Head 'Em Up, Move 'Em Out!

How to become an oyster rancher and beat taxes

If you want to help clean up the Chesapeake Bay and you're fond of oysters, there's a program you should know about.

Buy a special float used to grow oysters on the water, and you can get all your money back in Maryland in the form of a state tax credit.  If you own a home on the water you can place the float under your dock and the growing oysters will naturally filter the water, improving its quality. If you don't have waterfront property, no worries -- you can still become an oyster "rancher".

Buy a float for $250 from Circle C Oyster Ranch in Southern Maryland and they will raise the oysters for you at their place along St. Jerome Creek in St. Mary's County.

Another advantage to buying a float from Circle C: You own the oysters. You can donate them to an oyster sanctuary, or eventually eat them.

Several of my friend have these floating oyster homes, and they do work.  Oysters in them grow faster than oysters on the bottom, often reaching the legal minimum of 3 inches in one year, compared to three or more for "wild" oysters on natural bottom.

Richard Pelz, the ranch's founder, says he has customers who live a good distance away, like in Bethesda and north of Baltimore. He says some will carpool together to go pick up their oysters from Circle C for eating.

"Each float will produce about a bushel and a half, and if we're taking care of it, that's what we do is we give you a bushel and a half of oysters when you want them," Pelz says.

In addition to helping oysters, Pelz says crabs are fond of the floats as well. "They feed on the growth that's on it, they hide on them, there's pockets on top that they can get into where they can mate and molt," Pelz says.

Blue Crabs love oysters as much or more than people.  If a crab get into the cage naturally, and then moults to a larger size it might find itself stuck with nothing to eat but oysters.  Oh, the horror!  A single crab can wipe out the population of a float if it doesn't get found and removed.

This program doesn't really appeal to me.  I don't think I'd want to eat oysters grown in my harbor with the live aboard sail boaters, and as far as the benefit to the Bay, you might as well try to empty it with a teaspoon. 

But if you want to try it, just for fun, for education, or for good eating, go for it!

Don't Mess With the Dress

I thank Wombat-Socho for helping to drive traffic my direction with his Rule 5 roundup at The Other McCain, "All Over But the Crying."

Watch the Birdie

Watch for the bird...



Josh Williams sings Mark Mathewson's Mordecai at the Doyle Lawson Bluegrass Festival at Denton Farm Park in Denton, NC on May 5, 2011.

Found at Theo's.

RIP Doc Watson

Doc Watson dies at 89

Doc Watson, the blind Grammy-award winning folk musician whose mountain-rooted sound was embraced by generations and whose lightning-fast style of flatpicking influenced guitarists around the world, died Tuesday at a North Carolina hospital, according to a hospital spokeswoman and his manager. He was 89.

Watson died at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, where he was hospitalized recently after falling at his home in Deep Gap, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He underwent abdominal surgery while in the hospital and had been in critical condition for several days.

Doc and a couple of lesser known guitarists....

Sorry I didn't get to see you live.

Elizabeth Warren's Recipes: Also Not Indian

Dining Out on Dubious Identity

In recent weeks, much hay has been made of Elizabeth Warren’s claim to an American Indian background, in favor of which proposition the candidate has presented as evidence her mother’s stories, her family’s high cheekbones, and, perhaps most risibly, her contributions to the 1984 Pow Wow Chow cookbook. As yet, nobody seems to have picked up a copy of the volume and prepared any of the “Cherokee” meals that Warren submitted under her name. Intrigued by the prospect, I thought I’d do just that.

As an appetizer, I chose Warren’s recipe for “Mexican Oatmeal Soup.” Despite its name, this dish is somewhat geographically homeless, consisting mostly of chicken broth and a handful of other ingredients not associated with anywhere in particular. Thanks solely to the chopped tomatoes that float at the surface, there are a few dabs of color in the mix, but along with the somewhat egregious oatmeal that never quite becomes part of the whole, these are anomalous curiosities in what is essentially chicken-flavored water. It was a disappointing start.

