Kingston Rossdale, son of Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale was sporting quite the ensemble. He looks positively medieval in that fur vest. Hopefully it's faux.
Selasa, 29 Maret 2011 | 07.00 | 0 Comments
Kingston Rossdale, son of Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale was sporting quite the ensemble. He looks positively medieval in that fur vest. Hopefully it's faux.
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Kingston Rossdale is fashionable...
Kingston Rossdale, son of Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale was sporting quite the ensemble. He looks positively medieval in that fur vest. Hopefully it's faux.
Meg Ryan's son Jack Henry
Meg Ryan's son Jack Henry is all grown up. More disturbing than the state of Meg's face is her son's freakishly long weird hand. Click it and check it out. Scary!
Kelly Clarkson in Hawaii
Kelly Clarkson was on vacay in Hawaii and she wore a swimsuit. Big shocker. She doesn't look too bad at least she found a suit flattering for her body type unlike Ke$ha.
Pink and her baby bump...
Pink took to her twitter account and shared a photo of her baby bump. She's not too huge yet, but that will come soon enough. Wonder if it's true that she's expecting a girl. I think this is one Hollywood "bad girl" that is doing things right. No arrests, mug shots, DUI's or drug drama. The other nice thing is that she got married THEN got pregnant. How refreshing.
Rabu, 23 Maret 2011 | 03.39 | 0 Comments
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Brangelina Family all in one frame...
Now here is something you don't see everyday. Angelina Jolie and the entire family all in one shot. Including the twins who make only the rarest of appearances. You have to admit, that is one hell of a good looking family. Wonder how long it'll last? At least for the time being they have slowed down on the baby making (and acquiring).
Nicki Minaj and a big plastic dick...
Nicki Minaj decided to pull one out of her huge ass onstage and whipped out a big dildo. Really? And it's a white one? I didn't think white ones got that big. In any event I take it we are supposed to be shocked or maybe turned on? I really can't figure it out. I guess when you have Lady Gaga to compete with, a big plastic wiener is about as good as it gets.
Jennifer Love Hewitt needs a stylist!
Jennifer Love Hewitt dresses like an old lady. Why does she do this when there are so many fashion choices out there and I'm sure she's not strapped for cash... and those purple shoes with that hideous two tone dress? Awful! Even the purse is ugly.
Taylor Momsen almost... but not quite.
Taylor Momsen could be rather pretty but it's so hard to tell with all that black shit around her eyes. I suppose she's trying to be edgy and taken seriously but she sort of misses the mark. Hey, at least she is way better than Ke$ha whose voice is like fingernails on a chalk board.
Pink still looks like a dude...
Don't get me wrong, I like Pink, really I do but even being pregnant the chick looks like a dude. I'm sure her kid will be adorable I mean how can you go wrong with a hottie like Carey Hart for your baby's daddy?
Selasa, 15 Maret 2011 | 19.44 | 0 Comments
What’s the difference between dirt and soil? Well, dirt is the stuff we wash out of our clothes. Soil is the loose surface layer of the earth’s crust in which plant roots develop. Quoting Ralph Inge, “All of nature is a conjugation of the verb ‘to eat.’” And, ultimately, the soil eats us all. We must learn to value our soil. All life is tied to the thin layer of topsoil covering the land. Soil chemistry determines whether civilization can be supported or not. Some civilizations apparently became extinct because they did not understand the importance of their soils. Lierre Keith, in her book “The Vegetarian Myth,” refers to topsoil as “fossil soil” to emphasize the fact that this precious resource takes millennia to form. According to the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, it takes 500 years to form an inch of topsoil. And like fossil fuel, we’re using it up at an unsustainable rate. According to the USDA, one-third of U.S. agricultural land is eroding faster than the sustainable rate. The “sustainable rate” is the acceptable rate of soil loss. There are no figures for the proportion on U.S. agricultural land where top soil is increasing. Perennial pastures improve soil structure and fertility and decrease erosion losses. Pastures build topsoil!
Take an apple and imagine that it represents the earth. Now cut it into quarters and discard three of them, since three quarters of the earth’s surface is covered by water. Now cut the remaining quarter in half. One of these sections represents desert, swamps, mountains, and the Arctic and Antarctic regions, so discard it. Slice the remaining section lengthwise into four equal parts. Now you have four 1/32nd sections of the apple. Discard three of them, as they represent areas of the world which have rocky soil too poor for any type of food production, are too wet for food production, or are urban areas. Carefully peel the remaining section. This small bit of peel represents all the soil which humans depend on for food production (Wyoming Agriculture in the Classroom, 2008).
