[A] new analysis of 100 commercial beers shows the hoppy beverage is a significant source of dietary silicon, a key ingredient for bone health.

Though past research has suggested beer is chockfull of silicon, little was known about how silicon levels varied with the type of beer and malting process used. So a pair of researchers took one for the team and ran chemical analyses on beer’s raw ingredients. They also picked up 100 commercial beers from the grocery store and measured the silicon content.

The silicon levels of beer types, on average:

* Indian Pale Ale (IPA): 41.2 mg/L

* Ales: 32.8 mg/L

* Pale Ale: 36.5 mg/L

* Sorghum: 27.3 mg/L

* Lagers: 23.7 mg/L

* Wheat: 18.9 mg/L

* Light lagers: 17.2 mg/L

* Non Alcoholic: 16.3 mg/L

I show this study to Don Tequila over at the Liquor and Rubber Balls Sport Bar and Transmission Repair on Monday evening, a traditionally slow night.  Don still looks a little ragged after SuperBowl Sunday: the raucous crowd of mostly drunken lesbians who are his stock and trade left him with a humongous clean-up task.

“I found that old sign in the back,” he says to me, “and I figured it might be good for a laugh so I hung it up.  They made a drinking game out of it.”

The sign, in a mock Wild West  font, reads

Gentlemen’s Saloon

Liquor In the Front

Poker in the Back

Nice.  What kind of drinking game?

“You don’t want to know,” he grunts.  “The good news is, nobody got arrested.”

Just handcuffed, I bet.

“Well, that’s every weekend.  ‘Specially on singles night.”  He frowns at the list of beers before him, and grunts again.  “So the beers that do you the least good are the ones with the worst taste and least alcohol.  That adds up, for a change.”

I had the same thought, Don.  Listen to your body.  Friends don’t let friends drink lite beer.  As for NA beer, hell, what’s the point?

“I wouldn’t wash my balls with wheat beer, either,” says Don, “let alone drink that swill.”    He eyes the list again.  “I wonder if I would sell more beer around here I could link this study to preventing female osteoporosis.”

After this weekend, do you really need to sell MORE beer?

“That’s my bread and butter,” he says.  “You drinking?”

No.  Never on Monday.  I just dropped by to see if you survived.  I remember last year.

“You do?” asks Don, amused.  “I don’t.”

News that scientists have established the possibility of communicating with individuals thought to be “in vegetative states” arrives at a timely moment: the Tea Party Movement Convention got underway just yesterday.  Sarah Palin is the keynote speaker, and rumors are she will take questions from the audience.

Stay tuned for further developments.

12:15 Update:  The first vegetative speaker:

The convention started off with fireworks Thursday night as former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado used his kickoff speech to slam President Obama.

“People who could not even spell the word ‘vote,’ or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. His name is Barack Hussein Obama,” Tancredo said to cheers Thursday night.  — CNN.com

That didn’t take long, did it?

As it unfolds, this has become my favorite story of the year so far.  We pick it up at the arrest of the so-called “Sweat Lodge Guru”:

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — Authorities have charged motivational speaker James Arthur Ray with three counts of manslaughter for deaths that happened after a sweat lodge ceremony he led in northern Arizona last year.

The Oct. 8 sweat lodge ceremony was intended to be the highlight of Ray’s five-day “Spiritual Warrior” event at a retreat he rented just outside Sedona. He told participants, who paid more than $9,000 each to attend, that it would be one of the most intense experiences of their lives.

You read that right.  Five days in a sweat lodge, $9,000.  The “Spirit” on display here would seem to be entrepreneurial, yes?

About halfway through the two-hour ceremony, some began feeling ill, vomiting and collapsing inside the 415-square-foot structure. Despite that, Ray urged participants to push past their physical weaknesses and chided those who wanted to leave, authorities and participants have said….Two people… passed out inside the sweat lodge and died that night at a hospital.  [Another] slipped into a coma and died a week later. Eighteen others were hospitalized.  One participant… previously told The Associated Press that Ray did nothing to help the sick.  Ray’s attorneys have countered that he took all necessary safety precautions and wasn’t aware of any medical problems until the ceremony was over.