For the entrée, I prepared another Warren contribution: the crab omelet with tomato mayonnaise dressing. Where exactly the Cherokee would have sourced either cognac or Worcestershire sauce — both key parts of the dressing — and at what point in their 6,000-plus-year history they elected to develop a line in mayonnaise remain unanswered questions. Still, French television chef and immigrant to the United States Pierre Franey, who originally wrote the recipe for the New York Times in the late 1970s, would likely not have run into much trouble on either count. Franey developed the omelet at Le Pavillon, a high-end French restaurant in New York City, and its fans included the likes of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Cole Porter. It appears that Elizabeth Warren simply copied the recipe word for word and substituted in her name.

Ah, plagiarism, the greatest academic crime imaginable; taking credit for someone else's work.

There is, however, little to indicate that crab was ever an Indian favorite — especially in landlocked Oklahoma or the territories where the Cherokee lived. There is some evidence that tribes in both Delaware and the Puget Sound area caught and ate the creatures, and the Cherokee and other peripatetic tribes may have eaten seafood when they traveled to meet with other groups in other parts of country during conferences, or “powwows.” But, other than that, crab is no more associated with the Cherokee than gumbo is with North Dakotans.

At least the tomato descends from a plant domesticated by the Aztec.So maybe the dish is  1/32 Indian after all.

Obama Appoints Anti-Nuclear Activist to Head NRC

Stop Mcfarlane!

Allison Macfarlane is the author of the book Uncertainty Underground: Yucca Mountain and the Nation’s High Level Nuclear Waste. This book, which is endorsed by antinuclear activist Victor Gilinsky, makes the absurd argument that rather than risk unknown consequences 10,000 years in the future should geological conditions affecting remote underground desert repositories change, that high level nuclear waste should continue to be stored in cooling ponds adjacent to nuclear power plants located near heavily populated urban and suburban areas. Thus for Macfarlane, as for Jaczko, the clear goal is to not to make nuclear power as safe as possible — which is the purpose of the NRC — but to make it as unsafe as possible — which is the agenda of those seeking to shut down the nuclear industry.

Macfarlane’s fundamental commitments are thus directly at odds with the purpose of the organization she is being nominated to lead. In addition, Macfarlane has no experience or education in engineering, and is also technically unqualified to lead an organization whose purpose is to intelligently regulate the nuclear industry.

Unicorn farts (wind, solar, biomass) have proven incapable of providing America the energy it needs, and yet President Obama seems to want to kill anything thing else.

Don't Forget Your TED!

If you crab in the Chesapeake Bay with crab pot you need a Turtle Excluder Device (TED)

"Putting turtle excluders in a crab pot is easy, inexpensive and every recreational crabber's responsibility," DNR secretary John Griffin said in a news release Thursday. "A properly equipped crab pot will catch crabs very efficiently without killing these terrific little turtles."

A turtle excluder, or Bycatch Reduction Device, keeps the larger-shelled terrapins out with the help of a gate. According to the DNR, noncommercial crab pot owners are required by law to have turtle excluders installed in each funnel entrance. Each pot also is required to be marked with the owner's name and address.

Two crab pots are allowed on each waterfront property as long as they are legally set in tributaries where the terrapins live. Commercial watermen can set them in deeper waters of the Chesapeake Bay.

Diamondback terrapins are not yet endangered as sea turtles are but have suffered over the years from a decline in water quality and loss of habitat.

"As denizens of the Chesapeake's beaches and shorelines, terrapins are particularly vulnerable to shoreline development and hardening," Jack Cover, National Aquarium curator, said in the DNR release. "People who live on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay and Maryland's coastal bays have the special privilege of setting crab pots. But with that comes the responsibility to take the simple steps to make their pots turtle-friendly. Nobody wants to find a drowned diamondback terrapin in their crab pot."

