Current News You Can Use

This is a proposal for a no-frills hostel for those who just need a safe place to sleep and clean up: For perhaps $5 per person per night, the Center will provide: • A cot in a room full of cots: a dim, fairly quiet place to sleep, on a moment’s notice with no questions asked, and no searches; ·         Dog cages; • Ear plugs and eye masks available for purchase, as some light is necessary for security and people do snore; • A constant watch by camera and attendant on the belongings they carry in with them and store under their cots, and cameras elsewhere in common rooms for security; • Restrooms; • Separate shower facilities; • Coin-operated laundry machines to wash clothing and bedding and help fund the shelter; • A reading and dining room for food that people bring in, with a used book exchange and information on local services and employment listings. Rules: • Quiet. Do not bother the sleepers. • No exhib...

The same mask that stops colds and flu in the winter can help you breathe easier when forest fires are filling our air with smoke.  Your breath moistens the inside of the mask; smoke particles get caught up in the moist cloth, greatly reducing the amount you take into your lungs.  A bandanna cold mask has more cloth to catch the smoke than a dust mask or medical mask, and more room inside it to breathe easily.           You can breathe easier in your yard by using misters to clear the smoke by taking it to the ground, where it becomes good fertilizer.  The snakelike standing plastic misters with twin emitters that you can usually buy at the Grange Coop or Diamond Building Supply work very well for this, as they produce a very fine mist.  They also can be moved around, as they are made to be used on a hose.  (The hose should be heavy duty 5/8” or cheap ½” to take the pressure.)  Individual mist emitters tha...

“A woman is a woman and a man ain’t nothin’ but a male...” ~Louis Prima, Jump, Jive and Wail Honorable Public Servants,           “Male” and “female” are properly adjectives, modifiers of nouns, not nouns themselves.  “Male” and “female,” when used as nouns to refer to people, are dehumanizing.  Any animal and some plants are male or female. We have perfectly good words for male and female humans that convey not only humanity, but age range as well: man; woman; boy; girl.  The jazz tune from which the above quote was taken was written in the mid-fifties.  There is a long history of the words “male” and “female” being used to disrespect the people being referred to.  White, English-speaking men have a long called men and women of other races and cultures “males” and “females” and sometimes even the women of their own families.   I first noticed the dehumanizing aspect of such words in the ‘80s, when...

Kombucha brewing.  The scoby is so thick because I have not made more since I stopped drinking it. An afterword to " Make Kombucha Tea ," August 2014. After drinking too much of Kombucha daily for perhaps 8 years or 9 years, I've figured out that it was causing side effects.  I was told in the beginning that one should drink just a small glass first thing in the morning, before eating anything.  I like it so much that I just drank a pint all day long, putting it over ice first, and then diluting it more with water as the day goes on, so as not to ingest too much sugar.  I like the way a little sugar and acid make water less dry on the throat. For a long time I had constant soreness in the muscles in my arms, a common side effect of statins, which are used to lower cholesterol.  I have never bought into the anti-cholesterol fad, any more than the anti-fat fad.  A few days ago, I got to thinking about red rice yeast, which is rice fermented in a f...

A flat-topped 5-pound honey bottle; the fat one mentioned was thrown away.  The other day, I went looking for a honey dispenser with a pointy cap, because the 1 lb flat-topped squirt bottle I had been using was always sticky.  Honey would collect on the flat top and drip down the side when it was used.  It was a fat-top bottle, made to be able to set it upside down for easy dispensing, but that only made it easy for the honey to leak out and make a pool in the cabinet. I was looking through the honey selection at Fred Meyer and all the containers had the same type of flat top, some with a fatter top for setting the bottle upside down, others with a smaller top of the same design.  I noticed that the Agave Nectar bottles used by Madhava (Madhavasweeteners.com) had a pointed cap that opened to a short cone-shaped dispenser with a sloping cap that looked unlikely for honey to pool on.  I bought it, used it up, and now it is my honey dispenser. I call on ...

Mississippi Measure 48 is a proposed constitutional amendment, posted at http://www.mississippiforcannabis.org/  .  I have a question about its "locality tax," licenses, and fees.   Answers and further discussion will be edited into this post. " ...Regulations will require an annual Mississippi Cannabis Sales license issued by any Mississippi County Circuit Clerk for a fee of no more than $1000.00 to all adult residents who apply, and a $25.00 annual city or county governing locality fee to farm 10 - 500 plants. Locality fees for cannabis farms with more than 500 plants will not exceed $1000.00...." At first this "locality fee" sounded like a flat yearly fee, but the last sentence above makes it clear that is wrong.  Is it $25 per plant?  If so, it should say "per plant" after "$25." But it couldn't be $25 per plant, because 500 plants times $25 is $12,500.  501 plants, however, would only be $1000.  A fee of $25 plus $5 per p...