The Horse Doctor

The Annual Weldon Christmas Letter

2011-12-23T06:50:00.000-08:00

Well here is a quick glimpse into our lives....Beths Christmas Letter

Merry Christmas to all! We have had a happy, healthy year. I thought that I would be more organized this year and so Sarah e-mailed the funny incidents that happened throughout the year so that I could write the letter without my failing memory. Unfortunately, my computer died in early November and I lost all of my e-mails. Some of you will be celebrating that my letter is not as newsy (long) or outrageous (embarrassing to all involved) this year. Next year I will have to try a hardcopy and hope I don’t lose it again or try backing up my computer and attempt e-mails one more time! All grandparents are doing well and we just got back from an activity packed 80th birthday weekend for Pop in St. Augustine where he did the Alligator farm obstacle course/zip lines! Mom informed everyone no gifts, just a fond Pop memory oh, and an obituary for Pop, both to be read at his birthday dinner. None of my kids had even read an obituary. Family trips to Cumberland, St.Louis, the beach, the Okeefenoke swamp, a cruise to the Bahamas with Merle and Anna, Halloween Horror Nights, a Vet school reunion, visits from cousins, Woolstons, and Sheldons, and a family survival course (including Katie and Tucker)with expert Byron Kerns kept us busy. Alan has completed 3 rounds of P90X and one of Insanity both intense physical fitness programs. He pre-ordered the newest one “P 90X2” and when I called him to say it had arrived he asked me if Tony Horton was there (the workout guy on the DVD)! I thought he had lost his mind but apparently Tony was hand delivering the first few that were ordered and Alan thought that might be his order. (I think we may have to do an intervention). Somehow I got shanghaied into 1 round of P90X (90 days) and the Insanity round (another 90days)with him ( did I mention the need for an intervention) Alan dropped 15 pounds, I didn’t lose an ounce (but I did eat whatever I wanted without gaining and it's been a long time since I got to do that)! Alan is playing on 3 league teams as well as Monday night tennis. He and Murphy are going to the USTA league Nationals in March at Indian Wells in California. Alan’s new associate Katie, is working out beautifully. He is serving as an elder at First Presbyterian church. We go to all of the Jaguar home games (unfortunately this year). Alan and Murph have started taking their bags to the games to be the Baguars when appropriate. Alan finally got a new (used) F150 and traded in his old truck with 350,000 miles on it. He has a real problem letting go of things with a lot of miles on them, I guess I should be glad. Alan and I went to see the Monkees with the Bowers and Mike and Pam at The Florida Theatre and it was a blast. Last time I saw the Monkees in Jacksonville, Jimi Hendrix was opening for them and it was the 60’s (he was booed off the stage because we all wanted to see Davy). We also went to see the Moody Blues in St Augustine with the Mikes, Teresa and Pam. We went to the ACVIM conference with Erik & Patti, DL, Cheryl and the boys in Denver and had a great time. As we headed out to the conference I went through my first full body x-ray at the airport. I was standing there uncomfortably as the female homeland security guard was examining me, and she commented "Oh, I really like your shorts, they are so cute." I was wondering if she was just trying to make conversation in an awkward situation or if she really liked my shorts!

Sarah is doing well at Wash U and lives in apartment style University housing just off campus. She is in her junior year and is a Psychology major hoping to become an occupational therapist. She works at a cookie shop called Dough to Door and has only eaten 3 cookies while working there for 2 months which just boggles my mind! She uses a bike to get to her classes and when asked if it was a mountain bike or street bike she replied "a blue bike". (In fairness to Sarah, she borrowed it from a friend of Sally's and probably doesn't even know what make it is). She took some classes at UNF this summer to get all of her prerequisites for OT grad school at Florida completed by next year. She had her first college boyfriend this year. Their first date was to the school cafeteria on Valentines Day. Before they decided that they were dating, Sarah wanted to make sure that they had no misunderstandings so she laid her ground rules (Alan “She is so like her mother!) They actually dated 6 weeks! Alan presented her last Christmas to finish her debutante year. Sarah is such a rule follower, I think she was the only deb (maybe in the history of the tradition) who refused to break the rules and never drank because she was under age! She is enjoying crew despite having to be at practice every morning at 5. She is a kind, stubborn, smart, loyal, demanding, fun, honest, sometimes judgmental, hardworking, mature, and considerate person and makes me proud to be her mother!

Dani is also in her junior year at Florida majoring in Psychology and minoring in accounting. She made it to the finals in a modeling search at Abercrombie and Fitch where she was working until September. Dani had to write a short story in her Spanish Composition and Grammar class. Her professor posted the 3 best stories online and the class voted on the best one and Dani's won by a large margin earning her a book as a reward. She continues to work for her Cognitive psychology professor in the aging and cognition lab (does Family get a discount?) and plans to go to graduate school of some sort after graduation. Alan resolved to teach all of the kids how to properly shoot a handgun this year. When he took Dani to the gun range, she told him that she was so nervous about handling a gun that she was nauseous but she followed his instructions and did a great job. After her session, she was so proud she said she was going to take her target to Gainesville and put it on her front door to discourage any would be

attackers! Dani also caught her first fish this year on Cumberland, a bonnet head shark (go big or go home). Dani is a lovely, thoughtful, picky, industrious, intelligent, neat (unusual in the Weldon household), outgoing, sometimes a bit extravagant, playful, and determined person and she makes me feel honored to be a part of her life!

Murphy is in his sophomore year at UNF and is a business major. He plays just a little tennis, a LOT of video games, and goes to Jaguar games with us. He had his first real job this summer working as an assistant to Arnold Tritt's maintenance supervisor and it was a superb experience. He learned how to fix AC's, plumbing, roofing, duct work, mowing, and even replaced 2 toilets. He made good money and is saving it to purchase a car. It nearly came to naught in Murph's early weeks while he was giving Spencer (his supervisor) a ride to their job at the beach moving Arnold's family. Murph made the mistake of "Hot boxing" his boss (passing gas in a closed vehicle). Spencer wheezed "Is that you, boy?" Murph embarrassedly explained that he had eaten at Moe's (a Mexican restaurant) last night. Spencer grumbled "I don't think I'd be eating at Moe's any more!" Only Alan's son would get in trouble at work for passing gas!( That’s my boy) When they got to the beach, Arnolds wife Danielle said to Murph "You are learning so much, you are going to make someone a great husband someday!" This time Spencer muttered "I pity the fool!"Murph is still trying to find his direction as far as career options (recommendations are welcomed, at least by me). Murph is a quiet leader, tends to take the path of least resistance, often helps without being asked, frequently thinks of others, can be a bit bullheaded, has a great sense of humor, has a great work ethic when he commits, is always willing to come home and hang with Polly and Mac when needed, has a great brain (when he decides to use it), honors his elders, and is a true blessing in my life!

Polly is a senior at Episcopal and going through the college application process. She likes FSU, UCF, and UF. She has already gotten into Auburn and FSU. She is still working at Parkway on weekends and 2 days after school. She just finished cross country and was awarded the Coaches Award and given a Varsity letter as well even though she ran JV which made her ecstatic! She is taking 4 AP classes and Honors Algebra as well as working, volunteering, and running cross country and is one of the busier people that I know. She wanted to return to the Dominican Republic for another mission trip this summer but we send each child only once so she used her earnings from Parkway to pay her own way. A major goal this year is to get her braces off before prom. She was off campus for lunch with friends when one of them got pulled over. The officer didn't believe that they were high school seniors and called the school to verify and make sure they were legally off of campus. After verification, he looked back at Polly and told her "You look like you are 10!" “You look like you have eaten too many doughnuts” she replied silently in her mind. No wonder she wants her braces off. Dinners have shrunk and Polly and Mac have developed a language of their own that involves lines from and references to The Office, Scrubs, Futurama, or movies they’ve seen. Usually Alan and I don't have a clue what they are talking about. Murphy ‘s fluent in this language and Sarah claims to understand it but can’t speak it! Polly had a scare this year when her dog Momo got too close to our psycho cat Pauly. Pauly lunged at Momo and happened to get a claw right into her jugular vein. Momo proceeded to screech and gush blood and a panicked Polly came running up to me in the shower screaming that Momo was dying. I reminded her that she hopes to be a vet and to calm down and hold the wound off. By the time I got out of the shower it was clotting and we placed a bandage. I got abused at work the next day because only an Iggy (Italian greyhound) could be mortally wounded by a single cat claw puncture! Polly is bright, hardworking, a bit sensitive, inclusive, congenial, humorous, not the most coordinated, entertaining, vivacious, and brings me much joy.

Mac is a 10th grader at Episcopal and is dreading Polly's imminent departure for college. He ran cross country with Polly, Pepper, and Tucker and is currently wrestling on the Varsity team. When the coach told Alan that wrestling would be good for Mac because it would give him confidence, Alan almost refused to let him do it since Mac has confidence to rival Alan’s' (which is quite a lot)! Another common occurrence at the dinner table is "that's what he/she said” jokes and" ______ her I barely know her" jokes (I think both originated from the Office). Alan and any kids’ present love to engage in these. Unfortunately, Mac was not thinking when in study hall the teacher reprimanded a student for discussing liquor at school and Mac automatically piped up "Lick her I barely know her". Needless to say Mac got the next reprimand and rightly so. No more of those jokes at the dinner table! On a happier note, Mac is a teachers dream. 5 of his 6 teachers (all but his computer teacher) commented on his "enthusiastic learning and participation" in class discussions, a trait unusual in males his age (particularly those with the last name of Weldon). Perhaps the confidence is not all bad. Mac also plays a little tennis and some video games. He will be getting his Drivers License in about a week so you are forewarned. (Mac drives well IF he notices the stop signs and red lights.) Mac is the child most likely to just come up to me and tell me he loves me and give me a hug when he's not angling for something. Mac is a real outside of the box thinker, mouthy, brilliant, stubborn(are you noticing a trend yet?), confident, intellectually curious, sometimes oblivious, warm, and cheerful person who is not shy about showing his affections and I am delighted to have him as my son. Have a Happy New Year!

Blogger Outreach Newsletter: New Photo and Video Sharing Facebook App

2011-07-29T17:27:00.001-07:00

A new opportunity to share with you from Technorati Media’s Blogger Outreach program.

We connect you with worldwide brands for access to everything from movies and music to smartphones and cereal for product reviews, breaking news and content exclusives, including; unique Facebook applications that allow you to express yourself, like the Memory Mapper recently launched from Visa.

Share Your Travel Adventures with Visa Memory Mapper

Have you recently taken a trip with special meaning to you? Did you make some lasting memories along the way? Encounter any surprises or happy accidents?

Visa invites bloggers to recreate their travel adventures with a new Facebook application – Memory Mapper. The Memory Mapper is an easy and unique way to share your personal travel stories and meaningful, exciting moments with a virtual keepsake that utilizes Google Maps satellite technology.

Use the options the Memory Mapper provides – upload photos and videos from your trip, add captions, a soundtrack and geotag where these memories were created – to retell your special story and share it with the world (blog, Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail).

Create a Memory Mapper for the Chance to Win a $100 Visa Gift Card
Check out examples on Visa’s Facebook page, especially Adam Richman's Memory Mapper.

Every day through the end of August, five lucky people will win a $100 Visa Gift Card. Each day you create a Memory Mapper you will be automatically entered for a chance to win! See official rules* at facebook.com/visa.

If you would be interested in blogging about Visa’s Memory Mapper and the Memory Mapper Sweepstakes, review this press release.

Participate in the State of the Blogosphere Survey

Each year, we take an in-depth look at different segments of the blogosphere.

The 2011 report will launch in early November. Look for your invitation to participate in the survey in late August. Last year, we had a record number of blogger participants. Thanks again to all of you who responded.

If you're interested in being interviewed for the survey, contact us at press@technorati.com.

Technorati Media Blogger Outreach Opportunities

Bloggers, what can we say… You are in demand! We’re interested in working with you based on what you are already doing – sharing your passion, knowledge and opinions about anything and everything.

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Technorati Conversational Ads with blogger feeds also feature in these campaigns and receive millions of impressions–that’s a lot of potential new readers and followers.

Keep an eye out for Blogger Outreach opportunities coming to your inbox soon.

*OFFICIAL RULES
No Purchase Necessary to Enter or Win the Visa 2011 Memory Mapper Sweepstakes. Limit one (1) entry per person and per Facebook account per day. The Visa Memory Mapper Sweepstakes begins at 12:00:01 AM Pacific Time (PT) on 7/18/11 and ends 11:59:59 PM PT on 8/31/11 (the "Promotional Period"). Five (5) prizes will be awarded each day in a daily drawing from among all elligible entries received each day during the Promotional Period. Open to legal residents of the fifty (50) U.S. and the DC, 18 years and older. Void in Puerto Rico and where prohibited. For Official Rules, go to http://www.visa-memorykeeper.com/?a=sweepsrules.

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Disaster preparedness for horse owners

2011-07-06T19:21:00.000-07:00

Disaster preparation for Horse owners

As Hurricane season is upon us here in Florida it is past time to seriously address the task of preparation. Efforts taken today can save a great deal of anxiety and heartache in the future. Unfortunately, many of us are procrastinators by nature and wait until the news reports of the approaching storm prod us into some form of action. Every year when this happens you find yourself frantically wandering the isles of your local store searching empty shelves for bottled water and batteries with several hundred of your closest friends and neighbors. This doesn’t need to happen. With just a little time and effort now you will find yourself much more prepared and not just another aimless zombie in the golden hoard. Even if you are like me and lack the “organizational gene” you will find that following some simple guidelines can help get you ready for the eventual day when, as they say…. the manure hits the oscillating rotator. By breaking things down into simple check lists you can start getting the things you need and the things you need to get done checked off. You probably have many of these items and just need to get them together and inventoried.

Here are the disaster preparedness check lists we have for our clients. Some things may apply to your area and others will not and need to be adjusted to your geographical threats. The basics are the same regardless if the threat is a hurricane, wildfire, earthquake or electrical grid failure. I have broken these down into 1. Horses, 2. Farm, 3. Home, and tried to cover the important items and tasks you will need to do. In the need to evacuate many of these things will need to be organized into appropriate “go bags” so duplication of documents and some supplies may be needed.

HORSES:

Vaccinations- All horses should be vaccinated with Tetanus toxoid yearly. Mosquitoes increase significantly after the hurricane and transmit the Encephalitis viruses; therefore vaccination with Eastern&Western Encephalitis as well as West Nile Virus should be boostered prior to storm season.

Coggins test- Make sure you have a current negative Coggins test and that it doesn’t expire during hurricane season. These are required for interstate transport so have several certified copies for (truck, trailer and important papers folder)

Health Certificate- these are required for transport as well. You can obtain a six month event permit which will allow movement into adjoining states. (Have extra certified copies)

Identification- Make sure your horse has a microchip ID and register the number. Name tags on the halter “may” stay on but usually don’t and won’t help if your horse is stolen or “adopted” after the storm. Identification of horses that have died is extremely difficult after days in storm conditions as they all look the same. Evidence from work done in Louisiana and Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina showed that Microchip ID allowed positive identification in >90% of cases. During Hurricane Andrew in Florida it was almost the exact opposite since microchip ID wasn’t required in Florida and was not readily available then. Most of the dead horses were never identified.

Evacuation- Decide early if you are going to evacuate and have a destination prearranged. Contact family members or camp grounds that allow horses. Map out your evacuation route and all alternate roads to get there. Have several maps in each vehicle. Leave at least 48 hours before the storm gets close as roads and bridges will be clogged with traffic and higher winds as the storm approaches may close some bridges to trailer traffic leaving you stranded.

Important documents- keep copies of health records, Coggins test, health certificate, ID numbers and photos in a Ziploc bag. Also, store copies on a portable flash drive to be printed later if needed.

If you are not evacuating then it probably safer to turn your horses out in a large open pasture that has VERY few trees, if any. Most injuries occur from collapsed barns and flying debris. Just think about the fact that your barn was probably built to take advantage of the prevailing breeze to keep it cool and most likely done by the lowest bidder. That’s a bad combo with a CAT 3-4 Hurricane.

FARM: (Walk your property, visual inspection.)

Check and repair all fences. Remove any barbed wire.

Clear trees and dead limbs (clear all red maple, it only takes a few wilted leaves to induce renal failure in the horse….and they will eat them).

Remove all debris. This becomes flying projectiles

Store all jumps, tables and chairs in a barn stall

Get “tie-downs” for trailers, park them in a large open paddock away from trees and power lines. Park trucks there as well. Make sure they are fully fueled.

Store feed- 7 day supply stored in water proof containers ( 1lb /100lbs body weight x 7 days per horse)

Store hay in barn under waterproof tarp and off the ground on pallets

Water supply- 15-20 gal/horse/day. You can fill up troughs, boats, swimming pools ect. Bleach can be used to purify contaminated water ( 8 drops /gal) but horses may not drink it if treated. A hand “pitcher pump” for your well is also valuable with power outages. Dehydration and renal failure is a common source of death in horses after hurricanes.

Generator- 4hp (4000-5000 watts) with gas to last 7 days. This can be done with 4x5 gallon cans using the generator intermittently. Tri fuel options on generators are a great addition.

Extension cords- 4 long 100ft

Tools-

-Hammers and nails( you need a large and varied supply)

- fencing materials-field fence, posts and staples

-chainsaw, spare chain, gas and 2 cycle oil

-ropes and tow cable

- Ladder

-wire cutters and long handle pry bar (can still get to supplies if barn collapses)

- roll of black plastic sheeting and staple gun to cover broken windows and roof leaks

- flood light-work light with car adapter (1 million candle power), head lamps for hands free work

-waders or snake boots

Extra halters and ropes- stored in sealed plastic bins

Medical supplies-

-Bandage material(sheet cotton,gauze,telfa pads,vet wrap,duct tape

-wound medication (betadine scrub,Nolvasan ointment,triple antibiotic ointment)

-anti-inflammatory meds (Banamine,Phenylbutazone)

-Sedatives (acepromazine, Xylazine)

-Antibiotics (Trimethoprim sulfa tablets, Procaine penicillin)

-insect repellant

-syringes and needles

-scissors and knife

-clean towels

Ask your veterinarian for help and dosages on medications that you need, we are there to help and educate.

