TWO PILOTS I DON’T EVEN WANT DELIVERING MY PIZZA AND A HALLOWEEN STORY OF SORTS

New Japanese Robot

Hi again and yep, from the ramparts of the Bastion on the Puget Sound, it’s been another interesting week. Well, even as this goes to press, we’re still waiting to really find out how two airline pilots could overrun one of the larger airports in America by 150 miles/241 kilometers and stay out of contact with air traffic controllers for almost an hour and a half.

They’ve said they were just preoccupied with this new software program Northwest Airlines was switching over to and that since everything was cool weatherwise, etc., why not take some company time to learn this? I mean, close the cockpit door, put the plane on automatic pilot and land on time in the Twin Cities wiser men, for the good of the company and ultimately, the public. Somebody forgot to set the alarm, maybe? Like that’s the point?

Umm, no. Maybe it’s just me but when I ride a bus, I really appreciate it if the driver didn’t chat it up with other passengers when the rig is rolling. My life is in that driver’s hands and I do not want him focused on anything except getting me where I need to go safely and with no close calls.
It’s not a big leap to figure out that people using cell phones in their cars is not a real turn on for me either. And the cabbie who wants to chat me and an out of town guest up for a bigger tip from SeaTac to the U District? Buddy, no offense but just drive, okay?

What’s ironic is that I’ve never actually had to explain it to a bus driver, a cabbie or a pilot before and it tweaks me a little to think that it needs to be said to these two flying shepherds.

What rankles me even more is that they’re both from the Pacific Northwest and that this land of recent settlement and neo-trail blazing could produce two sons who could miss a familiar major airport by 150 miles and part of the state of Wisconsin shames me deeply. I no more want this region judged by these two jackasses than I do the commercial aviation industry by these two clowns. They are not, thank you Oroville and Wilbur, typical of either.

I kid around a lot about not flying in anything put together by the lowest bidder but the reality is that I love aviation and I’ve flown in everything from a C54 to a Boeing 707 to a single engine Piper Cub to a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter. I’ve never been afraid to fly because the people who mann the aircraft I’ve flown on have been topnotch and their first concern was for passenger safety.

There is something really wrong with these two Northwest pilots and I’m neither a priest nor a psychologist. I just know that these men are not worthy of either the fraternity nor the legacy of aviators. And especially not when the acts of one airliner crew and passengers on 9/11 and another safely landing in the Hudson River are taken into consideration.

I therefore stand totally behind the Federal Aviation Administration’s decision to revoke the licenses of these two escapees from a flying circus. The only time I want to see those boys in the air again is with their own wings and a halo.

Well, given the impact the swine flu is having all over the world, I have got to totally love this one from Japan, even though it creeped me out a little. As most of you know, they’re a leader in creating useful robots which resemble human beings in eerie detail. They’ve developed one now which mimics all the symptoms of swine flu, systemically, and if the right treatment isn’t applied, this robot “dies” No, despite the timing, this is NOT a Halloween story and no, sigh, I am not making this up. So ye of little faith, check it out here.

And on second thought, maybe this one’s fun to play with after all. Aside from the fantastic diagnostic applications across the health spectrum and around the world, think of how a robot like this could otherwise instruct. If appropriately programmed. Everything from having that first sex talk with the kids to resisting politicians of another persuasion. Think of the ultimate commercial. “Are they real or only Simulants? Only their programmer knows for sure.” So okay, Happy Halloween from the folks at The Northstar Journal. I just know you yahoos are going to have a ball with this one. One of these days I will learn. But apparently not tonight. Sigh.

At a time when people are still losing homes they can no longer afford due to layoffs, ill-advised investments, etc., it’s nice to know that as they recover and can again consider buying a new one that for the market more energy efficient and environmentally appropriate options are being prepared. Imagine having a fully heated house with no pipelines or conduits and a monthly bill of about $25.00, even during a Minnesota winter. And that’s without the option of adding solar panels for the energy source.

Yep, it’s along the same lines as that straw and plaster house being manufactured in the San Francisco Bay area and that we mentioned in an earlier column. This one’s out of Montana, though and to learn more about it, please go here.