But wait a minute! What about the grasslands which occupy 40% of the earth’s land surface (World Resources Institute)? “Crop production” and “food production” are NOT synonymous. This is the flawed mindset that agriculture means crop production and that farming means cropping. This mindset assumes that pasture-based livestock systems are less productive than cropping systems, and that pasture-based systems are less productive than confinement systems. These assumptions usually compare single-species pasture-based livestock systems on less productive soils with crop production on highly productive soils. Rarely are integrated, multiple species grazing systems considered, nor are these two philosophies compared on soils of equal productivity. The irony here is that this country’s most productive soils developed under the Midwest’s tall grass prairie. And the prairie was well managed by the Native Americans. But wait! Didn’t the Native Americans “live lightly on the land?” Once again, we’re confronted with a badly flawed worldview.
“At the time of Columbus the Western Hemisphere had been thoroughly painted with the human brush. Agriculture occurred in as much as two-thirds of what is now the continental United States, with large swathes of the Southwest terraced and irrigated. Among the maize fields in the Midwest and Southeast, mounds by the thousand stippled the land. The forests of the eastern seaboard had been peeled back from the coasts, which were now lined with farms. Salmon nets stretched across almost every ocean-bound stream in the Northwest. And almost everywhere there was Indian fire.” (Mann, 2006)
From fire created and maintained prairies and managed forests, to earthworks and settlements, the American landscape by the time of European contact had already endured thousands of years of modification by large Native American populations. The pristine wilderness view, to a large extent, is the invention of 19th-century romantic and primitivist writers like Henry David Thoreau and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Denevan, 1992). The reality is that the impact of native peoples was nearly ubiquitous, even in areas with comparatively sparse Indian populations. Many scholars now believe there were more than 90 million inhabitants of the New World when Christopher Columbus first set sail for the Indies (Denevan, 1996).
The climate responsible for the eastward extension of the tall grass prairies disappeared thousands of years ago, but manmade fires preserved it in areas such as southern Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and parts of Ohio by halting the process of ecological succession which would have resulted in these areas becoming dominated by trees as the natural climax vegetation (Williams, 1989). Further east, forest management with fire produced an environment that benefited wildlife and humans. The effectiveness of these practices is demonstrated by the observations that bison (Bison bison) once roamed along the east coast from New York to Georgia (Mann, 2006) and that elk (Cervus canadensis) have been observed in every continental state except Florida (Manning, 1997). “When Lewis and Clark headed west … they were exploring not a wilderness but a vast pasture managed by and for Native Americans” (Lott, 2002).
The popular misconception of pre-European North America as a “wilderness” reflects a lack of understanding of pre-Columbian North American conditions and practices, and a modern environmentalist ethic (Mann, 2006). “The post-Columbian abundance of bison,” was largely due to “Eurasian diseases that decreased [Indian] hunting,” according to Valerius Geist, a bison researcher at the University of Calgary (Geist, 1998). The huge herds of bison that were described by early European settlers were a symptom of the destruction of the human-animal-environment system that the Native Americans had operated for centuries before European contact, rather than an example of the “natural”, undisturbed grassland-wildlife system. Thus, the massive, thundering herds were pathological, something that the land had not seen before and was unlikely to see again (Geist, 1998, Mann, 2006). The prehistoric human imprint on the North American landscape was masked by the decimation of Native American populations as a result of exposure to Old World diseases, for which they had no immunities.
Charles C. Mann, in his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, writes:
“When the newcomers [European settlers] moved west, they were preceded by a wave of disease and then a wave of ecological disturbance. The former crested with fearsome rapidity; the latter sometimes took more than a century to tamp down, and it was followed by many aftershocks. “The virgin forest was not encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” wrote historian Stephen Pyne, “it was invented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” Far from destroying pristine wilderness, that is, Europeans bloodily created it.
“By 1800 the hemisphere was thick with artificial wilderness. If “forest primeval” means woodland unsullied by the human presence, Denevan has written, there was much more of it in the nineteenth century than in the seventeenth.
“The product of demographic calamity, the newly created wilderness was indeed beautiful. But it was built on Indian graves and every bit as much a ruin as the temples of the Maya.”
Despite the horrible pestilences of the 15th through 18th centuries, the physical health and condition of the plains-dwelling Native Americans were far more robust than those of their contemporary Europeans in the 19th century. Explorers who first contacted the Kiowa and other bison-dependent nations documented that the diet of these people was almost exclusively meat-based. Observations made during the 1830s recorded that it was rare to find a male of the Cheyenne tribe less than six feet (183 cm) tall, while among the Osage people in the Kansas area few were less than six feet tall, and some were seven feet (213 cm) tall (Catlin, 1844). In addition, there was no evidence of the chronic diseases already observed in European populations (Taubes, 2008).
