timouse

i worked out that niffermouse and i spend somewhere around $1500 a month in GST eligible purchases.

a 1% GST reduction will net me $15 a month.

[color:purple]woo hoo! enough for 6 beers!

from today's Globe and Mail:

Will consumers have a beef with test-tube meat?

ANNE MCILROY

From Monday's Globe and Mail

Scientists can grow frog and mouse meat in the lab, and are now working on pork, beef and chicken. Their goal is to develop an industrial version of the process in five years.

If they succeed, cultured or in vitro meat could be coming to a supermarket near you. Consumers could buy hamburger patties and chicken nuggets made from meat cultivated from muscle cells in a giant incubator rather than cut from a farm animal.

Home chefs could make meat in a countertop device the size of a coffee maker. Before bed, throw starter cells and a package of growth medium into the meat maker and wake up to harvest fresh sausage for breakfast.

duscuss.

wow, lots of birthdays this week! happy birthday jaimoe!!

RIP Buck...the live music scene on the other side keeps getting better and better

good call lex...woody harrelson is the real deal...he's an ordinary guy who has realized what his lifestyle was doing to the planet, and due to his economic and celebrity position, has found a way of making a difference by "becoming the change" that needs to happen.

his movie is pretty powerful. there's a scene where they stop at a high school, do a presentation and conduct a yoga class on the lawn...several of the kids get it right away...

and ollie, thanks for posting the wal-mart story. if a big company like sprawl-mart is embracing organics and sustainable source products, that will have a ripple effect that will be felt through the whole retal sector.

three cheers for hopeful news for a change

This lesbian bar doesn't have a fire exit. Enjoy your death trap' date=' ladies.[/quote']

funny only to 4:30 am drunken booche.

i disagree

yay mark and george and lucas!

teh boathouse was pretty packed last night, and it sounded great...it was very cool to see you guys play from out front for a change

happy spring day birthday!

happy birthday to you indeed, deb!

i'm going to have to promise you a belated birthday hug in a month when we all make a trek up to o-town...in the meantime, i'm sure dave and the girls and bunny will make your birthday amazing...

tim

this evening, Dylanesque KW singer-songwriter Lucas Stagg is the centre of an evening of music at the Boathouse. Opening for Lucas, it's mark tonin, geomouse and friends. the fun starts at 930 (ish)...not sure what the cost at the door will be, probably somewhere around $5...come out if you can!

shows what you know! I'm [color:brown]demon spawn...I aint got no momma!

so your birthday is...spawn-day?

This may not be as bad as it looks. I saw an advertisement for an upcoming movie by that name. Link

They should mention that it's a movie. It looks like the new york times is saying thank you for smoking. Thanks for pointing that out though.

no doubt the phillip morris/general foods/kraft lawyers will be on this' date=' and demand that the Times point out that it's a movie ad, and their customers should continue smoking.

[img']http://images.google.ca/url?q=http://www.24-7simpsons.com/blue_haired_lawyer_1_thumb.jpg

Jeremy Rifkin predicted that this would happen when they allowed the Harvard Mouse patent...it's a slow downhill slide toward corporate hegemony, with the usual ironic twists along the way.

the sad thing is that this still won't be enough to provoke a discussion of the concept. there will be heated debate about some niggly detail of the patent and no discussion of the meaning of the patent, or the patent process itself as it applies to life and living things.

the one up-side is that this can't (as far as i know) just be immediately foisted on canada, and hopefully our supreme court will react with the same good sense they diaplayed about the oncomouse...

sigh...

if purple is sarcastic, what colour is cynical??

i'm all for biodiesel, and particularly now in the age of prions, the idea that they have found a beneficial re-use for slaughterhouse waste is very cool.

it looks like there's something suspect going on though...any of you hammertown folks know anything about this?

Waste firm raises 'red flags'

Company operating without a permit while applying to build a refinery in

city

By Eric McGuinness

The Hamilton Spectator

(Mar 14, 2006)

A Montreal-based company applying to build a biodiesel fuel refinery on

Parkdale Avenue North has been operating a Hamilton transfer station for

animal parts, bones and used cooking oil for years without Environment

Ministry approval.

ABP Recycling, a subsidiary of Sanimal Inc., was also recently caught

dumping untreated wastewater from a related Elmira company into sewers at

its Hamilton plant without permission from either the ministry or the city.

Ministry spokesperson Mark Rabbior said Friday the ministry discovered the

lack of a permit March 3. It happened when an officer investigated a Feb. 15

complaint from the City of Hamilton that ABP was illegally accepting hauled

sewage at 800 Parkdale Ave. N., where it moved early last year.

Spokesperson John Steele further revealed yesterday that there is no record

of a certificate of approval ever being issued for ABP's previous site on

Strathearne Avenue North. He also said the Parkdale plant was accepting two

or three truckloads a day from holding tanks at The Grease Man in Elmira.

Hamilton East MPP Andrea Horwath, Ward 4 Councillor Sam Merulla and

Environment Hamilton are all upset by those disclosures.

Horwath asked: "Why are we faced with an application from people who have

already proven they are not prepared to follow the law? It's extremely

disconcerting that a company can operate in this fashion right under the

nose of everyone."

Brenda Johnson, project co-ordinator for Environment Hamilton, said she

hadn't seen ABP's application to produce 75 million litres of biodiesel a

year beside the transfer station, but "they still need a certificate of

approval for their present plant and don't have one. That's my biggest

concern."

Rabbior said ABP was ordered to stop taking sewage and to apply to legalize

its existing operation in a former Stelco building more recently owned by

Philip Services Corp.

General manager Joe Kosalle spoke about the biodiesel application Friday,

but did not return Spectator calls after the ministry revealed ABP's lack of

permits.