My undying gratitude goes out to the reader who sent us this real simple health test to determine how young one’s brain is. (No, don’t engage the mind on this one, not unless it can contact the mothership and get back down here again as fast as I can.) Apparently how young your brain is can be determined by how long you can stand on one leg. Again with the skepticism. So, I quote:

The longer you can stand (on one leg) without losing your balance, the younger your brain is. If you're 45 or over, 15 seconds is very good; if you're 30 or so, 30 seconds is fine.

Well, okay for the general population but what about people into Zen stuff? Like standing on one leg as a form of meditation and body control. And for the challenge of doing it outside, in a high wind and other kinds of interesting weather.

The bastion on the Puget Sound has interesting neighbors who do this weird stuff and a lot of them do it together. I’m not a philosopher and I’m not trying to sound like one now but it just seems to me that if there is one lesson we should be picking up from these trying times, it’s that true “control” does not come from the outside and building things so powerful, so transient, so expensive and so all consuming. I’m suggesting that yes, there are worse ways to grow old than standing on one leg in the face of a lashing rain and celebrating the power and control that comes from within.

I ran the math on our local storks by the way. Most of them have brains too young to be born yet.

Well, that’s it for this week, folks. Take care, stay well and thanks once again for the ear.

Rusty

NORTHSTAR RECOMMENDS

TO YOUR HEALTH
If you’d like to know whether your eating habits are either adding years to your life or taking them off, take this RealAge quiz. It will not only score your real age against your health age but give you a program for improvement. I’ve been working this one for about a month now and yep, I feel a lot better.

Want to know how to live to be 100? Try this one.

Ever had trouble getting behind eating a lot of fruits and vegetables despite how good they are for you? Ever had trouble selling that one to your kids and grandkids? Ever been totally sold on the idea then gone to the market and been totally tasered by the price of good health in some places? If your answer is yes to any or all of the above, you really need to check this site out. Fruits and veggies: more matters.

ONLINE TOOLS FOR THE KIT
Free People Search – This is an American online White Pages that I found really simple, quick and user friendly. I looked for myself under the several versions of my name and it found them all. It’s also free and doesn’t involve anything to download.

Know Thy Elected Officials - Just type in your zip code and this site will supply you with the names and contact information for your legislators from the state level up. This is a two click site with a host of other relevant features.

MEDIA

Entertainment
U Got Style is a monthly ezine dedicated to independent films. Fully illustrated, it features hard news, interviews, reviews and a wide variety of other information. It’s also fun to read.

Vinyl Cafe with Stuart McLean – Live from the smallest record store in North America. Canadian humor, entertainment and commentary at its maple leaf best. Popular on National Public Radio in the States.

News

The New York Times - best source of American news.

Reuters – Best in world news and an international perspective on American headlines..

Sightline Daily (formerly Tidepool) – The “United Press International/Reuters of the American West”. Updated and informative news shorts with links to the source. Its editors draw from a coverage area which includes Alaska, British Columbia, California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. They also put out an excellent weekly environmental edition.

The Vancouver Sun -- outstanding source for Canadian and world news.

TALENT FOR HIRE
Rusty Miller, Freelance Photojournalist – Whether it’s a one time press release, book or product review, difficult business correspondence, resume or classified ad composition you need, take a look at the services offered menu on my writer-for-hire homepage and we’ll get together on it.

Are you a travel editor looking for color shots of Seattle? Are you an art dealer looking for new work to carry on consignment? You might enjoy checking out a gallery of my work for sale

JOE BIDEN GOES ELECTRIC, AMERICA HELD SPELLBOUND BY A JERK, AUSTRALIAN LEECH HELPS SOLVE OLD CRIME

Colorful Biker has electric motor for that uphill oomph
Photo by MS(R)M

Hi again and yep, from the ramparts of the Bastion on the Puget Sound, it’s been another interesting week. Well, I don’t know about the rest of you but I haven’t paid a lot of attention to American vice-president Joe Biden since the election. Second bananas have never impressed me a lot.

