27 Apr 2010
Egg-straordinary

I haven't blogged about what's going on on the home front for a while, but the events of the past month in the hen house simply have to be shared.

We had a terrible winter, but all the while, my girls kept right on laying - a dozen or so a day. Sometimes as few as 10, other days as many as 16. With the makeup of my flock being what it is (35 hens and six 10 week pullets) that's about normal. I all my years of raising chickens, I've always held it as a rule of thumb that a free range brown layer flock in full production will produce about one egg every 36 hours per hen. So I was right in range.

In March the weather changed dramatically. We had several 80°F days, and surprisingly light winds. Very little rain, especially for this time of year. We've gotten some needed moisture recently, and we're certainly not in anything like a drough, but it has been dry. So far this year (knock on wood) we've had but one tornado watch. Mysteriously, egg production started dropping - 9, 6 4 ... by the end of the Month I was getting 2 eggs a day.

Hens molt,and when in molt they go "off-line" - stop laying eggs. So I figured the warmer weather had tripped a molting cycle. But molting hens lose feathers and some weight - and my hens looked fine. No feathers around the coop, outside of ordinary levels of shed.

So what else was going on? The henhouse was pretty stinky - I'd cleaned it out late last year, like September if I recall correctly, but because of the tighter insulation and the colder, wetter winter, it was ripe. So we cleaned it - a full cleaning, new chips and straw/hay. We double checked the doors and screen windows to make sure nothing could get in - I've dealt with weasels and opossums before. There were no obvious signs of predators - no broken eggs or shells. A week went by with no improvement to production. Hmmmm...

Back when I was doing full bore egg production, with 500+ hens, a friend had suggested that I start new pullets in nest boxes that were "seeded" with a wooden egg. You know, the find you can get at a craft shop, usually to be painted or decorated. It seemed to work then - but these weren't pullets getting started. But it couldn't hurt, so I dropped seven starter eggs as "seeds". Production levelled off at 2 eggs a day. No improvement.

We altered the feeding schedule. We lengthened the lighting. We tried everything we knew, and nothing seemed to help. Then, a week ago Monday, I was feeding and gathering eggs and picked up four. Not a great improvement, but it was the first time for about three weeks I'd gotten more than 2 eggs. I checked the boxes again - I counted six wooden eggs ... wait, I'd put out seven starters... I looked all over for the blasted thing - it was nowhere to be found.

OK, so this is odd. But what happened the next day was positively weird. I got 22 eggs - nearly two dozen! Production has rocketed since. Tonight I got 33 eggs!

I related the story to my mom, and she remembered her father finding a black snake, half in and half out of his henhouse, stopped in it's tracks by an unbroken egg it had swallowed. Ah-ha! I have no proof, but I think I inadvertently choked a black snake.

I'll bet I'd missed some hidden opening when we cleaned, big enough for an egg and a bit more to squeeze through. The snake had had a feast - but no snake can eat a dozen eggs a day. So what else? Well, hens stop laying when they're stressed. And birds and snakes are not exactly noted for being best buds. So I think the stress accounted for most of the drop - probably all but a couple or three eggs.

So that's my egg-straordinary tale. The proof will come when the weather warms up again - if I start smelling rotten meat in the henhouse, I'll know what to look for.

22:29 /Home | 3 comments | permanent link

The senators and their Fab foe

Un-freaking believable! The gall, the arrogance, the utter disregard for anything resembling rules, laws or fairness, even to the people paying his wages. This one really got me, personal like:

Fabulous, in an e-mail from 2007, described the mortgage business as "totally dead, and the poor little subprime borrowers will not last too long!!!" Yet two months later, he boasted that he had managed to dump some more of the worthless mortgage securities on "widows and orphans that I ran into at the airport."

I was one of those "poor little subprime borrowers", you twit. I'm still hanging in there, barely. And I know some of the widows whose pensions loaded up on your "fab" deals. If I were you, I'd hope for a long prison sentence when this is all over. Because your fellow criminals would probably be a whole lot kinder to you than the angry mob that's forming up with torches and pitchforks...

Goldman Sachs whiz kid Fabrice Tourre is fast becoming the poster boy of the financial crisis, a Michael Milken for current times. Last week, the SEC filed fraud charges against Goldman Sachs and the 31-year-old Frenchman who calls himself Fabulous Fab. And on Tuesday, Fabulous sat before a Senate panel that wanted to know how he helped a hedge-fund tycoon make a billion dollars by dumping worthless mortgage securities on unsuspecting Goldman customers and then betting against those same securities -- all the while accelerating the burst of the housing bubble and the downfall of the world economy.

