Redbird's Drive-by

The New York Times has an interesting article on the impact of warming temperatures on duck hunters. It is focused on hunters in Missouri. Missouri is widely regarded as one of the best duck hunting states. Whether you agree or not with global warming or climate change or any of that, you can't argue with the facts that conditions are changing and have been changing for several years. Is this one long trend? Is this another dust bowl type pattern? Or is this something more permenant?

 

I tend to fall in line with Dave Murray's expertise and position.

 

Here are two videos from Sunday & Monday duck hunts in NW Missouri near Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge.

 

Friday night the Soulard community gathered at the historic farmers market. Here some photos from a fun-filled evening.

 

A different way to examine business expenses.

Here's some raw video from a private reception prior to The Press Club of Metropolitan St. Louis event honoring broadcaster Joe Buck. This event was Wednesday night at the Ritz in Clayton.

What is extremely troubling is how a person at the event, Joan Quicksilver,

obstructed local television crews from doing their job. The crews were at the event to talk with St. Louis Cardinals manager, Tony LaRussa. Earlier in the day LaRussa plead guilty to drunk driving. Here's a link to the police video from the arrest. Back in March, police in Jupiter, Florida found Tony asleep at the wheel of his SUV at an intersection. His foot was on the break. The video speaks for itself.

Back to the Ritz. Reporters wanted to talk with Tony about his plea. Joan Quicksilver had other ideas. This is a woman who's bio says she was honored by The National Federation of Press Woman with its Quest Award for Outstanding Professionalism in Journalism at ceremonies in 2005.

The bio also says, In 2001, she received The Press Club of Metropolitan St. Louis’ “President’s Award” for outstanding performance in media and community relations. She was inducted into The Catfish Club, the highest honor bestowed by the Press Club of Metropolitan St. Louis, for distinguished service in the public relations field.

So how does a woman so recognized for her work as a journalist explain her obstruction to journalists working on a story? To make it worse, her actions took place at a Press Club event. Why is this woman trying to quiet and stop the press? Isn't the press club about building a better press? In fact the press club says,

The Press Club is a professional, social and charitable organization of people who make, cover and influence the news.

It is right there on the website.

This isn't the first time Quicksilver has played the heavy at a press club event. I found this item from Romenesko at poynter.org.

In the 2003 column it says, "When the journalists arrived, they were met by one of the event's planners, Joan Quicksilver, a Press Club official and local public relations person.

"Quicksilver told the journalists they could not enter. She backed that up by producing Ritz security guards to escort the journalists from the party in the hotel's main ballroom."

So let me get this straight, so long as the local journalists agree with the press club, or award winning journalist Joan Quicksilver, then it is fine to publish, but disagree and no access allowed. Sounds more like China or Iran than St. Louis.

UPDATE, FRIDAY, NOV. 30: Deb Peterson mentions this brouhaha in her column Friday morning.

Snow video from a Duck hunting Trip in NW Missouri on Nov. 20 & 21.

 

Gooselore Lodge

Hostess Sno Balls Celebrate 60th Anniversary - A St. Louis Favorite.

Nov. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Hostess Sno Balls, America's most famous pink snack cakes, are celebrating 60 sweet years as one of America's favorite treats.

Since being introduced in 1947, Sno Balls have become an enduring icon enjoyed by generations of snack cake lovers who can't get enough of the delicious and distinctive marshmallow, coconut and chocolate cake combination.

-- Over 25 million Sno Balls are sold each year.

-- With flour and sugar rationing during WWII, Sno Balls became an instant hit with Americans looking to indulge in a sweet treat.

-- Sno Balls were not always the pink creme filled treats we know today. Original Sno Balls were white marshmallow and shredded coconut covered chocolate cakes - it wasn't until 1950 that the creme filling was added.

-- Not long after the creme filling was added, in an effort to add a little pizzazz to the humble white Sno Ball, Hostess decided to tint the shredded coconut pink. And for added effect, each Sno Ball package included one white and one pink Sno Ball. Later, for efficiency's sake, two of the same color were coupled.

-- Today, the original white Sno Balls are produced mostly around the winter holidays.

-- Sno Balls are now produced in different colors for different seasons

- You can find Glo Balls (glow-in-the-dark Sno Balls) for Halloween, Lucky Puffs (green Sno Balls) for St. Patrick's Day and Hoppers (lavender colored Sno Balls) in the Spring.

--Even though St. Louis is not known for record snow falls, residents of the Gateway City love Sno Balls. St. Louis residents eat more Sno Balls per capita than any other U.S. city. Rounding out the top five Sno Ball-loving cities are: -- Louisville, KY -- Grand Rapids, MI -- Roanoke, VA -- Hartford, CT

-- Sno Balls are no strangers to celebrity. The marshmallow-and-coconut snack has had supporting roles in episodes of The X-Files and Gilmore Girls and in the film The Mirror Has Two Faces.

