Heavy Metals in Your Won Ton Soup

Our Missionary to the Frozen, Northern Wastelands tagged me and now I'm it. Well, Kelly, here's a tag right back. From today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required for the full article), we learn that the Chinese are discovering that lead is not useful as a spice.

For nearly two decades, Lai Mandai regularly ate and sold beans, cabbage and watermelons grown on a plot of land a short walk from a lead smelting plant in her village.

Like dozens of other villagers who ate locally grown food, Ms. Lai, 39 years old, developed health problems. "When I did work, planting vegetables or cleaning the floor, I felt so tired, and my fingers felt numb," Ms. Lai says. "I talked with other villagers. They had the same problems."

Mmmm. Lead-flavored beans and cabbage! Sounds like we can make a tasty vegetable stock from that.

Concerns have since soared over the safety of the country's exports. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently told consumers to stop buying toothpaste made in China because it might contain poisonous diethylene glycol. Last week, the FDA sounded an alarm on farm-raised seafood from China, citing excessive levels of antibiotics and additives.

Yet after decades of industrial pollution, some of the worst contaminants making their way into the country's food come from the soil in which it is grown. So far it hasn't been determined the extent to which tainted crops such as rice, fruits and vegetables have been exported to the U.S. What is clear is that in contaminated areas dotting the country, residents have been eating such food for years or decades.

Hey, man, this doesn't have anything to do with global warming. Why are we talking about it? It's not like this is something the environmental movement would be concerned about.

China's soil is also compromised by waste from the thousands of private and public mines that dot the country. Last year, a group of Chinese scientists published a study that found the soil and vegetables around an abandoned lead and zinc mine a few hours outside of Shanghai was contaminated with heavy metals...Slag that the miners had excavated from the mountain was left in piles near farmland, allowing rain to wash the metals into nearby fields.

Chinese scientists tested samples of soil and vegetables, including cabbage, chrysanthemum and spinach grown in the area around the mine, near Shaoxing in Zhejiang province. The soil's zinc level was 20 times higher, and cadmium levels 30 times higher, than the maximum heavy-metal concentrations allowed under China's national soil-quality standards.

The authors of the study, which was published in February 2006 in the Netherlands-based scientific journal Environmental Geochemistry and Health, concluded that soil near the mine "was unsuitable for agricultural use." Because of high levels of cadmium, lead and arsenic, the vegetables "could not be regarded as safe for human consumption," they wrote.

Dude, just chill. It's all just another spice, right? Sounds delicious. Dig in!

On the front page of Greenpeace's web site, we see articles about global warming, but nothing about China. Oh, and there's a good one blasting Exxon. %!&%* Americans! A search on their site for "China" reveals that it's all the fault of the West. The top 5 hits had to do with e-Waste, or the waste products caused by manufacturing high tech products.

Man, I hate those Americans. They're ruining everything.

La Jolla Sunset

We finally got a break in our normal May-June evening overcast and saw this sunset. For us, it's setting almost directly over Bird Rock in La Jolla.

Carpet Flying

No, I don't mean flying carpet. I mean carpet flying. Today our Maximum Leader was soaring majestically across the carpet.


She also thinks the term "carpet flying" is quite funny.

Thanks, Mother Superior

A good friend to the Feline Theocracy, Feline Empress and Mother Superior of the Holy Order of Ocean Whitefish, Kukka-Maria is retiring from blogging.

It is a catwa upon each of you to read her wisdom-filled last post and then check out the rest of her blog. You won't be disappointed. In all seriousness, we've conversed from time to time about the things we've learned about ourselves and about life in general from blogging. The list she gives in this post is a wonderful summation.

Thanks, Kukka. My days have been brighter because of you.

...and Sometimes You Roll Snake Eyes

A little while back I posted about how everything was going well. Yesterday was one of those days where it didn't.

My desktop PC died about a week ago. I looked at new systems and found a nice one for $530, but decided not to buy it and instead just replaced my hard drive. That went well for a few days and then the system began failing in other ways. The screen would just go black whenever there was much network traffic. No reboot, just a black screen and no response to any keyboard commands.

I started replacing components, trying to keep the cost of the overall repair under $530. That did not work. I've ended up replacing absolutely everything, including the case and the power supply and even then I needed to pay Frys to assemble it. I had assembled it at home and it didn't work. I drove back to Frys and they took it apart and reassembled it and it didn't work for them, either. With their typically excellent customer service, they said they would replace all the new components with other new components. I could either take them home and try again or pay Frys to put it together. By now I was out of time for this project and just couldn't afford any more trips back and forth to the store, so I paid for a full assembly.