Can you hear him, goading them on?  There is no ‘I’ in quit, people!  Don’t let a lack of oxygen, blowing chunks, and an irregular heart beat interrupt your spiritual journey! One participant, an orthodontist named Beverly Bunn, reported, “There were people throwing up everywhere.”  Puke for Purity!

Documents released in the investigation showed that some people lost consciousness and others suffered broken bones at past Ray-led events and that Ray largely ignored medical problems that arose. — NY Times

Great stuff.  He lines up these rubes to pay top dollar for deadly abuse, and when the shit hits the fan, they blame him, not themselves for being the damn fools they are.  Do you love it?  They obediently sit their fat middle-age asses in a room you could boil a lobster in, and actually believe the fraud when he tells them not to worry.

Okay, they clearly got what they deserve.  But in round 2, the Witch Doctor will get what HE deserves. because the indisputable fact that there are gullible saps in the world doesn’t give anybody license to rob, cheat, or kill them.  Even if you have a PhD, a hired media whore, and a batch of books to peddle.

Doctor Perspiration is not without advocates, of course.

On a conference call Mr. Ray held last week for sweat lodge participants….one recount[ed] the comments of a self-described “channeler” who visited Angel Valley after the retreat. Claiming to have communicated with the dead, the channeler said they had left their bodies in the sweat lodge and chosen not to come back because “they were having so much fun.”  — NYTimes

You hear this?  This honking quack says those barf-covered corpses are off somewhere, dead as Obama’s health care bill, because they’re having such fun in hell or wherever their gullible souls repose.  Can you wait for this one’s testimony on cross-examination?

Americans are imbeciles when it comes to matters of mental health, and even worse about the hilariously accredited professionals paid for its administration.  It has always been so.  The  so-called science of psychology isn’t scientific, and its practitioners are snake-handling shamans.  Sam Goldwyn famously  observed that “Anybody who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.”   He didn’t know the half of it.

Hoo boy!  Rahm Emanuel makes the stupid mistake of saying something politically incorrect where people could hear him, and Sarah Palin calls in the liberal mainstream media to seize an opportunity to play outraged offended victim.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Emanuel, exasperated upon learning that liberal special-interest groups were planning to run ads against conservative Democrats not supportive of health care reform, blasted the plan as “f—— retarded” over the summer. Naturally, some outrage ensued after Emanuel’s words came to light, with former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin taking to her Facebook page to call on President Obama to fire him for what she saw as the equivalent of a racial slur.

In a post titled “Are You Capable of Decency, Rahm Emanuel?,” Palin wrote, “Just as we’d be appalled if any public figure of Rahm’s stature ever used the ‘N-word’ or other such inappropriate language, Rahm’s slur on all God’s children with cognitive and developmental disabilities — and the people who love them — is unacceptable,” adding, “it’s heartbreaking.” –  Yahoo News

I have a few questions, including, “How do you pronounce “f—“?

Personally, having worked with  lots of mentally retarded people (in Special Olympics, among other places), I’m not happy about using “retarded” as a synonym for “politically conservative,” but I understand the rationale.   There are uncanny resemblances.  Examining my own immediate family, I’m not sure if they’re Republicans, Orthodox Jews, or mentally retarded —  or all simultaneously.  But still, I don’t use that expression.

Emanuel owes an apology, which by now he’s offered.  Of course, he grovels for strictly professional reasons.  On a personal level, I suspect the arrogant asshole is utterly incapable of sincerity, let alone apology.   As for Palin, I sincerely doubt she would have given a ripe shit until (a) she dropped  herself a Down Syndrome baby, and (b) spotted an opportunity for scoring political points, but that’s the rules of the game.   Nicely played, Sarah!  Are you sure consumption of tea doesn’t  cause brain damage?

Some of this might matter were we not at war in two or three countries, dealing with 10% unemployment (or worse), losing control of the economy, and standing by idly while the world burns itself to a crisp.  But it doesn’t.  It’s all fucking political chatter and manipulation for the next round of greed heads to battle for the human spoils we call  our system of government.

Words are important.  Yeah yeah yeah.  Actions are importanter.  Raise your paw if you know what His Rahmnesty was talking about when he uttered that epithet.   No, I didn’t think so.   See the problem?