You can find instructions on how to install your TED here. Terrapins are much more common in the tributaries, where commercial fishermen use trotlines, which do not drown terrapins.  However, recreational pots, and certain other kinds of commercial fish trap still catch and drown terrapins in the tributaries. 

Until 2007 Maryland still had a commercial fishery for Diamond Back Terrapins, however, the fishery was declining, and was halted.

The history of the eating terrapin in Maryland and Virginia is pretty interesting.  Once they were so common they formed a staple in slaves diets on tobacco plantations; a wagon load could be purchased for $1, and slaves once rebelled against eating them.  Later, "turtle" soup came into vogue, and a new market developed.

What's the Worst That Could Happen?

United Nations’ Proposal To Regulate Internet Going Before House This Week 

It seems that everybody wants a hand in the massive cookie jar known as the Internet. The latest group that wants some form of control over the Internet is the United Nations. I don’t need to tell you how bad of an idea that is and it seems that our government finally agrees with the Internet on something.

The House of Representatives will be examining the proposal this week. According to The Hill, the UN backed proposal is already supported by China, Russia, Brazil and other countries that would benefit greatly from being able to control the Internet. If there’s one thing that we’ve learned, it’s that the U.S. hates it when foreign countries try to control the Internet.

Thankfully, our government doesn’t seem to like this proposed regulation. The Hill has found that a majority of congressmen from both sides of the political spectrum are against it. It would appear that the Obama administration is also not a fan of letting the UN’s International Telecommunication Union have more of a stake in the way the Internet is run.

Well, they could screw it up entirely.

It's promising that our Congress is not yet on board with this power grab, but I'm sure with some pot-sweetening from the UN, they can be brought around.  The natural inclination of legislators is to bring things under their own control (that way you can collect the baksheesh, and you have lots of supplicants).

Sorry Charlie

We don't want radioactive tuna!

Radioactive bluefin tuna crossed the Pacific to US

Across the vast Pacific, the mighty bluefin tuna carried radioactive contamination that leaked from Japan's crippled nuclear plant to the shores of the United States 6,000 miles away — the first time a huge migrating fish has been shown to carry radioactivity such a distance.

"We were frankly kind of startled," said Nicholas Fisher, one of the researchers reporting the findings online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The levels of radioactive cesium were 10 times higher than the amount measured in tuna off the California coast in previous years. But even so, that's still far below safe-to-eat limits set by the U.S. and Japanese governments.

Previously, smaller fish and plankton were found with elevated levels of radiation in Japanese waters after a magnitude-9 earthquake in March 2011 triggered a tsunami that badly damaged the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors.

But scientists did not expect the nuclear fallout to linger in huge fish that sail the world because such fish can metabolize and shed radioactive substances.

I'm not surprised that some cesium (Cs) survived the trip across the ocean in tuna.  The biological half-life of Cs is estimated to be on the the order of weeks to months, and it take approximately 10 half-lives for a substance to vanish below detection due to such a depuration process.  Moreover, it's likely that the loss kinetics are multiphasic, with the loss half time being estimated on the the fastest phase.  Some Cs incorporated in more slowly exchanging pools will likely remain.

Actually, I remain unconcerned about the radioactive Cs in Pacific tuna.  Besides the fact that Georgia would never buy expensive, large Blue Fin Tuna, I have had enough experience with radioactivity analysis to know that it's incredibly sensitive, and it required heavy shielding and careful background correction to find the signal in the fish.

Found a Neighbor in the Garden Today

 A Black Rat Snake, Elaphe obsoleta.  I was preparing to mow the yard, and I found his tail sticking out of the weeds into the lawn.  One of our biggest local snakes (they can reach 8 ft in length), they are nonvenomous, and good for getting rid of unwanted rodents and other vermin.  This one was only around 4 ft long.












They are also excellent climbers, and are known to prey on birds and squirrels. We have found cast off skins from much bigger snakes than this one in our basement, where at least one sneaks in occasionally. 

