Sand Is A Liquid

It has to be if you can swim in it right?



I think it will be a while before you can book your scuba sarfari in the North African desert, but that lizard is still pretty neat.

(via Wired, with more explanation in the article)

Discovery

The internets are pretty cool...



That's Discovery taking off on its last mission.  Having grown up during the shuttle age (the Challenger blowing up is one of my earliest memories) it never ocurred to me that they would stop sending shuttles up.  At least not without some cooler, new fangled shuttle to replace them.

(via SNH on FB)

The US Spent 10x As Much Investigating Clinton - Lewinsky As The Fianancial Crisis

From the department of you've got to be f'ing kidding me...



(via Daily Bail / @koxinga21 / @AlbertoNardelli)

Read This Now - Not Just Oats

Mark Bittman is transitioning his writing for the NYT away from a weekly food and recipe column and towards more opinion and food policy based pieces.

One of his first new bits is up on the NYT Opinionator, it seems that Mickey D's is only sort of serving oatmeal...

A more accurate description than “100% natural whole-grain oats,” “plump raisins,” “sweet cranberries” and “crisp fresh apples” would be “oats, sugar, sweetened dried fruit, cream and 11 weird ingredients you would never keep in your kitchen.”

Since we know there are barely any rules governing promotion of foods, one might wonder how this compares to real oatmeal, besides being 10 times as expensive. Some will say that it tastes better, but that’s because they’re addicted to sickly sweet foods, which is what this bowlful of wholesome is. 

It's worth reading the whole thing, Bittman is as sharp as ever.

(thanks to DN for the pointer)

Wisconsin

I for one am super impressed with the people of Wisconsin, who are refusing to take their Governor's attempt to strip union's of their collective bargaining rights lying down.

The story definitely deserves more coverage than it's getting with schools closed and the Capitol in Madison filled with protesters every day this week.

TPM has been ramping up their coverage and the story is now the top section of the google news page.

Amazingly the Governor's claim that the union-busting is necessary to close a budget gap, refers to a gap that was only created when the Governor and his allies recently passed $140 million in new special interest spending.  The Madison Cap Times has the story...

In its Jan. 31 memo to legislators on the condition of the state’s budget, the Fiscal Bureau determined that the state will end the year with a balance of $121.4 million.

To the extent that there is an imbalance -- Walker claims there is a $137 million deficit -- it is not because of a drop in revenues or increases in the cost of state employee contracts, benefits or pensions. It is because Walker and his allies pushed through $140 million in new spending for special-interest groups in January. If the Legislature were simply to rescind Walker’s new spending schemes -- or delay their implementation until they are offset by fresh revenues -- the “crisis” would not exist.

The Fiscal Bureau memo -- which readers can access at http://legis.wisconsin.gov/lfb/Misc/2011_01_31Vos&Darling.pdf -- makes it clear that Walker did not inherit a budget that required a repair bill.

The facts are not debatable.

That tidbit came via the Maddow Blog along with this quick video...



I'd say things are pretty real in WI right now.

Solving Problems

So this is pretty much me lately, I need to break the cycle.  Check out the rollover on the XKCD site for one way to do so...

This nice weather should help, but the start of fantasy baseball season sure won't...

Nothing Lasts Forever

Relax, I'm not talking about this blog (or maybe stop celebrating).  Rather that post title refers to the demise of my favorite little brewery / beer label.  Wild Goose beers were a formative piece of my beer education and their IPA and Oatmeal Stout settled in as two of my top beers and my definite top choices when in the DC area.

Hell I can remember taking the tour of the brewery as probably an 11 or 12 year old in Cambridge.  When I was back in town around New Year's I noticed that I couldn't find Oatmeal Stout anywhere and was a little put off about it.  It wasn't until this afternoon though, that I fired up the google and found that Wild Goose was indeed no more.

It seems that Flying Dog (who took over a few years back and then moved all of their operations to Fredrick) needs all of the capacity it has to push out their own label beers.  I can't say that I blame them, just that I'd rather drink some Wild Goose.

Beer in Baltimore has a nice obituary for Wild Goose, which is how I finally got the news.  This seems to be all that's left otherwise.  I'm tempted to say pour one out for Wild Goose, but if you have any left you should enjoy them.