HOME:

-water supply, 1 gal/person/day. A “water bob” ($20) can be placed in the bathtub and once filled up holds 100 gallons of water and comes with its own hand pump.

-Food storage, plan on at least 2-3 weeks supply. It could be longer depending upon the level of disruption. The objective is to maintain independence and not be dependent upon rescue or food supplied at refugee centers. Trust me; historically it never works out well for the refugees. Most canned foods are good for at least 2 years. Canned dried storage foods can be good for up to 30 years as are freeze dried foods. These can be set aside in a closet or under a bed in a guest room for a time when needed. Choose foods that you like and fit into your regular diet. You should plan for several meals a day as you do now and shop accordingly. Many online sites and the LDS church provide sources for long term storage food.

-Generator, some form of electricity will greatly help when the lights go out. This will allow you to maintain refrigeration, cooking, lights and connection with the outside world. Gas to keep it running. Be aware of exhaust and fire dangers and keep it well ventilated.

-Solar lights, these outdoor LED lights can be brought indoors at night and provide light for about 6 hours. They are bright enough to use for reading and are much safer than candles and lamps. Once charged the batteries can be disconnected until needed.

-Gas grill, for cooking and boiling water. Keep at least one extra bottle of propane on hand as the grill will get a lot of use.

-Medical supplies, bandage materials, antibiotic ointment, anti diarrheal meds, anti inflammatory meds(advil,Tylenol) , any prescription medications you are currently on. Injuries such as burns and cuts associated with farm accidents should be your focus.

-A small cheap window unit air conditioner, keep stored in the box in a closet. This will provide an unbelievable relief in the hot humid post hurricane power outage (this is why you need a generator). We kept this in our bedroom and slept like a baby with our kids and all our nieces and nephews sleeping on the floor because we had A/C.

-Cash, with power disruptions the banks and ATMs will be non-functional. Having cash on hand will enable you to at least be more flexible.

-Firearms, while it may seem unnecessary to some, you may want to rethink this position. Police protection, phone service and street lights will all be disrupted leaving those in our society that thrive on those conditions to be emboldened. The sound of a generator and lights can send them a signal that you have “stuff”. While much has been written on which guns are best, I tend to think that the best gun is the one you have and are comfortable using. The simplicity of a shotgun with appropriate sized shot is a nice deterrent.

I’m sure this could be expanded many fold but keeping it simple is a great way for many to get started. Going over the list every year and adding to it to fit your needs is another way to keep the process of preparation moving forward. Remember to keep some extra supplies for charity as many of your neighbors may not be as well prepared or could be more severely affected by storm damage. Be prepared to help them.

The storm is coming; it’s time to get ready.

Yet another "super bug"

2011-06-02T19:50:00.000-07:00

E. Coli can be a particularly nasty bug if you ingest one of the drug resistant strains. The antibiotic resistance is shared from organism to organism by viruses called bacteriophages that carry the gene for resistance from one bug to the next. Now there is a new stain moving through Europe in infected vegetables that has people worried.
here's the link

Horse herpes outbreak forces rodeo queens to ride stick ponies - ksl.com

2011-05-27T16:43:00.000-07:00

Horse herpes outbreak forces rodeo queens to ride stick ponies - ksl.com

EHV-1, facts about the disease and the current outbreak

2011-05-21T09:39:00.000-07:00

As many are aware there is a current outbreak of EHV-1 neurologic disease or EHM Equine Herpes Myelitis. This has primarily been a western state outbreak but cases are now reported in Florida as well. Several cases were reported in South Florida several years ago as well and sporadically across the country over the past 20 years.
As always happens with disease outbreaks, the misinformation and fear spreads faster than the disease itself so what I wanted to do is put out there are some facts that we currently know and questions that we dont know the answer to. You can then use this information to make wise decisions for your horse.
This information comes from the consensus statement from the ACVIM ( American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine) .

EHV - Equine Herpes Virus or Rhinopneumonitis . There are 5 known strains of EHV. EHV-1 is associated with viral abortion and neurologic disease. This is a DNA virus and can remain dormant in neural tissue much like human Herpes viruses and become active during periods of stress.

Transmission- This virus is transmitted primarily by respiratory secretions from infected horses
via droplets from coughing or snorting . Typically viral shedding lasts 7-10 days but may persist for several weeks. Also it can be transmitted from contaminated surfaces or aborted fetuses. Virus particles may remain active in the environment for several weeks.

Incubation period- Typically the viral incubation period is 4-6 days but can be as rapid as 24 hours after infection.

Pathogenesis- Once viral infection occurs and viremia develops the virus is carried throughout the body and can infect the cells lining the blood vessel (endothelium). This activates the inflammatory cascade and causes necrosis and thrombosis of theses small blood vessels. This vascular damage ,whether in the uterus or spinal cord then leads to abortion or neurologic disease.

Latency- This is the main problem with this disease. When horses are infected with EHV-1 , usually within the first 2 years of life, the virus takes up residence within the neural tissue and can remain dormant for years, usually in the trigeminal ganglia. The infection rate may be as high as 60-80% of the horse population. During periods of stress the virus can then be activated (recrudescence) and a second viremia occurs leading to respiratory shedding. Reactivation from latency, with shedding and transmission to susceptible hosts, is a defining feature of herpesviruses and is very likely to play an important role in the etiology of EHV-1 disease outbreaks.

The Neuropathologic Strain- This has been identified as the EHV-1 D752 and N752 genotype.
There are 2 alternative scenarios for the origin of ‘‘high risk neuropathogenic’’ (D752 genotype) EHV-1 variants; either reactivation from a horse latently infected with a D752 variant or spontaneous mutation from a ‘‘low risk variant’’ (N752) to the high-risk genotype. It is possible that both events occur and given the rarity of neurologic disease outbreaks, it is very difficult to determine the relative contribution of one or the other event to such outbreaks. It seems likely that horses that are exposed to D752 variants during a neurologic disease outbreak will
become latently infected carriers of that strain, even if they were already latently infected with an N752 variant.

Vaccination- use of a modified live vaccine has been shown to reduce viremia and viral shedding during an outbreak. It has also been shown to increase the mucosal antibodies in the respiratory epithelium and this may be critical to reducing viremia. It must be noted that vaccination does not prevent recrudescence of the latent infection. Vaccination in the face of an outbreak may be beneficial in previously vaccinated horses as there will be a rapid anemestic response with a rapid rise in antibody levels.

Immunostimulants- It is theoretically possible that activation of the immune system could prevent viral reactivation but this is unknown. One study does show some benefit in preventing respiratory disease.

Biosecurity AAEP guidelines

ACVIM EHV consensus statement pdf

Authorities Investigating How Goat Herd Ran Into Traffic « CBS Sacramento

2011-02-28T19:54:00.000-08:00

Authorities Investigating How Goat Herd Ran Into Traffic « CBS Sacramento

Byron Kerns Survival School- more than I expected.

2011-02-21T15:15:00.000-08:00

Why in Gods name would anyone want to go to survival school if you aren't in the Military. That's what a lot of people think and has been a common thread with those whom I discuss the events of last weekend. That and "You're crazy", but I hear that a lot anyway so what the hell. This all started when I read the book "Deep Survival "by Laurence Gonzales.(which tells me I have got to get back to reading more surfing magazines) It is a scientific look at why some people survive disasters and others die. There are some amazing stories and a real analytical look at the brain functions and decision made in each. It also looks at the way your mind will block out certain information that it deems unimportant to the task at hand and how emotion can over power the neo cortex and lead to mistakes. In this book the author goes to the hills of Virginia for survival training with one of the country's foremost authorities on wilderness survival a former US Air Force SERE instructor named Byron Kerns. When I told my wife about it she had already been looking at some camps/schools that we could do with our kids and she saw one offered by Kerns . It turns out he now lives in Florida and runs a school near the Ocala National Forest. We signed up. The school we chose was called "Safe Return" and is geared to teaching you how to survive for 72 hours, the point at which most rescues occur. We took three of our kids ,one niece and one nephew 3 hours south and into the woods. I have to say he was not what I expected. We did the typical Weldon trip, ran late, trusted Mapquest and got lost and came flying into the dirt parking lot kicking up dust on the others who were waiting on us. I imagined Kerns to be the hard assed , lantern jawed drill instructor barking orders and chewing me a new one because I couldn't be on time. I couldn't have been more wrong. What I found was a teacher. Byron will instantly remind you of that great High School teacher or coach that really cared about you and took a special interest in your success. He is a BIG and imposing guy, don't get me wrong but there is a special gentleness there and genuine desire to see you succeed. He cares and it shows. He wants you to learn this stuff because it could save your life. After a quick briefing he had us (15 in all) divide into 5 teams of 3 . I think this helps breakup the family dynamics and forces team work. Another thing he's big on. We had about a mile hike into camp and as I found out, everything is used as a learning experience. He gave each team leader a clear plastic bag and a strip of duct tape. I had two great boys in my team Josh and Austin and we were told to use this stuff (everything can be a tool) and devise a way to collect water without digging and we were competing with the other teams. I don't want to give away any of his teachable moments so I won't go into detail on those, but suffice it to say that practically everything you do has some educational component. Byron would get everyone around a fire circle and used a white board as he talked about the "7 Priorities " of survival. He discussed all of the fears and stresses involved when you are alone and stranded in a wilderness setting and how you must maintain a positive mental attitude or PMA. that is the #1 priority by the way. It was also a major theme in Gonzalez's book as well. Those that were able to keep it together and saw the beauty and wonder of the surroundings made it out...those that paniced or gave up didn't.At this point Byron became more quiet and emotional as he said you have to have FAITH and he underlined it twice on the white board. He looked hard at the kids sitting around the circle and said " you have to know that somebody loves you and they are frantically looking for you, they are coming and they will find you. You just have to stay put and take care of yourself and do what I'll teach you". You could see that he was teary eyed at this point and I don't know if there was a memory from his training or military experience that brought it out but it was quite profound. We continued our training , lectures and competitions and then watched as Byron had the youngest kid there (a sixth grader) started the evening fire. He was digging the experience . I was surprised to learn the 7 principles and what goes into each one and how to satisfy each. When I ask people what things they think are important for wilderness survival they are usually backwards. He points out that you can go 3 minutes without air, 3 days without water and 3 weeks without food. Everyone thinks you should start off eating plants and bugs but as Kerns pointed out...there are too many poisonous plants so why bother. Bugs are better or you can set snares for rabbits but again ..it's #7 on the list. So with all of that said here are the 7 Priorities
1. Positive Mental Attitude
2.Wilderness First Aid
3.Shelter
4.Fire
5.Signaling
6.Water
7.Food

If you think about what constitutes a good survival kit you have to think about the area you will be in, what specific needs you have and above all else...never go into the wilderness without it and without letting someone know where you are going. Chose the things to go into it and be sure you cover something for each priority. There are a lot of "Chair-borne Rangers" out there selling everything "Survival" but I will assure you of this ...skills beat stuff. Knowing what to do and how to do it will save your life and there is no better teacher of that fact than Byron Kerns.

CDC: Deadly Superbug “C-Diff” Spreading « CBS Boston

2011-02-09T18:04:00.000-08:00

CDC: Deadly Superbug “C-Diff” Spreading « CBS Boston

Cumberland Island Ga. ( maybe the last time)

2010-12-22T15:20:00.000-08:00

Most of the private homes on Cumberland are now the property of the US Federal Govt via eminent domain. The house we have been renting and the one we spent part of our honeymoon in
"Nancy's Fancy" is now officially gone. The Government took it this month. We were fortunate to be the last family to stay in it as my sister in law was buying the large kitchen table and taking it back....we were able to stay for a week. My in laws lost their house to the Feds in 1980 but some families were able to make deals and get another 30 years. Never underestimate the power of Washington DC. The older I get the more Libertarian I become....why is Government the largest land owner in the country? anyway , here are some pics of this wonderful place.

Good Samaritans Face Fine After Rescuing Deer From Icy Water « CBS Baltimore – News, Sports, Weather, Traffic and the Best of Baltimore

2010-12-19T15:37:00.000-08:00

Good Samaritans Face Fine After Rescuing Deer From Icy Water « CBS Baltimore – News, Sports, Weather, Traffic and the Best of Baltimore

Big snake problem in Guam....innovative solution?

2010-10-02T13:24:00.000-07:00

Navy Bombs Guam With Dead Frozen Mice

Published October 01, 2010

| FoxNews.com

In a ploy to rid Guam of its population of invasive brown tree snakes, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is bombing the island with drugged frozen mice, military news outlet Stars and Stripes reported.

Using Naval Base Guam as a starting point, scientists drop mice packed with acetaminophen from helicopters into the jungle canopy.

The drug -- commonly found in Tylenol -- provided a regulatory advantage because it had already undergone extensive testing, Dan Vice, assistant state director of USDA Wildlife Services in Hawaii, Guam and the Pacific Islands, told Stars and Stripes.

Guam’s snake problem began in the 1980s, when the creatures arrived on the island accidentally in military cargo. The mildly venomous snakes can grow up to 10 feet long and, according to the Department of Land and Natural Resources for the State of Hawaii, are the leading cause of endangerment for some of Guam’s native animals.

“The discovery that snakes will die when they eat acetaminophen was a huge step forward,” Anne Brooke, conservation resources program manager for Naval Facilities Command Marianas told Stars and Stripes. “The problem was how you get the snakes to eat it.”

State of the Blogosphere Survey 2010

2010-09-28T08:37:00.000-07:00

2010 State of the Blogosphere Survey – please give us 15 minutes.

Since 2004, Technorati has been tracking the Blogosphere through our State of the Blogosphere study. The goal of the study is to create a complete snapshot of the activities and interactions that make up the Blogosphere by asking you, the bloggers, to share some information about your habits. The survey includes questions like how, when and why you blog. Is this a side business, full time job or something you do for fun?

Please feel free to send this link to other bloggers you know. And be sure to check back on Technorati.com in November for a summary of the results.

The 2010 State of the Blogosphere Survey: http://research.opinionguru.com/mrIWeb/mrIWeb.dll?I.Project=A17275

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Horse hoarder in Naples

2010-09-24T19:54:00.000-07:00

Very sad story from the gulf coast

Link here.

GOLDEN GATE ESTATES — A Golden Gate Estates woman’s dream of running a horse rescue foundation in Collier County came to a bitter conclusion on Wednesday when a judge barred her from ever owning horses again.

Tina Ciancaglini, a self-described horse lover who has been called an “animal hoarder” by county officials, was deemed incapable of caring for horses by a Judge Rob Crown after Collier County Domestic Animal Services reported she has consistently failed to provide for her horses.

DAS had been monitoring Ciancaglini’s Estates horse ranch since 2007 when there were reports of neglect. Officers with DAS reported finding consistently thin horses, but worked with her to improve conditions.

Ciancaglini was attempting to run a horse rescue organization, which she called Legacy Rescue Foundation.

But in July, DAS officials finally decided to shut down her horse ranch when, after a citizen complaint, they found 34 malnourished horses.

DAS Director Amanda Townsend said all of the horse scored moderately to dangerously low on a scale that determines healthy weight for horses. One foal since died from malnourishment-related illnesses, she said.

In the three years that the county has monitored the ranch, 19 horses have died in Ciancaglini’s care, reported DAS officer Paul Morris, with causes ranging from panther attacks, electrical fence entanglement and euthanasia due to sickness.

Though the county did not seek criminal animal cruelty charges against Ciancaglini for the deceased and malnourished horses, county attorney Steve Williams said the petition to ban horse ownership was filed to prevent further neglect.

In court on Wednesday, Williams said he doesn’t question Ciancaglini’s love for horses, but he argued she did not have the ability to care for them.

Ciancaglini has maintained that she found herself in a difficult financial situation after losing her job in March. She also cited that she broke both legs in 2007 and her house burned down in 2008.

That, she has said, made it difficult for her to provide proper care.

Ciancaglini’s lawyer, Louis Erickson, called his client “a victim of the Great Recession.”

Erickson also argued their was little reason to permanently ban his client from owning horses, when criminal charges have never been brought against her.

“I think it is absolutely unnecessary in an age where everyone is complaining about government intervention… to restrict this woman from ever owning horses again,” he said.

However, DAS Director Amanda Townsend, who has a background in animal cruelty investigation, said in court that Ciancaglini was likely an “animal hoarder,” or a person who obsessively collects more animals than they care for.

She even recommended the judge mandate psychiatric counseling for Ciancaglini to treat her tendency for collecting horses.

While Ciancaglini admitted that she ran into trouble by having too many horses and not enough resources to care for them, she said she would be capable of caring for horses once she got in better economic standing.

“My situation is purely financial,” she testified at the hearing. “I don’t think I’m an animal hoarder.”

While she said she did not plan to own horses in the near future anyway, Ciancaglini asked Judge Crown not to strip away her rights to be a horse owner in the future.

Her lawyer offered an alternative to a complete horse ban, arguing instead for a limit on the horses his client could own.

Crown neglected the compromise.

Before his ruling, Judge Crown cited testimony that Ciancaglini consistently failed to provide care for the horses she owned.

“Ms. Ciangcaglini, while I certainly hope you do not have another crisis,” he said, “I am not willing to take that risk at the expense of one more horse.”

He ruled not to require psychiatric counseling for Ciancaglini, though, saying that there was no expert testimony to compel that measure.

Townsend praised the ruling. She said it would protect future horses from neglect and save taxpayers money in the cost of monitoring Ciancaglini.

But Ciancaglini said the ruling went too far, and that the government should not be able to restrict her right to own an animal.

Outside the court room after hearing the ruling, she rhetorically asked, “Can you tell someone they can’t have a baby again?”

Connect with Aaron Hale at http://www.naplesnews.com/staff/aaron-hale.

State of the Blogosphere Survey 2010

2010-09-24T14:54:00.000-07:00

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Police horse goes bar hopping through nightclub district

2010-09-01T18:24:00.000-07:00

This is pretty funny, we take care of the Jax Sheriff's Dept mounted unit (some really great guys down there) . I would love to see some JSO horses cruisin' thru some of the night spots. What a hoot.
"A horse walks into a bar, across the room, up the back wall, across the ceiling, down the front wall and then up to the bar. The bartender gives the horse a beer, he drinks it and leaves. A guy sitting at the bar looks perplexed and asks the bartender "Hey, what's that all about?" The bartender replies, "Don't take it personally, he never says 'Hi' to anyone."

