No Sugar

Guess Who - No Sugar Tonight New Mother Nature (1970)
moondoggy
Kudos to Fran for remembering this tune. Randy Bachman gets the writer's credit for this tune. Bachman? That wouldn't be the Bachman of Bachman Turner Overdrive, would it? Yes, it would. But this is The Guess Who. Is he in here as well? Yes, he is. First one, then the other and now off to new things.

Update April 2026 replaced missing video.

Baking to the next level

Richard Hamming

Detroit Steve pokes a yeast cell:

    I've been on a bit of a search kick on foods that have copper affinity. It started with my use of cinnamon, I use it every day in my oatmeal and it is red so I wondered what made it red. Still no idea, but thought it could be copper. Not likely but still. Like Iron for the Irish, I was wondering if it could be possible poisonous in larger accumulated quantities.
    The Irish and iron premise is 8,000 years of isolation on Ireland with a soil devoid of iron, has made the Irish very good at pulling out any available iron in the foods to the point that a diet rich in iron will accumulates to toxic level such that it actually damages our hearts. Thus, giving blood is an important habit and necessary.
    Many foods have affinity to different elements, tobacco for lead and radon, rice has one for arsenic. Basically a strategy for survival for plants is a chemical approach, they are trying to find ways to kill or discourage anything that might eat it.
    The EFSA European Food Safety Authority put out a Scientific opinion on the inability to assess the safety of copper-enriched yeast added for nutritional purposes. I tried yeast additive in college, did not agree with me then.

So this lead to one of my favorite and Tyler's yeast; Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
​I was surprised but should not have been by the broad list of research that has been going on with this yeast.​
There is a Database devoted to it!
So I started to read one of the articles.
Right off the bat, it reminding me of the Dr. Strangelove plot.
They are playing around with the yeast to have it use a sugar found in wood. Keep in mind what three concepts I have in mind while reading this: the Richard Hamming story and the Atom bomb (igniting our atmosphere with and atom bomb), second why coal stopped forming (bacteria was able to digest cellulose) and third the garlic mustard in my yard starting to come up (invasive species that take over).
​It is all so unlikely it's funny. First assumption is there is a lot of xylose, I have no idea how much xylose sugar is out there. So this new version of our favorite yeast gets out and starts its fast consumption of all the xylose, what might happen?

I remember reading about a case of iron overload some years ago. The treatment they used then was blood letting. The man took the blood home and poured it on his roses.

Girls with Guns

Madame Derringer by Frank Franzetta

Came across this on Last Stand on Zombie Island and I just couldn't resist stealing it.

Howell Torpedo

Howell Torpedo 1896 animation- vbbsmyt
Stu tells me that there is a piece of Germany in the Caribbean. Seems that back in the glory days of red-blooded communism Fidel was feeling benevolent towards his eastern comrades and deeded a narrow little island to East Germany. East Germany, and their Caribbean island, have been subsumed by the reunited Germany.
    Looking for more information about this communist paradise I stumble across Last Stand on Zombie Island which seems to have more than its share of the weird, like the Howell Torpedo. The thing is powered by an internal flywheel that was spun up to 10,000 RPM by an external steam turbine before it was launched. The range wasn't tremendous, but it was better than any of the competing designs. The US Navy bought 500 of the things. The video does a good job of illustrating just how complex this design was, and this was 120 years ago. No wonder the F-35 cost $300 billion to develop.

Ernst Thälmann Island, Cuba.

As for the island, it was originally named Cayo Blanco del Sur but renamed to Cayo Ernesto Thaelmann by Fidel. Ernesto was a dyed-in-the-wool communist who fought against the Nazi's. He died in Buchenwald. Zombie Island has the story.

Update September 2015. Stu put up a post about his visit to Buchenwald, which prompted me to add a picture of the island.

Alacranes Reef

Alacranes Reef Trip - Robbie Gomez
Music - Tamacún by Rodrigo Y Gabriela
My friend Ned is down in Mexico, off the coast of Yucatan. They're running the Bolder Won out to Alacranes Reef for fly fishermen and scuba divers.

Alacranes Reef, also known as Scorpion Reef

The reef is a protected area, so designated in 1971 by a convention in Ramsar, Iran. (Iran? That hotbed of mad muslim bombers? Well, 1971 was before the revolution.)
    Up until now I thought the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico were synonymous. They aren't. The Yucatan Peninsula and Cuba separate the two. The Caribbean Sea is to the south and east and the Gulf of Mexico is to the north and west.
    There are several other places of interest that could be marked on this map, like the Dry Tortugas, which are about as far west of Key West as Alacranes Reef is north of the Mexican coast. Then there is Treasure Island, site of the pig farm (it's the pinky-nail sized island south by southwest of Havana with the city of Nueva Gerona).

House Dream

Rengstorff House, Mountain View, California, 1867. 
This is not exactly right, but the overall look and setting matches my dream remarkably well.

My parents have purchased a big, old house. White, three stories, with a flat roof. It sits on a large lot, perhaps even a corner lot. The previous residents have left some things. Nothing substantial, and not evenly distributed. A bedroom on the second floor (the mom's room, I suspect) has a couple rows of open topped boxes stacked along one wall. They don't appear to hold anything very interesting, clothes perhaps. A bathroom on the second floor has been stripped of everything, including the toilet and the sink. The bathtub is still there. There is plaster dust and dirt scattered on the ceramic tile floor. The tiles are those small, hexagons that used to be so prevalent, about one inch across. I come across a high chair sitting in the middle of the entrance on the main floor. It's old, made of wood. It looks sturdy. It's finished with a thick, dark varnish. I'm wondering why we have it. Did the previous residents leave it here? Or did we bring it with us? Then I remember someone in our family is due to deliver a baby, so, yes, we are going to need this.
    I'm wondering where I am going to stay so I head upstairs to see how many bedrooms this place has. In the right front corner of the house is a second staircase going down. Just past the stairs is a bathroom, and in the back corner of the bathroom is an opening to something. I go look, and find an opening that lets you look down into another bathroom half a story lower down. There is another stairway on the other side of the bathroom that connects the two.
    I'm wondering about the condition of this place. My dad, in this dream, is getting on (in real life he passed away several years ago).  Has anyone taken a look at the roof? Flat roofs, it seems, suffer neglect until they start leaking, and then it's a big crisis.
    The interior decoration is from another era, or maybe just a higher class. In other words, it has been decorated. It is not a model of sterility that you get from new houses. Some rooms are carpeted, some have bare wood floors. In one room (a bathroom?) the carpet has a floral pattern. The walls are decorated with moldings, though most of the walls are painted white.
   I never did find out how many bedrooms there were.

P.S. I just realized what the problem is with flat roofs: you can't see them from the ground. If you want to know condition of the roof, you have to actually climb up there, and who wants to do that? With a conventional pitched roof you can see the surface of the roof, or at least some of it, so you can see if you have a serious problem.

I'm all outta gum

Scene from Stand Up Guys with Al Pacino as Val, Christopher Walken as Doc, Alan Arkin as Hirsch and Julianna Margulies as Nina Hirsch.

I was perusing the new Heavy Metal website and I come across this line in a comic and it triggers this memory of Christopher Walken saying the same line, so I have to go track it down. Turns out it's been used in umpteen different places in umpteen different ways.