America
The first one dropped 70 cm. on Byron. (Which is a western suburb of London.)
The second one last night dumped another 30 cm on us!
That’s 100 cm’s folks!
OR, to put it in plain English………….., depending on the exact location you want to measure………………………, that’s between 3 and 4 FEET!
And it’s not even December yet!
HELP!
—————————————————
Brandi Glanville and Carlton Gebbia got flirty shopping for lingerie together on the Monday, Nov. 25 episode of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and a preview of next week’s episode suggests the two costars later make out.
(Your fearless reporter was invited to a “menage a trois” once …………….., that is, until I found out it was me and two other guys!)
———————————————————
Krystal Blais says she got a scare she’ll never forget.
The Montrealer had just finished washing a bag of grapes and was
about to feed them to her toddler, when she noticed a black spider
dangling from a stem of the fruit.
She looked closer, saw a red hourglass shape on the spider’s belly, and knew it was a black widow.
Blais screamed!
—————————————————–
A former bobsledder taking part in Russia‘s marathon Olympic torch relay ahead of next year’s Winter Games in Sochi briefly caught fire while carrying the flame in Siberia.
Homemade footage of the incident posted on Russian websites on Thursday showed the left sleeve of 2006 Turin Winter Games bobsleigh team member Pyotr Makarchuk bursting into flames from what appeared to be a leak in the torch.
“An assistant quickly put out the fire and gave the athlete a new uniform,” the news agency wrote from snow-covered Abakan.
(Another video captured on a phone camera earlier this month showed the flame exploding in the hands of a young woman who reports said had suffered minor burns.)
———————————————-
AND FINALLY: On this American Thanksgiving, we have a story for the good folks to the south of us!
Eric W. Sanderson is a senior conservation ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the author of “Terra Nova: The New World After Oil, Cars, and Suburbs” (Abrams, 2013) and “Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City” (Abrams, 2009). He contributed this article to LiveScience’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
As we tuck into our Thanksgiving feasts this week, let’s give thanks for the blessings of America.
Most Americans live in a house. Since World War II, America built over 90 million housing units, mostly in the suburban rings around cities. (Today 14 percent of existing homes stand vacant all year long.)
With houses came cars. 314 million Americans own over 253 million
cars. Nineteen percent of families own three or more vehicles. Americans
commute to work and drive to do our errands, collectively racking up
2.9 trillion vehicle-miles per year.
Cars drink oil. Oil was once fabulously cheap in America. The price of a gallon of gas actually dropped 40 cents on an inflation-adjusted basis between 1949 and 1970. Not so any more. Sure gas is cheaper today than last summer, but much more expensive than the halcyon times before 9/11.
Why dredge up all this ancient history on Thanksgiving ? Because cheap oil, cheap cars and cheap land within commuting distance of downtown generated American wealth
and power in the last century. It was a great blessing. We won the Cold War. We ate a lot of turkeys.
But if the oil-car-suburbs economy worked for the Baby Boom generation, it’s destroying the country now. Our current way of living is a trap, a siren song, calling us deeper and deeper into economic, environmental and social peril.
Sprawling suburbs make people drive. Cars depend on oil, which is no longer cheap — financially or ecologically. The necessity of obtaining oil, whether from the Middle East or Canadian tar sands or deep water horizons, brings us terrible things: wars, terrorism, climate change, broken landscapes and polluted shores.
We need to seek solutions for our children rather than from their grandparents.
Nature provides many blessings. In America, we assume them, we don’t cherish them, at least when it comes to our economy. The way to make nature matter to the economy is to shift taxes off of income and sales and onto natural-resource use and waste instead. The more resources you use, and the more waste you create, the more you pay. I call these gate duties. They stand at the gate between the economy and the rest of nature.
Gate duties will help us rebuild America’s towns and cities. Everyone deserves a great town to live in, with enough people in a place to make jobs and wealth for young and old talent. Manhattan-like density is not required, but more density than most suburbs have is. Urban America will lead the economy of the future with innovation
that rises from working together. [Urbanization Can Actually Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Op-Ed)]
Density also frees people to move in different ways. It is a blessing to walk or bike to work. Bicycling is the fastest growing transportation mode on the planet. Coupled with streetcar and light-rail systems — and eventually high speed trains — deployed on the public roadways, Americans can make cars optional for most trips, leaving what oil remains for intercontinental air travel and long-driving vacations, where there is no real alternative.
And having implemented a program of roads to rails, we can finally benefit from the massive, relatively unexploited, renewable energy resources of the nation. Gate duties will tip the economics toward renewables once all the costs of fossil fuels are added in. We can forget about oil wars and oil spills. We can act on climate change. Solar, wind , and geothermal sources — alongside efficient, pumped hydrologic storage — will supply the entire nation with energy for as long as the sun shines.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not
necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the
article was originally published on LiveScience.
http://www.livescience.com/41589-the-new-world-after-oil-cars-and-suburbs.html
The second one last night dumped another 30 cm on us!
