Category: Uncategorized

Got a pressure cooker…

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August 1941. Coffee County, Alabama. “Josh Smart family participates in the FSA Food for Defense program. Mrs. Eulia Smart says: ‘I never had a pressure cooker before, an’ when I got this one, I canned everything in sight’ — 264 quarts since spring.” Medium format nitrate negative by John Collier for the Farm Security Administration.

We never did get a pressure cooker in our house. With the war on, items like that stopped being available. My grandparents up in Duchess County, NY had one though. Still, my mom did her best putting up what we grew in our Victory Garden. Just took a heck of a lot longer than what her own mother could crank out with that pressure cooker.

Irish court rules Subway “bread” ain’t real bread

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In a judgement published on Tuesday, the court ruled that the bread served at Subway, the US chain that hawks giant sandwiches in 110 countries and territories, could not in fact be defined as bread because of its high sugar content…

the court pointed out, Ireland’s Value-Added Tax Act of 1972 draws a distinction between staple foods – bread, tea, coffee, cocoa, milk and “preparations or extracts of meat or eggs” – and “more discretionary indulgences” such as ice-cream, chocolate, pastries, crisps, popcorn and roasted nuts.

The clincher was the act’s strict provision that the amount of sugar in bread “shall not exceed 2% of the weight of flour included in the dough”.

Eeoough! I don’t add any sugar to the bread I bake for myself, every week. Not even a teaspoon to kick off the yeast. Just not my inclination or style. Two-percent of the weight of flour in the loaf is a helluva lot of sugar.

Trying to build in an early sugar addiction or what?

Blonde Vikings? Not really…

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Getty Images

“The Vikings had a lot more genes from Southern and Eastern Europe than we anticipated. They frequently had children with people from other parts of the world. In fact, they also tend to be dark-haired rather than blond, which is otherwise consider an established Viking trait,” says Eske Willerslev…

However, the Viking’s diverse genome doesn’t just stem from people from elsewhere traveling to their settlements. In fact, they were avid travelers, and historically, we know them best for their plundering and murdering raids abroad. But this genetic study sheds new light on who went where.

“The Danish Vikings went to England, while the Swedish Vikings went to the Baltic, and the Norwegian Vikings went to Ireland, Iceland, and Greenland. However, the Vikings from these three ‘nations’ only very rarely mixed genetically. Perhaps they were enemies or perhaps there is some other valid explanation. We just don’t know…”

Shucks. There goes another movie role for blonde weightlifters.

Think Tik-Tok users will vote for Fake President?

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It’s not often folks whose cultural lives are crapped on by an incompetent government get to respond in a timely, effective manner. I’m going to presume that Tik-Tok users aren’t feeling all warm and fuzzy about the meathead in the White House…how he’s screwing over their cultural life.

15% of Tik-Tok users are going to be first-time voters in a couple of months. Can you imagine a better opportunity to express your contempt for the buffoon who tried to crush their communal chat and creativity?

Thousands of birds falling from the sky in American Southwest

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Allison Salas/New Mexico State University

Thousands of migrating birds have inexplicably died in south-western US in what ornithologists have described as a national tragedy that is likely to be related to the climate crisis.

Flycatchers, swallows and warblers are among the species “falling out of the sky” as part of a mass die-off across New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Arizona and farther north into Nebraska, with growing concerns there could be hundreds of thousands dead already, said Martha Desmond, a professor in the biology department at New Mexico State University (NMSU). Many carcasses have little remaining fat reserves or muscle mass, with some appearing to have nose-dived into the ground mid-flight…

Historic wildfires across the western states of the US could mean they had to re-route their migration away from resource-rich coastal areas and move inland over the Chihuahuan desert, where food and water are scarce, essentially meaning they starved to death. “They’re literally just feathers and bones,” Allison Salas, a graduate student at NMSU who has been collecting carcasses, wrote in a Twitter thread about the die-off. “Almost as if they have been flying until they just couldn’t fly any more.”

Folks here in New Mexico been talking about this for days. At first, we thought it was just something local. We figured on climate change. Waterways are turning bad as much as trees and vegetation are dying off. It’s just more widespread than we ever imagined.