[Happy News] Trained geese and a proud owner here.

This is from The Lexington Clipper-Herald news source and I got this off their page located [HERE]. I do recommend you go to the original post at that link and read this formatted as intended, those guys wrote it and presented it their way and this is not equal to theirs. I only share this stuff to lead you to it, not to take it from them.


It's a story of affection and a sort of bond created between the most unlikeliest combination I can think of. A pretty big rugged man and a bunch of cute little geese.


Read on...

They started out as a 431-pound man and 13 baby geese

by Amy Schweitzer
World-Herald News Service

Published: Tuesday, August 31, 2010 10:48 AM CDT

They started out as a 431-pound man and 13 baby geese walking down the sidewalk in Missouri Valley, Iowa.

Now, six years later, Paul Messerschmidt is down to 241 pounds, and his 11 geese are trained with voice commands and hand signals to follow him through the crowds at the Nebraska State Fair.


In 2003, Messerschmidt's doctor told him he needed to start walking for his health.


His kids, who were 15 and 18 at the time, were supposed to help him get his exercise, but they weren't.


"I had these babies," Messerschmidt said of the geese. "I took them down the street to embarrass my kids.


"It worked," he said with a laugh. "Amanda (his daughter) came home one day and said, People are talking about a fat man walking baby geese down the sidewalk.'"

When he first started walking with the geese, he could only make it about a half-block at a time. The next week, they made it a block, and they kept increasing the distance.


"It keeps me out of the hospital," Messerschmidt said of all the walking. He said he suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and chronic pneumonia.


That first year, Messerschmidt took the geese in a parade, just to see if he could win some prize money. He actually planned on having goose meat at the end of that year. But people took to them and him.


More and more people started asking him to bring his geese places. He has taken them to nursing homes, day care centers and schools.


Most of his appearances are generated by word of mouth. About three years ago, the poultry division at the Nebraska State Fair hired him to come by in hopes that he could become a main fair attraction. This year, he is walking around the grounds with his geese as one of many strolling acts.


Messerschmidt guides his geese through a series of nine voice commands, telling them to turn right or left, come or stop. They also know five hand commands, including one finger up as a warning if they are being contrary, and two fingers mean the "woodshed." And, yes, they have gotten "spanked" in public.


"Actually, they obey better than most children," he said.


He and his geese have walked 711 miles in six years, traveling to 417 towns for fairs, festivals or parades.


At the Nebraska State Fair, they walk about one and a half miles every day, so he figures they will have added 20 miles by the end of the fair.


This year, he will be going to 117 shows, which is less than the 168 last year because he has more multi-day fairs.


Messerschmidt often gets questions about "messes" the geese may make, but he said it is not a problem.


"If you don't feed them for six hours before, you don't have to clean up after them," he said. The geese get fed overnight, then usually don't go out walking until at least 11 a.m.

Paul Messerschmidt with one of them, I wonder which one it is. Click here to go to his site and read more about them.

They do get treats during the day and are particularly fond of soda pop. Mountain Dew is their favorite, followed by Pepsi. They don't like Coke or 7UP.

"They also like Mike's Hard Lemonade," Messerschmidt said with a laugh. "But they don't get drunk on it. It doesn't affect them."

The geese also occasionally get treats of Skittles, M&Ms and cotton candy.

It is the same group of geese that he started with. They are 6 years old now. He started with 13 geese but has lost two to illness and accidents.

"They imprinted together," he said, adding that he couldn't add in another goose at this point because they would attack it. "Although they have some sibling rivalry, they protect each other."

Messerschmidt said the protectiveness gets stronger when they are not "on duty." They seem to know that, when they get their outfits on, it means they are "on."

The geese are each dressed in a themed outfit, which changes each day. Monday was a baseball theme, but the geese also have outfits for NASCAR, evening gowns and tuxedos, and cowboys.

He saw the movie "Fly Away Home" and saw a scene where the birds were dressed up. Messerschmidt decided that he could do that, too.

The geese were only 6 months old when he started putting the little outfits on them, so they mostly stand still and let him. All except Crybaby, he still protests the clothes occasionally.

