The Avenger

Stuart Everybody knows a burrow owl lives in a hole in the ground - why the hell do you think they call it a burrow owl, anyway?

Yep - makes sense and I agree. The new stuf seems tighter, but still a bit loose in places from what I heard.

I really like the track, but I heard a bunch of them tonight (Foo Fighters hosted a broadcast event player for radio and Internet), and The Day That Never Comes does NOT sound like the other tracks I heard. The other stuff sounds more like St. Anger, perhaps a bit more on the melodic side. I may be one of the few people who liked St. Anger - you just have to embrace that album for being loud/heavy/thrashy. I'm guessing I'm going to like Death Magnetic better than St. Anger (can't wait for January - just got my ticket to the show!).

Classic!

Actually, that was an illegal forward pass, but who's paying attention, anyway?

Great freelance piece in the Boston Globe Sunday Magzine today about a Giants fan who went all the way to Nicaragua to land one of the "Patriots 19-0 World Champions - Perfect Season" shirts and hats discarded by the league and given to the poor in a remote area of Nicaragua - awesone quest, awesome write-up.... A Hero's Quest

That's huge. It's the size if the potential fan base, not just who lives within city limits, that has impact upon how well a franchise can survive. Mesa, AZ may be more populous than Cleveland propper, but I doubt it has much in the way of suburbia - my guess is that Cleveland's potential fan base is several times larger than Mesa's.

The time and energy committment isn't too bad - I have 3 year old twins that take plenty of my time and I find I can manage my hives just fine. The good thing is they aren't like keeping other animals - you usually don't have to do anything at a very specific time (i.e. - it doesn't have to be done on Thursday - it can wait until the weekend or maybe even the following weekend). I do most of my work on weekends. The energy is really watching the hive to see how it is behaving and whether it is healthy, managing disases and pests with medications, and feeding them at key times (i.e. - when you start up a hive or are preparing them for winter). Start up for a single hive is probably about $500 once you get the equipment (hive, frames, medications, tools, veil/suit, etc.). Sunsequent hives may cost $100-$200 (obviously you'll already have the tools, veil/suit, etc.). The best thing is to find a local bee club in your area - chances are they run or can refer you to a bee school that will teach you everything you need to know to start (that's what I did - 12 evening sessions with loads of great info).

In your part of the country I would be very careful about any feral colonies - lots of Africanized honey bees and you do NOT want to mess with a hive of AHB unless you're a professional expereinced in dealing with AHB.

That's what honey is pretty much - straight out of the comb. My bees store excess honey in combs they build on the frames I give them rames and cap the cells with a bit of wax. You cut off the wax cappings and then put the frame in an extractor which is really just a big centerfuge. When it spins, the honey comes out of the comb. Then you run it through some seives to filter out and small wax particles, etc., you let any air bubble out for a few days and then you bottle it - presto, you have honey! I actually pulled some bridge comb (comb built between frames or between boxes - comb where it really shouldn't be). I put it on a plate and let some of the honey drain out - had it on toast. Then I put the comb back on the hive - within hours the bees had cleaned out all the remaining honey and stored it in a better place. Bees ara amazing.

Yeah - and that's only my early harvest - in late summer I'll be able to pull some more off. Right now I have 3 honey supers on, and each will give about 50 pounds, but the third isn't full so I'm leaving it on. Unfortunately, there's a nectar dearth around this time of the year in these parts meaning that honey production slows way down.

I'll answer as posibly TBD's only resident beekeeper.... Colonly Collapse Disorder (CCD) is, unfortunately, still hitting commercial beekeepers hard. They still have not found a root cause - the "smoking gun". CCD happens when you have a hive that appears to be healthy, but the field bees fly off to do their pollen/nectar gathering and never come back. As a beekeeper you open up your hive and find almost nothing is left - just the queen and a small number or workers. Unlike other hive maladies, there are no sick bees to gather up and analyze - the bees simply aren't there. Current thought is that CCD is a factor of set of factors that push a stressed out colony over the edge - the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. It is quite possible that the same factor or factors are hitting hives under less stress and it doesn't push them over the edge - they can withstand the additional stress on the colony. Commercial beekeepers are hit hard because their bees are under lots of stress to begin with - they are put on trucks and transported from crop to crop where they are used to pollinate commercial crops. In addition to the grueling travel, their diet gets no variety as they work a single crop and are often fed high fructose corn syrup to keep them going. The life of a bee in a migratory commercial hive has been compared to that of a marathon runner existing on a diet of candy bars. Anyway, the big migratory commercial guys are taking immense losses - 80%+ and many may go bankrupt (unlike other forms of agriculture, there is nothing like crop insurance available to beekeepers). The economic impact is huge. Growers have to pay more for bees to pollinate their crops as fewer are available. Few bees also mean less crop yields. In both instances the law of supply and demand means what you pay for almonds is going way up. Hobbyists like me and people who don't truck their bees around the country have seen some instances of CCD, but not nearly like the big guys. Thankfully my hives are doing well (in fact this afternoon I'm going to pull about 100lbs of honey off of one of my hives). Bees will survive CCD - they always have. In the sort term it will mean higher prices for many things, and it may change the model of how commercial crops are pollinated - migratory beekeeping may die out or become just too costly - growers may have to start keeping hives on their own fields and running their own bee operations. Hobbyists like me can help, especially since as a hoby we are growing by leaps and bounds (see Friday's WSJ or an interesting piece on the issues our new popularity has caused).

