Hot List Subjects

• I have a new hotlist topic. It is called Terra Preta or "Terra Preta de Indio" . It comes from areas of dark earth in indigenous areas of the Amazon. There is the Terra Preta home site at Cornell University. There is also a terra preta wikipedia article. One of the concepts that is adding to the CO₂ build up in the atmosphere is the slash and burn technique of clearing Amazon rain forest. If they slash and char, they can create terra preta by burning at a lower temperature and adding the charcoal to the soil. The charcoal adds to the fertility of the soil and does not decay into carbon dioxide like composting does. You have a net lost of CO₂ in the atmosphere, which is a plus for global warming.
  
  What was even more interesting was the eprida process of scrubing CO₂ from the exhausts of power plants.
• I have a site that I am watching. It is called "Eos" and is being developed by the friend of my next oldest nephew. They met when Greg was in Italy on a LDS mission. They also share birthdays and one of Carmelo's twins is named for Greg. Carmelo is a twin and I don't know if twins run in his wife line or not. At any rate, there are some interesting images of a nice looking Italian costal town on the heel of Italy.
• I'm sitting here watching footage of the strikes in Afghanistan and one point become abundantly clear. It doesn't matter how deep your bunker is when your access to the outside world is through 100 meters of colapsed rock and rubble. If you haven't read Tom Clancy's "Executive Order", you should. The only difference is the ground war and the nasties using an airable version of the Ebola Virus. A realtime video of two 500 pounders taking out a rulers complex would make primetime news. A couple of successive precision strikes with GBU-28's would be equally popular. What I have read is that a GBU-28 (5000 pound precision guided bomb) can penetrate something like 20-36 feet (6-12 meters) of reinforced concrete before they explode. A 2nd precision strike may even penetrate further because of the fractures introduced by the first hit. How many cubic meters of rock rubble can you clear out of a tunnel before you run out of air? Your first clue that you have massively fubar'ed is when the ground for 10 kilometers is producing dust from the vibrations of the ground. You also really don't want to fight someone that is at their best in total dark because that is when your infarared signature is the best. The hot air from a camp fire will show up like a spot light in the cold winter nights. The popular comment will be "¡Vaya con dios!" or Bruce Willis' quote from the movie Die Hard, i.e., "Adiós MF".
  
  I was reading Time magazines news release on choosing the "Man of the Year". The list had 4 choices. The 1st was President Bush. The 2nd was Osama Ben Laden. I don't remember who was 3rd but the Fire Department and Police Department of New York City was the 4th choice.
  
  My reasoning produced a choice that came down to the 1st two people. The public service people of New York were recognized around the world for what they gave in trying to rescue trapped people in the WTC. The primary statement on man of the year was for the impact on the world. The first two people stood out above all of the others. One was for the positive things he had done and the other was for the negative things he had done. In the end, the evil of OBL won my vote. I was really pretty indecisive until I looked up the man of the year for 1938 and it was Adolf Hitler. I thought that he paled in comparison to what OBL had accomplished. Because of OBL and the attack on the WTC and the Pentagon, President Bush has done things that no one would have thought possible. You have Americans and military hardware in all of the countries around Afghanistan. You have America promising to protect some of the ex-Soviet states. What looked to us as Russia against the small people really turned out to be Russia against terrorists funded by OBL and Russia suddenly had an open season on the terrorists. You had Russia, contrary to one of their original statements, going back into Afghanistan. This time it was aid for what we think are the good guys. They were also some of the people responsible for chasing them out of Afghanistan, which was their version of the Vietnam War.
  
  Around a month after the WTC was attacked we started bombing Afghanistan. It wasn't too far from being a 100 days later that the Taliban was out of power and the Alliance had control. The way it sounds most of the people recognize that this time they need a government that rules all of the people fairly. None of this would have happened but for OBL and his hatred of the USA. The world didn't fall apart and the Muslim's didn't begin a "Holy War" like he wanted. We got to watch our current military hardware being tested in war time conditions. I read that we have a new, even larger cave buster bomb called a "thermobaric bomb" that will be tested on the Tora Bora caves soon. There are still some nits in some of the hardware that need fixing. The US dropped propaganda leaflets on the Taliban alliance telling them that our bombs were so accurate that we could put one in their bed room window. It wouldn't have been so frightening to the Taliban but the bombers then proceeded to put bombs in their bedroom windows and the Taliban leader's world started to fall apart. The campain in Afghanistan has some writers worried because of the small amount of collateral damage. In their minds it makes going to war easier because the military knows they won't accidently kill a lot of civilians.
  
