Tuesday, January 29, 2013

SARAH PALIN HAS LEFT THE BUILDING
















Seems like we won’t have Sarah Palin to kick around any more. Ask not for whom the blue bus is calling. Palin has reached her sell-by date and will be carried away by the inevitable time stream of huckster history that takes them all, the good, the bad, and the bozos. I’ll guess I'll miss her. You, me, and Tina Fey had so much fun at the expense of the witless Witch Queen of Wasilla.but now it’s all over. As the New York Daily News tells it…

“Fox News chief Roger Ailes, who once thought Palin a hot commodity, began privately calling her "stupid," according to a 2011 article in New York Magazine. During the Republican National Convention in August, Palin publicly complained that Fox News had canceled her on-air interviews. And rising Republican leaders, like Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, are steering the GOP away from Palin's Tea Party philosophies in the wake of Mitt Romney's 2012 defeat.  Palin was paid a salary of $1 million per year while at Fox, and a University of Minnesota study found that during her tenure at the network she earned a hefty $15.85 per word spoken on air.”

Click here for The Bay City Rollers

The secret word is Passage

THIS IS WHERE I KEEP MY OVERDRAFT



















Some may disagree but if your bank is going to be crooked (and that seems inevitable) I think it’d rather have it laundering dope money than throwing folks out of their homes.  

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS 20TH CENTURY


TENNESSEE WILLIAMS 21st CENTURY (You decide!)


EVA GREEN SEZ...






















“Don’t ask me, my hands are tied.”


SPACE OPERA


Sunday, January 27, 2013

SUNDAY BREAKFAST














One of the things I really miss now I’m back in England is a proper hotdog. Okay, I know probably half of you are disgusted by now and are just straining at the leash to tell me all about the bugs and the rats hairs and the diseases and all the other hotdog horror stories, But hey, a coke and a hotdog, what more can the hungover ask. And the tradition is a noble one and even comes with it's own landmarks Nathan’s on Coney Island, Pinks in Hollywood, but I’m no frankensnob, I’m just as happy with a Sabrett from a pushcart in Manhattan or the ones in the 7/11 revolving on those hot rollers.  I take my dog with mustard and ketchup. I like relish but it tends to get on your shirt. And that's my sunday dog tale and I’m sticking to it.

Click heref or Billie Holiday

The secret word is Bun 

Yossarian -- RIP

MARILYN SEZ…





















“Give the man a goddamned hotdog and while you’re there get me one too!".

BUT LET’S TALK ABOUT FROGS FOR A WHILE













Because their bodies absorb just about everything in their immediate environment, frogs are bellwethers of toxic pollution and what happens to them today happens to us tomorrow and right now they are dying.  

“Widely used pesticides can kill frogs within an hour, new research has revealed, suggesting the chemicals are playing a significant and previously unknown role in the catastrophic global decline of amphibians. The scientists behind the study said it was both "astonishing" and "alarming" that common pesticides could be so toxic at the doses approved by regulatory authorities, adding to growing criticism of how pesticides are tested. "You would not think products registered on the market would have such a toxic effect," said Carsten Brühl, at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany. "It is the simplest effect you can think of: you spray the amphibian with the pesticide and it is dead. That should translate into a dramatic effect on populations."
Trenton Garner, an ecologist at the Zoological Society of London, said: "This is a valuable addition to the substantial body of literature detailing how existing standards for the use of agricultural pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers are inadequate for the protection of biodiversity." Amphibians are the best example of the great extinction of species currently under way, as they are the most threatened and rapidly declining vertebrate group. More than a third of all amphibians are included in the IUCN "red list" of endangered species, with loss of habitat, climate change and disease posing the biggest threats. Brühl had previously studied how easily frogs can absorb pesticides through their permeable skins, which they can breathe through when underwater. But pesticides are not required to be tested on amphibians, said Brühl: "We could only find one study for one pesticide that was using an exposure likely to occur on farmland."
His team chose widely used fungicides, herbicides and insecticides. The most striking results were for a fungicide called pyraclostrobin, sold as the product Headline by the manufacturer BASF and used on 90 different crops across the world. It killed all the common European frogs used as test animals within an hour when applied at the rate recommended on the label. Other fungicides, herbicides and insecticides also showed acute toxicity, even when applied at just 10% of the label rate, with the insecticide dimethoate, for example, killing 40% of animals within a week.
The study, published on Thursday in Scientific Reports [will be live after embargo], concluded: "The observation of acute mortality in a vertebrate group caused by commercially available pesticides at recommended field rates is astonishing, since 50 years after the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring one would have thought that the development of refined risk-assessment procedures would make such effects virtually impossible." A BASF spokesman disputed the findings: "This study was performed under laboratory 'worst-case' conditions. Under normal agricultural conditions amphibians are not exposed to such pesticide concentrations. According to our knowledge, no significant impact on amphibian populations has been reported despite the widespread and global use of the fungicide pyraclostrobin." Brühl said the method, a single spray directly on to the frogs, sometimes at just 10% of the label rate, was a "realistic worst-case" scenario. He added that in the field, multiple sprays of a variety of pesticides was likely and that chemicals might run off into ponds where frogs lived. Sandra Bell, Friends of the Earth's nature campaigner, said: "From frogs to bees, there is mounting evidence that the pesticide bombardment of our farmland is having a major impact on our precious wildlife. Strong action is urgently needed to get farmers off the chemical treadmill.
"As well as banning the most toxic products, governments must set clear targets for reducing all pesticides and ensure farmers have safe and thoroughly tested alternatives."
Earlier this month, the world's most widely used insecticide was for the first time officially labelled an "unacceptable" danger to bees feeding on flowering crops, by the European Food Safety Agency. The agency had previously stated that current "simplistic" regulations contained "major weaknesses".
"There is an urgency to address [the amphibian issue] as pesticides will be applied again soon because it's spring, and that's when we have all these migrations to ponds," said Brühl.
"We don't have any data from the wild about dead frogs because no one is looking for them – and if you don't look, you don't find. But the pesticides are very widely used and so have the potential to have a significant effect on populations."

DOC’S PAPERBACK CLASSIC # 106



VAROOM!


GRATUITOUS BLACK & WHITE