Need a trim? Or maybe just cutting down to size ...

July 31 is the feast day of the founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) -- St. Ignatius Loyola. Ignatius was canonized on March 12, 1622 in a ceremony that honored four other saints: Teresa of Avila, Francis Xavier, Isidore the Farmer and Philip Neri. Neri, founder of the Congregation of the Oratory, was the lone Italian, all the others being Spaniards. This led the Italians to say that Pope Gregory XV had canonized four Spaniards ... and a saint.

Ignatius is noted for his seriousness. Philip Neri was noted for his sense of humor. 

My favorite story/legend about the two of them recounts an encounter they had when both were in Rome. While Ignatius went on and on about something of vital importance to the progress of the Catholic Reformation, Neri supposedly pulled out a pair of scissors and patiently began trimming the Jesuit's beard.

I'm not Italian, but that is still my idea of a saint!

Gives the saying piss off a whole new meaning

San Francisco city officials are implementing a new "pee-proof" paint around the city to combat the persistent problem of public urination. 

Public Works crews have painted 10 walls in the city with a special UV-coated, urine-repellent paint, according to CNN affiliate KPIX

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Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru was inspired by a project in Hamburg, Germany, where walls in a night club district were coated with the liquid-repellent paint. 

If an offender tries to urinate on a wall coated with the super hydrophobic paint, the urine, instead of running down the wall, will spray back at the person relieving himself, potentially hitting his clothes or shoes. 

Public urination has been a chronic issue in San Francisco for a long time. In 2002, the city passed legislation banning public urination and imposing a $50 to $100 fine for offenders, but the ban has had little to no impact on the problem. 

Since the beginning of January, Public Works has had about 375 requests to steam clean urine from various areas in the city. The hope is that the new "pee-proof" paint will help quell some of the city's hottest urinating zones.

Proof of evolution ... or of Genesis?

The oldest snake fossil on record looks almost like a modern snake, except for one glaring difference: It has four feet, each with five digits, a new study finds.

 The roughly 120-million-year-old snake, dubbed Tetrapodophis amplectus (literally, four-legged snake), likely didn't use its feet for walking. Instead, the appendages may have helped Tetrapodophis hold onto a partner while mating, or even grip unruly prey, said study co-researcher David Martill, a professor of paleobiology at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom.

Previous research has detailed two-legged snake fossils, but this is the first known snake ancestor to sport four legs, he said. It likely evolved from terrestrial-burrowing creatures, and was a transitional animal that lived during the shift from ancient lizards to modern-day snakes, he added. 

"We've found the ancestor of all snakes," Martill told Live Science. "We have found the missing link between four-legged lizards and snakes."

The researchers found several indications that the fossil is, in fact, a transitional snake. Unlike lizards and crocodiles, Tetrapodophis has faint impressions of a single row of belly scales, a signature still seen on snakes today.

When the researchers used ultraviolet photography to examine Tetrapodophis' gut, they found partly digested bone fragments that the camera highlighted in different colors. These remnants suggest the snake ancestor ate vertebrates, just as modern carnivorous snakes do.

Moreover, the fossil had other classic snake features, including a short snout, long braincase, elongated body, fanged teeth and a flexible jaw that could swallow large prey, the researchers said. It also has a similar vertebrae column that allows the snake to be extremely flexible, they said.
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Damien's note: Anti-evolutionists often claim that transitional animals or fossils have never been discovered, thus disproving that evolution exists. This is of course famously false, as everyone knows who has ever seen the fossils of Archaeopteryx with its feathers and teeth. The two- and four-legged transitional snakes are another example, one would say, thus providing more weight to evolution.

On the other hand, Biblical fundamentalist are nothing if not logically slippery. I would imagine at least one preacher will immediately latch onto this fossil as proving that snakes once had legs and lost them because of the role of the serpent in tempting Adam and Eve. (Genesis 3:14 -- And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.)

And you thought it was just Wikipedia that was ... unreliable?

One of the "headlines" on my computer news feed this morning was Yanked off air. Apparently yet another sportscaster has embarrassed himself by saying something offensive to an entire group of people and lost his job as a result. Why this is news is unclear to me.