  The first real encounter between the US special forces and the Taliban soldiers had our people going into theWhite Mountain Taliban caves in the dark of the night. They did something that really finished unnerving the Taliban fighters because the next morning they very quickly GTF'ed out of their caves and higher into the mountains. What dirty tricks did our special forces people pull in the dark of the caves that night. Considering the speed that the Taliban soldiers left their caves in the morning, it must have been really something.
• Back to more pleasant topics, I attended my second felicidad a la Mexicano style birthday party. It was a birthday party Michoacan style. The boxes being shipped from Zinapécuaro, Michoacan de Ocampo, Mexico didn't arrive in time that party had to be delayed for a while. I had a camera in my car trunk and shot a number of photos. People also used the camera to take photos of some of the others. I had to grin at the one Miguel took of me standing between Mariana and Jennefer. I have this kind of goofy smile on my face. My camera quit working about 23 shots into a roll of 24. I don't know if it was the battery or the camera. If it is the camera, I like the looks of the Canon EOS-7e, which focuses where your eye is looking. It was the camera and I walked into the camera store when the 7e was only $20 more than the 7. I haven't set it up to follow my eye.
  
  I had to chuckle this time because Sandra had some great tasting hot sauce (salsa) that I was eating with the food and sipping Mescal. Some people were noticing that I liked the sauce. I didn't think anything about it until the hombre sitting next to me put some on his serving and when he took a bite and went "OUCH!". The way I understand hot is that salsa goes from suave (mild), to picante(spicy), and picoso (muy picante). They thought it was picoso and I thought it was between suave and picante. It definitely wasn't mild. I later told people that my ex-wife used to keep adding jalapeño peppers to her toco sauce until I sweated. If I didn't think Sandra's sauce was hot, i.e., it didn't burn or make me sweat, then they would have found LaNeen's sauce to be muy picoso.
  
  If you want to see a heat rating for hot salsa, visit the Wild Pepper web page. One of their links is to a "Heat Scale for Peppers". I think that I might be able to handle a "2" and perhaps a "3". I have no doubt that anything hotter will be too hot and they have an extract salsa that is rated at 10++++. They tell you that it is only for being added to food. Another place with a number of hot sauces is called "Firegirl.com". She has some "off of the scales" sauces with names likes "Blair's 2 a.m. Reserve" that was the closest thing to legal and was used to get the drunks out of the bar. It is rated at 650,000 - 900,000 scoville units. Wild Pepper and FireGirl appear to use different ratings and I don´t know what my limit is. I know that too much Cholula will make perspiration break out on my forehead but I can still eat it.
  
  I also started to look for salsa that I could purchase. The local stores have lines such as Tapatío, Valentina, Cholula, El Pato and a few others but none of them are for fruits and etc. I had encountered Cholula at my local Mexican food restaurant that I eat at that is called the "Casa Chapala" and they supply Tapatío and Cholula. The selection is pretty limited as far as spices that you add to other dishes. During my effort to try and find what Sandra had used on her desert, I found a store call MexGrocer.com and in their section on "Spices and Herbs", I found what I was looking for. The line is called "Via Nueva" and they have a seasoning for everything. If you want to taste a fruit dish Mexico style, you use Via Nueva Chile con Limon . Another one is called "Via Nueva Pico de Gallo Mix " and it is for things like oranges, coconuts, jicamas and etc. Like I said they have a seasoning for everything.
  
