Note to Birds, Insects, and other wild animals
Oh, and if you think people are animals too...
It's against the law for animals to mate in the city limits of Dibble, Oklahoma.
Thursday December 13, 2007 at 7:58am
The Power of Beets
Ever since Akron announced late last week that it was going to use a dash of beet juice in its road salt, drivers have been thinking the worst.The city says nothing will be stained and nothing will be hurt. Not cars, not clothes, not people.
For starters, this stuff is actually a brownish color, not beet red. And it's so diluted that it's barely noticeable.
As for damaging your vehicles — well, the opposite is true. Beets cancel out some of the corrosive properties of salt. With beets beating salt, our clothes, cars and concrete should all last longer.
But the key to the switch is that beet juice allows the salt to work at temperatures as cold as minus-60 degrees, rather than salt's normal low of 17 degrees.
The stuff Akron is dumping on its streets is 5 percent beet juice, 10 percent calcium chloride and 85 percent rock-salt brine.
Thursday December 6, 2007 at 7:37am
Ecotourism in Brazil
There's a good article in the October/November 2007 issue of The Brasilians about Ecotourism, specifically in the Pantanal region. (They do need to work on their web formatting, however)
I was at Iguacu in 1990, and someday I want to take our whole family there and then on an ecotour of the Pantanal. Butterflies galore.