War On Drugs Takes No Prisoners -Truth May Set You Free (And Get You Fired)

Watch your words
The United States isn't the only country to fight a war on drugs. The U.K. is battling, too, and until this past week, one of the country's biggest fighters was David Nutt. But that was before he went on the record as saying that marijuana, LSD, and ecstacy were less dangerous than alcohol. The assertion caused a huge stir and led to Mr. Nutt's near-immediate dismissal. But the recently laid-off official isn't taking the news lying down. In an interview with BBC, Mr. Nutt accused British Prime Minister Gordon Brown of being "irrational" with regards to the dangers of marijuana. In another buzzy article, Mr. Nutt was quoted as saying that he was "not prepared to mislead the public about the harmfulness of drugs like cannabis and Ecstasy." The British government is currently seeking a replacement.

http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzzlog/93142?fp=1

UK drug adviser fired after marijuana comments

By RAPHAEL G. SATTER, Associated Press Writer Raphael G. Satter, Associated Press Writer Fri Oct 30, 2:57 pm ET

LONDON – Britain's top drug adviser was fired Friday after saying that marijuana, Ecstasy and LSD were less dangerous than alcohol.

David Nutt's comments have embarrassed the British government, which toughened the penalties for possessing marijuana earlier this year over the protests of many prominent British scientists.

Nutt said he was disappointed by his sacking, telling Sky News television that it might have something to do with the upcoming general election, which must be called by the middle of next year.

"Politics is politics and science is science, and there's a bit of a tension between them sometime," he told the broadcaster by telephone.

In later comments to BBC radio's "PM" program, Nutt accused British Prime Minister Gordon Brown of making "completely irrational statements" about the dangerousness of marijuana.

"I'm not prepared to mislead the public about the harmfulness of drugs like cannabis and Ecstasy," he said.

A call and an e-mail by The Associated Press seeking comment from the scientist were not immediately returned.

Britain's Home Office confirmed that Nutt, a professor of neuropsychopharmacology, had been removed from his position and said it would be seeking a replacement shortly.

In Britain, drugs are classified in three different categories, with Class A the most dangerous one. Marijuana was recently upgraded to Class B from Class C, joining amphetamines, Ritalin and pholcodine as drugs whose unlawful possession could result in up to five years in prison.

But the move ran counter to recommendations made by Nutt, who has long argued that marijuana is far less dangerous than legal drugs such as alcohol, which is responsible for nearly 9,000 deaths a year in the U.K., according to recent government statistics.

Nutt argues that while all drugs are dangerous, the restrictions placed on them should be proportional to their potential harm. Britain's Home Office has rejected his advice, saying the scientific evidence is uncertain and that a message needs to be sent to marijuana users that possessing the drug is a serious crime.

The move prompted a flurry of protest from scientists — among them two former chief scientific advisers to the government. They and others wrote an open letter to the government warning that reclassifying marijuana would send confusing messages about how dangerous it and other drugs really were.

Although Nutt's views have long been public knowledge, the government seems to have been angered by a recent lecture for the Center for Crime and Justice Studies at King's College in London during which Nutt accused former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith of "distorting and devaluing" researchers' work.

In the lecture, Nutt said Smith's decision to tighten restrictions on marijuana had undermined public faith in government science.

"I think we have to accept young people like to experiment — with drugs and other potentially harmful activities — and what we should be doing in all of this is to protect them from harm at this stage of their lives," he said.

"If you think that scaring kids will stop them using, you are probably wrong."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091030/ap_on_re_eu/eu_britain_drug_chief_fired_2

DEA Pressure On Pain Doctors and Their Patients

The War On Drugs has many effects. Seniors needing pain medicine are in the DEA's sights.

DEA crackdown hurts nursing home residents who need pain drugs

By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 29, 2009

Heightened efforts by the Drug Enforcement Administration to crack down on narcotics abuse are producing a troubling side effect by denying some hospice and elderly patients needed pain medication, according to two Senate Democrats and a coalition of pharmacists and geriatric experts.

Tougher enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act, which tightly restricts the distribution of pain medicines such as morphine and Percocet, is causing pharmacies to balk and is leading to delays in pain relief for those patients and seniors in long-term-care facilities, wrote Sens. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).

The lawmakers wrote to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. this month, urging that the Obama administration issue new directives to the DEA and support a possible legislative fix for the problem, which has bothered nursing home administrators and geriatric experts for years.

The DEA has sought to prevent drug theft and abuse by staff members in nursing homes, requiring signatures from doctors and an extra layer of approvals when certain pain drugs are ordered for sick patients.

The law, however, "fails to recognize how prescribing practitioners and the nurses who work for long-term care facilities and hospice programs actually order prescription medications," Kohl and Whitehouse write. They conclude that delays can lead to "adverse health outcomes and unnecessary rehospitalizations, not to mention needless suffering."

Most nursing homes do not have pharmacies or doctors on site, adding to delays for patients who fall ill late at night or in transition from a hospital.

Justice Department and DEA officials had no immediate comment. The DEA sent out guidance last summer in response to some of the pleas, but it did not resolve the central issue of whether a nurse could serve as an agent of a doctor and administer pain medication with a verbal directive rather than a written prescription from a doctor.

The problem took on new urgency this year after the drug agents heightened their enforcement of the rules at pharmacies in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Virginia. The pharmacies face tens of thousands of dollars in fines if they deviate from strict controls that require doctors to sign paper prescriptions and fax them to a pharmacy before a nurse can administer them in the nursing home setting.

"The system is broken. It isn't working, and patients are suffering," said Claudia Schlosberg, director of policy and advocacy for the American Society of Consultant Pharmacists. "While we need to ensure there are proper controls on the medications, the overall law enforcement concern has to be compatible with meeting patients' needs, and right now it's not."

Doctors in nursing homes say the restrictions do not take into account that many more patients, with higher levels of illness and pain, are moving into long-term-care sites and out of hospitals.

William Smucker, medical director of the Altenheim Nursing Home in Ohio, said that the "delay is not what I would want for myself or my family, and it's not the way I practice in other settings."

Terence McCormally, a doctor who cares for patients in nursing homes in Northern Virginia, said the tug of war reflects "the tension between the war on drugs and the war on pain."

"For the doctor and the nurse, it's a nuisance," he said, "but for the patient it is needless suffering."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/28/AR2009102803146.html?hpid=topnews

Vic Mizzy - Composer

In the last paragraph of this obituary of Vic Mizzy, Mr. Mizzy gives a nice summation of the advantages of holding on to the rights to one's own compositions.


