Happy Martin Luther King Day!
Make it a day ON, not a day off.

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Happy Birthday, !

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Saw Big Fish with Danny last night...(Peter Pan started a smidgen too early) it was good, but I saw it maybe jut a little too soon after Ted passing away. It was quite enjoyable overall. I really didn't notice the score to the movie...which was supposedly fantastic, but it didn't stick in my skull at all. The Preview for Spidey2 looked good, too! Doc Ock is squatly stocky after all, has the dark glasses and moderately bad haircut.

Before the movies, the air was cool and fresh after a few hours rain, so we walked from my place to Las Olas. We had conversation over delicious bread, *huge* garden salads and Bass Ale in front of the Big City Tavern...(We didn't go to the propane-smelling bridge-place, because it was closed) we watched people go by, and gabbed about religion, the clothes young people are wearing these days, and Tolkien, mostly. A lot of our usual topics just didn't come up. The servers were excellent... left us alone, but slid in when we needed anything. We roamed up the street, past the singing fountain.. it was doing a Paul McCartney gig... Live and Let Die, and Magical Mystery Tour. It was especially well-synced to the Bond song.

After the movie, there was a lot of low-hanging mist or cloud cover, allowing for city lights to reflect back... it was pretty surreal.. made the horizon, and sky look like a movie backdrop.

Funky yellow house just next door that screams tacky South Florida to me.


A pair of Really "Awky" parrots on the power lines out back. Hard to see here, but they had the Green bodies and red heads. They were exceptionally loud, right about 5pm.


Singing Fountain... I probably take too many pictures of this thing... watching it in action is hypnotic to me.


Singing Fountain again


That weird Smoky-reflective haze. Too blurry.


More Reflecto-mist. It was a bit like being in front of some sort of projection screen.

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Top 10 Open Source Tools for eActivism

These appear to be very useful for anyone looking to create and maintain any kind of online audience/tribe.

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A Cotton Candy Autopsy - via Beautiful stories for ugly children

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Hm... it looks like entry #6413 is lost to the land of wind and ghosts.

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Per-Serving.org information on nutritional value of foods. Includes links to nutrient calculators.

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Search Herald obituaries: this page from Herald.com will search 365 days of obits.

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Hair into Soy Sauce Scandal

Media exposure forces government to respond to hair-into-soy sauce scandal

Shanghai. (Interfax-China) - The Chinese government has shown an unusually high level of concern as a result of a bold media exposure towards a scandal in which human hair was used to make soy sauce. The government has now ordered an immediate inspection of all domestic food seasoning plants before the end of January.

China Central Television (CCTV), the state television station, first raised public worries over the quality of domestic soy sauce by uncovering a substandard workshop in central China's Hubei Province, where piles of waste human hair were found. The hairs were treated in special containers to distill amino acid, the most common substance contained in soybean sauce.

Human hair is rich in protein content, just like soybean, wheat and bran, the conventional and legally accepted raw ingredients for the production of soy sauce.

The plant, describing itself as a bioengineering company, made around 100,000 tons of amino acid daily, in either syrup or powder form, making it easier for delivery, plant workers said. They were then distributed to diluting plants in or near the province, where it was diluted with approximately ten times water, was then made into ready-for-use soy sauce and was bottled or packaged.

In one such plant shown on the CCTV program, more chemical additives were poured into the amino acid syrup and heated and stirred continuously by a worker.

The additives include one whole bag of solid hydroxide to make the sauce taste better, and bottles of hydrochloric acid to balance the acid and alkali content in the mixture in order to make it safer for human consumption. Both additives were for industrial use only, according to their packaging.

By producing soy sauce from such raw materials, the producers were said able to cut costs by half. Workers employed at the plants, however, never bought soy sauce marked as "blended" on the packaging, because that usually meant that human hair was the basic material in the sauce.

Soy sauce made from human hair is not the first low-quality food product exposed by state television, which launched a program called "Weekly Quality Report" around half a year ago. The program, which conducts investigations into the low quality of some of China's most common food products, has frequently ruined the public appetite.

In related news the Beijing Star Daily reported the Beijing government has begun closer monitoring and supervision of 14 kinds of foods, including rice, meat, vegetables, bottled water, dairy products and cooking oil due to fears of large-scale food-poisoning cases.