The European settlers suffered from their own flawed mindsets. They referred to the Great Plains as the Great American Desert, because of its lack of trees. This reflected the European farming mindset typical of the 18th and 19th centuries (Manning, 2007). They failed to recognize the value of grassland and its true potential, as well as its unique requirements. Governmental policies and the settlers’ farming practices were ill-suited to the Great Plains. Areas of natural grassland, the result of an interaction between climate, topology, soil, plant, grazing animals, and man-made fire, were plowed out for crop production. The topsoil, our nation’s greatest natural resource, was no longer protected (and increased) by a protective layer of an adapted perennial plant community. When the next drought occurred, as they periodically do in that region, the catastrophe known as then dust bowl began. Top soil was lost at a phenomenal rate. By 1934, The Yearbook of Agriculture announced that “100 million acres have lost all or most of their topsoil, another 125 million acres are about to and 35 million acres cannot grow crops of any kind.”
"The ultimate meaning of the dust storms of the 1930s was that America as a whole, not just the plains, was badly out of balance with its natural environment. Unbounded optimism about the future, careless disregard of nature’s limits and uncertainties, uncritical faith in Providence, devotion to self-aggrandizement - all these were national as well as regional characteristics." Robert Worster
I recently attended the 11th Annual Oregon State University Extension Small Farms Conference. There were many young people among the six hundred people attending. I find this exciting and encouraging, since the average age of this nations farmers, a steady decreasing group, has been increasing for many years. The future of agriculture in this country depends upon young people taking up the calling of producing food for those who don’t. I learned a lot and met a number of interesting folks. It is critical, I believe, that these young farmers understand that grass farming is the agricultural model for the 21st century.
Williams, G. W. 2002. “Are There Any ‘Natural’ Plant Communities?” in Wilderness and Political Ecology: Aboriginal Influences and the Original State of Nature, in C. E. Kay and R. T. Simmons, eds. Salt Lake City, UP: University of Utah Press. 2002, 179-214.
Williams, M. 1989. Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
World Resources Institute. “Grassland extent and change.” Washington, DC http://www.wri.org/publication/content/8269. Retrieved 15 March, 2011.
Wyoming Agriculture in the Classroom. 2008. “The Earth as an Apple: Wyoming Science, Social Studies, & Mathematics.” http://www.wyomingagclassroom.org/. Retieved 15 March, 2011.
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Changing Mindsets
But wait a minute! What about the grasslands which occupy 40% of the earth’s land surface (World Resources Institute)? “Crop production” and “food production” are NOT synonymous. This is the flawed mindset that agriculture means crop production and that farming means cropping. This mindset assumes that pasture-based livestock systems are less productive than cropping systems, and that pasture-based systems are less productive than confinement systems. These assumptions usually compare single-species pasture-based livestock systems on less productive soils with crop production on highly productive soils. Rarely are integrated, multiple species grazing systems considered, nor are these two philosophies compared on soils of equal productivity. The irony here is that this country’s most productive soils developed under the Midwest’s tall grass prairie. And the prairie was well managed by the Native Americans. But wait! Didn’t the Native Americans “live lightly on the land?” Once again, we’re confronted with a badly flawed worldview.
“When Lewis and Clark headed west … they were exploring not a wilderness but a vast pasture managed by and for Native Americans” (Lott, 2002).
Images of woodlands, unsullied by human presence, and of the Great Plains (or Prairie, in Canada) with its huge herds of bison (Bison bison) may come to mind when we think about pre-European North America. But this popular image of pre-Columbian North America as a pristine paradise is incorrect. When Europeans first arrived in North America, they found anything but a primeval landscape. Instead, they encountered a land significantly altered by humans through the use of fire, sophisticated agricultural techniques, mining, and road and mound building (Mann, 2006).
“At the time of Columbus the Western Hemisphere had been thoroughly painted with the human brush. Agriculture occurred in as much as two-thirds of what is now the continental United States, with large swathes of the Southwest terraced and irrigated. Among the maize fields in the Midwest and Southeast, mounds by the thousand stippled the land. The forests of the eastern seaboard had been peeled back from the coasts, which were now lined with farms. Salmon nets stretched across almost every ocean-bound stream in the Northwest. And almost everywhere there was Indian fire.” (Mann, 2006)
From fire created and maintained prairies and managed forests, to earthworks and settlements, the American landscape by the time of European contact had already endured thousands of years of modification by large Native American populations. The pristine wilderness view, to a large extent, is the invention of 19th-century romantic and primitivist writers like Henry David Thoreau and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Denevan, 1992). The reality is that the impact of native peoples was nearly ubiquitous, even in areas with comparatively sparse Indian populations. Many scholars now believe there were more than 90 million inhabitants of the New World when Christopher Columbus first set sail for the Indies (Denevan, 1996).
