SuziQ- who in Portland needs to be yelled at? my voice is coming back nicely.

The quinoa conversation is amusing me. Last night's dinner was a quinoa salad I love to make with lentils, feta, and arugula in it. Yums. Strangely enough, though quinoa and arugula can both be bitter, somehow combining them with lentil, lemon, and olive oil neutralizes all that.

Hair is now dyed and greys are properly banished for a couple more weeks. I need to move on to grading.

It's probably the lemon that reduces the bitterness.

The pretty pretty snow finally switched over to rain here, which is kind of too bad. But possibly better for the commuting, if it stays well above freezing...

The bitterness of quinoa is a survival adaptation, according to Trader Joe's and Wikipedia.

Quinoa in its natural state has a coating of bitter-tasting saponins, making it unpalatable. Most quinoa sold commercially in North America has been processed to remove this coating. This bitterness has beneficial effects during cultivation, as the plant is unpopular with birds and thus requires minimal protection.

I like my grains with pluck.

And protein.

A new H&½ was just posted: Wolf pack.

6 long lost species of frogs found in Haiti.

Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert!

God, I'm old. By my ever-rising standards, he was too young to die.

I like quinoa all right, but with my larva phobia, I am put off by the squiggly white thing.

For tommyrot.

Awwww....

Wow, here's a catastrophe I'd never heard of....

PS General Slocum

The PS General Slocum was a sidewheel steam passenger ship, also known as a paddle steamer, built at Brooklyn, New York in 1891... She operated in the New York City area as an excursion ship for the next thirteen years under the same ownership.

On June 15, 1904, the General Slocum caught fire and burned to the waterline in New York's East River.[1] At the time of the accident she was on a chartered run carrying members of St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church (German Americans from Little Germany, Manhattan) to a church picnic. An estimated 1,021 of the 1,342 people on board were killed. The General Slocum disaster was the New York area's worst disaster in terms of loss of life until the September 11, 2001 attacks.[2] The events surrounding the General Slocum fire have appeared in a number of books, plays and movies through the years.

...

This is one of the freaky things about the disaster:

Although the captain was ultimately responsible for the safety of passengers, no effort had been made to maintain or replace the ship's safety equipment. The fire hoses had been allowed to rot, and fell apart when the crew attempted to put out the fire. Likewise, the crew had never had a fire drill, and the lifeboats were tied up (some claim they were wired and painted in place)[9] and inaccessible. Survivors reported that the life preservers were useless and fell apart in their hands. Desperate mothers placed life jackets on their children and tossed them into the water, only to watch in horror as their children sank instead of floated. Most of those on board were women and children who, like most Americans of the time, could not swim; even victims who did not don the worthless life preservers found that their heavy wool clothing weighed them down in the water.[9]

It has been suggested that the manager of the life preserver manufacturer actually placed iron bars inside the cork preservers to meet minimum weight requirements at the time. Many of the life preservers had been filled with cheap and less effective granulated cork and brought up to proper weight by the inclusion of the iron weights. Canvas covers, rotted with age, split and scattered the powdered cork. Managers of the company (Nonpareil Cork Works) were indicted but not convicted. In any event, the life preservers had been manufactured in 1891 and had hung above the deck, unprotected from the elements, for thirteen years.[10]