Stuff below the fold

Another day, another earthquake...this one in the south, not in our area.

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with all the headlines about storm chasers being killed or injured in Oklahoma, Dustbury has a photo showing a heck of a lot of stormchasers, and comments:

...Each of those little red dots represents a storm chaser. US 81 (the big vertical line) was just crawling with them....

you can’t really complain about the TWC team; corporate, over the years, has done everything short of parachuting Jim Cantore onto an ice floe in the Arctic. But the volume of chasers this time around suggests a high volume of people who just want their footage on YouTube to go viral. I’m not sure I’d risk my butt for that. It did not help matters in the least that one of the local television weather gods made noises to the effect that it might be possible to outrun the damned thing.

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Bookmarked for later reading: Mom Jones has an article on those protests in Turkey.

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The "Math is your friend" post of the day:

The BBC has a new program on Anne Boleyn, and one of the controversies is how old was she when she snared Henry.

leading to this sarcastic letter to the editor:

SIR – Throughout Thursday’s BBC Two drama-documentary The Last Days of Anne Boleyn, it was repeated time and time again that the story has divided historians for more than 600 years.

I know that time passes faster with increasing age, but Anne Boleyn’s death in 1536 still appears to be only 477 years ago. Mental arithmetic is evidently a thing of the past.

Robert Grindal
Reading, Berkshire

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Ancient French winemaking had it's roots in Italy.

but it originated in the middle East, and was brought to Italy by the Etruscans...

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Getting rid of sugar and replacing it with an herb.

I sometimes buy the local version of this: I want to grow it, but you need a clipping to get a plant that is sweet, since most of the plants aren't sweet, and the seeds don't replicate the parent in all cases. I tried using seeds, but none of the surviving plants were any good.

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There was a program awhile back about the libraries of Timbuktu, which have not yet been duplicated or examined in detail by the west.

But the BBC reports how a lot of them, and other treasures, were kept safe from the recent war.

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TORN has an Essay wondering if Tolkien would have liked Jackson's treatment of his writings.

No, he probably would not. But he was still poor when he sold the film rights, (and facing retirement with a tiny pension) so he was philosophical about it. And Jackson's fidelity to the story was a lot better than Hollywood's proposals in 1957...