The climate responsible for the eastward extension of the tall grass prairies disappeared thousands of years ago, but manmade fires preserved it in areas such as southern Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and parts of Ohio by halting the process of ecological succession which would have resulted in these areas becoming dominated by trees as the natural climax vegetation (Williams, 1989). Further east, forest management with fire produced an environment that benefited wildlife and humans. The effectiveness of these practices is demonstrated by the observations that bison (Bison bison) once roamed along the east coast from New York to Georgia (Mann, 2006) and that elk (Cervus canadensis) have been observed in every continental state except Florida (Manning, 1997). “When Lewis and Clark headed west … they were exploring not a wilderness but a vast pasture managed by and for Native Americans” (Lott, 2002).
 |
| Bison grazing in the Tallgrass Prairie Nature Preserve, Osage County, Oklahoma |
“When the newcomers [European settlers] moved west, they were preceded by a wave of disease and then a wave of ecological disturbance. The former crested with fearsome rapidity; the latter sometimes took more than a century to tamp down, and it was followed by many aftershocks. “The virgin forest was not encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” wrote historian Stephen Pyne, “it was invented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” Far from destroying pristine wilderness, that is, Europeans bloodily created it.
“By 1800 the hemisphere was thick with artificial wilderness. If “forest primeval” means woodland unsullied by the human presence, Denevan has written, there was much more of it in the nineteenth century than in the seventeenth.
“The product of demographic calamity, the newly created wilderness was indeed beautiful. But it was built on Indian graves and every bit as much a ruin as the temples of the Maya.”
Despite the horrible pestilences of the 15th through 18th centuries, the physical health and condition of the plains-dwelling Native Americans were far more robust than those of their contemporary Europeans in the 19th century. Explorers who first contacted the Kiowa and other bison-dependent nations documented that the diet of these people was almost exclusively meat-based. Observations made during the 1830s recorded that it was rare to find a male of the Cheyenne tribe less than six feet (183 cm) tall, while among the Osage people in the Kansas area few were less than six feet tall, and some were seven feet (213 cm) tall (Catlin, 1844). In addition, there was no evidence of the chronic diseases already observed in European populations (Taubes, 2008).
The European settlers suffered from their own flawed mindsets. They referred to the Great Plains as the Great American Desert, because of its lack of trees. This reflected the European farming mindset typical of the 18th and 19th centuries (Manning, 2007). They failed to recognize the value of grassland and its true potential, as well as its unique requirements. Governmental policies and the settlers’ farming practices were ill-suited to the Great Plains. Areas of natural grassland, the result of an interaction between climate, topology, soil, plant, grazing animals, and man-made fire, were plowed out for crop production. The topsoil, our nation’s greatest natural resource, was no longer protected (and increased) by a protective layer of an adapted perennial plant community. When the next drought occurred, as they periodically do in that region, the catastrophe known as then dust bowl began. Top soil was lost at a phenomenal rate. By 1934, The Yearbook of Agriculture announced that “100 million acres have lost all or most of their topsoil, another 125 million acres are about to and 35 million acres cannot grow crops of any kind.”
"The ultimate meaning of the dust storms of the 1930s was that America as a whole, not just the plains, was badly out of balance with its natural environment. Unbounded optimism about the future, careless disregard of nature’s limits and uncertainties, uncritical faith in Providence, devotion to self-aggrandizement - all these were national as well as regional characteristics." Robert Worster
I recently attended the 11th Annual Oregon State University Extension Small Farms Conference. There were many young people among the six hundred people attending. I find this exciting and encouraging, since the average age of this nations farmers, a steady decreasing group, has been increasing for many years. The future of agriculture in this country depends upon young people taking up the calling of producing food for those who don’t. I learned a lot and met a number of interesting folks. It is critical, I believe, that these young farmers understand that grass farming is the agricultural model for the 21st century.
 |
| Breaking Prairie Sod, Camrose, Alberta, 1900 from this website |
"The Last of the Virgin Sod"
by Rudolph Ruste
We broke today on the homestead
The last of the virgin sod,
And a haunting feeling oppressed me
That we’d marred a work of God.
A fragrance rose from the furrow,
A fragrance both fresh and old:
It was fresh with the dew of morning,
Yet aged with time untold.