But it made me wonder about the origin of the word yank, which means, we are told by Merriam Webster Online,

: to suddenly pull (something) in a quick, forceful way

: to quickly or suddenly remove (something or someone)

 Okay, I pretty much knew that part. What I wanted to know was the origin of the word. (Did it have anything to do with the word Yankee, for example.) But M-W assures me that the origin is unknown. It goes on, however, to say that the first known use was in 1822. So probably not some Rebel slang slander of the Union soldiers.

But being the curious person that I am -- and you can feel free to take that every which way you wish -- I scrolled down. I have learned not to stop reading too soon.

The next entry (unidentified source) said the first known use was circa 1864, squarely in the middle of the Civil War, and making me wonder about those pesky Union dudes again. But it is more than forty years later than the date given by M-W.

Scroll further and discover that Yank as a person from the US of A appears for the first time in 1778, as far as we know.

For what that's worth.

You pays your money, you takes your chances. 

National Hot Dog Day

No, seriously. It is.

On the anniversary of the Moon Landing

Replica of the chalice Aldrin took to moon.

The first drink consumed on the moon was wine. No, the crew didn’t pop a few corks to celebrate. Buzz Aldrin — a strict Presbyterian Christian — actually took a mini communion kit without NASA knowing.

Silly String goes to war

In 2006, a soldier serving in Iraq named Todd Shriver contacted his parents in New Jersey, asking that mom and dad send him some Silly String. The request wasn’t a sophomoric one, though; Shriver wasn’t going to use the Silly String to play a practical joke on the other members of his detail or for revelry at all. Rather, he planned using it for something which could one day save his life or the lives of others: bomb detection.

It is not uncommon for buildings in Iraqi war zones to be booby trapped, with bombs rigged to explode when someone enters the room. The bombs are triggered when an entrant stumbles into a thin, nearly invisible tripwire, leaving almost no time for escape. For soldiers, entering an unoccupied room is therefore a gamble -- unless you can somehow detect the tripwire before crossing it. Enter Silly String. It travels far enough where a soldier can shoot it across most rooms, and it’s light enough such that if some Silly String lands on the tripwire, it won’t cause bomb to explode. Fire the Silly String and if it hangs in the air, it’s snagged on something -- and therefore, the room is best avoided. Pretty clever, right?

La Fête Nationale

Do you think they are celebrating Bastille Day in Paris today?

The title Bastille Day is not common in France. They call it la Fête Nationale, or the National Holiday, or La fête du 14-juillet, July 14th. Bastille Day is what it is commonly called in English.

Bastille was not an ordinary prison and it wasn’t the worst prison in France either.  One imagines that it would be a huge place holding hundreds or even thousands of prisoners. Actually it could hold only 50 prisoners at a time. When it was stormed on July 14, 1789, there were only six or seven criminals in the prison.

Prison phone calls

A dozen years ago, a friend of mine spent nine months as a guest of the federal government. I was one of the names on his call list, but he had to call me. I could not call him. My phone would ring, a recorded message would tell me that XYZ was calling and would I accept the call. (No charges to me.) If I was there when the message came and accepted it, we got to talk for maybe ten minutes before the call shut off with no warning. If I was not there, no message showed up on the phone I had at the time and I had no idea that he had tried to reach me. 

I do not know if he had to pay a fee for those calls or not. 

This horrible story, however, from  "Inside the Shadowy Business of Prison Phone Calls" (International Business Times, 13 minutes, June 2015) brought the inconvenience of those months back to mind:

Joanne Jones, an occupational therapist from Warwick, Rhode Island, has made an unlikely foe in the past year: Securus Technologies, a billion-dollar prison technology company based in Dallas.
Sitting at her kitchen table one recent afternoon in front of a stack of Securus bills, Jones explained that her 29-year-old son, Nate Jones, had been arrested on an aggravated robbery charge in January 2014. Her son’s life may have taken a negative turn, but Jones tries to keep in touch with him as often as possible.
They speak roughly once a week in a 15-minute phone call, and speak for another 25 minutes on a video chat. Jones says she’d travel to Texas to visit her son in person, but Hays County Jail, where he is locked up, banned visitations in November 2013. That happened shortly after the county jail entered into a contract with Securus.
Since then, all family communication with inmates at Hays County goes through Securus, which charges Jones about $10 for a phone call and about $8 for a video visit.
In the year and a half that her son has been locked up, Jones says she has racked up over $1,000 in bills with Securus to keep in contact with her son. The cost to keep in touch, Jones says, “makes me ill.”