Police horse goes bar hopping through nightclub district

Mystery Seal deaths

2010-08-18T18:46:00.000-07:00

Very interesting image of a seal recently killed off Great Britain in The UK Sun. It appears that there is a continuous circular laceration that corkscrews from the head to the tail. They seem to have eliminated a lot of potential causes such as propellers and sharks. the continuous nature of the wound makes you think that they rotated through the blade much like an impeller in a turbine.
Sad , but an interesting puzzle.

Universal News And Sport
Science sleuths have been hunting for the 'murder weapon' since the first seals started dying last year, but they are still clueless? Now they are appealing to Sun readers to see if you can solve the mystery?
Horrified scientists have found around 60 carcasses so far? Most of the seals were spotted off the Norfolk coast, but ten more have been discovered at St Andrew's on the east coast of Scotland?
The cut goes all the way around the seals' bodies from head to stomach like a CORKSCREW ?
Professors have so far eliminated sharks, tidal power generators and ordinary boat propellers from the list of suspects - but they have no idea what else could have caused the injuries?
The search is now on for a mystery vessel that could have inflicted the mechanical wounds?
Top mammal scientist Callan Duck told The Sun: "It's a very clean cut - it looks like one single cut? If you're cutting a loaf of bread, there's a sawing action and you leave jagged edges, but there are none of those, so it looks like one continuous movement?
"The skin has been ripped clean off the seals' jaws? It would take hours to do that with a scalpel yourself?" The clever animals have learnt to avoid swimming too close to ships, leaving Mr Duck's team puzzled that they seem to have swum into the blade HEAD FIRST ?
He added: "Seals are pretty savvy creatures and they won't approach an obvious threat, but very suddenly they're being dragged head first into a rotating blade?"
The Scottish killings have already hit ten per cent of the breeding population of se als - and scientists are worried that the species could soon be wiped out entirely?
The seal team at St Andrew's University has already asked the RSPCA, the National Trust and even the Scottish Government to solve the mystery - with no luck?
The baffled experts are now hoping Sun readers can piece together the puzzle for them?
Mr Duck said: "It's a good mystery? We do believe it's solvable? Once we find out where, we can move on to why and what?
"We'd like to encourage members of the public to call in and make suggestions?"
Experts are also keen for any snaps of the dead seals? Mr Duck added: "They can be smelly but please take a picture?"

Muslim suicide bombers go on strike

2010-05-22T15:52:00.000-07:00

Very funny...leave it to the Brits to finally hit a home run in the Muslim humor department.

Suicide bombers go on strike due to shortage of virgins

Could a Mini Horse Be Bred Small Enough to Fit in Your Palm?

2010-05-03T20:32:00.001-07:00

Could a Mini Horse Be Bred Small Enough to Fit in Your Palm?

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1889 Pandemic-from wired.com

2010-04-26T19:49:00.001-07:00

1889 Pandemic Didn’t Need Planes to Circle Globe in 4 Months

By Alexis Madrigal
April 26, 2010 |
6:25 pm |
Categories: Medicine

The 1889 Russian flu pandemic circled the globe in just four months, captivating the world, despite the lack of airplanes or hyperventilating cable news stations.

If that was possible, closing down air traffic in the event of a new pandemic might not do much, argue the authors led by Alain-Jacques Valleron, an epidemiologist at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale in Paris.

“The rapid progression of the 1889 pandemic demonstrates that slower surface travel, even with much smaller traveler flows, sufficed to spread the pandemic across all of Europe and the United States in ~4 months,” the researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on April 26. “This observation supports mathematical model results, which anticipated that restricting air transportation would have little, if any, effect. One possible hypothesis is that the important predictor of the speed of the pandemic is not the absolute numbers of passengers traveling between cities but the connectedness of the network of cities.”

The data on the disease were assembled for the first time from local records in 172 European and American cities. The Russian flu is particularly interesting because it was the first major epidemic to strike Europe after the laying down of dense railroad connections. In 1889, there were already more than 125,000 miles of rail lines connecting European cities. (That’s more mileage than exists today, the authors note).

The outbreak began in the spring of 1889. It peaked first in St. Petersburg, Russia, in December of that year. By then, it had spread all across Europe and North America and was front-page news in many places across the country. In papers like The Evening Bulletin in Maysville, Kentucky, the flu hit the front page in the days after Christmas. The paper printed dispatches from cities across the world. “It is safe to say that over one-tenth of the population is affected by it,” a Boston reporter wrote. Meanwhile, doctors in Pittsburgh “expected[ed] ‘la grippe’ to reach here in all its violence before another month has passed.”

Reports of royalty afflicted with influenza popped up in papers interspersed with bits of other news. The Salt Lake City Herald reported that the czar of Russia was “making favorable progress toward recovery from influenza.”

While popular culture was receiving its information through the papers and informal information networks, the new study shows that more detailed records exist that make detailed, quantitative epidemiology for 19th-century disease outbreaks possible. Local authorities in Germany were already conducting massive surveys of 16,000 physicians, of whom 21 percent actually responded.

Tracking the medical response to the outbreak is much harder. At the time, many different ideas for what caused the disease were floated, according to historian F.B. Smith.

“In keeping with traditional speculations about epidemics, some doctors invoked earthquakes and volcanic eruptions as material energizers, concentrators, and disseminators, but in mechanistic terms, not as mere erratic signs of Providential displeasure,” Smith wrote in a 1995 essay on the Russian flu. “Earthquakes had been reported in almost every month of 1889, in such disparate locations as the Isle of Wight and Portsmouth, Manchester, Sicily, Greece, Japan, Samoa, Alabama, and elsewhere round the world.”

One editorial in The Lancet argued that disease could travel around the world as easily as the dust from Krakatoa, which had exploded in 1883 and delivered brilliant sunsets in Europe.

“Why should not this troublesome complaint have been produced by injurious emanations from the earth? Mild at first . . . [influenza] gets worse as it goes on, apparently gathering up other morbific elements on its way,” he wrote. “There is no more difficulty in admitting an atmospheric pollution traveling across the Atlantic to New York than that the red sunsets . . . round the world were lately caused by the dust of a Java volcano.”

Other theories held that electrical and magnetic phenomenon were “likely agents,” Smith wrote, largely because some earlier epidemics had coincided with spectacular northern lights displays. It was hypothesized that electrical currents in the air could produce ozone, which intensified the illness.

In the end, what doctors did may not have mattered much. The French researchers found that the mortality of the 1889 pandemic was about the same as the flu outbreaks of 1947, 1957, 1968, and 1977-1978, and (so far) 2009-2010. Transportation, information and medical networks may have changed, but the virulence of the flu — with the huge exception of the 1918 pandemic — appears to have stayed roughly the same.

New Alzheimer's Vaccine

2010-04-24T05:10:00.000-07:00

New Alzheimer vaccine to be tested in Europe

Fri Apr 23, 10:39 am ET

VIENNA (AFP) – A new vaccine against Alzheimer's, developed by the Austrian biotechnology firm Affiris, will soon be tested in six European countries, the company announced Friday.

Some 420 patients will be recruited to take part in clinical trials in Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Germany and Slovakia, Affiris said in a statement.

The AD02 vaccine, developed with British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, was already tested for safety and tolerability over the past year.

The clinical trials will now test its efficacy, with results expected as early as 2012, the company said.

ADO2 is meant to prevent the building up of beta-amyloid plaques in the brain, which cause the degradation of nerve cells and are believed to play a crucial role in causing Alzheimer's disease.

The vaccine works by causing the body to attack these plaques by producing more antibodies, Till Jelitto, a spokesman for Affiris, told AFP.

More specifically, these antibodies are meant to attack only the part of the beta-amyloid protein that causes the plaques, he added.

This would reduce the risk for patients, as the protein as a whole already exists in healthy individuals.

The current vaccine is therapeutic, meaning it is aimed at treating patients already affected by the disease. But if results are positive, the technology could also be used to manufacture a prophylactic, or preventative, vaccine, Jelitto said.

In 2001, tests for a first vaccine against Alzheimer's disease were conducted in the United States and Europe but had to be cut short after serious side effects emerged.

Another vaccine was tested in Sweden in 2005.

Alzheimer's disease, also known as AD, is a neuro-degenerative disease that affects cognitive functions, further impacting patients' behaviour and social adaptation.

The disease, which still has no known cure, affects about six million people in Europe every year.

Affiris is also working on vaccines against Parkinson's and atherosclerosis.

Revellers Article

2010-02-08T20:40:00.000-08:00

Jacksonville man having a ball planning Ye Mystic Revellers party

Riverside's Alan Weldon is captain of annual elaborate event for Ye Mystic Revellers

By Mary Maraghy
Story updated at 2:00 PM on Friday, Jan. 29, 2010

Photos

Ye Mystic Revellers

In 1923, George Hardee, a New Orleans native who moved to Jacksonville, convinced the chamber of commerce to start a Mardis Gras-style celebration called the April Follies. The slogan was "Be Yourself." Thousands crowded downtown for the longest parade in history. Hardee was a charter member of the Jesters, a club limited to 53 members, representing a deck of cards. The group was later renamed Ye Mystic Revellers. The April Follies were abandoned, but the Revellers continued and expanded its membership. It continues its storied tradition today.

Source: Ye Mystic Revellers

Alan Weldon of Riverside is planning what he hopes to be the Mardis Gras-style party of the century.

The veterinarian and father of four teenagers is a member of Ye Mystic Revellers, an 87-year-old, invitation-only men's social club founded in Ortega and known for its elaborate parties with lots of booze and debauchery. Most of the members are from the Ortega and Riverside areas, officials said.

"It's very irreverent. We make fun of politicians. Skits with guys in spandex or dresses," Weldon said. "Goofy and baudy. It's bizarre."

One year, someone brought in a bull that got loose and was circling the hall.

Cleaning up the day after is similar to the movie "The Hangover," Weldon said, laughing.

This year, Weldon is captain of the annual Revellers Ball, a black-tie affair slated for 7 to midnight Friday at the Jacksonville Fairgrounds.

As is the case every year, a queen and her court will be ordained, and there will be live comedy performances by Revellers trying to out-funny the skits of years past.

Weldon and his family have spent months developing this year's theme: Mission Impossible. In sort of a mystery theater style, a fictional group - the Society Opposed to Booze and Especially Revellers, or SOBER - will kidnap the queen in an effort to destroy the ball and the Revellers.

Weldon has already filmed the beginning video segment, in which Sister Chastity Teatotaller, SOBER leader, wearing a Sunday dress, hat and gloves, announces her evil plan to the audience.

In the end, Weldon's children, nieces and nephews, playing Scooby Doo's gang, show up to save the day.

Weldon chuckled while watching the video on his laptop.

"He loves this stuff," said Weldon's wife, Beth, whose parents, grandparents and siblings have all been Revellers. "This is his creative outlet for the year. Once you get out of school, you don't have many opportunities to get creative, do dramas and stuff like this."

In decades past, city officials and other dignitaries were Revellers, Beth Weldon said. But because the group is not a charitable cause, it fell out of favor, she said.

The ball is for adults only, but, Beth Weldon said, as a kid she was able to scoop up all the elaborate costumes that were tossed away after the ball. Decades ago, the Revellers spent more than $100,000 on parties. Today, the budget is about $35,000. Revellers pay $275 a year to belong to the club. Some fundraisers throughout the year help fill the till.

As captain, Weldon is also keeper of the massive scrapbooks of Revellers past and he's had fun reading through them. He was tickled when he found an onion skin-thin document from a laboratory showing a chemical evaluation of some moonshine.

Over the years, the ball has been held at armories, the Jacksonville Coliseum and the Prime Osborn Convention Center. For more than a decade, it was held at the Morocco Shrine Auditorium on the Southside, but the rent jumped $4,000 this year, so Weldon is moving the event to a 28,000-square-foot space at the fairgrounds.

"How do you decorate 28,000 square feet?" Weldon said, smacking his forehead.

So far, he's planning to have drapes and icicle lights surround the space.

He's hired Big Swing and the Ballroom Blasters, a 13-piece band from South Carolina promising to play a three-hour non-stop set.

So far, it's looking good. A writer from Mardis Gras Digest might be there, Weldon said.

Serving as captain is a one-time-only gig and there's no prize for the best ball, Weldon said.

"But there's bragging rights," he said.

For more information, visit www.yerevellers.com.

Thorium reactors? Fascinating.

2010-01-02T19:11:00.000-08:00

The full text of this article is posted at wire.com. It's well worth the read.

Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke

* By Richard Martin Email Author
* December 21, 2009 |
* 10:00 am |
* Wired Jan 2010

Photo: Thomas Hannich

Photo: Thomas Hannich

The thick hardbound volume was sitting on a shelf in a colleague’s office when Kirk Sorensen spotted it. A rookie NASA engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Sorensen was researching nuclear-powered propulsion, and the book’s title — Fluid Fuel Reactors — jumped out at him. He picked it up and thumbed through it. Hours later, he was still reading, enchanted by the ideas but struggling with the arcane writing. “I took it home that night, but I didn’t understand all the nuclear terminology,” Sorensen says. He pored over it in the coming months, ultimately deciding that he held in his hands the key to the world’s energy future.

Published in 1958 under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission as part of its Atoms for Peace program, Fluid Fuel Reactors is a book only an engineer could love: a dense, 978-page account of research conducted at Oak Ridge National Lab, most of it under former director Alvin Weinberg. What caught Sorensen’s eye was the description of Weinberg’s experiments producing nuclear power with an element called thorium.

At the time, in 2000, Sorensen was just 25, engaged to be married and thrilled to be employed at his first serious job as a real aerospace engineer. A devout Mormon with a linebacker’s build and a marine’s crew cut, Sorensen made an unlikely iconoclast. But the book inspired him to pursue an intense study of nuclear energy over the next few years, during which he became convinced that thorium could solve the nuclear power industry’s most intractable problems. After it has been used as fuel for power plants, the element leaves behind minuscule amounts of waste. And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts. Because it’s so plentiful in nature, it’s virtually inexhaustible. It’s also one of only a few substances that acts as a thermal breeder, in theory creating enough new fuel as it breaks down to sustain a high-temperature chain reaction indefinitely. And it would be virtually impossible for the byproducts of a thorium reactor to be used by terrorists or anyone else to make nuclear weapons.

Weinberg and his men proved the efficacy of thorium reactors in hundreds of tests at Oak Ridge from the ’50s through the early ’70s. But thorium hit a dead end. Locked in a struggle with a nuclear- armed Soviet Union, the US government in the ’60s chose to build uranium-fueled reactors — in part because they produce plutonium that can be refined into weapons-grade material. The course of the nuclear industry was set for the next four decades, and thorium power became one of the great what-if technologies of the 20th century.

Today, however, Sorensen spearheads a cadre of outsiders dedicated to sparking a thorium revival. When he’s not at his day job as an aerospace engineer at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama — or wrapping up the master’s in nuclear engineering he is soon to earn from the University of Tennessee — he runs a popular blog called Energy From Thorium. A community of engineers, amateur nuclear power geeks, and researchers has gathered around the site’s forum, ardently discussing the future of thorium. The site even links to PDFs of the Oak Ridge archives, which Sorensen helped get scanned. Energy From Thorium has become a sort of open source project aimed at resurrecting long-lost energy technology using modern techniques.

And the online upstarts aren’t alone. Industry players are looking into thorium, and governments from Dubai to Beijing are funding research. India is betting heavily on the element.

The concept of nuclear power without waste or proliferation has obvious political appeal in the US, as well. The threat of climate change has created an urgent demand for carbon-free electricity, and the 52,000 tons of spent, toxic material that has piled up around the country makes traditional nuclear power less attractive. President Obama and his energy secretary, Steven Chu, have expressed general support for a nuclear renaissance. Utilities are investigating several next-gen alternatives, including scaled-down conventional plants and “pebble bed” reactors, in which the nuclear fuel is inserted into small graphite balls in a way that reduces the risk of meltdown.

Those technologies are still based on uranium, however, and will be beset by the same problems that have dogged the nuclear industry since the 1960s. It is only thorium, Sorensen and his band of revolutionaries argue, that can move the country toward a new era of safe, clean, affordable energy.

Named for the Norse god of thunder, thorium is a lustrous silvery-white metal. It’s only slightly radioactive; you could carry a lump of it in your pocket without harm. On the periodic table of elements, it’s found in the bottom row, along with other dense, radioactive substances — including uranium and plutonium — known as actinides.

Actinides are dense because their nuclei contain large numbers of neutrons and protons. But it’s the strange behavior of those nuclei that has long made actinides the stuff of wonder. At intervals that can vary from every millisecond to every hundred thousand years, actinides spin off particles and decay into more stable elements. And if you pack together enough of certain actinide atoms, their nuclei will erupt in a powerful release of energy.

To understand the magic and terror of those two processes working in concert, think of a game of pool played in 3-D. The nucleus of the atom is a group of balls, or particles, racked at the center. Shoot the cue ball — a stray neutron — and the cluster breaks apart, or fissions. Now imagine the same game played with trillions of racked nuclei. Balls propelled by the first collision crash into nearby clusters, which fly apart, their stray neutrons colliding with yet more clusters. Voilè0: a nuclear chain reaction.

Actinides are the only materials that split apart this way, and if the collisions are uncontrolled, you unleash hell: a nuclear explosion. But if you can control the conditions in which these reactions happen — by both controlling the number of stray neutrons and regulating the temperature, as is done in the core of a nuclear reactor — you get useful energy. Racks of these nuclei crash together, creating a hot glowing pile of radioactive material. If you pump water past the material, the water turns to steam, which can spin a turbine to make electricity.

Uranium is currently the actinide of choice for the industry, used (sometimes with a little plutonium) in 100 percent of the world’s commercial reactors. But it’s a problematic fuel. In most reactors, sustaining a chain reaction requires extremely rare uranium-235, which must be purified, or enriched, from far more common U-238. The reactors also leave behind plutonium-239, itself radioactive (and useful to technologically sophisticated organizations bent on making bombs). And conventional uranium-fueled reactors require lots of engineering, including neutron-absorbing control rods to damp the reaction and gargantuan pressurized vessels to move water through the reactor core. If something goes kerflooey, the surrounding countryside gets blanketed with radioactivity (think Chernobyl). Even if things go well, toxic waste is left over.