ABP is wholly owned by Sanimal Inc. of Montreal, the largest animal

rendering company in eastern Canada. Sanimal last year acquired a Wisconsin

renderer, Anamax, which is building a 75-million-litre-a-day biodiesel plant

on which the Hamilton application is modelled. The combined company calls

itself Sanimax and has headquarters in Montreal.

Merulla said he would ask city officials to check the biodiesel plan closely

so council can take any concerns to the ministry.

Asked about ABP's lack of a permit, he said: "I'm not sure how it went under

the radar. It's really putting up a lot of red flags for me. I'm not sure we

as a city should be welcoming people like this to do business in the city,

and it's incumbent on the province that every decision it makes is in the

best interests of this community."

Burke Austin of Community Action Parkdale East (CAPE) said flyers would go

out this week urging area residents to tell the ministry "we will not accept

this type of operation in our community."

ABP's biodiesel refinery would be the second in Hamilton. Biox Corp. of

Oakville, which built the first at Oliver and Wentworth streets, says

production will start soon. Its capacity is 60 million litres a year.

Canada's only operating biodiesel facility, built by the Rothsay rendering

division of Maple Leaf Foods, opened last year on Montreal's south shore.

Clean-burning biodiesel can be made from animal fats, vegetable oils and

used cooking grease. It is usually blended with petroleum diesel at

concentrations ranging from 2 per cent to 20 per cent.

The market is growing so fast that an industry website lists 44 plants

planned or under construction in the United States.

March 29 is the deadline for public comment on ABP's application for a

certificate of approval for air emissions from the proposed biodiesel plant.

For more information, call the ministry's Hamilton district office at

905-521-7640. The reference number is 3141-6LZT6R.

so it would seem from the rotating banner ad that there's a celebration being had in the diesel dog family!

congratulations you guys!

or...

Homer: "Beer...the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."

that's exactly BoB Macadory's voice!

and lloyd robertson to boot

sir paul needs to chew with his mouth closed.

it's like howard dean with a pee fetish

wow.

niffermouse and i were on that ferry on our cross country honeymoon, and it would be bedlam trying to get everyone off of the ship...at least nobody was seriously hurt.

Gone-Arrhea

oh my. i had to read the subject like 3 times before it registered who you were talking about. i kept seeing McKenna instead of MacIsaac.

at first glance, he couldn't be much worse than the schnook currently keeping the chair warm, but...ummm...shouldn't you be elected a couple of times or something before they put you in charge? how very quixotic (thanks DEM for the vocabulary boost )

indeed, stay strong. it's an horrible thing to have to do, at least you're doing it right and cutting the cord on a monday, that way they have a full week to get the next step going.

i've had to fire 2 people in my life, and both of them broke down when i told them. then i broke down, but held my ground. then i went and smoked a lot of hash.

good luck...

woo hooo!

from saturday's Toronto Star :

Bottled water questions

Mar. 18, 2006. 01:00 AM

CAMERON SMITH

I don't know of anyone who will tell you that bottled water is unsafe to drink. But professor William Shotyk won't tell you that it's safe, either. He says a lot more research is needed before anyone can say for sure whether it's safe or unsafe.

Shotyk is director of the Institute of Environmental Geochemistry at Heidelberg University in Germany, and has just published research establishing that the plastic containers commonly used for bottling water leach antimony into the water.

The leaching is at levels well below what's recommended as safe for drinking water. The troubling aspect, however, is that antimony is very much like lead and, says Shotyk in one of his research papers, "has no known biological function, has a similar toxicity (to lead), and is a cumulative poison."

Discovery of leaching came about because Shotyk was testing "pristine" groundwater at Elmvale, north of Barrie, where he spent his summers as a boy at his parents' country retreat. It was part of an ongoing investigation into increasing levels of antimony in the environment. "Antimony has been off the radar screen until now," he says.

He found such a disparity between the amount of antimony in the groundwater and in water bottled from the same area, that he became suspicious antimony might be leaching from the plastic of the bottles.

So, he tested 15 different brands of bottled water sold in Canada, and 48 brands in Europe. He found significant leaching from bottles made with polyethylene terephthalate (PET). These are the bottles used for water and soft drinks almost exclusively.

(He also found there was a negligible amount of leaching from polypropylene bottles. However, very few bottles are made from polypropylene, which is used primarily for containers that need to withstand wide temperature changes.)

According to Shotyk, 90 per cent of PET containers use antimony trioxide as a catalyst. It's a suspected carcinogen, he adds.

In PET water bottles, he found up to 375 parts per trillion (ppt) of antimony. In bottles stored an additional three months, it had increased to 625 ppt, indicating, Shotyk says, that there was "profound" and continuing leaching in the bottles.

Ontario, federal, and U.S. guidelines all set a limit of 6 parts per billion for drinking water, well above what was found in the bottles. But, with such a fast rate of leaching, and the expectation that antimony accumulates in the body like lead, can the bottles be considered safe for water?

David Coggan, an epidemiologist with the environmental epidemiology unit of the Medical Research Council at Southampton, England, says it's too early for the question. Little is known about the toxicity of antimony, he says, and more research is needed before health implications can be addressed.

Shotyk agrees, especially since rates of antimony pollution are rising. He and a team of researchers recently found that 50 per cent more antimony is being deposited in the Canadian Arctic than occurred 30 years ago. "Having recognized the scale of contamination, we now need to know if antimony really is as toxic as we think it could be," Shotyk says.

His research papers are published in the Journal of Environmental Publishing. To read them, go to the website of the Royal Society of Chemistry at http://www.rsc.org/jem.

They raise a classic issue of the precautionary principle: Should people abstain from water and pop bottled in PET containers until it's established there's no risk to health?

Shotyk has decided to abstain. I think I will, too.