Wednesday, April 10, 2013
PETA Kills Puppies
Warning: Some of the following graphic photos may distress the reader.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an organization that publicly claims to represent the best interest of animals -- indeed their "ethical treatment." Yet approximately 2,000 animals pass through PETA's front door every year and very few make it out alive. The vast majority -- 96 percent in 2011 -- exit the facility out the back door after they have been killed, when Pet Cremation Services of Tidewater stops by on their regular visits to pick up their remains. Between these visits, the bodies are stored in the giant walk-in freezer PETA installed for this very purpose. It is a freezer that cost $9,370 and, like the company which incinerates the bodies of PETA's victims, was paid for with the donations of animal lovers who could never have imagined that the money they donated to help animals would be used to end their lives instead. In fact, in the last 11 years, PETA has killed 29,426 dogs, cats, rabbits, and other domestic animals. (...)
Acording to inspection reports by the Virginia Department of Agriculture, the PETA facility "does not contain sufficient animal enclosures to routinely house the number of animals annually reported as taken into custody... The shelter is not accessible to the public, promoted, or engaged in efforts to facilitate the adoption of animals taken into custody."
Routine inspections often found "no animals to be housed in the facility" or, at best "few animals in custody," despite thousands of them impounded by PETA annually. Since they take in thousands per year, where were they? "90% [of the animals] were euthanized within the first 24 hours of custody," according to the Virginia Department of Agriculture inspector. How can people adopt animals from PETA when they kill the animals they acquire within minutes without ever making them available for adoption? How can people adopt animals when they have no adoption hours, do no adoption promotion, and do not show animals for adoption, choosing to kill them without doing so? In fact, when asked by a reporter what efforts they make to find animals homes, PETA had no comment.
by Nathan J. Winograd, Huffington Post | Read more:
Image: Virginia Department of Agriculture
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an organization that publicly claims to represent the best interest of animals -- indeed their "ethical treatment." Yet approximately 2,000 animals pass through PETA's front door every year and very few make it out alive. The vast majority -- 96 percent in 2011 -- exit the facility out the back door after they have been killed, when Pet Cremation Services of Tidewater stops by on their regular visits to pick up their remains. Between these visits, the bodies are stored in the giant walk-in freezer PETA installed for this very purpose. It is a freezer that cost $9,370 and, like the company which incinerates the bodies of PETA's victims, was paid for with the donations of animal lovers who could never have imagined that the money they donated to help animals would be used to end their lives instead. In fact, in the last 11 years, PETA has killed 29,426 dogs, cats, rabbits, and other domestic animals. (...)
Acording to inspection reports by the Virginia Department of Agriculture, the PETA facility "does not contain sufficient animal enclosures to routinely house the number of animals annually reported as taken into custody... The shelter is not accessible to the public, promoted, or engaged in efforts to facilitate the adoption of animals taken into custody."
Routine inspections often found "no animals to be housed in the facility" or, at best "few animals in custody," despite thousands of them impounded by PETA annually. Since they take in thousands per year, where were they? "90% [of the animals] were euthanized within the first 24 hours of custody," according to the Virginia Department of Agriculture inspector. How can people adopt animals from PETA when they kill the animals they acquire within minutes without ever making them available for adoption? How can people adopt animals when they have no adoption hours, do no adoption promotion, and do not show animals for adoption, choosing to kill them without doing so? In fact, when asked by a reporter what efforts they make to find animals homes, PETA had no comment.
by Nathan J. Winograd, Huffington Post | Read more:
Image: Virginia Department of Agriculture
Robert Rauschenberg, Engagement, solvent transfer on Arches paper with gouache, watercolor, wash and pencil, 57.47 x 75.88 cm, 1968.
via:
Soaking Up the Sake: Izakayas
Easy: izakayas. These informal Japanese restaurants have been opening at a rapid pace around the country, but most Americans haven’t figured them out yet. Where’s the sushi bar? What’s with the tiny portions? Is this Asian fusion tapas or what?
That’s the izakaya: easy to love, but hard to nail down. It’s friendlier than a French bar à vins, has more food choices than a Spanish tapeo, and takes itself less seriously than a British gastro pub.
But it makes the same point: drinking is primary; food is secondary; and if you’re doing it right, there will be hangovers.