  I have started to believe that some people react to some sauces differently than other people do. The is an indication of this on a University of Texas web site about Mayan's that I visited recently. The name of the site is "Rabbit In The Moon: Mayan Glyph's and Architecture". They have a word called Húuyub (hoo yub), which they would shout out aftering eating a really hot chilie. They also point out that if you encounter to high of a concentration of capsaicin, it will have the affect of a neurotoxin. I know people that like food progressively hotter than I do and I wonder if we have all affected our nerve endings, which let us eat hotter food. For example, I have a couple of neat neighbor's that tested my hot sauce comfort range. Jan had a fairly hot sauce called "Insanity" or something like that. She stuck a toothpick in it an gave it to me to test. I had to suck on it three times before I got enough to notice it. It was pretty hot after a 2-3 minute buildup. I would probably rate it at the bottom end of picoso. It was hot, but not enough to send me running for coolant. They dip a knife (cuchilla) into it and then add the little bit that comes out attached to the knife to a large dish of food such as spagetti sauce. FireGirl rates Dave´s Total Insanity at a 9. They think that small amount will make their spagetti sauce almost too hot for them but I could test the salsa without diluting it.
  
• Iin June 2001, I came across a project called "The Hire". It is a series of 5-6 minutes films on a driver for hire. The driver is played by Clive Owens. I read where he is considered likely to be the next "James Bond". The current content depends on the size of the video that you want to download. I chose the "Large Size" and they run on the order of 60-70 megabytes. You can play them on anything that will play an avi but they play MUCH better on the BMW Film Player. The project consists of 5 videos and a few side topics. The cars are all BMW's, of course. The design goal was a film with non-stop action. There are serious driving stunts in all but the third video, which is called "The Follow". In "The Follow", the driver is hired to follow Adriana Lima. Lima plays the beautiful, but abused, wife of a Hollywood actor played by Mickey Rourke. The driver stays with her until he finds out that she has a black-eye from being beaten. The driver just magically happens to lose her at this point and returns the envelope of money to the star's manager. The manager wants to know how he could lose her and he is told "Don't call me again!".
  
  The first video is called "The Ambush". The driver and a diamond courier are being chased by a van full of really bad guys. The end of the chase is spectacular. The second video is called "The Chosen" and is centered around the driver and an 8 year old Tibetian boy. The get away is an interesting sequence where a number of cars are choreographed. In the fourth video, Guy Ritchie direct's his wife in a video called "The Star". The driver is paid to give her what she wants and she makes a bad request. The driver does his best to get away from the security people who are following his car. While they are getting away, the stunt actor portraying Madona's character is getting bashed around in the back seat. When she is dropped off and on to the runway at the theatre where she is going to perform, she has a large wet-spot a few inches below her belt line. All of this is seen by the camera people waiting for her to show up for the performance. Justice was for the little but verbally abused people working for her. The director points out that he used a spray bottle and sprayed coffee on her lap to make it look like she had spilled the cup.
  
  The fifth video is called "Powder Keg". It is about a war photographer that happens to shoot a roll of film while a bus load of people were massacered. The driver is sent by the UN to get the photographer out of harms way. The photographer is feeling guilty of shooting photographs of people dying and becomes self-destructive when the driver gets him to a check point when they are leaving the country. He pushes the people at the check-point. He is sitting in the back seat of theBMW and all you can hear is "click, click, click,...", which really irritates the boarder guards and they push back. The driver tries to get him through the line but he was hit by a bullet and dies in the back seat of the BMW. The final scene is the driver delivering the photographer's dogtag to his mother while the song "Una Palabra" is sung by Carlos Varela in the background. The music in the videos can almost replace dialog.
  
  Seeing the video on how they drive ordinary BMW's and do the stunts is interesting. The video on the thoughts that went into making the series complete the current set of video's.
  
