Zandra Skafec

It was a grim holiday weekend for some fishermen in Louisiana's Sportsman's Paradise. Fishermen returning to the Rigotlets Marina this morning brought back samples of tar balls they collected while out on Lake Pontchartrain according to the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation (ABC 26 Video Report).

Ann Rheams, Director of the Foundation, estimated to CNN that the amount of oil reaching the Eastern shore of Lake Pontchartrain near Slidell at under 100 barrels, with tar balls about the size of a silver dollar. Though hundreds of miles away, Hurricane Alex stalled Gulf Coast oil containment and the resulting storm systems have pushed the oil inwards.

Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Secretary Robert Barham announced precautionary closures to fishing in parts of Orleans, St. Bernard, St. Tammany and Plaquemines parishes because reports of oil, easterly winds and high tides. Closures of recreational and commercial fishing are based on information from field biologists, staff and trajectory models from NOAA. Once reports of oil are received, the Department initiates a field survey and seafood testing. LDWLF updates maps of closed fishing areas daily as the oil pushes inward.

Coming during a popular holiday fishing weekend, today's closures are a gut punch to parishes fighting to keep the BP Oil Spill at bay.

In late May, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and St. Tammany Parish President Kevin Davis asked the U.S. Coast Guard to approve the building a series of earthen berms and rock dikes in Lake Borgne from Alligator Bend to the East Pearl River. The Alligator Bend and Seven Lagoons Shoreline Projection Projects were originally developed to restore the coast as part of the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection, and Restoration Act, but can also prevent oil from encroaching into the marshland along Lake Borgne and can protect the lower Pontchartrain Basin.

“I was out at Fort Pike earlier this morning and can attest that our assets are in place and crews are picking up tar balls as swiftly as the weather conditions permit,” Landrieu said yesterday. “We have always asserted that this is going to be a long, tough slog, but I remain confident that every asset we have available is being deployed to protect the Lake.”

And finally, because 11 workers died in the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion, it seems important to remember them on this weekend of national reflection.

Full Article and ABC 26 Video Clip Posted at NewOrleans.com.

Obama filled the top slots of the bureaucracies with environmentalist ideologues. Dr. Jane Lubchenco, Obama's selection for the head of NOAA, is a brilliant scientist and a capable administrator, but also a hard-over environmentalist. She has plans to shrink the fishing fleet by more than half and then to restructure the remainder into bigger, presumably more efficient vessels. New regulations were imposed on 1 May 2010: miniscule allocations, big-brother reporting, electronic tracking, government observers on every other trip. Of course, to implement this, the bureaucracy has expanded — exploded — with lots of public-sector jobs. The trouble with public-sector jobs is that they do not create wealth. On the contrary, they are paid for by the taxpayer and represent a drain on available capital. 

Swarovski

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Science educators often skim off the top, as it were. They regale young minds with the marvels of science while remaining silent about the problems to which it has contributed.

When I was in grade school as a member of a different younger generation, we had routine drills in which we took cover under our desks. This was to prepare us to act quickly in case the Russians decided to nuke our playground. No one ever explained how this pathetic maneuver would save us, but it seemed to make the teachers feel better. Today's youngsters are treated to a different menu of menaces. Their nuclear hazard is more likely to come in the form of a dirty nuclear device detonated by a terrorist instead of from a Russian plane or missile. Then there is global warming, nuclear waste, environmental degradation, polluted air, water and soil. There are acidified oceans, melting polar ice, oceanic dead zones, dying coral reefs, vanishing species, on and on, all of which are due in some measure to the downside of science and technology. The mantra that only science can save us from these perils rings hollow to many youngsters, since it was largely science and technology that bequeathed them in the first place. As anthropologist and educator Loren Eiseley put it,

We have lived to see the technological progress that was hailed in one age as the savior of man become the horror of the next. We have observed that the same able and energetic minds which built lights, steamships and telephones turn with equal facility to the creation of what euphemistically is termed the “ultimate weapon.” It is in this reversal that the modern age comes off so badly.

The usual defense from the science community toward views such as Eiseley's is that it is technology, not science itself, that has made a mess of things. This is no doubt true to a certain extent. But scientists sometimes take risks in their research that appear breathtakingly irresponsible and reckless, which they usually justify in the name of pure or basic science. Some of these risks are so obvious they draw fire from scientists themselves. Consider a recent editorial in the respected British publication New Scientist titled “The Scary Business of Tinkering with Life”:

“By tinkering with the cell's natural machinery …[the research team] has found a way of making proteins with entirely new properties, opening up a future of exotic designer organisms…. This is a fundamental advance that could lead to new drugs, materials and energy sources. But tampering with life's operating system will inevitably raise safety concerns — and it's true that we have no way of predicting the fallout of this work. Synthetic biologists need to confront openly and honestly public fears that they are “playing God [emphasis added].”