The creak of leather and clevis,
The rip of the coulter blade,
And we wreck what God with the labor
Of a million years had made.
I thought, while laying the last land,
Of the tropical sun and rains,
Of the jungles, glaciers and oceans
Which had helped to make these plains.
Of monsters, horrid and fearful,
Which reigned in the land we plow,
And it seemed to me so presumptuous
Of man to claim it now.
So when, today on the homestead,
We finished the virgin sod,
Is it strange I almost regretted
To have marred that work of God?
References
Catlin, G. 1844. Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians, London. Republished in 1973 by Dover Publications, Inc. New York, NY.
Denevan, W.M. 1996. Carl Sauer and Native American Population Size. Geographical Review 86:385-97.
Denevan, W.M. 1992. The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 82:369-85.
Geist, V. 1998. Buffalo Nation: History and Legend of the North American Bison. Stillwater, MN: Voyager Press.
Keith, Lierre. 2009. The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability. Crescent City, CA: Flashpoint Press.
Lott, D.F. 2002. American Bison: A Natural History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Mann, Charles C. 2006. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Vintage.
Manning, Richard. 1997. Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics and Promise of the American Prairie. New York: Penguin.
Pyne, S. 1982. Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Stanturf, J. 2009. Use of Fire by Native Americans.The Southern Forest Resource Assessment Summary Report. Southern Research Station, USDA Forest Service.http://www.srs.fs.fed.us/sustain/report/fire/fire-06.htm. Retrieved 25 January, 2011.
Taubes, Gary. 2008. Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. New York: Anchor Books.
USGS. 2006. Regional Trends of Biological Resources – Grasslands.Prairie Past and Present. Fig. 2. http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/habitat/grlands/pastpres.htm. Retrieved 27 January, 2011.
Williams, M. 1989. Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
World Resources Institute. “Grassland extent and change.” Washington, DC http://www.wri.org/publication/content/8269. Retrieved 15 March, 2011.
Wyoming Agriculture in the Classroom. 2008. “The Earth as an Apple: Wyoming Science, Social Studies, & Mathematics.” http://www.wyomingagclassroom.org/. Retieved 15 March, 2011.
Reese Witherspoon is average...
Reese Witherspoon was caught by the paparazzi after a work out. She looks average at best, sweaty and dishelved... like most people after going to the gym. Unfortunately for her the photos are out there. So maybe she looks average but as a Hollywood star she just looks like shit.
Ke$ha in a bikini...
Ke$ha is in a bikini and it's not looking good. I suppose she looks like most of the women on the beach these days, but really, a one piece would have flattered her a lot more than this weird contraption. But then again, it's Ke$ha... what do ya want?
Alicia Silverstone is so fat...
Just kidding! Alicia Silverstone is totally pregnant but she is missing that expectant mom glow. Instead she looks sorta greasy, dirty and disheveled... kinda like most of the "real" pregnant ladies out there.
Snooki and her ass....
Here is a shot of Snooki and her ass in a bikini. I don't get the whole Jersey Shore craze. I've watched it a few times and really, it just nauseates me. I love, LOVE reality TV... I watch everything from Survivor to Big Brother but The Shore? Just stupid. GTL? Goofy Tanned Losers as far as I'm concerned.
Vanessa Hudgens is a lesbian?
Vanessa Hudgens had a few more racy photos "leaked" to the press. This time it looks like one is a rather gnarly shot of her crotch, of course it's censored but if you look closely, (and you know I did) it still looks like the girl could use a good razor or a trip to the bikini wax shop. Included were some shots of Vanessa kissing a girl and it looks like she liked it. It would explain the whole dating Zac Efron thing. Rumor has it that they are both gay and used each other as a cover. It's hard to say... but interesting none the less.
Rabu, 09 Maret 2011 | 05.33 | 0 Comments
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Gisele Bundchen has her flaws...
Gisele Bundchen posed for some photos showing a nicely packed ass and a little side boob. I don't find Gisele particularly attractive and even less so now that I caught a glimpse of her back. It looks like some prehistoric lizards backbone. She also has some skinny odd looking arms. Oh well, we can't all be perfect.
There now. Wasn't that fun?
Audrina Patridge has downsized...
Where in the hell is the rest of Audrina Patridge's boobs? Looks like she swapped her big old inflated tittays for smaller implants. Now she has a big dent (aka tit pit) in the center of her chest or maybe she always did but it was smothered in silicone.
Foxy Brown is one hot mess...
Foxy Brown is not so foxy. Played out tattoos, missing tooth, saggy boobs and awful hair. Looks like some slapped a burnt up cinnamon roll on top of her head. It doesn't even match the rest of her weave. I kinda like the bracelets.