The end result was that I paid about $570 to repair the computer. It should be back to me on Wednesday. I would have been better off buying the Vista machine I saw last weekend. Oh well.

The 1966 Mustang I was going to buy as a father-son project car is no longer available. Nor are the other three we tried to buy. Those all fell through yesterday, too.

Lastly, yesterday a very dear friend of mine told me she is getting a divorce. Brutal. I never liked her husband very much. It turns out he was stealing from their business and had decided he was gay. They have two kids and had been married more than 15 years. Her world has been turned absolutely upside down. Their children will be devastated and will lose out for years to come. And for what? Greed and lust. Every time I see things like this it makes me more and more of a Puritan.

I've been meaning to research the origins of the seven virtues and post on that. This gives me another reason to do so.

Thank God today's a new day.

The iPhone and Sushi

The iPhone is now out. Hurrah! I'll stick with my current phone, thank you. Here's why.

I have a $20 Sprint cell phone. You have a $500 iPhone. I make phone calls. You make phone calls. I send text messages. You send text messages. I go out for sushi. You go home and eat Top Ramen.

Update: The New York Times has a more positive than negative review of the iPhone that closes with this.

But even in version 1.0, the iPhone is still the most sophisticated, outlook-changing piece of electronics to come along in years. It does so many things so well, and so pleasurably, that you tend to forgive its foibles.

In other words, maybe all the iPhone hype isn’t hype at all. As the ball player Dizzy Dean once said, “It ain’t bragging if you done it.”

Financial decisions, like buying an iPhone plus AT&T service for $1200-$1400 are made on the margins. As in, "what else could I do with the money?" For all the glorious interface capabilities of the iPhone, I don't understand what I'm getting for my extra, say, $480. I'll admit that I don't want to surf the web or get emails on my phone. I want to be inaccessible in that way when I'm not at home or in the office. That $480 is just for useless, shiny things as far as I can see.

Not being a crow, it doesn't interest me.

A member of the iPhone's target audience.
Being an occasional contributor to the Festival of Frugality, I don't think the thing was made with me in mind in the first place. Of course, the sushi wasn't, either. I'll take that $480 and put it in a mutual fund instead. At an average rate of return, in 5 years I'll have $703. You'll be replacing your iPhone battery from Apple by mail for a hefty fee.

Poland's Bison Herd Wholeheartedly Join the EU

From today's WSJ comes an article (subscription may be required) that's almost too good for words.

Poland has a herd of bison. The European Bison Program is trying to teach them to migrate so they can mingle with other herds. The bison are proving to be too lazy to do it, even when shown the benefits of doing so.

To keep the animals from extinction, Mr. Niedzialkowski, coordinator of the European Bison Program, is trying to change the migration patterns of about 400 lowland bison (Bison bonasus bonasus) roaming the primeval forest in northeastern Poland. He wants to persuade Polish bison to breed with other wild herds of the same species in neighboring Lithuania and Slovakia.

To do that, the bison, which can weigh nearly 2,000 pounds, need to stop gathering in one large herd and eventually must learn new migration routes now possible with the expansion of the European Union. In this town of one-story wood houses on the edge of Bialowieza National Forest, Mr. Niedzialkowski runs a project to lay out trails of beets and hay -- food to coax the bison to take their first small steps beyond the forest and eventually, he hopes, across borders.

"It's not working very well," says Wolfgang Fremuth, a zoologist at the Frankfurt Zoological Society, which is helping to finance the project. "Bison are very lazy and they haven't understood where to go. It may take a couple of years for them to learn."

Too lazy to avoid their own extinction. What a metaphor for the EU.

I can't tell if this is a bison or a gigantic, ratty, old sofa.
Thinking about it some more, these don't sound like Polish bison. They sound more like unionized French or German bison to me. I would have expected Polish bison to have figured it out completely and to have raced about the countryside smacking the other bison upside the head and breeding at will.

LOL Hamster

After seeing some of the fine entries here, I decided to make my own.



For more laughs, visit this week's Friday Ark.

A Comprehensive Immigration Reform Proposal

Now that the Kennedy - McCain amnesty bill has been taken out behind the barn and killed with an ax, the crack editorial staff here at The Scratching Post would like to propose our own Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill.

BUILD THE BLASTED FENCE, YOU MORONS!