Joe looks a lit-tle like Spiro Agnew, except that he keeps his hands in his own pockets. Unlike another vice president, Dick Cheney, Joe’s not a disciple of Prince Machiavelli and unlike Richard Nixon, he doesn’t have five o’clock shadow and I’ve never seen a photograph of him doing stupid things with a beagle. Oh and yeah, unlike Dan Quayle, Joe also appears to have mastered high school level spelling and grammar. So the fact that he’s a bit banal and off the scope doesn’t bother me.

I owe American Vice-President Joe Biden an apology, big time, and from now on, I’m paying more attention to him. He took a plan which originated in Berkeley, California and developed it on a national level. As San Francisco Chronicles reporter Carolyn Jones explains:

Biden's program, known as Recovery Through Retrofit, creates a framework for cities, counties and states to set up tax districts that allow residential and business property owners to install solar panels and make other energy improvements, repaying the investment over a 20-year property tax assessment.

Well, to no one’s surprise, I imagine, the swine flu is certainly impacting the way Americans live. I was in our local Safeway (chain grocery store) the other day and all of the checkers and baggers had blue surgical gloves on. A spokesperson for the store explained that there wasn’t really an official policy in place but that Safeway employees were encouraged to take appropriate steps to protect the health of themselves and their customers. The New York Times has a splendid and informational overview on this from a national perspective. Please go here.

The swine flu vaccine is now available to Canadians after Ottawa this week approved a strain of it for its citizens. Two million doses have already been shipped to the provinces and territories and two to three million a week will be distributed until the entire country is protected. Canada has a population of about 33-million.

Well, a study in Japan apparently proves that chimpanzees are capable of being nice to one another without being trained to do so. Researchers term the behavior “human-like altruism,” which sort of has me shaking my head a little. While I grant you that we are capable of considerable kindness to one another, we have also devised more ways to tease, taunt, insult, exploit, injure maim, torture, kill and annoy each other than any species – flora, fauna or hybrid – in the history of the planet and, I suspect the universe. So while I applaud the behaviour, I’m not quite up to slandering the chimpanzee by suggesting that compassion and generosity are necessarily intrinsic human traits. I suspect we learned such behaviour from high mountain gorillas, when the gorillas were in exceptionally good form.

If I didn’t live in a state whose unofficial “creature” is the banana slug, this second critter feature would tweak me a little. But in happened in Australia, where everything is upside down to begin with. Nine years ago, Tasmanian police investigated the scene of the robbery of a 71-year-old woman. At the scene they found a leech and extracted from it a sample of the blood it was engorged with for a DNA profile. When Peter Cannon was arrested on an unrelated crime last year, they took a sample of his DNA and lo and behold (I like saying that), the match placed him at the scene of that earlier crime and he pleaded guilty to it this week. Yep, I know. So check it out here. And yep, sounds like television series material to me; CSI Down Under and g’day, mate.
We mentioned last week that Vancouver, our sister city to the north, is preparing for a significant increase in electric cars thanks to a deal worked out with Nissan and endorsed by both Victoria and Ottawa. The U.S. federal government has decided to fund a project expected to put 1,000 quiet autos in the Puget Sound area and provide an “electric corridor” on Interstate Five from Eugene (mid-Oregon) to Vancouver, B.C., Canada. Washington was among five states involved in a study on the feasibility of “electrification” through a $100 million grant from the Department of Energy under the economic recovery program. For more about this one, please go here.

I used to live in Southern California back when smog and banal weather were still major pains in the psyche. One of the reasons I survived the last of my Navy enlistment and my university schooling down there was the Los Angeles Times and it’s “only the LAT could get away with this” headlines. This one got me going because I also like bicycles but I’m not a fanatic about them. I loved having one built for two and a significant other who loved to pedal. That meant that going uphill, I didn’t need to, and I’m sorry. I admit that’s not very cavalier but it is how my mind works. That’s the teaser. Check out the story here under “Electric bikes are all green (colors vary)”

And finally, since one of you asked me what I thought of that Colorado publicity junkie, his family and his balloon, I think he needs the services of a mental health professional and his kids a better paternal role model. I think that not only should he be required to pay back every cent of the cost of rescue, he should have to give all of us held spellbound and aching of heart by that particular dog and pony show $10 an hour for that monumental waste of time. I also think he should be required to spend 20 hours a week community service time over-dubbing Billy Mays infomercials. It’s creepy watching a dead guy promote stuff for $19.95 and this other jackass would make a nice addition to the weird team.