Besides Crybaby, there is Wrongway, Flyby, Petey, Little Droops, Mr. Books, George, C.C., Little Frankie, James Dean and Rocks.

For more information on Paul Messerschmidt, visit his website at http://paulgooseman.tripod.com.

The group photo. Remember to visit his TriPod Site here....

Yet another Leonard Cohen post:

Yea well, since it's obvious now I guess I might as well come clean and just confess.

Okay, I confess that I do love Leonard Cohen's poetry, art, music and talent. The guy amazes me with his depth and perception. I think that if ever given the opportunity to I could just sit there and listen for hours on end to his insights and views and with that being said it is now time for the post.

This post is on two matters of subject. One is his more recent album titled "Songs from the Road" and second is just a little on his themes (taken from Wiki's page at this link). What interests me most about his work is his apocalyptic predictions that the present will create the future and that in the end all things will pay the balance owed to make things right and restore what is back into what should have been.

I'm sure I screwed up that mouthful but I'm not so good with words sometimes and describing Mister Cohen's talents would require someone far better with words than I.

Enough of that. Now the album cover (so you'll know what to look for in the music store), next the post and after that two songs. I will in a day or two remove the songs because they are only placed here to sample anyway.

Buy Leonard Cohen's - Songs From The Road (CD/DVD) [Enhanced] for $12.99 from Amazon.com, reduced by 28% or regularly $17.98

Themes:

Recurring themes in Cohen's work include love, sex, religion, depression, and music itself. He has also engaged with certain political themes, though sometimes ambiguously so. "Suzanne" mixes a wistful type of love song with a religious meditation, themes that are also mixed in "Joan of Arc". "Famous Blue Raincoat" is from the point of view of a man whose marriage has been broken by his wife's infidelity with his close friend, and is written in the form of a letter to that friend. "Everybody Knows" deals in part with social inequality ("...the poor stay poor/ And the rich get rich"), and AIDS: "… the naked man and woman/ Are just a shining artifact of the past".
"Sisters of Mercy" depicts his encounter with two women in a hotel room in Edmonton, Canada. Claims that "Chelsea Hotel #2" treats his affair with Janis Joplin without sentimentality are countered by claims that the song reveals a more complicated set of feelings than straightforward love. Cohen ^[46] confirmed that the subject is Janis with some embarrassment. "She wouldn't mind", he declares, "but my mother would be appalled". "Don't Go Home with Your Hard-On" also deals with sexual themes.
Cohen comes from a Jewish background, reflected in his song "Story of Isaac", and also in "Who by Fire", whose words and melody echo the Unetaneh Tokef, an 11th century liturgical poem recited on Rosh HashanaYom Kippur. Broader Judeo-Christian themes sound throughout the album Various Positions. Hallelujah, which has music as a secondary theme, begins by evoking the biblical king David composing a song that "pleased the Lord", and continues with references to Bathsheba and Samson. The lyrics of "Whither Thou Goest", performed by him and released in his album Live in London, are adapted from the Bible (RuthKing James Version). If it be Your Will also has a strong air of religious resignation. In his concert in Ramat Gan, Israel, on the 24th of September 2009, Cohen spoke Jewish prayers and blessings to the audience in Hebrew. He opened the show with the first sentence of Ma Tovu. At the middle he used Baruch Hashem, and he ended the concert reciting the blessing of Birkat Cohanim.^[47] and 1:16-17,
In his early career as a novelist, Beautiful Losers grappled with the mysticism of the Catholic/IroquoisCatherine Tekakwitha. Cohen has also been involved with Buddhism since the 1970s and was ordained a Buddhist monk in 1996. However, he still considers himself also a Jew: "I'm not looking for a new religion. I'm quite happy with the old one, with Judaism."^[48]
He is described as an observant Jew in an article in The New York Times:

Mr. Cohen is an observant Jew who keeps the Sabbath even while on tour and performed for Israeli troops during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. So how does he square that faith with his continued practice of Zen?