None at all if you go places where they get foreign visitors (hotels, bars, restaurants, sites). Now if your plan is to go off the beaten path and do things/go places usually reserved for locals, then you might have an issue - then you might need to know french or the local Polynesian language.

Sorry - I've got to call B.S. on that. The Toll House cookie was invented in Whitman, Massachusetts in the 1937. It was named for the Toll House Inn run by by Mrs. Wakefield who ran it out of an old toll house built in 1709. History from Nestle

Good call on not staying in Papeete - that's really the city/port where everything coming to/from French Polynesia is located. It's not what you think of when you think of Tahiti and pardise. It is congested and somewhat dirty. Moorea is very nice - much more of what you think of when you think of paradise. I was there for my honeymoon 12 years ago and we loved it. I can't advise anything on hotels/restuarants, etc. as they may no longer be there, but I can tell you some of the beaches are beautiful. I recommend going up to the Belvedere lookout in the mountains - really amazing views. There is also a waterfall you can go to (not really posted on maps but all the locals can tell the tourists how to get there). A bit of a hike but amazing when you get there - something out of a movie. Things are vey expensive in French Polynesia because everything has to come from Australia/NZ or the U.S. (and even a bunch of things from France as there is still a decent French influence and lots of French tourists). Local items like fish and fresh fruit are cheap and delicious, but if you want a candybar from home, sunscreen, etc. you're going to pay through the nose - bring as much of that stuff as you can. I'd love to go back someday, perhaps when the U.S. Dollar is worth more than the Mexican Peso... PM me if you have any specific questions you think I can help you with.

Mosi Tatupu. There's an episode of the Simpsons that's a takeoff on King Kong where the natives are chanting to the giant beast (actually a huge Homer) and they are all chanting "Mosi Tatupu, Mosi Tatupu" - gotta love all the things they work into the Simpsons... Oh, and I nominate him in this thread as a Ram, not a Patriot*.

Check out Kid Rock's Youtube video - a fake PSA advocating people "steal everything"

The thing is that most people who get a fake don't know its a fake so they leave the seller all sorts of comments like "this really IS an authentic jersey" or "not a fake". Once you see an honest authentic its easy to tell what's a fake, but most people haven't done that and consequently they don't know that their jersey is fake. I have an authentic and I have an e-Bay "authentic". The real authentic is heavy - very heavy - all the parts of it are heavy duty. The e-Bay "authentic" I knew was fake before I opened it - the package didn't weigh enough when it arrived. I like the e-Bay "authentic" - it looks nice and has sewn on letters like I wanted, but in the end I got what I paid for - a $50 jersey and not a $300 authentic.

I saw it and thought it was pretty good, but I'd wish they had spent a bit more time educating us on what they were doing and how they were doing it - as somebody who knows nothing about oil rigs and drilling I was a bit lost and I'm not sure how much the general public knows about the process, either.

I knew a kid who got kicked out of school for plagarism because he used just "of" and "to" - did Obama really believe that he could do that AND tack on "we" as well? Did he not realize that was never going to get by the keen eyes of the pundits on Fox? Does he think they're stupid? Once again, his liberal elitism will be his undoing...

The other thing to keep in mind is that these are fantasy ratings (at least that's what your title says and that's what Scouts, Inc. does). Fantasy football is different than NFL football (outside of Brady and Moss the Pats* aren't a great fantasy team, but they had the best record in the NFL so their fantasy status does not predict their NFL status [insert your own cheating comment here]). Anyway, I don't know what makes a good o-line from a fantasy perspective (I've been playing for 10+ years and have never come across a league where you draft o-line and have o-line accumulate stats), but it may be different from a good o-line from a NFL perspective - the two aren't always the same.

Actually, she didn't even apologize - she talked about how "the media" characterized what she said, not what she said. Hey, E.D. - the problem wasn't that the media said you called it a "terrorist fist bump", it's that you actually called it a "terrorist fist bump". Geeze - get nailed flat out and then try and blame it on the (liberal) media - what a crock.

Let's not forget the over the shoulder grapic Fox did the other day - a picture of Michelle Obama with the title "Obama's Baby Mama" - are you kidding me? How can you even try and pass yourself off as a news organization with crap like that?

You saw them in Japan as well, didn't you? Caught the last night of the 1998 Asian tour in Tokyo and I remember someone from this board had also caught that show.

I never met or knew Tim Russert, but after seeing all the tributes it confirms everything I always wanted to believe about him as a person. Being from Buffalo and being a Bills fan you automatically wanted to think that Russert was a good guy (because, let's face it - folks from Buffalo and Bills fans are good people!). Unfortunately there are plenty of famous people who have a public persona that belies their real personality. I am so glad to see that the Tim Russert you saw on TV appears to be the guy he was in real life - one hell of a human being. Yeah he was a great journalist, Buffalonian and Bills fan, but I am struck at what a great man he was in total. Loved his family and deeply respected what his father had done (how many people ever realize that and get to tell their fathers how much they appreciate what they have done)? Genuinely cared about people, Was the godfather to the children of several colleagues. I was struck that Bryant Gumbell said he had just received a bote from Tim recently because his mother had passed away - the two hadn't worked together in years yet TR still made it a point to send a personal note - that's good people. He also received the Dream Father award from Parents magazine - may not be as important as the Pulitzer but I can guarantee he cherished it. So depressing to see us lose one of the good guys - but if he's having his way in heaven now he's probaly grilling God as to why the Bills haven't won the big one...