Composer wrote snappy themes to 'Addams Family, 'Green Acres'

By T. Rees Shapiro
Thursday, October 22, 2009

Vic Mizzy, 93, a composer and conductor who wrote the bouncy, contagious theme music for the 1960s television comedies "The Addams Family" and "Green Acres," died of a congenital heart failure Oct. 17 at his home in Los Angeles, said his daughter, Lynn Mizzy Jonas.

Mr. Mizzy's career stretched over eight decades and included movie scores and pop and novelty tunes. Early in his career, he collaborated on such standards as "My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time," which became a hit for Doris Day, among other leading singers of big-band era.

His other songs, including "Take It Easy" and "No Bout Adout It," were featured in popular movie comedies and musicals of the 1940s, but his career slumped after his return to civilian life after Navy service during World War II.

Through a stroke of luck, he was invited to compose songs for the Esther Williams film musical "Easy to Love" (1953), which led to further Hollywood studio assignments and important connections in the burgeoning world of television.

In 1964, he was commissioned to write the theme music for "The Addams Family," a new ABC comedy based on the macabre New Yorker cartoons by Charles Addams.

Mr. Mizzy went back to the network executives with the "ba-da-da dum!" beat and signature double finger snaps tune that he said produced "smiles right away."

The show's production company, however, refused to pay for extra musicians. So Mr. Mizzy played a harpsichord and overdubbed himself singing the tune three times to make it seem like a whole chorus was singing: "They're creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky, they're altogether ooky: the Ad-dams fam-il-y." Snap. Snap.

Jon Burlingame, a historian of television theme songs, said Mr. Mizzy was responsible for two of the "most memorable" sitcom themes in history.

"He was an old-school songwriter of the old Tin Pan Alley tradition, and he believed in melody and hummability," Mr. Burlingame said. "He only had 60 seconds to make a musical point that was memorable so that you'd go, 'Oh, that show is on, let's go watch.' "

Mr. Mizzy's popular theme for "Green Acres,", which aired on CBS from 1965 to 1971, had lyrics that quickly summed up the show's premise, about a New York lawyer who relocates his family to a farm.

In the song, star Eddie Albert celebrates life in the countryside from atop a tractor, "Green Acres is the place to be/Farm livin' is the life for me," as Eva Gabor, playing his socialite wife, proclaims her love for Manhattan from a towering apartment balcony, "I just adore a penthouse view/Darling I love you, but give me Park Avenue."

Victor Mizzy was born Jan. 9, 1916, in Brooklyn, N.Y., and grew up playing the accordion and piano. He attended New York University and once joked that he took classes in "harmonics, 12 tone row and advanced finger snapping."

His marriages to radio singer Mary Small and Shirley Leeds ended in divorce. Survivors include his daughter from his first marriage Lynn, of Staten Island, N.Y.; a brother; and two grandchildren. Another daughter from his first marriage died in 1995.

Mr. Mizzy started writing movie scores with the William Castle horror film "The Night Walker" (1964) and later scored a string of Don Knotts comedies, including "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken" (1966) and "The Shakiest Gun in the West" (1968). He released a compilation album in 2004 called "Songs for the Jogging Crowd."

Mr. Mizzy, who owned the rights to the "Addams Family" theme song, often credited two of his fingers for his lasting success. As he said in a CBS interview, "Two finger snaps and you live in Bel Air."

Jack Nelson - Journalist Covered Civil Rights Era

Former LA Times journalist Jack Nelson dies at 80

By DOUGLASS K. DANIEL
The Associated Press
Wednesday, October 21, 2009 2:39 PM

WASHINGTON -- Jack Nelson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who covered the civil rights movement and the Watergate scandal for the Los Angeles Times and was the paper's Washington bureau chief for 20 years, died Wednesday. He was 80.

Nelson, who had pancreatic cancer, died at his home in the Washington suburb of Bethesda, Md., said Richard Cooper a family friend and longtime Times associate.

Nelson spent more than 35 years with the Los Angeles Times, stepping down as its chief Washington correspondent in 2001. He joined the Times in 1965 and in 1970 began working in its Washington bureau. He was bureau chief from 1975 to the end of 1995.

As a reporter with The Atlanta Constitution in 1960, he won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting for exposing malpractice and other problems at the 12,000-patient state mental hospital in Milledgeville, Ga.

"Jack was a reporter's reporter," said Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times. "He maintained that the main thing people want from newspapers is facts - facts they didn't know before, and preferably facts that somebody didn't want them to know. Jack was tolerant of opinion writers; he respected analysis writers, and he even admired one or two feature writers. But he believed the only good reason to be a reporter was to reveal hidden facts and bring them to light."

Nelson began focusing on civil rights issues when he opened the Los Angeles Times bureau in Atlanta in 1965.

"He carried his investigative abilities forward and applied them to what was going on in the South during the civil rights era," said veteran journalist Gene Roberts, an author of the book "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation." "Jack had what the military calls 'command presence.' He was very self-confident and his earnestness and authority communicated itself."

Two of Nelson's five books stemmed from his civil rights reporting: "The Orangeburg Massacre" (1970), co-authored with Jack Bass, which chronicled the 1968 incident in which police fired into a crowd of young protesters at South Carolina State College, killing three, and "Terror in the Night: The Klan's Campaign Against the Jews" (1993).

"A reporter likes to pride himself on being as objective as he can and, you know, tell them both sides of the story. Well, there's hardly two sides to a story of a man being denied the basic right to vote," Nelson said in an interview in 2004. "There's no two sides to a story of a lynching. A lynching is a lynching."

Nelson covered presidential administrations from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton. During the Watergate scandal, he scored an exclusive interview with a security guard for the Nixon re-election campaign who had been involved in the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

John Howard Nelson was born on Oct. 11, 1929, in Talladega, Ala., and graduated from high school in Biloxi, Miss. He was a reporter for the Biloxi Daily Herald from 1947 to 1951 before serving a stint in the U.S. Army. He joined The Atlanta Constitution in 1952.

Survivors include his wife, journalist Barbara Matusow, and two children, Karen and John Michael "Mike" Nelson, from his marriage to Virginia Dickinson. Another son, Steven, died earlier.

(This version CORRECTS to show a son preceded Nelson in death.)

