An entrant for headline of the year...

Badger blighted road deemed safe

A still from 28 Badgers Later

I've Seen This Movie....

....and it was terrifying. Don't go into the fog. Nor apparently leave any skunk un-beheaded:

Rabies Plagues Camden
To pick a few choice quotes:

Roberts found himself this past week in the uncomfortable position of beheading two of the skunks.... "If you find something like that, don't handle it without gloves and a shovel," said Roberts..... For burial, one should make sure there are at least 18 inches of soil covering the grave..... aim for the heart, not the brain "Because the brain needs to be intact," he said.... "It was a long afternoon," said Roberts.

"Where do you get your ideas?" the budding writer asked Maine novelist Stephen King.

Run cat, run!

I'd Almost Rather Stick With Oil

White gold; Tilney St Lawrence Tea, that is
I happened to catch a story recently that mentioned that should the technology become available to make production affordable, sugar beet farmers were well positioned to benefit from the coming ethanol boom (the always riveting Biofuel Review has more details). As a child of East Anglia (for my American chums, that's the grumpy bit of merry olde England) this first filled me with joy.

"Oh!" I thought. "All my below sea-level dwelling, unisex frosted hair modelling, speaking like a seagull crapped in one's mouth paisanos are finally going to be able to break the bondage of the soil and live like Texans or Saudis. Yippee."

Then I contemplated the above sentiment, and a cold chill ran up my spine. It takes a certain sort of soul to remain on the land, growing unglamorous crops like oil seed and sugar beet, staring out over the flat and featureless landscape, never able to escape the smell of poultry dressing (its not for salads, lets leave it at that), and getting all one's news from Look East. Throwing mad money from the sugar beet-to-oil-substitute industry into the mix is only going to have two results, neither good.

Result 1: The formation of a primitive Methodist Taleban who'll impose strict shia'horse law on the county and blow up all the fonts in the Church of England churches like so many Bamiyan Buddhas. Face it: "wahabbi" already sounds like a Norfolk exclamation.

Result 2: They'll all take the money and end up like this proud successor to Nelson.

Please- don't give them any money. They'll only cause trouble as detailed above then blow whats left in the arcades at Cromer.

Ull be avun that, wuntuh, when uhm quids in, unteye."

Your Sofa Will Probably Kill You...

I got an email from the Natural Resources Council of Maine the other day that said in essence, "hey, you are a Maine blogger- would you do us a favour and link to a video we have made?"

Sure:
"You're in Jeopardy"

The video is a pretty cool way for the NRCM and Maine House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree to help spread the word about some of the nastier chemicals lurking in everyday products that might well be leading to a decline in public health both locally and globally.

Visitors to the sister blog of Wisdom Weasel might well recall the trouble we went through to get a decent, non-toxic mattress a few weeks back. My humble advice to all and sundry is to watch the above video and do some checking in with local retailers about better products. If the political avenue represented by Hannah doesn't appeal, don't forget your wallet gives you great power over what stores try to sell you. Three local mattress stores lost out and one is about $1,000 richer thanks to Country Mouse and me exercising our consumer choice. If 10 of the visitors to this site were Rocklanders, and all 10 were in the market for a good non-toxic mattress (and by crackidy, our mattress rocks), the store with the nice natural latex mattress would be $10,000 to the good and the others would catch on pretty damn quick.

I'm not a biologist by any stretch of the imagination but I am a firm believer in the law of unintended consequences and in the reality of inertia. Those wonder-chemicals designed 30 years ago or more to protect us from fire, or bed bugs, or having our pajamas runch up in an irritating manner might well be coming back to bite us in the ass. I don't have the facts and figures for you (ask the NRCM, I'm sure they could tell you more- or better yet, do a little independent research) but I do know that there are many other cases of animals suffering depredation due to long term chemical exposure. It would be ironic in the extreme if the very things that we feel set us apart from other species (furniture, clothes, Woody Allen movies) were accelerating the accumulation of toxins in our bodies that might one day do something along the lines of this or this to us.