Science boosters should wake up. Kids aren't dumb. To borrow novelist Ernest Hemingway's term, they have excellent “built-in bullshit detectors.” And nothing triggers the warning more than when those in charge present only one side of a story.

Must Science Be Depressing?

Why would anyone who is psychologically healthy pick a career that demands a view of the world that is morbid, pessimistic and depressing? That's precisely the worldview advocated by some of the most outstanding scientists of our day. This can be a turnoff to any optimistic, questing, curious, intelligent kid who stumbles onto it. Perhaps that is why the advocates of science education almost never acknowledge this prevailing view when promoting the wonders of science to youngsters.

Typical of the gloomy perspective is that of Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg in his 1977 book The First Three Minutes. In a now-famous passage, he writes,

It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning… It is hard to realize that this all [i.e., life on Earth] is just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

By the time Weinberg unveiled his gloomy view, the notion of a purposeless, meaningless universe was already on a roll in science. One of the most influential supporters of this perspective was the Nobel molecular biologist Jacques Monod (1910-1976), whose 1972 book Chance and Necessity powerfully influenced a generation of scientists. For Monod, purpose and meaning in nature were outlaw concepts; for a scientist to believe in them was unbecoming at best and a moral failing at worst. As he confidently proclaimed, “The cornerstone of scientific method is the systematic denial that 'true' knowledge can be got at by interpreting phenomena in terms of final causes–that is to say, of 'purpose.'”

Cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel C. Dennett of Tufts University has joined the chorus of meaninglessness by dissing free will. “When we consider whether free will is an illusion or reality,” he says, “we are looking into an abyss. What seems to confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair.”
Although prevalent, this depressing verdict on the status of meaning, direction and purpose in the world is not unanimous, and kids who intuitively reject this view have a few strong shoulders to stand on, as we'll see in the next blog.

References

Eiseley L. The Man Who Saw Through Time. New York, NY: Scribner; 1973: 106.
The scary business of tinkering with life. Unsigned editorial. New Scientist. February 20, 2010; 205(2748): 3.

Geddes L. Rewriting life in four-letter words. New Scientist. February 20, 2010; 205(2748): 14.
Hemingway E. Quoted in: Thinkexist.com. http://thinkexist.com/quotation/develop_a_built-in_bullshit_detector/204440.html. Accessed February 17, 2010.

Weinberg S. The First Three Minutes. New York, NY: Basic Books; 1993: 154.

Monod J. Chance and Necessity. New York, NY: Random House; 1972:21.

Dennett DC. Quoted in: “Overbye D. Free will: Now you have it, now you don't.” New York Times online. January 2, 2007.

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This attachment is technically a pasta extruder. It works like those old Play-Doh Spaghetti Factory play sets: fresh pasta dough gets put into a hopper and then pressed out through plates. The noodles are cut when they get to the desired length.

The KitchenAid attachment actually comes with six different plates for making six different pasta shapes. You can make regular spaghetti, bucatini (hollow spaghetti), large or small macaroni, fusilli, and rigatoni. It looks like the hopper is made of plastic, but the plates themselves are metal.

This is the first pasta maker or attachment we've seen that lets us make shaped pasta at home. We absolutely love our KitchenAid pasta roller attachment – not to mention KitchenAid in general – so we have high hopes for this attachment. We'll be saving our pennies starting right now!

• Check It Out! Pasta Press KitchenAid Attachment from Williams-Sonoma, $179.95

What do you think about this attachment? Has anyone had a chance to try it?

Related: Weekend Project: Make Pasta!

(Images: Williams-Sonoma)

Before the park’s grand opening, Harry Potter expert Melissa Anelli was magically granted access into Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter for a “chill-inducing” walk through the gates of Hogwarts and a taste of some genuine “butterbeer.”

I will never get over the bizarre feeling of strolling through a snowy British town in air so hot and so humid I could boil pasta in the palm of my hand. Nor will it ever feel natural to gaze upon Hogwarts, flanked by its iconic boars—and the palm trees that surround it—from afar. But (sorry, mayor of London), there really isn’t a better place than Florida for the wedge of Harry Potter paradise that is Universal Studios’ Wizarding World of Harry Potter. After a few minutes, the superb detailing of the attraction fully distracts from the environmental ironies.

