BeauTie's Banterings

Greensburg Kansas, a town of 1600, reduced to rubble Friday night, May 4th by a monster tornado.

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I grew up in a town near Greensburg, my father was the storm spotter for our community (before Doppler), and we, being part of the Mennonite community, would travel throughout the state to help in rescue and recovery after tornadoes.  .I learned a lot about weather patterns and tornadoes from my father. And I've seen some really bad devastation, but nothing like the one in Greensburg Friday night where 95 percent of the town was flattened. Only the old courthouse, a silo, and a couple other buildings were left standing.

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Death toll (at this writing) stands at 8  but yet there are huge mounds of wood and brick rubble to go through to see if buildings collapsed on top of basements and over storm shelters trapping victims. inside.  This could take days before fatalities are tallied up.

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Early guestimates based on damage, say this was probably an EF4 or an EF5 with wind speeds over 200mph. Most tornadoes cut a swath several yards to several blocks wide, but this one was approximately a mile and a half wide and took out the whole town.

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My uncle's wife grew up Greensburg and may still have family living there, so I'm waiting to hear back from them.

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Would I rebuild the town?  Probably NOT.  
Weather patterns in the SW part of Kansas are ripe for tornadoes from April through June because of cold coming down from the Rockies that meets up with warm moist air from the gulf.  Because this area is prone to dozens (hundreds) springtime tornadoes, along with memories of the devastation, I myself would choose to relocate....just like I chose to move AWAY from Kansas in my early 20s.

Deserted beehives, starving young stun scientists

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By Dan Vergano and Patrick O'Driscoll, USA TODAY

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"The bees were gone," David Hackenberg says. "The honey was still there. There's young brood (eggs) still in the hive.

 Bees just don't do that."

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On that November night last year in the Florida field where he wintered his bees, Hackenberg found 400 hives empty. Another 30 hives were "disappearing, dwindling or whatever you want to call it," and their bees were "full of a fungus nobody's ever seen before."

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The discovery by Hackenberg, 58, a beekeeper from Lewisburg, Pa., was the first buzz about a plague that now afflicts 27 states, from the East Coast to the West. Beekeepers report losses of 30% to 90% of their honeybee hives, according to a Congressional Research Service study in March. Some report total losses.

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Now a nationwide investigation, congressional panels and last week's U.S. Department of Agriculture scientific workshop swarm around the newly named "colony collapse disorder." Says the USDA's Kevin Hackett, "With more dead and weakened colonies, the odds are building up for real problems."

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Busy bees

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The $15-billion-a-year honeybee industry is about more than honey: The nimble insects pollinate 90% to 100% of at least 19 kinds of fruits, vegetables and nuts nationwide, from almonds and apples to onions and broccoli.

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"Basically, everything fun and nutritious on your table — fruits, nuts, berries, everything but the grains — require bee pollinators," Hackett says.

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Beekeepers, who travel nationwide supplying pollinators to farmers, have been losing honeybees for a long time, mostly a result of suburbs snapping up habitat and the invasion in the 1980s of two foreign parasitic mite species. As a result, bee colonies have declined 60% since 1947, from an estimated 5.9 million to 2.4 million, says entomologist May Berenbaum of the University of Illinois.

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Each year, in fact, the bee industry supplies at least 1 million queens and packages of bees to replace lost hives, according to a 2006 National Research Council report. And sudden losses of hives have been reported since the 1800s.

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But colony collapse disorder differs from past outbreaks:

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•Instead of dying in place, the bees abandon the hives, leaving behind the queen and young bees.

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•Remaining bees eat sparsely and suffer the symptoms — high levels of bacteria, viruses and fungi in the guts — seen by Hackenberg.

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•Collapses can occur within two days, Hackett says.

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•Parasites wait unusually long to invade abandoned hives.

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Daniel Weaver, head of the 1,500-member American Beekeeping Federation, estimates that about 600,000 of 2 million hives (a more conservative number than other estimates) nationwide have been lost.

