Lion Brand Yarn has introduced a new line of yarn, and I suppose they have redeemed themselves for the Fisherman’s Wool being made in China.

LB Collection Pure Wool Yarn

Part of our line of affordable, luxury fibers, this 100% undyed wool roving yarn, is spun in the USA, from fiber from American-raised sheep. This natural yarn with great texture is perfect for hand-dyeing, as well as felting.

At $4 for a 182 yd skein of worsted weight wool, it’s totally in my preferred price range for dying and felting projects. I will be ordering some as soon as I have some spare cash!

Kudos to Lion Brand.

America’s top pork producer churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed rivers, killed millions of fish and generated one of the largest fines in EPA history. Welcome to the dark side of the other white meat.

I know it’s a long article. I know it won’t be pleasant to read. Please read it, and then consider your next pork chop. Factory farming needs to be stopped … or regulated to within an inch of its life. It’s not just about the poor pigs, though there is plenty of sympathy in my heart for the life they lead until they get slaughtered. It’s also about the disgusting levels of pollution and damage to human life factory farming causes on many levels.

It’s just awful, for the pigs and any nearby humans (and in this case, nearby seems to be most of North Carolina). Please read the article and pass it on. Most people don’t think about this kind of thing, and they should. It’s an older article, so I can’t imagine the situation has gotten much better since then. The guy who runs the company only seems to care about one thing: getting rich on the backs of pigs and people.

Note: Anyone in the Austin area looking for tasty, tasty pork from pigs who live happy pig lives before becoming pork chops, may I suggest Richardson Farms? Just look at the happy pigs, cows, and chickens! That’s ranching the way it should be done.

Framed by a circle of clouds, this is a stunning illustration of Nature’s powerful force. A plume of smoke, ash and steam soars five miles into the sky from an erupting volcano. The extraordinary image was captured by the crew of the International Space Station 220 miles above a remote Russian island in the North Pacific.

You have to see these photos taken by the crew if the ISS. Just … wow! Beautiful and awe inspiring.

Today’s activities will include finding out if my Hello Kitty iPod dock will power my iPod while I am using it to feed video to the TV. I charged the iPod last night until it said it was fully charged, we started watching a movie, and 40 minutes into it, the battery was drained completely. I’m pretty sure my silly pink dock will work as hoped, but I won’t know until I try it.

Lin says it’s probably time to change the battery in my iPod, but I don’t use it that much, so I don’t see how it could already not be holding a charge. It is three years old though, so I guess it’s possible. Any iPod owners out there ever replace their own battery? I watched this video on how to change the battery in mine, and it looks easy enough. It seems the most economical way to do it too. After the hassle I went through getting my iMac fixed (which has subsequently broken again), I am not at all keen on letting Apple do anything for me, let alone paying them for the joy of having to deal with them. Besides, they only replace the whole iPod, and I’m actually not so cool with that. Mine is pristine in every way, and I know the only thing that might be wrong with it is the battery needing to be changed. I’d rather keep the one I have, thank you very much.

I think I’ll set my dock up in the living room right now and watch a few podcasts to see what it does to the power level. It would be really awesome if just once the tech in my life worked as I needed it to work. Only getting to watch half a movie at a go would sort of suck.

The Living Waters is releasing their own edited and abridged version of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Yes, you read that correctly. The people who believe the modern banana was designed by god (YouTube link) as the perfect food for humans are going to be selling a mutilated copy of Darwin’s book in an effort to refute evolution.

This special 280-page edition not only contains an abridged Origin of Species but also has a 50-page Introduction that reveals the dangerous fruit of evolution, Hitler’s undeniable connections to the theory, Darwin’s racism, and his distain for women. It counters the claim that creationists are “anti-science” by citing numerous scientists who believed that God created the universe—scientists such as Einstein, Newton, Copernicus, Bacon, Faraday, Pasteur, and Kepler. It has many original graphics and (as it says on the back cover) is designed for use in schools, colleges, and prestigious learning institutions. The back cover lists the above information as well as saying the book contains “Information on Intelligent Design vs Evolution.” We want to get one million copies into the hands of students and professors in colleges and universities throughout the U.S. Let’s see if they try to ban Darwin’s Origin of Species. That would be interesting.

The 50 page introduction can be downloaded for free at their web site, and, of course, I’m reading it. I should say I am trying to read it. I made it as far as page 10, and then my head threatened to explode, and I had to close the file. My tolerance level for this kind of stuff is pretty low.

Maybe I’ll try reading it again tomorrow … or maybe I will start working on my own version of the Bible. I’m pretty sure it isn’t under copyright anymore, and I’m fairly certain I could improve on the current text.

And for the record, I posted a photo of true banana (created by evolution or god as you see fit to believe), and perhaps it’s time to revisit that post.