Memorial Day at the Beach

If Memorial Day does mark the beginning of Summer, today was a fine example of that.  Clear and calm, with temperatures up to 80 at 9:30 AM and rising, and enough humidity to be noticeable but not oppressive.

We ran into a guy with a couple of dogs; he thought they'd be friendly, but an adolescent male violated Skye's  sense of propriety, and we had to pull them apart.  No blood was spilled but a little snarling and yapping caused us to separate them again.

 A crabber working in close to shore.  No day off for him.

We met a couple, Dick and Cassie, from the Pittsburgh area, staying at the cottages, where they say they have stayed Memorial Days for 30 years.  Now, that's continuity.  We might have met 25 years ago then, because when Georgia and I and the kids moved to Maryland on June 1, 1985 , we stayed at the cottages for several weeks, until we could move into our house.

Just so Joel won't feel the Red is being slighted... Despite being raised as a pet dog, and not a working dog, Red still has that retriever spirit.  Skye, on the other hand, figures if you throw it, you must not want it back.

By the time we were through with the walk, the activity level on the beach was starting to pick up a lot. Gonna be hopping later this afternoon.

Zombie Apocalypse Reignites in Florida

Miami Police Shoot, Kill Man Eating Another Man’s Face

MIAMI (CBSMiami) – Miami police are still tight-lipped about the man they shot and killed on the MacArthur Causeway Saturday afternoon, but new details back claims they had no choice: the naked man they shot was trying to chew the face off another naked man, and refused to obey police orders to stop his grisly meal, which one source now claims included his victim’s nose and eyeballs.

Surveillance video taken from security cameras at the nearby Miami Herald building show a police officer arrive on the scene, appear to be startled by the spectacle of two naked men lying on the street, and draw his service weapon. It appears that the officer shot one of the men, but it was difficult to tell in the video.

I was afraid this might happen, after the recent aborted zombie outbreak in Pennsylvania.

The bizarre shooting happened shortly after 2 p.m., when police responded to a 911 call about two naked men fighting on a bike path along the Causeway, which was packed with traffic on a busy holiday weekend.

Miami police have not confirmed the details of what happened next, but sources close to the investigation told CBS4 News that officers found one man gnawing on the face of another, in what one police source called the most gruesome thing he’d ever seen.

I suspect it's being spread around the country by the #Occupy movement.

The fight was taking place at the causeway exit near the Miami Herald building, and amazed officers tried to stop it, ordering the man making a meal out of the other man to stop.

Miami police have not confirmed the details of what happened next, but sources close to the investigation told CBS4 News that officers found one man gnawing on the face of another, in what one police source called the most gruesome thing he’d ever seen.

I hope they handle the bodies carefully; we don't really know how contagious this is.

The fight was taking place at the causeway exit near the Miami Herald building, and amazed officers tried to stop it, ordering the man making a meal out of the other man to stop.

Armando Aguilar, who heads the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, said he has spoken with the officer who responded. Aguilar said the officer saw what the man was doing, and ordered him to stop. He said the man growled at the officer, and then returned to his meal.

Sound like classic Hollywood George Romero zombie infection, not the Haitian original drug-induced, undead zombie

Aguilar said the man ate his victim’s nose and eyeballs.

The officer then used his service weapon and shot the man, Aguilar said, but the gunshot had no effect.

Other sources confirmed that the man refused to obey, and continued his attack. Aguilar said the officer had no choice but to keep shooting until the attacker was dead.

Investigators sharing limited details about the confrontation, saying only that the two men were fighting and the officers felt they had no choice but to take deadly force.

Time to prepare.

Hey, what fun is death if you can't laugh at it?

I thank Wombat-Socho for helping to drive traffic my direction with his Rule 5 roundup at The Other McCain, "All Over But the Crying."

Beach Report 5/27/12

Another great morning at the beach.  A bit warmer than yesterday, on it's way up to 90 F this afternoon, but quite pleasant at 9 AM.  We left Georgia behind this morning to tend to some business, and met Joel a little early to get an early start on a trip up the road.