Mike Starr Found Dead
Well, I guess we knew this was coming. Mike Starr was found dead at his home.Former Alice in Chains bass player Mike Starr, who went public with his drug problems on the reality TV show "Celebrity Rehab," was found dead in a Salt Lake City house, police said on Tuesday, nine years after the rock band's singer died of an overdose. Starr was 44.
A spokesman for the Salt Lake City Police Dept. said officers responded to call about a possible body at a residence southwest of downtown earlier in the afternoon.
"There is nothing to indicate that this was foul play by another individual," the spokesman said.
Bummer. I watched the season of Celebrity Rehab while he was on it and honestly, I didn't see him making it without relasping. Mike was just too hard core and angry. Still, that sucks.
Senin, 07 Maret 2011 | 09.35 | 0 Comments
Suri Cruise is 4.
FOUR years old and still sucking on a binkie. Can we say, issues? That is not normal. No way. The pediatricians will tell you to take the bottle away at 1 year old. I have done this successfully twice. Of course I still suck on a bottle now and then but that is a whole other issue.
Anyway, in a perfect world you are supposed to wean a baby of the bottle at about 1 year of age... the pacifier needs to go as soon as they have enough teeth to chew through the thing. The fact that Suri still needs the "comfort" of a binkie shrieks definite issues going on there. Sad. Really sad.
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Suir Cruise has issues...
Suri Cruise is 4.FOUR years old and still sucking on a binkie. Can we say, issues? That is not normal. No way. The pediatricians will tell you to take the bottle away at 1 year old. I have done this successfully twice. Of course I still suck on a bottle now and then but that is a whole other issue.
Anyway, in a perfect world you are supposed to wean a baby of the bottle at about 1 year of age... the pacifier needs to go as soon as they have enough teeth to chew through the thing. The fact that Suri still needs the "comfort" of a binkie shrieks definite issues going on there. Sad. Really sad.
Sabtu, 05 Maret 2011 | 03.43 | 0 Comments
Chris Brown has bleached his 'fro and taken a video of his dick. I guess if you like length instead of girth then you'll love Chris Brown's penis photo. Of course Chris doesn't have any balls, but we knew that already. It gives the phrase "I'ma gonna Chris Brown ya..." a whole new meaning. If you want to see the photo click HERE. Of course it's NSFW and neither is Chris Brown.
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Chris Brown Penis Photo
Chris Brown has bleached his 'fro and taken a video of his dick. I guess if you like length instead of girth then you'll love Chris Brown's penis photo. Of course Chris doesn't have any balls, but we knew that already. It gives the phrase "I'ma gonna Chris Brown ya..." a whole new meaning. If you want to see the photo click HERE. Of course it's NSFW and neither is Chris Brown.
Jumat, 04 Maret 2011 | 14.54 | 0 Comments
Something is seriously wrong with Katie Holmes. She just does not look right and hasn't for a while. I just read a bio on Tom Cruise and trust me, that Scientology stuff is crazy. Just bananas. And they all worship the ground Tom walks on. Their beliefs while at first seem rather normal and logical, after a while things take a weird turn... the farther they get into it the more out there it gets. Tom is way, way into it and of course Katie is required to participate to the fullest.
I think Katie should get the hell out and run for her life. The bummer part is that she will not be able to take their child Suri. That is simply not allowed. Just like Tom's other kids with Nicole Kidman. After the divorce those kids stayed with Tom and are still active in Scientology. I don't think Katie had a real grasp on what she was getting into with Tom. She was swept up into all the excitement that turned into craziness rather quickly.
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Katie Holmes looks wretched...
Something is seriously wrong with Katie Holmes. She just does not look right and hasn't for a while. I just read a bio on Tom Cruise and trust me, that Scientology stuff is crazy. Just bananas. And they all worship the ground Tom walks on. Their beliefs while at first seem rather normal and logical, after a while things take a weird turn... the farther they get into it the more out there it gets. Tom is way, way into it and of course Katie is required to participate to the fullest.I think Katie should get the hell out and run for her life. The bummer part is that she will not be able to take their child Suri. That is simply not allowed. Just like Tom's other kids with Nicole Kidman. After the divorce those kids stayed with Tom and are still active in Scientology. I don't think Katie had a real grasp on what she was getting into with Tom. She was swept up into all the excitement that turned into craziness rather quickly.
Jake Gyllenhaal is naked...