“Hangover prevention is a big topic of conversation at izakaya meals,” said Yukari Sakamoto, a Japanese-American sommelier and writer who lives in Tokyo. (She swears by a morning-after remedy called Ukon no Chikara.) “That is, when you’re not talking about what to eat next.”
From the words for sake (rice wine) and stay, traditional izakayas are places anyone can linger for the price of a drink. The word is usually translated as tavern or pub — not very helpfully, since those words suggest a menu more T.G.I. Friday’s than Nobu. An izakaya isn’t a destination for great ramen, or perfect tempura, or impeccable sushi — although the menu, confusingly, will list all those dishes and more. Izakaya food, like most bar food, is salty and spicy, crunchy and savory, and engineered to be especially delicious with beer or wine.
But our phrase “bar food” can’t cover the dizzying spread of house-made tofu and pickles, grilled seafood, deep-fried bites like octopus balls and chicken wings, home-style meat stews, fried rice, noodle bowls and local seasonal produce that characterize even modest izakayas in Japan.
At their best, izakaya meals can also be models of Japanese culinary poise and delicacy. “It’s supposed to be a kind of casual place to eat and drink,” said Eric Bromberg, the chef and restaurateur who opened Blue Ribbon Izakaya and Sushi on the Lower East Side last year. “But since it’s Japan, everything comes out beautiful and elegant anyway.” (...)
In Japan, where the custom goes back at least to the 19th century, izakayas — marked by glowing red lanterns and long sake lists — are where co-workers go to celebrate a promotion, where young people meet to fill up before clubbing or karaoke, where families gather for an inexpensive weekend treat. There are upscale and hole-in-the-wall izakayas, kawaii izakayas where the waitresses are dressed as little girls, and chains of kechi yasui (“for misers”) izakayas where the drinks or food come free. Among young people, sake consumption has been steadily declining in Japan as stronger drinks become popular, and chain izakayas are among the efforts by the sake industry to bring them back.
“In Japanese life, there is a lot of drinking, but it is always combined with eating,” said Ms. Sakamoto, who was raised in Minnesota and attended culinary school in New York City, and was a sommelier at the Park Hyatt in Tokyo. “Which is why we have more izakayas than bars.” (...)
Although the menu may look huge and rambling, there is a logical sequence to an izakaya meal.
“To a Japanese eye, an izakaya menu looks like a bento box,” Ms. Sakamoto said. “And you just know how to eat it: something raw, something pickled, something fried, something simmered.”
by Julia Moskin, NY Times | Read more:
How a Leafy Folk Remedy Stopped Bedbugs in Their Tracks
Generations of Eastern European housewives doing battle against bedbugs spread bean leaves around the floor of an infested room at night. In the morning, the leaves would be covered with bedbugs that had somehow been trapped there. The leaves, and the pests, were collected and burned — by the pound, in extreme infestations.
Now a group of American scientists is studying this bedbug-leaf interaction, with an eye to replicating nature’s Roach Motel.
A study to be published Wednesday in The Journal of the Royal Society Interface details the scientists’ quest, including their discovery of how the bugs get hooked on the leaves, how the scientists have tried to recreate these hooks synthetically and how their artificial hooks have proved to be less successful than the biological ones.
At first glance, the whole notion seems far-fetched, said Catherine Loudon, a biologist at the University of California, Irvine, who specializes in bedbug locomotion.
“If someone had suggested to me that impaling insects with little tiny hooks would be a valid form of pest control, I wouldn’t have given it credence,” she said in an interview. “You can think of lots of reasons why it wouldn’t work. That’s why it’s so amazing.”
“The areas where they appear to be pierceable,” Dr. Loudon said, “are not the legs themselves. It’s where they bend, where it’s thin. That’s where they get pierced.”
This folk remedy from the Balkans was never entirely forgotten. A German entomologist wrote about it in 1927, a scientist at the United States Department of Agriculture mentioned it in a paper in 1943, and it can be found in Web searches about bedbugs and bean plants.