When he took over as head of Oak Ridge in 1955, Alvin Weinberg realized that thorium by itself could start to solve these problems. It’s abundant — the US has at least 175,000 tons of the stuff — and doesn’t require costly processing. It is also extraordinarily efficient as a nuclear fuel. As it decays in a reactor core, its byproducts produce more neutrons per collision than conventional fuel. The more neutrons per collision, the more energy generated, the less total fuel consumed, and the less radioactive nastiness left behind.

Even better, Weinberg realized that you could use thorium in an entirely new kind of reactor, one that would have zero risk of meltdown. The design is based on the lab’s finding that thorium dissolves in hot liquid fluoride salts. This fission soup is poured into tubes in the core of the reactor, where the nuclear chain reaction — the billiard balls colliding — happens. The system makes the reactor self-regulating: When the soup gets too hot it expands and flows out of the tubes — slowing fission and eliminating the possibility of another Chernobyl. Any actinide can work in this method, but thorium is particularly well suited because it is so efficient at the high temperatures at which fission occurs in the soup.

In 1965, Weinberg and his team built a working reactor, one that suspended the byproducts of thorium in a molten salt bath, and he spent the rest of his 18-year tenure trying to make thorium the heart of the nation’s atomic power effort. He failed. Uranium reactors had already been established, and Hyman Rickover, de facto head of the US nuclear program, wanted the plutonium from uranium-powered nuclear plants to make bombs. Increasingly shunted aside, Weinberg was finally forced out in 1973.

That proved to be “the most pivotal year in energy history,” according to the US Energy Information Administration. It was the year the Arab states cut off oil supplies to the West, setting in motion the petroleum-fueled conflicts that roil the world to this day. The same year, the US nuclear industry signed contracts to build a record 41 nuke plants, all of which used uranium. And 1973 was the year that thorium R&D faded away — and with it the realistic prospect for a golden nuclear age when electricity would be too cheap to meter and clean, safe nuclear plants would dot the green countryside.

The Weldon Christmas letter 2009

2009-12-20T20:21:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! It’s time to get out a magnifying glass and feel good about your life. We are blessed as always but there have definitely been some speed bumps in the road of life this year. Alan's dad's appendix ruptured and he had emergency surgery. His mom's breast cancer recurred and she is undergoing Chemo therapy now as is Robert's wife Elizabeth who was also diagnosed with breast cancer. Mac hit his head playing football(not the real thing but the fooling around after lunch kind) and had an MRI which was fine but his nose continued to bleed daily until he had it cauterized and then it still bled daily for another week or so. Polly and Mac probably had Swine Flu, (Alan thinks this is because their rooms are pig sties). My sister-in-law Pam has a mass on one of her heart vessels and Alan has now forbidden me or the kids to see any doctor for any reason until 2010 (since I'm overdue for both a colonoscopy and a mammogram I am very happy to wait)! We went to Cumberland, took a cruise in March, went to Canada for a veterinary meeting in May, took a vet school cruise in June, stayed at the beach and the mountains this summer, took Sarah to Wash U and visited Providence and the CGA with Murph, went back to Wash U for parents weekend, and did Halloween Horror nights at Universal. Alan lost 2 associates this year and has hired another part-time so he is crazy busy. He is Captain of Revellers(Jacksonville's only remaining Marde Gras krewe) this year which means he has to write, direct, and produce an off-off Broadway type theatre production ending with the presenting of the court (Sarah is his Queen but that's another whole story), a dance with a big time show band, and open bars! He has to hire the place, arrange decorations, tables, chairs, table cloths, the bars and booze, hire security and everything else I can't even remember. He has arm twisted every friend and relative either of us has to join so they could vote for Sarah. I feel like I'm married to an Amway salesman! He says it is the funniest thing he has ever done. He is excited and VERY STRESSED pegging it as a “number 9 pucker factor”. He is still playing great tennis, doing yoga sporadically, and hitting the gym in spurts. He loves his Thursday morning men’s Bible study (how anyone can enjoy anything at 6 AM is beyond me).He does ultrasounds for the zoo and went to Disneyworld to evaluate some critters for cardiac problems (we were “On Show” with a large crowd watching which made Alan happy until he saw the glare from his head on the monitor). He has interns train with him occasionally and enjoys life. I work at Merrill Animal Clinic 3 days a week and Parkway 1 day monthly. I love my job and that's a real blessing! As I tell my kids, I feel there are 3 critical choices you make in life: your faith, your spouse/partner/family (someone to share life with), and your profession (and by that I mean what you are passionate about and what makes you feel fulfilled and useful in life). Most people are lucky and happy if they have 2 out of 3. I have been blessed with all 3! I am consistent with my exercise and spend 30 minutes 5 days a week on the elliptical, yoga 3 times weekly, and play doubles tennis once weekly on Monday nights with Alan and many of the rest of my family. My biggest challenges this year entail preparing my various children to leave the nest. Sarah is a serious rule follower and I did not want her to go off without ever having a drink. I told her she needed to have a few drinks while still at home. She went to school and told all of her friends that her mom wanted her to get drunk and told me that she refused to break the law. We went on a cruise for spring break and while we were in Mexico we went to lunch with all of the kids and we ordered Sarah a frozen pina colada and a margarita with lunch because she was 18 and it was legal! She had her 2 drinks, did not fall apart and I was satisfied. I realized after prom that Sarah was not ready socially for college and took it upon myself to decree that she had to have 10 dates before she left for school. She had a blind date to Revellers the year before and her prom date thanks to mom so she needed 8 more. She set up her usual squawk but I told her I would pay $10,000 of her student loans if she would go happily and make sure that both she and her dates had some fun in the process. She immediately told her friends that I was paying her $1,000 a date for 10 dates! Now that she had agreed, I had to find 8 more dates. I hit up my friends with sons the right age and most said "here's his number. Good Luck!" I called each guy and said "I'm a friend of your parents and my daughter is headed off to college and I think she needs some dates before she goes. Would you be willing to take her out?" Each of them paused and then either agreed outright or asked a few questions and then agreed. I was so grateful and impressed that these young men were willing to help a relative stranger even though it put them in an awkward situation. None of them would even let me pay for the dates! They made me feel good about young men today. I am still working on the last 4(any takers 18-20 please let me know) but even Sarah has grudgingly admitted that it was something she needed and she had had fun with each of them! Sarah’s tuition is a bit of a stretch for us so she had to take out a loan for$10,000 each year that she will pay back (except for the 10 I am paying in date bribe money). To help her pay her loans, I decided to breed 2 of our Italian Greyhounds and apply the puppy money to her student loans. Kiwi is an experienced, great mom but I was worried about Netty so when they came into heat together I figured that we could breed them both and if Netty was a bad mom, then Kiwi would be happy to raise her pups and Netty's too. Both got pregnant and were due 4 days apart. 3 days before Netty was due she was out in the yard and I was doing laundry when I looked out of the window and saw Momo had gotten out of the yard. I went searching and found a huge hole and no Netty! I sent the kids out into the neighborhood and scoured the yard and started making flyers and signing in to lost dog websites. After no luck, I told Murphy to go fill in the hole and we had dinner and went to bed with no Netty. The next morning bright and early I went to all of the nearby vets and put up signs and went to Animal control and searched the runs and the "Dead Dog Log" with no luck. When I got home Patty was still there cleaning and asked how many dogs were in the yard. It was summer so all kids were still in bed and only Munchie was out and I told Patty this. She told me that she had seen 2 grey dogs in the back yard. We went out and looked thoroughly with no results again. I went out front to see if she had gone in and out of the hole that Murphy had NOT filled in. Patty called and I returned and Netty was emerging from the hole! Unfortunately, she was no longer pregnant. I told Patty I couldn't stand to see any puppy carnage and she offered to look. We got a flashlight and the hole was so long she couldn't see all of the way in but said she could hear puppies! I ran and hauled Mac out of bed since he was the skinniest and shoved him in the hole. He wiggled in so that only his knees were showing and yelled back that the hole/den took a turn to the left and the pups were at the end of it but his arms weren't long enough to reach them. Patty and I pulled Mac back out and now the hole was big enough for Patty to wriggle in (she's nice and thin) and she could just reach the pups. Badger, Meerkat, Moley, and Mako (it was shark week and Polly insisted) were all fine despite being born underground with an inexperienced mom. I have never been so thankful that Murphy is not always diligent in his assignments! I could not believe that Netty had dug a den 4 feet out and 3 feet to the left in an "L" shape and delivered her pups and stayed outside all night with no food or water! Turns out she's a pretty good mom too! Sarah is a sweet, considerate person who is somewhat shy but bold at the same time. She throws herself fully into things that she is passionate about and wears her emotions on her sleeve for all to see. In some ways she is very confident and worldly and in others perhaps too sheltered. She rowed crew last spring and started to row at Wash. U.until she got a cold and started hacking and the coach suggested she take a few days off and the few days became 6 weeks! I think that she is finally getting back on track. Sarah loves Washington University and although I was a little anxious about her going I was also excited about taking her up and settling her in. We arrived in St.Louis late, got up early the next morning, settled Sarah in her room, unpacked, had lunch, and made the mandatory trips to Target and Bed, Bath, and Beyond. At 4:00 we were to leave Sarah for a dorm meeting and pick up pizza to have with Cate, Carlos and the kids before returning at 7 for the Chancellors talk. At 4:15 Alan was still puttering around Sarah's room trying to get her printer set up. I had to physically grab his arm and drag him out of the dorm. As soon as we got outside, Alan said "I need a drink, I feel like I've been punched in the stomach!" He looked a little peakish but I thought he was kidding. We went to the nearest pizza parlor and ordered the pizza and I pointed out that they had beer. Alan informed me that beer would NOT do. The pizza man pointed to the bar next door and told us the pizza would be ready in 20 minutes. We walked next door and Alan ordered a double Bourbon and told me he hadn't felt this bad since he found out that his dad had cancer! I was so busy worrying about my own concerns that I hadn't even noticed Alan's misery! I tried to explain that it was familiar to me because it reminded me of my own college experience to which Alan muttered " Yeah, me too, I'm paying for college all over again,only it’s a lot more expensive this time around and I don't even get to attend” . Dani is at Florida and has enough AP and IB credits that she is already a sophomore. She is studying and doing well with her grades but still works too many hours. She is learning how to budget and what is important in life and that sometimes she has to do unpleasant things because I feel they need to be done even if she doesn’t (like talking person to person to a Teaching Assistant before dropping a class, etc).She is a wonderful young lady who is maturing nicely and making good decisions. Alan had Dani helping at the Revellers fall party and she was wearing Cat ears and a snug black top and jeans in keeping with the cat woman theme. She did a great job and her tip jar was full at evenings end. Polly and Katie were at the sushi bar and their tip jar was not as full (somehow the Kimonos were not as tip inspiring). When Polly and Dani were on their way home, they decided to stop at the Gate station for gas, a soda, and a snack. When they got back in the car, Polly was snickering and Dani wanted to know why. Polly informed Dani that she had forgotten to take her ears off and had paid with a fist full of ones and the guy behind the counter thought that she was a "dancer" and was pointing her out to the other attendant! Murphy is a great young man. He is kind, considerate, fun, bright, entertaining and has no ambitions or passions (at least that he will share with me.) I worry about him being able to self-motivate next year at college. He was Captain of the Boys JV Tennis team this year (which I didn't know until the tennis banquet where the Girls JV captain’s mother told me!). I was watching one of the his matches against a much weaker opponent and when it ended the boys started talking and instead of coming off of the court, Murphy started helping the other young man with his serve and coaching him! The people sitting next to me asked me if I knew who that boy was who was so nice that he was helping their grandson who had not been playing tennis for very long. I was very proud. Murph is a senior and as far as I can tell the only reason he has applied to any colleges is because on 2 occasions when he wanted to go out with friends I required that he finish at least 2 applications before he could go. Those are 4 of the 5 schools to which he has applied. FSU, UCF, UNF, USF, and my personal favorite the Coast Guard Academy. When I mentioned the CGA to Murph he waved me off as usual and I thought that was the end of it. The next day he came home from school and told me "I've been thinking about it mom (another surprise) and maybe the CGA would be good for me. I don't know what I want to do and they will tell me what to do. I will have a guaranteed job when I get out of college and 85% of the Coast Guard re-up after their 5 year commitment so they must like it." Unfortunately the freezing rain and snow when we visited the school in Connecticut was not encouraging (Murph hates the cold) and I think the CGA is in his #2 spot right now (which may be good because he's a long shot to get in). Murph is a techno kid and doesn't go anywhere without his cell phone (kind of like Dani and her lip gloss which she tells me is now chapstick). The only way I can get him to do his chores promptly is to take his phone and threaten to read all of his text messages until said chores are done! Turns out he's a pretty good worker under the right circumstances. Alan was sitting at his desk the other day when he received a text from Murph "Dad stuck on the toilet please bring toilet paper!"No more yelling at the top, of your lungs praying that someone would be within hearing range and not extract too heavy a deal for the needed rescue! These kids don't know how easy they have it! Polly runs cross country, plays soccer, fosters any injured or orphaned animals that get dropped on our doorsteps, and works Saturdays at Parkway. She is a pleasant kid with a really quirky but superb sense of humor (I know exactly where that gene came from!). To celebrate getting out of school last spring we all went out to dinner. Mac had just found out that he was taking Chinese the next year and was bragging about how much Chinese he already knew from Catherine (who speaks fluent Chinese). Polly was annoyed by his bravado and blurted out "Then how do you say ‘I like to eat dogs’ in Chinese" loudly enough to make the patrons at the nearest tables in our Chinese restaurant turn around and stare! Another example of her humor happened 2 weeks ago on a Sunday. I woke up to find Alan in a foul mood and when I asked him why, he told me that he had had a bad dream (I'm still trying to figure out why it wasn’t a nightmare) that I was cheating on him with a fat construction worker who lived in Callahan. I laughed until I realized that he was really annoyed. "But I didn't do anything!" I complained. To which he replied "I saw you!" He then proceeded to describe how he had tracked us to a hotel and gotten video that he was going to put on You-Tube and send to all of my friends and family (probably the same ones he made join Reveller’s this year) with a "must watch really funny" tag on it and he was even going to send it to our minister. By now all of the kids were in on it and putting in their 2 cents worth. At the mention of our minister Polly piped up "Yeah, you could put a notice in the urgent prayer request part of the church bulletin saying" please pray for Alan Weldon whose wife is a cheating whore!" Then they all discussed whether or not the church bulletin people would notice it and print it or not. I'm still trying to figure out how Alan had the dream and I took the heat! Polly’s poodle Fou escaped (again) 3 weeks ago and poor Polly cries herself to sleep every night. He usually turns up in the first several days but I feel certain someone has adopted him and is keeping him confined. Pray that he turns up. Polly (still) wants to be a veterinarian and I think that's a great fit for her. Mac is even more different than the rest of the crew. He has his father's confidence perhaps to a flaw. He wrestles, plays football, and hopes to make the tennis team this year. His grades are great when he applies himself but that is a bit iffy. He is wrestling Varsity and he is only in the 8th grade but he's the best 1 small enough to wrestle the 103 weight class. He got 3rd place in the Varsity tournament this weekend and got a medal so he was very pleased. Mac joined the church this year and dad was his mentor. Robert shot some video of the new members for the presentation in church and he asked each new member their favorite flavor of ice cream. Mac immediately replied "Neapolitan because you get the 3 best flavors just like the Holy Trinity". Here is Alan’s Mac story he insisted on including in his words (minus the stuff I thought absolutely had to be edited). “After the Margarita lunch episode in Mexico, the three girls went back to the ship because Beth wanted to go shopping and I needed to find a special bottle of Tequila for my buddy Eric Peterson. Mac decided it would be more fun to go with me (and Beth thought Mac would make sure I was on good behavior Ha!), so we started down the crowded back streets of the tequila trail. We went from shop to store looking for the particular bottle but weren’t having any luck. Unfortunately, when you go into these Tequilerias it is customary to sample all the tequilas via paper shot glasses and of course I followed custom (when in Rome and all of that). I had shot after shot of some of the most God-awful liquids you could imagine as I searched for the Holy Grail of Tequila. Needless to say I was getting progressively hammered at this point and a little bit vocal (not Alan!). As we continued on our trek I began to tell each shop keeper explicitly what I thought of their Tequila. Mac now interjects that he thinks Tequila makes me mean and incoherent and Beth interjects at least I wasn’t driving anywhere. My lower lip is numb and I think I might be having a stroke as I keep rubbing it with the back of my hand and drool keeps rolling out. The sweaty Mexican woman behind the counter says “try deez juan senior, it’s berry smooth” 3 other guys step up to try it as well. At least I think it was 3 but can’t be sure because I didn’t cover one eye to see if it was double vision or not. It was absolutely ghastly, kind of a cross between diesel fuel and a lime someone wiped their@$$ with. Mac flattens himself to the back wall as I spit spray it across the counter….”OMG..WTF..I’m positive the back of my throat now has a gaping hole in it that you can see through” and there’s a high pitched whine in my ears. The 3 other gringos start swearing at her. She starts sweating some more. An old woman comes out of the back with a bottle of “aged” tequila. (Note- you know it’s good when it is aged in months) I’m starting to have the shakes and I can’t even feel the fluid in my mouth anymore as it dribbles down my chin. The whine won’t go away. As we/ I stagger down the street Mac convinces me to loan him $20 to buy a knife. We are now moving down the center of what was once a crowded street as everyone now has moved to the sidewalks to let us pass. The whine in my ears is replaced by the rhythmic click…snap….click…snap… of Mac repeatedly opening and closing the 6” switch blade he just bought. Miraculously, coming down the street towards us out of the sun was Beth…it was like a scene from a Clint Eastwood western (am I Clint or the bad guy?). I’m beginning to think I’m actually saved and will make it back to the ship before it sails. We tack into the last store and a large woman with a mustache said “how much do ju want to speend, deez juan is mucho expensivico”. I said “what”. Mac translated “it costs a lot of money”. I’m not sure I can actually get it up to my lips at this point and the burning in my throat has now migrated southward, a harbinger of something truly horrible to come. Everyone is staring at me as rivulets of sweat pour off my bald head “are ju OK senior?”, I have an intense sense of warmth rush over my body …and bright lights are popping in my peripheral vision. “Wow…That’s a really good tequila” I said. Mac is shaking his head in disbelief (but not as much as Beth shook hers when she found out that I not only let Mac buy a switch blade but also gave him the money!) as I hand her my credit card …I bought two. While our lives may seem hectic to some, we wouldn’t have it any other way. God continues to smile on us and for that we are truly grateful. Merry Christmas all!
Alan, Beth, Sarah, Dani, Murphy, Polly & Mac (the switchblade kid)

Really weird lights in the sky

2009-12-10T13:59:00.000-08:00

I saw this reported yesterday about this bizarre light that appeared over Norway. This would absolutely freak me out.

