Delicious Peace

Need a fresh cuppa Joe? Think about ordering some Mirembe Kawomera Ugandan coffee next time you stock up.

Mirembe Kawomera (mir´em bay cow o mare´a) means "delicious peace" in the Ugandan language Luganda. It is the name of a Ugandan cooperative of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian coffee farmers.

The farmers of the Mirembe Kawomera Cooperative are a courageous example of people of faith working together for peace, tolerance, and economic justice.

Thanks to the good folks at Thanksgiving Coffee (who have been doing the whole fair trade thing forever) we can get the product of this co-op's toil right here in the USofA. And lest you suspect your pruchase might only line the pockets of fat Americans:

On October 1st Thanksgiving Coffee wired $2,500 to the co-op's bank account in Uganda. This is an advance on future rebates from sales of Mirembe Kawomera Coffee, and will enable a dramatic expansion in coffee production this year in Uganda.

That money is being used to purchase hand-cranked coffee pulping machines, of which the co-op has only had one to date, thus limiting their production capabilities.

Jake Sutton: MIA

So, yeah... I'm still here. Here's a little catch-up:

• My efforts at work on the superultramegaubercrazy-high priority project have come to a rather frustrating result so far thanks to interoperability problems between ColdFusion 5 and Oracle9. Every time we hit the Oracle9 database it causes the memory usage of the ColdFusion server to climb, with that memory never being released. This eventually causes the connection to the database to die with an S1001 Memory Allocation Error, which requires a ColdFusion restart to fix the problem (until the memory allocation builds back up again). Super-fucking-duper.
• The Big Blue Couches rock. While we are trying to keep the pets off them, it's obviously futile. At least the puddles of Mingus hair come off the ultra-luscious blue microsuede without a problem. I'm just extra-pleased with the fact taht I can lie completely prostrate on the big sofa without touching either arm.
• The Wife and I have been to the hotbox yoga a total of three times so far. I am enjoying it quite a bit, though I think I may have overstretched my back the last time out. We hope to squeeze a couple more classes into our two week trial period.
• My motorcycle wrenching buddy Erik and his wife are inches away from having their baby boy. Very exciting times for them!
• I'll be brining the second turkey of the month for Thanksgiving festivities starting tonight. If you haven't brined a turkey or at least eaten the product of said process, I can't even express how much you need to try it.
• I'm almost done with the Tales of the Otori trilogy. I highly recommend all three books.
• Now let's turn the lens outward a bit:
  • Winners seem few and far between at American Music Awards -- The hour we watched was pretty worthless.
  • BitTorrent to block links to pirate flicks -- Smart. There will always be way to find torrents of pirated material, though.
  • Breastfeeding appears to reduce diabetes risk -- Huh... Of course this is one of those studies that will eventually be conflicted by another study that says "breastfeeding give you brain tumors" or something. Kind of liek the red wine is good/bad for you studies.
  • The Xbox 360 is out - and sold out. Reviews are mostly so-so, and it might have a few bugs still. They call it the "bleeding edge" for a reason, eh?
  • Oh, and Paris Hilton got attacked by her pet kinkajou (which the press generally has been calling a "monkey" - obviously, it's actually a Pokemon). Thankfully, it looks like she may not get to keep the varmint -- Just the fact that she named it "Baby Luv" is a clear case of animal abuse.

And thus concludes today's category smorgasbord.

Freak of the Week: Vincent Gallo

I've always thought Vinnie Gallo was an odd duck. Consider this bit of drama surrounding his film The Brown Bunny:

Roger Ebert called the film "the worst in the history of Cannes" to which Vincent Gallo responded that Ebert was a "fat pig with the physique of a slave trader". Ebert paraphrased a remark of Winston Churchill and responded that "although I am fat, one day I will be thin, but Mr. Gallo will still have been the director of 'Brown Bunny'". Gallo then put a "hex" on Ebert's colon, to which Ebert responded that "even my colonoscopy was more entertaining than his film".

That's kooky.

Then I saw this: Vincent Gallo's Sperm $1 Million

If the purchaser of the sperm chooses the option of natural insemination, there is an additional charge of $500,000. However, if after being presented detailed photographs of the purchaser, Mr. Gallo may be willing to waive the natural insemination fee and charge only for the sperm itself.

Good to know Vincent has "no cripples" in his family history.

Ticky Tacky

Little boxes, on the hillside...(A gorgeous/frightening panorama of suburban sprawl in California.)

La Fee Verte

Damn Matt to hell. He sent me this link and any adverse consequence is entirely his to bear... I have long been a sucker for the mystique built up around absinthe. Anything that might have contributed to Van Gogh lopping of his ear can't be all bad, right? Right? Well, you know what I'm getting at. Plus, I like anise/liquorice flavors, so I bet I'd dig it.

