techyum ::

Giving new meaning to the term “tipsy”, a female cattle rancher in British Columbia has been giving her cows red wine to drink during their final two months before becoming burgers, and turns out the cows love to party — and suffer no ill health effects while making the meat have a distinct flavor described to be like candy. The best part, besides knowing the cows get to have a two-month rager up to the inevitable moment of death, is that it apparently makes the cows happy and “chatty.” What I want to know is, what wines do they prefer? Would a posh BC cow drink Pinot Noir, while a Bakersfield Bessie hunker down in the field with a bottle of Boone’s Farm?

Snip:

(…) The idea of giving wine to cattle came to Ravndahl late last year during a TV food program that featured beer-swilling pigs. As the Okanagan is one of Canada’s premier wine regions, getting local beef on the bottle seemed like a good plan. Ravndahl said she started with one young cow who took to the bottle immediately, quickly earning the epithet Wino. “It definitely changes their personalities. They moo a lot more with each other. They get really chatty,” she said.

Trying to find the optimal time to serve the cows their wine course was vital to getting the best beef. They’ve determined 60 days produces a great taste in the beef. “At 90 days, the costs get a little out of control,” she said.

When cattle are fed wine, they’re reported to be much more social. (Janice Ravndahl, Lionel Trudel/Associated Press)The first bovine wine tasting was in April 2009 with the 21-day dry-aged beef first hitting the market in February 2010. “We just put it in a pail and said, ‘Who’s going to drink it?”‘ she said. “Wine has a very strong aroma. They were curious about it right away.”

The cattle get a litre-blend of red wines daily, but their preference is for sweeter vintages, she said. Ravndahl said the wine appears to make the steers more docile, which enhances the texture of the meat. “Cattle that are relaxed taste better,” she said. “You don’t want tense beef.” (…read more, cbc.ca, via Braincraft)

Image by SissiSvan.

…in print form, at least. The Telegraph is reporting that the next edition of the OED will probably not be published in print, “because of the impact of the internet on book sales.” It will continue to exist in online form, as it has for ten years.

An important distinction is that this is not the one-volume Oxford Dictionary of English, which is sold in many if not most bookstores. The 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary is considered the most definitive work on the English language, with complete etymology for all words. It was last published in 1989, and 80 lexicographers have been working on the next edition ever since. The next edition of the 20-volume OED is an estimated ten years from completion — as of now, it’s 28% finished.

Says the Telegraph:

Sales of the third edition of the vast tome have fallen due to the increasing popularity of online alternatives, according to its publisher.

The dictionary’s owner, Oxford University Press (OUP), said the impact of the internet means OED3 will probably appear only in electronic form…The most recent OED has existed online for more than a decade, where it receives two million hits a month from subscribers who pay an annual fee of £240.

“The print dictionary market is just disappearing, it is falling away by tens of per cent a year,” Nigel Portwood, the chief executive of OUP, told the Sunday Times.

Link.

It’s worth mentioning that the press will use this opportunity to once again sound the death knell of print publishing, based on shit data Amazon pulled out of its fragrant ass. It re-re-re-reported, as the media has been doing for months, Amazon’s report that ebooks outsell print books. This “fact” doesn’t take into account the fact that many of Amazon’s ebooks “sold” for the Kindle are free because they are public domain or sample chapters.

I could go hand out crack on the street, too, rather than selling it. I’d still go to prison if I got caught — but I’d never get myself a pink Jaguar that way. Get my point?

Outrage over new invasive airport searches, indeed. If nonconsensual genital prodding is your kick, then it’s time to fly the friendly skies. If you decide you don’t want to go through the “naked” X-ray scanner which lets everyone see your — everything (and you can only imagine what happens with the digital images), then you too may be able to delight in one of the few ways you can be fingerbanged in the name of homeland security: seductively named by the TSA as the “front-of-the-hand, slide-down technique.” Snip:

US officials are using “invasive and aggressive” searches for those who refuse to go through their controversial full body “naked” X-ray scanners. The “front-of-the-hand, slide-down technique” amounts to an indecent assault in any other context and shows an alarming disregard for privacy by the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA), civil libertarians say.