Months ago, I attended a press preview of the theme park on behalf of my website, The Leaky Cauldron. During that preview we were given a quick tour of the still-under-construction park and offered samples of food from its Three Broomsticks restaurant. After all the deliciousness that ensued, I started joking that we fans were going to enter the park, which officially opens this week, as our normal selves, but walk out fat and poor.

Fast-forward to Memorial Day weekend, when all three hosts of The Leaky Cauldron’s PotterCast—John Noe, Frank Franco, and I—gained entrance to the park during its soft opening period. We get a lot of tips in our inboxes, and quite a few of them indicated a soft open around the end of May. Nothing was certain, but we knew there would be a theme park “experience” for people who had bought a certain vacation package, so we figured, why not just spend Memorial Day in Orlando… just in case? The gamble paid off. It turned out that a guest at one of the Universal Resort hotels could get into the park an hour before it opened to everyone else—and that was how we got into the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. It closed after a few hours, but we spent those hours making the most of everything and my wisecracking prediction came true inside two hours. Three butterbeers, five souvenir pins, a Hog's Head Ale, a pumpkin juice, a Cauldron Cake, a set of wax seals, a Hogwarts shirt, and an annual pass later, my stomach had grown as my bank balance diminished—and I can honestly say it was the happiest I've ever been under such conditions.

At 7:30 a.m. sharp on May 29, we stood on line with roughly 400 other people, awaiting entrance to the Promised Land. Every last person there was part of the largest human train I’ve ever seen, speed-walking like ducks all the way to the back of Universal Studios' Islands of Adventure theme park to get into Hogsmeade. We squealed like children as the arch, with its wrought-iron sign that reads “Please respect spell limits,” drew near, and almost ran to get right into Hogwarts and onto the Forbidden Journey ride, the park’s signature attraction.

Sadly, we never got on: As we were reminded, the soft opening was like the technical rehearsal for a show. We instead spent 20 minutes wandering around the magnificently built Hogwarts, ogling the so-real-looking moving portraits and trying to restrain ourselves from hopping into a seat next to the Gryffindor common room fire, before the queue came to a standstill and a mild-voiced announcer evacuated us.

Who cared? We had all of Hogsmeade to explore—a life-size recreation of the world I’ve immersed myself in for nearly a decade. We moved on to Ollivanders, the wand shop from the franchise, where a wand master carefully selected two young children from our group and performed tests on them to determine their wands. Of course, in true theme park tradition, this meant they would have to buy them in the neighboring shop.

A recent issue of a US Department of Agriculture publication includes an examination of how America’s food choices have changed over the past one hundred years. As you can see from one of the charts provided in the article, we’re eating a lot more chicken. The authors explain why:

Chicken availability over the past 100 years illustrates the effects of new technologies and product development. Increased chicken availability from 10.4 pounds per person in 1909 to 58.8 pounds in 2008 reflects the industry’s development of lower cost, meaty broilers in the 1940s and later, ready-to cook products, such as boneless breasts and chicken nuggets, as well as ready-to-eat products, such as pre-cooked chicken strips to toss in salads or pasta dishes.

Broilers were first marketed in the 1920s as a specialty item for restaurants. By the mid-1950s, innovations in breeding, mass production, and processing had made chicken more plentiful, affordable, and convenient for the dining-out market and for cooking at home. Media coverage of health concerns associated with total fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol in the last quarter of the 1900s may have contributed to a rise in chicken tacos and turkey burgers.

Link via Ace of Spades HQ

Cook the Book: Northern Fried Chicken

Posted by Caroline Russock, April 8, 2010 at 1:00 PM

[Photograph: Caroline Russock]

All of you fried chicken traditionalist out there take warning: This is not a typical Southern fried chicken recipe. There are ingredients and techniques within this recipe for Northern Fried Chicken from Bromberg Bros. Blue Ribbon Cookbook by Bruce Bromberg and Eric Bromberg that will go against all previous fried chicken notions.

Now that we have that out of the way, let's get down to the genius and timeliness of this recipe. In the week following Easter folks are always looking for creative uses for their leftover eggs, but this recipe addresses another holiday leftover: Passover matzo. The Bromberg Brothers' fried chicken is coated in a mix of matzo meal and flour, which gives it a crust that is worlds away from your typical fried chicken. It's lighter and crisp in a way that brings to mind a cornmeal crust. Using egg whites to adhere the coating to the chicken ensures that the crust stays put, even if your chicken sticks to the bottom of the frying pan. The last bit of atypical preparation is sprinkling the hot chicken with the Bromberg's Fried Chicken Seasoning once it comes out of the fryer. Since the coating isn't seasoned at all, this post-fry application of the Old Bay-like spice mix is where the majority of the flavor comes from.

