text:
"Why is everything broken in this county?..."
Hampshire is a large county in England, well-known for the production of ham products (may not contain ham). It is not remarkable for its large numbers of chavs - most counties have far too many - but for the remarkable situation that has existed since the 1940s between the said chavs and the remainder of the population, most of whom are dull, uptight, awfully middle-class, or dead. Or all of the above. However, two final strongholds against the chav epidemic still hold out: Lymington and New Milton, towns that nevertheless have ghettos filled with chavs. The British Army has been contracted to firebomb this area ASAP. Many from the local populace have called for crucifixions to take place for chavs, either that or just nail their hand to a table with a rusty nail.
The County[edit]
|Motto: "Every little
|Official language(s)
|English, Chav Speak, Gridder (Forest talk)
|Tesco vouchers magic mushrooms organic roadkill
Hampshire is large and square by the standards of English counties insomuchas it is not very large or very square. In particular, it is not as large as Wyoming, or as square. Since Hampshire disowned its most pointless cities, Portsmouth, Southampton, Northampton and West Ham, its principal settlements can be considered to be Winchester, established in the 1st century as a retirement home, and Basingrad, which has been a landfill site for at least 8000 years (although its current, rapid growth started on the 17th of September, 1825, the exact date of invention of the railway station).
A deep-seated rivalry exists between the two, which has led to the county being effectively split into two factions: Eastleigh, Fareham and Andover support Basingrad, while Petersfield, King's Worthy and Bishop's Waltham are allied with Winchester. Thare are a few towns which. The major differentiator of Bishop's Waltham is that it is home to the great Anthony Barrow. Anthony Barrow loves Bishops waltham. Who else can save the town from Sainsburys but him. Ahhh...! do not support either side:
- Aldershot
iswas held by the British Army, but was recently taken over by retired regiments of Gurkhas.
- Beaulieu is too posh even for Hampshire, and as such exists as a principality in its own right; it is directly subject to HM the Queen.
- Farnborough does not exist.
- Alresford is a special case. See the relevant section for details.
- Havant, largely dim population, stands alone as Hampshire's premier source of chavs. Southampton is now beginning to contest this title, however, and rumours of World War 2.5 have surfaced. Always damp, best just to keep moving and pass through without stopping. Town Mayor is a horse.
Many places in Hampshire are crowded by grockles, or tourists as they're more commonly known, mainly arriving in caravans and walking around like they own the place, which they often do after purchasing a couple of holiday homes and the odd badger den. Here are some notes from The Grockles Guide to Grockling by Derek Tiffin-Gridder:
- Contrary to popular belief, there are NO milfs in Milford-on-Sea.
- Contrary to popular belief, there are no bunnies in Chewton Bunny - playboy or otherwise. But an orange juice at Chewton Glen will set you back £5.
- Ringwood is still a disputed territory between Hampshire and Dorset - neither of them want it. You will be able to get a bus to the depot in Ringwood, however none make the return journey. Think of it as the Prisoner without the drugs.
- Bournemouth, whilst within the confines of Dorset, has been on loan to Hampshire since it was recorded in the Doomsday book. This is because Hampshire doesn't have any beaches. Well, at least not proper ones. Unless you count that bit of dirt down by the Blackwater river in Brockenhurst. Instead why not experience Hampshire's many marshy areas? We also have many bogs and were the first county to breed cows to eat mud instead of grass.
- Lymington is a great place to pick off other grockles (tourists) with high-powered sniper rifles as the locals do, hang out with the odd old as fuck person in lymington(all of them), do grotty yachtie things, speak in Lymingtonian (which is kind of like a West-country Cockney as its main use is for criminal purposes) and watch young boys on bikes breaking their necks by jumping off an Iron Age monument named Buckland Rings.
- Andover, the great supporter of Blasingrad, is one of the great tourist attractions of the South (after Stonehenge and The Not-So-White Cliffs of Dover). Andover is home to: the Grumpiest Big Issue Seller in the World, many different supermarkets, The Intriguing Road Markings Club, and Andover Iron Age Museum. Also popular is the Shoot-a-Chav games arcade, and the train to Salisbury. It is most definitely not, as some people are lead to believe, in Southampton.
- Burley offers great oppurtunities for you to experience oldy-worldy speed bumps: donkeys. Burley's other navigation obstacles include tourists. The particular strain that affects burley consider cars to be yet another quaint form of wildlife that should be gawped at and possibly fed burgers and toffee.
- Blazingstoke invites you to watch hungover teenagers fall over repeatedly on its ice-rink. Or smash into small ginger children. And Blazingstoke kids are only ginger for one reason...
- Blackfield is actually black due to intense pollution by the gigantic cigarette/computer motherboard that is Fawley refinery. Local prophesies (mainly from Forest gypsies or cackers) states that one day Dick van Dyke will arive to clean the chi-mer-neys once and for all.
- New Milton is well worth a visit if you are looking to become depressed really quickly. It was set up as a leper colony in 1984 but has since fallen on hard times. The town's comprehensive school, Arnewood, recently achieved a pass rate of 98% in car mechanics due to 98% of pupils having special needs and thus not being able to enter the national curriculum. The towns head councillor said recently "we are very proud and my Nissan Bluebird has never run so well!"
Geography & Geology[edit]
Hampshire essentially consists of three regions. The south-west of the county comprises large deposits of sand, forming the foundation for the New Forest (home to dozens of New Forest ponies). In the north and north-east, the landscape consists of ancient beds of rock, while the central region and the south-east are formed from intrusions of mud.
Hampshire to 1066[edit]
Hampshire has been inhabited much longer than anyone cares to remember. The first human inhabitants were Neanderthals, who came over in around 12,000 BCE when, according to local legend, the Devil moved Hell a bit closer to Britain to reduce travel costs, thereby warming the place up and melting the ice that was the result of millions of years of rain and excessive Northernness of latitude. From these first settlers are all modern chavs descended, as borne out by recent genetic studies. These Proto-Chavs, as they are known to modern scholarship, were so disgustingly lower-class that the French Neanderthals dug the English Channel to keep them out. This was completed in around 6000 BCE. Cut off from the sound advice of the Europeans, the Proto-Chavs quickly burned down most of their trees and wiped out most of the native animal species, to such an extent that by 5000 BCE there was nothing left to eat and so the Proto-Chavs turned to cannibalism. They were so busy devouring each other they forgot to burn the New Forest, and this is why there are still trees in the New Forest to this day. In around 4000 BCE the Nazis took pity on them and introduced farming just in time to save the Chavs from extinction, along with a posh kind of pot. It was long believed that these pots represented a significant influx of people from the continent at this time, however new research suggests that in fact the Nazi invasion was very limited in scope and may not have taken place at all.
Shortly thereafter, some Hampshire Proto-Chavs were involved in the construction of the circus at Stonehenge, in response to blackmail from an indigenous tribe of Giants living in Dorset. In 2500 BCE however, according to local tradition, a young Hampshire Proto-Chav named Jack invaded Dorset and defeated the Giants by cutting down their prize beanstalk, whereupon the Chief Giant died of grief. While he was in Dorset, Jack killed a Spaniard who happened to be passing through on the grounds that he did not display a valid passport on demand. Going through his pockets afterwards, Jack found a metal dagger and decided to keep it. And so the Bronze Age began.
The Bronze Age was characterised by Proto-Chavs obeying the dictates of the Nazis, because they thought they were magicians because of their ability to work bronze, whereas this was in fact merely one manifestation of their innate Aryan brilliance at everything. However by 800 BCE the Proto-Chavs had had enough, and built little wooden forts on hills to keep the Nazis out and, when the Nazis tried to reconquer them, the Chavs threw sharpened sticks and slung stones at them until they ran off covering their golden Aryan heads. They then sued for peace, telling the Chavs that if they would let the Nazis live in peace alongside them, they would share the secret of their new discovery. And so the Iron Age began. This may be the origin of the traditional account of the Glorious Revolution, and is certainly why people from Hampshire are the best at everything even to this day, because of all that Aryan interbreeding.
Without the Nazis to tell them what to do, the Chavs soon fell to squabbling with one another, and eventually simply refused to speak to each other. They built more hillforts and hid in them, only coming out to work their fields and shit on them so that they could keep eating the stuff that grew on their shit. Around 300 BCE, a group of Neo-Pagans from Wales arrived in Hampshire, calling themselves Druids, and using cheap tricks, they soon convinced the Chavs that they could do magic and made them sacrifice their friends to the Gods for their amusement. From these Druids it is said are descended all modern Conservatives. Around 150 BCE, a band of warriors arrived from the continent called themselves the Atrebates and asking for shelter, however they then betrayed the Chavs and turned them into slaves. It was only after this that the Chavs found out that in fact the Atrebates were Belgians and they should never have trusted them in the first place. In 54 BCE Julius Caesar, defeated by the men of Kent, invaded Hampshire instead. The poor Hampshire Chavs, with only Belgians to lead them, were crushed in several battles, and Hampshire was conquered. The Belgians too were now slaves just like the Chavs, which the Chavs thought was pretty fair and so they allowed the Romans to stay. This date marks the arbitrarily selected end-date for the era of Prehistory.
After defeating the Belgians, Julius Caesar turned central-Southern England into the county of Hampshire, which means "Land of Ham" in Latin on account of the large numbers of pigs Caesar thought he saw in many areas, such as the New Forest, Andover and Portsmouth. In fact what he was really seeing were Druids in disguise, as ham is and has always relatively rare in Hampshire, somewhat counter-intuitively. It is thought that this may be on account of its name; for pigs are very intelligent creatures, and so, upon hearing the name "Hampshire", they are led into believing that such will be their fate if they go there, and so they avoid the county entirely. As such it is in fact the Druids' fault that pigs are not to be found in Hampshire, which may in part explain why Christianity was so successful in this area. Caesar took over the old Belgian capital and built Roman buildings there, before returning to Rome. The Chavs were then left to govern themselves for a few years, happily pretending to be Romans without actually being Roman, until in 43 CE the Emperor Claudius invaded again and so pissed them off that they decided they didn't like the Romans after all. In 60 CE the men of Hampshire sided with Queen Boudicca of Norfolk in The Great Chav Rebellion, however they were finally defeated and went back to Hampshire dejected. The Druids, who were by this time rapidly evolving into the middle class to avoid being executed for their nasty habit of sacrificing people for fun, profited from this to pin the blame on the Chavs, claiming that they had been loyal all along, when in fact they had stirred up the revolt in the first place, but the Romans swallowed it because they didn't really give a shit and gave them lots of wine and hot baths, which pissed off the Chavs no end. This partly explains why from around the year 200 the Chavs started developing many of their modern favourite past-times; burning rich people's houses and generally screwing them over.
This violence escalated throughout the next 300 years until eventually the Romans got tired of failing to keep order and told them all to fuck off in 410 CE. This brought the Chavs and the middle class to their senses, and they both begged the Romans to come back, but it was to no avail. They realised they were going to have to protect themselves, because the Irish, the Scots and the Saxons were all raiding and invading across the whole of England; unfortunately the social tensions were too great, the two classes were unable to agree who should be in charge, and fell back to squabbling. It was in this political climate that King Arthur came to the throne. He built a big round table in Winchester and made all the Chavs and middle class people sit down together and talk things over. Then he pulled a sword from a stone, lost it in a bet, found a new one in a pond, and beat the Saxons back out of England. All was going well, until Arthur was tragically murdered by his son Mordred. Mordred was then lynched by the Chavs, however the middle class condemned this act, arguing that the death penalty was barbaric and should be abolished; this led to a renewed period of tension and social upheaval, so great in fact that the Chavs forgot how to use pi and starting building rectangular houses instead.
Finally, in 495 CE, a noble Chav emerged with the power and vision to lead Hampshire out of the Dark Ages. His name was Cerdic. He was actually middle class, but in order to avoid taking sides, he pretended he was a Saxon instead. This also helped him trick real Saxons into joining him, and he quickly got himself a massive army with which he then proceeded to conquer Hampshire. He wanted to call his new kingdom "Cerdicland", but the Saxons would have none of it, and made him call it "West Saxon Land" - or Wessex for short. Wessex included a number of neighbouring counties to the West as well, mostly inhabited by sheep-shaggers and/or other inbred rustics. The rustics of Hampshire never really got into sheep-shagging, as most of them lived in the New Forest, where sheep are not very common and they learnt long ago that ponies kick. Cerdic had lots of kids, conquered a few more sheep-shaggers, and then died.
He was succeeded by his son, who did a bit more, and then his son, who did a bit more, so you get the picture, until Wessex was the most powerful kingdom in England. All this time the Chavs stayed quiet, because they were trying to learn English in order to get all the extra housing benefits that the immigrant Anglo-Saxons got. (Some of them didn't think this was fair, and so they founded the BNP.) In the end though the Chavs and the Anglo-Saxons mixed together, and the Anglo-Saxons being of Nazi Aryan origin, this made the men of Hampshire even better at everything. So good in fact, that when the Vikings overran the rest of England, it was the Hampshire-born King of Wessex Alfred the Great who was the only one who could beat them. Unfortunately he died, and the Vikings then overran Wessex too, but the Anglo-Saxon Chavs quickly drove them out again, and then followed it up by conquering the whole of the rest of England too. They were feeling pretty good about themselves at this point, so in 1066 Vikings from Norway invaded again, up in Northumbria. The king, King Harold, beat them at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, but then William the Bastard from Normandy invaded Kent. Harold raced back South, only to find that he had left most of his army behind because not all of them could afford sports cars. The story goes that while he was looking to the North to try and see where on earth his army had got to, a Norman arrow hit him in the arse, killing him instantly. A variant story is that the arrow hit his eye, but this seems like an attempt to cover up the embarrassing truth and can be safely dismissed. One interesting alternative put forward by the historical team at The Elder Scrolls suggests that in fact King Harold did not die, but simply took an arrow to the knee and had to retire to become a palace guard instead. Either way, Wessex was defeated at the Battle of Hastings, and William the Conqueror took over Hampshire.
The Middle Ages[edit]
This section requires expansion.
From the Age of Communism to the Present Day[edit]
In the 19th century, the economic power of Basingrad increased rapidly, and by the end of the century it rivalled that of Winchester. This caused some tension between the two, but major conflict was avoided for some years. However, in the mid-20th century, the vast numbers of chavs presented such a threat the the people of Winchester that war seemed inevitable. Neither side dared openly attack the other, but in 1950 military action was taken by Basingrad, resulting in the first of a series of minor wars and skirmishes.
Alresford War[edit]
|Battle of sexy magic bus lane
The Land Rover driven by Reuben Forrester.
|Conflict: The War on Chavs
|Date: 25th June 1950 - 27th July 1953
|Place: New Alresford
|Outcome: Inconclusive
|United Popely
Black Dam Tichborne
Bournemouth Drug addicts
|some chav with smart price tesco lager
|Lt. Gen. Reuben Forrester
|Gn. Gordon the Tramp
His Land Rover
|1350 chavs
23 assorted chav cars
|Slight damage to paintwork
|371 chavs
2 Ford Escorts
1 Vauxhall Corsa
10 Argos gold chains
The first "proxy" battle between the City of Winchester and the Borough of Basingrad and Deane started on the 25th of June, 1950, when an army of 1,350 chavs attacked Alresford before dawn. Scallies, druggies, truants and other low-grade scum completely overran the north and central part of Alresford, backed by a barrage of poor-quality rap music from loudspeakers mounted on their Peugeot 106s. Resistance was at first very weak, but Tichborne's military leader Reuben Forrester, realising that the area risked being lost to pikey scum, went in with his Land Rover and made a valiant defence against the chavs. It seemed that he might be outmanoeuvred at one point (due to the chavs' skill in executing handbrake turns and donuts) but their badly-maintained Corsas and MkII Fiestas proved inferior to the enemy's military hardware. Lieutenant-General Forrester, who was subsequently awarded a gold ninjastar by the City Council, single-handedly killed 371 chavs but despite fighting the menace for over three years could not ultimately repel his enemy.
To this day Alresford is split; half of the town is retained by ordinary middle-class citizens, but the other half is held in the iron fist of the chav. They tend to dwell and burn things at the Sun Hill rec, which before the war was actually used by children to play ground games such as 'I can spin the fastest' and 'teasing smaller special kids', but the children have been chased away by pikeys with flick knives and novelty lighters. Even the nice corner shop closed down because of all the teenage mothers stealing their next meals while the unknown fathers got wankered at bus stops and woke up in ditches somewhere. If the mothers went to parties, they would end up swapping their children for a fag or a cheap shag to make them feel alive again.
The ordinary citizens, however, spend there time shopping and drinking cups of tea and coffee at Alresford's many coffee shops and going down the pub on a Friday night while the kids pop a pizza in the microwave and watch MTV till their parents wander home.
Alton Tesco Crisis[edit]
In 1959 chavs took control of the East Hampshire district council, based in Alton Towers, and over the next few years enacted changes unfriendly to the aging residents of Winchester. Large areas of council housing were built, benefits were increased 400%, and exports of cheap beer to the rest of the county abruptly ceased as the chavs drank it all. While the Winchester City Council did not initially wish to confront East Hampshire, in summer of 1962 lorries from Basingrad started delivering parts for a new Tesco supermarket to Alton. This would pose a major threat to Winchester, which decided to blockade the town. Roadblocks, overseen by retired policemen and former secret agents, were set up around Alton, and the railway service was permanently delayed. The chavs were shocked by this move, and threatened to attack several enemy cities. Winchester C.C. were well aware that the chavs could destroy almost any city in Hampshire if they were provoked, and after thirteen days of incredible suspense, the blockade was lifted.
Some time later the Tesco supermarket was built, and all the other shops went out of business.
Eastleigh War[edit]
The second, and most famous, proxy war between the powers of Winchester and Basingrad has its origins in the occupation of the old railway town of Eastleigh by Lib Dem forces in the 1940s. In 1945 the country was partitioned between the Conservatives and Labour, but the Lib Dems negotiated a settlement with the two factions to allow them to re-occupy the town. With the competing Labour influence removed, in 1963 chavs, yobs and football hooligans backed by the BNP launched a devastating series of coordinated attacks on the better-off neighbourhoods.
The Liberals fought back mercilessly, bombing council estates and blocks of flats with huge quantities of tea and crumpets. Huge casualties resulted, with appalling numbers of deaths occurring among innocent bystanders, but the nationalist mobs were undeterred. Lib Dem supporters were killed in vast numbers, leading to massive protests by hippies and students against the campaign. Eventually, in 1973, the Lib Dems pulled out completely from the conflict. The few middle class citizens in Eastleigh stood no chance and were overrun. Chavs assumed total control of the town in 1975 when they overran the Borough Council building. Since then, Eastleigh has opposed Winchester in almost every sphere of operations; shootings and muggings in the Winchester area are largely blamed on Eastleigh.
Leigh Park[edit]
Leigh Park is a housing estate just north of Portsmouth, notable for being the largest pile of shit this side of the pond. Leigh Park has had a tory for MP for the past hundred years, despite the fact that everyone in Leigh Park is poor, this may be due to the fact that most people that live there get arrested upon leaving 'their' house. The residents of Leigh Park have a qualification system that is also used in the near by area of Wecock Farm, ASBOs are taken by children between the ages of 5 and 7. The most popular sport in Leigh Park is Murder, this is closely followed by bank robbery and burning, extra points are awarded if the item burnt is a Hobo sleeping on a bench.
Leigh Park park is a major source of spare parts for Ford Cortinas and Ford Capris, available to order from various spare part "suppliers".
Although Leigh Park has no formal gang system, tribal lines are traditionally drawn broadly in-line with the school catchment areas.
Historically the greatest rivals were Broomfield and Wakeford comprehensives. (St. Trinians was modeled on Broomfield with the greatest excesses having been toned down.)
At the height of the "school wars" Broomfield acquired a semi-automatic rifle. So dismayed were the school governors that they issued a statement decrying the low standards to which the school had sunk.
Responding to this criticism the schools PTA (Part time assassins) held a sponsored flick knife throwing contest, raising enough money to be able to donate a FULLY automatic rifle, an Italian made Fucile FAL BM 59, to the school.
School gangs held the annual "Park Parade" where school colours are paraded through the local shopping area. Broomfield's pupils gathering outside of Gregg's while Wakeford choose Iceland.
The ensuing food fight is invariably won by Wakefords. The harder iced up food items proving more than a match for the softer more succulent Gregg's offerings.