A fence-like object.

Viral Marketing Jackpot

To satisfy my blogging ego, I keep a close tab on my SiteMeter traffic statistics. Yesterday's World of Good (WOG) post on volunteers for the Rochester & Genesee Valley Railroad Museum turned out to be HUGE viral marketing hit. I sent the link to my normal WOG Squad and got a link from Mark Shea. Mark's busy site sent me lots of traffic. I also sent the link out to one email address given at the bottom of the Rochester & Genesee Valley Railroad Museum web page. That has generated a TON of hits. I can tell because the referrals are either "unknown" or a web email client. There must have been 40-50 hits so far from those locations. That's a 40-1 ratio of investment to payoff. I love it!

I just wish someone would leave comments. I can't tell if they're emailing each other saying what a horrid job I did or if they really like it. :-)

World of Good, Railroad Style

For Wayne.

All aboard for another excursion into the World of Good!

Years ago, I had an officemate who was a huge railroad buff. Not model trains, but real ones, particularly the steam locomotive kind. He had train calendars, train photos, his vacations were built around the Amtrak schedule and most weekends, he volunteered at the local railroad museum. After some persuasion, I visited.

There's a certain glamour and romance to trains.
It wasn't a fancy place with multimedia displays and computer graphics, it was a slice of Americana from a time when traveling by train was commonplace. The museum, through its volunteers, tried to give you a look into the past. The Rochester & Genesee Valley Railroad Museum is another such place. It's another place where people donate their time to give us a chance to experience a time and place unavailable to us any other way.

The museum is run solely by dedicated volunteers and works in partnership with the New York Museum of Transportation to bring the visitor a unique dual museum experience in the railroad and transportation history of Rochester and Western New York...Beyond the depot, the museum's volunteers have built a five-track yard around the depot which allows for the display of some of the museum's railroad equipment. In 1995, volunteers drove the golden spike on a two mile, standard gauge demonstration railroad that joins the R&GV Railroad Museum to the New York Museum of Transportation. The following year joint public museum operations began offering track car rides between the two museums for visitors.

I lost $12 playing cards with the boys in that caboose. I shouldn't have tried to draw to that inside straight.
When my son was a wee lad, he loved trains. (Does anyone's son not love trains at some point in their childhood?) We took him to the railroad museum and he spent a wonderful day playing in and around the trains. The R&GV RR Museum is all about giving people that experience.

Not being too far removed from my childhood in spirit, this part really appeals to me.

The Rochester & Genesee Valley Railroad Museum is also home to a large collection of historic construction equipment. When you decide to build and run a railroad, you quickly learn how useful it is to have your own construction equipment. With a dedicated group of volunteers who maintain and restore the equipment, the collection has grown to over fifty pieces; most of them serviceable. The historic construction equipment collection is a real asset to the R&GV Railroad Museum!

Big, antique construction equipment! Hooray! (Insert Tim Allen ape grunting noises here.)

All aboard! Next stop, 1953!
The volunteers also run railroad excursions for visitors.

Open-air track car rides connect the New York Museum of Transportation with the Rochester & Genesee Valley Railroad Museum. The trip takes 15 minutes each way through unspoiled country scenery, and the 30 minute guided tour at RGVRRM visits a 1918 country train station and a host of railroad cars and engines on display.

Keeping this museum running is no joke. The organization, management and maintenance of this museum is a non-trivial effort and shows the volunteers' devotion to sharing their love of railroading with the rest of us. These people aren't shopping at the mall or taking in the latest movie at the theater, they're giving of themselves that we might experience the past.

Don't you be talkin' about the size of my caboose!
This last part requires you to turn up your speakers. If you've got kids, they'll enjoy this. Go to this page of their website and listen to the sounds of the railroad. What a clever idea! I love it. They've got a great collection of videos as well. I just wish they had uploaded them to YouTube so I could embed them here.

I'd write more, but I've got to run. The train to Dobbs Ferry is about to leave.

---

My officemate passed away about 15 years ago. I still tend some of the houseplants he kept in our office and every year a friend and I buy the same train calendar he used to have on his wall. For the rest of our lives, whenever we see a train, we'll think of him, his passion for trains and how he gave of himself to share his enthusiasm and joy with the rest of us. Whether he knew it or not, he was a part of a World of Good.

Eating out is not a Hunger Strike

At her visit to the vet early last week, our Maximum Leader was told to lay off the high carb cat food and go on the "catkins" diet. We purchased her some special, high-protein food which she seemed to like right away. All did not stay well, however.