So, there you have it: Northern Fried Chicken thought up by two French trained Jewish boys from New Jersey. This fried chicken was like no other recipe I've ever attempted at home, or eaten out for that matter, but it was really tasty. On the scale of making fried chicken it was not all that time consuming since there was no need to soak or preseason. All and all, pretty good, and even when served with some honey as the Brombergs recommend.

Win Bromberg Bros. Blue Ribbon Cookbook

As always with our Cook the Book feature, we have five (5) duplicates of Bromberg Bros. Blue Ribbon Cookbook to give away this week. Enter to win here »

Northern Fried Chicken

- serves 4 -

Adapted from Bromberg Bros.Blue Ribbon Cookbook by Bruce Bromberg and Eric Bromberg.

Ingredients

6 cups soy oil
1 (3-pound) chicken, cut into 8 pieces (2 legs, 2 thighs, 4 breast pieces)
4 large egg whites, whisked
1/2 cup matzo meal
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
Perfect Roast Seasoning (recipe follows)
1 teaspoon Fried Chicken Seasoning (recipe follows)
Mexican honey (or any honey you prefer), for serving

Procedure

1. Fill a big pot with about 3 inches of oil. Heat the oil over medium-high heat until a deep-fat thermometer reads 375°F.

2. Rinse the chicken pieces and pat dry with paper towels. Place the egg whites in a massive shallow bowl. In a separate shallow bowl, combine the matzo meal, flour, and baking powder. Dip each chicken piece in egg white and let excess drip back into the bowl. Next press each chicken piece into the matzo mix and tap off excess.

3. Working in 2 batches, if necessary, fry the chicken until dark golden, about 10 minutes for white meat and 13 minutes for dark meat. Transfer to a paper towel-lined plate. Sprinkle immediately with the perfect roast seasoning, then coat the pieces with the fried chicken seasoning. Serve with gravy if you like, and honey, for dipping.

Perfect Roast Seasoning

- makes about 2/3 cup -

Ingredients

1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons kosher salt
3 tablespoons freshly ground black pepper
1 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme

Procedure

Combine the salt, pepper, and thyme, and store in a covered container.

Fried Chicken Seasoning

- makes about 3 tablespoons -

Ingredients

2 teaspoons hot paprika
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon onion powder
1/2 teaspoon dried parsley
1/2 teaspoon dried basil
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Procedure

Combine the paprika, salt, garlic powder, onion powder, parsley, basil, and cayenne
pepper, and store in a covered container.

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LOS ANGELES — SunLust Pictures has released “Sunny Loves HD Porn 2.”

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“Sunny Cares about HD Porn 2” is available from SunLust through Vivid Entertainment. It is available for buy at SunLustProducts.com.

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Holly Madison Bikini Photos: Holly Madison arrives at the Wet Republic pool party hosted by Kendra Wilkinson and Hank Baskett at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino on March 27, 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Daylife is reborn at Wet Republic's ultra pool, where the ultimate nightlife vibe merges seamlessly with poolside pampering and relaxation. The adults-only playground is a magnet for partygoers, the glitterati and celebrities from around the world. Dance under the sun to the beats of world-renowned DJs or retreat. Dive into one of eight refreshing pools.

Catch some rays in a chaise lounge or daybed, or book a cabana or an exclusive VIP bungalow. Quench your thirst with delectable libations and feast on mouthwatering poolside eats.

Photo credit: Solarpix / PR Photos

Fine is not that ?

Mom and I have scheduled this session about 4 times over I think!  We finally got a good day free of rain, cold, snow, and sickness.  :)  And what a perfect day it was!  Doing a session with a 1 year old and a 2 year old is always a challenge.  Take into account that the youngest is ultra bashful, makes my work cut out for me.  I was mentally prepared for the worst.  lol.  But, They did wonderfully.  Both boys were awesome to work with (as usual!)  We got SEVERAL good smiles out mr. bashful too!  :)  Here are some favorites…

the bashful one…

  
 
 
how is that for cuteness?

Kristin and Jerrold, they are beautiful boys!  I look forward to seeing you all again this summer!  

I hope to be back tomorrow to share another, I have 7 sessions this weekend, so I may not get around to it for another day or so!  Stay tuned for LOTS of sharing!!

For every action, I have a superior and opposite reaction.

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Whether doing it for the memories or to experience the new tech, the below 50 free photography lessons you should take for fun are jam packed with useful tips, tutorials, video lessons, and much more.

Fine is not that ?

CheckSee|Look at} few house pictures i love.