Anti-immigration supporters who think the USA should “boycott” Mexico have no idea what percentage of the American food supply comes from Mexico, and they must not wear blue jeans. Those are just two examples, of course. In some parts of the country, “Made in Mexico” is as ubiquitous as “Made in China” is nationwide. But there is no place in the USA that doesn’t have “Made in Mexico” produce and products on their shelves, and in some instances, “Made in the USA” actually means something more like “the final stages of product readiness are completed within the borders of the United States … but really, it was mostly made in Mexico (or China).” Don’t think that doesn’t apply to produce and foodstuffs either, because it does.

So sure, we could boycott Mexico completely and not buy anything from Mexico. More Mexicans would be unemployed, several large American manufacturers would go under — causing many Americans to become unemployed, and Americans would have to start growing enough food for their own country.

Also, the US might have to do something about it’s addiction to oil and petroleum, seeing as Mexico is currently our second largest source. But yeah, sure … brilliant idea! Let’s boycott the whole of Mexico! That will make our lives so much better!

Sorry for the outburst, but I was wandering along some strange path on the internet and ran into a wall of stupid. I’m not even going to link to the stupid. My blood pressure is already up, and there’s no need for anyone else to suffer the same.

In case you haven’t heard, and if you get your news from the TV in the USA you may not have, there is all sorts of unrest in Iran following the recent election. I don’t have time to find and post a bunch of good links, but The Big Picture has the big picture of what’s been going on in Iran right now.

This is one of my favorite shots from yesterday’s visit to the Japanese Peace Garden at the Nimitz Center. Not that I think it’s possible to take a bad photo there. The place is just so beautiful. It’s one of my favorite places in the whole world. Never fails to make me feel peaceful and centered … and in awe of the beauty around me.

If you want to know more about the garden and it’s creation, it was just featured on Central Texas Gardener this week, and the video has been posted online. It will fill you in on the history of this wonderful gift given to my hometown (and the American people as a whole) in honor of Admiral Nimitz and his friendship with Admiral Togo.

I was there when they built it. I was 11 years old at the time, and not only was I fascinated with what was going on across the street behind the big rock wall, I was also excessively curious about the Japanese who were there building it. The only people and cultures I’d had experience with up to that point in my life had been German and Hispanic. The Japanese were so different … in the way they spoke, worked, dressed, and even in how they ate^†.

Bless them, they never seemed annoyed by the tiny little American girl hovering around while they worked^††, not even when I brought friends along. In fact, if I hung around too long, they put me to work planting. There’s a corner of the garden, behind the ropes that keep visitors at bay, that my hands were involved in creating, and I think I left a little of myself there. Once the excitement of the creation of the garden was over, the bench across from that corner became my favorite place to sit and do embroidery … or just to sit and think.

I still feel happy (and proud) whenever I go there and see the irises and grasses I helped plant (the ones along the bottom of the photo and the right bottom corner). In a way, it feels like that’s where I achieved a little bit of immortality. That garden is going to be there long after I am gone. In fact, barring some horrible future crisis, I imagine that garden –and the corner of it I helped plant– will be there forever. Not that I was thinking such lofty thoughts at the age of 11. I was just thrilled to have an excuse to spend more time there … to watch these unusual people building a garden unlike any I had seen before (except in old martial arts movies on late-night TV).

The Peace Garden is a very special place, and it’s open year-round and costs nothing to visit. It’s a little slice of Japan in the middle of a small Texas town, and if you are in the area, it’s well worth visiting.

Side note: The whole Nimitz Museum complex is fascinating and worth spending a day walking through. Right now is not a good time to visit though. They are expanding the museum (by a lot), and there’s a lot of construction going on. Supposedly it will be finished in December (and the Bushes –the whole lot of them, I believe– will be there for the grand opening). It was impressive before, but it’s really going to be something now! But wait until next year, if you want to see the whole museum, as about half of it is closed right now. When the Bush Gallery reopens though, it’s going to be a hundred times more awesome than it was before, and it was really awesome before! You can watch a preview video (in 3D graphics) of what the new building and exhibits are going to be like.

1. † The workers always had bento boxes of unusual food for lunch. Even sitting around a work site eating their “box” lunches, they seemed so formal to my young American eyes. Almost like eating was a ritual. Sometimes one of them would give me some odd bit of food to try, and though my juvenile palate still preferred mac-n-cheese, that was where my love of Japanese food began. [↩]
2. †† I was not your average 11 year, which is likely why they weren’t bothered with me being around. I was a quiet and watchful child, always stayed out of the way, and rarely spoke unless spoken to first. In other words, not much of a bother at all, so long as no one minded being watched intensely. [↩]

I’ve been pondering business cards. I have some, but I don’t like them anymore. I want something new and really different. In my search for inspiration today, I ran across Cool Business Card Designs: Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. Plenty of inspiration there, and a lot of really awesome business card designs!