(link) [Washington Post]

Update: Ouch!

20:32 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

25 Apr 2010
Separate Truths

Fascinating article, especially in it's perception of differing goals for differing religions, and suggesting that multiple truths can be equally valid.

At least since the first petals of the counterculture bloomed across Europe and the United States in the 1960s, it has been fashionable to affirm that all religions are beautiful and all are true. This claim, which reaches back to “All Religions Are One” (1795) by the English poet, printmaker, and prophet William Blake, is as odd as it is intriguing. No one argues that different economic systems or political regimes are one and the same. Capitalism and socialism are so self-evidently at odds that their differences hardly bear mentioning. The same goes for democracy and monarchy. Yet scholars continue to claim that religious rivals such as Hinduism and Islam, Judaism and Christianity are, by some miracle of the imagination, both essentially the same and basically good.

(link) [Boston Globe]

12:38 /Asatru | 0 comments | permanent link

21 Apr 2010
Orthodox experts considers Iceland volcano eruption a sign of God's wrath

Who do they think did this? If we're looking for spiritual causes, there's another possibility that should be considered... but then again, sometimes a volcano is just a volcano.

Eruption of the Iceland volcano is a display of God's wrath, the Association of Orthodox Experts believes.

(link) [Interfax]

via Hardscrabble Creek

22:53 /Asatru | 0 comments | permanent link

18 Apr 2010
Cilantro Haters, It’s Not Your Fault

I had no idea there were people who felt this strongly about cilantro - I like it, as long as it's not overdone. And even when it's overdone, it's not "soapy" to me, more like excessively pungent.

Food partisanship doesn’t usually reach the same heights of animosity as the political variety, except in the case of the anti-cilantro party. The green parts of the plant that gives us coriander seeds seem to inspire a primal revulsion among an outspoken minority of eaters.

(link) [New York Times]

12:21 /Home | 1 comment | permanent link

The implications of Goldman's defence

So this is how it was done:

...it [Goldman Sachs] says that the normal practice of a market maker ... is not to "disclose the identities of a buyer to a seller and vice versa".

This goes well beyond a conflict of interest or the appearance of impropriety. This is a recipe for fraud. The only people who could consider this as "normal practice" are con artists.

I'm not a proponent of more "regulation" of financial (or any other) markets - I'd be more than happy if common law (and common sense) was applied as it should be. But the fact that the suit against Goldman for this outright ripoff is civil rather than criminal shows that the government has no intention whatsoever of applying either law or sense - they'd rather handle it through "regulation", with plenty of wiggle room for the accused and no possibility of real punishment for the "convicted".

How much more corruption can the system tolerate before it simply collapses in on itself?

Goldman Sach's response to the SEC's fraud charge shows that probably the best way to see the SEC's action is as an attack on one important aspect of the leading investment bank's business model - which, of course, probably makes the charge more significant than the narrower allegation that it committed a single billion-dollar crime.

(link) [BBC]

12:18 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

17 Apr 2010
FFA volunteers to give aging Ind. barn a facelift

Well, Dull's Tree Farm won the contest and the work is well underway. We dropped by last week and watched some of the proceedings for a bit. The barn under renovation is the one that houses the petting zoo we supply each year. According to Tom and Kerry, when it's finished our critters will have a livestock Hilton to live in over their Yuletide vacation!

An aging central Indiana barn is getting a facelift thanks to hundreds of volunteers from the National FFA Organization and National FFA Alumni.

(link) [Fox59 News]

08:03 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

15 Apr 2010
Sheep in the News - Leaving the Big House Edition

On the lam?

Two Argentinean convicts who escaped from jail evaded capture after disguising themselves as sheep.

(link) [The Telegraph]

23:08 /Humor | 1 comment | permanent link

13 Apr 2010
Corporate Welfare Queen Kills 25

Pitch perfect exposition of the way(s) in which the regulatory state destroys free markets by absolving businesses of liability for their malfeasance. Sideshow - it's guys like this that make me queasy about the supposed libertarian underpinnings of the Tea Parties...

Watching recent news on CEO Don Blankenship of Massey Energy — renowned for falling spectacularly short of industry safety standards which are themselves almost nonexistent, and most lately for hosting the site of the worst mining disaster in decades — I got the feeling I’d heard of this guy before.