Dayum! Jake Gyllenhaal is getting naked and I like it. I know... despite all the women he's dated, they say he's gay. He kind of looks gay here. But I'll tell you what... that is something I would not mind seeing in MY bed, any day or night.
Kamis, 03 Maret 2011 | 06.34 | 0 Comments
Justin Bieber flipped off the paparazzi and I don't blame him. Apparently someone clocked his girlfriend Selena Gomez in the face as they were getting to their car. Instead of putting a beat down on the offender, Beiber decided to flip them off. Possibly the most manly thing Justin has done thus far. He actually looks kinda sexy with that band aid bird.
That said... I'd hit it. Next year.
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Justin Bieber got mad...
Justin Bieber flipped off the paparazzi and I don't blame him. Apparently someone clocked his girlfriend Selena Gomez in the face as they were getting to their car. Instead of putting a beat down on the offender, Beiber decided to flip them off. Possibly the most manly thing Justin has done thus far. He actually looks kinda sexy with that band aid bird.That said... I'd hit it. Next year.
Selasa, 01 Maret 2011 | 12.21 | 0 Comments
Christina Aguilera got herself arrested for being so damn stinking drunk she couldn't take care of herself after her boyfriend was arrested last night for a DUI. Christina has been on a downward spiral for a while now. Girlfriend better pick herself up out of the gutter and check into rehab before she loses her kid and her career.
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Christina Aguilera got arrested!
Christina Aguilera got herself arrested for being so damn stinking drunk she couldn't take care of herself after her boyfriend was arrested last night for a DUI. Christina has been on a downward spiral for a while now. Girlfriend better pick herself up out of the gutter and check into rehab before she loses her kid and her career.
Nature Votes Last
Temperature, humidity, soil, sunlight, electricity, vital force, express themselves primarily in vegetable existence that furnishes the basis of that animal life which yields sustenance to the human race. What a man, a community, a nation can do, think, suffer, imagine or achieve depends upon what it eats.
The primary form of food is grass. Grass feeds the ox: the ox nourishes man: man dies and goes to grass again; and so the tide of life, with everlasting repetition, in continuous circles, moves endlessly on and upward, and in more senses than one, all flesh is grass.
From “In Praise of Bluegrass,” an address by John James Ingalls (1833-1900)
Senator from Kansas from 1873 to 1891.
Originally printed in the Kansas Magazine in 1872.
Senator from Kansas from 1873 to 1891.
Originally printed in the Kansas Magazine in 1872.
We frequently forget that the law of unintended consequences still rules. Our actions, like medications, have multiple effects. Some effects are desirable, some are undesirable. Without a thoughtful consideration of all of these effects, we cannot make intelligent decisions. And even after such thoughtful consideration, we are still likely to be surprised by some previously unknown effects. A rancher once told me his version of this law – “Nature Votes Last!”
I visited a lovely ranch property several years ago. The owners had recently relocated from an area where the quality of the roads made buying a new car unwise. But now they were driving on good roads, so they had purchased a nice, new, white Cadillac. She loved their new car. While the county roads were asphalt, their long ranch drive was not. He soon tired of washing mud off of their new, white Cadillac. His solution? Pave the drive!
They were in the early stages of developing this property. They hadn’t constructed sufficient interior fencing, so they couldn’t control the movement of their cattle. The cows were pretty much free to wander where ever they chose, and they were very happy that this passive solar energy collector had been installed. Every night they gratefully camped on this warm asphalt. Anyone who’s spent time around bovines knows what they do soon after standing up. So instead of washing mud off her new, white Cadillac, he was washing off … processed forage!
Nature votes last!
For the last thirty years, the official dietary policy of the United States Government has been that every American needs to be on a low-fat, reduced-cholesterol diet to prevent cardio vascular heart disease, obesity, and other chronic diseases. This policy was enacted by people who believed that dietary saturated fat and cholesterol raised the level of cholesterol in the blood, and that this increased one’s risk of developing heart disease. The obvious solution, equivalent to paving the ranch drive, was to eat less saturated fat and cholesterol.
It would be one thing to be surprised by some unforeseen effects of such a sweeping policy, but it’s quite another that they failed to properly consider all of the information before enacting this disastrous policy. These policy makers ignored the fact that there was little data to support their position and a great deal to refute it (Taubes, 2008).
Here’s a quick test (thanks to Barry Groves):
Consider two groups of animals:
Group one - cattle, gorillas, and sheep
Group two - humans, lions, and polar bear
Which of these two groups of mammals are “designed” to digest a low fat diet?