Well, that’s it for this week, folks. Take care, stay well and thanks once again for the ear.

Rusty


NORTHSTAR RECOMMENDS

TO YOUR HEALTH
If you’d like to know whether your eating habits are either adding years to your life or taking them off, take this RealAge quiz. It will not only score your real age against your health age but give you a program for improvement. I’ve been working this one for about a month now and yep, I feel a lot better.

Want to know how to live to be 100? Try this one.

Ever had trouble getting behind eating a lot of fruits and vegetables despite how good they are for you? Ever had trouble selling that one to your kids and grandkids? Ever been totally sold on the idea then gone to the market and been totally tasered by the price of good health in some places? If your answer is yes to any or all of the above, you really need to check this site out. Fruits and veggies: more matters.

ONLINE TOOLS FOR THE KIT
Free People Search – This is an American online White Pages that I found really simple, quick and user friendly. I looked for myself under the several versions of my name and it found them all. It’s also free and doesn’t involve anything to download.

Know Thy Elected Officials - Just type in your zip code and this site will supply you with the names and contact information for your legislators from the state level up. This is a two click site with a host of other relevant features.

MEDIA
BBC – Best source for international news

Vinyl Cafe with Stuart McLean – Live from the smallest record store in North America. Canadian humor, entertainment and commentary at its maple leaf best. Popular on National Public Radio in the States.

Sightline Daily (formerly Tidepool) – The “United Press International/Reuters of the American West”. Updated and informative news shorts with links to the source. Its editors draw from a coverage area which includes Alaska, British Columbia, California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. They also put out an excellent weekly environmental edition.

U Got Style is a monthly ezine dedicated to independent films. Fully illustrated, it features hard news, interviews, reviews and a wide variety of other information. It’s also fun to read.

The Vancouver Sun -- outstanding source for Canadian and world news.

TALENT FOR HIRE
Rusty Miller, Freelance Photojournalist – Whether it’s a one time press release, book or product review, difficult business correspondence, resume or classified ad composition you need, take a look at the services offered menu on my writer-for-hire homepage and we’ll get together on it.

Are you a travel editor looking for color shots of Seattle? Are you an art dealer looking for new work to carry on consignment? You might enjoy checking out a gallery of my work for sale

AN AMERICAN PRESIDENT WINS THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE, ELECTRIC CARS COME TO CANADA, AND ALASKA’S SEA OTTERS GET A SECOND CHANCE

Photo courtesy of National Geographic and David Menke/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Alaska sea otter now has “a fighting chance

Hi again and yep, from the ramparts of the Bastion on the Puget Sound, it’s been another interesting week. I was real pleased to note that eleven Americans, including Barack Obama, were among this year’s Nobel Prize winners.

This U.S. president joins peers Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter in this regard. History records that the American public did not totally endorse the selection of these two men at the time either. But the Nobel Prize is also the voice of the international community and for a glimpse of what they think of Barack Obama abroad, you might just want to go here.

As we mentioned last week, Seattle’s bracing for an onset of the swine flu and the teamwork among health care providers, the media and the general public is just short of awesome. Overlake Hospital, for example, is providing its pregnant patients free flu shots.

And to make sure this doesn’t turn into a Puget Sound version of a buffalo stampede, Jean Enerson, our NBC affiliate’s veteran health reporter and herself a cancer survivor (October is Breast Cancer Awareness month in the United States) has provided us with an excellent article on the reality of what we’re dealing with. It’s headlined The H1N1swine flu shot - separating fact from fiction.