"Allen Ginsberg asked me the same question many years ago," he said. "Well, for one thing, in the tradition of Zen that I've practiced, there is no prayerful worship and there is no affirmation of a deity. So theologically there is no challenge to any Jewish belief."^[49]

Having suffered from depression during much of his life (although less so recently), Cohen has written much (especially in his early work) about depression and suicide. Beautiful Losers" and "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy" are about suicide; darkly comic "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong" mentions suicide; "Dress Rehearsal Rag" is about a last-minute decision not to commit suicide. An atmosphere of depression pervades "Please Don't Pass Me By" and "Tonight Will Be Fine". As in the aforementioned "Hallelujah", music itself is the subject of "Tower of Song", "A Singer Must Die", and "Jazz Police".
Social justice often shows up as a theme in his work, where he, especially in later albums, expounds leftist politics, albeit with culturally conservative elements. In "Democracy", he laments "the wars against disorder/ … the sirens night and day/ … the fires of the homeless/ … the ashes of the gay. He concludes that the United States is actually not a democracy. He has made the observation (in Tower of Song) that, "the rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor/ And there's a mighty judgment coming." In the title track of The Future he recasts this prophecy on a pacifist note: "I've seen the nations rise and fall/ …/ But love's the only engine of survival." In "Anthem", he promises that "the killers in high places [who] say their prayers out loud/ … [are] gonna hear from me."
Several Cohen songs speak negatively of abortion. In "The Future", he sings sarcastically "Destroy another fetus now/ We don't like children anyhow." In "Stories of the Street" Cohen speaks of "The age of lust is giving birth/ And both the parents ask/ The nurse to tell them fairy tales/ from both sides of the glass." "Diamonds in the Mine" is often described as a song about abortion because of the lyrics, "The only man of energy/ Yes the revolution's pride/ He trained a hundred women/ Just to kill an unborn child." However, research suggests these lyrics are referring to Charles Manson, his followers, and Sharon Tate's unborn baby from the Manson "Family" murders of 1969. [Read the rest in the correct format ------>HERE]

Now two songs...

Suzanne 

(MENA Arena, Manchester, EnglandNovember 30, 2008)

Waiting For The Miracle 

(HP Pavilion, San Jose, California November 13, 2009)

Sorry, but no download links this time. Buy the album!

If you want to see my other posts on Leonard Cohen , then click here.

This day in history in the news.

Well, if you wait a while today will be in history. That means this isn't a complete damn lie (I hope).


No full posts on these but titles are links to the original posts.


Comments are mine.


September 3, 2010 in the damn news:

Companies add 67K workers, but jobless rate rises

"WASHINGTON – Private employers hired more workers over the past three months than first thought, a glimmer of hope for the weak economy ahead of the Labor Day weekend. But the unemployment rate rose because not enough jobs were created to absorb the growing number of people looking for work."

First of all this is bullshit and I'm not even going to read this full news post. Want to know why? because I saw this coming months ago. First they change the self-employed rules which then takes contracted help out of the role of the self employed and places them in the role of as being employed by those who only use their services sporadically, like farmers hiring out small aspects of their crop preparation for transport or renewal or any other number of services used by small scale privately operated and run businesses and they then force those people to be listed as employed by those people. They know that the insurance and hidden costs are going to cripple the small time company and then later ruin the other guys ability to go out and hire on to work those small jobs but for today and for the record and for braggers rights a bunch of people got hired and it will last just a short time until everything goes "bang" and then the big guys get yet another small guys small farm or repair shop or whatever and this only ends when nobody has anything unless the government has its hand in it.

Next.....

Hillary Clinton’s one-man presidential campaign

"While the rest of the political world is preoccupied with the midterm elections, Chicago dentist William DeJean is hatching plans for 2012. He shelled out $5,000 to create an ad encouraging Americans to back a Hillary Clinton presidential run in 2012. He says the spot will run in New Orleans, Washington, New York and Los Angeles."

More smoke for the news media to be spreading around. Anything will work as long as they get and keep your attention on the stupid shit.

Read it if you want to but as far as I can see it's nothing but noise used to hide the real noise...U.S. unemployment soars to 9.6% after economy loses 54,000 jobs in a month

The U.S. unemployment rate rose to 9.6 per cent in August, official figures released today have shown.