Job Opening In Colorado

Dope gig! Paper hiring reefer reviewer

Many applicants offering to work for free critiquing state’s dispensaries

The Associated Press

updated 4:55 p.m. ET, Tues., Oct . 20, 2009

DENVER - The store has a television lounge and a pool table, and snacks and acupuncture are free for customers who drop up to $130 an ounce on 16 varieties of marijuana. But a reviewer of the business warns the decor looks a little cliche, what with the Grateful Dead posters on the wall and the Mexican-blanket tablecloths.

The medical marijuana review business is booming as states like Colorado and California have seen an explosion in the number of pot shops.

A Denver alternative newspaper recently posted an ad for what some consider the sweetest job in journalism — a reviewer of the state's marijuana dispensaries and their products.

Medical marijuana users can also look to dozens of review Web sites, even mainstream rating sites such as Yelp or Citysearch, to find their high. At least five iPhone applications allow weed fans to find the closest place to legally buy bud in the 14 states that allow some sort of medical marijuana.

The Denver paper, Westword, has already has gotten more than 120 applicants, many of them offering to do the reviews for free. When the newspaper settles on a permanent critic for its new "Mile Highs and Lows" column, industry watchers say, it will be the first professional newspaper critic of medical marijuana in the country.

Critic must be able to legally buy medical pot
There's one condition: The critic has to have a medical ailment that allows them to legally enter a dispensary, and buy and use marijuana.

"More and more people are having the opportunity to use marijuana for whatever illness they have. So we want to be a place they can come to find out which place is the best, the cleanest, the closest, that kind of stuff," said Joe Tone, Web editor at Westword.

Most current reviews focus on dispensaries in California, the first state in the nation to approve medical marijuana in 1996. Los Angeles now has an estimated 800 medical pot shops, up from only four in 2005. Colorado has more than 100, including one across the street from the state Capitol.

The growth of the business has created clashes with local, state and federal authorities, prompting the U.S. Attorney General to issue guidelines this week telling federal prosecutors that targeting people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state laws was not a good use of their time.

Sites such as marijuanareviews.com and weedmaps.com boast thousands of users who dish on the merits of various strains, from "White Widow" to "Afghan Gold Seal," which is cheap but one critic warns "delivers a very heavy stone with the same degree of munchies to go along with it."

The pot review sites say they're getting dozens of new users a day as people acquire permission to use medical marijuana but aren't sure where to go or what kind of pot to use.

"People are really desperate for this kind of information," said Justin Hartfield, manager of weedmaps.com, a Laguna Hills, Calif.-based Web site that now has five employees and is planning new sites for Colorado. "There are so many places to go that users are really looking for honest reviews."

The idea for Westword's column came from a writer who doesn't use marijuana.

'Somebody needs to tell what these places are like'
Features writer Joel Warner has been covering Colorado's medical marijuana industry for years, and he noticed a wide disparity in the places selling pot.

"Some really looked like your college drug dealer's dorm room. You know, Bob Marley posters on the wall and big marijuana leaf posters," Warner said. "But then some were so fancy, like dentist's offices. They had bubbling aquariums in the lobby and were so clean. I thought, somebody needs to review these. Somebody needs to tell people what these places are like."

So Warner started the column. A back injury made him eligible for the medical card needed to enter Colorado dispensaries. But because Warner doesn't use marijuana and fears legal trouble if he gives it away, Warner suggested the professional critic who would review both the dispensaries and the products they sell.

The newspaper hasn't yet settled on a freelance fee for the reviews; it's currently running an essay contest and sharing excerpts of potential critics talking about what marijuana means to them. "Marijuana isn't just important to me, it is my life," gushed one hopeful.

On one recent visit, Warner stopped in the dispensary across the street from the Colorado state Capitol to pick up some cannabis-infused candy. The office was nondescript, a couple couches and a sleek modern glass receptionist's desk in front of a flat-screen TV.

You'd have no idea what the Capitol Hill Medicine Shoppe was if not for a pervasive marijuana smell and a few small marijuana plants plopped on the front desk.

Another shop is located in a charming Victorian with exposed brick walls, cushy leather couches and a coffee counter serves lattes and herbal teas. The drinks, of course, are spiked with cannabis-infused honey tincture that a reviewer says is "guaranteed to give you more than just a caffeine buzz."

Reviewers say there is plenty of room for more critics.

Photographers are cashing in, too, with new Web sites popping up that look like lush food photography sites — except the pictures feature marijuana instead of fancy desserts. Hartfield just started a new advertising-supported weed photo site called nugporn.com and says there is plenty of work for photographers and even stylists for the pot shots.

"This is professional stuff," he said.

Laura Kriho, spokeswoman for the Colorado-based Cannabis Therapy Institute, a pro-marijuana legalization group, said it's natural that the review industry is growing like, well, weeds.

"This is such a new industry. Just like anything else, the market is going to decide which places survive," she said. "It's going to be a battle, and patients want to do their research just like for any other medicine."

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33402549/ns/health-more_health_news/from/ET/

CyClone Dairy - Perfect Milk @ Green Fest

I went to the 2009 Green Festival in Washington, DC, (October 10, 11), where I saw an interesting booth for CyClone Dairy which promised perfect milk from cloned cows. The booth was staffed by a pair of "scientist" looking types - clean cut, white lab coats. I didn't have time to engage them - I thought it was strange that someone at Green Fest would promote cloning, but I picked up their pamphlet and kept moving. At home I checked the web site www. cyclonedairy.com and clicked through enough times to realize that it is a Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream campaign to support legislation that would require the tracking of cloned animals. All very clever even if owned by UniLever.

www. cyclonedairy.com

Global Warming And Cow Farts

Cheryl Senter for The New York Times

Some of the 75 dairy cows at Guy Choiniere’s farm in Highgate, Vt., where feed has been changed to plants like alfalfa and flaxseed to reduce the methane emitted when they belch.

June 5, 2009

Greening the Herds: A New Diet to Cap Gas

By LESLIE KAUFMAN

HIGHGATE, Vt. — Chewing her cud on a recent sunny morning, Libby, a 1,400-pound Holstein, paused to do her part in the battle against global warming, emitting a fragrant burp.

Libby, age 6, and the 74 other dairy cows on Guy Choiniere’s farm here are at the heart of an experiment to determine whether a change in diet will help them belch less methane, a potent heat-trapping gas that has been linked to climate change.

