double Chocolate Stout and other, mostly English beers, that have successfully transferred the taste of their beers from bottles to cans. I think there may be a perception that beer in a can will pick up a metallic flavor, but in my experience, that is unfounded.

Take City Brewery’s Golden Leaf, for instance. It had good head retention and a crisp body. It is not the German-style wheat with the clove-banana yeast characteristic, but the wheat flavor is very noticeable. It has some honey in it, which along with the wheat gives it a slight sweetness, but no more than is found in most wheat beers. It has a nice golden-bronze color with some haze, due to being an unfiltered beer.

And for that matter, his teeth? Texas Man Catches Fish With Human-Like Teeth.

As the story points out, it’s probably a pacu.

Here come Landis

The Lance vs. Landis comparisons are already starting to make the rounds.

I watch the the whole tour every year — the joy of working from home. I agree with the announcers who said that Landis’ performance today was the best single-day performance they have ever seen in the tour. Better than any single-day Lance had.

Not to say he is better than Lance, but Landis definitly has way more balls than the Texan to pull something off like he did today.

Maybe Landis can challenge Chuck Norris to a “who has more testicles” contest now.

Hat tip to The Greek for passing this along.

Africa is losing its vultures.

South Africa’s national lottery is claiming an unlikely victim: vultures. Local people - convinced these birds’ superb eyesight gives them the gift to see the future - are eating vulture meat to acquire the power of clairvoyance.

And they are not alone. In neighbouring Zimbabwe, voters fearful of supporting the losing side in recent elections ate vulture meat, mainly heads, talons, eyes and hearts, believing this would enable them to pick the winning party. Then there has been the rise of traditional medicines, for which vulture parts are highly valued, as well as soaring cases of poisoning and shootings by starving farmers in East and West Africa.

African vultures are members of the Accipitridae, the Old World Vultures, as opposed to the vultures we find in the Americas, the Cathartidae, or (of course) New World Vultures.

Of the various vulture species found in Africa, only the Lappet-faced and the Cape Griffon are listed as vulnerable by the IUCN Red List, though it appears likely that most of the other African species are at least in decline, with the possible exception of the Palm Nut Vulture, which may be less at risk than the other species thanks to its unique diet.

The vulture populations in India have already collapsed due to the widespread use of the livestock medicine diclofenac, but the drug is not in widespread use in Africa, so it is unlikely to have been much of a factor in the population decline of the various vulture species there.

A measure of this loss is provided by recent surveys which indicate that vulture numbers have dropped by 95 per cent in West Africa. ‘It also appears there has been a similar, drastic reduction in East Africa,’ added Anderson.

The exact causes of the disappearance of the vulture in Africa are unclear. ‘In Asia, diclofenac was responsible,’ said Rondeau. ‘But that is not the case in Africa. It is hardly used there. There seems to be a number of causes. The need for vulture flesh to satisfy markets for traditional medicines, their links with clairvoyance, hunting, and deliberate poisoning are probably all involved.’

Use of the various body parts in traditional medicine may play a role as well, but–aside from the initial anecdote–the article gives no reason to think there has been an up tick in that practice. A 95% drop in observed population is far too steep to be accounted for by even a large upsurge in demand for folk remedies. To kill off 95% of a population, you need a disease, and not just any disease. You need the bird equivalent of Ebola.

During the height of the West Nile hysteria of a couple years ago, the CDC commissioned a study on the effects of the virus on Chicago area crow populations. The death rate among crows not previously exposed to West Nile was quite high.

Whether a similar spatial association between early-season crow deaths and residences of WNV-infected case-patients will be evident in future seasons is unknown, as an estimated 81% of the Chicago-area crow population is thought to have died in 2002.

The problem with West Nile is that, once a population has made it through the initial exposure, death rates plummet, and West Nile Virus has been endemic in Africa for decades. Also, an 81% mortality rate–though quite high–is still quite a step down from 95%.

However, there is another virus deadly enough to account for the steep decline in the African vulture population; the avian flu, which in its more virulent form has a very high mortality indeed.

It spreads very rapidly through poultry flocks, causes disease affecting multiple internal organs, and has a mortality that can approach 100%, often within 48 hours.

Vultures, like crows, are very susceptible to avian flu. As of April, that virus had already made large inroads into the African subcontinent, including areas close tto where vulture drop offs have been observed.

Since then, the virus has appeared in Djibouti and South Africa as well.

Given the extremely poor nature of the public health infrastructure in most of Africa, birds could drop out of the skies like rain and the rest of the world would not know for months, if not years. If avian flu is decimating vultures, one would expect similar mortality rates in other bird populations–especially crows–but population declines in species other than vultures might not be as easily noticed.

If the Hn51 virus is making heretofore unnoticed inroads into Africa, it will soon be endemic in many of the same areas where AIDS is found, giving the virus easy access to an immune-compromised human population, with all that that implies.

AIDS patients are testing grounds for new diseases. Diseases that would otherwise be to weak to resist the human immune system live on in a sufferer from AIDS, which gives them time to evolve defenses and strategies for fighting the immune system.

Up to now, the bird flu virus appears to be less lethal when transmitted by one person to another, but if the virus ever evolves into a form more deadly to humans, it will probably do so in Africa.