(link) [Center for a Stateless Society]

17:07 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

11 Apr 2010
China reports first trade deficit in six years

This is news and no mistake!...

China recorded a $7.24 billion trade deficit in March, the General Administration of Customs announced Saturday, according to state media Xinhua News Agency.

(link) [CNN]

11:56 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Fiber Event 2010

Well, it's over and done and another year - and despite good weather and a two day stand by our booth, we actually didn't do much better than last year. The crowds were even thinner.

What saved the day was Lorraine's already skeined yarn, and some junk fleece we sold at $10/bag. Without those it would've been a complete waste.

Of course, due to the event and good weather here, we actually have about half the flock sheared already, and all of our inventory is sorted and priced (which explains the lack of posting here the past week or so). And we got some excellent feedback on our breeding program, about which I'll have more to say later. So it wasn't a complete loss. But it does give me pause to wonder if the so-called economic recovery that's allegedly underway is just a figment of somebody's imagination...

11:48 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

New iPhone Developer Agreement Bans the Use of Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone Compiler

Wow. Just wow. The new language in Apple's dev license for the iPad and iPhone has this gem:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

Basically, this not only shoots Adobe's product in the head, it gets Lazarus, Embarcadero's forthcoming multiplatform products, and a whole slew of other potential and existing compilers and cross-compilers. It's got a lot of developers really pissed off, and as the news spreads, even more will decide that it's simply not worth developing for a platform with such capricious and obnoxious "rules". It's as though Apple was intent on returning to the 90's, when developers spurned the Mac because of it's arcane OS idiocy and did nothing but Windows work instead. That really worked for them then - and it'll work about the same way now.

I'm big on property and ownership. Apple's shenanigans prove that you really don't own anything anymore, we're all just renting or leasing.The last time this was the case on Planet Earth, they called it the Middle Ages, and they called the renters and lessees "serfs". It'll be interesting to see how long our new medieval times last.

What Apple doesn’t want — and as we see now, is not going to allow — is for anyone other than Apple to define the framework for native iPhone apps. What Apple is saying here is, if you’re going to write a native iPhone app, then you need to target our platform; if you want to do something else, then target the iPhone with an optimized web app. I.e., the iPhone OS supports two software platforms: Cocoa Touch and the web. Apple isn’t going to let anyone else build a meta-platform on top of Cocoa Touch.

(link) [Daring Fireball]

09:03 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

04 Apr 2010
Developers Trying To Treat Houses Like Copyright

Obnoxious and idiotic, eh? But it may serve a useful purpose. It brings into sharp relief the real threat of patents and copyrights to a free society, which is the threat against property (ownership) itself. This is probably the ultimate reductio ad absurdum argument against copyright and patent restrictions of any sort - it's much easier to understand the ridiculousness of such encumbrances when they're applied to physical property that has traditionally been owned outright.

The final irony here is the name of the company pushing this scheme: Freehold. They should look that word up - I don't think it means what they wish it meant.

We've been noticing a trend in recent years of companies that sell physical goods trying to figure out ways to have those goods get some of the "advantages" of digital goods. For example, with physical products, once you sell it, in theory, the seller no longer owns a piece of the good. But with digital goods, they still hold the copyright, and often try to limit what you can do with the product even though you thought you "bought" it. So we've been disturbed by the rise of things like artist resale rights, which take away the right of first sale on artwork, and require you to pay the original artist every time you sell the product.

(link) [TechDirt]

via Overlawyered

08:03 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

03 Apr 2010
Feds found Pfizer too big to nail

I guess size does matter when it comes to justice... disgusting.

Imagine being charged with a crime, but an imaginary friend takes the rap for you.

(link) [CNN]

19:46 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

The Magic of Corporate Personhood

The modern corporation as the ultimate magical entity - conjured by legal writ and set loose upon society at large ... this guy nails it.

The legal history of corporate personhood, stretching over a hundred and fifty years, is an interesting story itself, marked by the dogged persistence of the Central Pacific Railroad and other corporations in bringing cases to the Supreme Court year after year that corporations were entitled to the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment drafted to guarantee equal protection for the freed slaves. Overcoming the resistance (and incredulity) of the Court, and many presidents, was a gradual process. It is ironic that it was the non-humanness of the corporation--its immortality--that led to its successful bid to acquire the rights of mortal citizens.

(link) [Huffington Post: Dale Pendell]

via Hardscrabble Creek

18:54 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link