Friday Night Miscellany

Ahhhh, it was a beautiful day here today, and I loved having the day off! I got a lot done, but not nearly what I had planned :) Instead, after I finished cutting the front lawn, I did some blogging, ate lunch, and then had a nice long nap. There's nothing like a nice long nap in the early afternoon to make one feel truly rich and at leisure! Here's an article that caught my eye at The New York Times: Los Angeles Eyes Sewage as a Source of Water. Rather behind the times, I think; Chicago has, from the beginning of time, been dumping it's allegedly treated waste water into the Chicago River that was specifically engineered to flow the wrong way and force its waste into rivers that eventually flow to the mighty Mississippi, from which millions draw their drinking water; and in Milwaukee we've been dumping our actually treated waste water into Lake Michigan for about 100 years. After the 1993 mass outbreak of cryptosporidium (blamed on run-off from animal waste, yeah, right) that sickened some 400,000 people, the city spent millions upgrading this and that at the waste water treatment center which now includes something with ozone to kill all the crap (no pun intended) that the prior treatment system did not. Nothing like scientific progress, heh? What's worse - dying from sewerage passed off as drinking water after being "filtered" or dying from the toxins in the plastic bottles that contain supposedly "pure" drinking water? Pick your poison. There's something wrong with this picture, folks. This article says that "man" started populating the rest of the world about 60,000 years ago out of Africa. This article says there is evidence of human habitation in the United States from about 50,000 years ago. If both are true, this means that man would have had to hightail it out of Africa all the way across Europe and then swim over to the east coast of North America, or else trek to the eastern edge of Siberia and then swim over what used to be the Bering land bridge into Alaska, because 10,000 years ago the glaciers were melting and the traditional "stepping off" places that science says existed in order to aid the travel of man from the "old world" to the "new world" would have been under lots of water, darlings. So, both cannot be true! Under traditional theory, I believe it's still being taught that man first arrived in Alaska some 14,000 years ago, and made it all the way down to South American by 13,000 years ago, and all the latest evidence is routinely ignored, dismissed or - if mentioned at all - ridiculed. Geez, will the academics ever get it right? Here's a squirrel story that is just so cute - and the ranger ain't bad, either: A squirrel's gone nuts over ranger Mark. A "Don't Eat That Elmer" story: "Snake man" slithers out of prison cell Spooky video - call me skeptical. 'night!