“People want to feel safe and secure when flying,” Civil Liberties Australia director Tim Vines said.
“And that includes feeling safe from the wandering hands of transport officials. The punishment for opting-out of an invasion of your privacy is an even greater invasion of your bodily integrity.”

(…) While the TSA says it has received “very few” formal complaints about the new search techniques, Mr Vines called for a halt to the procedure until they could reveal why it was needed. “The actions of the US TSA would amount to indecent assault if performed by anyone else in the community,” he said.

US passenger Rob Webster told the Boston Herald he found himself subject to the new search after refusing the scanner during a domestic flight. “It was extremely invasive,” Mr Webster said. ”This was a very probing-type touching. Not just patting over all your areas, but actually probing and pushing and seeing if I was concealing something in my genital area. If anybody ever groped me like that in real life, I would have punched them in their nose.”

The searches are being trialled at Boston’s Logan International Airport and McCarran ahead of a planned national rollout. After conducting a similar type of search in 2004 the TSA received hundreds of complaints of sexual harassment and abuse – including the “manhandling” of private areas. (…read more, news.com.au)

Loyola University Health System reported last week on Loyola University researchers’ discovery of a protein that appears to destroy HIV in rhesus monkeys. The team reports their findings in the September 15 edition of Virology, already available online.

Called TRIM5a, the protein occurs in humans in several variations, but for some reason humans’ TRIM5a doesn’t protect against HIV. TRIM5a consists of 500 amino acid subsets; the researchers identified 6 that seem to be important to inhibiting the virus. Study leader Edward M. Campbell, PhD, said that researching the action of those amino acid subsets could lead to genetically engineered TRIM5a that will stop HIV in humans, or synthetic drugs that mimic the simian TRIM5a’s action.

Notice how I didn’t even once say “HIV, the virus that causes AIDS” or “the HIV virus?” That cos I’m SMART.

Sometimes you run across stuff online, and you think to yourself, “Really? This is just sitting there for me to find it?” I don’t mean the meanstream media, though I often do have that experience of it. I mean stuff like the NASA image gallery, which is packed with the most amazing public domain images around, proof that our federal tax dollars aren’t just going to pay for lavish Illuminati bank executive parties on 747s and which, if you dig deep enough, hides some very strange stuff.

Take, for instance, this series of photos in the NASA image gallery that’s been cryptically captioned “Visit to Glenn Research Center by Author of a Book,” which made me assume we were talking about some fringe alien theorist or an obscure science fiction author who has a friend in the PR department–

–not so. The question in my mind is not so much “Why is former NASA engineer Homer Hickam too cool to hang out with any of the white people at NASA?” as it is “How many books get written about rocketry that the people hired to do the captions at NASA don’t recognize this guy?”

The former question, I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation for; the latter would be less troubling if in that last photo, Hickam wasn’t actually holding a copy of his #1 New York Times best-selling memoir Rocket Boys, on which the biographical film October Sky was based.

That look on his face says it all: “None of these people have the slightest idea who I am.” Been there, Homer. Been there indeed.

On August 24 the 30-day comment period opened for the proposed .XXX top-level domain. Until September 23, the public is invited to tell ICANN what they think. If you’re unfamiliar with the history and issues around .XXX, and the men who stand to profit from it (while exhibiting blatant disregard for the very serious problems it poses) please read Now Playing: .XXX. TLD Carpetbaggers Give New Meaning to “Drop and Snatch” (carnalnation.com).

After the jump you’ll find a sample email you can send to ICANN (with address).

In short, a few men with no ties to adult business or family groups have been trying for ten years to get ICANN to add .XXX to the selection of domain options — and they are already selling pre-registration at high prices. They scanned a list of rejected domain extensions and picked the one they could profit from the most. There has been no proof of support from any communities, despite their claims. Anti-porn organizations also oppose this. The men behind .XXX have continually skirted the issue that there is no single, universally accepted definition of adult content. There are huge security and global human rights concerns; meanwhile the men behind it are bragging to media about how much money they will make. (References.)

Please consider asking ICANN to make a responsible decision.