She had gotten her annual shots and they did blood work on her, too, because of her age. She didn't like that at all and attacked everyone in the office when they tried to keep pressure on the spot where they had taken the blood. That's our Maximum Leader! A whirlwind of death and destruction when she's angry. To add insult to injury, I promptly went on travel and her Serene Furriness went on an apparent hunger strike in a fit of pique. Our neighbors came by to feed her, but her dish stayed full. When I returned, she simply refused to touch her food. I gave her some tuna, which she ate immediately, but her crunchies remained untouched.

She's starving! Absolutely famished!
Deeply concerned, I locked her in the house overnight. We have a cat door which is open 24/7, but I closed this off to her. Last night she ate all of her food. It's pretty clear what happened. One of our neighbors, perhaps as a result of some personal problems, has been appealing to the Mystical Powers™ of the Feline Theocracy by feeding our Maximum Leader. She's been dining out all this time.

Look at her! She's just skin and bones!
While we appreciate the fact that some have an urgent need for the intercession of her Serene Furriness, we really must find the source of these victuals and cut them off. I'm sure we can persuade them that her purrayers on their behalf will be just as strong if they but offer her substantial petting and praise.

For more posts on purring epicureans, visit this week's Friday Ark and Carnival of the Cats.

And the (Chinese) Beat Goes On

Today's Wall Street Journal has another chapter in the continuing saga of the Chicoms selling us total garbage.

About 450,000 Chinese-made tires sold in the U.S. -- and possibly many more -- may lack an important safety feature, according to federal regulators and the U.S. distributor that helped design them...The tire defect comes in the wake of several other high-profile safety problems involving Chinese products, including the discovery of lead paint on children's toys and hazardous materials in Chinese-made toothpaste and in wheat gluten used in pet food.

The American distributor of the tire began sounding the alarm when it discovered an abnormal number of incidents with the tires.

FTS knew about the tire defect, which it reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration earlier this month, as early as last year -- when it conducted its own tests in the wake of an accident in New Mexico that didn't result in any serious injuries or deaths.

It gets better. Just like in their software piracy industry, the Chicoms have either distorted the product numbers or left them out completely.

The case points to questions about the effectiveness of U.S. safety regulations as they relate to imported tires. Not only has FTS told NHTSA it doesn't have the money to pay for a recall, it said it can't even clearly identify the tires affected because the Chinese manufacturer has failed to provide it with the identification numbers of the tires that were made with the missing safety feature.

The article has lots more details. Read the whole thing.

Our Missionary to the Frozen, Northern Wastelands has more posts like this as well. There's enough to go around for everyone. China has recently or very soon will pass the US in carbon emissions. I look forward to Al Gore's visit to China where he roundly castigates them.

Ha ha.

Don't Ask

...just click here.

Two Very Different Blogging Groups

Take a look at the number of comments on this week's Carnival of the Cats and this week's Carnival of Family Life. I stopped by to say thanks in both places for linking to me and I noticed that the Family life one has about ten times as many comments, almost all thank you's, as the COTC. The lack of these has always struck me as a shame when I've hosted COTC. It's interesting to see that it's not like that everywhere.

I would argue that it's a matter of the moms who post things for family life being a different sort than the cat bloggers who post for COTC. It's more of a social group at the Carnival of Family Life and it would be bad form to not stop by and say thanks to the host.

Why a Budget Matters

My hard drive on my big desktop machine crashed yesterday. That PC is the one I use for all my blogging and web surfing. It's about three years old and runs Windows XP. At first, I didn't know what the problem was so I went out shopping for a new PC. All I do with it is blog, surf, edit images and videos, store my AV files and a bit of MS Office. I don't need a big gamer's machine. At BestBuy I found a nice ACER desktop for $529. Offhand, I asked what a new hard drive cost, just in case that was the problem. They said about $120.

This is where I really needed a household budget. While I follow most of Dave Ramsey's advice, I don't keep a budget. I just don't spend money on anything I don't need. I've managed to pay off all my debts except my mortgage and have salted some cash away in the bank. I'm in good shape and this expense could be handled easily. I almost bought the machine.

I decided to leave BestBuy and think about it. I tried to make a business case for the purchase. My choices were a new PC running Vista with all kinds of upgrades or a new hard drive and $400. It was then that I realized that my lack of a budget was damaging my decision process. Since I had no money set aside for computers or entertainment, I had no hard decision to make. It wasn't the PC vs. going out to eat, it was just a decision to buy a PC.