Since January, cows at 15 farms across Vermont have had their grain feed adjusted to include more plants like alfalfa and flaxseed — substances that, unlike corn or soy, mimic the spring grasses that the animals evolved long ago to eat.

As of the last reading in mid-May, the methane output of Mr. Choiniere’s herd had dropped 18 percent. Meanwhile, milk production has held its own.

The program was initiated by Stonyfield Farm, the yogurt manufacturer, at the Vermont farms that supply it with organic milk. Mr. Choiniere, a third-generation dairy herder who went organic in 2003, said he had sensed that the outcome would be good even before he got the results.

“They are healthier,” he said of his cows. “Their coats are shinier, and the breath is sweet.”

Sweetening cow breath is a matter of some urgency, climate scientists say. Cows have digestive bacteria in their stomachs that cause them to belch methane, the second-most-significant heat-trapping emission associated with global warming after carbon dioxide. Although it is far less common in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, it has 20 times the heat-trapping ability.

Frank Mitloehner, a University of California, Davis, professor who places cows in air-tight tent enclosures and measures what he calls their “eruptions,” says the average cow expels — through burps mostly, but some flatulence — 200 to 400 pounds of methane a year.

More broadly, with worldwide production of milk and beef expected to double in the next 30 years, the United Nations has called livestock one of the most serious near-term threats to the global climate. In a 2006 report that looked at the environmental impact of cows worldwide, including forest-clearing activity to create pasture land, it estimated that cows might be more dangerous to Earth’s atmosphere than trucks and cars combined.

In the United States, where average milk production per cow has more than quadrupled since the 1950s, fewer cows are needed per gallon of milk, so the total emissions of heat-trapping gas for the American dairy industry are relatively low per gallon compared with those in less industrialized countries.

Dairy Management Inc., the promotion and research arm of the American dairy industry, says it accounts for just 2 percent of the country’s emissions of heat-trapping gases, most of it from the cows’ methane.

Still, Erin Fitzgerald, director of social and environmental consulting for Dairy Management, says the industry wants to avert the possibility that customers will equate dairies with, say, coal plants. It has started a “cow of the future” program, looking for ways to reduce total industry emissions by 25 percent by the end of the next decade.

William R. Wailes, the head of the department of animal science at Colorado State University who is working on the cow of the future, says scientists are looking at everything from genetics — cows that naturally belch less — to adjusting the bacteria in the cow’s stomach.

For the short run, Professor Wailes said, changes in feed have been the most promising.

Stonyfield Farm, which started as a money-raising arm for a nonprofit organic dairy school and still has a progressive bent, has been working on the problem longer than most.

Nancy Hirshberg, Stonyfield’s vice president for natural resources, commissioned a full assessment of her company’s impact on climate change in 1999 that extended to emissions by some of its suppliers.

“I was shocked when I got the report,” Ms. Hirshberg said, “because it said our No. 1 impact is milk production. Not burning fossil fuels for transportation or packaging, but milk production. We were floored.”

From that moment on, Ms. Hirshberg began looking for a way to have the cows emit less methane.

A potential solution was offered by Groupe Danone, the French makers of Dannon yogurt and Evian bottled water, which bought a majority stake in Stonyfield Farm in 2003. Scientists working with Groupe Danone had been studying why their cows were healthier and produced more milk in the spring. The answer, the scientists determined, was that spring grasses are high in Omega-3 fatty acids, which may help the cow’s digestive tract operate smoothly.

Corn and soy, the feed that, thanks to postwar government aid, became dominant in the dairy industry, has a completely different type of fatty acid structure.

When the scientists began putting high concentrations of Omega-3 back into the cows’ food year-round, the animals were more robust, their digestive tract functioned better and they produced less methane.

The new feed is used at 600 farms in France, said Julia Laurain, a representative of Valorex SAS, a French company that makes the feed additives and that is working with Stonyfield Farm to bring the program to the United States.

A reason farmers like corn and soy is that those crops are a plentiful, cheap source of energy and protein — which may lead some to resist replacing them. But Ms. Laurain said flax cost less than soy, although grain prices can fluctuate. The flax used in the new feed is grown in Canada, is often heated to release the oil in its seed and yield the maximum benefit for the cow. For now, however, that process is expensive because there is no plant for it in the United States, and the flax is shipped to Europe for heating.

If the pilot program was expanded, she said, a heating facility would be built in the United States, and processing costs could be slashed.

Ms. Laurain maintains that even if the feed costs more, it yields cost savings because the production of milk jumps about 10 percent and animals will be healthier, live longer and produce milk for more years.

The methane-reduction results have been far more significant in France than in the Vermont pilot — about 30 percent — because the feed is distributed there not just to organic farms, where the animals already eat grass for at least half the year, but also to big industrial farms.

Farms in the Vermont program, like Mr. Choiniere’s, are also relying on Valorex’s method for measuring methane reduction, which involves analyzing fatty acids in the cows’ milk. Professor Wailes, of Colorado State, said he found that method for testing for reduced methane emissions promising. “I believe it is very possible,” he said.

Mr. Choiniere said that regardless of how the tests turned out, he planned to stick with the new feeding system.

“They are healthier and happier,” he said of his cows, “and that’s what I really care about.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/us/05cows.html

Cow farts collected in plastic tank for global warming study

Scientists are examining cow farts and burps in a novel bid to combat global warming.

By Rupert Neate
Published: 2:43PM BST 09 Jul 2008

Experts said the slow digestive system of cows makes them a key producer of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that gets far less public attention than carbon dioxide.

In a bid to understand the impact of the wind produced by cows on global warming, scientists collected gas from their stomachs in plastic tanks attached to their backs.

The Argentine researchers discovered methane from cows accounts for more than 30 per cent of the country's total greenhouse emissions.

As one of the world's biggest beef producers, Argentina has more than 55 million cows grazing in its famed Pampas grasslands.

Guillermo Berra, a researcher at the National Institute of Agricultural Technology, said every cow produces between 8000 to 1,000 litres of emissions every day.

Methane, which is also released from landfills, coal mines and leaking gas pipes, is 23 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

Scientists are now carrying out trials of new diets designed to improve cows's digestion and hopefully reduce global warming. Silvia Valtorta, of the National Council of Scientific and Technical Investigations, said that by feeding cows clover and alfalfa instead of grain "you can reduce methane emissions by 25 percent".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2274995/Cow-farts-collected-in-plastic-tank-for-global-warming-study.html

Electricity From Food Waste In Vermont

From The Burlington Free Press (Vermont)

JOSHUA LAMBERT, Free Press

Ted Coles (far center) dumps a load of food scraps into his dump truck outside of Shaws supermarket in Montpellier on Friday, September 25, 2009.