• It has been a while since I was emailed a site that was deadicated to the terrible or dumb drivers around Atlanta, Georgia. It is called TARDsite for the "The Atlanta Roadways Digest". TARDboy used to take digital photographs of bad drivers as he drove around Atlanta. Now days he simply runs a camcorder mounted in the back seat. The TARD driver of the month for December 2000 is a VW Jetta with 3000 pounds of construction material strapped to the top of the vehicle. It wiped out the back wheels and drove the shock absorbers through the floor board. If the car would have moved, he probably would have rubbed the lower part of the back end off by the time he got to Annapolis. You have to see it to believe it.
• I found some sites that covers the ancient world. I have read anything I could read on Mesoamerica since I was really young. I did a web search on "Oaxaca, Mexico" was presented with many pages of URL's. My visits all began with the Oaxaca Travel (OT) site. Anyone that knows about the Mesoamerica temples will find the photographs interesting. There are a number of sites covering this area. The OT site was just the start. Later, I spent a lot of time on Mexico Connect and on the Oaxaca Journal (OJ). The OJ site was interesting because it had a link to a feed of Radio Oaxaca over the internet. Stan Gotlieb's "Letters From Mexico" were really interesting. His letter about " Traffic Control, Mexican Style Tópes, Rópes & Vibradores" brought a smile on my face. The concept of people gathering to see how high a car would fly when it hit the tópe, how far it would fly before touching the road, or what would fall off was sort of funny. It added a touch of reality to how bad the speed bump (tópe) could be. That brought back memories of bad tópes that I had hit with my cars over the years. I could visualize a car hitting a tópe. The only thing missing would be having a score for how well or how badly you did when you hit the tópe. Running over a really bad tópe could be really hard on a car; however, from the moment that you hit the bump until you touch down and stabilize, it is all beyond your control. It is "what ever will be, will be" and all you can do is laugh at being scored.
  
  One of the web pages talked about learning Spanish by immersion. The cost of an apartment and school is less than what it costs me to live in my house. This is a really interesting possibility. I have started listening to radio stations in Mexico via the Internet. See Mexico Radio. The best, consistent audio is from a low powered AM station in Oaxaca with the call letters of Xeoax that is broadcasting over the Internet with Mp3 streaming audio. It is only mono and will only play from Internet Explorer but it sounds much better than the majority of the stations broadcasting in "Real Audio" or "Microsoft Media Player". They were either really good or disappeared for minutes at a time because of network congestion.
  
  There was a travel book in the local Barnes and Nobel on Oaxaca, Mexico. In it was a list of small towns with cultural centers. One of the ladies that works at the local Old Country Buffet (OCB) is from Santa Ana del Valle. If I were to blame someone for upsetting my scheme of things, she has to be close to the top of the list. When I first met her, which was about 2-3 years ago, she talked about the local Mesoamerican sites around where she and her husband used to live. This was just an interesting piece of information until I looked at a map of southern Mexico. I could see where two of the volcano's that I curently follow were located and both of them have active web sites. The links for Popocatépetl and Volcán de fuego de Colima are on my Volcano Links web page. Then, I noticed that a number of the sites I had followed as a kid could be driven to. I had always assumed they were deep in the jungle and not outside of modern villiages. 
  
  The book talked about the cultural center in this town. It stated that the village was Zapotec, which I already knew, and it was mostly just the young people that spoke Spanish. Everyone has been telling me I could get by with English and then I find out that being conversational in Spanish might not be enough to just get by in these various cultural centers. Developing conversational skills in Spanish jumped an order of magnitude in my priority of things. You can hire a guide but you always have questions that you don't know how to ask and I think that understanding one of the local languages is _very_ important. It also converts you into something different than the usual mono-language American. Trying to learn Spanish has been very frustrating.
• Kennewick Man is probably the primary special local subject that I cover. There used to be a web page by Dr. Chatters and the PaleoNet people as viewed by the first person to identify him. That IP address is now owned by a porno site and you don't want to go there. The US Government's National Park Service has a web page called Kennewick Man. The local newspaper called the Tri-City Herald also has a section called the Tri-City Herald's Kennewick Man Virtual Interpretive Center. The Herald's web page has a timeline of the history of Kennewick Man and has points of view from the scientists and the local Native Americans. The major problem the Tri-City Herald had in their early stories is confusing archaic Caucasoid with Caucasians. The closest living people would be the Polynesians or the Ainu from Hokkaido, Japan. Seeing a side by side comparison of a typical Native American skull and Kennewick Man demonstrates a noticeable difference. The Kennewick Man skull is large and ellipsoidal where as the typical Native American skull was smaller and quite round. A rendition by sculptor Tom McClellan of how they think Kennewick Man would have appeared at age 50 was also unveiled at the special Sunday night get together we held especially for the French TV crew that was filiming "The Man From Kennewick". Also mentioned were tribal stories about the tall red headed people that were killed out in the early days, which seems to fit the description of the people that Kennewick Man was a member of. It wasn't thought that they were red-headed but that they used red ochre to color their hair red.
  