But the commercial availability of pesticides like DDT in the 1940s temporarily halted the legions of biting bugs. As their pesticide-resistant descendants began to multiply from Manhattan to Moscow, though, changing everything from leases to liability laws, the hunt for a solution was on.
by Felicity Barringer, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Megan W. Szyndler and Catherine Loudon/University of California, Irvine
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Masters 2013: Hole-by-Hole Guide to Augusta
Past and present Masters stars reveal how they would tackle each hole from tee to green at Augusta National as the world's best players gear up for the first golf major of 2013.
by Paddy Allen and Ewan Murray, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: PGAgolfArt.com
Paying For Your Ex-
[ed. Click HERE for larger graphic.]
What is probably the most exclusive club in the world has a similarly exclusive price tag. The bill included $450,000 on Bill Clinton’s Harlem office and $85,000 on George W Bush’s telephone bill, said the report by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service.
The cost of funding the former presidents will raise eyebrows, given that the hefty speaking fees they can command after leaving office and the well endowed presidential centres and foundations that facilitate many of their post-presidential activities.
The figures don't include security provided by the Secret Service, costs which are on a separate, undisclosed budget.
The cost of funding the former presidents will raise eyebrows, given that the hefty speaking fees they can command after leaving office and the well endowed presidential centres and foundations that facilitate many of their post-presidential activities.
The figures don't include security provided by the Secret Service, costs which are on a separate, undisclosed budget.
by Mark Oliver and Conrad Quilty-Harper, The Telegraph | Read more:
h/t TYWKIWDBI
Lost in Translation
It’s a dupe, you know?
Being alone, you steel yourself. There is no expectation but for self-perseverance and at least you’re allowed that thrill of pride. But if you set down your independence and let down your draw bridge and then it doesn’t work? Then you find yourself—or them—still impenetrable? Who can survive that?
You’ve been there, too. Those quiet doubting long drive homes. Those shut out, wordless, withholding trips beside a partner who’s closing down. Or maybe it’s you that has shut down this time, stuck enduring the nearly unbearable wait for them to simply notice. (...)
What I mostly loved about Lost in Translation the first time around, I think, was the gaps. It is a movie defined by what is missing. The quiet spaces and the unspoken words and even the now-classic final scene. The whispered farewell between Bob and Charlotte that we’re not asked or allowed to hear.
Do you remember this? There are entire websites devoted to analyzing and breaking down what Bob says to Charlotte in the film’s final moments, his aging cheek pressed to hers – soft and taut and flawless as a whole lifetime left before you.
I really love that Sofia Coppola never told us. I want something in all this to remain pure. If it must be a secret, then so be it.
And that’s the beauty of the entire movie, really – its sort of Japanese elegance. What it invites and never forces. The line that it toes. (...)
Finishing this essay took too long for no particular (and a hundred insignificant) reasons. Sitting on an airplane drinking gin and tonics and wondering about quinine and procrastinating it, I read this quote and finally pulled it all together:
“First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself.”
- Carson McCullers, “The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories”And I thought: that’s it, exactly, and yet still only a part of it. Just like travel, we often enter into love for far different reasons than we choose to remain in that country. We change, they change. What we want changes. We learn them too well, the illusion burns off, they stop needing us, we let them down.
Somehow, we drift apart and there is an incredible loneliness in the indecision over whether we’ll choose to paddle after each other or not.
Sometimes it takes work to love a country. Most times, it’s never what you thought it would be and you have to decide if you can just let it be what it is, and love it fiercely anyway.
by Erica C., A Bright Wall in a Dark Room | Read more:
h/t and photo: YMFY
Slow Cooking, Slow Eating
As the North American interest in food and farms has grown, more people have become familiar with the organization Slow Food, which was started in 1986 by leftwing intellectuals in the gastronomically and vinously rich Italian region of Piedmont. (Right away I have to pause and say that I work with people who do or did work for Slow Food, but I’m not much of a joiner, and a few years ago I let my brief membership lapse.) The immediate cause for starting Slow Food was the opening of the first McDonald’s in Italy, near the Spanish Steps in Rome. A few years later, in 1989, the Slow Food movement went international when delegates from 15 countries met in Paris to sign the Slow Food Manifesto.
This short document is rather wonderful. It says: “We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods.” The manifesto contains a large element of hope: “May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.” And the manifesto proposes just that single solution to the problem: “A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life.”