Poor Red; he picked up a fish hook in his lip with some bait yesterday after we left, and got a trip to the vet as payback, but he was looking OK this morning.


Some Daylilies escaped from captivity into the area behind the dunes.

A wild Ginger sighting.  You do occasionally find them in the wild, but usually they hide from the sun due to their sensitive skins and lack of souls.

Come on in, Dad!  The water's fine!  It really is too.  It's warm enough to swim in now, it's about as clear as you're likely to find it here, and the jellyfish (Sea Nettles) have not started yet.

But some people were determined to work up a sweat anyway.

Others were working up a sweat retrieving driftwood for some kind of artsy project.

Fishing out on the end of the jetty.  I don't know if anything was caught (I didn't see anything come up) but it's time for Croakers and Spot to start appearing near the beach.

Come On Baby, Light My Fire

Beach rocks erupt into flame in woman's pocket

The case of an Orange County woman severely burned after rocks collected last weekend from San Onofre State Beach ignited in her pocket has puzzled scientists, who say they've never seen anything like it and aren't quite sure how it happened.

"It's pretty implausible," said Larry Overman, a professor of chemistry at UC Irvine.

The 43-year-old San Clemente woman, who remained hospitalized Thursday with second- and third-degree burns, visited the northern San Diego County beach last Saturday with her family, authorities said. Her name has not been released.

Her children collected rocks, including two that were distinctive — one was large and a marbled gray; the other much smaller and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle green.

Both of the beach stones were streaked and flecked with bright orange.

The mother put the rocks in her right pocket and went home. Then they suddenly ignited.

Witnesses reported seeing flames coming from her shorts. She had second- and third-degree burns from her right knee to her right thigh, with second-degree burns on her hands. Her husband also had burns on his hands from trying to help her.

I regard this as a real problem; random beach rocks bursting into flame in someone's pockets?  It could happen to anyone! More to the point, it could happen to me, as I often have random beach rocks in my pockets.  We need a federal investigation!  So what happened?

The Orange County Health Care Agency examined the two rocks, and tests revealed a "phosphorous substance" on the rocks, which now have been sent to a state laboratory for further testing, said Tricia Landquist, an agency spokeswoman.

That discovery, however, has only added to the mystery.

Scientists wondered: How does a chemical like phosphorus wind up on a Southern California beach? And why did a substance so volatile not burst into flames sooner?

"I can't think of a scenario of chemicals on the beach that would have the properties that are described," Overman said.

Andrew Borovik, also a chemistry professor at UCI, had similar doubts. He said that phosphorus — which is typically kept in a controlled setting and stored in water — could indeed ignite when air touches it. But he was unsure how the phosphorous substance could be part of a rock.

"I don't know if it exists just sitting around on the beach," Borovik said. "It just seems unlikely."

James Earthman, a professor of chemical engineering and material science at UC Irvine, had a few possibilities: The inorganic chemical could have come from a passing ship or from nearby Camp Pendleton. And the reason for the delayed combustion could be because the rocks were still wet and didn't ignite until they were dry — and, he noted, we don't know what else could have been in the woman's pockets.

Hmm.  My theory (FWIW) is that they picked up a piece of wet (and therefore non reactive) white or red phosphorous remaining from from a shell at Camp Pendleton, which ignited the cloth in her shorts.  There's probably nothing left of the original piece of phosphorous, but the residue on the other rocks.  The orange looks like rust to me; maybe some reaction involving some metal object in her pocket as well.

A Four Beer Appetizer

More Japanese Weirdness



The second guy seems to have a better grasp of the problem.

Judge Sentences Honor Student to Jail for Skipping Class

A Texas judge threw an 11th-grade honors student in jail for repeatedly missing school in the hope that he could make an example of her.