Well, we’ve got two critter stories for you this week. This first one is not about bears and mountain lions reclaiming the ‘hood but about this weird thing Puget Sound owls go through every fall. These normally unobtrusive and extremely useful nocturnal feathered rodent control machines become very territorial and extremely aggressive in the protection of said turf. Several joggers in our parks here have been attacked, along with their dogs, but since this is annual behaviour, there’s been no backlash. We just avoid the parts of the parks the owls call home until after Halloween, when our feathered neighbors have chilled out. To me, it’s another example of inter-species cooperation and I totally love it. For a video on this one, please go here.

And in another outstanding example of what a government bureaucracy can do when the people running it have heart and conscience, the once endangered sea otters are no longer facing extinction. The U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife has designated over 5,000 square miles in the Aleutian Islands, the Bering Sea and the Alaska Peninsula as protected habitat for these truly ingenuous and smallest of marine mammals. Rebecca Noblin, a lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity, explained that providing an endangered species critical habitat gives them, “a fighting chance of recovery.”

In a couple of years, the streets, roads and highways of Vancouver, Victoria and other parts of Canada’s British Columbia province are going to be a lot quieter and a lot cleaner thanks to an agreement reached earlier this month between the Renault-Nissan Alliance, the province, the city of Vancouver and B.C. Hydro.

Canada’s been moving in this direction for some time now with both the technology and the legislation necessary to establish electrical recharging stations using either 120V or 240V. Vancouver, like Seattle, is installing hundreds of these and there’s been no talk yet about charging drivers of vehicles like Nissan’s LEAF or those hybrids which run on electricity and then switch over to either gasoline or ethanol when the battery runs out of charge. Seattle this year also entered into a similar agreement with the Renault-Nissan Alliance.

Canada’s Architects For Humanity (AFH) is tackling the issue of urban density and using Vancouver as a laboratory of sorts. They’re calling for designs for homes that can be constructed in about the square area of two parking spaces (about 19 feet by 19 feet). New Science reporter Tom Simonite interviewed one of the organizers of the competition about what the AFH hopes to accomplish and it’s pretty simple. Even the most crowded cities have unused space too small for more conventional housing or commercial units. Compact, energy efficient and environmentally appropriate dwellings could provide additional residential options. For the interview itself and a look at the winning designs, please go here.

And yep, it’s also under the category of “Probably Only In Seattle Might This Possibly Work,” the merchants and landlords of Belltown have decided that playing classical music through outside speakers will discourage crime in the neighborhood. You guys still accuse me of making this stuff up so check it.

I’m thinking, if this was East LA or some other interesting places I’ve lived, no way, Jim. And here in Seattle? If it was worth it, these criminals would either take a music appreciation class, ignore it, or get together and short circuit the speakers.

Sigh. I’ve lived here for twenty years. The crime rate in Belltown is going down. I don’t claim to understand this stuff and this is a good example of why. But, like Grandpa Seamus used to say, “If it’s working, do not fix it.” If any of you decide to try it, let me know. I can always use more weird in my life.

Well, that’s it for this week folks. Take care, stay well and once again, thanks for the ear.

Rusty

NORTHSTAR RECOMMENDS

TO YOUR HEALTH
If you’d like to know whether your eating habits are either adding years to your life or taking them off, take this RealAge quiz. It will not only score your real age against your health age but give you a program for improvement. I’ve been working this one for about a month now and yep, I feel a lot better.

Want to know how to live to be 100? Try this one.

Ever had trouble getting behind eating a lot of fruits and vegetables despite how good they are for you? Ever had trouble selling that one to your kids and grandkids? Ever been totally sold on the idea then gone to the market and been totally tasered by the price of good health in some places? If your answer is yes to any or all of the above, you really need to check this site out. Fruits and veggies: more matters.

ONLINE TOOLS FOR THE KIT
Free People Search – This is an American online White Pages that I found really simple, quick and user friendly. I looked for myself under the several versions of my name and it found them all. It’s also free and doesn’t involve anything to download.

Know Thy Elected Officials - Just type in your zip code and this site will supply you with the names and contact information for your legislators from the state level up. This is a two click site with a host of other relevant features.

MEDIA
KING 5 NEWS – for a good window on Seattle, the Puget Sound and the Pacific Northwest.