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Posts Tagged 'browser'
Tech bytes: Konqueror and Java – Opera on Kubuntu 8.04
Today's tech bytes:
Some very nice people over at Kubuntu's tech support IRC channel brought my attention to the fact that Kubuntu 8.04 doesn't have an LTS version. Apparently, both the KDE 3.5.9 and KDE4 versions have not been given that status as KDE development has been in flux lately. So people, all those Powered by Kubuntu 8.04 LTS post-scripts in my previous posts stand corrected as …Kubuntu 8.04 (KDE 3.5.9).
Ever found the fact that from a fresh install of Kubuntu 8.04, Konqueror's java behavior is a tad odd? No matter what you do, when you enable Tools>HTML Settings>Java, the java setting never sticks. It stays on the website you're visiting but that's it. As soon as you go to some other website, that java setting resets back to disabled. Furthermore, when you restart Konqueror, it's the same deal again.
Tried the latest Opera 9.5 Beta 2/weekly snapshot on Kubuntu/Ubuntu? If you live outside of the US, there's a good chance that your system locale settings are set to use something other than English US by default. It so happens that this causes Opera 9.5b2 to crash with a segmentation fault. In order to enjoy Opera 9.5b2, make sure you have Sun Java set as the default Java version (use this howto) and set your locale to English US (en_US). On Kubuntu 8.04 (KDE 3.5.9) do the following as discussed here :-
- Goto System Settings>Regional & Language>Country/Region & Language
- Click on the 'Locale' tab
- Click on 'Select System Language' and choose 'English US'
- Click 'Apply'
- Restart KDE (log out and then log in) for settings to take effect
I have found the flash support to be a little flaky, at least with Opera 9.5b2. Opera, for me, often suffers from this grey box phenomenon. One moment a flash video works perfectly, other times I'd find grey boxes with audio but no sound. This becomes particularly the case when I'd have two or more tabs with flash video open in them and keep switching between them.
Quick user tip: To set your middle-click options, press the Shift key and then middle-click.
Is it just me or does Firefox 3 RC1 seem faster on Windows XP than on Ubuntu/Linux? For me, FF3RC1 on Kubuntu 8.04 still seems to take a lot more memory than on Windows. I guess their Linux development is slow or something.
Google announced their Google Health service recently. Privacy concerns abound.
That's it for today folks. See ya!
Copyright © 2006 – 2008 Firas MR. All rights reserved.