Good business decisions are not made like that. Sound decisions are made on marginal analysis. That is, will I get the same return by buying the PC vs. saving the money vs. $400 worth of clothes vs... Without the budget, the money simply came from out of the blue and had no intrinsic value. Had it been budgeted for clothes, my ugrade decision would have been new shoes and some shirts or a new PC.

After I went home, I was able to boot the machine and listen to the noises it made. It was clearly the hard drive and nothing else was wrong. I have decided to just replace the drive, but I'm really wrestling with the underlying problem of not having a budget. I've avoided it because it's a little work and I've been doing OK without one. This experience shows just how close I come, day in and day out, to making bad financial decisions without one.

So now that I'm done with that decision, I have to ask: Will I see you at the Festival of Frugality? I'll be there. You'll know it's me because I'll be the one talking about my new hard drive. And my new budget

Update: By the way, I lost ZERO data because I use Mozy to backup my files over the Internet. That was one of the best decisions I ever made. Mozy rocks!

I'm With Fred Thompson

Dude gets it.

He comprehends the nature of our enemies and the complex interrelations between them. Unlike the simpletons who need to see clear connections before they act, he understands that this asymmetric, networked war we're in does not have the direct linkages we're used to from previous conflicts.

I watched a few more of his YouTube speeches and liked what he had to say about our borrowing and spending as well. Reagan proved that charisma and speaking directly to the American people can bring great success to an administration. It's something that the others just don't seem to get. I like Mitt's positions, but he talks like a dork. His ads are all polished politician gobbledygook. He's John Edwards without the vacuous positions.

I've heard people criticize Fred because he hasn't come out with detailed policy statements. Frankly, I don't need a president who has great plans. I need one that understands that we need to divest ourselves of the hangover from previous great plans. We spend every penny we get in taxes. We spend all of our Social Security surplus. We borrow money and spend that. What are the other candidates talking about? Government health care. Where's the money for that coming?

Imagine sitting down with your spouse one night to discuss the family finances. They look like this and they have for years.

Income $48,000
Expenses $59,000

Imagine your spouse says that they think you ought to take out another loan and buy something new, a loan that will last tens of years. You'd think they were crazy, right? Well, that's what all the candidates are saying.

We don't need complicated, detailed policy statements. We need to stop spending money.

Lorrie Morgan as Fred Thompson's First Lady

Fred Thompson dated Lorrie Morgan for a while. Fred could be our next president, God willin' and the creek don't rise. While Fred ended up marrying Jeri Kehn, Lorrie still holds Fred in high regards, like all the rest of Fred's ex-girlfriends.

His ex-girlfriends still like him. Dude is a total stud.

In any case, imagine the White House with Lorrie Morgan as first lady.

Here's what part of what Lorrie had to say from the article linked above.

Morgan blames herself rather than Thompson for the break-up of their “serious” relationship. Although she is a Republican, the country singer believes that she was too politically incorrect to suit the role of senator’s wife. “Country music is all about glamour and shine and politics is a little more reserved,” she said. “I felt I had to change my whole wardrobe.”

She laughs at the thought that she could have become the first lady. “You know what?” she said. “The White House would never have been the same.”

What a contrast it would have been to a certain hag shrew harpy crone woman who is running for president. It's too bad that Lorrie and Fred didn't hook up. It would have been glorious.

Our Maximum Leader's Got The Right Idea

Man, does this look good right now.



I've got a headache and am feeling generally blargh-y from travel and another late arrival. I think I need to take a cue from her.

See also: Cats, Carnival of the.

I Just Flew In...

...and boy, are my arms tired.

In fact, all of me is tired. It's 1:30AM and I can't get to sleep. I'm wired from travel and weird hours and all the rest. Our Maximum Leader greeted me with lots of love and affection. I really appreciated that.

As usual, I arrived in San Diego 90 minutes later than scheduled. I fly cross-country about 20 times a year. By my calculations, 75% of my flights are late. Both westbound flights and one eastbound flight this time were late, right on the 75% mark.

I didn't bring my camera this time, but I'll share a photo with you from the last time. It's some geese in the pond near the hotel I stayed at in Falls Church, VA.


It was a great trip in terms of work and on the way back I sat next to a SpecOps guy from the Marines. We talked shop and we talked Iraq. If I'm coherent later today, I'll post about it.