As slogans go, the meaning of “slow food” is perfectly clear. It’s the opposite of fast food. The Slow Food mother organization in Italy celebrates the country’s traditional regional food, publicizing and arranging support for many individual foods. Those include lardo di Colonnata and alici di menaica. The first is cured fat back, as prepared in marble coffers in a particular quarrying village above Carrara in Tuscany; the second is cured anchovies, caught in an ancient design of net in just one fishing port 100 miles south of Naples. The symbol of Slow Food is the snail. Slow Food opposes mass-production and a high-speed life. It supports what I would call a civilized life.
These days Slow Food talks about Slow everything — even Slow Fish, meaning fish that have been caught in ways that don’t result in overfishing or other damage to the environment. But “slow food” also has a lower-case meaning. And a slow life doesn’t revolve just around food.
You’re living a slow life when you gather seashells along the shore, feed a campfire, visit a nearly empty museum on a weekday morning, talk late into the night, read an ink-on-paper book cover to cover without stopping to do much else, and, I would say, if you take the time to be bored. Part of being civilized is not just being slow but occasionally coming to a stop, establishing a point of reference for the moment when you start moving again. When you stop you aren’t really stopping, of course, because that’s often when good ideas rise to the surface. (...)
Some of the most delicious food, including some of the greatest dishes, is made using cooking techniques that by nature are slow. Most of these involve liquid — braising, poaching, stewing, soup making. But proper roasting, too, takes time, whether on a spit or in an oven (though the latter is really baking). Some examples of excellent results from slow tactics are a French navarin (braised lamb shoulder with spring vegetables, including turnips), oxtail soup (which starts as a braise), braised lamb shanks with whole garlic cloves and bulb fennel, pieds et pacquets from Marseille (sheep’s feet with packages of sheep stomach), osso buco from Milan, and the beef brasato made in different regions of northern Italy.
Of course, those who believe in slow food don’t really oppose fast cooking techniques. What’s wrong with toast? Or call it bruschetta. Certain techniques are inherently fast — sautéing, frying in deep fat, grilling. They apply high heat directly to relatively thin or small pieces of food, and if the cooking goes on too long the food burns. A lamb chop grilled medium rare takes just two or three minutes per side. A classic French omelette takes less than five minutes from cracking the eggs to sliding the cooked omelette onto a plate. Spinach, with the washing water still clinging, can take just a minute to cook through in a wide covered pot, stirred once or twice, a hybrid of boiling and steaming. Peas, green beans, cut-up carrots, turnips, or broccoli put into a big pot of boiling water don’t take more than a few minutes. (You can boil spinach, too, but if it’s young and delicate, it loses too much flavor to the water.) Then, to have all the good qualities of this quickly cooked food, you have to eat it quickly, before the vegetables lose their utterly fresh taste, before the grilled meat or fish looses juice and the bit of outer crispness.
Slowness really means living at the right speed for whatever you are doing, living more in the present moment, rather than looking always ahead to the next thing: deadlines, bills, future plans. It’s not about being inefficient or taking too much time. It’s about moving at the right speed.
by Edward Behr, The Art of Eating | Read more:
Photo: Kimberly Behr
Travels in the New Psychedelic Bazaar
The gray market for these new drugs, referred to as “research chemicals” or “synthetics,” has gotten little attention outside the tabloid media in the past few years, even as there has been worry about Mexican cartels and cocaine and heroin rings and medical-marijuana laws. It’s not a huge market, but it is a vivid one and fervent. For young guys interested in drugs today (and the users of these drugs are “150 percent male,” as one aficionado puts it), this underground scene of hobbyists and tinkerers, hippie-meets-hipster drug geeks, who like to call themselves psychonauts, there’s no better reason to try a new drug other than it happens to be just that—new. These drug users imagine themselves as amateur chemists, proto–Walter Whites, sampling and resynthesizing drugs to achieve exactly the state of consciousness they find most pleasurable. And there are no end of drugs to play with. As Hamilton Morris, the son of filmmaker Errol and a Williamsburg-based journeyman drug historian, as well as an independent chemist conducting research at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, has noted, this era “is to ecstasy what the Cambrian period was to arthropods.”
