And Now...Skyline Number One!!!

Hong Kong.

Signs An Establishment Isn’t Going to Deliver the Service You Expect.

I got this from waiterrant.com. Very good advice, I'd say:

1. There’s an “unsatisfactory” sticker from the Board of Health pasted on the front door. (Ever since the rats at Taco Bell incident the public’s been so picky!)
2. There are glowing restaurant reviews hanging in the lobby for all to see. The only problem? The most recent review is from 1987.
3. No one greets you at the door with a smile and says “Welcome.” That’s because the sexual deviant who owns the place has scared away all the young female hostesses OR the hostess is in the back getting high and/or servicing the owner/headwaiter/chef/sugar daddy customer who told her he’d get her a modeling gig OR the girl’s too busy talking to her agent/boyfriend/therapist/girlfriend/married man she’s having a fling with/ on her cell phone.
4. The waiter greets you by saying, “What up yo?”
5. That same waiter smells like he/she hasn’t bathed in days.
6. The menus are sticky, torn, and out of date.
7. The olive oil on the table is rancid.
8. You smell bleach because some Einstein in the kitchen decided it would be a good idea to swab down the prep area during the dinner rush.
9. The air conditioning/heat doesn’t work.
10. You see a man sitting at one of the back tables surrounded by stacks of bills and crying bitterly. Then you find out that person’s the owner.
11. You try using the bathroom but discover two of the waiters are using it to have sex. (Can we have some privacy please?)
12. When you do get into the bathroom there’s a floater in the toilet and no toilet paper.
13. Think about #12 some more. Now think about the sign “Employees must wash hands.”
14. There’s no air freshener in the toilet either.
15. There’s only COLD waiter in the bathroom sink because the owner is that cheap of a bastard. The liquid soap dispenser is also empty. Please think about #12 and #13.
16. On your way back to your table you catch a glimpse of the kitchen guys and swear you’ve seen all their faces on America’s Most Wanted.
17. When the waiter’s telling you the specials he slips you a note that reads, “Please kill me.”
18. The waiters are inking jail house tattoos into each others arms using the corkscrews on their wine openers.
19. The bartender’s watching some kind of kinky anime porn on the TV over the bar. Ugh! Tentacles! That’s the seafood special tonight folks! . Surf and Smurf!
20. There are no customers in the restaurant and its Saturday night. (DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! DANGER!)
If you walk into a restaurant and see any of these things — run like hell!

10 reasons why america kicks ass

Here's ten reasons why America does it better than anyone else. Happy Independence Day, USA

Will Prom Night Disappear?

It failed to bring Jim Carrey happiness in the award-winning film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but scientists have now developed a way to block and even delete unwanted memories from people's brains.Researchers have found they can use drugs to wipe away single, specific memories while leaving other memories intact. By injecting an amnesia drug at the right time, when a subject was recalling a particular thought, neuro-scientists discovered they could disrupt the way the memory is stored and even make it disappear. The research has, however, sparked concern among parliamentary advisers who insist that new regulations are now needed to control the use of the drugs to prevent them becoming used by healthy people as a "quick fix". But the US scientists behind the research insist that amnesia drugs could be invaluable in treating patients with psychiatric disorders such as post-traumatic stress. In a new study, revealed in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, psychiatrists at McGill University, in Montreal, and Harvard University, in Boston, used an amnesia drug to "dampen" the memories of trauma victims. Prof Karim Nader, of McGill University, said: "When you remember old memories they can become 'unstored' and then have to be 'restored'. "As the memory is getting restored, we gave patients a drug that turns down the emotional part of the memory. It left the conscious part of the memory intact, so they could still remember all the details but without being overwhelmed by the memory." The research suggests memories can be manipulated because they act as if made from glass, existing in a molten state as they are being created, before turning solid. When the memory is recalled, however, it becomes molten again and so can be altered before it once more resets. The drug used by the scientists is thought to disrupt the biochemical pathways that allow the memory to "harden" after it is recalled. The researchers used propranolol, a drug normally used to treat hypertension in heart disease patients but also known to cause memory problems. They treated 19 accident or rape victims for 10 days with the drug or with dummy pills, while they asked to describe their memories of a traumatic event that happened 10 years earlier. A week later, they found that the patients given the drug suffered fewer signs of stress such as raised heart rate when recalling their trauma.
The technique echoes scenes from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where the characters played by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet both undergo treatment to delete each other from their memories. In the film, scientists ask the characters to remember their unwanted memories in order to target them with small electric shocks. But the treatment goes drastically wrong, when the characters discover they in fact wanted to hold on to the memories after all. Scientists at New York University have published another new study where they claim to have erased a single memory from the brains of rats while leaving the rest of the animals' memories still intact. The rats were trained to associate two musical tones with a mild electrical shock so that when they heard either of the tones they would brace themselves for a shock. The researchers then gave half the rats a drug, called U0126 and known to cause limited amnesia, when playing one of the musical tones. After the treatment, the rats that had been given the drug no longer associated that particular tone with an imminent shock but still braced themselves upon hearing the second tone, demonstrating only one memory had been deleted. Prof Joseph LeDoux, who led the New York team, said: "Such treatments may have highly specific and potentially permanent effects." The research has alarmed some experts, however, who fear that memory altering drugs could be abused by healthy individuals to delete unwanted memories on a whim.
A new report published by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, which advises MPs about scientific advances, warned that regulations need to be put in place to restrict the use of any memory-blocking drugs, imposing strict limits on their prescription.
Dr Peter Border, who edited the report, said: "There has been a deafening silence from the regulators about whether or not they might consider licensing pharmaceuticals for use in individuals where there is no medical benefits. There is a need for someone to consider how to regulate these things."