October 4, 2009

A new view of food scraps’ potential

There’s power on your plate

By Nancy Remsen, Free Press Staff Writer

Instead of thinking “yuck” when faced with shriveled brown apple cores, slimly spinach leaves and stinky chicken bones, Dan Hecht of Montpelier thinks “energy.”

“There is value to be derived from stuff we throw away,” he said.

In an age when finding alternative sources of energy is both a state and national priority, Hecht points to the potential in a squandered resource: food scraps.

For one thing, it’s plentiful, Hecht said: “Every city and town in America already possesses a major source of renewable energy, one that does not need to be mined, harvested, refined or transported long distances.”

Hecht is project coordinator for the Central Vermont Recovered Biomass Facility, a research project that’s assessing the feasibility of collecting food waste, mixing it with manure and letting it stew until it releases methane gas, which can be used to produce heat and power, plus environmentally safe byproducts.

“The food garbage is the big innovation here,” Hecht said of this waste-to-energy project, seeded by a $492,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. “Nobody is doing post-consumer food waste.”

Once the research phase is completed in December, the food power project would move from the proof-on-paper phase to proof in practice.

The plan is to tap 14 tons a day of food scrap in the Central Vermont Solid Waste Management District, combine it with 10 tons a day of manure from area dairy farms, and feed it into a biodigester to be built on the campus of Vermont Technical College in Randolph. The methane produced would be used either to fuel the college’s heating plant or to generate electricity for the campus.

What’s left — likely a thick, dark liquid — would have several potential uses, such enriching soil on farmers’ fields.

Hecht said this project is intended to produce a roadmap that others in Vermont and across the country could follow to make better use of food scraps. Hecht tries to avoid calling food scraps “waste” because they have so much energy potential: 200 to 400 percent more energy per ton than manure.

Ponder the potential in greater Burlington, with its many eateries, educational institutions and a medical center, Hecht suggested. New data developed by consultants for the research project estimate 245 tons of food materials is produced weekly in Chittenden County.

First step: fetch the food

Start where the food scraps originate, such as the dining hall at Norwich University in Northfield.

Twice a week, a truck from Central Vermont Solid Waste Management District comes to Norwich and collects 22 totes full of food scraps, said Paul Bento, general manager of dining services at the university. Serving 716,000 meals a year, Norwich ends up with a lot of food scraps: 207 tons last year, Bento said.

The Central Vermont district began diverting food scraps from landfills in 2004, sending the material instead to two composting sites.

“We had identified organics in 2001 as a priority for diversion,” said Donna Barlow Casey, executive director of the waste district. It’s part of the district’s zero-waste commitment.

Because of the largely rural nature of the district, Barlow Casey said the food-scrap initiative has focused on commercial and institutional producers, not residential. That would remain the case even with the added demand of feeding a biodigester, she said.

To satisfy the end-users of the food scraps, the district had to provide contaminate-free material — no plastic wrap or foil, just food.

“We have one the cleanest food-scrap programs in the nation,” Barlow Casey said. “When we talk about contamination, it’s just the tiny stickers on fruit and vegetables. We work with every single business that comes on board. We train their kitchen staff. There is a feedback loop. If we see forks, plastic or paper, we reject that tote. It’s that feedback system that keeps the food clean.”

The totes aren’t small like the composting jars that homeowners may keep on their kitchen counters. They are 48-gallon rolling trash barrels with lids.

How smelly is that? Barlow Casey says putting sawdust in the bottom and layering more sawdust or coffee grounds with the food scraps buffers the odor.

“It does work,” confirmed Bento at Norwich.

Barlow Casey said there are more than enough sources of food scraps in Central Vermont to continue to provide material for the two composters and meet the 14-ton-a-day requirement of the new digester. New data estimate 98 tons of food scraps are produced weekly in the region. The district currently has 77 customers providing 18 tons of food scraps a week. In anticipation of having to ramp up collections, she said, the district just began recruiting new customers.

Collecting and delivering the food scraps is an expense that has to be balanced against the benefits of producing energy from it, Hecht said. In planning how to collect it, he said, “You have to do it with the shortest possible distance.”

Now the power part

There are many variables but fewer unknowns about the process that would transform rinds, bones and eggshells into power once they arrived at the biodigester, proposed for a site on the back portion of the Vermont Technical College campus, Hecht said.

Simply, he said, the food waste would go into a “blender” with some water and the manure to create the feedstock that would be put into an anaerobic digester. Some microbes would break down the organic materials into two byproducts: methane gas and a nutrient-rich liquid.

One of the questions yet to be answered is what regulations apply to this process, Hecht said.

“As of right now, we don’t have specific rules for digesters,” said David DiDomenico, environmental material engineer with the Department of Environmental Conservation. State regulators have been working on revisions to composting regulations, he said. “Our plan is to make it more of an organics rule. We’d like to put in a part for digesters.”

Other pending questions have to do with the best uses for the methane and the liquid effluent.

The methane, for example, could replace the oil that fuels the college’s central heating system and warms 15 buildings, said Frank Reed, a consultant working with Vermont Technical College on the project.

But what about in summer, when heat isn’t needed? Reed said the methane could be used to make electricity. Or maybe making electricity would be the best option year-round.

There also are options to weigh with the liquid effluent. It could be spread on fields, or perhaps used to grow algae in a process that would produce biofuels, Reed said.

Four consultants will provide models to help the college identify the options that best fit its energy goals and wallet. Hecht noted the reports from the consultants will provide others interested in food power with information about alternatives that might work under different conditions than those found at Vermont Technical College.

VTC will decide this winter whether to go ahead with planning and construction. Reed predicted that when the reports come in later this fall, “I think we will find it is feasible.”

What will Chittenden do?

The Chittenden Solid Waste District is pursuing its own research on how to divert more food and other organics from landfills. The district recently requested proposals from consultants for a comprehensive study.

“What is happening now is, we are about to head into the second era of modern solid-waste management,” said Tom Moreau, executive director of the Chittenden district. “This is the second wave of investment, and organics are going to be a big piece.”

Moreau said he is monitoring the development of the central Vermont project. He has no question about the feasibility of the biodigestion process.