Thank god we have an all-important  SuperBowl to distract us.

And I thought the mold-prone dry wall was unsettling.

In November, investigators in Hunan province provided details about a July raid on an underground workshop where they found laborers lubricating condoms with vegetable oil in unsterile conditions, passing off the counterfeits as high-quality-brand products.

In another case, workers recycled used condoms into hair bands in southern China.

“People could be infected with AIDS, [genital] warts or other diseases if they hold the rubber bands or strings in their mouths while weaving their hair into plaits or buns,” a dermatologist told the state-run China Daily newspaper.  — LA Times

Where do we begin with this one?

Let’s start with the word “condom,” which isn’t nearly as entertaining as (e.g.) love glove, the goalie, willie warmer, sheath, nodding sock, raincoat, French letter, cock sock, gentleman’s jerkin, etc., and imagine what it must sound like in Mandarin.    Then run through a series of your favorite brand names and styles.  Old faithful Trojan is still around, and so are  Max Headroom, Latex Louie , Jiffy Lube, Needle Nogginz, Putter Protector, Rough Rider, Big Boy, Rain Man, and a zillion others.  Best of all — did you know you can buy them in flavors now?

Back in the day, the joke was about the corduroy condom for a groovy kind of love.

So when you consider the variety, as well as the diverse applications and apertures for their joyful deployment, the thought of unsterile sheaths coated in rancid vegetable oil is shall we say a trifle off-putting.  Why can’t they stick (sorry) to copyright violations, fake iPods, beer, DVDs, and designer handbags?

Besides, what sense does it make for the Chinese to try to kill us?  We owe them money.  Big money.

Of course, this is just one more example of that time-honored spirit of capitalist creativity, honest endeavor that encourages all imaginable violations for the sake of making a buck.  If it creates death and disease among those round-eyed devils across the pond, what the hell.  We’ll just make more.  Especially if the condoms don’t work anyway.

From the people who told their Congressman to “keep yore damn socialist hands offa my Medicare payments……..”

A Tea Party convention billed as the coming together of the grass-roots groups that began sprouting up around the country a year ago is unraveling as sponsors and participants pull out to protest its expense and express concerns about “profiteering.”

The convention’s difficulties highlight the fractiousness of the Tea Party groups, and the considerable suspicions among their members of anything that suggests the establishment.

Erick Erickson, the editor of the influential conservative blog RedState.com, wrote this month that something seemed “scammy” about the convention. And the American Liberty Alliance withdrew as a sponsor after its members expressed concerns about the convention’s finances being channeled through private bank accounts and its organizer being “for profit.”  — NYTimes

This is the event at which Sarah Palin is supposed to deliver the keynote speech, allegedly for a six-figure fee (eight, if you count the zeroes after the decimal point; many more if you count the zeroes in the audience as well).   And speaking of the audience, tickets are $549 each.   Ain’t populism great?

Not to be cynical (ha!), but is anybody surprised that the Tea Party Movement is in reality just another scam out to bilk the suckers true believers of their hard-earned shekels?   Scanning the crowd – and look at that crowd: do these folks arrive at rallies directly after posing for People of Wal-Mart? –  did anybody truly subscribe to the notion that these are kindly, sincere Americans doing what they think is best for themselves and their countrymen?

The Teabaggers are the probably the best thing that has happened to the ‘Crats since Ford pardoned Nixon.  They fill a void in popular culture missing since the late ‘60s, when activists perceived as nauseating, rabble-rousing, drug-using, youth-corrupting, anti-American anarchists indelibly stained liberals and the mainstream Democratic party, setting the stage for Tricky Dick and his 5:00 shadowed minions to trash the Constitution (for patriotic purposes and to save America, of course).

So over 40 years later, behold the Teabaggers in their pressed pants and plaid shirts waving painted placards  denying evolution, demanding school prayer, clamoring for the President’s birth certificate, but mostly viscerally reacting with profound, deep-seeded negativity.  To paraphrase Groucho  as (Rufus T. Firefly), Whatever it is, they’re against it.