'The data from the U.S. Labor Department showed the economy lost 54,000 jobs last month as the United States continues to struggle to recover from the recent global recession.
Economists had predicted even worse figures and despite the fact unemployment rose for the first time in four months, a number of experts described the news as 'positive'"

I'm confused. Didn't we just add 67,000 jobs? Now they say we lost 54,000? Did we only add 13,000 workers or did we add 67,000 then fire 54,000 all in the same month or did we add 67,000 then deport 54,000 because they were illegal immigrants and they were here stealing jobs from good honest Americans who were once illegal immigrants or their families were when they stole boats and ships and came over from Spain, England, Germany, France, Ireland, Sweden and Russia with stolen illegal alien slaves who worked for really nothing  and stole jobs picking cotton and oranges and cuttin firewood and all kinds of other shit. 


Now I'm really confused. I say we fukkin arrest everybody, arrest me even and let the judge sort things out but first make sure the damn judge aint an illegal alien here stealin a job from another "honest" American too.

How to Lie With Statistics (1954) - Huff.pdf

I better quit and think about this stuff for a while...

How to make Ice Cream in a Baggie.

Summers over and the little monsters are going to be spending more time around the house whining "I'm bored" and "Waa~Waa, there's nothing to do".


Well here's a quick and easy little fun thing you can do with em to shut em up and they'll even have some fun doing it (don't tell them this but it's kinda educational too).


It's another post from those folks at About.com in their home/education/chemistry section [located here], that's the link to the section. This is a link to the page from this post [LINK].


Following is a method of making ice cream...

Make Ice Cream in a Baggie

Freezing Point Depression and Colligative Properties

By Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D., About.com Guide

                         Materials

• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 cup whipping cream (heavy cream)
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon vanilla or vanilla flavoring (vanillin)
• 1/2 to 3/4 cup sodium chloride (NaCl) as table salt or rock salt
• 2 cups ice
• 1-quart Ziploc^TM bag
• 1-gallon Ziploc^TM bag
• themometer
• measuring cups and spoons
• cups and spoons for eating your treat!

Procedure

1. Add 1/4 cup sugar, 1/2 cup milk, 1/2 cup whipping cream, and 1/4 teaspoon vanilla to the quart ziploc^TM bag. Seal the bag securely.
2. Put 2 cups of ice into the gallon ziploc^TM bag.
3. Use a thermometer to measure and record the temperature of the ice in the gallon bag.
4. Add 1/2 to 3/4 cup salt (sodium chloride) to the bag of ice.
5. Place the sealed quart bag inside the gallon bag of ice and salt. Seal the gallon bag securely.
6. Gently rock the gallon bag from side to side. It's best to hold it by the top seal or to have gloves or a cloth between the bag and your hands because the bag will be cold enough to damage your skin.
7. Continue to rock the bag for 10-15 minutes or until the contents of the quart bag have solidified into ice cream.
8. Open the gallon bag and use the thermometer to measure and record the temperature of the ice/salt mixture.
9. Remove the quart bag, open it, serve the contents into cups with spoons and ENJOY! 

Explanation

Ice has to absorb energy in order to melt, changing the phase of water from a solid to a liquid. When you use ice to cool the ingredients for ice cream, the energy is absorbed from the ingredients and from the outside environment (like your hands, if you are holding the baggie of ice!). When you add salt to the ice, it lowers the freezing point of the ice, so even more energy has to be absorbed from the environment in order for the ice to melt. This makes the ice colder than it was before, which is how your ice cream freezes. Ideally, you would make your ice cream using 'ice cream salt', which is just salt sold as large crystals instead of the small crystals you see in table salt. The larger crystals take more time to dissolve in the water around the ice, which allows for even cooling of the ice cream.
You could use other types of salt instead of sodium chloride, but you couldn't substitute sugar for the salt because (a) sugar doesn't dissolve well in cold water and (b) sugar doesn't dissolve into multiple particles, like an ionic material such as salt. Compounds that break into two pieces upon dissolving, like NaCl breaks into Na⁺ and Cl^-, are better at lowering the freezing point than substances that don't separate into particles because the added particles disrupt the ability of the water to form crystalline ice. The more particles there are, the greater the disruption and the greater the impact on particle-dependent properties (colligative properties) like freezing point depresssion, boiling point elevation, and osmotic pressure. The salt causes the ice to absorb more energy from the environment (becoming colder), so although it lowers the point at which water will re-freeze into ice, you can't add salt to very cold ice and expect it to freeze your ice cream or de-ice a snowy sidewalk (water has to be present!). This is why NaCl isn't used to de-ice sidewalks in areas that are very cold.