“I’m confident it will work,” he said. “It will demonstrate to us in Vermont that once we collect it, we can handle it.”

For him, the challenge is food collection — whether from residents or commercial producers.

“People get lazy. They just want to throw things away,” Moreau said. “How do you collect the material in a cost-effective and energy-efficient way, and how do you get over the yuck factor?”

Contact Nancy Remsen at 651-4888 or nremsen@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com.

Additional Facts

Key terms when discussing “food power.”

• BIODIGESTER: An airtight container in which anaerobic — meaning without air — digestion takes place over periods that range from five to 60 days. The output from biodigestion is methane gas and a nutrient-rich, liquid.

• BIOMASS: Plant materials and animal waste that can be used as fuel to produce energy.

• FOOD SCRAPS: Food that is leftover from meals plus trimmings from food preparation.

What’s so great about food power?

• Food scraps are available in significant volumes.

• Food scraps produce 200-to-400 percent more methane than cow manure.

• Biodigestion of food scraps captures methane, reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

• Food scraps don’t go to waste. Biodigestion creates valuable byproducts.
Source: Dan Hecht

Project facts

• WHAT: The Central Vermont Recovered Biomass Facility is conducting a study of the feasibility of biodigesting food waste along with cow manure to produce electrical power and heat.

• WHO: The project is being carried out by a partnership that includes the Central Vermont Solid Waste Management District, Vermont Technical College, Vermont Environmental Consortium and Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund.

• WHERE: The biodigester, if feasible, will be built on the campus of Vermont Technical College in Randolph. The food scraps would come from commercial and institutional sources in central Vermont.

• FUNDING: The feasibility study received a $492,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, with addition funding coming from the Vermont Department of Agriculture, the Clean Energy Development Fund, the state and Seventh Generation Foundation. The U.S. Department of Energy has promised $952,000 for advanced design and construction. Total construction is estimated at $3 million.

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200991002010

South Africa - Solar Gold

Under the apartheid regime of the National Party, South Africa pursued one of the world's most ambitious synthetic fuels programs and continues to be the world leader in the production of synthetic fuels. The bulk of the source material for SA's synthetic fuels program is coal which is also used for electricity production. Sasol, the privatized state creation, supplies over 35% of the liquid fuels used in South Africa primarily using a coal to liquid process . As a result of the reliance on coal, South Africa is the 14th highest emitter of greenhouse gases.

Had a solar electricity plant been available off the shelf in the 1950's or 1960's, the National Party leaders would have gone for it. Their motivation was energy independence - long before any oil embargo against South Africa, the National Party regime was making liquid fuel from coal with massive government subsidies. Sasol, created in 1950 by the government, first produced gas for cars in 1955 - eight years before the first UN committee call for an oil embargo. South Africa is an amazing place for solar electricity generation - in the future SA might find it's solar power resources are worth more than their gold resources.

Park project set to boost appetite for solar power
SISEKO NJOBENI	Published: 2009/10/12 06:15:19 AM

SA COULD finally see substantial investment in solar energy after the Energy Department and the Clinton Climate Foundation on Friday announced plans for the construction of the country’s first solar park by the end of next year.

The park is likely to rejuvenate investor appetite in solar energy. Despite its abundant solar resources, the country does not have significant solar projects. The initiative will also see SA join the trend towards solar parks as a way to optimise solar resources and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions while also reducing dependence on fossil fuels.

The Clinton Foundation and the Energy Department on Friday signed a memorandum of understanding in relation to the development of concentrated power in SA.

In August the foundation entered into a memorandum of understanding to build a solar park in Gujarat state, India.

Speaking at the announcement of the initiative in Centurion on Friday, Clinton Climate Foundation chairman Ira Magaziner said there was a “solar revolution”.

Energy Minister Dipuo Peters on Friday said the foundation would assist government to deploy large solar energy platforms.

“It is a commonly-known fact that our country is well endowed with unique and abundant natural renewable energy resources that still remain largely untapped,” Peters said. She said the memorandum of understanding was a key milestone in the achievement of the government’s target of 10000GWh contribution of renewable energy to final energy consumption by 2013.

Magaziner said the foundation would conduct a pre-feasibility study to identify sites for the solar park analysis of, among others, solar radiation indices, land availability, access to and cost of transmission and assessment of low-cost financing options for the park.

Peters said the pre-feasibility study would lead to the development of a business case upon which the independent power producers would be attracted to SA “and the eventual creation of a sustainable local renewable energy industry”.

Peters and Magaziner said the Northern Cape had a high level of solar radiation.

Magaziner said the abundant solar resource was the country’s “gold in the sun”.

njobenis@bdfm.co.za

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=83688

I do not share the view that synthetic fuels are an exciting new fuel source but this post has some interesting historical info about syn fuels.

moneybox

Thanks for the Cheap Gas, Mr. Hitler!

How Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa perfected one of the world's most exciting new fuel sources.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Monday, Oct. 23, 2006, at 3:30 PM ET

---

When it comes to racial policies, it may be somewhat hyperbolic to say that the apartheid regime that came into power in South Africa in 1948 picked up where the Nazis left off. It's not at all hyperbolic to observe that the apartheid regime picked up where the Nazis left off when it came to producing gasoline from coal. Nazism, apartheid, and international sanctions created a fuel source that might never have existed in a better world.

The circuitous travels of the Fischer-Tropsch process, a chemical technique to convert natural gas and coal into liquid fuels, provide an object lesson in historical irony. Used by the Nazis to make oil from coal during World War II, it was commercialized by the century's second-most-odious racial supremacist regime in the 1950s through South Africa's state energy company. Now, that privatized company, Sasol, may help liberate Western democracies (and non-Western ones, like India) from the grip of crude oil produced largely by loathsome authoritarian regimes.

Sasol is the ExxonMobil of South Africa, though its annual sales of about $10 billion are around what Exxon Mobil does in about 10 days. With 30,000 employees, including the largest number of Ph.D.s of any company in the Southern Hemisphere, Sasol is one of South Africa's largest employers. It produces about 38 percent of South Africa's fuel needs and accounts for about 4.4 percent of the country's GDP.