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Weaver, of Navasota, Texas, says his hives have been spared the mystery affliction so far. "But if we go into another winter without understanding what's going on, the risk of a more devastating effect on beekeepers is a real possibility," he says.

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Fittingly, in The Cherry Orchard, physician/playwright Anton Chekhov observed that when people offer many remedies for an illness, you can be sure it is incurable.

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If so, the bees are in trouble. A colony collapse disorder working group based at Pennsylvania State University has become a central clearinghouse for all the suspected causes, which include:

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•An overload of parasites, such as bloodsucking varroa mites, that have ravaged bees. The parasites reportedly spread to Hawaii only last week.

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•Pesticide contamination. Hotly debated suspicion centers on whether "neonicotinoid" insecticides interfere with the foraging behavior of bees, leading them to abandon their hives.

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•Fungal diseases such as Nosema ceranae, which is blamed for big bee losses in Spain. It was spotted by University of California-San Francisco researchers who were examining sample dead bees last week.

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•The rigors of traveling in trucks from crop to crop.

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A complex problem

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"We may have a perfect storm of many problems combining to kill the bees," Hackett says. And bees are social animals, who cue each other through "bee dances" to find food. "Something could be just disrupting bee society and causing the problem. That's very difficult to tease out."

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Weaver says the beekeeper federation is "bombarded with lots of interesting theories," including "far-fetched ideas like cellphones," the notion that radio waves from mobile phones are zapping the bees' direction-sensing abilities.

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"But right now there's not a lot of evidence to support any of these theories," Weaver says. "We think science is the only way to get to the bottom of this."

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The USDA spends about $9 million a year on bee research, Hackett says, about half of it focused on breeding bees resistant to mites. California is undertaking a five-year, $5 million project to examine insecticides, hive care and transport as well, he says.

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Weaver says researchers need perhaps $50 million over the next five years to cover studies, deeper analysis of the "leading suspects" and a national surveillance system.

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"Creating healthier bees, with a good diet, better able to fight disease is the best thing we can do right now," Hackett says. 

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Otherwise, "when you sit down to dinner, the question will be what sort of grain do you want — corn or wheat or rice — because that's about all the choice we'll have left."
 

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I remember as a child, making little baskets with handles out of colorful construction paper,  and very early on May 1st going out to mother's garden to pick fresh flowers to fill the baskets.  Then I'd take them around the neighborhood, placing baskets on porches, knocking on doors, and then running to hide to watch as people opened doors.  Everybody was thrilled to get their little May Day baskets.

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Do that nowadays and people would probably call out the cops.

Light Rail comes with a lot of resistance, as it did in Portland Oregon 20 years ago when it first went into operation (1986).

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But Portland's Light Rail system, called "MAX", exceeded all expectations with both planners and the public, ridership bounded, projects were paid off well in advance, much faster arrival times than congested freeways, and it revitalized the downtown area which has now become a very popular cultural hub of the city for daytime shoppers, Concerts in the Park, the Saturday Market for artists to sell their work, and the Grand Floral Parade that draws tourists worldwide;   as well as nighttime events such as fine dining, the arts, theaters, sporting events.  Many people drive "out of their way" to reach a Park & Ride, rather than fight traffic and parking spaces in congested areas of innercity.

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I left Portland in 2001 and at that time, as I recall, they had three completed lines, one coming in from the far east county, another coming in from the next county to the west, I think a line is now completed going to the very busy Portland International Airport.    All these lines meet up in the downtown area like a hub of wheel, and are color-coded so one can tell at a glance if they're getting on the correct one for their return trip home. Red, Blue, Yellow lines have been in operation for years; Green is under construction, and Orange phase is still on the drawing board.

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Portland's Light Rail has the fourth largest ridership in the United States. Only Los Angeles, San Fransico, and Boston have higher ridership.