BBC – Best source for international news

Vinyl Cafe with Stuart McLean – Live from the smallest record store in North America. Canadian humor, entertainment and commentary at its maple leaf best. Popular on National Public Radio in the States.

Sightline Daily (formerly Tidepool) – The “United Press International/Reuters of the American West/ Updated and informative news shorts with links to the source. Its editors draw from a coverage area which includes Alaska, British Columbia, California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. Update and informative collected news shorts from those sources. They also put out an excellent weekly environmental edition.

U Got Style is a monthly ezine dedicated to independent films. Fully illustrated, it features hard news, interviews, reviews and a wide variety of other information. It’s also fun to read.

The Vancouver Sun, outstanding source for Canadian and world news.

TALENT FOR HIRE
Rusty Miller, Freelance Photojournalist – Whether it’s a one time press release, book or product review, difficult business correspondence, resume or classified ad composition you need, take a look at the services offered menu on my writer-for-hire homepage and we’ll get together on it.

Are you a travel editor looking for color shots of Seattle? Are you an art dealer looking for new work to carry on consignment? You might enjoy checking out a gallery of my work for sale

A PYROMANIC THREATENS SEATTLE’S U DISTRICT, SCIENTISTS PROVE WE ARE NOT RELATED TO APES AND A STRAY LLAMA IS RESCUED FROM PIKE’S PEAK

Calm in the face of pyromania

photo by MS(R)M

Hi again and yep, from the ramparts of the Bastion on the Puget Sound, it’s been another interesting week. Where I live is under two alerts now; one for an arsonist sliding into pyromaniac status and the other for the swine flu. This is the U District, so named for the University of Washington, with a student body of approximately 42,000, making this one of Seattle’s more densely populated neighborhoods.

Faced with a choice between the swine flu and someone who likes setting buildings on fire, I would take the former in a country heartbeat. Fire does not turn me on. If it had been left to my ancestors to invent it, we’d be eating our meat sushi style. I don’t even like roasting marshmallows. My feeling is that if the Good Lord had intended them lightly browned, He’d have made them crispy to begin with. So I’ll take mine fresh from the bush, thank you.

I also don’t like fire because I’ve seen what it can do up close and personal. We survived one in the Sierra Nevada Mountains when I was a kid growing up in Northern California. I fought one on a destroyer in the Mekong and then spent some time in an intensive care ward of a hospital ship when helicopter crash victims were coming back from Vietnam proper. Some twenty years later, in southern Oregon’s Umpqua Valley, there were two forest fires the same summer, Bland Mountain and the Angel Complex. And I’ve covered probably another twenty or so as a newspaper reporter and photographer.

What was particularly insidious about these last two incidents here is that they involved setting fire to flammable materials and then semi-blocking the rear exit of two apartment buildings. This arsonist doesn’t just want to see something burn, he wants to hurt people. And he wants to strike fear into the heart of every resident in the District. He wants to distract 42,000 students from the start of a new school year. He wants to deploy emergency services often and at the taxpayer’s expense. He wants the satisfaction of knowing that however small, insignificant, impotent and lacking in courage he himself may be, he is still capable of exercising the power of a piney woods Caligula or another legendary pyromaniac, Nero.

Well, this freak isn’t having it entirely his way. There is no panic in the University District. I happened to be out walking one night when Seattle Fire and other emergency services were called to the scene of one of these and there was no hysteria, no fright. This is a land of earthquakes, volcanoes and weather as chimeric and unpredictable as any the planet has ever known. Northwesterners do not frighten easily. They know what vigilance is like. They know how to take care of one another.

Eventually this fire fetishist will be apprehended, hopefully before his lethal hobby hurts anyone. So far that hasn’t happened but God forbid that it should. Seattle’s justice system will not be inclined to show leniency, compassion or much understanding. These young people ~ some of them veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan ~ are the future of this region. They are, in that sense, children of us all. The surest way to hell in this part of the country is to hurt one of them.