The process that Sasol uses to turn coal or natural gas into liquid fuels was first developed by two chemists working in Germany in the 1920s: Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch. The two men died in the 1930s. But their invention was used by the Nazis to fuel the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe. After World War II, the vast oil fields of Arabia made it uneconomic for most free nations to pursue the technology. But South Africa, which had plenty of coal but little petroleum, wasn't a free nation. In 1948, the newly elected National Party regime formally instituted apartheid. Two years later, it created Sasol. Aside from mining and manufacturing chemicals, Sasol set out to develop a domestic gasoline-production capability, a goal that became more urgent when many oil-producing nations refused to sell oil to the apartheid regime. In the late 1970s, using government loans, the firm built a huge complex at Secunda, where it has produced some 1.5 billion gallons of gasoline that is functionally no different than the gas produced from Texas crude.

Since the end of apartheid, Sasol has prospered, finding new markets and customers outside its borders. But with the spike in oil prices of the last few years, it has really caught fire. (Note this five-year chart of Sasol, whose shares were listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2003, against ExxonMobil.) And that has much to do with the company's technological promise.

Transportation, which accounts for about 40 percent of the world's energy use, relies overwhelmingly on liquid fuels produced from oil. But oil supplies are (a) controlled by regimes that are politically unstable and frequently hostile to the United States and (b) in danger of depletion. Meanwhile, the world is blessed with vast reserves of natural gas and, particularly, coal, that reside under soil that is more congenial to democracy. The United States, for example, is the Saudi Arabia of coal, with 200-plus years of reserves. And some Americans, among them Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, believe that coal-to-fuels technology has the potential to make the United States energy independent (and his constituents rich).

But Sasol may have difficulty getting off the ground in the United States for some of the same reasons it has had so much success in its home market: government incentives and low costs. As a favored company in apartheid-era South Africa, Sasol enjoyed cheap credit, land, and labor. Regardless of the global market price of oil, it found a ready market for its products. Today, the privatized firm continues to make profits off of earlier investments and still enjoys significant cost advantages operating in South Africa. But it must compete against global oil producers. And even with oil near $60 a barrel, the extra expenses involved in the Fischer-Tropsch process don't make aggressive expansion a no-brainer. Sasol's first international joint venture, a factory in Qatar that turns natural gas into liquid fuel, cost $1 billion, or about $30,000 per barrel of capacity. According to Sasol CEO Pat Davies, that's twice as much as a more conventional oil refinery costs.

Without the sort of special government assistance that it received as it grew, Sasol faces a challenge. In theory, producing synthetic fuels should be profitable in the United States if oil prices remain near their current levels. But big energy companies—in the United States and abroad—won't brave new technologies without government subsidy. "We can't go forward until incentives are in place," said Davies. In the U.S. market, he notes, ethanol receives a 51-cents-per-gallon subsidy. (Here's a helpful Sasol presentation on the U.S. market.)

Sasol's smooth-talking CEO is in something of a tricky spot. Meeting with a group of visiting American and European journalists, he practically apologizes for Sasol's massive earnings: "We're just a little company stuck on the bottom of Africa." And he says the right things about South Africa's transformation. "We can't deny that we were part of a regime that was not just and fair. We acknowledge that, are not happy about that. But we move on." But Sasol hasn't been seen as particularly cooperative when it comes to facilitating black ownership. And given South Africa's chronic underinvestment in public infrastructure, management rightly fears the imposition of a windfall tax. Indeed, the firm that built its competitive advantage during the apartheid years is clearly concerned that it may be asked to help pick up the cost of atoning for the country's sins—which could make it harder for Sasol to bring its snazzy technology, incubated in Hitler's Germany and Botha's South Africa, to the United States.

Daniel Gross visited South Africa on a study tour sponsored by the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2152036/

Dow Chemical Sees Big Bucks In Solar

And Dow Chemical becomes an energy company........ wolf in sheep's clothing..... I just hope they get 'em in the marketplace cheap!

Dow sees huge market in solar shingles

Mon Oct 5, 2009 8:57pm EDT

By Matt Daily

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Dow Chemical Co said on Monday it would begin selling a new rooftop shingle next year that converts sunlight into electricity -- and could generate $5 billion in revenue by 2015 for the company.

The new solar shingles can be integrated into rooftops with standard asphalt shingles, Dow said, and will be introduced in 2010 before a wider roll-out in 2011.

"We're looking at this one product that could generate $5 billion in revenue by 2015 and $10 billion by 2020," Jane Palmieri, managing director of Dow Solar Solutions, told Reuters in an interview.

The shingle will use thin-film cells of copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS), a photovoltaic material that typically is more efficient at turning sunlight into electricity than traditional polysilicon cells.

Dow is using CIGS cells that operate at higher than 10 percent efficiency, below the efficiencies for the top polysilicon cells -- but would cost 10 to 15 percent less on a per watt basis.

Dow Solar Solutions said it expects "an enthusiastic response" from roofing contractors for the new shingles, since they require no specialized skills or knowledge of solar systems to install.

The new product is the latest advance in "Building Integrated Photovoltaic" (BIPV) systems, in which power-generating systems are built directly into the traditional materials used to construct buildings.

BIPV systems are currently limited mostly to roofing tiles, which operate at lower efficiencies than solar panels and have so far been too expensive to gain wide acceptance.

Dow's shingle will be about 30 to 40 percent cheaper than current BIPV systems.

The Dow shingles can be installed in about 10 hours, compared with 22 to 30 hours for traditional solar panels, reducing the installation costs that make up more than 50 percent of total system prices.

The product will be rolled out in North America through partnerships with home builders such as Lennar Corp and Pulte Homes Inc before marketing is expanded, Palmieri said.

Dow received $20 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to help develop its BIPV products.

The company also produces fluids used in concentrated solar systems, in which sunlight is used to generate heat that produces steam to power a turbine.

In addition, it supplies materials used to help manufacture photovoltaic panels and increase their efficiency.

Dow shares were up 4.4 percent at $24.67 on the New York Stock Exchange in afternoon trading.

(Reporting by Matt Daily, editing by Dave Zimmerman and Gerald E. McCormick)

http://www.reuters.com/article/ousivMolt/idUSTRE5944NP20091006

Boswell Catches Up On The Nats Money Machine

If I remember correctly, Boswell was a big cheer leader for DC taxpayers to give the Lerner's the new stadium.......... even cheer leaders begin to see what the game is........

Last week during the home stand against the Dodgers, Orlando Hudson of the Dodgers sponsored a meet and greet before a game for DC middle school and school students. My son went - I dropped him off at the stadium by car. I noticed the cheapest parking sign I saw was for $25. - I saw a sign for $40. parking!!! For the Orioles in Baltimore, parking is $8.!