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In the early beginnings I was neither FOR IT nor AGAINST IT, but instead watched with interest. Ridership was sparse at first because "change is hard",  but finally when I got around to "trying it out a few months later",  the cars were nearly full.  Take offs are very fast (like the tram at Las Vegas airport), and we were soon breezing along at a good clip doing 55mph in outlying areas, passing congested freeway traffic that ran alongside Light Rail.  And once we reached our destination, we didn't have to drive around block after block to find available parking garages or spaces for vehicle.

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All along the routes are gated Park and Ride lots with security guard attendants (as I recall) to protect vehicles, with easy access to light rail which comes by every few minutes.....much more frequent than the bus system.  Light Rail is wheelchair accessible, and riders are allowed to bring their bikes on board to continue to their destination to workplaces, colleges, events in and near downtown area.
(probably NOT the best place for Rick D'amico to learn to ride his bike)

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The down sides (which are few), pedestrian and vehicle traffic need to be alert when crossing tracks because light rail cars are so quiet that you can't hear them coming. Even 25 to 35mph in congested areas is still quite fast. And never walk over the high-voltage light rail tracks except at designated crossings.

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Needless to say I was (and still am) very impressed with Portland's well-laid out routes for light rail.  My question is why has a large city as Phoenix and entire valley area taken so long to get light rail system into place?

Does the undernourished baby, whose parents were arrested for child neglect, happen to have Celiac Disease?   Name of condition wasn't given on the noon news (4-19).

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If it is Celiac Disease, my nephew born back in the 1960s had this disease when very little was known about it, and it took months to finally get a diagnosis. Meanwhile he failed to gain weight.  My sister-in-law was investigated for child neglect even though she and the doctors were trying to find out WHY he was unthrifty and losing weight.

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Celiac Disease is the body's inability to absorb nutrients in the small intestines.  There's quite a bit of information about this disease on the web, whereas 40 years ago it was almost unheard of. 

Hope I don't get anyone in trouble by relating this....

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My computer froze up last week, so I made a trip over to Walmart to buy a new mouse, thinking that might be the problem.  This particular Walmart is undergoing a major remodel, everything has been changed around so I couldn't find anything.   Finally I asked an employee where I could find a MOUSE. 

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He laughed and then said....

"Have you tried the bakery department...?"

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<a href="http://photobucket.com" target="_blank"><img src="http://i151.photobucket.com/albums/s125/LadyBeauT
ie/mouse.gif" border="0" alt="Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket"></a>

In the metal storage shed next to my house, there is a can of gas (or some type of fuel).   It was left here by previous owners...or perhaps my ex (probably the latter). 

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I didn't know about it (the gas) until I opened the door to get yard equipment out and the fumes were overpowering.  I'm afraid it's going to cause a combustion and huge fire....especially now that the weather is starting to get hot which I imagine can really heat up a metal shed quickly.

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How can I get rid of it?  I'm afraid to even open the shed door now,  and won't touch it myself.

I decided to start another blog on this topic (5-yr-old girl trampled to death in Tucson Parade) since the previous blog was rushed to the back where many wouldn't see it.

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It's a VERY IMPORTANT TOPIC where changes need to be made to prevent further accidents from happening.

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The more I think about this horrible accident that killed the 5 year old girl knocked off and run over by team of horses, I'm even more convinced that children should NOT be allowed to ride horses in parades until they're 18 years old, at which time they're considered adults.  At least adult riders have more strength to control their horse, if heaven forbid, it should happen again.  

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An 8 year old child (the minimum age parade organizers require) wouldn't have stood a chance against a spooked team of horses rushing up from behind,  hitting rider's horse, knocking to pavement, and then running over the fallen rider. 

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I had to chuckle tonight when watching the news segment about men's hair-do's, and the trend nowadays toward a more feminine look, worn in ponytail, pigtails, and even in buns.

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Personally I LOVE IT!
I'm a baby boomer which means I'm over a half century old....(GASP)..... but yet I love long straight hair on men, slicked back and put in a ponytail or pigtail.  The longer the better.