So then comes this: The Mystery of the Green Menace

So Breaux decided to make some himself. He found a French-language history book with "pre-ban protocols," a vague description of how absinthe was made back before it was outlawed. Armed with the protocols, he prepared a batch in the lab. The result? "Not very good," he concedes. "I couldn't imagine that being the most popular liqueur in France."

He got his chance to taste the real thing in 1996, when a friend spotted a bottle marked "old French liquor" at an estate sale. They were asking $300, and Breaux, seeing it was a vintage Spanish Pernod Tarragona absinthe, immediately wrote a check. When he got it to his lab, he plunged a syringe through the cork, extracted one precious sip, and downed it. "It had a honeyed texture, distinct herbal and floral notes, and a gentle roundness uncharacteristic of such a strong liquor," he says. "Those protocols were crap."

So, Ted Breaux used his gas chromatography-mass spectrometer to analyze some old, pre-ban absinthe and has figured how to distill something approaching the real thing. (Breaux calls the stuff you can get in the Czech Republic, etc. these days "mouthwash and vodka in a bottle, with some aromatherapy oil.")

"It's like an herbal speedball," he says. "Some of the compounds are excitatory, some are sedative. That's the real reason artists liked it. Drink two or three glasses and you can feel the effects of the alcohol, but your mind stays clear - you can still work."

Breaux has hooked up with a distiller in France and you can order his goods online -- shipped via courier -- for around $150 a bottle. Yikes. I don't even spend that kind of scratch on Scotch, and I know I like Scotch.

But I am sorely tempted...

Damn you, Matt.

No way! A cool Hummer?

Looks like GM may pull off something I never considered possible: A Hummer I actually think is cool looking. Cosmetics aside, though, it's still a Hummer, and therefore still stupid.

More Tattoo Stuff

Highlights from Needled (which anyone with any interest in skin+ink should read daily):

• To Die For Clothing -- T-shirts and other fun kit with designs by actual tattoo artists.
• BellaVendetta.com [NOT SAFE FOR WORK] -- BellaVendetta seems sort of like SuicideGirls, except with more of a fetish angle ("Every shoot I do is like an entire art project. Today, we will be exploring zombie clown porn. Every aspect of it is an art." - The italics are mine.), male models ("I want to get many more boys. It's funny because pornography is such a male dominated business, yet, I have the hardest time getting boys naked. They're all so self conscious."), and perhaps less drama.
• The World of Tattoo -- An encyclopedic book on tattoo. Apparently filled with trivia like: Catherine The Great had incredibly obscene tattoos, which she believed increased her sexual attractiveness.
• Inked Magazine -- A glossy tattoo magazine? I got my subscription. Did you?
• Coast Guard tightens rules on tattoos -- One of the guys in my motorcycle class was an Air Force recruiter. He told me I could still get into officer training at my age with my Aerospace Engineering degree and technical career background. He said the ink would be a problem, though. I told him no worries. ;)

Katrina Tattoos

In Katrina's wake, a tattoo boom in New Orleans

Tattoo artists report a surge in demand for designs that celebrate New Orleans: fleur-de-lis patterns, "NOLA," after the city's widely known abbreviation, and even a symbol modeled after the weather-map depiction of hurricanes.

Between returning residents, construction workers pouring into the battered city and the National Guard troops preparing to pack up and head home, demand has been brisk.

It is interesting that tattoos have become mainstream enough for just about anyone who lives through a significant event (9-11, Katrina, etc.) will at some point think to themselves "I should get a tattoo to commemorate this." Heck, there are firefighters that have never set foot in New York who have gotten FDNY memorial/tribute ink just because of the "brotherhood" in the job.

I think that's great.

I never eat a pig

Wow. I've never seen a police officer with so much visible (and basically un-hidable -- he's got one on his hand and at least a couple on his neck) tattoo work. I'd like to hear about how much fuss he's run into from his bosses and from citzens.

Getting In

Malcolm Gladwell's article about Ivy League admissions in the New Yorker is a bit of an eye-opener:

In the nineteen-eighties, when Harvard was accused of enforcing a secret quota on Asian admissions, its defense was that once you adjusted for the preferences given to the children of alumni and for the preferences given to athletes, Asians really weren’t being discriminated against. But you could sense Harvard’s exasperation that the issue was being raised at all. If Harvard had too many Asians, it wouldn’t be Harvard, just as Harvard wouldn’t be Harvard with too many Jews or pansies or parlor pinks or shy types or short people with big ears.

Why do people gotta hate?

HOTTness

Amina Munster: Redefining Beauty

I like SG because it shows that you don't have to conform to the blond bombshell standard of perfection to be beautiful, and Amina Munster truly exemplifies this. Amina is a gorgeous, heavily tattooed amputee who lost her leg and the tips of her fingers due to lack of circulation and oxygen after nearly drowning as a child. You can read more about her experience in her BME interview. Since her debut on Suicide Girls in 2002, she has never shown her missing leg in any of her photos. That is, until today.