To learn more about Hostess and to find Hostess Sno Ball recipes that are sure to sweeten any occasion visit www.hostesscakes.com.

Interstate Bakeries Corporation, the maker of Hostess products, is one of the nation's largest wholesale bakers and distributors of fresh baked bread and sweet goods under various brand names including Wonder(R), Hostess(R), Dolly Madison(R), Baker's Inn(R), Home Pride(R), Merita(R) and Drake's(R). For more information visit www.interstatebakeriescorp.com.

Website: http://www.hostesscakes.com/
Website: http://www.interstatebakeriescorp.com/

Please share your favorite Sno Ball stories.

November 8, 2007 Basics Don’t Throw Out Your Broken iPod; Fix It via the Web By PETER WAYNER

A FEW months ago, Stephen Ironside, a student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, confronted a minor but modern tragedy: the iPod that filled his life with song stopped working.

The device was out of warranty, and Apple would not fix it free. So he left it in a drawer until he happened to read a blog posting on CrunchGear.com that described how he might fix it — with a small, folded piece of paper. Mr. Ironside celebrated by posting thanks on the blog: “I’ve been on CDs for months. You saved my life (and my iPod).”

The author of the blog post, Matt Hickey of Seattle, says that using paper as a shim to put pressure on the hard drive has worked on about 70 percent of the failed iPods he has encountered — even though he is not sure why it works.

Gadget-fixing is adapting to the modern era. Neighborhood repair shops are all but gone, and along with them the repairmen who could offer casual advice, even when that advice was whether it was worth repairing the device. But Web sites can help users find and share solutions that can save a device from the landfill. If the job is too tricky, a number of Internet-based firms offer highly specialized repairs via overnight mail.

Here's a link to the rest of the article. 

Every year Beloit College in Wisconsin puts out a Mindset List which lists what the students entering college would be familiar with and NOT familiar with. For example, students entering this fall, who will – maybe, hopefully – graduate in 2011 have never “rolled down” a car window but have always had bottled water.

 

The phrase “off the hook” has never had anything to do with a telephone and music has always been “unplugged.” MTV has never featured music videos; and stadiums, rock tours and sporting events have always had corporate names. High definition television has always been ubiquitous.

 

Chavez has nothing to do with iceberg lettuce and everything to do with oil. Burma has always been Myanmar. The Berlin Wall never existed for them but Humvees, minus the artillery, have. Women have always been police chiefs in major cities.

Wolf Blitzer has always been serving up the news on CNN and Katie Couric has always – as list compilers Tom McBride and Ron Nief put it – “had screen cred.” And the World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born.

The Secret Lives of Public Officials

I can only hope this does not spread, but something tells me it will. Maybe you knew this -- I didn't, but for the last year or so, it has been illegal to post the addresses of California public officials online.

All an official has to do to stay private is ask for that privacy in writing. Why these people deserve that kind of privacy when nobody else does, I do not know. You would not be able, for example, to see if they paid their property taxes, see what property they own and so on. Property records, home ownership and other data have always been public until now.

See the law here.

 

By Al Tompkins (more by author)

The Coming Movie Firestorm

This December, look for church groups to protest the soon-to-be-hyped film, "The Golden Compass," starring Nicole Kidman. Take a look at the movie trailer here.

The film is already being hailed for its amazing animation. The howls of protest are less about the movie than the book it's based on and the author who wrote it.

The movie is based on Philip Pullman's children's book series (which includes "The Subtle Knife" and "The Amber Spyglass"). Books in this collection have sold 15 million copies worldwide.

You can read a chapter of the book here.

Catholics are already protesting the film, which critics have reported is a watered-down version of the book.

In the film, witches rule the northern sky. Every human soul lives on the outside of the body as a  demon that takes the form of an animal.

The compass, which is a key in this film, seeks not True North. (As real compass users know, compasses really seek out "magnetic north," but I digress.) This compass seeks out "Truth." If you know how to set the dial on this device, you can get the answer to any question, but nobody really knows how to use it except for the film's teenage heroine, Lyra.

But, as Rotten Tomatoes, a film critic Web site, points out:

Unfortunately for the filmmakers, Pullman's books also include a fair amount of what has been perceived to be anti-Catholic rhetoric; in the first book, for instance, the church is in the business of kidnapping children and conducting some rather unpleasant experiments on them.

A group called The Catholic League is critical of the movie and book series, and launched a two-month campaign against it. The Catholic League, often described as a "conservative watchdog group," says this film is "selling atheism to kids."