 Now I know some people will say that the son committed a crime and so deserves to have his life made uncomfortable. His mother, however, as far as we know, committed no crime and yet she is the one who pays to talk to him. And we know the best way to rehabilitate inmates is to make sure that they have no contact with healthy outside relationships but instead get all their socializing from other prisoners.

For what it's worth, my parents both worked for many years in prison administration. They find this situation applalling.

Silent summer?

The din created by thousands of nesting birds is usually the first thing you notice about Seahorse Key, a 150-acre mangrove-covered dune off Florida's Gulf Coast near Cedar Key and Sumner.  But in May, the key fell eerily quiet all at once. 

Thousands of little blue herons, roseate spoonbills, snowy egrets, pelicans and other chattering birds were gone. Nests sat empty in trees; eggs broken and scattered on the muddy ground. 

"It's a dead zone now," said Vic Doig, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist. "This is where the largest bird colony on the Gulf Coast of Florida used to be." 

For decades, Seahorse Key has been a protected way station for myriad bird species. It's part of the Cedar Keys National Wildlife Refuge, about 21 miles west northwest of Crystal River, established in 1929 as a sanctuary for birds devastated by decades of hunting for their colorful plumage. Accessible only by boat, today it's a rare island off Florida not dominated by human activity and development. 

When the birds come to nest, so too do biologists and naturalists who study the different colonies. But this year, the birds' exit has the state's avian biologists scrambling for answers. 

"It's not uncommon for birds to abandon nests," said Peter Frederick, a University of Florida wildlife biologist who has studied Florida's birds for nearly 30 years. "But, in this case, what's puzzling is that all of the species did it all at once." 

Doig said some of the Seahorse birds seem to have moved to a nearby island, but they're just a fraction of the tens of thousands of birds that would normally be nesting on the key right now.
To find answers, service biologists have been acting on the few clues they have. 

First, they tested left-behind bird carcasses for disease or contaminants. Those tests came back negative. 

Next, they researched possible new predators. Did raccoons swim over from another island? Perhaps some great horned owls flew out at night and started feasting? 

Traps caught a few raccoons, which is common, but not enough to have created a wholesale abandonment. There were no telltale signs of owls. 

Finally, Doig said, recent years have seen an increase in night flights over the area by surveillance planes and helicopters used to combat drug runners. Although the planes' noise could be disruptive, Doig admits it's a longshot. 

The abandonment concerns biologists because it could have a ripple effect: Many bird species here return year after year to the same nesting sites. The disruption provokes anxiety that this important island refuge could somehow be lost. 

"Any rookery that's persisted for decades as one of the largest colonies is incredibly important," said Janell Brush, an avian researcher with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. "It's quite a large colony. There had to be some intense event that would drive all these birds away." 

Biologist also don't know how the disappearance will affect the island's other animals, some of which rely on the birds to survive. Cottonmouth snakes eat bird predators like rodents, and in turn the birds drop lots of fish and other nutrients from the trees to feed the snakes. 

In the meantime, tour operators that once spent hours taking naturalists and bird watchers to the island are making other plans. 

Mike O'Dell runs tours out of the little marina in nearby Cedar Key. He said on a Tuesday in May he led a group out to view thousands of birds crowding the shores of the key. On Wednesday, there was nothing. 

"It's just that drastic," O'Dell said. "There were none. It's like a different world."

Source: New York Times

Who? What? When?

Today, according to the unfailingly accurate (cough, cough!) Wikipedia is National Fried Chicken Day:

"National Fried Chicken Day is observed on July 6 every year in the United States. In observance of this day, some people consume various preparations of fried chicken.Fried chicken has been described as an "American restaurant staple". Some fried chicken restaurant locations such as Church's Chicken and KFC, and other restaurants such as Grandy's locations, offer special price reductions on National Fried Chicken Day. It is unclear how the day originated and who or what entity started it."

Damien's note:I think it is pretty clear National Fried Chicken Day originated in the marketing department of one of the above-mentioned purveyors of deep fried cholesterol shaped like chopped up poultry. For once, we can absolve the greeting card industry of the blame.