subset: commoncrawl


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Mountain Confederation's Annual Gagpipper's competition to be held in Confed Camp. Tuesday night o'dark thirty. Come test your skill or just to listen. E-12
Events Open to All
Christian prayer group non-denominational. All are welcome 8PM Battlefield. Look for the Banner.
The War Horn is on display in the merchant area, market street behind the barn, Mon-Fri, 1pm-5pm weather permitting. Guarded by House Darkyard. Come take a look at SCA History!
For Sale
16" English saddle a little worn Olympic brand $75 find me @ Materialis 124
16 Ft. Yurt. 6Ft. Wall. Timber Roof Ring. Used 3 times. New canvas this war. 2 doors. See at Under the Rose on E01. EC Asking $1400.
2 new 16 ft rounds-complete setup. $1200 obo p-u SAT 9th. B08 Black Pearl-Rose or Tristan. Also 10x16 wedge black-yellow used 2 years bo
Agate Burnishers - bone ivory & horn handles - hand carved - also dog tooth and carnelian. Guild of Limners #24.
Arastorm's excellent booklets- cookies, magick and more than you ever needed to know about Anglo-Saxons. #19 Bow St.
ATTENTION WOAD WARRIORS! Feeling a little blue? I have the real thing! Genuine woad imported from Scotland. $4 Limited supply, buy early. Guild of Limners #24.
BAD GARB I and BAD GARB II - Now AVAILABLE From Claus the Toymaker- How do you know you are not in them unless you read them?
Evil Abra has budget amber! Amber rings from $9.95, amber bracelets from $9.95, amber necklaces from $14.95, amber pendants from $9.95, amber earrings from $7.00! Check out our 1/2 price amber boards! Buy $100 worth & get an extra 10% off if you mention this ad! Visit The Gypsy Caravan, #107 Street of Gold, open 'til 11:00 pm nightly!
Bamboo for your construction needs Yumi #83
Bellydancer's veils genuine silk 8 1/2 ftx3 1/2 ft $50 colorful! 19 Bow St.
Blank Books - hand bound in leather, handmade paper, thick & chunky. Fair trade products. $10 - $32 limited supply - Guild of Limners. #24.
WE'RE NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE! Claus the Toymaker will autograph his new book, ASTONISHING TALE OF THE GUMP OF OZ, Monday, Aug. 4 from 11am to 4pm at Poison Pen Press Booth 637
'Bosch' hurdy-gurdy for sale. This is the last one made by the lutier Charles Supplee before his retirement, and is patterned after the one in the Painting Garden of Earthly Delights (15c). Includes heavy wood case, antler tuning key, string cotton, and waist strap. $1900. contact Sir Ogami, Clan Yama Kaminari, E03
Canvas hammock with frame $40 - see Katherin at House of Blacksilver, E11.
Benefit the Chirurgeons-- buy an original Pennsic XXXVII T-shirt. $10. Available from Claus of Burzee, #24 Merchants Row.
Cat got better, vet bills didn't. Car died Monday so...big sale at Fabric Dragon at space #106!
Etched amber awards are at Time Traveling Traders Space #77 Market St.
Evil Abra has a new garb annex! Do you like flax, winter sun and cut loose? Check out our back room garb. Someone has to dress the peasants! Garb, pants, skirts, dresses & shirts in silk, linen and cotton. Very comfy and most is $5 to $20! Mention this ad for an extra 10% off! Visit The Gypsy Caravan, #107 Street of Gold! Open 'til 11:00 pm nightly!
Bad Garb Old Maid card game- Yes we have 'em!- from Claus the Toymaker (Who else?)
Evil Abra says, "Check your silver prices!" We bought last year when silver was $7 an ounce, folk who restocked before Pennsic paid much more- guess whose prices are going to rock!!! Mention this ad for an extra 10% off any purchase of $100 or more! (Bring friends & shop together for the discount!) Visit The Gypsy Caravan, #107 Street of Gold, open 'til 11:00 pm nightly.
Fabric Dragon is not in the merchants guide but is at Pennsic in space #106 Street of Gold. Big Sale!
Finest Amber in the known world is at Time Traveling Traders Space #77 Market Street.
Glass muller & burnishers from England, also Mitchell nibs, vellum, parchment, and hand bound leather books- The Guild of Limners, #24
Vellum - - opaline vellum (sheepskin) direct from England. Finest Quality sale price $25 per sheet. Lovely Dutch sheepskin parchment whole skins $125 can be cut smaller. The Guild of Limners #24, across from the barn.
GOING OUT 4 BUSINESS SALE. Did you see my ad in the Pennsic Handbook?
"Digitescant" Probable pronunciation "dih-jih-tehs-cant." "to eat with one's fingers..." Especially when dining on pulled pork.
Camp furniture, iron work, horse tails $14, beautiful speckled cow hides. Come browse and BS (Be Satisfied). The Crossing #3
Evil Abra says, "You can do research at home - read something fun at Pennsic!" See our vast selection of novels, magickal books & fun subjects. All the books are buy 2 get 1 free all war! Most are 1/2 off cover price as well! visit The Gypsy Caravan, #107 Street of Gold, open 'til 11:00 pm nightly.
Hafla tent 4 sale best offer. Orluk Oasis
Handspun yarn from a 12th c-type flock. Also fiber dyed & undyed. Ongoing spining demo, MTFC Space 26
Harps & Musical instruments all on sale. Harps 20% off. Silvershell Music 43 Broadway.
High quality korean horse bows $399 yumi #83
Evil Abra's empire has expanded! New items include sale book selection, the garb annex & 1/2 price clearance corner! Visit The Gypsy Caravan, #107, Street of Gold. Open 'til 11 pm nightly!
SCA Road Signs- "Fighter Practice Area", "Danger Viking Territory" and many others, some new and very silly. Claus the Toymaker, #24
Is this YOU? Free pics from past wars. Space 26
Mischief, murder & mayhem- is your kingdom involved? See the on-going saga in the diorama. Space 26.
NOT for spinners only- "Spinster's Rules!" Visit Misty Tower, Space 26 to read the list and order a T!
Oxblood leather shovel greaves. New,never worn House Black Hammer N30 804-931-5799 $100
Panther pavillion, 10x10, regent, $500, BEN@SINPIT,E05
Ink-Oakgall, walnut hull, also gallo-tannic ink, absolutely perfectly opaque. $4 per bottle Guild of Limners #24.
Pavilion 4 sale 18X18 6Ft. walls 2 Yrs old Paid 2400 asking 1800 natural* extra ropes ask at Tgertoggs#32 Street of Dreams behind the barn *(color)"Pennsic for Dummies" by Claus the Toymaker - scurrilous, tongue-in-cheek fun, everything you need to know to complete your Pennsic experience.
"Pennsic in a Box" new royalty expansion set this year, limited supply. From Claus the Toymaker #24.
Period pavilions available on site for rent/sale. Rent rebates toward later purchase. Space 26.
THE GUILD OF LIMNERS habitantes in platea mercatores vendunt encusto, penna, libri, pigmenti, colorum diversi, rubia, quadone, omnimodes tinctori et instrumenta clericis necessaria.
Uniquely You dressmaker forms - the only one that corsets properly available on site space 26.
Weld, Woad, Madder, Cochineal, Brazilwood, Longwood - dyes to die for. Guild of Limners #24.
Wolfram's wondrous wares now has the book "Dragons, Demons, Blood, and Gold" poetry by well known proprietor of Jolly Sven's Bargain Pillage, Morgan Bloodaxe. Come turn the pages in space 134.
Wolfram's wondrous wares. We're at the War come see us. We're in space 134 we've got cloak clasps, pouches, and feast gear galore we're your one stop wonderful store.
X-chairs $175 Silvershell Music 43 Broadway.
You! Sew on our machines. We have thread. Space 26.
Yurt for sale. E01 Middle of Dragon Trace. Car died again. Ask for Pente (Wookie) camp Infinity 8-)
12 Step Meeting daily 4:00 pm E07 off Great Eastern Highway Denys the Decadent's Camp AA NA OA SA all welcome.
A new Viking Home Companion CD is now available at the Pillaged Village Midgard Mayhem by T8 Rvaldr Torgarson Live perfomances will be at 7PM on Sunday Wednesday and Friday in front of the village.
ATTENTION BARONY OF STORVIK!! Baronial Court will be at 4:00 Tuesday in the Clan Cambion Encampment in E-15. It is the intention ofTheir Majesties to be in attendance. BYOC [Bring your own chair] is suggested. Very light refreshments.
BARON GUGLIEIMO BARDICCI gratefully extends his artisan jubal to provide his beautious WOAD body art to Pennsic, located at the Guild of Limners (Booth 24). BONA NOTTE!
Bored Scadian at Garments by the goat. #097 red hair and chutzpah. Drop by.
BPAL meet & sniff! Come and share the magic. Tues @4:00. Camp Dancing Fox on E01 Dragons Trace
Brendoken's Baroness luncheon starts at 12:30 in N09, Fletcher RD near the highway. Look for black and green field with a gold star.
By Odin, Snaebjorn this is some place! I shall tell my friends mead is found here in abundance! I have sampled all night. This explains why I still have not arrived. The mead has led me astray but I vow I will find the silver apple!
"Edofication" Probable pronunciation "ehd-oh- fih-kay-shun." "to arrange foods in ways that imitate architectural forms.É" Fun to do with mashed potatoes as a child. High-class restaurants charge a lot for this! A.k.a. "nouvelle cuisine."
Citizens of Brendoken and friends. Come to our Revel at N09, Fletcher Rd near the Highway, at 6P.M. on ... There will be Court.
Costumes by Loren has comfortable cool cotton! Tunics, kaftans and cloaks in celtic knotwork designs. Different sales every day! 166 Fleet Street
Do something with your kid besides sweat! Make colorful medallion cords! Kits at Claus the Toymakers.
Don't miss the Known World Canine meeting Tuesday Aug 5th from noon to 2pm in ®thelmearc Royal. All are welcome!
DRAGON BROCADES, 20% off at Dragon's Magic #25
EXCELLENT QUALITY 100% wools & wool coating at Dragon's Magic #25
FINE ENGLISH NEEDLES, Sold singly. Dragon's Magic #25
Good Gentles......
How much have you spent on your armor?
How much have you spent on your garb?
How much have you spent on your children?
This has been a public service announcemnt from Claus of Burzee, Toymaker.
Free garb and stuff! Please visit E30, the tent with the orange curtains. Help yourself to anything on the mats in the front yard each day till Thurs.
Go see Auntie Arwen at #185 and ask if she is drinking WATER. From Kirsten at Fabric Dragon in #106.
Have you seen the Baroness' Silver Ass?
HOT GLASS - X05 - Tonight - Ask for Erland (Next to Solar Showers)
In training for the squid Olympiad-Cooper's Lake's own Squirty! First up! 100 meter ink shooting and there's the unsuspecting target, over by the Flushies...
Is your child bored? Make a medallion cord! Colors galore! At Claus the Toymaker's Store!
Laurel vigil for Joanna of Northumberland Tues 7PM Ealdormere Royal W17
Open fire medieval cooking Monday SPCA Camp W10 Fires start at noon with consultation at 6PM
SAILMAKERS NEEDLES. 2", 3 1/2", 4 1/2"! Dragon's Magic #25
Silk veiling 3.5mm, 5mm silk/cotton DRAGON'S MAGIC #25
Slavic interest group will meet Wed at 10 am in A&S 3.
STEEL HOOP BONING - 1/2" xl2y $13.95 Dragon's Magic #25
THREAD COUNTERS, 8x-10x metal & glass booth #25
TO THE 2 WOMEN who came to my shop on Thursday and bought 12 yds of purple silk - I found the tag. Please come back for the money I owe you! Dragon's Magic
Wurm- roses r red violets r blue hope to have many more Pennsics w you- TRIS
Yes, I'm Still Here! And my brick-and-mortar fabric store is still in Tunkhannock, PA. The housing market decided to get weird right after War last year so I couldn't make the move I wanted to make. I've consoled myself by buying more luscious wool, linen, and silk...which, of course, I brought for your shopping pleasure, along with corset stays, needles, pins, cheese cloth, etc. (Space 25)
Lost & Found
Lost 2 rings in woman's shower near Cooper Store on Sat AM . Huge sentimental value-Eye ring is a good luck charm and may bring bad luck to finder. Please call cell 585-507-3938 to claim reward and return rings. I'm camped in disability camping, big white wall tent near orange fence on right side, ask for Sue
Feast of St. Elvis- Mon night Camp Famdamily (The usual spot in B08) 8PM-ish. Come celebrate his ascension! Make the pilgrimage!
To all Ostgardrians past & present and future. Come to the annual Ostgards Pancake Breakfast on Mon from 8 to 11 AM. Donations welcome but not necessary E4
A definite sign of the apocalypse-Kibitz has vanished! Griz is trying his best but is just not as follicly endowed and won't wear those goofy pants. We miss you and hope all goes better. The PI Staff.
** Archery Champions ** To the archery champions' team for the Middle Kingdom and their Allies does Demetrious the Undecided send greetings and congratulations. I wish you all good shooting and good fun. Wishing I could be there with you, enjoy.
Farasha & Suad #60 rave "now to the sky" by Tribe O
Ladies of Pennsic, Lord Valdis of Gotland had a birthday on July 26th. I ask you to wish him well, gift him with a kiss or punish him with a spanking, as you deem appropriate.
Single Pagan male looking for Pagan matchmaker to find single Pagan female see Kirk N9 Sunderroak.
Tiger seek champion to ransom him from Midrealm merchant. Space 122 hurry!
Wanted to Buy
House Fallenstar (N12) Aquarium going well. Today we need sharks. Large and toothy. Think Jaws. Ask for Pan Wilhelm Michalik.