Tonight, I ran across a web site I was certain had to be a parody, a spoof, being completely preposterous on purpose, someone having some fun. What I was reading was so diametrically opposed to the universe and reality I happen to live in, it could be nothing but a joke. A bad one, but still something meant to be entertaining in some odd funny way. I didn’t find it terribly funny, so I went to Google to make sure I had this person’s official web site. Surely not. It had to be someone spoofing that person and trying to make them look like complete and total moonbats.

But no … I was in fact reading the web site of an internet broadcaster, and he is completely and totally for real.

For example:

“Tonight at 9:00 PM, “The Hal Turner Show” will talk about the recent killing of an abortionist and what the shooter did wrong. No, not the shooting itself; but rather what he did wrong that got him caught!

We’ll talk at length about how to carry out such an act and significantly reduce the chances of getting caught.”

Or…

“Let me be the first to say this plainly: These Judges deserve to be killed. Their blood will replenish the tree of liberty. A small price to pay to assure freedom for millions.”

And finally…

“It is our intent to foment direct action against these individuals personally. These beastly government officials should be made an example of as a warning to others in government: Obey the Constitution or die.

If any state attorney, police department or court thinks they’re going to get uppity with us about this; I suspect we have enough bullets to put them down too.”

His name is Hal Turner. I should hope it comes as no surprise he’s been arrested. What I find surprising is how many people on the internet seem to think he’s getting a raw deal, because “Free speech!!! Rah! Rah! There can be no limits on free speech!”

Well, there are all sorts of limits on freedom in the USA, and if there weren’t, we wouldn’t have prisons full of people who had broken “laws” of some sort. Freedom is just a steady state where the majority of people are at least content with the way things are going, and when the majority is no longer pleased with their particular flavor of freedom, they change the way things are going until it is pleasing again. We are only as free as our personally applied chains allow.

One of the things we, as a society and civilization have agreed upon is it is generally a very bad thing to kill someone, except under very specific circumstances. Another thing we have agreed on –or so I thought– is it is also a very bad thing to convince, persuade, entice, provoke, or incite others to kill or harm someone. Not to mention publicly stating you have enough bullets to “put down” state attorneys, police officers, and members of the court is, to put it in overly mild terms, is never ever considered wise.

I feel sorry for Mr. Turner, not because he got arrested for speaking his mind, but because he must be suffering from some kind of mental condition. No rational and sane mind would post and say things like the above and then be surprised or outraged about being arrested.

“What happened to society? I go into business, I don’t make it, I go bankrupt. I’ve been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No. No.”
–Craig T. Nelson

Really? Mr. Nelson got no help at all from anyone? Then what the hell does he call food stamps and welfare? Personally, I call that getting help from a whole lot of someones … like every tax payer in the USA.

And since I am posting that idiotic statement, let me post this one too:

“Hispanic polls, Hispanic surveys, indicate that Hispanics think just like everyone else. We’re not like African-Americans. We think just like everybody else.”
–Manny Miranda

Who is everybody else? White people? What does that make African-Americans? Aliens from Planet X? What a freaking moronic and racist ass, and the sad fact is he probably doesn’t even realize how offensive and obnoxious that statement is to anyone with a brain cell or two.

My gods, the stupid … it hurts my head!

Speaking of stupidity and idiots, I have found a book a simply must read: Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (Hardcover).

Question: Is there a specific turning point where, as a country, we moved away from prizing experience to trusting the gut over intellect?

Charles P. Pierce: I don’t know if there’s one point that you can point to and say, “This is when it happened.” The conflict between intellectual expertise and reflexive emotion—often characterized as “good old common sense,” when it is neither common nor sense—has been endemic to American culture and politics since the beginning. I do think that my profession, journalism, went off the tracks when it accepted as axiomatic the notion that “Perception is reality.” No. Perception is perception and reality is reality, and if the former doesn’t conform to the latter, then it’s the journalist’s job to hammer and hammer the reality until the perception conforms to it. That’s how “intelligent design” gets treated as “science” simply because a lot of people believe in it.

Yes, I need to scrape together some spare cash to get this book ASAP, if only to validate the feeling I have had since the mid-80’s that Americans have been getting more and more stupid with every passing year. It’s always nice when I don’t feel like I am alone in realizing this sad fact.

Time Warner has done it now. They have dropped HDNet and HDNet Movies from the high definition tier we pay extra to get. Now we are left with MavTV (”created by men for men” and gods does it suck), MGMHD (old movies), Universal HD (used to be good but has begun sucking), and the Smithsonian Channel.

