Totally orange cracker on the street.

Wow. This blog post (via BoingBoing) talks about a Chinese farm producing food for McDonald's (I assume that's the Chinese McDonald's, since I don't think this stuff would go over so well here). This feels so William Gibson. And in America it would outrage people But, of course, that's why America is slipping -- in so many ways we've lost our love of exploration, experimentation, development. Sure, that Ben Franklin drive is still visible in parts of society, but we're being ruled by the shuffling masses of zombies who think the best thing America has to offer the world is Hollywood.

Anyway, the future of food is now:

Friday afternoon we visited a very large corporate village that is financed in part by the Beijing government. This is for Agri- and non-Agri-business activities alike. I toured hydroponics facilities growing lettuce for McDonald's. Each room was twice the length of a football field and about as wide. Cabbage plants were stuffed into a piece of styrofoam with holes in it. The roots from each plant was stuck down into a water solution containing all the nutrienets. It sprouts about 1,000 little cabbages on a piece of foam the size of a computer monitor face.

Then it was off to view all the animal breeding centers: Simental, Black Angus, etc., bulls and cows. Really big ones weighing more than one ton each. Then we saw the Transgenic ones: these are produced by manipulating genetic materials of two different strains. Then we saw the clones: These are produced from say a Holstein cow where you take a skin cell and dissect out the genetic material and replace it with genetic material from another cell, perhaps from the same animal or could even be from a separate animal, and the genetics might even have a special gene in it for some human trait such as the ability to produce human serum albumin.

Quoted from: Talkin' Shit About A Pretty Sunset: Your Food is from China

Fire on vernon place.

Fire on vernon place.

Fire on vernon place.

Fire on vernon place.

Fire on vernon place.

Fire on vernon place

Fire on vernon place


It looks like nobody got hurt, except a firefighter who looked like he was being treated for smoke inhalation. He seemed like he'd be OK, from my remote vantage point, of course.

This is the second house to burn down on our block this year. It's nuts. I don't know what started it. I saw the people who lived there, and it looked like they had been called down from work. So it seems like the house was empty at the time of the fire, although there was another guy there who kept saying that he had just stepped out for a minute. What does that mean?

Off to put up a new smoke detector...

This is one half of an accident involving a bus from the school. I was riding the UB Stampede to school, and I saw lights. I should have gotten out my cam quicker, then I would have been able to get two pix. But the bus driver was sitting in her seat, talking to a cop and clearly wiping her eyes with a tissue. The girl was talking to somebody who looked like a father and a cop, and the car had tape holding parts onto it -- it looked like some kind of on-the-spot patch job. It was sad. And I have no idea what happened -- I don't mean to make it seem like it's anyone in particular's fault.