From "The Telegraph.UK"

Ads From Yesteryear Volume Two

I have nothing to say about this..except "liar, liar pants on fire"

Ipod Tuesday

Today was the 33rd anniversary of the wedding day of my first marriage. I celebrated by mowing the yard. As stated before, I really like mowing my own yard, over the whine of the lawn mower, THIS is where I hatch my plans to take over the world, you can see how far I have gotten. Anyway, had the old Ipod charged and ready to go. With weedeating and some general maintanence in the yard, I was out for about one hour and twenty minutes, here is what came up as I shuffled my way back to...wherever.

We started with..
Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey - Paul McCartney...one of my faves from him
Unchained-Van Halen...underrated Fair Warning disc
Dragonfly-Mahogany Rush..from IV a very fine release from 1976
In From The Storm-Hendrix..nuff said
The Fool and Me-Robin Trower..another Raley Hall of Fame album
I Just Want To Celebrate-Rare Earth...great song for 4th of July eve
Across The Border-ELO..was there a better album than "Out of The Blue"? maybe, maybe not
Shouldn't Have Took More Than You Gave-Dave Mason...see previous post
Trademark-Eric Johnson...Ah Via Musicom was my favorite release of 1991
Stone Cold Crazy-Queen...heavy metal Queen 2:16 of pure rock and roll
Workin For MCA-Skynyrd...one of their best, loved this band
Last Of The Singin Cowboys-Marshall Tucker..maybe my favorite song of theirs
Rocket In My Pocket-Little Feat...great live tune
Fools-Deep Purple..from Fireball when I was 15, this was my favorite album
Accidents will Happen-Elvis Costello...I hated this guy till I got older
All Things Must Pass-George Harrison...miss this dude a lot
The E Street Shuffle-Bruce...before he was famous
You-Bonnie Raitt...gets me every time.
Do You Want To Dance?-Jim Messina..one of the best albums to make love to..not that I would know or anything

Not a bad playlist, huh? Think I could run my own station? Nah...

Skyline Number 2

My kind of town, Chicago is....

The 100 Days That Changed Music History

How cool! What a great list from the people at Blender. Is there any doubt what number one is?

Ads From Yesteryear Volume one

Thanks, Beth

God the Painter Number 4

On second thought, I think I would rather live here. Who needs artists when the Almighty gets it perfect?

Farming In The Big Apple?

I got this story from the BBC, being a guy who was raised on a farm I found this very interesting...(is this what Jethro Tull was referring to in their song "Farm On The Freeway"?)

Vertical farming in the big Apple
By Jeremy Cooke BBC News, New York

Is this how farms will look in the future?
Downtown Manhattan is hardly a place you would associate with agriculture. Rather, with its countless restaurants, cafes, shops and supermarkets this is a place of consumption. And so every morsel, every bite of food New Yorkers munch through every day must be trucked, shipped or flown in, from across the country, and across the world. Now though, scientists at Columbia University are proposing an alternative. Their vision of the future is one in which the skyline of New York and other cities include a new kind of skyscaper: the "vertical farm".
The idea is simple enough. Imagine a 30-story building with glass walls, topped off with a huge solar panel. On each floor there would be giant planting beds, indoor fields in effect. There would be a sophisticated irrigation system. Even if it's not quite natural...you're going to get back the rest of the earth. And so crops of all kinds and small livestock could all be grown in a controlled environment in the most urban of settings. That means there would be no shipping costs, and no pollution caused by moving produce around the country. It's all the brainchild of Columbia University Professor Dickson Despommier. He and his students took existing greenhouse technology as a starting point and are now convinced that vertical farms are a practical

suggestion. Professor Despommier lists many advantages of this revolutionary kind of agriculture. They include:
Year round crop production in a controlled environment
All produce would be organic as there would be no exposure to wild parasites and bugs
Elimination of environmentally damaging agricultural runoff
Food being produced locally to where it is consumed
And, says the professor, vertical farming would allow some existing traditional farms to be returned to natural forests. Good news in a time of global warming. "Even if it's not quite natural.... a little bit factory-like in terms of its production, here's what you're going to get back: you're going to get back the rest of the earth. And I'll take that any time."
The plan is to make the whole complex sustainable.
Nurturing high rise crops in the "vertical farm" Energy would come from a giant solar panel but there would also be incinerators which use the farm's waste products for fuel. All of the water in the entire complex would be recycled. Several hours drive north of the city in upstate New York, Ed Miller's 18,000 apple trees are in full bloom. Like farmers across the world he has lived through decades of constant change and innovation. But he remains, at heart, a man of the soil.
So what does he think of the virtual farm concept? He is, perhaps, surprisingly positive: ''It looks like a fancy greenhouse," he says. "It's fabulous, it will be very interesting. It will be phenomenal." For now, vertical farms are a virtual concept. But the scientists insist that the theory is sound.
All they need now, they say, is the money to make this a reality.