Don’t Cancel Your Cable Yet

We know times are hard unless you were skeevy enough to have Madoff with a shit-ton of loot last year. Pay thru March, Tor(rent) up, or just boot off the neighbors for a few days. You must. not. miss. the HBO premiere of Death on a Factory Farm on March 16.

All Your B(A)SE Are Belong to Cows

New twist in tale of BSE’s beginnings

Sheep didn’t do it.

Cows eating cows did it … or maybe sheep eating cows. Their brains got sick. Then your brains got sick. Cows and sheep don’t really eat each other – at least not that they’re aware of. And thousands of mice got sick to remind you that feeding cows to sheep or sheep to cows, and either one or both to yourself, is still a bad idea.

Pop Quiz!

That’s 140,000,000 if you’re scoring at home in the US.

You so have to take this little test. It moos at you when you get one wrong. Holy lagoon spill! You can look up who’s funding the funders for peer-reviewed, scholarly journal articles.

What the Creator wants you to know about pigs

Joanna has transcribed for you over at the Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary’s blog.

Once every great while, you get to add something to the volumes of human knowledge that arrives via Divine intervention. You should read it aloud because it’s in a form you can hear without your head exploding, as might happen if you actually heard the real voice of God while you’re still alive.

You should read it because unless you really are that rarest, one-of-a-kind individual for whom a single “oink” once communicated paragraphs-worth of perfectly translated understanding, you will never know a most basic truth of the pig:
This is what I am,
what I ever was,
all that I will ever be.

After you’ve read it and committed it to memory, you can go about your work in the world, however humble or monumental, making perfect sense of—and good decisions about—anything pig-centric you may encounter. Specious and confounding pronouncements won’t distract or trouble you anymore. They will look and sound and seem as what they are, then crumble back into the dust under hooves and snouts and vanish into the grains of Earth from whence pig was made.

Hatch debris

We’re talking biological debris here, not your garden variety roadside rubble and ruins. Cellular-type debris, damaged or dead tissue, over and above extracellular artifacts on a badly prepared slide. So what is “hatch debris,” exactly? Baby birds hatch from an egg, so it must be the remains of the egg shell in the nest, maybe some tiny feathers, and a bit of albumen goo.

Yeah, that stuff. Icky, but that’s birthing—somebody’s bound to get dirty.

“Hatch debris,” as it turns out, is a bit more involved. It’s bigger than a piece of broken shell. It has wings that twitch under those downy feathers and tiny toes that curl. It breathes and peeps and blinks.

“Hatch debris” was me. You can feed yourself on Thursday and for the rest of your life without ever feeding into this.