Some knockout content at Needled (compare with the standard promo at INKEDblog, which has been a pretty steady letdown since I found it).

Of course, I had to forward the article on to my tattooist, Fish, who has been known to have a bit of an amputee fetish... ;)

Well, crap.

Cranberry juice no benefit for kidney stones?

In both, the cranberry juice increased urine levels of calcium and oxalate. Levels of brushite did decrease, but this substance causes a different type of kidney stones (known as brushite stones), which are comparatively rare.

Not that I've been hitting the Ocean Spray in hopes of avoiding another kidney stone. It was just kind of nice to have the idea that there was something that could help.

Nano-nano

Molecular motors push liquid uphill

Droplets of liquid have been moved uphill by molecular motors designed to manipulate Brownian motion.

While other researchers have found ways to make drops of liquids move before, what is new here, says David Leigh at the University of Edinburgh, is the use of molecular motors to achieve it: “This is the first time you can use molecular-level motion to move a macroscopic object. OK, so it’s only a tiny droplet – but it’s a start.�

How very Diamond Age!

Best are the "you might also do this" scenarios:

The so-called “nano-shuttles� could also create a range of different types of smart surfaces, such as adhesive surfaces that can be switched on and off, or surfaces that can be switched from one colour to another.

Brave new world, indeed. I can't wait until I can finally customize the color of my flying car!

Leavin' on a Jet Train

Plans for high-speed rail between Wyoming and New Mexico rolls on

Organizers envision the "Ranger Express" traveling about 110 mph and connecting Cheyenne, Wyo., Denver and Albuquerque, N.M., and cities in between. The plan will need cooperation not only from voters but also members of Congress and commercial rail companies.

Interesting. I wonder if the economies of the cities along this proposed line actually support the idea of building it. Or if people are just banking on the "if you build it they will come" idea.

[Ta, Garret]

Trappist Tragedy

Monks run out of the world's best beer Brings a tear to the eye, it does. Those Belgian monks make some fine brew.

Xtreme Hawai'i

The X-Games kids of today have nothing on the old traditions of our fiftieth state. Check out Tom "Pohaku" Stone. He's a surfer and a woodcarver. He hand carves traditional wooden surfboards. Even more interesting is the so-called lava sled:

Hölua, or heÿeholua (to slide together or as one entity) , refers to the ancient art of surfing mountain slopes and lava fields on a specialized Hawaiian sled, a papahölua, constructed of wood lashed together with coconut fiber that is capable of attaining speeds up to 50 mph+ over rock lightly covered with pili, a grass native to Hawai'i.

Fifty miles per hours?! Gads! Sounds dangerous to me.

Oh, yeah, it is:

He has the scars to show for it.

Wearing just a tank top and shorts and reaching speeds of up to 70 mph on a sled standing only four inches above ground, Stone once ran into a steel post sticking up from the grass during a demonstration in a slope on Maui, tearing an 18-inch gash in his left thigh.

In another crash, Stone broke his neck. It hasn't stopped him.

"You can't even imagine what it's like to be head first, four inches off the ground, doing 30, 40, 50 miles an hour on rock," Stone said. "It looks like you are riding just fluid lava. It's death-defying ... but it's a lot of fun."

So yeah... Any friends I have living in Hawai'i who are still recovering from massive bodily injuries should make sure never to look up Tom Stone, OK? Thanks.

Cool Kids

Really cool invention brings teens awards

Today, the young inventors say, U.S. drivers use about 7.9 billion gallons of fuel each year to run their air-conditioners, which draw power from the engine. By adopting their contraption - which taps into the electrical system, using fans to blow hot air through five Peltier chips and then releasing cold air - they say the country stands to save 3.9 billion gallons of fuel annually, or about $10 billion based on current gas prices.

Furthermore, the product would free drivers from Freon - which despite improvements, remains an ozone-depleting chemical in current air-conditioners. The Peltier chips, which they purchased on eBay for $9.99 each, have a life span of 20 to 30 years and an unfaltering cooling capacity. And like every component in the Space Beast, which can be minimized in size to about 2 inches in width, the chips are recyclable.

Wow. Way to go!

Note to Self:

Never buy an Acura Integra.

ICE

Interesting idea: Store your "in case of an emergency call this person" number in your phone as "ICE".

A Man's Man

Kenyan grandfather, 73, kills leopard with hands

The leopard sank its teeth into the farmer's wrist and mauled him with its claws. "A voice, which must have come from God, whispered to me to drop the panga (machete) and thrust my hand in its wide open mouth. I obeyed," M'Mburugu said.

...

"This guy is very lucky to be alive," Kenya Wildlife Service official Connie Maina told Reuters, confirming details of the incident.

Because we love tough old geezers around here.