Digestion and ingestion are different processes. Clearly the first group of mammals ingest a low fat, high fiber diet. But mammalian enzymes cannot hydrolyze (digest) the cellulose and other complex carbohydrates that make up plant fiber. Microorganisms, however, produce enzymes that can. Herbivorous mammals live in a symbiotic relationship with these organisms. The host mammal possess digestive systems that permit fore-gut fermentation (the cattle and sheep, for example, via their reticulo-rumen), or hind-gut fermentation (the gorilla, for example, via it’s enlarged colon and cecum). In either case, the products of these fermentation processes are short-chain, volatile fatty acids (principally acetic, propionic, and butyric acids). Interestingly enough, 60 – 80 % of a ruminant’s (Pond, 2005) and 66 % of a gorilla’s (Popovich, et al., 1997) energy needs come from these fatty acids. These animals digest a high fat diet!
Humans are meat eating cooks.
All living tissue requires energy for maintenance. Our basal metabolic rate, when adjusted for total body size, is the same as other primates (Leonard and Robertson, 1997). By eating a truly nutrient dense diet, one based upon animal products, our ancient ancestors no longer needed to maintain the large digestive tracts required by mammals living on high fiber diets. Our large intestine, or colon, is less than 60 percent of the mass that would be expected from our total body mass (Martin, et al., 1985). In fact, the volume of the entire human gut is only 60 percent of what would be expected from our total body mass (Aiello and Wheeler, 1995). This reduction in human gut size frees up at least 10 percent of the expected basal metabolic rate for our brain’s requirement (Aiello and Wheeler, 1995). In addition, the cholesterol (and other nutrients, including choline) provided by a diet based on animal products provided the vital “raw material” to build the brain (Leonard, et al., 2007). Plant-based diets lack these vital nutrients.
One can wish that our survival did not require killing. But, as Ralph Inge said, “All of nature is a conjugation of the verb ‘to eat.’” Wishing won’t make it so. The USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010 continues the pattern of recommending carbohydrate-based diets, with restricted consumption of red meat, full-fat dairy, cholesterol, saturated fat, and salt. The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee ignored peer-reviewed scientific research demonstrating the harm this approach has caused and will continue to cause (Hite, et al, 2010). Given what we know about our nature, we should not be surprised by the epidemic of obesity and chronic disease we are experiencing in this country, and around the world.
Nature votes last!
References
Aiello, L., and P. Wheeler. 1995. “The Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis: The Brain and the Digestive System in Human and Primate Evolution.” Current Anthropology 36:199-221.
Bramble, D. M., and D. E. Lieberman. 2004. “Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo.” Nature 432:345-352.
Hite, A.H., R.D. Feinman, G.E. Guzman, M. Satin, P.A. Schoenfeld, R.J. Wood. 2010. In the face of contradictory evidence: Report of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans Committee. Nutrition 26 (2010) 915–924
Kaplan, H., K. Hill, J. Lancaster, and A. M. Hurtado. 2000. “A Theory of Human Life History Evolution: Diet, Intelligence and Longevity.” Evolutionary Anthropology 9:156-185.
Leonard, W. R., and M. L. Robertson. 1997. “Comparative Primate Energetics and Hominid Evolution.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 102:265-281.
Leonard, W. R., J. J. Snodgrass, and M. L. Robertson. 2007. “Effects of Brain Evolution on Human Nutrition and Metabolism.” Annual Review of Nutrition 27:311-327.
Martin, R. D., D. J. Chivers, A. M. MacLarnon, and C. M. Hladik. 1985. “Gastrointestinal Allometry in Primates and Other Mammals.” In Size and Scaling in Primate Biology, W.L. Jungers, ed., 61-89. New York: Plenum.
Pond, W. G., A. W. Bell. Eds. 2005. Encyclopedia of Animal Science. New York: Marcel Dekker.
Popovich, D. G., D. J. A. Jenkins, C. W. C. Kendall, E. S. Dierenfeld, R. W. Carroll, N. Tariq, and E. Vidgen. 1997. “The Western Lowland Gorilla Diet Has Implications for the Health of Humans and Other Hominoids.” J Nutr 127: 2000-2005
Stanford, C. B., and H. T. Bunn. 2001. Meat-Eating and Human Evolution. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Taubes, Gary. 2008. Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. New York: Anchor Books.
Wrangham, 2006. “The Cooking Enigma.” In Early Hominin Diets: The Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable, P. Ungar, ed,. 308-323. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wrangham, R. 2009. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. New York :Basic Books.
Wrangham, R., W., J. H. Jones, G. Laden, D. Pilbeam, and N. L. Conklin-Brittain. 1999. “The Raw and the Stolen: Cooking and the Ecology of Human Origins.” Current Anthropology 40:567-594.