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DWTS Season 14 – Oh Come On, That's Not Gonna Happen! Chapter 3
In case you missed chapter 1 and chapter 2, this is a series where I talk about what I see on Twitter that makes me roll my eyes in exasperation or laugh…or just groan in disbelief. 🙂
Once again, we have a series of people who don't seem to read and comprehend the written word all that well…or perhaps they just read too fast. Whatever the case may be, they are a tad annoying. Why, you ask? Well, Huffington Post (awesome site, btw) publishing a post that they very clearly call their "wish list" is NOT a listing of people who are going to be on the show, OR a listing of people actually rumored to be on the show. Please look up the words "wish" and "list". Thank you. 🙂
And really, how many times do Tebow and his reps need to say he's NOT doing the show before people chill on that rumor? Getting sick of his name in my tweetdeck.
What else is annoying me?? What's "not gonna happen"?? Spamming everyone and their freakin brother with "tell them we want Marina Sirtis on DWTS" is NOT going to actually get her on the show. What it will do is piss me, and everyone else who does twitter searches, off…in the extreme. Especially when your Twitter icon is annoying as some are. Really, just stop. I already don't like this person or her fans and I don't even know who she is…oh, and by the way – she will NOT have an impact on ratings one way or the other. Every year a fan group makes this claim….and it's usually the fans of someone I've never even heard of before. Go figure.
Who wants to explain to Xtina's manager that "The Voice" did not beat DWTS in ratings on Monday night?? Do I have to say anymore?? He's probably comparing The Voice's numbers to those of DWTS last season…still wrong. Unless they're both on at the same time, you have no business comparing the numbers. When they were on at the same time, DWTS was beating The Voice easily. BTW, hell of a lead in, that Super Bowl. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the Voice. It's far superior to anything I saw of the X-Factor (admittedly, I got bored early on that one) and it's different enough from AI that I enjoyed it on Sunday night. But I don't like misleading tweets like his – it's what starts turning all the "wish lists" into serious rumors. Very misleading.
Oy Veh – sudden increase in the need to campaign for pros happened just yesterday. Namely Chelsie and Dmitry. People – your campaigning won't be any more effective than that done by the fans of Marina Sirtis. For one thing, they appear to outnumber you (even though it's more repetition by a few tweeters than it is a massive number of people tweeting about it, if you follow me) and for another…if they don't find them a match, they don't find them a match. Usually, it's that simple. I think Tristan's appearance is a bit detrimental to Dmitry, even though I think he's an inch or two taller than Tristan is, because Tristan appears to have wide appeal. Chelsie I'm not worried about. I think she'll be back. But seriously – the show is watched by about 20 million people. Five or five hundred tweets ain't gonna sway them.
Okay, now that I've gotten that off my chest, it's back to pro watch. 🙂