I’m behind these guys 110% — that’s arithmetic they would approve of – not only for their amusement value, but also because they create such chaos.  Ultimately, they will limp home utterly disgusted and defeated as one by one, their high profile friends in government let them down once they’ve used them up.  They will not get a smaller government or a flat tax.  They will not see a birth certificate.  They will not get prayer back in schools or an anti-abortion amendment.  They will, however, get endless requests for donations by conservative politicians  who have mastered the art of keeping people at arm’s length  while holding a hand out.

Godspeed, good people.  Rest assured that America will follow your exploits on the Daily Show, and your 15 minutes of fame will last all the way to the next election.

If you missed the memo, J.D. Salinger finally stopped complaining about violations of his privacy, and filing lawsuits to prevent unauthorized publication of his works, both previously published and not.  He was 91.

People of a certain age remember when Jerome David Salinger’s first novel, Catcher In the Rye, was the most controversial issue in America since women shed their bloomers.  As with most controversies of this flavor, looking back years later it’s hard to understand, let alone appreciate.  But major battles were fought over dinner tables, in school auditoriums, and eventually, in courts of law.  I won’t say who won or who lost, but by the time I got around to reading it, it was required in tenth grade.

I probably read the book 50 times, counting those sessions where I’d pick it up and pore over a chapter or two.  I still hear myself saying, “ferchrissake, Ackley,” and remembering what a horse’s ass Stradlater was.  Thinking about it now, it’s so out of date and downright quaint it probably has zero impact on today’s readers just for style, let alone content.  That’s okay.  More for me.

There are three other books, including the amazing Franny and Zooey, and a bunch of stories that leaked out over teh internets before he had his lawyers scuttle them (I have them printed out and collected in a binder).  That’s it for his officially published works.  He ain’t no James Patterson.  More like Calvin Coolidge of the literary world.

When Salinger disappeared into his private compound up in frozen Cornish, NH, it was widely rumored that he was still working, scribbling away, but with no intention of ever publishing another word so long as he stayed vertical.  Forty years later, I confess to a certain sense of impatience, even fear: what if the sonofabitch outlives me and I never get to read anything more?

Now I’m worried that he didn’t write a damn thing, or that he left instructions that nothing of his would see the light until the Mayans regain control of the hemisphere.  Or worse – until the Congress passes a health care bill.  * Groan *  We might ALL be dead as Salinger himself.

We shall see, we shall see.  Meanwhile, remember the words of satirist/songwriter Alan Sherman:

“Don’t be a stingy sandwich-maker / Pile the cold cuts high

Customers should see salami / Coming through the rye.”

He’s dead, too.

Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard

To fetch her poor dog a bone

But when she got there, the cupboard was bare

So she called the plastic surgeon and had her set of #11 and #12 ribs removed to feed it,

And while she was there opted for the abdominoplasty tummy tuck, too.

Not only doesn’t that rhyme, it looks gruesome.

But at least the dog got a meal out of it.

(Photo credits here and here.  And there are plenty more.)

Hoo boy.  As they say in New Hampshire, Rib Free or Die.

I can’t help but observe that even in the context of elective surgery, she might have chosen more wisely. Not that there’s a whole lot you can do about the wear on a tire that just accumulates over the years.

I tried to select photos that downplay the funhouse aspects of the results – visit the sites to see worse, and if you’re really into it, Google “ribs removed by a plastic surgeon“ and see what youtube has to offer – but even so, IMHO everything that isn’t covered up in clothing from the hairline down should be.

I bet she’s a cheap dinner date, though.

Leonard Pitts did a very good job covering this story in the Sunday Hurled, better than the one I had started last week, but I’m gonna shove my two cents in anyway.

[Glyn] Bindon, who lost his life in a 2003 plane crash, was the founder of Trijicon, a Michigan company that has a $600 million contract to provide gun sights to the U.S. military. Apparently he had a policy, which survived him, of inscribing coded references to Bible verses on the gun sights he manufactured for high-powered rifles used by U.S. service personnel. So that, for instance, one sight is marked, 2COR4:6, i.e., 2 Corinthians 4:6: “God said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness.’ He made his light shine in our hearts. It shows us the light of God’s glory in the face of Christ.”