• My introduction to archaeology on the Internet was the cave of "Chauvet-Pont-D'Arc" in France. The cave was discovered just before Christmas 1994. The Minister of Culture had a small web site up shortly after that. Somewhere on AOL, I found a reference to the site and began the long trail of learning about the Chauvet Cave. France has a limestone rock formation that will conviently dissolve producing caves. The atmosphere in the cave also preserves ancient history better than any other region that I have encountered. The French Ministry of Culture has a master site called "Great Archaeological Sites". If you are not comfortable visiting the English site, they also have one called version française. The only problem that I can see is how much time are you going to allow for the visit(s). Once you get there, it is sort of like wanting to visit all of the geyser's in Yellowstond NP. There are people that think you can see everything in Yellowstone in one (1) day. I have been coming back to the Cauvet Cave for 7 years and don't see any end to the visits. I have 50+ years invested in seeing the geyser's of Yellowstone and have a large number that I have never seen erupt.
• Website with the Stewart Clan Magazine Indexes. Mary Stewart Kyritsis has done Stewart genealogy researchers a real favor and indexed the genealogy information published in the USA by George T. Edson.
• The Ancient World Web: The Ultimate Index of All Things Ancient
• SR-71 Photo Gallery The bird of birds. I like EC95-43351-2, which is the second sunset, the best. My Father told the story about getting to make a part for a broken SR-71 that had landed at Hill Air Force Base in Ogden, Utah.. I would be forever content just getting to ride in one. Some family member's were more easily satisfied by simply sitting in the pilot's seat on a powered down Spirit.
• COUNTRY 105'S ARTIST LINKS. What can I say. I like country music and this is a good place to find out about the current hit makers.
• Cyndi's List of Genealogy Sites on the Internet
• My Bookmarks There isn't anything special here. It is just a way of getting to my links when I am away from home.
• Netscape Home Page I get Explorer for free but find the designer's of Navigator have done it the way I like it.
• Anistoriton(Greek History, Archaeology, and ArtHistory)
• I was introduced to a survivor site called the Shared Experience. It is all about cancer and would be a good place to visit for recently diagnosed people.
• The local Family History Center (FHC) has a series of WordPerfect documents that list all of the local assests. It is about 3 feet or 1 m of printed output. You can't use a computer to search paper. The data also includes a great quantity of data from the local Genealogy Society. Getting the data from the computers in the FHC and on the Internet required several people working together. They had to be written on to zip disk and transfered to other computers before they could be converted from WordPerfect documents into HTML.
  
  The web index pages were all done by a lady known as Charanne on the Internet. Charanne ships the WordPerfect 5.1 documents to me as attachments. I save each document as text and ftp the text to crystal. The conversion of the data from text to HTML is done by me on crystal using the Unix editor vi. We tried using many automated ways of generating HTML from documents. The resulting HTML was pretty terrible. That also translates into a really slow loading web page. What I came up with was adding a <br> at the end of each line and then include a hdr record at the top of the file and a tail record at the very end of the file. Several features became obvious at that point. Text based spacing, for example, is translated into a single space. A bullet in a document on a Mac translates into ¥. You can create a • but this required manual editing. You only have to use one command and it will sweep through and change the 400+ occurances of the strange character into bullets. The command string that does the edit is ":.,$s/¥/\&#149;/". You can see what the resulting web pages look like at Richland Genealogical Library. The advantage in HTML is that you can have simple browsers on different computers and they can all do text searches on the data. You can even use a text based web browser to access the data. Once the data has been converted into HTML, I burn a CDROM and the data is loaded onto the two computers running Windows in the FHC. I have no idea if they will ever print the paper documents again. It almost seems pointless.

Home Page