Recent Chemistry Features

Suggested Reading

• Melting Snow & Ice with Salt
• Chemistry Activities for Kids
• How to Grow Great Crystals

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• IMFs and DNA
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More Chemistry How-To's

• Make Frozen Bubbles
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Related Articles

• Making Ice Cream in a Bag - Building Science Skills
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Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D.
Chemistry Guide

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Thanks Anne and for the rest of you, go to About.com and sign up for their email list. Lots of good projects and ideas and it's free.

Two scans (Using Remote Assistance in Windows XP)

Sorry but low quality scans, just a reference type thing....
Click on image to see full sized.

 

[E-Book Complete] Seeds of Deception - Exposing Lies About Safety of Genetically Engineered Foods (2003)

Seeds of Deception - Exposing Lies About Safety of Genetically Engineered Foods (2003) by Jeffrey M. Smith is a "must read" for those concerned with the ongoing and growing food orientated health problems here in America. 


Both me and my daughter have Coeliac Disease (Gluten Sprue), most people in America call it "Celiac". I have done a great deal of reading on the subject and most of the information about the recent rise of people effected with this food intolerance points to over processed foods and the modification of our food supply. It has become widely believed that tampering of our most basic and widely used grains and staple foods like corn and wheat has caused many peoples immune system to react to them with intolerance, causing symptoms ranging from allergy like to the equivalent of being poisoned.

It is becoming more and more clear to us that the average person cannot do anything to avoid the need to use these modified foods for survival and that means that only those average or below average in society need be effected by these changes to our food supply. The above average to the extremely wealthy though, well naturally they have more options and they have the resources allowing them the ability to survive off of a different standard of food so then, they have more choices than the rest of us. 

I guess what that means is it's the average person who really needs to force the changes to take effect and stop the poisoning of our food supply.  Of course others may find some time and help as they can but want to and want to is only "want to", just as need to is still as always "need to" and I think those of us that need to had better piss or get off the pot or fall down next to it and give up.


I can't say any more on this topic. It pisses me off to much and I try so hard not to scream out like an idiot about it my words just get muddled up and I confuse even myself. 

This is a download link to the book.

Laters all...

MIRROR ON THE WALL - ORIGINAL SONG

This is Kenny Marshall. He just subscribed to me on YouTube and from there I found him. I think yer gonna like this.....

Food Science and Nutrition Basics...

Basic Nutrition Science Part 1, Processed vs. Whole Foods Why? 

This is yet another fine post shared from the folks at psychetruth. You might want to subscribe to them on YouTube as I did. 

This post comes in a two part video post. I like it because it covers many points in a short time in a way that you can easily understand.


Please enjoy this information and share it with those you care about.

Part 1`starts out with the first real form of energy. 

The pure energy derived from the sun.

Part 2 deals with emotion and depression, etc...

New Science and Old Science

I can't tell you how nice it was to find this site. It's the Scientific American and it's a fantastic Magazine that I used to love reading through in my earlier grade school years. They had it in our library then and that was my first all time favorite hang-out place. I both cut classes to go there and later skipped school altogether opting to stay in there rather than do classes at all.


This post is a representation of their article called "Reading between the lines: How we see hidden objects". That title is a link to the original post, as is this [link here]. You will want to read theirs because it is three pages long and mine is just a primer for it.


Here also is their site [The Scientific American Journal], enjoy it.

  Reading between the lines: How we see hidden objects

 From the September 2010 Scientific American Mind

Imagine that you are looking at a dog that is standing behind a picket fence. You do not see several slices of dog; you see a single dog that is partially hidden by a series of opaque vertical slats. The brain’s ability to join these pieces into a perceptual whole demonstrates a fascinating process known as amodal completion.