That’s 100 cm’s folks!
OR, to put it in plain English………….., depending on the exact location you want to measure………………………, that’s between 3 and 4 FEET!
And it’s not even December yet!
HELP!
—————————————————
Been there, done that?Well, in Hollywood I guess nothing is out of bounds!
Brandi Glanville and Carlton Gebbia got flirty shopping for lingerie together on the Monday, Nov. 25 episode of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and a preview of next week’s episode suggests the two costars later make out.
Single mom Glanville, however, later clarified on her
blog that she won’t be engaging in a lesbian romance — because she’s
tried it before.
“As I have said before, I love beautiful women, and Carlton is one of them,” the 41-year-old ex-wife of Eddie Cibrian
wrote on her Bravo blog of her new castmate, 40. “However, neither one
of us are lesbians. I have actually tried to be, but it just didn’t work
out for me. I can’t speak to Carlton’s experiences, because I honestly
have no idea what they have been. As you can tell, I am easily
distracted by lingerie. In fact, I’m quite obsessed with it and all
other things sexy and girly.(Your fearless reporter was invited to a “menage a trois” once …………….., that is, until I found out it was me and two other guys!)
———————————————————
Krystal Blais says she got a scare she’ll never forget.
The Montrealer had just finished washing a bag of grapes and was
about to feed them to her toddler, when she noticed a black spider
dangling from a stem of the fruit.She looked closer, saw a red hourglass shape on the spider’s belly, and knew it was a black widow.
Blais screamed!
—————————————————–
Homemade footage of the incident posted on Russian websites on Thursday showed the left sleeve of 2006 Turin Winter Games bobsleigh team member Pyotr Makarchuk bursting into flames from what appeared to be a leak in the torch.(Another video captured on a phone camera earlier this month showed the flame exploding in the hands of a young woman who reports said had suffered minor burns.)
———————————————-
AND FINALLY: On this American Thanksgiving, we have a story for the good folks to the south of us!
Eric W. Sanderson is a senior conservation ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the author of “Terra Nova: The New World After Oil, Cars, and Suburbs” (Abrams, 2013) and “Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City” (Abrams, 2009). He contributed this article to LiveScience’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
As we tuck into our Thanksgiving feasts this week, let’s give thanks for the blessings of America.Most Americans live in a house. Since World War II, America built over 90 million housing units, mostly in the suburban rings around cities. (Today 14 percent of existing homes stand vacant all year long.)
Cars drink oil. Oil was once fabulously cheap in America. The price of a gallon of gas actually dropped 40 cents on an inflation-adjusted basis between 1949 and 1970. Not so any more. Sure gas is cheaper today than last summer, but much more expensive than the halcyon times before 9/11.
and power in the last century. It was a great blessing. We won the Cold War. We ate a lot of turkeys.
But if the oil-car-suburbs economy worked for the Baby Boom generation, it’s destroying the country now. Our current way of living is a trap, a siren song, calling us deeper and deeper into economic, environmental and social peril.
Sprawling suburbs make people drive. Cars depend on oil, which is no longer cheap — financially or ecologically. The necessity of obtaining oil, whether from the Middle East or Canadian tar sands or deep water horizons, brings us terrible things: wars, terrorism, climate change, broken landscapes and polluted shores.
Nature provides many blessings. In America, we assume them, we don’t cherish them, at least when it comes to our economy. The way to make nature matter to the economy is to shift taxes off of income and sales and onto natural-resource use and waste instead. The more resources you use, and the more waste you create, the more you pay. I call these gate duties. They stand at the gate between the economy and the rest of nature.
Gate duties will help us rebuild America’s towns and cities. Everyone deserves a great town to live in, with enough people in a place to make jobs and wealth for young and old talent. Manhattan-like density is not required, but more density than most suburbs have is. Urban America will lead the economy of the future with innovation
that rises from working together. [Urbanization Can Actually Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Op-Ed)]
Density also frees people to move in different ways. It is a blessing to walk or bike to work. Bicycling is the fastest growing transportation mode on the planet. Coupled with streetcar and light-rail systems — and eventually high speed trains — deployed on the public roadways, Americans can make cars optional for most trips, leaving what oil remains for intercontinental air travel and long-driving vacations, where there is no real alternative.
And having implemented a program of roads to rails, we can finally benefit from the massive, relatively unexploited, renewable energy resources of the nation. Gate duties will tip the economics toward renewables once all the costs of fossil fuels are added in. We can forget about oil wars and oil spills. We can act on climate change. Solar, wind , and geothermal sources — alongside efficient, pumped hydrologic storage — will supply the entire nation with energy for as long as the sun shines.
http://www.livescience.com/41589-the-new-world-after-oil-cars-and-suburbs.html
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