Here’s one that’ll rock your socks a little. Apparently, based on new fossil evidence, scientists have decided that human beings are not related to chimpanzees or any other simians. There is no “missing link”. We cannot blame any of our uncivilized behaviour on a common gene pool. There is no “going ape” or “aping”. We cannot fault the gorilla for our chronic chest beating nor this recurrent sport of mooning on the orangutan. I’m sure, once the word hits the jungle telegraph, that will come as some relief to them as well. It’s time to quit slandering these poor creatures and get on with it.

Well, residents along the northwestern coasts of British Columbia, Canada and Washington State are welcoming back some old friends. One of the most beautiful of all seagoing creatures and one nearly hunted to extinction is off the endangered species list and thriving. We’re talking about the humpback whale and you really need to experience this story firsthand. So please go here.

This week’s “Interesting Application of New Technology Award” goes to the farmer whose cattle were polluting a stream where salmon came to spawn and decided to try an alternative. He installed a small pump in the stream, ran PCP pipe underground and pumped water for his cattle into two big watering troughs. Where did the power to run the pump come from? A single solar cell installed with a fence around it. Now the cows aren’t polluting the stream and the Coho are starting to return in greater numbers. By my reckoning, that’s got to have applications a lot of other places besides Washington State.

Thanks, among other things, to two American Belgian draft horses, a couple in Walla Walla, Washington is proving that thirteen acres is enough to not only sustain a small family but produce a surplus to sell to the local community. It’s totally organic and includes eggs laid by organically raised and fed chickens. Again, another example that is imminently exportable. For more, please go here.

And finally, I have never been to the Colorado Rockies but I have always admired the music of John Denver. For all of that, I have heard rumours of high mountain eccentricities and of the strange relationships between man and beast. Therefore, I was more than a little curious when I came across this story about the rescue of a white llama from the top of Pike’s Peak. It turns out that some hikers had seen it wandering alone, were concerned it might fall victim to a predator and decided to rescue it and relocate it to friendlier territory. My opinion, then, is some revised about people who live in that part of the country.

Well, that’s it for this week, folks. Thanks once again for the ear. Take care, stay well and God Bless.

Rusty


NORTHSTAR RECOMMENDS

To Your Health
If you’d like to know whether your eating habits are either adding years to your life or taking them off, take this RealAge quiz. It will not only score your real age against your health age but give you a program for improvement. I’ve been working this one for about a month now and yep, I feel a lot better.

Want to know how to live to be 100? Try this one.

Ever had trouble getting behind eating a lot of fruits and vegetables despite how good they are for you? Ever had trouble selling that one to your kids and grandkids? Ever been totally sold on the idea then gone to the market and been totally tasered by the price of good health in some places? If your answer is yes to any or all of the above, you really need to check this site out. Fruits and veggies: more matters.

Online Tools for the Kit
Free People Search – This is an American online White Pages that I found really simple, quick and user friendly. I looked for myself under the several versions of my name and it found them all. It’s also free and doesn’t involve anything to download.

Know Thy Elected Officials - Just type in your zip code and this site will supply you with the names and contact information for your legislators from the state level up. This is a two click site with a host of other relevant features.

Media
BBC – Best source for international news

Vinyl Cafe with Stuart McLean – Live from the smallest record store in North America. Canadian humor, entertainment and commentary at its maple leaf best. Popular on National Public Radio in the States.

Sightline Daily (formerly Tidepool) – The “United Press International/Reuters of the American West/ Updated and informative news shorts with links to the source. Its editors draw from a coverage area which includes Alaska, British Columbia, California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. Update and informative collected news shorts from those sources. They also put out an excellent weekly environmental edition.

U Got Style is a monthly ezine dedicated to independent films. Fully illustrated, it features hard news, interviews, reviews and a wide variety of other information. It’s also fun to read.

The Vancouver Sun, outstanding source for Canadian and world news.

Talent For Hire
Rusty Miller, Freelance Photojournalist – Whether it’s a one time press release, book or product review, difficult business correspondence, resume or classified ad composition you need, take a look at the services offered menu on my writer-for-hire homepage and we’ll get together on it.

Are you a travel editor looking for color shots of Seattle? Are you an art dealer looking for new work to carry on consignment? You might enjoy checking out a gallery of my work for sale