It is clear why such a tendency would have evolved. Animals must be able to spot a mate, predator or prey through dense foliage. The retinal image may contain only fragments, but the brain’s visual system links them, reconstructing the object so the animal can recognize what it sees. The process seems effortless to us, but it has turned out to be one of those things that is horrendously difficult to program computers to do. Nor is it clear how neurons in the brain’s visual pathways manage the trick.
In the early 20th century Gestalt psychologists were very interested in this problem. They devised a number of cunningly contrived illusions to investigate how the visual system establishes the continuity of an object and its contours when the object is partially obscured. A striking example of amodal completion is an illusion devised by Italian psychologist Gaetano Kanizsa. In one view, you see a set of “chicken feet” arranged geometrically. But if you merely add a set of opaque diagonal bars, a three-dimensional cube springs into focus seemingly by magic, the chicken feet becoming cube corners.

The astonishing thing is you do not even need to overlay real bars—even illusory ones will do. Here the otherwise inexplicable absence of boundaries terminating the chicken feet leads the brain to automatically infer the presence of opaque bars. So you see an illusory cube occluded by illusory bars!

The term “amodal completion” was coined to distinguish it from modal completion. Modal completion is the brain’s tendency to see the full outline of a nonexistent object, as occurs in Kanizsa’s classic triangle illusion. The brain regards it as highly improbable that some sneaky visual scientist has placed three black disks with pie-shaped wedges cut out of them precisely in this manner, preferring instead to see an opaque white triangle that is partially covering three black disks.

 Read the rest ---> [here].

Alice Cooper "Nobody likes Alice - live", blues too???

♫ Alice Cooper - Nobody likes Alice (1969-Live) ♫

This is the (I guess Cassette tape rip of) the 1970 concert "Nobody likes Alice" recording from his Toronto show. With this I obtained even some earlier works of his and may post them also, but for now I'll just stick with this.


 One reason I chose this one over the other was that it shows the Alice Cooper that we all have grown to admire in his not-so early stages of development but full of talent and well on his way to becoming the Super-Star Alice of fame as we know him now.


I did include my comments with the posts even though I hate that, what with opinions being all that they are. Still I did it because if you only plan to try a few I hope you'll at least give the blues tracks a shot. Trust me, it'll be painless and you'll be glad you did it in the end.

01 - Ain't That Just Like A Woman.
♫  ♫ ♫ ♫ ♫ This one is very good. It's almost like a Honky-Tonk night club blues. Plenty of horns, brass end is great.

02 - Painting A Picture.
♫ ♫ ♫ A little more electric, vocals are pretty good. Music is full of confusion, it adds to the suspense though.

03 - For Alice.
♫  ♫ ♫ Similar to the last track with some warped metal effects. Still good tho.

04 - I've Written Home To Mother.
♫  ♫ ♫ More metal. I think this and the last two go together well like a trilogy.

05 - Freak Out Song.
♫  ♫ ♫ ♫ Good lyrics, nice & dark. First real taste of Acid Rock yet.

06 - Goin' To The River.
♫  ♫ ♫ ♫ ♫ Really good blues. I'd like to hear more like this. Keys are nice, guitar kinda catchy, harp adds to its completion.

07 - Nobody Likes Me.
♫  ♫ Kind of dark, I've heard better but I guess it fits here.

08 - Science Fiction.
♫  ♫ ♫ ♫ More Acid Rock here. This one's better tho.

09 - Ain't That Just Like A WomanGoin' To The...
♫  ♫ Close-out blues medley of the others previously. I'm not sure why he added this one, because it seems redundant. Maybe it was a track intended for promo radio play.

All in all this album scored 31♫ 's  out of a possible 45. I guess that ranks it at 3.4 out of possible 5. Pretty good if you ask me.

BONUS: Alice with Dali

Timecrimes (2008) English [Full Movie].

This movie is Awesome! It is a voice-over but you can barely tell, it is done so well.

As usual you can save it as an avi and watch on your choice of vid player (I like VLC Media Player myself and it's free) or if you have DIVX codec installed somehow then stream it from here.


Either way, enjoy.

Timecrimes (2008) English

A man accidentally gets into a time machine and travels back in time nearly an hour. Finding himself will be the first of a series of disasters of unforeseeable consequences.