The Wizard claimed a highfalutin motivation for his interest in these drugs—it’s about studying the way that changing one’s brain chemistry alters consciousness, he says, and drawing conclusions from there about what “is” is—but it seemed to me that the drug-taking itself had become the thing. He was constantly scanning the forums to check out the best dosages and “delivery methods” of various drugs—discerning whether, say, E-Cat, a bath salt, was better taken buccally, insufflated, perhaps injected (though the Wizard didn’t like to do that), or “pegged” in a “shamanic enema,” which is lingo for putting a packet of drugs up the butt. Eventually, the list of substances that he tried, in addition to old standards like alcohol, heroin, MDMA, cocaine, marijuana, acid, ether, nitrous, hydrocodone, mescaline, and cubensis mushrooms, grew to include MDA, DOM, LSA, MDAI, DOB, DOI, DOC, DMT, K, GBL, GHB, TMA-2, AMT, BZP, 2C-B, 2C-C, 2C-D, 2C-I, 2C-T-7, 5-MeO-DiPT, 5-MeO-MIPT, 5-MeO-DALT, 5-MeO-DMT, PCP, MDE, 4-Acetoxy-DET, 4-Acetoxy-DiPT, FLEA, 4-FA, JHW-018, MPA, AM-2201, AM-2233, 4-MEC, 4-EMC, 5-APB, 6-APB, ALD, MXE, BHO, Bromo-DragonFLY, Salvinorin A, Soma, fentanyl, Dilaudid, Marinol, thujone, oxymorphone, hydromorphone, and some of the “bath salts,” which is just a catchy, consumer-friendly name for “synthetic cathinones,” a slew of amphetamines and MDMA-like substances invented in 2008 to mimic the chemical composition of the African khat plant. (In Belize, before his legal troubles, McAfee Virus founder John McAfee was trying to resynthesize MDVP, a bath salt that he called “super perv powder” and that is supposed to feel like doing a bunch of meth and then, twenty minutes later, a line of very fine cocaine.)
As we sit in front of a crackling fire at his neatly kept cabin in the woods, the Wizard smiles. “These are all awesome substances, if you know what to expect,” he says. It’s possible he may have missed a few drugs when he put together this list, he adds—given the hammering to his cerebrum over the years—but he feels satisfied that he could remember most of them.
The story that America tells itself about drugs, particularly psychedelic ones—that term, invented by Aldous Huxley, is preferred these days, since “hallucinogens” implies that one is not actually on a trip through one’s mind (or a universal mind) but seeing things that aren’t there—is that they exploded in the sixties and seventies, in circles like Timothy Leary’s and on Haight-Ashbury, then were demonized by the government and shortly dispensed with, relegated to being the plaything of curious college kids at Oberlin and Brown. These days, though, almost every drug, from pot to GHB to morphine, has been messed with, as chemists find that removing a methoxy group or adding a benzene ring makes a new drug with different properties: body-grooving with a side helping of visuals, euphoric or speedy, long or short, or administering just the right dose of primal fear. These man-made compounds were called “designer drugs” in the late nineties; you might have thought, as I did before I researched this story, that they had such a name because they were carried around by trendy types in designer Gucci handbags, but it refers to a chemist’s “designing” a new molecular compound that replicates the effects of an illegal drug.
By virtue of being molecularly distinct, these newer synthetics now exist somewhere between the realms of legal and illegal, in the gray. That’s a big deal to most of the people who are drawn to them: those who are often drug-tested, particularly in the Army and Navy, or trying to dodge rehab (drug tests have yet to be updated for many synthetics); less affluent users who like the fact that a lot of these drugs are extremely cheap and sometimes even found in head shops; and kids who probably don’t even know a drug dealer, but they do know how to order things off the Internet. Most of these folks are looking for legal amphetamines. The Wizard’s crowd of underground psychonauts, probably made up of about 10,000 to 20,000 people, most of whom communicate through the forums, are a little different. They’re most interested in the ability to custom-match a substance with a desire—even if, in some cases, the new drugs are substandard to known ones (making your heart race; shoving you through a fractal landscape with elves coming out of the gloaming; making you feel weird, and not good weird, but bad weird). “You can pinpoint what you want now: ‘I’d like something of four hours’ duration with mescaline effects, or twelve hours’ duration with alternating mushroom and LSD rushes,’ ” says a 37-year-old software engineer whose activity in this realm has led friends to give him the nickname of Saddam Hussein’s poison-gas henchman, “Chemical Ali.”
by Vanessa Grigoriadis, New York Magazine | Read more:
Photo: Steve Smith/Getty Images
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