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Brad Yearwood has been firing up the burners to come up with the perfect rabbit recipe. His concoction uses the loin, legs and eventually the full carcass of the critter to create a dish that he hopes top chefs from across the country will appreciate. He'll use his rabbit dish this weekend at the Northeast Regional Chef of the Year competition.
The Easter Bunny visited the Yearwood house a different way this year — on a platter.
Brad Yearwood, executive chef at Cobblestone Creek Country Club in Victor, N.Y., has been firing up the burners to come up with the perfect rabbit recipe. His concoction uses the loin, legs and eventually the full carcass of the critter to create a dish that he hopes top chefs from across the country will appreciate.
"I'm going to take this bunny to Cincinnati and win," he said.
This weekend, April 5-7, Yearwood will participate in the most important contest of his career — the American Culinary Federation's Northeast Regional Chef of the Year competition.
Held in Cincinnati, the competition is judged by some of the nation's most famous chefs. Yearwood, who holds the title of the American Culinary Foundation of Rochester's Chef of the Year, was chosen from a pool of hundreds of chefs to compete. If he wins the regional competition, he advances to the national challenge in Las Vegas.
"It's very prestigious to be with the company of some of the other chefs I'm competing against," he said. "It's the bragging rights — just being able to say that you're the USA Chef of the Year."
The rules of the competition are simple: Choose a protein and make four of the same dishes in one hour. Nothing can be prepared ahead of time, and chefs bring their own materials.
Yearwood's competition is fierce. He's up against a culinary Olympian, an instructor at the Culinary Institute of America and a chef from the Washington, D.C., Convention Center — all master chefs at the top of their careers.
Yearwood said he has tried out his rabbit dish about 15 times, getting advice from other chefs and trying something different each time. He said he wants to be able to prepare the meal with his eyes closed and not miss a beat in the process.
He has competed with the same recipe in smaller culinary competitions in Boston and Cleveland.
"I've taken my rabbit on the road," he said.
At home, he sets up a timer and competes against himself, testing how long it takes to make sausage stuffing, risotto and fiddleheads and asparagus. Yearwood said his recipe showcases many of his skills as a chef, like braising, poaching and working with meats. He's turning his colleagues on to the delicacy of rabbit, too.
"Nobody liked rabbit when they first started," he said. "All the sudden, my cooks, they really like rabbit now."
Yearwood said practice and trial and error have helped him a lot during his career as a chef.
He graduated in 1992 from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park in the Hudson Valley. He got his start as a professional chef in Colorado and later moved back to New York and worked as a chef at the Lincoln Hill Inn in Canandaigua and then at the Genesee Valley Club in Rochester. Even now, as executive chef at Cobblestone, Yearwood said he's still learning, and that's one of the reasons why he enters cooking competitions.
"No matter what I do, I still don't know enough," he said. "I get to learn different skills and see what other chefs are doing."
Former colleague James Neuman, executive pastry chef at the Genesee Valley Club, is also competing in Cincinnati for the title of pastry chef of the year with an almond sponge cake filled with vanilla-bean pineapple compote.
Neuman noted Yearwood's competitors are master chefs, the highest rank in the culinary profession, but "he's definitely got the competitive nature, he knows what he's doing."
Yearwood said his strength in the competition is that he's well prepared.
His weakness?
"Nerves," he said. "I'll probably be competing in front of 100 different chefs."
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Removing Commercials
MythTV does not automatically remove commercials. The system will flag commercials and skip them during playback. It can also transcode recordings between MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 or lossless transcode MPEG-2 and remove a cutlist from the program. Since a list of commercial flags is not a cutlist, it is not removed automatically. This document describes how to remove commercials permanently from the source material.
Removing commercials using mythfrontend
You can remove commercials that have been flagged by editing the recording using mythfrontend. Once you have brought up the timeline editor (press E) you can press Z to load the flagged commercials as a cutlist in the editor. Once the cutpoints are created, you can manipulate them normally in the editor to get the exactly where you want them. It is uncommon for the commercial detection to be perfect all the time so some tweaking may be necessary.
After editing is complete, you can choose Begin Transcoding from the OSD menu or you can also choose to Begin Transcoding from the INFO menu in the Watch Recordings screen under Job Options. This will insert a transcode job into the Job Queue which will convert the recording based on your transcode settings in the recording profiles setup.
Removing commercials from the command-line
You can also remove commercials using the command-line utilities mythcommflag and mythtranscode.
You must have already flagged commercials for this option to work.
Use mythcommflag to create a cutlist by using
mythcommflag --gencutlist
Then use mythtranscode to transcode the recording using the cutlist with
mythtranscode --honorcutlist
You will need the additional standard options to both programs to choose the proper program based on filename or channel and time. Look at the --help output from each program for details on using these options
Automatically removing commercials
In the 0.20 release of MythTV, you can specify a custom command-line option for both the commercial flagging job and the transcoding job. Using this function, you could create a wrapper script for transcoding after commercial flagging that would use the command-line options outlined above.
One such way to implement this is to setup a User Job that uses this script. Save that script as /usr/local/bin/removecommercials and ensure that the script is executable by running:
chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/removecommercials
Set up a user job that runs the following:
removecommercials %DIR% %FILE%
You can do this by following the directions found on the User Jobs page.
Name the user job "Commercial Removal". You can now remove commercials by highlighting the recording in the recording list, hitting the right arrow, selecting "Job Options", and then selecting "Begin Commercial Removal". You may also set up your recordings to automatically run this script after a recording finishes. For more information on doing this, see the User Manual.
Update All Recordings
If you want to update all your recordings to automatically remove commercials, you could use the following SQL statement:
UPDATE record SET autotranscode = 0, autocommflag = 0, autouserjob1 = 1, autouserjob2 = 0, autouserjob3 = 0, autouserjob4 =0 WHERE autocommflag = 1
This SQL statement assumes you've set up the job as User Job 1, and will only update those recordings already set to flag commercials.


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The Central Connecticut volleyball team used a strong defensive effort to defeat Saint Francis (PA) in four sets on Sunday. The Blue Devils recorded 15 blocks as a team and limited the Red Flash to a .097 hitting percentage.
The Blue Devils (8-9, 3-1 NEC) won the first set 25-21 and the second set 25-13, but fell 28-26 in a back and forth third set that required extra points. CCSU rebounded to take the match with a 25-12 victory in the fourth set.
Central was able to limit the Red Flash (6-10, 2-1 NEC) offense to a .097 hitting percentage and just 44 kills over four sets.
The Blue Devils also recorded 15 blocks as a team. The duo of senior Jamie Rademacher and freshman Makenna Lommori led CCSU's net defense. Rademacher assisted on 10 blocks and registered a solo block. Lommori chipped in on eight blocks, most of the time teaming with Rademacher.
The Blue Devil offense was led by Rademacher, senior Emily Cochran and sophomore Rachel Dunlap who all recorded double-digit kills. Cochran led the group with 12, Rademacher had 11 and Dunlap 10. Dunlap led all players with a .500 hitting percentage in the match, she connected on 10 of 18 attacks with just one error.
Lommori posted a match-high 41 assists and contributed 10 digs.
Joining Lommori with double-digit digs was Cochran with 11 and sophomore Brittany Schumacher who posted a match-high 16.
The Blue Devils played their best in the fourth set building a 7-3 lead and then expanding it to 19-12. Junior Veronika Ban served the final six points for the Blue Devils and recorded three aces, including the final point of the match.
The Blue Devils return to action on Wednesday night at Sacred Heart. That match is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m.


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I'm wondering if I can get to Uruguay and back before anyone knows the verdict on Prop 30.
Gov. Jerry Brown's temporary tax measure, aka Prop 30, has a narrow lead but is under 50 percent in recent polls. That result suggests that the contest over whether Prop 30 gets a majority -- and passes -- is likely to be very close.
So close that we may not know whether Prop 30 has won for several days -- maybe weeks -- after election night.
U.S. & World
News from around the country and around the globe
This is true for more than Prop 30. Close contests in California are likely to produce very long waits for a final result.
Why? Because we've changed the way we vote.
Most Californians don't vote at polling places anymore. They vote by mail. Indeed, a majority of Californians vote by mail.
And counting mail ballots is a much slower process than counting votes cast in polling places.
The reason: poll workers automatically verify your vote and identity when you vote in a polling place. But a mail ballot requires more scrutiny, with a check of whether the signature on the mailed-in ballot matches the signature on file with voter registration. And more mail ballots come in later, which extends the count and verification time. As Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation put it in this Associated Press story, "We've given people more avenues to vote, but to ensure there's no fraud and error, we have to take more time to verify the ballots. We've traded speed for convenience."
Your blogger, who voted by mail because he'll be on the road reporting on Election Day, had worried that a post-election trip to an international direct democracy conference in Uruguay would be a problem, since I'd be out of California for the 11 days or so after the election. Now I think my timing might be perfect, since it could easily take that long to figure out who's won Prop 30 and other close contests.


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Funny And Weird Pregnancy Symptoms
Photo credit: PhotoAlto/Alix Minde/PhotoAlto Agency RF Collections/Getty Images
Are you pregnant? Sure, you can take a pregnancy test, but if you take one too early, the answer may not be entirely true. You can make a guess based on your symptoms, but they can be weird and wacky — even if you're not pregnant. We talked boobs, barfing and babies on board with these moms to find out the real deal on early pregnancy symptoms.
"My boobs hurt"
By far, one of the first pregnancy symptoms many of these moms noticed was sore boobs. And we don't mean just a wee bit sore — we're talking real pain. Jenna, mom of two, had a little help to realize that something may be a bit off. "I was lying in bed and my cat walked across my chest, when he stepped on my boob it hurt so bad!" she relates. "That's when I thought, maybe… I took a pregnancy [test] the next morning and it was positive."
Melissa, who lives in Texas, reported she had a similar experience. "With my second and third, my boobs hurt bad," she says. "Like even putting on and taking off my bra, let alone trying to sleep."
"That smell makes me want to hurl"
Other moms noticed that they were triggered by certain smells, and the results weren't pretty. "The smell of bacon made me throw up," remembers Katie from Washington. "I knew something had to be going on, because my love for bacon doesn't usually waver." Kristi, mom of two, unfortunately had a similar experience. "I had cooking first hour (was in school) and we made tuna casserole this particular morning," she shares. "The smell made me sick. I remember looking at my teacher, and all she said was, 'RUN!' because the bathrooms were on the other side of the building."
"That just tastes wrong"
Smell is not the only sense to become amplified and altered during pregnancy. "Maple brown sugar oatmeal tasted salty," explains Lindsay, mom of two. "Like someone took a salt shaker and dumped all of it in the bowl." Emily, mother of four, probably didn't enjoy her experience any more than Lindsay did. "Things tasted different," she tells us. "With the twins, everything tasted like pickles for the first few weeks."
And a couple moms realized that their favorite drinks just didn't taste the same. "I couldn't drink a beer without feeling sick," explains Becky, mom of three. "I liked beer... I liked all alcohol, actually. But it all made me feel nauseous." Crystal, mom of two, had a similar experience. "With my first I went out and had a martini with a friend and I felt strange after drinking it," she says. "Not really drunk, just strange."
"Sleeping is good"
Fatigue is a common complaint of pregnant women, but pregnancy fatigue is far different from what you normally experience. "I slept for an entire Sunday," shares Maureen, mother of three. "I couldn't understand why I felt the greatest fatigue of my life. Four years and three kids later, I still will never forget that feeling of not being able to lift my head from my neck. Possibly because actually having the children causes a similar fatigue?"
Aubrey, who is expecting her third baby, mentioned fatigue also. "I was so incredibly tired," she says. "I'm anemic so I'm used to a certain level of tiredness. But this was a whole different ball game."
"It was just weird"
Pregnancy symptoms are as varied as the moms who experience them, and some moms had experiences that were a little more, shall we say, fun. "I wanted to punch everyone around me. I had a lot of rage," explains Krista, mom of two. Hollie, mom of twin girls, had a few notable symptoms. She tells us, "Sore breasts. Heartburn. Wicked weird dreams about babies and small children." Liz from Massachusetts also had a weird one that just sounds terribly unpleasant. "Gagging while brushing my teeth," she remembers. "For both kids."
Pregnancy is definitely unique for everyone who experiences it. What were your first pregnancy symptoms? Did you have any weird ones?
More on pregnancy
Are you pregnant? The signs of pregnancy
Advanced pregnancy tests scaring moms-to-be
Highway birth takes first-time mom by surprise


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The Handbook of Texas Online
Welcome to the Handbook of Texas — your source for Texas History
Handbook of Texas Women
The Handbook of Texas Women project strives to expand on the Handbook of Texas by promoting a more inclusive and comprehensive history of Texas. Texas women make Texas history, and TSHA wants to significantly recognize the various ways women have shaped the state's history at home, across the state, nationally, and abroad. The impacts of women on Texas history are often overlooked, and as more and more people are accessing information using smartphones, tablets, and other mobile technologies, this project will seize upon the unprecedented opportunities of the digital age in order to reshape how Texas women's history will be understood, preserved, and disseminated in the twenty-first century.
The Handbook of Texas Women project is a statewide educational and content development campaign focused on Texas Women's History by the TSHA for the Handbook of Texas. TSHA is establishing this project to capitalize on the unprecedented opportunities of the information age by updating existing Handbook of Texas entries on Texas women while adding new scholarship, all compiled and accessible for free through our digital portal.
This project is of such importance that it will be led by Dr. Jessica Brannon-Wranosky of Texas A&M University-Commerce, an Executive Advisory Committee, and Managing Editor of the Handbook of Texas, Brett Derbes. The TSHA will ensure that Texas history scholarship is supported, promoted, and disseminated at the highest levels. Through this emphasis on sound scholarship, the Association can provide authoritative and trustworthy information for anyone seeking to learn more about Texas.