Anyone for some Arctic roll? Mystery as spiral blue light display hovers above Norway

By Mail Foreign Service
Last updated at 12:53 AM on 10th December 2009

What's blue and white, squiggly and suddenly appears in the sky?

If you know the answer, pop it on a postcard and send it to the people of Norway, where this mysterious light display baffled residents yesterday.

Curiously, it appears to be unconnected with the aurora borealis, or northern lights, the natural magnetic phenomena that can often be viewed in that part of the world.

Strange spiral: Residents in northern Norway were left stunned after the lightshow, which almost looked computer-generated, appeared in the skies above them

Curious: A blue-green beam of light was reported to have come shooting out the centre of the spiral

The mystery began when a blue light seemed to soar up from behind a mountain in the north of the country. It stopped mid-air, then began to move in circles. Within seconds a giant spiral had covered the entire sky. Then a green-blue beam of light shot out from its centre - lasting for ten to 12 minutes before disappearing completely.

Onlookers describing it as 'like a big fireball that went around, with a great light around it' and 'a shooting star that spun around and around'.

The Norwegian Meteorological Institute was flooded with telephone calls after the light storm.

Confusion: The Norwegian Meteorological Institute was flooded with calls after the light storm

Totto Eriksen, from Tromsø, told VG Nett: 'It spun and exploded in the sky,'

He spotted the lights as he walked his daughter Amalie to school.

He said: 'We saw it from the Inner Harbor in Tromsø. It was absolutely fantastic.

'It almost looked like a rocket that spun around and around and then went diagonally down the heavens.

'It looked like the moon was coming over the mountain, but then came something completely different.'

Celebrity astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard said he had never seen anything like the lights.

He said: 'My first thought was that it was a fireball meteor, but it has lasted far too long.

'It may have been a missile in Russia, but I can not guarantee that it is the answer.'

What could it be? Astronomers say the spectacle did not appear to be connected to the Northern Lights

Air traffic control in Tromsō claimed the light show lasted 'far too long to be an astronomical phenomenon'.

Norwegian defence spokesman Jon Espen Lien also said the lights were probably from a Russian missile test claiming it was normal for Russia to use the White Sea and the Barents Sea as a testing ground.

Tromsō Geophysical Observatory researcher Truls Lynne Hansen agreed, saying the missile had likely veered out of control and exploded, and the spiral was light reflecting on the leaking fuel.

But the mystery deepened last night as Russia denied it had been conducting missile tests in the area.

A Moscow news outlet quoted the Russian Navy as denying any rocket launches from the White Sea area.

Norway should be informed of such launches under international agreements, it was stressed.

The Russian Defence Ministry was unavailable for comment.

Strange Calf Mutilations in Colorado

2009-11-28T12:06:00.000-08:00

SAN LUIS, Colo. (AP) - A creepy string of calf mutilations in southern Colorado has a rancher and sheriff's officials mystified.

Four calves were found dead in a pasture just north of the New Mexico state line in recent weeks. The dead calves had their skins peeled back and organs cleared from the rib cage. One calf had its tongue removed.

But rancher Manuel Sanchez has found no signs of human attackers, such as footprints or ATV tracks. And there are no signs of an animal attack by a coyote or mountain lion. Usually predators leave pools of blood or drag marks from carrying away the livestock.

Two officers from the Costilla County Sheriff's Office have investigated the mutilations but say they don't know what's killing the calves.

"There's nothing really to go by," said Sanchez, who's ranched for nearly 50 years. "I can't figure it out."

A spokesman for the sheriff's office told The Pueblo Chieftain that investigators doubt a person butchered the calves because there is no blood at the scene.

"I've butchered a cow before and I know what kind of a mess it leaves," Sgt. James Chavez said.

Some in the area believe the mutilations are the work of aliens. An area UFO chaser, Chuck Zukowski of Colorado Springs, has been to the Costilla County pasture to investigate.

He told the paper there have been other unexplained calf mutilations in the area, including three in March. One of the other calves, found dead on a ranch near Trinidad, had its ears removed, Zukowski said.

"We're trying as much as we can to find a pattern," said Zukowski, who runs a UFO Web site called ufonut.com.

Sanchez said he has sold off his 32 remaining calves out of fear more would be mutilated. He hasn't decided how he'll manage the remaining 40 animals in his herd.

"It's a big loss for a small rancher," he said.

They Might be Giants

2009-11-28T07:35:00.000-08:00

This is the Dr Evil theme song from Austin Powers

Dr. Evil (Album Version) - John Flansburgh

Farting Pig causes scare

2009-11-27T20:03:00.000-08:00

Flatulent pig sparks gas leak scare

A suspected gas leak at an Australian farm, which led to 15 firemen in two fire engines to rush to the scene, turned out to be the work of a flatulent pig.

By Tom Chivers
Published: 11:37AM GMT 27 Nov 2009

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! Photo: Christopher Jones

The farmer in Axedale, a town in Victoria in the south-east of the country, called the emergency services after believing he had smelled gas.

But when the fire crews arrived, they found the real culprit – a 260lb sow the family's children kept as a pet.

Fire captain Peter Harkins said: "When we got there, as we drove up the driveway, there was this huge sow, about a 120-odd kilo (265-pound) sow, and it was very obvious where the gas was coming from.

“We could not only smell it, but we heard it and it was quite funny."

He added: "She got very excited when two trucks and 15 firies turned up and she squealed and farted and squealed and farted.

"I haven't heard too many pigs fart but I would describe it as very full-on."

However, despite the false alarm, Mr Harkins said the farmer had done the right thing by calling 000 (the Australian equivalent of 999). He told The Melbourne Herald Sun: "It's all bottled gas up here and a leaking cylinder could pose a major fire risk.

"It was because we took it so seriously that 15 volunteers still managed to attend the call out at 10.30 on Tuesday night."

The Pentagon Parade-great story

2009-11-27T14:25:00.000-08:00

This is a fantastic story that really needs to be told. The Pentagon Parade, from Micheal Yon's website. He is the best war correspondent of our era. Well worth your time.

By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY
McClatchy Newspapers

Over the last 12 months, 1,042 soldiers, Marines, sailors and Air Force personnel have given their lives in the terrible duty that is war. Thousands more have come home on stretchers, horribly wounded and facing months or years in military hospitals.

This week, I'm turning my space over to a good friend and former roommate, Army Lt. Col. Robert Bateman, who recently completed a yearlong tour of duty in Iraq and is now back at the Pentagon.

Here's Lt. Col. Bateman's account of a little-known ceremony that fills the halls of the Army corridor of the Pentagon with cheers, applause and many tears every Friday morning. It first appeared on May 17 on the Weblog of media critic and pundit Eric Alterman at the Media Matters for America Website.

"It is 110 yards from the "E" ring to the "A" ring of the Pentagon. This section of the Pentagon is newly renovated; the floors shine, the hallway is broad, and the lighting is bright. At this instant the entire length of the corridor is packed with officers, a few sergeants and some civilians, all crammed tightly three and four deep against the walls. There are thousands here.

This hallway, more than any other, is the `Army' hallway. The G3 offices line one side, G2 the other, G8 is around the corner. All Army. Moderate conversations flow in a low buzz. Friends who may not have seen each other for a few weeks, or a few years, spot each other, cross the way and renew.

Everyone shifts to ensure an open path remains down the center. The air conditioning system was not designed for this press of bodies in this area.

The temperature is rising already. Nobody cares. "10:36 hours: The clapping starts at the E-Ring. That is the outermost of the five rings of the Pentagon and it is closest to the entrance to the building. This clapping is low, sustained, hearty. It is applause with a deep emotion behind it as it moves forward in a wave down the length of the hallway.

"A steady rolling wave of sound it is, moving at the pace of the soldier in the wheelchair who marks the forward edge with his presence. He is the first. He is missing the greater part of one leg, and some of his wounds are still suppurating. By his age I expect that he is a private, or perhaps a private first class.

"Captains, majors, lieutenant colonels and colonels meet his gaze and nod as they applaud, soldier to soldier. Three years ago when I described one of these events, those lining the hallways were somewhat different. The applause a little wilder, perhaps in private guilt for not having shared in the burden ... yet.

"Now almost everyone lining the hallway is, like the man in the wheelchair, also a combat veteran. This steadies the applause, but I think deepens the sentiment. We have all been there now. The soldier's chair is pushed by, I believe, a full colonel.

"Behind him, and stretching the length from Rings E to A, come more of his peers, each private, corporal, or sergeant assisted as need be by a field grade officer.

"11:00 hours: Twenty-four minutes of steady applause. My hands hurt, and I laugh to myself at how stupid that sounds in my own head. My hands hurt... Please! Shut up and clap. For twenty-four minutes, soldier after soldier has come down this hallway - 20, 25, 30.... Fifty-three legs come with them, and perhaps only 52 hands or arms, but down this hall came 30 solid hearts.

They pass down this corridor of officers and applause, and then meet for a private lunch, at which they are the guests of honor, hosted by the generals. Some are wheeled along.... Some insist upon getting out of their chairs, to march as best they can with their chin held up, down this hallway, through this most unique audience. Some are catching handshakes and smiling like a politician at a Fourth of July parade. More than a couple of them seem amazed and are smiling shyly.

"There are families with them as well: the 18-year-old war-bride pushing her 19-year-old husband's wheelchair and not quite understanding why her husband is so affected by this, the boy she grew up with, now a man, who had never shed a tear is crying; the older immigrant Latino parents who have, perhaps more than their wounded mid-20s son, an appreciation for the emotion given on their son's behalf. No man in that hallway, walking or clapping, is ashamed by the silent tears on more than a few cheeks. An Airborne Ranger wipes his eyes only to better see. A couple of the officers in this crowd have themselves been a part of this parade in the past.

These are our men, broken in body they may be, but they are our brothers, and we welcome them home. This parade has gone on, every single Friday, all year long, for more than four years.

"Did you know that?

The media haven't yet told the story."

V/R TK
TOM KUNK
COL, GS
Division Chief for ODO
HQDA, G3/5/7

Steelers fan kicks puppy to death

2009-11-23T15:00:00.000-08:00

Police: Pa. man killed puppy before Steelers game

Nov 23 01:09 PM US/Eastern

Comments (41) Email to a friend Share on Facebook Tweet this

"It looked as if he was kicking a soccer ball."

BRIDGEVILLE, Pa. (AP) - Police say a western Pennsylvania man told them he kicked his girlfriend's puppy to death because he was upset that the pit bull wouldn't behave before the start of the Pittsburgh Steelers game.

Twenty-two-year-old William Woodson, of Bridgeville, remained jailed Monday on a charge of animal cruelty.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazettes reports that a witness told police that Woodson was kicking the dog down the street shortly after 1 p.m. Sunday, which is when the football game began. Police say Woodson was supposed to be taking the pit bull for a walk, but the animal resisted. By the time police arrived, the puppy was dead.

Police say Woodson didn't like the dog and was upset that his live-in girlfriend bought it.

Online court records don't list an attorney for Woodson.

___

Information from: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, http://www.post-gazette.com

Global Warming hoax.....just like I've been saying.

2009-11-20T19:33:00.000-08:00

there is now a report that has gone viral on the net that seems to prove what I've been saying for years....man made global warming is a hoax and a religion.
this from Newsbusters.org

NYT Environmental Writer Confirms Probable Authenticity of Hacked Climate Change Messages

By P.J. Gladnick | November 20, 2009 - 21:39

Let us give New York Times environmental writer Andrew Revkin credit. He is one of the few in the mainstream media reporting on the hacked global warming e-mails story which has gone viral in the blogosphere and was covered in-depth by NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard. If you aren't yet familiar with this brewing scandal then I recommend you get up to speed on this controversy by reading Sheppard's blog post.

Despite Revkin's commendable willingness to at least cover this controversy, he is still stubbornly clinging to his global warming belief...for now. Perhaps his stubborness against veering away from the global warming doctrine is more a matter of inertia. After all, he has invested over 10 years of his life in that particular dogma and it is not easy to give it up overnight despite the shocking revelations of the e-mails. Here is Revkin's not very convincing money quote disclaimer:

The documents will undoubtedly raise questions about the quality of research on some specific questions and the actions of some scientists. But the evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so broad and deep that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument.

Noel Sheppard has this great post.
Possible Conspiracy To Falsify Temperature Data Uncovered

By Noel Sheppard (Bio | Archive)
November 20, 2009 - 15:30 ET

E-mail messages between high-ranking scientists appear to indicate a conspiracy by some of the world's leading global warming alarmists to falsify temperature data in order to exaggerate global averages.
Those involved allegedly include: James Hansen, Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies; Michael Mann, famous for Mann's "Hockey Stick"; Gavin Schmidt, NASA climate modeler, and; Stephen Schneider, Stanford professor and Al Gore confidant.
A statement released Friday by the alarmist website RealClimate has confirmed that e-mail servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Norwich, England, were hacked recently with contents illegally made available over the Internet.
Although the authenticity of all these e-mail messages has yet to be proven, what's currently available points to a coordinated attempt to manipulate climate data by those directly involved in advancing the theory of anthropogenic global warming.
New Zealand's Investigate magazine reported Friday that it has verified these e-mail messages are indeed real:
The director of Britain's leading Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, has told Investigate magazine's TGIF Edition tonight that his organization has been hacked, and the data flying all over the internet appears to be genuine.
In an exclusive interview, Jones told TGIF, "It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails."

Sniffer dog reunited

2009-11-13T05:25:00.000-08:00

Sniffer dog that went missing in action after Afghan battle is discovered safe and sound after 14 MONTHS lost in the desert

By Mail Foreign Service
Last updated at 6:23 PM on 12th November 2009

A sniffer dog that went missing in action after a battle in Afghanistan has been found safe and well after more than a year in the desert.

Sabi the black Labrador was with a joint Australian-Afghan army patrol when it was ambushed by Taliban militants in September 2008.

Nine soldiers were wounded in the ensuing gun battle, which earned one Australian SAS trooper the country's highest bravery award.

But there was no sign of the bomb-sniffing dog after the battle in a remote area of Uruzgan province.

Sabi's handlers spent months scouring the desert looking for the four-year-old animal, but to no avail.

Enlarge

Having a ball: Sabi at Forward Operating Base Ripley in Tarin Kowt, Oruzgan Province, Afghanistan, after her amazing return

Last week - 14 months after she disappeared - a U.S. serviceman spotted a dog with an Afghan man at an isolated patrol base in another part of Uruzgan.

The Afghan handed Sabi over and the American quickly realised she must be a military-trained animal.

Within days, the Labrador was returned to her unit - no worse for wear.

Mark Donaldson, the SAS trooper awarded the Victoria Cross for rescuing a wounded interpreter during the battle, said: 'Sabi's the last piece of the puzzle.

'Having Sabi back gives some closure for the handler and the rest of us that served with her in 2008. It's a fantastic morale-booster for the guys.'

The dog's unnamed handler told of the moment he was reunited with Sabi. He said: 'I nudged a tennis ball to her with my foot and she took it straight away.

'It's a game we used to play over and over during her training. It's amazing, just incredible, to have her back.'

Enlarge

Hero's welcome: Sabi is greeted by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and US commander General Stanley McChrystal

The dog was returned to the Australians' base just in time for a visit by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who was photographed along with the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, petting Sabi.

'Sabi is back home in one piece and is a genuinely nice pooch as well,' Rudd told reporters.

The canine star appeared composed and relaxed, showing no signs of stress - she even welcomed strangers with a sniff and a lick.

Exactly where Sabi has been or what happened to her during the past 14 months will probably never be known, though her good condition when she was found indicated somebody had been looking after her, military spokesman Brig. Brian Dawson said.

The dog was being tested for diseases before a decision was made on whether she can return to Australia.

More than 1,500 Australian troops are in Afghanistan and most are involved in training Afghan security forces. Among them are units that use dogs to sniff out roadside bombs and other explosive booby traps.

People:: Kevin Rudd
Places:: Afghanistan,; Australia

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Happy veterans Day

2009-11-11T16:25:00.000-08:00

This is a great letter and is perfect for Veterans Day. Thanks to all of you that put your lives on hold and at risk .

Drafting Guys over 60

This is so Funny & obviously written by a Former Soldier----

New Direction for any war: Send Service Vets over 60!
I am over 60 and the Armed Forces thinks I'm too old to track down terrorists. You can't be older than 42 to join the military. They've got the whole thing ass-backwards. Instead of sending 18-year olds off to fight, they ought to take us old guys. You shouldn't be able to join a military unit until you're at least 35.

For starters:
Researchers say 18-year-olds think about sex every 10 seconds. Old guys only think about sex a couple of times a day, leaving us more than 28,000 additional seconds per day to concentrate on the enemy.

Young guys haven't lived long enough to be cranky, and a cranky soldier is a dangerous soldier. 'My back hurts! I can't sleep, I'm tired and hungry' We are impatient and maybe letting us kill some asshole that desperately deserves it will make us feel better and shut us up for a while.

An 18-year-old doesn't even like to get up before 10 a.m. Old guys always get up early to pee so what the hell. Besides, like I said, 'I'm tired and can't sleep and since I'm already up, I may as well be up killing some fanatical son-of-a-bitch.

If captured we couldn't spill the beans because we'd forget where we put them. In fact, name, rank, and serial number would be a real brainteaser.

Boot camp would be easier for old guys. We're used to getting screamed and yelled at and we're used to soft food. We've also developed an appreciation for guns. We've been using them for years as an excuse to get out of the house, away from the screaming and yelling.