Though I am sure the new Smithsonian Channel will have programming I would enjoy, I won’t justify paying an extra $7 a month just for that one channel, and I couldn’t care less about the other three. When we first got HDTV, the extra HD tier was a good idea. Most channels weren’t available in HD yet, and for a small amount of money, we got about a dozen channels to enjoy on our new HD television. Now almost all the standard channels are freely available in high definition, and we have the HD versions of all the premium channels we pay for as well. We are longer hurting for high definition programming. Without HDNet and HDMovie, that extra tier is now completely worthless to us. Those were two of our favorite channels, and the only reason we continued paying for the HD tier after they dropped a few other channels we liked from it.

And since we’ll be going to the TW office to cancel that, we might as well tell them to ditch Cinemax as well. Haven’t been watching it, and it usually only has crap on anyway. If the soft porn was at least good, it would be one thing, but it’s not even good soft porn. So Cinemax goes too, and we’ll be saving close to $20 a month on our cable bill.

Until they raise the prices again, of course, which they always seem to do after the take away channels everyone loves and add junk no one wanted, no one likes, and likely costs them next to nothing to get their hands on.

Oh how I wish some competition for Time Warner would come to my neighborhood. I am so sick of being stuck with them if we want high speed internet and cable TV. They do nothing but screw everyone over all the damn time.

Read today in an online discussion:

“Most of the founding fathers were ministers moron.”

Since I can’t be bothered to go to the trouble to sign up for an account at the particular newspaper where I read that, and the information about what our founding fathers actually did for a living is rather interesting, I shall educate the masses here at my own blog.

Via Wikipedia:

The 1787 delegates practiced a wide range of high and middle-status occupations, and many pursued more than one career simultaneously. They did not differ dramatically from the Loyalists, except they were generally younger and less senior in their professions. Thirty-five were lawyers or had benefited from legal education, though not all of them relied on the profession for a livelihood. Some had also become judges.

* At the time of the convention, 13 men were merchants: Blount, Broom, Clymer, Dayton, Fitzsimons, Shields, Gilman, Gorham, Langdon, Robert Morris, Pierce, Sherman, and Wilson.

* Six were major land speculators: Blount, Dayton, Fitzsimons, Gorham, Robert Morris, and Wilson.

* Eleven speculated in securities on a large scale: Bedford, Blair, Clymer, Dayton, Fitzsimons, Franklin, King, Langdon, Robert Morris, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and Sherman.

* Twelve owned or managed slave-operated plantations or large farms: Bassett, Blair, Blount, Butler, Carroll, Jenifer, Jefferson, Mason, Charles Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Rutledge, Spaight, and Washington. Madison also owned slaves, as did Franklin, who later freed his slaves and became an abolitionist.

* Broom and Few were small farmers.

* Eight of the men received a substantial part of their income from public office: Baldwin, Blair, Brearly, Gilman, Livingston, Madison, and Rutledge.

* Three had retired from active economic endeavors: Franklin, McHenry, and Mifflin.

* Franklin and Williamson were scientists, in addition to their other activities.

* McClurg, McHenry, and Williamson were physicians, and Johnson was a college president.

I certainly didn’t know all of them without looking it up, and they were all pretty much what I expected. Wealthy, white, educated, male, landowners in the middle to upper classes and having careers that suited their positions in life. And while it is recorded that a few of them had studied theology, and I am certain some of those often discussed theology privately and publicly (because I have read a number of their books and papers), not a one of them was actually a “minister” of any sort.

Furthermore … no, we don’t need to designate the first week of May as America’s Spiritual Heritage Week for “the appreciation of and education on America’s history of religious faith.” Nor do we need to designate 2010 as The Year of the Bible. Both of these things have been recently presented as plausible ideas by a few of our national elected representatives, because there are those who are so firmly of the belief the USA is a Christian nation, they feel the need to ram that idea down everyone’s throats.

I started a rant about this very subject last week and eventually trashed it, because it gets tiresome arguing about the same stuff all the time. All I have to say about whether or not we are a Christian nation is this:

Which particular sect of Christianity in the USA is representative of this supposed Christian nation everyone keeps telling me we are? In my travels and studies in the world of Christian believers, there are a vast number of differing sects all wearing the label of Christianity, and few of them agree on even the basic points of morality, dogma, or beliefs. So which of these Christian sects is it that is meant to represent the whole of America? Answer me that.

Two blogs I have been enjoying lately:

Awkward Family Photos never fails to elicit a groan or giggle from me. What were some of those families thinking when they had that photo taken? Seriously!

Kind Over Matter is a blog “dedicated to kind acts, inspirational art & kind projects”. I don’t really know how to describe it better than that. I just love it.