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It didn't seem to bother audiences, though: Each and every time the trippy, hypnotic anthem was aired hands would go in the air and the crowd would get noticeably more animated. (This was true even as the week neared its completion.) Thing is, the track isn't quite the normal hit. Jones hit a populist vibe, and successfully kept it weird enough to keep the purists happy as well.
B-side "You!" may be forgotten here, but it shouldn't be: The track utilizes the deep house boom-tchk template, but adds enough sonic elements to keep things from groove-based boredom. And, by "You!"'s end, it turns out that it was almost more interested in the vocal sample repeated the titular phrase than anything else. The Mannheim kids could take a lesson from Jones: Hit the groove, then make sure you add enough to make sure they'll come back for more.


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Watch CBSN Live
Alexander Graham Bell spoke the words "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you," into a phone similar to this one.
Credit: Cyber Telephone Museum/Ron Christianson
This 1879 top box wall set was made with mahogany wood and Viaduct Manufacturing Co. hardware.
The Gower-Bell telephone was the first type of phone that was used in countries like Spain, Japan and England.
The Western Electric folding cabinet was used in hotels, telephone booths and private homes.
The Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange Company's 10 digit automatic wall telephone was the first to use an automatic rotary motion dialer.
Not much is known about the manufacturer of this unique wooden cradle desk telephone dated around 1885.
Made by the Stromberg-Carlson Telephone Mfg. Co., these types of upright desk sets were nicknamed "oil cans" by antique telephone collectors because of its unique shape.
This corner vanity's elegant frame made by American Hardwood Telephone Cabinet Mfg. Co. The telephone hardware was made by Kellogg Hardware.
This upright desk set made by the Chicago Telephone Supply Company is often called "potbelly" because of its curvy shape."
Legend has it that Almon Brown Strowger was a mortician that believed his local operator was directing all business calls to his competitor, who happened to be her husband. Strowger felt that subscribers should have control over calls rather than operators. He patented the automatic telephone exchange a.k.a. dial service in 1891, eliminating the need for an operator to direct calls.
These S.H. Couch Company desk sets were typically used to interoffice communications.
The Magnavox anti-noise desk set is an early example of noise-cancellation technology. The phone began to make gain popularity in the military in the 1920s.
This sleek desk top was made by the De Veau Telephone Manufacturing Company.
The Frankfurt "Bauhaus" Telephone was made by the Fuld & Co. in Frankfurt, Germany.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
This rotary phone was made by the Hungarian Telephone Factory in Budapest, Hungary.
A typical 1940s rotary phone.
A typical 1950s rotary phone.
A common phone in the 1960s through 1980s.
An example of a videophone in the 1960s.
These princess phones were popular from the 1970s through the 1980s.
A typical Dutch phone in 1975.
One of the first videophones by AT&T.
This is how mobile phones looked in the 1980s. It was backbreaking work to to utter the words "can you hear me now?"
Behold the first commercial line of mobile phones launched in 1983.
If you were a teenager in the 1980s, this touch-tone was your best friend.
A typical table-top phone in the 1980s.
Only really important people and early adopters had one of these cell phones.
A typical cordless phone in the 1990s.
The first GSM phones were not sleek or sexy.
The IBM Simon is widely considered the first smart phone.
Nokia dominated the wireless market with cell phones like this one.
The flip phone craze started with this Motorola cell phone.
Available in Japan, the Sharp J-SH04 was the first camera phone.
The first introduction to the "CrackBerry."
Credit: RIM
The first BlackBerry with a color screen.
The Palm Treo was an addictive PDA and phone combination.
Credit: Palm
The T-Mobile G1, also known as the HTC Dream, was the first mobile phone to use Google's Android operating system.
Flip phones were at their peak when the Motorola Razr v3 hit the market.
Credit: Motorola
The highly anticipated Storm was the first BlackBerry with a touchscreen.
The smartphone that arguably changed our lives forever. The iPhone's operating system allowed users to browse full webpages, triangulate positioning with Google maps and easily download apps.
Credit: Apple
This Windows 7 smartphone introduced Microsoft's "metro" user interface.
Credit: Flickr/danielbuechele
An employee of Softbank mobile phone shop displays Apple's new iPhone 6 (R) and iPhone 6 Plus (L) at the company's Omotesando shop in Tokyo, Sept. 19, 2014. Over 200 customers queued up for Apple's new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus before opening the shop.
Credit: Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images


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I started the day with a run in the park. Absolutely gorgeous day. Did a little over two miles. The park runs all along the Han river and there are plenty of bridges that cross.
A little bit late, Meine Schwester, and The Archivist and I headed out to the Korean Folk Village. We thought we were going to see a fortress wall as well, but the subway took much longer than we thought, and then we had to take a 45 minute bus ride that we didn't know about. It totally threw off our day. I was a bit grumpy this day, and I'm sorry. It happens.
But Meine Schwester is always good at cheering me up!
Here is one of those things that they carry royalty in using four big guys. The Archivist was the only one willing to take her shoes off to get in and take the photo.
There was live entertainment, like a tight rope walker. This guy was fucking hysterical. If you understand Korean. Which we didn't.
I originally thought that these guys were waving their streamers with their hands, but then I realized the ribbons are attached to their heads. They would swing their heads around while banging on their drums and defying gravity. Please, try this at home.
The Archivist found these rice snacks. They are covered in honey and sesame seeds. Meine Schwester is demonstrating how to eat them. Sexy, right? Right?
Funny, but the snacks looked a lot like these silk worm cocoons. We watched as a woman spun silk thread from these.
So, after our stressful day riding the subway, a bus, and touring a very empty Folk Village, we headed back to Seoul. We had every intention of going to Seoul tower for the amazing view, but never made it. Ended up going to a Chinese restaurant down the street.
The food was…well, incredible. We thought maybe the cute valet parker told the restaurant to treat us nice. But he denies it. Regardless, we ate more food than we ordered. We ordered a set of potstickers and this is what they brought us.
I loved the way they presented this with the spiderweb top. It was beautiful. And what was even better was that they decided to try out some new potstickers on us. They were filled with tomato, egg, and ham. Breakfast for dinner! Meine Schwester and The Archivist loved them. I ate the original ones instead.
Then the waiter kept bringing us food. I don't remember what else he brought us other than desert! We weren't expecting that either. But it was good. I was so excited! It totally made my day!
Meine Schwester still thinks Chinese food should be Panda Express, but I was totally impressed with what we had.
The rest of Day 5 photos are in My Gallery.