Diane Tran, 17, works two jobs while taking dual-credit and advanced placement classes at Willis High School in Willis, Texas, KHOU-TV reported. Her parents divorced and moved away, leaving her to support an older brother at Texas A&M University and a baby sister who lives with relatives. She lives with the family of one of her employers, the owners of a wedding venue.

Tran told KHOU she doesn’t want to miss school, but is so exhausted sometimes that she can’t make it to her morning classes before attendance is taken. Other times she even ends up missing the day entirely.

“She goes from job to job, from school she stays up ’til 7 o’clock in the morning doing her homework,” Tran’s friend Devin Hill told the station.

Judge Lanny Moriarty warned Tran back in April not to miss any more school; when she missed again last week, he issued a summons and had her arrested in open court Wednesday. Tran was sentenced to a night in jail and ordered to pay a $100 fine.

“If you let one (truant student) run loose, what are you gonna’ do with the rest of ‘em? Let them go too?” Moriarty asked.

He admitted to KHOU after the fact that he didn‘t know the full circumstances of Tran’s situation. He said he might work to have the arrest removed from her record, where it would otherwise remain.

This is just insane.  I'll bet there are literally hundreds of under-performing students at the same school, skipping classes routinely, and the teachers and administration have just written them off.

This judge needs a stint in jail the next time he's late for anything.  Remember, overwork or need for sleep is no excuse.

Gregg Allman Dreams Again

Legendary Rocker Announces Engagement to 24-year-old Girlfriend

Gregg Allman, a Hall of Fame Rock and Roller and founding member of the Allman Brothers Band, is getting married for the seventh time.

Allman, who was married to singer Cher from 1975 to 1979, sat down on Piers Morgan Tonight on Tuesday and spilled the beans about his new fiance Shannon Williams, a girl 40 years his junior.

“This time, I am really in love,” the 64-year-old rocker told Morgan.

When 24-year-old Shannon was asked how she felt about becoming Allman’s seventh wife, Gregg quickly intervened, saying:

“That’s not what she’s becoming. She’s becoming wife number one. I don’t have a wife. Haven’t had one for years.”

Gregg Allman is generally credited with lyrics the song "Dreams", which he also sings:

Pedophile Defrocked Priest Takes Philly TSA Post

Priest Removed From Ministry Due To Sex Abuse Allegations Now Works At PHL

The CBS 3 I-Team has learned that a Catholic priest who was removed from the ministry over sex abuse allegations now holds a sensitive security post at Philadelphia International Airport.

The security checkpoint between Terminals D and E is a busy place where thousands of people – including lots of kids – pass through every day. But you might not believe who the I-Team observed working as a TSA supervisor at that checkpoint this week: Thomas Harkins.

Until 2002, Harkins was a Catholic priest working at churches across South Jersey. But the Diocese of Camden removed him from ministry because it found he sexually abused two young girls. Now, in a new lawsuit, a third woman is claiming she also is one of Harkins’ victims.

The I-Team asked Harkins about the suit as he was leaving his shift at the airport.

“I have nothing to say,” was Harkins’ reply.

I said this once before recently, but at the risk of being redundant, I'll say it again.  TSA must die.  The agency can show no effect on terrorism.  Terrorists keep getting caught anywhere but at TSA  check points.  It only serves to enormously complicate the process of flying, and employs a large number of people for the sole purpose of aggravating the flying public.

It's all just security theater to make you feel safer.  A helpful infographic here (source).

Oh My, What a Morning at the Beach

Oh my, what a morning!  Sunny, warm, but not too warm, not too humid and just the right amount of breeze.  Weather doesn't get any better than this.

Skye decided that these sun bathers needed checking out.













The water has warmed up to comfortable wading temperatures.  We waded around looking for shark's teeth, but it wasn't really good day for us.











However, Joel brought the big one he found last week for our viewing pleasure.  This is a once a year grade tooth, a fine specimen of what we call the extinct Mako, but which is likely a precursor to the modern Great White Shark.