John (bird whisperer)

"This curry is hearty without being overly heavy, and is packed with all kinds of good vitamins in an attempt to keep you healthy through cold and flu season. We ate this on its own, but a few pita chips or a side of naan wouldn’t be so bad, either. You can make this on a Sunday afternoon and have it for the week, or freeze it and thaw out portions as you see fit. All of the warm, autumnal flavors will be sure to lift your spirits this season." - John (bird whisperer)

*bump* - John (bird whisperer)

"Everyone gets mad. It happens. It’s human nature. But how we choose to express our anger is what defines us. Now, for the first time in history, you can express your anger in a safe and portable manner. We give you the Mini Flipping Table." - John (bird whisperer)

Want. - Brent Schaus

We were in Jasper, AB going to take train to Prince George, BC and during a bus tour in and around Jasper we came upon a large, full curl, Big Horn Sheep lying under a tree about a hundred yards from where the bus parked. I had to actually grab arm of a nice lady who was on her way to get a "close-up." Bus driver quickly explained about not tame and dangerous and stay far enough away. I'd like to blame Disney but nice lady was from big city and never saw an animal except in zoo. - WarLord

*bump* - John (bird whisperer)

#sunset - John (bird whisperer)

"No one has yet claimed ownership of a giant head found last week floating in the Hudson River, but we may have scooped the major news outlets on its possible origin. If you aren’t familiar with the story, a rowing crew from Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, found the 7-foot-tall, foam and fiberglass head damaged and adrift on April 22. The team’s coach considered the enormous, Greek-style noodle a water hazard and enlisted 10 students to haul it to shore. It’s since become a school attraction. Oddly, no one has seemed interested in retrieving the head. However, Weird NJ was quick to identify it from issue 12 of the magazine, published in 1999, in which a reader-submitted article placed the head in Bergen County, New Jersey" - John (bird whisperer)

Oh, man. I had totally forgotten about this. - Jennifer Dittrich

I'm gonna sex your moth (baybeh) - WoH: Professor MOTHRA

*bump* - John (bird whisperer)

"The TV program, on the topic of firewood, consisted mostly of people in parkas chatting and chopping in the woods and then eight hours of a fire burning in a fireplace. Yet no sooner had it begun, on prime time on Friday night, than the angry responses came pouring in. “We received about 60 text messages from people complaining about the stacking in the program,” said Lars Mytting, whose best-selling book “Solid Wood: All About Chopping, Drying and Stacking Wood — and the Soul of Wood-Burning” inspired the broadcast. “Fifty percent complained that the bark was facing up, and the rest complained that the bark was facing down.” He explained, “One thing that really divides Norway is bark.”" - John (bird whisperer)

Season 3 is awesome! - Eivind

"Goodreads and smaller similar sites are addressing what publishers call the “discoverability” problem: How do you guide consumers to books they might want to read? The digital age has created online retail sites that are overflowing with new books, leaving readers awash in unknown titles. At the same time the number of bookstores has shrunk considerably, depriving customers of the ability to browse or ask staff members for guidance. For a long time Amazon, the largest online bookseller, dominated the digital discovery zone through its book reviews, recommendations and displays on its home page. But Amazon has lost some trust among readers recently amid concerns that its reviews and recommendations can contain hidden agendas. The theory behind Goodreads and its two main — albeit much smaller — competitors, Shelfari and LibraryThing, is that people will put more faith in book recommendations from a social network they build themselves. Amazon was convinced enough by the concept that it bought Shelfari in 2008. It also owns a portion of LibraryThing as a result of purchasing companies that already owned a stake in the site. Goodreads members represent a small portion of all book buyers, and it is not immune from some of the politicking that goes on elsewhere — authors are not prevented from reviewing their own books, for instance. But advocates consider this acceptable because readers can choose their own reviewers. “Because Goodreads is not a publisher or retailer, people feel that the information is not getting manipulated,” said Amanda Close, who runs digital marketplace development for Random House. “People trust them because they are so crowd-sourced and their members are fanatics. You can’t buy a five-star review there.”" - John (bird whisperer)

*bump* - John (bird whisperer)

The strings did a really nice job with the accompaniment for this. - John (bird whisperer)

*bump* - John (bird whisperer)

This is four out of ten or so verses. - John (bird whisperer)

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*brakes squeal* - Spidra Webster