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How to Feed 10 Billion by 2050 Without Destroying the Planet
By 2050, there will be 10 billion people on the earth, and global income will triple. Feeding more people with more money will increase the environmental pressures put on the planet by the global food system by between 50 and 92 percent. If nothing is done, those pressures will push Earth "beyond the planetary boundaries that define a safe operating space for humanity."
That's the starting point of a major new study published in Nature Wednesday that is the first to quantify how food production and consumption impacts the planet's ability to sustain human life.
The food system gobbles up planetary resources in four key ways:
- It is a major contributor to climate change.
- Land use changes required for farming drive biodiversity loss.
- Agriculture uses up lots of fresh water.
- Nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer pollute land and water.
Luckily, the study also mapped a way out of this mess.
"Feeding a world population of 10 billion is possible, but only if we change the way we eat and the way we produce food," research participant professor Johan Rockström at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany told The Guardian. "Greening the food sector or eating up our planet: this is what is on the menu today."
The researchers found that greening the food sector depends on three major changes.
1. Diet
To keep warming below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the world will have to change how it eats. What that means is different for the population at large and for people in wealthy countries like the U.S., but overall, researchers recommended a "flexitarian" diet that eschews meat in favor of beans and nuts.
For people in the U.S., that will mean:
- Eating 90 percent less beef, pork and lamb
- Eating 60 percent less poultry, milk and sugar
- Eating five times more lentils
- Eating more than four times more nuts and seeds
2. Waste:
It's not just about how much we eat, but about how much we throw away. The researchers found that cutting food waste in half would reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture by 16 percent, BBC News reported.
"Tackling food loss and waste will require measures across the entire food chain, from storage, and transport, over food packaging and labeling to changes in legislation and business behavior that promote zero-waste supply chains," Fabrice de Clerck, the director of science at food-system think tank EAT, which funded the study, told BBC News.
3. Farming:
In order to reduce the environmental footprint of food production, farming techniques themselves have to be changed. The study recommended increasing the yields on existing cropland, improving water use and storage and reducing or recycling fertilizer.
The agricultural changes required mean that altering our food system for the better isn't just a matter of consumer choice.
"People can make a personal difference by changing their diet, but also by knocking on the doors of their politicians and saying we need better environmental regulations—that is also very important. Do not let politicians off the hook," research leader and University of Oxford scientist Marco Springmann told The Guardian.
Netflix's 'Rotten' Reveals the Perils of Global Food Production https://t.co/OzWJhzwWZY @foodandwater… https://t.co/iQHoarzFVG— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch)1521472036.0
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
Walmart, the world's largest retailer, will start requiring next week that all its stores in the U.S. deny entry to any customer not wearing a mask, as CNN reported. The announcement comes after months of a pandemic that has led to more than 3.5 million coronavirus cases and more than 130,000 deaths nationwide.
- Starbucks to Require All U.S. Customers to Mask Up - EcoWatch ›
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California, Washington and British Columbia Unite to Protect Forests From Wildfires
Some of the largest wildfires on record have swept across the West in recent years.
- After a Quiet Summer, 'Dangerous' California Wildfire Burns ... ›
- Wildfire in LA Burns 7,000 Acres During Record-Setting Heat Wave ... ›
- Trump Admin Manipulated Wildfire Science to Encourage Logging ... ›
By Douglas Broom
Artificial reefs play an important role in protecting offshore installations like wind farms. Unprotected, the turbine masts are exposed to tidal scouring, undermining their foundations.
Home from home: Reef cubes encourage marine biodiversity. ARC Marine
By Elizabeth Claire Alberts
In 1997, Charles Moore was sailing a catamaran from Hawaii to California when he and his crew got stuck in windless waters in the North Pacific Ocean. As they motored along, searching for a breeze to fill their sails, Moore noticed that the ocean was speckled with "odd bits and flakes," as he describes it in his book, Plastic Ocean. It was plastic: drinking bottles, fishing nets, and countless pieces of broken-down objects.
"It wasn't an eureka moment … I didn't come across a mountain of trash," Moore told Mongabay. "But there was this feeling of unease that this material had got [as] far from human civilization as it possibly could."
Captain Charles Moore looking at a piece of floating plastic in the ocean. Algalita Marine Research and Education
Moore, credited as the person who discovered what's now known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, returned to the same spot two years later on a citizen science mission. When he and his crew collected water samples, they found that, along with larger "macroplastics," the seawater was swirling with tiny plastic particles: microplastics, which are defined as anything smaller than 5 millimeters but bigger than 1 micron, which is 1/1000th of a millimeter. Microplastics can form when larger pieces of plastics break down into small particles, or when tiny, microscopic fibers detach from polyester clothing or synthetic fishing gear. Other microplastics are deliberately manufactured, such as the tiny plastic beads in exfoliating cleaners.
"That's when we really had the eureka moment," Moore said. "When we pulled in that first trawl, which was outside of what we thought was going to be the center [of the gyre], and found it was full of plastic. Then we realized, 'Wow, this is a serious situation.'"
Captain Charles Moore holding up a jar of plastic-filled seawater from a research expedition in 2009. Algalita Marine Research and Education
Since Moore's discovery of the plastic-swirling gyres, there's been a growing amount of research to try and understand the scale of the plastic pollution issue, including several studies from 2020. This new research shows that there's actually a larger quantity of plastic in the ocean than previously thought, and that the plastic even enters the atmosphere and blows back onto land with the sea breeze. Recent studies also indicate that plastic is infiltrating our bodies through food and drinking water. The upshot is that plastic is ubiquitous in the ocean, air, food supply, and even in our own bodies. The new picture that is emerging, scientists say, is of a biosphere permeated with plastic particles right down to the very tissues of humans and other living things, with consequences both known and unknown for the lifeforms on our planet.
How Much Is Really in the Ocean?
In the past 70 years, virgin plastic production has increased 200-fold, and has grown at a rate of 4% each year since 2000, according to a 2017 study in Science Advances. Only a small portion of plastics are recycled, and about a third of all plastic waste ends up in nature, another study suggests.
While new research indicates that plastic is leaking into every part of the natural world, the ocean has long been a focal point of the plastic pollution issue. But how much is actually in the sea?
Moore says it's "virtually impossible" to get an accurate estimate because of the ongoing production of plastic, and the tendency for plastic to break down into microplastics.
"This count is constantly increasing, and it's increasing at a very rapid rate," he said. "It's a moving target."
One commonly cited study, for which Moore acted as a co-author, estimated that there are more than 5.25 trillion plastic pieces floating in the ocean, weighing more than 250,000 tons, based on water samples and visual surveys conducted on 24 expeditions in five subtropical gyres. But even at the time of publication in 2014, Moore said he knew "that was an underestimate."
A more recent study published this year, led by researchers at Plymouth Marine Laboratory, indicates that there's a lot more microplastic in the ocean than we previously thought. When taking samples from the ocean, most researchers use nets with a mesh size of 333 microns, which is small enough to catch microplastics, but big enough to avoid clogging. But the team from Plymouth Marine Laboratory used much finer 100-micron nets to sample the surface waters in the Gulf of Mexico and the English Channel.
"Our nets clogged too, so we used shorter trawls and a specialized technique for removing all the plankton — microscopic plants and biota — from the sample to reveal the microplastics," Matthew Cole, a marine ecologist at Plymouth Marine Laboratory and author of the study, told Mongabay in an email. "This process is quite time-consuming, so it'd be challenging for all samples collected to be treated this way."
The research team at Plymouth Marine Laboratory collecting water samples. Matthew Cole
The researchers found there were 2.5 to 10 times more microplastics in their samples compared to samples that used 333-micron nets.
"If this relationship held true throughout the global ocean, we can multiply existing global microplastic concentrations ascertained using 333-micron nets, to predict that globally there are 125 trillion plastics floating in the ocean," Cole said. "However, we know these plastics keep on degrading, and these smaller plastics would be missed by our smaller 100 micron net — so the true number will be far greater."
Another team of researchers delved down to the seafloor in the Tyrrhenian Sea in the Mediterranean to take sediment samples. They found that microplastic accumulated at depths of 600 to 900 meters (about 2,000 to 3,000 feet), and that certain spots in the ocean, termed "microplastic hotspots," could hold up to 1.9 million pieces per square meter — the highest level ever to be recorded on the seafloor. The results of this study were published in Science in June 2020.
"We were shocked by the sheer number of [microplastics]," Ian Kane, the study's lead author, told Mongabay in May. "1.9 million is enormous. Previous studies have documented much smaller numbers, and … just talked about plastic fragments, but it's fibers that are really the more insidious of the microplastics. These are the things that are more readily consumed and absorbed into organisms' flesh."
A water sample containing plastic. Algalita Marine Research and Education
While these studies shine light on the fact that there's definitely more plastic in the ocean than we think, it still doesn't complete the picture, says Steve Allen, a microplastic expert and doctoral candidate at the University of Strathclyde in the U.K. Large quantities of microplastics still appear to be "missing" from the ocean, he said. For instance, one study suggested that 99.8% of oceanic plastic sinks below the ocean surface layer, making it difficult to detect, but Allen says this doesn't fully explain what's happening to all of the plastic that enters the ocean.
"We're finding some of it," Allen told Mongabay. "But we're … trying to explain where the rest of it went."
Allen and his wife, fellow scientist Deonie Allen, also from the University of Strathclyde, have been working to find their answer, or at least part of it, in an unlikely place: up in the sky.
'Microplastics Are in Our Air'
As the ocean churns and breaks waves, air is trapped in tiny bubbles. When those bubbles break at the sea's surface, water rushes to fill the void, and this causes tiny, micro-sized particles, like flecks of sea salt or bacteria, to burst into the atmosphere. A new study, published in PLOS ONE, suggests that microplastics are entering the air in the same way.
"[Bubbles] act a little bit like velcro," Deonie Allen told Mongabay. "Rather than the bubble going through the plastic soup and coming to the surface and not bringing any of the plastics with it, it actually collects [the plastic] and hangs on to it as it comes up. And when it bursts, the energy from the creation of the jet to fill the hole that's left in the sea … is what gives it the force to eject the plastic up into the atmosphere."
A lot of previous research on plastic pollution in the ocean has assumed that plastic remains in the seawater and sediment, or gets washed ashore. But this study takes a pioneering step to suggest that ocean plastic is entering the atmosphere through the sea breeze.
"This was just the next logical step to see whether what we're putting into the ocean was actually going to stay there, or whether it would come back," Steve Allen said.
A device used to collect air and mist samples to test for microplastics. Steve Allen
To obtain the necessary data for this study, the research team collected air and sea spray samples on the French Atlantic coast, both onshore and offshore. They found that there was a high potential for ocean microplastics to be released into the air, and suggested that each year, 136,000 tons of microplastics were blowing ashore across the world, although Steve Allen said this number was "extremely conservative."
This study specifically looked at microplastics, but the much smaller nanoplastics are likely going into air by the same means, according to the Allens. But detecting nanoplastics in the water or air can be challenging.
While this is the first study to look at the ocean as a source of atmospheric plastics, other research has examined the capacity of land-based plastics to leach into the air. One study, authored by the Allens and other researchers, found that microplastics were present in the air in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain, even though the testing site was at least 90 kilometers (56 miles) from any land-based source of plastic, such as a landfill. This suggests that the wind can carry microplastics over long distances.
"We know that microplastics are in our air everywhere, from the looks of it," Deonie Allen said.
More research needs to be done to understand the implications of atmospheric microplastics on human health, but according to the Allens, it can't be good for us.
A "cloud catcher" used to collect data for research on microplastics in the atmosphere. Steve Allen