They could lighten up on the obstacle course however. I've been in combat and didn't see a single 20-foot wall with rope hanging over the side, nor did I ever do any pushups after completing basic training. I can hear the Drill Sgt. In the 'New army' now, 'Get down and give me ... um..er .. One!'

Actually, the running part is kind of a waste of energy, too. I've never seen anyone outrun a bullet.

An 18-year-old has the whole world ahead of him. He's still learning to shave, to start up a conversation with a pretty girl. He still hasn't figured out that a baseball cap has a brim to shade his eyes, not the back of his head.

These are all great reasons to keep our kids at home to learn a little more about life before sending them off into harm's way.

Let us old guys track down those dirty rotten coward terrorists. The last thing an enemy would want to see right now is a couple of million pissed off old farts with attitudes and automatic weapons who know that their best years are already behind them. Also, we won't get in trouble for mistreating prisoners.
We won't take any.

If nothing else, put us on border patrol....we will have it secured the first night!

Share this with your senior friends. It's purposely in big type so you can read it!!!

Deer jumps into Lions den at National Zoo

2009-11-08T19:24:00.000-08:00

At zoo, no escape to safety for deer in the lions' den

By Martin Weil
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 9, 2009

A young deer that jumped a wall at the National Zoo was fatally injured by two lions Sunday as dozens of startled spectators looked on.

The incident, which zoo spokeswoman Pamela Baker-Masson described as highly unusual, occurred about 2:50 p.m. as zoo visitors lined the perimeter wall of an enclosure that contained two female lions.

At some point after jumping into the enclosure, the deer broke free from one of the two lions and bounded into a moat, as the spectators cheered, according to zoo visitor Josh Shpayher.

"Everyone was cheering, 'Go, go, go' " to encourage the deer to reach safety, Shpayher said.

"Everyone was rooting for the deer," which began swimming in the leaf-strewn waters of the moat, as the two restlessly pacing lions stared from the moat's edge.

Alerted to the incident, zoo personnel sent visitors away and brought the lions indoors. With the enclosure empty, the deer left the moat on its own. It was anesthetized and taken for evaluation by specialists.

They found it "pretty evident" that the deer "would not survive," and it was euthanized, Baker-Masson said.

Shpayher said that when he approached the lion enclosure, the crowd there was swelling to at least 100 people.

When he asked what was happening, he said a woman told him that "a deer jumped in and the lions got him."

Video footage taken by a visitor begins with the deer on the ground, under a lion's paw. It then shows the deer breaking free and bounding toward the moat with no obvious wounds.

However, Baker-Masson said an examination indicated that in addition to head and neck scratches, the deer, a female, had a serious wound on its belly.

Many deer live in Rock Creek Park, where the zoo is located, and many have been spotted on the zoo grounds.

weilm@washpost.com

Staff writer Amy Argetsinger contributed to this report.

Nicole's Law now in effect in Florida

2009-09-27T14:55:00.000-07:00

I have to say I had not heard of this until I saw the notice at a farm this weekend. Under this law
all kids will have to wear a helmet when riding. This was in the Sun-Sentinal

LOXAHATCHEE - Nicole Hornstein was riding a horse when the animal stumbled and fell, tossing her, and her head slammed into the pavement.

The 12-year-old girl, who wasn't wearing a helmet, died in 2006 after 20 days in a coma.

But her death was not in vain, her father and state legislators said Monday, moments before Gov. Charlie Crist signed a safety bill into "Nicole's Law."

"Because of the hard work of Nicole's family and all her friends ... families in the western communities and all throughout Florida will be saved the pain and anguish the Hornsteins have experienced," said state Sen. Dave Aronberg, D-Greenacres, who co-sponsored the bill with state Rep. Joseph Abruzzo, D-Wellington. "Because of your efforts, children will be saved and families will be spared."

About 80 people attended the signing at The Acreage's Hamlin Equestrian Park, adjacent to an equestrian ring. The signing comes three years after Nicole's accident. Her father, Gary, traveled regularly to Tallahassee to push for the law.

As legislators pondered the bill, two other children were injured in horse-related accidents.

"This is truly a remarkable achievement because good legislation often doesn't happen for years in Tallahassee," Aronberg said. "It takes a groundswell ... The perseverance of all of you put it back on the agenda and when Gov. Crist came out in favor of it, it really rocketed that bill to the top."

Similar to the youth-helmet law for riding bicycles, Nicole's Law requires horseback riders 16 and younger to wear a helmet when riding on public roads and rights of way and while taking riding lessons. Rodeos, parades and private property are exempt.

Crist told the Hornstein family that while they cannot go back and change what happened, others can learn from those experiences to make children safe.

"This is about the future, about doing what's right, about making this a safe place to live," said Crist, a former horseback rider who said his sister was injured in a fall from a horse. "I know the courage it takes to take a family tragedy like this and turn it into something very positive for so many other people. My heart bleeds for you but also my heart sings for what you're doing for Florida."

Head injuries are the most common cause of death for people who ride horses or ponies, according to the American Medical Equestrian Association.

Under the new law, anyone who allows a child to ride a horse without a helmet would be fined $500.

Some Florida cities, including Davie, Plantation and Parkland, already have laws that require minors to wear helmets when riding, but the law makes helmets mandatory throughout the state.

"The ones that don't, they'll learn real fast because there's no margin for error," Gary Hornstein said. "[Nicole] did not have a second chance. It happened once and that was it. It was horrific and she went through things that no man, woman or child should ever go through."

Am I a racist

2009-09-19T11:03:00.000-07:00

There is a debate raging....are you a racist if you disagree with the direction the President is going.
There are several problems with this premise. (1.) the President was elected primarily by White people, there just aren't enough minorities to provide sufficient votes to win. (2) the definition of "racist" : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. Unfortunately, the term racist is thrown out as the reason you might disagree with any person of color when actually you just might happen to disagree with them. In the current political debate...I just disagree. The government spends to much money, is involved in way to many activities and everyday lives, it regulates to many aspects of business and is currently in the process of doubling the National debt and the money supply (ie.printing more money). This is the wrong direction and it is saddling my children with a debt load that will require them to give up even more of there time and treasure to pay for these bills, and that PISSES ME OFF. That does not make me a racist, I could care less what color someones skin is, where they come from, what religion they follow or what football team they root for. The accusation of racist is becoming a tool of distraction and I think I've had about enough of it. Heres a link to how it is currently applied.

A new virus threat

2009-09-18T20:03:00.001-07:00

This from Reuters:

By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and Europe face a new health threat from a mosquito-borne disease far more unpleasant than the West Nile virus that swept into North America a decade ago, a U.S. expert said on Friday.

Chikungunya virus has spread beyond Africa since 2005, causing outbreaks and scores of fatalities in India and the French island of Reunion. It also has been detected in Italy, where it has begun to spread locally, as well as France.

"We're very worried," Dr. James Diaz of the Louisiana University Health Sciences Center told a meeting on airlines, airports and disease transmission sponsored by the independent U.S. National Research Council.

"Unlike West Nile virus, where nine out of 10 people are going to be totally asymptomatic, or may have a mild headache or a stiff neck, if you get Chikungunya you're going to be sick," he said.

"The disease can be fatal. It's a serious disease," Diaz added. "There is no vaccine."

Chikungunya infection causes fever, headache, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, muscle pain, rash and joint pain. Symptoms can last a few weeks, though some suffers have reported incapacitating joint pain or arthritis lasting months.

The disease was first discovered in Tanzania in 1952. Its name means "that which bends up" in the Makonde language spoken in northern Mozambique and southeastern Tanzania.

The virus could spread globally now because it can be carried by the Asian tiger mosquito, which is found in Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand.

In the United States, the mosquito species tends to live in southern regions east of the Mississippi but has been found as far afield as western Texas, Minnesota and New Jersey.

Health officials are greatly concerned about the appearance of Chikungunya in the islands of the Indian Ocean -- Mauritius, Seychelles and Reunion -- which have beach resorts frequented by European tourists.

"It is hyper-endemic in the islands of the Indian Ocean," Diaz told the meeting.

"Travel by air will import the infected mosquitoes and humans," he added. "Chikungunya is coming."

Diaz warned of possible double-infections involving Chikungunya and dengue fever or malaria, which are also carried by the Asian tiger mosquito.

The spread of the disease could be greatest in so-called mega-cities such as Mumbai and Mexico City, which have large and impoverished populations, poor health controls and water systems that provide ready breeding grounds for mosquitoes, Diaz said.

West Nile, spread by a different mosquito species, first appeared in New York in 1999 and now can be found in most of North America.

People of Wal-Mart...I just couldn't stop looking

2009-09-12T08:44:00.000-07:00

I just got this link today. It is wrong on so many levels but I just couldn't stop looking. It's like a bad car accident. Page 6 just killed me. Peopleofwalmart.com

‘Cause I Like To Party!

September 9th, 2009 | Author: admin

Let’s run through my rock star list….Mullet? – check; big sunglasses? – check; heart shaped tattoo? – u know i love my mom; Cut jean shorts? – are there any other type of shorts?; wife beater tied at the midriff – check;….. He is an official ROCK STAR!

Oklahoma

Posted in Uncategorized | 97 Comments »

That’s Not G

September 9th, 2009 | Author: admin

Y’all like camo? Y’all like NASCAR? Do y’all like to keel stuff? Den come on down to da huntin’ headquaters and we’ll getcha fixed up!

North Carolina

Posted in Uncategorized | 47 Comments »

Uh Oh

September 9th, 2009 | Author: admin

I tried to fart and a little sh*t came out. I just sharted. Now let’s go.

Washington

Posted in Uncategorized | 54 Comments »

Hard To Believe

September 9th, 2009 | Author: admin

It seems like you just started adding random things to that list. Midgets and DSL make you hard? Really?!

Florida

H1N1-swine flu...oops not 'spose to call it that

2009-09-12T06:57:00.000-07:00

With my oldest daughter off at College now this current "pandemic" (as everyone freaks out) is a bit closer to home. A student at Cornell recently died from the H1N1 related disease. LINK."A student from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., has died of complications from the H1N1 virus, according to a statement on its Web site. Warren J. Schor, 20, died Friday at Cayuga Medical Center." Now the Agriculture secretary is upset about the name, "Each time the media uses the phrase 'swine flu,' a hog farmer, their workers and their families suffer," Vilsack said in a statement. LINK US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack stood up Friday for pigs and hog farmers, saying their name has been dragged through the mud by people who insist on calling the A(H1N1) influenza pandemic "swine flu." Is this really that important...is it really that serious.
Here are a few thoughts that may help shape your opinion. Remember that any virus can be serious because we dont have significant anti-viral drugs like we do anti-biotics for bacterial infections. Heres a link to Virology on the recent outbreak in Mexico".Influenza incidence is difficult to determine because most infections are not confirmed by laboratory tests. Consequently case estimates play an important role in understanding transmission and spread. In this study, the authors used mathematical models to calculate the number of infections in Mexico based on exportation of the disease by travelers. They estimate that 23,000 infections had occurred in the country by late April. From this number they calculated a case fatality ratio of 0.4%. I note that my own crude calculations yielded a similar number." The CDC reports that the current fatality from infection rate in the US is approximately 5%.

Heres a good look at the potential threat from Global Security.org. which looks at the H1N1 (swine flu...sorry, shouldnt call it that) and the H5N1(avian flu)

"Pandemic years are associated with many more cases of influenza and a higher case fatality rate than that seen in seasonal flu outbreaks. It is common to encounter clinical attack rate ranges for seasonal flu of 5% to 15% in the literature. For pandemic flu, clinical attack rates are reported in the range of 25% to 50%.

During a typical year in the United States, 30,000 to 50,000 persons die as a result of influenza viral infection. Frequently cited numbers are 20,000 deaths each year, and 37,000 annual deaths. About 5-10% of hospitalizations for influenza lead to fatal outcome in adults.

In normal years, although most influenza infection is in children, the serious morbidity and mortality is almost entirely among elderly people with underlying chronic disease. During influenza epidemics from 1979–80 through 2000–01, the estimated overall number of influenza-associated hospitalizations in the United States ranged from approximately 54,000 to 430,000/epidemic. An average of approximately 226,000 influenza-related excess hospitalizations occurred per year, with 63% of all hospitalizations occurring among persons aged > 65 years."

In a nut shell.....if either virus develops significant pathogenic variables then we could be in for a BIG problem. That said , it hasn't and dare I say...probably won't do that anytime soon. As I am fond of saying...probably my microbiology and infectious disease training...It wont be the bombs but the bugs that get us.

545-vs-300,000

2009-09-08T19:25:00.000-07:00

I recently received this article and it really struck a chord with me. In a time when our Government is spending ever larger sums of money ( which everyone seems to think is a bad idea)it seems logical to question why they keep doing it. Here's a thought.

545 PEOPLE

By Charlie Reese

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?

Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don't propose a federal budget. The president does.

You and I don't have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does.

You and I don't write the tax code, Congress does.

You and I don't set fiscal policy, Congress does.

You and I don't control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.

I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason.. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a president to do one cotton-picking thing. I don't care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator's responsibility to determine how he votes.

Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits.. The president can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.

The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House? Nancy Pelosi. She is the leader of the majority party. She and fellow House members, not the president, can approve any budget they want. If the president vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to.

It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted -- by present facts -- of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can't think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

If the tax code is unfair, it's because they want it unfair.

If the budget is in the red, it's because they want it in the red ..

If the Army & Marines are in IRAQ , it's because they want them in IRAQ

If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it's because they want it that way.

There are no insoluble government problems.

Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power. Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like "the economy," "inflation," or "politics" that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible.

They, and they alone, have the power.

They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses.

Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees.

We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!

Charlie Reese is a former columnist of the Orlando Sentinel Newspaper.

State of the Blogosphere Survey/Changes to Your Technorati Authority

2009-09-06T00:24:00.000-07:00

Dear Technorati member, here is the latest news from Technorati! 1)
Technorati's State of the Blogosphere Survey <#sob>2) Why Your
Technorati Authority May Have Changed and What You Can Do About It
<#authority>3) New! Become A Technorati Writer <#writer>4) Technorati
Email Preferences <#preferences> 1) Technorati State of the
Blogosphere Survey
<http://research.opinionguru.com/mriweb/mriweb.dll?i.project=a16114>
Over the years, Technorati has been tracking the State of the
Blogosphere. Our annual study investigates how blogging is growing and
changing, as well as its impacts on current events and the bottom
lines of businesses and bloggers. Please share your perspective by
participating in our survey. We think you'll find the survey
interesting. It should take just 15 minutes of your time, and of
course your answers will be completely confidential. Please feel free
to send this link to other bloggers you know. And be sure to check
back on Technorati in October for a summary of the results. 2) Why
Your Technorati Authority May Have Changed, and What You Can Do About
It Changes in Technorati Authority numbers - there are several reasons
these numbers have decreased recently: As our intent is to measure the
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Austrailian Veterinarian dies from Hendra Virus

2009-09-02T16:23:00.000-07:00

Australian Veterinarian Alistair Rodgers died after being infected with the Hendra virus he contracted after working on an infected filly. The Hendra virus, formally called Equine Morbillivirus is a parmyxovirus and is thought to be carried by flying foxes (bats of the genus Pteropus) found in Australia.This has popped up several times in Austrailia and is a very bad bug to get. As with most viruses, we have few antiviral options and those (tamiflu) are not very effective.
Heres what they said in the Australian

QUEENSLAND vet Alister Rodgers lost his battle with the lethal Hendra virus overnight, dying after two weeks in a coma.

Vet dies from Hendra virus

Alister Rodgers fell ill after coming into contact with a horse that was carrying the deadly hendra virus.

State Health Minister Paul Lucas today sent his deepest sympathies to Dr Rodgers' widow, Linda, and children Courtney and Duncan.

“This is a terrible tragedy for his family and they are being supported by the staff of Princess Alexandra Hospital,” Mr Lucas told Parliament this morning.

“They've requested privacy and I would ask that people respect this at this time.”

Dr Rodgers, of the Rockhampton Veterinary Clinic, was infected with the virus when he treated a sick filly - thought at the time to be suffering from snakebite - at the J4S stud in central Queensland on July 28.

Despite an experimental treatment with anti-viral drugs, he fell into a coma three weeks later.

The Australian Veterinary Association today paid tribute to Dr Rodgers.

“We extend the sympathy of veterinarians around the country to Alister's family, friends and workmates,” AVA president Mark Lawrie said.

“Unfortunately this problem is not going to go away.

I dont recall that it was a problem when I was there and I'm glad we dont have it here.

Scuba testing the GO Pro camera

2009-07-18T11:34:00.001-07:00

I just returned from a Vet School reunion cruise to Grand Cayman and Cozumel Mexico. Beth got me the Go Pro Surf Hero camera that mounts on the front of my board so I can shoot video of myself....thats right, it's all about me. I think she did it because I think I surf better than I might actually be doing and she wanted to bring me down a notch. The camera is really small and runs on 2 AAA batteries (1 hour) and holds 50-60 minutes of high quality video on a 2GB card. Oh....and it's waterproof to 100 feet. It's so small and light that you can stick it in your BCD vest pocket. I did have some goober moments where I couldn't tell when it was on or not. You have to look into the front and see if the small screen has a number on it...and whether it's flashing. There are no lights on the back of the camera. It worked great and never leaked. When you're back on the surface you just put the card in your laptop and view ...that simple. We dove Eagle Ray reef (non-eagle ray...none there) and Devils grotto. Both are very close to shore since it drops off to 2000 feet very quickly. Quite a few tarpon present and a very active reef. We did a few "swim through s" ...kinda like a cave but with an opening at the end. Now let me set everyone straight....I hate caves, and when the dive master said "anybody got a problem with swim through s?" I was to busy trying not to crap myself to speak. He said "these are really big ones"....translation ( they are very small and your tank is going to scrape along the walls so don't panic) ....concentrating on sphinter and bladder control earnestly at this point. When we dove down to the devils grotto at about 50-60 feet I couldn't even see the opening....even when he went in. I waited towards the back of the line and went in ahead of Beth. She commented afterwards on how warm the water was inside....I didn't tell her how scared I really was and just why it was so warm. I also didnt shoot video inside either as mentally I had some difficulty turning the damn thing on and shot about 2 minutes of my fins because I thought it was off and was trailing behind me. Just as well since the sound of my tank hitting the coral roof is still a bit un-nerving , especially when combined with my girlish whimpering through my regulator. Once out I was much better, saw some huge tarpon....sorry no video....still having touble with the on/off thing but got some classic clips of my shorts. We went to Cozumel the next day and did a shore dive at Villa Blanca for $25 each...including all the equipment. A shallow dive about 40 feet and the camera worked great, however there was some operator error. I didn't change the batteries (see note at top..2AAA batteries=1 hour). After the dive we had lunch at La Mission, a great Mexican resturant with killer Margaritas. After 3 ,I was unable to add up the bill and had to get Beth to do it.Seriously had trouble walking back in a straight line so we did some shopping at the Tequilla store. We did learn a great travel tip...while they say you can only bring in 1 bottle per person, thats not exactly true. You can bring back however much you want, the duty is 3% but they don't collect on any total less than $10. So you can actually bring back $300 of booze without a problem...just declare it. All in all another great Weldon adventure....may have to take the kids next time.