!!! <3 - felicious

"Are you grossed out by blue cheese? (I’m not, but I know many who are). Does that blue-green marbling of delicious fungus kind of make you gag? Well, this little factoid probably won’t help: there may be sex going on in that cheese. Until pretty recently, a big chunk of fungal species were thought to reproduce without sex–until people really started to look. It turns out, there’s a lot more sex going on in the fungal world (on the down-low) than people thought. And that includes fungi that are used to make delicious blue cheese. Jeanne Ropars and colleagues in France, the home of Roquefort cheese, looked at the genomes of the mold species used in this particular cheese to see what kind of funny business was going on in their snack of choice. They found much more diversity than could be explained by asexual reproduction. And even more telling, the genes used by fungi to find mating partners have been kept intact and functional by evolution, meaning there’s probably some sex going on." - John (bird whisperer)

Somewhat related? http://agapakis.com/cheese... plus crazy in-depth PDF here: http://agapakis.com/cheese.pdf - Meg VMeg

Much more sex! ;) - edythe

CHEESE - John (bird whisperer)

"On a sweltering afternoon on Staten Island, the New York City parks department unveiled its latest weapon in the war on phragmites, an invasive weed that chokes the shoreline: goats. Twenty Anglo-Nubians, to be exact. With names like Mozart, Haydn and Van Goat, and with floppy ears and plaintive bleats, they did not seem fearsome. But on Thursday they were already munching inexorably through the long pale leaves in the first phase of a wetland restoration at what will soon be Freshkills Park. Known for their unending, indiscriminate appetites, the goats are being rented by the city for the next six weeks from a farmer in the Hudson Valley. Parks officials are counting on the goats to clear the phragmites across two acres of wetlands that will eventually be cultivated with native grasses like spartina and black needle rush. The hope is that the goats will weaken the phragmites, setting the stage for another series of assaults on their stubborn rhizomes — applying herbicide, scarifying the earth and laying down sand. In the short term, the goats are part of an unusual experiment to eradicate the pesky reeds, which were introduced from Europe in the late 19th century and which, once rooted, are almost impossible to eliminate. They have fueled brush fires across the region and pushed out other species along the East Coast. But the farm animals are also being tested for their lawn-mowing prowess, especially at Freshkills Park, which is in transition from its former life as the world’s largest landfill to its future one — as the largest park to be developed in New York City in more than a century." - John (bird whisperer)

*bump* for a goat named Haydn - John (bird whisperer)

LOL - Jennifer Dittrich

It's spring/summer according to the John Clock! - Spidra Webster

*bump* - John (bird whisperer)

"Strader's employer, a branch of the federal Department of Agriculture called Wildlife Services, has long specialized in killing animals that are deemed a threat to agriculture, the public and – more recently – the environment. Since 2000, its employees have killed nearly a million coyotes, mostly in the West. They have destroyed millions of birds, from nonnative starlings to migratory shorebirds, along with a colorful menagerie of more than 300 other species, including black bears, beavers, porcupines, river otters, mountain lions and wolves. And in most cases, they have officially revealed little or no detail about where the creatures were killed, or why. But a Bee investigation has found the agency's practices to be indiscriminate, at odds with science, inhumane and sometimes illegal." - John (bird whisperer)

*bump for archiving* - John (bird whisperer)

"Thanks to my shamefully pathetic memory, I quickly forgot all of what I saw on the Serious Eats list and promptly started my own. It took all of two minutes to compile. And I sat and thought, and thought and thought, and I felt pretty happy with what I came up with; I truly can rattle off my 13 top favorites quite quickly. After looking back at the Serious Eats list, there was only one style of cheese that I think I missed on the list, and that'd be some sort of bloomy-rinded, brie-style cheese. Whoops. Think of this as a sort of CliffsNotes, a starting point for where to begin if you want to learn more about cheese. It's what I'd consider my desert island cheese list, that is, the not-to-be-missed essentials. (Though a desert island with a whopping selection of 13 cheeses sounds like anything but a desperate situation.) And take the list with a grain of salt. It's my for-what-it's-worth compilation of favorites after seven years of working with cheese. They're some of the cheeses that have blown my mind, and others that I just find essential to understand the varied span of styles that cheesemaking can cover. Realize, also, that this list is terribly subjective. But I have good taste, swear. Some are general styles—like Farmhouse Cheddar, or Fresh Goat Cheese—and some are specific cheeses that deserve their own mention." - John (bird whisperer)

CHEESE - John (bird whisperer)

And this. - John (bird whisperer)

Photos of a Kingbird eating a dragonfly. - John (bird whisperer)

The script I was using (scrape-ff) didn't use the API since it just paged through my feed and saved each individual page. The downside is that a lot of the metadata with each post was not preserved. At least that's my understanding of how it works. - John (bird whisperer)