"Microplastics are really good at picking up the contaminants in the surrounding environment — phthalates, flame retardants, heavy metals," Deonie Allen said. "That will get released into the body, relatively effectively."
Enrique Ortiz, a Washington, D.C.-based ecologist and journalist who writes on the plastic pollution issue, says that this evidence should be a "wake up" call to humanity.
"The oceans are picking up the plastic that we throw in it, and that's what we're breathing," Ortiz told Mongabay "And that's the part that really … amazes me."
"But it's not just happening in coastal cities," he added. "No matter where you go, [even] in the middle of the Arctic … the human imprint is already there."
We're not just inhaling microplastics through the air we breathe — we're also getting it through the water we drink and the food we eat.
'Our Life Is Plasticized'
Plastic waste isn't just leaking into the ocean; it's also polluting freshwater systems and even raining or snowing down from the sky after getting absorbed into the atmosphere, according to another study led by Steve and Deonie Allen. With microplastics being so ubiquitous, it should come as no surprise that they are also present in the food and water we drink.
Drinking water, including tap and bottled water, is the largest source of plastic in our diet, with the average person consuming about 1,769 tiny microplastic particles each week, according to a 2019 report supported by WWF. Other primary sources of microplastics include shellfish, beer and salt.
A new study published this year in Environmental Research found that microplastics were even present in common fruits and vegetables. Apples had one of the highest microplastic counts, with an average of 195,500 plastic particles per gram, while broccoli and carrots averaged more than 100,000 particles per gram.
"The possibility of plastics in our fruit and vegetables is extremely alarming," John Hocevar, ocean campaign director for Greenpeace USA, said in a statement. "This should prompt additional studies to assess how much plastic we are consuming through our produce each day and examine how it is impacting our health."
"Decades of plastic use have contaminated our air, water, and soil," Hocevar added. "Eating just a bite of an apple could now mean eating hundreds of thousands of bits of plastic at the same time."
Through normal water and food consumption, it's estimated that the average person consumes about 5 grams of plastic each week, equivalent to the size of a credit card, according to the WWF report.
"Plastic is everywhere," Thava Palanisami, a microplastics researcher at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and contributor to the WWF report, told Mongabay. "We live with plastic and our life is plasticized — that we know. But we don't know what it does to human health. That's the biggest question mark."
While it's not entirely clear how plastic affects human health, research suggests that the inhalation of fibrous microplastics can lead to respiratory tract inflammation. And another study, referenced in the WWF report, shows that fish and other marine animals with high concentrations of microplastics in their respiratory and digestive tracts have much higher mortality rates. Another study, published in 2020, indicates that plastic accumulates in the muscle tissue of fish.
"If you look at what happens, for example, in fish — it [plastic] stays in their muscles," Ortiz said. "It's scary. If you look at the numbers, you're eating something in the order of one kilo of plastic every three years. I wonder, in our lifetime … if a percentage of our weight will be plastic that is still in our muscles."
"The problem is serious," Palanisami said. "We've got to stop using unwanted plastic and manage plastic waste properly, and … work on new plastic alternates."
Stemming the Tide
Erin Simon, head of plastic waste and business at WWF, and leader of the organization's packaging and material science program, says the key to curbing the plastic pollution issue is making sure that plastic doesn't leak into nature in the first place.
"If you had a leaky faucet, would you bring out the mop first, or would you turn off the water?" Simon told Mongabay. "We're trying to stem that tide of plastic flowing into the ocean and into nature in general … but at the same time, trying to identify the different root causes of that leakage."
While Simon says there are various ways to try and stop plastic from entering the natural world, such as well-managed recycling and composting programs, she also said that large companies can play a critical role in helping to reduce plastic waste. WWF is currently spearheading a new program called ReSource, launched in 2019, that helps analyze companies' plastic footprints in order to work toward sustainable solutions. The program's website says 100 companies could prevent 50 million tons of plastic waste.
"We have three targets that we're looking at when we're partnering with companies," Simon said. "One, get rid of what you don't need. At the end of the day, we do need to reduce our demand for virgin nonrenewable plastic. Once you get rid of that, you think about the stuff that you do need — the things [for which] plastic is the right material choice. Where am I sourcing that from? Am I getting it from recycled content? Am I getting it from a sustainably-sourced bio base, or is it virgin non-renewable [plastic]? And then finally … how are you, as a company … making sure it comes back? Are you designing it in a way that it's technically recyclable into the places that it's ending up?"
Marine debris litters a beach on Laysan Island in the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge, where it washed ashore. Susan White / USFWS
While recycled plastic may seem like a satisfactory alternative to virgin plastic, a new study, published in July 2020, showed that children's toys made out of recycled plastic contained high levels of toxic chemicals, comparable to levels found in hazardous waste.
Moore, who has been studying plastic pollution since his discovery of the floating debris in the North Pacific Ocean, says he doesn't believe there's an easy fix to this issue, especially when it comes to the businesses that are producing large amounts of plastic.
"There's no change that corporations can make under the current system that will successfully combat plastic pollution," Moore said. "There is no technical fix to the plastic problem. It's not in the corporate portfolio to reduce sales of your products — the corporate portfolio is about increasing sales. The idea that [corporations] can be convinced to reduce their production and sale of the products that they make is a fantasy."
However, Moore says a solution could be found in "radical change," and that this moment of time, with the Black Lives Matter movement spreading across the world, could provide the opportunity for that change.
"Now is the time when a world historical revolution would be possible, when the people of the world could unite to change the system as a whole," Moore said.
"There won't be a techno fix and science won't develop … a new product that will get us out of the problem of plastic pollution," he said. "It will only come with the world as a whole agreeing to charter a new course towards a non-polluting future."
Reposted with permission from Mongabay.
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Siberian Heat Wave Was Made 600x More Likely by the Climate Crisis, Scientists Say
The record-breaking heat in the Arctic saw temperatures soar above 100 degrees for the first time in recorded history. Now, a new analysis has put to rest any notion that the heat was caused by natural temperature fluctuations.
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Coronavirus Cases Spike in the South, But Decline in the Northeast — Here's How
By Taison Bell
"Hospital Capacity Crosses Tipping Point in U.S. Coronavirus Hot Spots" – Wall Street Journal
This is a headline I hoped to not see again after the number of coronavirus infections had finally started to decline in the Northeast and Pacific Northwest. However, the pandemic has now shifted to the South and the West – with Arizona, Florida, California and Texas as hot spots.
Hard-Hit States Quickly Learned Value of Masks<p>As a respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted mainly through droplets that leave the mouth and nose as a person talks, sneezes, coughs or exhales. It thrives in environments where there are lots of people in enclosed spaces – <a href="https://theconversation.com/aerosols-are-a-bigger-coronavirus-threat-than-who-guidelines-suggest-heres-what-you-need-to-know-142233" target="_blank">especially if they are laughing, talking, singing</a> or otherwise coming into close contact. It thrives physically in the same settings where we thrive socially.</p><p>This is why the early hard-hit areas were able to crush the curve by closing businesses and implementing stay-at-home orders. Without significant close human interaction, the coronavirus couldn't spread.</p><p>While other states are now seeing hospitals fill with COVID-19 patients, most of the Northeast is maintaining control of community spread as its economies reopen. The difference reflects, at least in part, each state's behavior expectations and the willingness of residents to keep up safety precautions like wearing masks, avoiding large crowds, maintaining social distance of at least six feet and staying isolated when they are ill or may have been exposed to the virus.</p>
How Rhode Island's Daily COVID-19 Case Numbers Fell<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzQ2MTAwOS9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyNDE1MDUxMH0.Ce8r6qCwhkJm8D8vUnTl5CblhFPXj_eBIlYqJ5yobqE/img.png?width=980" id="32ce3" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="f15da39d4dab6393216510dbed678840" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" /><p>Northeastern states now <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/26/politics/maskwearing-coronavirus-analysis/index.html" target="_blank">lead the nation</a> in mask-wearing and adherence to other best practices. An <a href="https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/26/which-part-of-the-u-s-leads-the-country-in-mask-wearing/" target="_blank">Axios/Ipsos poll</a> showed that in states with high mask use, virus circulation is at <a href="https://www.inquirer.com/health/coronavirus/covid-19-coronavirus-face-masks-infection-rates-20200624.html" target="_blank">lower levels compared to states with less mask use</a>. Studies on the <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0908-8" target="_blank">effects of how quickly coronavirus restrictions have been lifted</a> around the world have found that slow, careful strategies have led to fewer illnesses and deaths during reopening.</p><p>In many parts of the Northeast, the months of illnesses, deaths and the struggle to turn the COVID-19 tide are still <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/23/most-americans-say-they-regularly-wore-a-mask-in-stores-in-the-past-month-fewer-see-others-doing-it/" target="_blank">fresh in people's minds</a>. The progress isn't uniform, however. <a href="https://gothamist.com/news/coronavirus-cases-among-20-somethings-nyc-rise-prompting-de-blasio-issue-new-mask-guidance" target="_blank">New York City's mayor has expressed concern</a> about an uptick in positive cases among people in their 20s.</p>
The Problems of a Political Divide<p>Elsewhere in the country, the current surge in COVID-19 cases <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-surges-of-the-coronavirus-across-the-nation-could-force-more-shutdowns/2020/06/12/e6985b94-acd9-11ea-a9d9-a81c1a491c52_story.html" target="_blank">began to pick up after Memorial Day weekend</a>, when people in several states that hadn't seen the same toll from the pandemic let their guard down. <a href="https://theconversation.com/covid-19-messes-with-texas-what-went-wrong-and-what-other-states-can-learn-as-younger-people-get-sick-141563" target="_blank">Video and pictures</a> showed parties, barbecues, crowded beaches and political rallies – all with very little social distancing or mask-wearing – giving more fuel for the coronavirus to spread.</p><p>Despite the overwhelming evidence for what we should be doing, following the advice of public health experts has also, sadly, become politicized. Depending on the news sources people listen to, they might hear warnings from health officials being taken seriously or being dismissed by pundits and politicians.</p><p>A <a href="https://www.axios.com/axios-ipsos-poll-coronavirus-index-15-weeks-e4eb53cc-9bc8-4cac-8285-07e5e5ef6b2b.html" target="_blank">recent national poll</a> shows that Democrats report consistently wearing a mask 68% of the time, while Republicans reported doing the same only 34% of the time. The national conversation has devolved into a false dichotomy: Either you're on the side of prioritizing safety or you're on the side of personal freedom and opening the economy.</p><p>In reality, the two should be partners, as these preventative measures are the best tools we have to reach our common goals of reopening businesses and schools safely. It's the same reason we stop at stoplights and go through metal detectors at the airport – we make a small sacrifice for the greater public good.</p><p>For the foreseeable future, Americans will have to collectively agree to live life a little differently. Until we can all agree on this, the coronavirus will continue to have the upper hand, and our health and wealth will suffer.</p>
Trump Announces Final Rollback of Law That Gives Communities a Say in Fossil Fuel Projects
President Donald Trump announced the final rollback of the "Magna Carta" of U.S. environmental laws on Wednesday, The New York Times reported.
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I recently posted, and attached a picture here...
The picture came out HUMONGUS !
That was not my intent, in that on some other Forums, stuff like that is automatically sized down to a reasonable size. Given that isn't done here, what is an appropriate size for an attachment ? I have a Picture program where I could do that before attaching.


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With Purpose Forward
A short update to break the silence. We're hard at work on several new projects, including one rooted in Norse mythology (but not in the way most people would expect — let's just say that Odin is playing a long game revealed to no one.) Read More →


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Product Details
Add this luggage handle wrap to your bag handle for comfort and style.
Pair it with a luggage tag for identifying complete set.
5" x 5" neoprene fabric with velcro closure and black trim.
Inventory Last Updated: Jul 04, 2020
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