Barn air quality and Respiratory Disease- How it effects you and your horse.

2009-06-07T14:06:00.000-07:00

This is the first of what I plan to be a series of notes and perceptions from the ACVIM Forum in Montreal. This an annual meeting of Veterinary Internists and a lot of current research is presented. This is a synopsis of "Air Quality in Barns" presented by Melissa R.Mazan, DVM, Diplomate ACVIM. After listening to this I wasn't sure I wanted to go back into a barn again.
Everyone knows that Barns are dusty places , this is no surprise. We don't design them for good airflow, in fact we build them more for protection and put walls up. Additionally, most barns are also used for hay and equipment storage. Not to be insulting but when was the last time you cleaned your barn? When an epidemiology study was done to evaluate respiratory disease among barn workers it was found that they had 50% more respiratory symptoms and grooms had a 3x incidence of asthma. Whereas significantly less symptoms were reported among Poultry, Swine and Dairy workers. In those environments there is more regulation and attention to cleanliness due to food production and the monitary costs associated with respiratory disease.
So what exactly is the problem, the problem is respirable organic particles or particlate matter.
The data suggests that > 2.4mg/cubic meter of air causes a higher morbidity. Most barns in this study had much higher levels than this , 40 to 60 mg/M3. In the breathing zone ( where the horses head is frequently low) it was higher. These particles include dust, endotoxin, mold spores, ammonia and arena dust(silica). Hay has 19.3 mg/M3 . Bedding is a prime source of particulate matter with straw being the worst and shaving somewhat better( but still bad).
When working in the arena the dust level reaches 60.6mg/M3 ....for both the horse and rider. The increased respiratory rate and volume allows for an even deeper penetration of particulate matter. This dust contains Iron, Copper, Magnesium and silica. Once in the distal airways this material functions as a foreign body causing marked inflammation. When these horse have their airways sampled using a BAL (Bronchial Alveolar Lavage) there is a massive increase in WBC's (White Blood Cells) . This inflammation is the principal cause of the clinical signs and can lead to chronic fibrosis if left untreated. So what do we know and what should we do?
1.The barn environment is unhealthy
2.Horse owners won't believe it.
3.If the horse has a respiratory problem....there's a good chance the owner may as well.

There are many different treatments out there but the best thing you can do is to keep your horse outside as much as possible. The second thing you can do is start cleaning. Move the hay to a separate barn or structure. Change the bedding. Pressure wash the whole place. Improve ventilation. Keep dust to a minimum. Feed hay outside....it is one of the prime offenders. Roll bales are worse since the horse has to stick it's head into the roll to feed.
If you are coughing , sneezing or have been complaining of respiratory illness..... then the barn might actually be the problem. It's time to start cleaning.

Craziest Elephant photo

2009-05-25T14:49:00.000-07:00

I have no idea when this happened but it would be quite a shock if you were on the front elephant.
Just look at the faces of all involved and you will see just about every emotion possible.

Voice recognition software

2009-05-19T18:50:00.000-07:00

For years they have been trying to come up with software that would recognize how you were speaking to put that information directly on the screen. Several years ago I tried a product called Dragon naturally speaking and found it was very difficult to work with and frequently had more mistakes than it did correct ones. Since I produce a great deal of reports for all medical cases that I see I thought I would give the software a new shot and see if it was up to my expectations. The new software is called Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10. I thought about getting the Dragon medical version but the price of my prior experience made me shy away from it. I just finished dictating five of my ultrasound case reports in under 30 minutes with very few mistakes. In fact, I am dictating this post with Dragon 10, and it only had to correct one error. While this may not be perfect for most people and most usages, I find it will be a very good tool for me as I dictate my medical reports when I'm on the road. I'm not one to hawk products but I think this one is pretty cool and worth a looksee.I'm not one that's easily amazed that this program is a mindblower.

Dead horses and compounded medications

2009-04-23T17:46:00.000-07:00

21 dead polo horses in Wellington. Reports are that these horse were administered an IV "jug" of Vitamins and minerals....for what. Theses substances take along time to take effect, why give them pre-performance. Now these horses are dead. There is plenty of blame to go around here and I'm sure that we will hear a lot about that as more becomes known. The current report is that there was a mistake in the compounding of this product by Franks Pharmacy in Ocala Florida. The big question should be ...why were they making it in the first place. There is a similar combination manufactured in France by Merial called Biodyl: B12, potassium aspartate, magnesium aspartate and selenium. It is not approved for use in the United States. Apparently 14 horses died on site while 7 others died at the hospital. All for some voodoo pseudoscience that is given IV to help win. How about something like training and a better polo player. Legally Veterinarian prescribe compounded medications on a case by case basis where there is no commercially available product. In this case the doctor may be in the clear if each med was marked for each horse and not "batch dispensed". They may be at fault for giving the stuff in the first place but not legally. Franks pharmacy on the other hand has a serious problem. Other compounding pharmacies have been shut down for extended periods . Many of these are really lax in product quality and were making cheaper "generic" versions of commercially available products. Franks was always one that seemed better than the others.

Global warming and the coming Ice age

2009-04-13T19:14:00.000-07:00

I came across a great post on Powerline today that is right in line with my thoughts on the Global warming religion by Matt Patterson. He says it perfectly..."it seems some grotesque combination of narcissism and self-loathing, a mentality that says at once "I am so important that my behavior is causing this" and "I am so inherently tainted that it must be bad."
Here's the main thread-
Make no mistake -- the earth has warmed. Unfortunately for the climate-change catastrophists, warming periods have occurred throughout recorded history, long before the Industrial Revolution and SUVs began spitting man-made carbon into the atmosphere. And as might be expected, these warm periods have invariably proven a blessing for humanity. Consider:

Around the 3rd century B.C., the planet emerged from a long cold spell. The warm period which followed lasted about 700 years, and since it coincided with the rise of Pax Romana, it is known as the Roman Warming.

In the 5th century A.D., the earth's climate became cooler. Cold and drought pushed the tribes of northern Europe south against the Roman frontier. Rome was sacked, and the Dark Ages commenced. And it was a dark age, both metaphorically and literally -- the sun's light dimmed and gave little warmth; harvest seasons grew shorter and yielded less. Life expectancy and literacy plummeted. The plague appeared and decimated whole populations.

Then, inexplicably, about 900 A.D. things began to warm. This warming trend would last almost 400 years, a well documented era known as the Medieval Warm Period. Once again, as temperatures rose harvests and populations grew. Vineyards made their way into Northern Europe, including Britain. Art and science flourished in what we now know as the Renaissance.

Then around 1300 A.D. things cooled drastically. This cold spell would last almost 500 years, a severe climate event known as the Little Ice Age. Millions died in famine as glaciers advanced all over the world. The plague returned. In Greenland, the Norse colony that had been established during the Medieval Warming froze and starved. Arctic pack ice descended south, pushing Inuit peoples to the shores of Scotland. People ice skated on the Thames; they walked from Staten Island to Manhattan over a frozen New York Harbor. The year 1816 was remembered as the year without a summer, with some portions of the Northern Hemisphere seeing snowfall in June.

But around 1850 the planet began to warm up yet again. Glaciers retreated. Temperatures rose. This is the warming period which we are still enjoying today. And once again, the warmth brought bounty: The last 150 years have seen an explosion in life expectancy, population, and scientific progress like never before.

Of course, even before the appearance of humans, the earth alternated throughout its history between extremes of heat and cold: 700 million years ago the planet was covered entirely in ice; 55 million years ago, a swampy greenhouse.

Why? What drives these ancient cycles? There are a lot of theories. The waxing and waning of solar output; cosmic rays and their role in cloud formation; the earth moving through plumes of galactic dust as it travels up and down through the arm of the Milky Way; plate tectonics redirecting the ocean currents; vulcanism. Perhaps it is a combination of all of these things. Perhaps it is something as yet undiscovered. One thing for sure that it's not: SUVs.

Why, then, do otherwise sensible people believe that we are both causing the current warming and that the warmth is a bad thing? To me it seems some grotesque combination of narcissism and self-loathing, a mentality that says at once "I am so important that my behavior is causing this" and "I am so inherently tainted that it must be bad."

For these self-hating humans who want us to cut our carbs (carbons, not carbohydrates), I say relax and enjoy the warmth while it lasts.

Because it won't. No matter what we do, the ice and the cold and the dark will come again. That should be our worry....Amen

Technorati Update: Publishing content on Technorati and cameras for bloggers

2009-03-27T21:33:00.000-07:00

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Jumping Shark...I would have soiled myself

2009-01-30T19:55:00.000-08:00

I just saw this on Pat Dollards site and had to post it. It is a short video clip of a shark jumping out of the water at Hutchinson Island Fla while a surfer paddles out....close by. I dont know why the shark would breach like that unless after fish or birds and you cant see any in the clip. Spooky when you think one of those could pop up next to you.
note....just found a note on this, they are called spinning sharks