Read more…

Thursday August 26, The Washington Post ran an interview with FEMA’s Craig Fugate about the 5-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The interview was accompanied by a photo of Fugate in his office, with a caption explaining that Fugate “keeps his FEMA office sparse with Florida Gator mementos.” Perhaps no one except Techyum reader jeffmc happened to take a close look at the photo and notice a very interesting detail in the sparseness of the FEMA director’s office: a handy copy of the guidebook, THE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE: COMPLETE PROTECTION FROM THE LIVING DEAD.

I only regret that the WaPo article was answering reader questions, and no one had an opportunity to ask about just what kind of disaster Fugate is expecting next. Considering that the last director of FEMA, aka Brownie, would have a difficult time saving room for dessert, let alone save lives in the event of a disaster, this is oddly reassuring. Should America become besieged with an undead hoarde, we know at least one guy at the top has put serious thought into how to disseminate information to citizens on the proper way to smash a zombie skull. Or perhaps the title of the book is itself a revealing factor; maybe Fugate knows something we don’t. In any case, we know that when the eventuality of humanity’s battle with flesh-eating zombies comes to pass, one man has a plan.

(thanks, jeffmc!)

Japan is one of the few industrialized nations that still uses the death penalty, and they still execute prisoners by hanging. Mainichi Shimbun (or “The Mainichi Daily News,” one of Japan’s largest newspapers) says that reporters were allowed to view Tokyo’s execution chamber, one of the seven such facilities in the country, for the first time today.

The sterile-looking chamber has a trap door in the floor, with a room below into which the hanging condemned fall so they are not visible to observers as they die. Reporters did not see that chamber.

Keiko Chiba, Japan’s Justice Minister, decided to show the room to reporters after witnessing the execution of two prisoners. She said she wanted to spur a nationwide debate on whether the death penalty should exist in Japan and how executions should be performed.

Hanging is specified in the Japanese Penal Code as the method by which executions shall be performed, a practice that dates to the Meiji period (1868-1912).

The kind of spammy, bot-tastic Fashion Week News Twitter Account nonetheless guides me to exactly what I’ve been looking for all my life: a chance to make my lover smell like Princess Leia after she’d been kept in chains in a basement and licked by Jabba the Hutt a few thousand times.

The blog, which says the Slave Leia Fragrance and the Eau Lando fragrance were introduced by Genki Wear earlier this month at the Star Wars Celebration V, also hips me to the fact that they’re $39.99 each. Leia’s aroma”includes floral top notes of white peach, lily, bergamot, heliotrope and raspberry that dry down to a warm sultry mix of cashmere woods, musk and night-blooming jasmine.” Lando apparently smells like “a potent mix of mandarin warmed with incense and lotus flower, exotic woods, dark violet and sensuous musk.”

Look, I don’t know about this bergamot stuff or white peach or whatever; it’s all whale puke to me. All I know is that any chick with a fresh-baked pair of cinnamon buns on her head and the Hush Puppy of a left-wing Navy Seal is packed with so much sexy that whatever she smells like is positively anticoagulant in its deliciousness. If, like so many of your fellow humans, you spend a healthy percentage of your time trying to figure out how to tempt this correspondent into a satin-swathed King-Size of Sin, I’ll just go ahead and spill the secret: about forty-three spirtzes of Slave Leia Perfume — within hours I’ll be following you around with my lightsaber moaning like John Lee Hooker, you dig?

And as for the Essence of Lando? Well. Who could be sexier than Lando, right?

If you’ve got a .45 ACP Kimber Ultra Carry II in your pocket AND you’re glad to see me, you’re probably thinking what any responsible, healthy, socially-minded, red-blooded and heavily-armed adult is thinking: “Where can I, as a gun owner, find love?” Meaning other than the local roadhouse, of course, where it can cost up to $45 or $50 plus the cost of the Jack Daniels and the methamphetamine, which can get pretty steep lately, depending on the county.

The good news? Gun Lovers Passions is free. And let me tell you, does this site know a sexy come-on when it sees one or what!?!? Mas oui oui oui, mon petit chou!

Welcome to Gun Lovers Passions!

Like To Shoot Stuff?

Definitely starting off on the right foot! Though I’m not sure if they mean “stuff” as in “assault rifles” or “stuff” as in “squirrels and Democrats.” I’m pretty sure it’s the latter, but in any event, back to Gun Lovers Passions:

Read more…