Tom Munson, a Trijicon executive, told ABC there was nothing wrong or illegal about the inscriptions and noted pointedly that the issue was being raised by a group (presumably meaning the Muslims who have complained) that is “not Christian.” On Thursday, the company agreed to discontinue the practice.

This is wrong on many levels (as Pitts masterfully enumerates), including the one that goes unsaid: it’s guaranteed  that a whole lot of American conservatives not only think there’s nothing wrong with this, but hail this policy as patriotic, morally justified, and a damn good idea.  What better way to combine your conviction that this Christian nation of ours is at war with Islamofascism, and to honor God by smiting His unholy enemy in the service of America’s military?  Basically, by blessing and sanctifying its weapons, Trijicon is performing evangelical work here.

Only an America-hating, flower sniffing, Birkenstock wearing  liberal would see it otherwise.  Surrender-monkeys, squeamish about defending this great nation, incapable of recognizing that this is a holy war we’ve got here, and the way to win is to make sure the enemy understands that we’re not only the good guys, but our religion is better, too.

I assume “the company agreed to discontinue the practice” because it wanted to preserve the contract.   Praising god is important, but they have a business to run.

One of the great hypocrisies that coats conservative dogma like mold on bad cheese is its stated conviction that respect for the rights of individuals is predominant while blithely accepting religious intrusion into individuals’ lives.  It’s a cavernous blind spot in their balsa wood platform.  The US military is not the Salvation Army.  A soldier’s oath is to the Constitution, not the ten commandments.  Public schools are not bible study classes.  The bedrooms of consenting adults are not appropriate venues for unwanted prayer meetings, and a fetus in not an opportunity for chancel-prancing zealots to sermonize.

Ramming religion – any religion — down the craw of a nation’s citizens is exactly the wrong way to demonstrate respect for individual freedom.  If that’s conservatism, deal me out.

Genetic material from the Asian carp, a voracious invasive species long feared to be nearing the Great Lakes, has been identified for the first time at a harbor within Lake Michigan, near the Illinois-Indiana border, ecologists and federal officials said Tuesday.

Experts said the most recent findings…could mean that the carp has found its way beyond an elaborate barrier system built at the cost of millions of dollars to prevent the fish’s access to the Great Lakes and its delicate ecosystem, where it has no natural competitors and would threaten the life of native fish populations.

“It’s a big admission of failure,” said Henry Henderson, the director of the Midwest program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It indicates the kind of thing we’ve been fearing since 1993.”  –NYTimes

This story has been big news in places nowhere near south Florida, unless you’re a fisherman.  But you’re not (and neither am I).  It is nonetheless a dire matter for anybody who cares about the environment.  Like us rare registered Greens who you blame Monkey Boy’s 2000 election victory here in the nation’s dick tip.

The Asian Carp is this monstrous invasive species that can do to the Great Lakes’ ecosystem what pythons and iguanas can do to the Everglades and south Florida.  Without natural predators, they can eat everything in sight without being eaten.  In the natural world, that spells disaster.  Look at what man did in Detroit, Newark, and Youngstown, for example, once the cannibals were exterminated.

But the bigger tale is contained in the unfolding history of the impending disaster, and that, in summary, is that these penny-brained overgrown minnows managed to outsmart human beings, despite millions of dollars shelled out over almost 20 years in an effort to stop them.  God, we’re stupid.

It’s the story of how short-sighted economic considerations trumped long-term solutions.  Authorities resisted measures that might have stopped the invaders because shipping and fishing interests  yowled about potential loss income, not focusing on the eventual disaster such policies might yield.

Sound familiar?  It should.  You find the same theme (different players) in debates over tuna and redfish stocks, oysters, and caviar.  It’s the reason we still strip mine for coal.  It’s why you find such resistance to controls over poisonous emissions – no, not my farts, that was earlier in the week —  and acceptance of global warming.  Somebody’s gonna lose money, so shaddup tree huggers, and screw the earth.

Ah well.  Maybe the anglers up there have  a new game fish to pursue.  Forget about tossing them back, too.  It’s catch and filet.

photo credit: IGFA