The Weldon annual Christmas Letter

2008-12-22T16:02:00.000-08:00

I did this last year and thought I would give you a glimpse of the reality that is my life. It's long but funny and since Beth thought it was funny she included one of my previous posts (the Costa Rica story)... Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! It's time to put on your reading glasses, pour yourself a glass of Christmas cheer & feel better about your life. First a disclaimer, my mind has finally failed & I can’t remember the stories I wanted to write for Polly & Mac (which were great but will now be mediocre). As a result of this, I have now acknowledged that I must write things down for next year & Alan was a large contributor this year so there are some “bodily function” & adult content stories. Consider yourselves forewarned! That said, Alan's folks & family are doing well as are mine except for my dad whose artificial hip got infected & had to be removed & can't be replaced until the diabetic ulcer on his foot heals. Sarah's best friend Dani is an addition to the family since the end of last December. Turns out she's the best behaved, most appreciative of the feral Weldon kids! She seems to ease some of the sibling bickering & create more camaraderie (an unexpected plus). We had fun family trips including skiing (we learned Sarah’s cautious, Murphy likes jumps, Polly hates her helmet, & Mac craves speed), Cumberland (the perennial favorite), a cruise, a trip to Washington University (Sarah's 1st choice for college), the beach, North Carolina, Costa Rica, & Halloween Horror nights. We had wonderful visits from & to family & friends in Jacksonville, St.Louis, Phoenix, & Chicago.
Alan hits the gym most mornings before work & is looking really buff! His philosophy of weight lifting is to increase his chest size, then regardless of how big his belly gets as long as his chest is bigger he will proportionally look okay. He is playing a lot of tennis & entered 2 doubles tournaments this year with his partner Elliot (our cruise ended up being 4 days instead of 7 for about the same price because Alan thought his tournament was a week early & we needed to get back!) He has hired another Associate & is only on call 1 out of 6 weekends, which is great (except the weekend he is on)! He is elated with the Gators & disgusted with the Jaguars. GO GATORS! I have switched jobs after over 17 years although I still work once monthly at my old practice. My new job is 3 days a week mostly doing surgery in a practice with 3 other veterinarians. I exercise 5-6 times weekly & yoga about 3 times. We average 4-5 sit down dinners a week although usually at least 1 kid is missing (not milk carton missing) for soccer, wrestling, or work at this time of year. Alan used to avoid the soccer games when the kids were peewees as he considers it "Commie ball". He would never let them play in holiday tournaments because he felt it ruined family time together. But to his credit, now that they are playing at Episcopal he won’t miss any sporting events, even soccer! Last week we were on our way back from a night at a bed and breakfast in St. Augustine when Greg called to ask Alan what he was doing that evening. Alan explained that Polly had a 4:00 soccer game, then Murph had a 5:30 soccer game, & finally Dani had a 7:20 soccer game. Greg started laughing & when Alan asked him what was so funny, Greg replied, "You know what you are don't you?" "What?" asked Alan innocently & then Greg blindsided him with " a SOCCER DAD!" Alan was horrified as the truth of this sunk in. We are still over run with Italian Greyhounds (IG’s) & though Alan was concerned when the roofer told him that he had seen a huge rat in the back yard running under the deck, he was delighted after he related the information to me and I pointed out that we had 6 dogs & 2 cats in the yard & I was sure that there were no rats only 3 gray IG’s that like to hide under the deck! He has been laughing about my "show rats" ever since. I should have had enough sense to keep my mouth shut, but he has enjoyed it so much it was probably worth it. While in a haunted house at Universal, a redneck ghoul asked me if I wanted to dance on the table (after hearing Alan suggest this to me) while he blocked my progress. I declined & then he offered me a spot behind the bar with him. “I’m with my husband” I responded apologetically. He replied, “Oh, he can watch” much to Polly & Dani’s horror! Thanks Alan!
Dani has been a superb addition although she complains about the midnight curfew. She is in the IB program at Stanton & plays Varsity soccer. She works as a hostess & a lifeguard, too many hours in my opinion but she likes her spending money. Her nickname is Thumbelina because she averages over 2000 text messages a month! Dani is a bit of a flirt & we like to tease her about her male harem. While we were in Costa Rica this summer doing the zip lines, at each stop an instructor would asked Dani how old she was with a big smile & ended up with a big frown after hearing"17". Apparently they are very strict about underage kids there. She can’t go out to the convenience store alone or even with a chaperone without attracting some male attention. Last week a guy driving by in a truck blaring loud music noticed her looking his direction (despite Sarah's warning to avoid any male eye contact) & made a u-turn to pull into the store parking lot & came inside just as Dani was commenting to Sarah about his lack of teeth. He didn't care. He still asked for her phone number! Dani is also the queen of lip-gloss & won’t even go to the bathroom at night without applying some. I thought she was crazy to put it on before going out to mow the yard, but when the mower broke down & 2 guys stopped to fix it & then finished mowing for her, I realized she was “crazy like the fox! “
Sarah is enjoying senior year & rubbing in at every opportunity that it is her "last time going to the fair, last Thanksgiving, last Christmas, last season of cross country" etc. She can't wait to leave home & I hope she will be as happy as she supposes. She got her braces off after 31/2 years. She runs cross country, rows crew, & works cleaning 30 cat litter boxes 3 days a week for an elderly woman for $240 a month. Last summer her coach assigned her the Head Counselor position when she worked at crew camp & wrote her a letter afterwards thanking her for being the best Head Counselor that she had ever had & asking her to return next year. Sarah is a sweet, confident, opinionated, judgmental, kind-hearted, responsible, inclusive young lady who is very ready to tackle the world in some ways & oh so not ready to be exposed to it in others. She was very excited this week when we went to the Dermatologist to have a rarely appearing mark on her forehead diagnosed & the Dermatologist admitted that he had never seen anything like it & had no idea what it was although he listed a barrage of diagnoses it was not. For some reason she felt that made her unique (apparently she has been pining since Polly's orthopedic surgeon advised Polly that he had never seen bipartite patella’s that caused pain until Polly). Only Sarah would be pleased with a medical abnormality! While on the weird medical theme, on our annual Itchetucknee Springs tubing trip, Sarah elected to swim instead of floating on a tube. By the time we arrived at the end of our trip, Sarah had broken out with a severely itchy rash & welts over her whole body! As we went into the bathroom to change for the trip home, I noticed a sign on the door reading ”WARNING! If you develop a rash or unexplained skin condition, please report it to one of the Rangers to insure proper treatment & reporting of the reaction”. We sought out a Ranger & showed him the rash. He scratched his head & acted entirely ignorant of the WARNING on his bathroom door! Just as I decided that this whole thing was over blown another Ranger walked by & over heard us. He immediately reached into his pocket & handed me a slip of paper, which stated. “Please report this incident to the State Health Dept. of Hazardous Marine Life & Toxins at” a 1-800 number. It was a Sunday & the recording told me to call back during office hours. After Benedryl, a shower, & good nights sleep, Sarah was fine the next morning & went off to school. Being the conscientious mother that I am, I followed up with another call to the State Department. Once again, the person on the other end of the line had no idea what I was talking about. I read him the instructions & the phone number. He said his Department mostly dealt with Red Tide Reports & other toxins. When I asked if this rash posed any threat to my child, he said that he didn’t have a clue. This was not comforting, but it’s our government at work!
Murphy continues to play soccer, run cross country, & surprised an XBox 360 out of me by actually making the JV tennis team at Episcopal & playing at number one despite an obvious lack of practice preparation last spring. His academic efforts (& hence grades) continue to be less than stellar. Murph is perfectly happy to coast through life with the minimum effort required to stay out of trouble at home. Unfortunately, he sometimes does not titrate it perfectly & there is NO TV, NO computer, NO sleepovers, & NO car privileges. He has developed into a nice young man frequently taking up for me with the other Weldon rabble & even manages to make me proud without prodding occasionally. This summer as we were traveling & piled onto a bus headed for an airplane, I noticed from the other side of the bus that Murphy got up & offered his seat to an older woman on his own! He balances those moments with things like the infamous “sauna incident” in Costa Rica that Alan documented. Alan wrote “It's day 3 on the Adventura Costa Rica, we are at the Hacienda Guachipelin for another night. Today we were up at 7am & really stiff from the climb up & jump off the waterfall yesterday but this is kinda an ECO-hotel so the hot water is solar & if someone showers at night then there is no hot water in the morning.... like this morning. We had breakfast, more gallo pinto.... pronounced "Guy-yo peen-toe".... black beans and rice. We have it every day, for breakfast, lunch & dinner; it's typical Costa Rican food. At 8am we were at the stables for the horse back ride to the hot springs, mud baths, & volcano. I haven't been on a horse in many years & the ride, 90 minutes, meant serious butt pain all the way around. The trail was steep & incredibly rocky...the horses slipped constantly with one going down to his knees. Sarah’s horse we all renamed "El-Diablo" since it got into a kicking bout with Beth’s horse & bit Dani's knee... the lead Gaucho had to discipline him (needed Dr Dick to do some ass kickin). Sarah loved her feisty horse. When we went as far as the horses could go, we dismounted & then hiked 3-4 miles up the volcano, had to cross some suspect suspension bridges, a long tree over a gorge like Indiana Jones & cross a set of rapids going rock to rock... no BS here this river was the real deal. The waterfall at the top was awesome & very cold. Oddly only about a kilometer away we came to the bubbling pools of volcanic mud ...248 degrees...you don’t get in these. We went by so many you lose count & the kids were pissed at this point... the joy being sucked out of them by the shear work load of getting up this volcano. Beth & I were having a blast.... pays to be in shape. Horse back down the mountain in the rain to the Symbiosis Spa... a hot mud bath spa on the side of the volcano. Oh by the way...they forgot to bring the lunches...cranking the kids P.O.-meter into the redline area. We were told first to sit 10 minutes in the sauna (to open our pores)...we all dutifully piled in as they shut the door... jeez it's really hot in there. Serious squawking at this point... very concerned about breathing & how much time is left before they open the door. Every breath is an effort. Polly, Beth & Mac move down to the floor... where it is supposedly not as hot & there was a rumor that there was more air. I stayed on the middle bench with Murphy, Sarah & Dani on the top row. At the 5-minute mark it is deathly quiet as every one concentrates on breathing...then Murphy whispers in my ear "safety".... (Remember we have all been on a strict diet of gallo pinto) I blurt out " Oh God No Murphy.”. it was too late. The acrid sulfur smell made the volcanic mud pits smell like fresh laundry. I'm thinking about what the spa director said about opening your pores & what this is going to do to my skin. I'm certain the last molecule of oxygen is now gone. Murphy is howling. Deliverance, they open the door & lead us to the hot mud pit to cover ourselves with hot volcanic mud... again I'm rehashing the whole open pore thing. Dutifully we cover “every” square inch of skin with mud. Now you can't actually expect to put mud & the feral children together & not expect trouble... it wasn’t long in coming. It was sort of a Costa Rican mud-wrestling extravaganza. The British family at the mud bath at the same time were somewhat taken aback..."Oh Dear God!" To top things off...the showers quit working. What to do, naturally we hit the hot springs & to nobody's surprise instantly changed the color of the water from blue to a deep mud brown. That mud doesn’t come off very well either. We then, back in wet clothes with residual mud attached, got back on the horses for the ride back down...another hour. When we got back, Beth & I decided on a couples massage...we loaded up more Gallo pinto, some muscle relaxants (coconut rum), & headed to the massage. It was a man & a woman (who had striking witch-like features)...usually I get the dude because Beth is uncomfortable with guys giving massages, I am also uncomfortable with guys giving me massages, actually it ranks right up there with witches but guess what…I got the witch. Lights dimmed & under a towel she began working on me...at this point in time... so did the gallo pinto. I was rumbling audibly & I think she thought she could help by working diligently on my AB's. Bad idea. I was able to somehow hold back the tide but it was like someone squeezing an unopened bag of chips...the kind made with Olestra. She then started lighting candles...I’m not sure if this is some wicken behavior or if she thought striking matches was going to help. Next she applies some liquid to my face & returns to the massage...rumblings now under control. After about 15 minutes she wipes the stuff off my face...with a warm wet cloth...I now realize that this is some kind of skin exfoliation treatment. Sort of a cross between the gelatinous rust remover used at paint & body shops & a hoof rasp. I felt like Ben Stiller in Mystery Men as Captain Furious..." heart rate rising...blood pressure increasing...skin temperature approaching the surface of the sun". OMG...WTF...this @#% burns. If I have any skin cancer it is now gone...along with every wrinkle...blemish & any distinguishing scars. The rumbling starts again...now Beth can hear it...I think about saying "safety". My mind is rapidly working on the physics...the open flame...how far from my ass to the candle & back to the volatile liquid on my face. This is going to be really bad. My mind is replaying video clips from those disaster movies where the fireball blows out all the windows. I think Cruella figures this out & they both bolt for the door...the concentration on my face evident…the sphincter gives up… the volcano erupts...how do you say "safety” in Spanish? Beth is convulsing under her towel (laughter or convulsions from toxic gas?) & in the distance there is snickering on the other side of the door with a Spanish accent. I have Beth check my face...not sure if she will recognize me...I feel like a burn victim. We get dressed & they are waiting for us on the other side of the door. They are very concerned when we go to walk back to the room " you are very hot...perhaps sick" (I’m sure my face looks like a tomato) they wrap us in towels ...I want to tell him that Dr Mengela just deep fried my face, of course I'm hot... he wants to come with us & use an umbrella so we don't get wet...but we wave him off welcoming the cool rain on my face as we return to our room, where the numbing anesthetic qualities of coconut rum awaits. Tonight for dinner...you guessed it...gallo pinto!” Another example of Murphy’s sense of humor was operation devil cat. We have 1 very strange cat that Dani feels has taken to stalking her. I don't know if Dani started it by expressing this concern or Murphy started the anxiety by putting the cat in Dani's room every time she left it even for a minute or 2. She kept complaining that she was shutting her door & it would remain shut but still the cat was getting in. Murphy kept telling her about the air-ducts in her closet & the space under the door & she would diligently check these sources of entry & try to rule them out. But still every time she went into her room that cat was sitting on her pillow staring at her. Amazingly enough Murphy who has never kept a secret in his life pulled this one off for 2 months before telling Alan & letting the proverbial cat out of the bag!
Polly runs cross-country, plays soccer, & runs track. She was diagnosed with painful bipartite patellas but the good news was that it wouldn’t cause further damage to run through the pain & so she does (ignoring my suggestion that a weekend warrior lifestyle might be better for her than the intense 7 days a week of training required in high school sports). Last fall, after winning the Celeste Hampton award for Outstanding Character in cross country (reported last year), she won it again for soccer in January & so got 2 Celeste Hamptons in 1 school year which is a huge accomplishment & quite unusual according to my sister Catherine (whose daughter Katie did it the year before!) Polly is a diligent student & hopes to follow her folk’s footsteps to & through vet school. She is off to a good start & so far this year has nursed a baby turtle attacked by birds, the minnows she caught to feed the turtle so it could be released into the wild knowing how to forage for itself (the turtle has refused to eat the minnows & they are now named & additional pets), a crow missing some feathers so it can't fly, 4 squirrels, & a flying squirrel as well as Fou & Momo (her dogs), Feisty (her Leopard Gecko), & Todd (her hamster). Alan says she’s Polly Mae hanging out by the cement pond with all her critters. Polly works Saturdays at Parkway bathing animals, cleaning cages, walking dogs, sweeping, mopping, & (her favorite) poop patrol! She loves it & was tickled pink when she reported to me 2 weeks ago that she got a raise (no longer paid by the pile)!
Mac played football this year & is wrestling now. He loves both but I cringe every time I watch him wrestle. I am much happier when we have a schedule conflict & Alan watches the wrestling & I attend whatever soccer game is in progress. Last year Mac was the smallest wrestler on the middle school team & the biggest wrestler was also a redhead named Mac. The larger Mac was called Big Mac & my Mac was dubbed Happy Meal! Mac got into the end of a football game this fall & had the longest run from scrimmage against archrival Bolles (probably because no one could see him until he broke into the open because he is also the shortest player on the football team). After the play I heard over the loud speaker “and there goes Mac ‘Happy Meal’ Weldon with a nice 15 yard run!” Turns out Big Macs’ dad was announcing the game. Mac is an avid reader (all except Murphy are) & a great student (when he hands his homework in). He says he wants to go to MIT but I explained that might be a problem since they require you to turn in assignments there. While helping Alan clean out mom’s office as a new years resolution (untouched for over 20 years) Alan found a box and (for some reason) showed it to Mac. It contained a pneumatic “male enhancer” in his best Austin Powers voice Mac said “ honestly, baby…it’s not mine!” Mom claims dads brother gave it to him! Mac continues to observe the world in his unique manner. He was selected with 2 classmates to be on the cover of the Episcopal magazine & complained because his teacher insisted that he comb his hair before the photo was taken. He objected on the grounds that it was not “his style” to comb his hair and that his Dad says, “it doesn’t matter how it looks as long as it sticks to your head”. Fortunately the teacher prevailed! As always, God has truly smiled on the Weldon’s…. Have a Happy New Year & God Bless! Alan, Beth, Sarah, Dani, Murphy, Polly, and Happy Meal!
P.S. Sarah just got into Washington University and is ecstatic! Alan said I should point out that is why the font is so small as we are trying to save on postage for tuition!

There is no such thing as West Nile Virus...What an IDIOT

2008-11-18T18:32:00.000-08:00

Here is an interesting ....wrong word....idiotic article that was recently published called "There is no such thing as West Nile Virus" . The AAEP sage Dr David Ramey found this and posted it on the AAEP list serve. The author" Ramiel Nagel is an alternative medicine author devoting his time towards helping free the world of disease consciousness." It seems Mr Nagel is a full on member of the Tin foil hat society and black helicopter conspiracy group equating West Nile Virus with the easter bunny and santa Claus.....and all caused by evil drug/pesticide companies. "Pesticide manufacturers, pharmaceutical giants, the U.S. government, industry scientists, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), State and County government agencies believe in their own fairy tales. But they find those children's stories too boring and too happy. They wanted something dark and sinister. So they rewrote the fairytale and thought of some scary name that evokes fear of the unknown: "West Nile Virus". As Dr ramey points out.....just what was it that was killing all of those horses. Nagel is of the opinion that all disease is cause by environmental sources and not by "germs". While there are diseases caused by environment toxins to be sure, but to say that bacteria and viruses are not pathogenic is positively medieval in thinking. He even thinks that viruses have not been identified "West Nile Virus is not the only virus to never have been truly isolated. HIV, the virus believed to cause AIDS, also does not exist." There have been many electron microscopic images taken of pathogenic viruses over the years...here are two photos. His argument is that these bugs just show up after the body has been damaged by diet or environmental sources.....what a coincidence. If you can inject WNV into an animal and the animal develops the disease...well.....I guess to us stupid scientists that would be a clue. Here I go again...being a heretic and blasphemer.....I can't wait to hear from all of those Holistic, 3rd world medicine, flat earth society types...I can hear it now..."Burn him, Liar..unbeliever". As I have said over and over...it have to be evidence based and follow the scientific method. Oh and for Mr Nagel's daughter...brush your teeth, it's the Strep that's causing your cavities. Tell this guy there is no West Nile Virus

Horses on the Beach

2008-11-11T05:53:00.000-08:00

I was listening to Bill Bennett this morning and he said he didn't think horses would just walk on the beach......YES they do on Cumberland Island Ga.

Parasites and "Dewormers"....something new

2008-11-05T14:32:00.000-08:00

Treating horses for parasites has been a staple of barn management since...oh I guess, forever. People have put just about any toxic substance into their horse to "git rid of worms". Virtually all of my clients use some form of rotational system whereby they use different products every 4-8 weeks thinking they are preventing drug resistance. "Unfortunately , parasites have risen to the chemical challenge. Anthelmintic resistant cyathostomes (small strongles) now are highly prevalent and even where drugs still are effective , the egg reappearance rate ERP following treatment has become significantly shorter"." Today horse owners continue to follow recommendations that are based on knowledge that is 30-40 years old and frequently use anthelmintics that have become totally ineffective due to the presence of drug-resistant parasites" It has been know for a long time that most of the parasites on a farm are actually in the ground as eggs and larvae (about 90-95%) and only a small percentage
are really in the horse at one time , but what if most are in only 1 or 2 horses that are shedding most of the eggs. A new approach has been published recently and it really isn't that new , it's just looking at the horse population as individuals instead of the herd. This has been published by Dr Ray Kaplan at the Univ. of Georgia. What Dr Kaplan suggests is to treat each horse as an individual and do fecal egg counts on each. You then can identify which horses are the ones that are responsible for most of the egg shedding.
Once these are targeted you can concentrate more of your treatment on those that are the main problem instead of treating the entire herd as one. This study showed that on 40% of farms there was small strongyle drug resistance to fenbendazole(Panacur), oxibendazole(Anthelcide) and pyrantel pamoate (Strongid) meaning that on almost half of farms only one drug class is effective (avermectin/milbemycin) which has been around for 25 years. This is a very disturbing trend that should scare every horse owner. What the current plan is now is to treat the right horse with the right drug at the right time. The key to this is the FEC (fecal egg count) and the fact that not all horse are as susceptible to parasites as others. About 20-30% of horses harbor about 80% of the worms and shed almost all of the eggs. We have to identify these horses to be successful. The current protocol in North Florida is as follows

SEPT 1 Fecal Egg Count
Treat all horses
Start treatment on all horses( regardless of FEC)
Ivermectin or Moxidectin with praziquantel for tapeworms
based on FEC you can categorize your horse as
Low<200>500 epg

NOV 1
Only if treated with ivermectin. If Moxidectin then wait until December to treat again
FEC on all horse >150epg

DEC 1
treat all horses regardless of FEC
ivermectin or Moxidectin plus praziquantel
FEC on all horses

FEB 1
Based on FEC,Treat if Ivermectin used in DEC, if moxidectin used then wait until

MAR 1
Based on FEC, only treat horses with FEC >150 epg or has been a high shedder.
treat if using Moxidectin , treat horses as for FEB with FEC >150 epg

APR 1
based on FEC, only horses with >150 epg

MAY-SEPT
No need to treat during the summer months unless obvious parasite issue presents on a case by case basis.
To hot for transmission, most worm eggs will not survive and develop L3 form and these will die rapidly.

As you can see the real key is doing fecal exams on the horses regularly to see which horses need treatment instead of just treating every month or so and actually promoting resistance. Not to mention the money wasted on dewormers that either are not needed or not effective. I really think this is the way to go and will be sending out info to every owner in the practice. I think we can cut down on the incidence of colic substantially by just monitoring the parasite loads these horses carry.

He wants the White House Now....the video

2008-10-24T20:11:00.000-07:00

My brother Doug must have way to much time on his hands. He put together a political video take off of Brother where art thou. I think it's really funny.....good voice to.

Asteroid tracking...accurately.

2008-10-08T17:34:00.000-07:00

It appears that we have gotten much better at predicting when and where asteroids will impact on the Earth. A fairly large one just exploded over the Sudan recently and it was tracked and the impact was predicted by experts and several amateurs as well. From the Honolulu Star Bulletin
"

Asteroids routinely hit the Earth's atmosphere but the impact by one over northern Africa Monday was the first time astronomers saw one coming and accurately predicted the time and place it would hit, a University of Hawaii astronomer said yesterday.

That successful prediction bodes well for a Maui-based system in development to warn against potentially hazardous space rocks, David Tholen said.

The impact occurred at 4:46 p.m. Hawaii time Monday over northern Sudan. A colleague compared the asteroid, called 2008 TC3, with the size of a Volkswagen, he said."

These hit the upper atmosphere all the time but there is always the possibility that a really big one could be coming our way and it's good to know when and where. It doesn't chjange the fact that there isn't much we can do about it but tracking them is a good start.

Tholen said more than 500 observations were made of the asteroid approaching Earth by astronomers all over the world, primarily in Europe and western Asia.

"It was the first opportunity to really test the whole impact-prediction software system on a real object," he said, adding that it was 100 percent accurate.

There was one report of a visual sighting by a KLM Airlines pilot, but it was far from the impact location and merely saw "a streak of light," he said."

"These things happen every month or two and most of the time just go unnoticed, except people on the ground who see the fireball," Tholen said. "This time, astronomers saw it first and could predict the fireball. It was unique."

Suspensory Ligament injury-Treatment with PRP

2008-09-19T19:05:00.000-07:00

In the past, an injury to your horses suspensory ligament frequently meant the end to their athletic career. Treatment consisted of enforced rest and anti-inflammatory medications, sometimes for a year with inconsistent results. In the last few years several newer treatment modalities have been developed to treat tendon/ligament injuries in the horse. Extra corporeal shock wave treatment and Stem-cell implantation have been the most popular. Recently a newer
treatment called PRP for Platelet Rich Plasma has been developed. PRP has been found to contain the following growth factors promoting tissue healing-

transforming growth factor beta (TGF-b)
platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF)
insulin-like growth factor (IGF)
vascular endothelial growth factors (VEGF)
epidermal growth factor (EGF)
fibroblast growth factor-2 (FGF-2)

Many of these factors have been shown to enhance one or more phases of osteogenesis. PDGF, EGF, and FGF-2 have been shown to stimulate proliferation of osteoblastic progenitors. TGF-b increases matrix synthesis (eg, type I collagen) in vitro and in vivo. Angiogenic factors, including VEGF and FGF-2, can potentially enhance early angiogenesis and revascularization, as suggested by a recent study examining blood vessel formation in large segmental defects in the tibias of rats treated with platelet-rich plasma (PRP).(from the American Association of Orthopedic Surgeons)
Using a sterile kit supplied by Vetcell Laboratories you use the horses own blood to harvest
platelets through a filter yielding about 8ml of PRP which can then be injected into the damaged
ligament. We also combine this treatment with several other modalities such as shock wave therapy to improve our outcome. It has yet to determined which if any of these treatments will be the best but thus far the PRP treated ones have shown a much improved sonographic appearance
Here are some clips of a sonogram showing needle placement and PRP injection in a suspensory
ligament high in the origin

The Horse Doctor

The Annual Weldon Christmas Letter

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Disaster preparedness for horse owners

Yet another "super bug"

Horse herpes outbreak forces rodeo queens to ride stick ponies - ksl.com

EHV-1, facts about the disease and the current outbreak

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Byron Kerns Survival School- more than I expected.

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Cumberland Island Ga. ( maybe the last time)

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The Pentagon Parade-great story

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Sniffer dog that went missing in action after Afghan battle is discovered safe and sound after 14 MONTHS lost in the desert

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