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Recently I saw a guy riding his Harley through parking lot at grocery store, his gorgeous long dark pigtail wrapped in leather strips streaming out behind and thought WOW what a HUNK....but (SIGH) he was probably younger than my youngest child. LOL

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I may...or may not  (not sure yet) post a photo of my ex with his long blond hair worn in TWO ponytails....one on each side to look like POODLE EARS. 

In regard to the 5-year-old girl trampled and killed by horses in the Tucson Rodeo Parade.....

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Children, whether age 5, 8, 16 (or even adults), could have just as easily been killed in that accident.  It's NOT the age of the person.  From video taken shortly before the accident, it was easy to see this young 5-year-old girl was very much in control of her horse. And the horse was very comfortable with all the events happening along the parade route.  Her horse was very well trained.

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<b>HOWEVER
Fault lies ENTIRELY with the spooked team of horses pulling carriage</b>, running up from behind and into this young girl's horse, causing her to fall and was then run over by the team and carriage, killing her. This, I understand, is NOT the FIRST time this has happened at the same rodeo parade in Tucson <b><i>(and just might be the same team of horses...which I suspect it might be)</b></i>. I heard several years ago a team of horses pulling a carriage spooked and went into crowd of parade-goers.  This should never happen if horses are well-trained and conditioned to every possible thing that can happen during parades.

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Team of horses need a lot of training to be steadfast around crowds and other things associated with parades.  They should also have chain shanks (like those used on stallions) with horse riders riding alongside them to keep them under complete control.  And horse teams that have spooked in the past should be eliminated from any further participation in parades.

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Also horse-drawn carriages should be moved to very start of the parade route, not behind where they stand chance of running up and into horse riders.  

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<b>And finally,  if parade organizers want to put an minimum age for horse riders, they should make it age 18 at which time they're considered adults. 

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I've been hesitant to mention this...{GRIN}
probably waiting for someone else to bring up the topic.

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Maybe it's because I have big screen TV with high resolution that shows every detail....but I'm really turned off to see some of the American Idol contestants that don't brush their tongues.  They go to great lengths to make sure clothes look good on them, hairstyle is flattering, makeup applied meticulously, teeth white....but they fail to realize that the moment they open their mouths to sing, you can see gross-looking tongues coated from days/weeks of neglect. 

Below is crossposted from the Finding Jackie Hartman webpage, the 19 year old from Gilbert, missing now over 2 weeks after she went out on a date with a guy she'd just met.  He is now in custody and charged with her murder. 

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Hope all of you will check this daily for tips, information, and planned searches regarding Jackie Hartman.
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http://findingjackiehartman.blogspot.com/

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========CROSSPOSTED========

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found this post on the phx411.com
On Sat. Feb. 10th 15 members of the Riverside Mountain Rescue Unit from Riverside Ca. added in the search for Jackie in the Four Peaks Wilderness area. At approx. 1500 hrs. 2 searchers discovered truck tire track on a very rugged ATV trail that appeared to be some what old. Upon following those tracks they came to a spot where the vehicle turned around, at this location was found two words written in the sand but were unable to make out what they said. Near by a third word was found that clearly said HELP with an arrow pointing deeper into the wilderness. If the tire tracks match up with that of the suspects vehicle this would turn out to be a good lead as to where she might be. So no the search is not over nor will it be untill Jackie is brought home.

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Even though I'm female, I fail to understand what other women see in flowers and candy.

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I'm much rather go out to a nice candle-light dinner, have a couple drinks, slow-dance to live music, and then be presented with a sexy nightie at bedtime....than getting cut flowers that  are DEAD within days, and candy that adds DEAD calories to women that don't need them. 

I'm SHOCKED and SADDENED by the untimely death of Anna Nicole Smith, which I just found out about. 

I've always been humored by her unconventional mannerisms;  felt badly for her when her son, whom she seemed to absolutely adore, died just days after she had given birth to her daughter.  What a tragic short life for this beautiful and entertaining blond bombshell who has always reminded me of Marlyn Monroe.

RIP pretty lady, you've had a fun-filled adventurous life.... and lots of heartache as well.