The Baltimore Sun reports:

"Right now, it's hard to see where it's going to have a real impact on the movie," speculates Gregg Kilday, film editor of The Hollywood Reporter. "Historically, these warnings sent as many people to see the movie, once they were labeled 'forbidden fruit,' as they kept away."

His Dark Materials centers on a world run by the sinister and dictatorial Magisterium, a force that suppresses free will, demands conformity and punishes anyone who deviates from the norm. "The first volume, the one that's being adapted, doesn't have much in it, in terms of the author's philosophizing," says Kilday, who has read the trilogy. "The latter volumes do have more, and they are a kind of metaphorical attack on the church."

Golden Compass director Chris Weitz recently told the London Daily Telegraph: "In the books, the Magisterium is a version of the Catholic Church gone wildly astray from its roots. If that's what you want in the film, you'll be disappointed."

The filmmakers didn't go so far as to change the name Magisterium, which in Catholicism refers to the teaching authority of the church. Still, Thomas Doherty, author of Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration, decried the changes, telling The Daily Telegraph, "This is part of a long-term problem over freedom of speech."

Doherty has written extensively on film censorship. He says protests like those spearheaded by Donohue and the league are far less effective today than they were in the past, when the Roman Catholic Church could slap a film with the dreaded "condemned" tag and seriously affect its box-office potential.

"Basically, today, Catholics themselves are far less willing to obey either the priesthood or their alleged spokesman and forgo seeing a film," says Doherty.

Snopes.com, a credible urban myth-busting Web site, goes on to point out that the author of the book series the film is based on is a self-professed atheist who said the books "are about killing God."

Over the years, interviews with the book's author, Pullman, have explored how he portrays God as an invalid and suggests the toppling of heaven that is replaced by an atheistic republic on earth. No wonder his work draws so much heat. See this 2004 piece in The Sunday (London) Times.

There is quite a bit more to this author, including his passion for children's literature. Read more about it here.

Whether you do something on the film or not, I thought you would at least want some background.

From: By Al Tompkins (more by author)

 

This video has attracted lots of attention on the web.

What do you think?

 

By Al Tompkins (more by author)

Buying Your Carbon-Neutral Footprint

This site for the Pop!Tech Carbon Initiative lets you calculate how many tons of carbon you pump into the atmosphere, then gives you the opportunity to contribute to groups that are doing something green. The amount you should give depends on how much carbon you contribute.

How accurate these calculators are. Isn't there a built-in incentive for the people who make these calculators to make my footprint as big as they can?

By Al Tompkins (more by author):

The Associated Press reports this story, which has lots of local angles:

Across the nation, Americans are increasingly unable to stretch their dollars to the next payday as they juggle higher rent, food and energy bills. It's starting to affect middle-income working families as well as the poor, and has reached the point of affecting day-to-day calculations of merchants like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., 7-Eleven Inc. and Family Dollar Stores Inc. 

Food pantries, which distribute foodstuffs to the needy, are reporting severe shortages and reduced government funding at the very time that they are seeing a surge of new people seeking their help.

While economists debate whether the country is headed for a recession, some say the financial stress is already the worst since the last downturn at the start of this decade.

From Family Dollar to Wal-Mart, merchants have adjusted their product mix and pricing accordingly. Sales data show a marked and more prolonged drop in spending in the days before shoppers get their paychecks, when they buy only the barest essentials before splurging around payday.

"It's pretty pronounced," said Kiley Rawlins, a spokeswoman at Family Dollar. "It seems like to us, customers are running out of food products, paper towels sooner in the month."

Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, said the imbalance in spending before and after payday in July was the biggest it has ever seen, though the drop-off wasn't as steep in August.

  
Food banks say the wave is just the beginning of what's to come.

The same AP story referenced above says:

"The reality of hunger is right here," said the Rev. Melony Samuels, director of The BedStuy Campaign against Hunger, a church-affiliated food pantry in Brooklyn.

The pantry scrambled to feed 5,000 new families over the past 12 months, up almost 70 percent from 3,000 the year before.

"I am shocked to see such numbers," Samuels said, "and I am really concerned that this is just the beginning of what we are going to see."

In the past three months, Samuels has seen more clients in higher-paying jobs — the $35,000 range — line up for food.

The Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York, which covers 23 counties in New York State, cited a 30 percent rise in visitors in the first nine months of this year, compared with 2006.

Maureen Schnellmann, senior director of food and nutrition programs at the American Red Cross Food Pantry in Boston, reported a 30 percent increase from January through August over last year.

Find a food bank near you.

Related resources:

• Hunger and Poverty Statistics
  
  
• Child Hunger Facts
  
  
• Hunger in the Suburbs
  
  
• Rural Hunger
  
  
• Senior Hunger
  
  
• Working Poor
  
  
• Low Income Families

Click here for state-by-state hunger statistics from the 2007 Almanac of Hunger and Poverty.