This brings up the fact that all it takes to have something declared National Whatzit Day is for someone, anyone to declare a day National Whatzit Day. The fact that congress and state legislatures routinely do this for no reason other than to satisfy a handful of constituents at no cost to themselves does not render any of these days truly National (or for that matter State) in significance.

Feel free to declare a Day yourself!   

PS -- See if you can then get a Wikipedia entry verifying that such a Day exists.

Happy X-Day!

X-Day is a traditional part of the Church of the SubGenius, a religion formed as a parody of cults and extreme religious groups, and their pamphlets and claims. X-Day fell on July 5, 1998, the scheduled "end of the world", and has been celebrated on July 5 each year since then. 

From its inception in 1980, the Church had prophesied that an army of alien invaders (known as the X-ists or Men From Planet X) would land on the planet Earth and destroy the world of normals, pinks, and glorps, while the members of the Church of the SubGenius would be rescued by the aliens and taken away into space. 

Chapters 10 and 11 of Revelation X: The Bob Apocryphon supplies additional details as to the precise kinds of fates which supposedly await the pinks and normals (as well as SubGenii who have not paid their membership fees) left behind when X-Day comes, saying, among other things, that those who are not immediately killed by the aliens will be enslaved by a society of evil clowns known as the Bozo Cult until eventually their souls are devoured by the Elder Gods. The book also tells readers that if they want more information, they should send one million dollars to Ivan Stang so that he can remake his 1973 film Let's Visit the World of the Future.

Damien's note: The above, taken from the Wikipedia entry, like many entries in that source may be imperfect. For example, whether or not the Church of the SubGenius is a parody or just a prime example of an extreme religion. And cult, as the Church of Scientology will soon be reminding Tom Cruise most vigorously, is such an ugly and actionable word.

High in the sky on the Fourth of July

Okay, we all know the Declaration of Independence wasn't signed on July 4, 1776. That is, however, the date it bears as "An Action of the Continental Congress."

But did you know that the first and second drafts of the Declaration of Independence were on hemp paper (made from Cannabis sativa, still mostly illegal in the United States) and the final one on parchment (animal hide)?

Raise the flag high on this Fourth of July!

Just blew in from the Windy City ...

Five years ago, a Baltimore woman was severely injured when she was impaled by a flying beach umbrella on the beach in Ocean City, providing the backdrop of a reminder about the importance of properly installing the shade providers.
 
On June 30, 2010, Lynn Stevens was enjoying a windy but hot summer day on the beach with her family in the area of the Gateway Grand when a beach umbrella in her vicinity was lifted high in the area by a gust of wind and came plummeting back to the ground at a high rate of speed. The spiked end of the umbrella pole impaled Stevens’ thigh and nearly severed a major artery.

“It was a very windy day and the umbrella was lifted straight up in the air,” said Stevens this week as she recounted the incident five years ago. “It came straight back down and went through my thigh. The pole went into my leg about four inches and it just missed my femoral artery. It didn’t tumble like you see them do so often. Instead, it went straight up and came straight down.”

The Ocean City Beach Patrol and Ocean City EMTs responded quickly and began a rather unusual treatment of Stevens.

“It took four men to hold the umbrella steady in the wind to prevent it from doing more damage,” she said. “They literally sawed off the pole right there on the beach and left about a 12-inch length of the pole sticking out of my leg. They took me to PRMC and the rest of it was taken out in the operating room. It was a little unnerving because the nurses and doctors looked a little astonished to see the umbrella pole sticking out of my leg because I figured they had probably seen everything.”

While the severity of her beach umbrella injury five years ago this week was somewhat unusual, it certainly isn’t unusual for beachgoers to be struck and injured by flying umbrellas. Because of the ever-changing and often windy conditions on the beach and improperly installed beach umbrellas, there are dozens of cases nearly every day. Some are worse than others, but nearly all of them are preventable.
 
The Ocean City Beach Patrol responds to medical emergencies caused by flying beach umbrellas almost every day throughout the summer and some, including Stevens’ case, are serious enough to require an emergency services response. According to the OCBP, it is almost never the person who owns the umbrella that gets hit, but rather an unsuspecting person nearby. The accidents can often be prevented and are essentially caused by an umbrella that was not properly set in the sand to begin with.

Indeed!