A D.C. Game of Moneyball

By Thomas Boswell
Thursday, October 1, 2009

The Nats' final home game of the year Wednesday combined all the paradoxical and troubling threads of a season in which the team had the game's worst record and saw attendance drop 22 percent. Yet these same Nats, who will certainly receive revenue-sharing funds from other clubs this winter, operate on such a low budget and possess such a healthy bottom line that they are the financial envy of most other franchises.

The combination of Nats potential, both as a team and a market, has stood in contrast all year to the team's deluge of 103 losses. All that was illustrated, to an almost ludicrously degree, by a Justin Maxwell walk-off grand slam to sweep the Mets before 23,944. That two-out, full-count blast in the ninth off New York reliever Francisco Rodriguez brought cheers but also a hard question. Why are such moments, which make addiction to baseball go viral in any town, so rare here?

As Washington's obvious promise has been thwarted by its gruesome won-lost reality, resentment toward the way the Nats do business, already prevalent in Washington, is now spreading through the game. This offseason may be the juncture at which both local fans, as well as executives throughout the game, decide if the Lerners are responsible baseball citizens.

The Nats, who clinched the game's worst record on Wednesday thanks to a Pirates win, are on the verge of becoming a lightning rod of criticism, especially by big-market teams that pay into the game's huge revenue-sharing pot, according to numerous baseball sources contacted over the last three months.

"You're probably going to see revenue-sharing reform pretty soon," an American League executive said. "It's usually small-market teams like Pittsburgh that are the issue."

The Pirates, who have fielded 17 straight losing teams yet concede they have made a profit in each of the past six seasons, exemplify the business model: keep the payroll tiny, lose a ton of games every year, yet turn a profit thanks to revenue sharing and then claim it's the only way to survive in a tiny market.

But the Bucs have an excuse: Their metropolitan market -- like Denver, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Kansas City and Milwaukee -- is less than half Washington's size (No. 9 in the United States).

If the Nats keep operating as they have, they'll be seen as the only top-10 market with the gall to act like a bottom-five town.

When Major League Baseball ran the Nats, the Lerners inherited a 2006 payroll of $63 million that many considered skimpy after the Nats averaged 33,000 fans in '05. Yet the Lerners cut that budget immediately to $37 million and have not returned to $63 million. One consequence is that Forbes magazine ranked the Nationals the second-most profitable team in baseball in '08.

Even with the recent contracts to Adam Dunn, Ryan Zimmerman and Stephen Strasburg, the Nats' payroll will still plummet from $61 million this year to $40 million in current '10 obligations, close to dead last in baseball.

The Nats' position: We won't tell you anything about our finances, but just wait 'til next year.

"We are tremendously excited. The next big step is right there to be taken," said President Stan Kasten, who speaks for the team. "This is not a great year if you want a [free agent like CC] Sabathia or Mark Teixeira. But the players who are available are just what we need: a veteran starter in the rotation, two more arms in the bullpen and a middle infielder who helps our defense.

"We can do those things. We just have to do those things."

Actually, the Nats could afford to do all this and more. The bullpen arms they talk about don't include a costly closer. Add an $8-million-a-year right fielder if you want, too. (They won't.)

The paradox of the Nats was apparent in their final homestand. In nine games, at which you might expect empty stands, the Nats averaged 22,990 fans vs. their average of 22,719. Same old story: Some of us were the incorrigible core; some came to see a popular foe (Dodgers); and 85,174 arrived last weekend just because the weather was nice and, well, it was the last baseball this year.

Baseball awarded the Lerners such a popular core American product, still relatively affordable, and the District built them such a pretty new ballpark, that they can't keep people away. Attendance ranked above six teams, and if the average had been just 1,000 higher (as it might be once Strasburg arrives), the Nats would have been ahead of 10 teams. Factor in the Nats' big-market ticket prices, and they stand right in the middle of baseball in gate receipts.

To see how well the Nats are doing, even though the Lerners' public position is that they will "take no money out of the team" in the first 10 years, compare them to the Pirates: Since the Lerners took over, the Nats have outdrawn the Pirates by 1.4 million fans and, at higher ticket prices, produced about $100 million more in gate revenues. The Nats' local TV revenue (about $24 million a year) is also far higher.

On the other hand, the Lerners paid far more for the Nats, and borrowed more money, a debt that must be serviced.

The Nats provide no information on how they define "taking no money out of the team," except Ted Lerner's comments to me twice that he considers debt service as a cost. Kasten adds that Forbes magazine's '08 ranking of the Nats as the second-most profitable team in baseball is "way off." How so? No detail. Sorry.

Such privacy is their corporate right, but it's hardly forthcoming from a family that presented itself as a long-term partner with the District in the civic-minded attempt to revive Southeast with baseball as an expensive core catalyst.

Kasten assures me I can't possibly grasp the Nats' high finance. He even threw up his hands in exasperation, a new touch.

"That shows how much you don't know," Kasten said.

Here's one theory: After speaking with executives of other teams about their borrowing structures, one approach is to secure highly leveraged term loans with revolving lines of credit and then to amortize principal in the manner of a mortgage; that way, owners can claim to take little or no money out of the teams while still building their equity (and thus their own net worth).

Unlike the tiny-town teams, the Nats are a franchise with a defining choice to make. But it won't be psychologically easy. Teams such as the Padres have argued that, unless you are one of the sport's traditional "haves," it's not a winning business proposition to add tens of millions to payroll to build a better team. Ironically, the way the game is structured, it's safer and easier to be a lousy cheap club, but be ensured a decent buck.

Kasten vows that the Nats still have the same big-market dreams they proclaimed three years ago when the Lerners brought a team back to their home town, claiming they would build a franchise worthy of "the most important city in the world." The Dunn, Zimmerman and Strasburg deals are merely first tastes. Just wait -- but not long. That's their pitch.

No Washington team has lost more than 106 games since 1909 -- 100 years ago. The Nats could still reach 107 this weekend.

If the Lerners keep their promises, that is an opportunity that should never, ever come again.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/30/AR2009093004563.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2009093005311

More Crooked Beat - The Crooked Road (Not Lombard!)

This is about Virginia's music route The Crooked Road, not San Francisco's Crookedest Street In The World - Lombard! (And I thought DC had the Crookedest Street In The World but I guess the crooks are in the offices not on the street.)



Virginia's Crooked Road: A Warm Welcome to Mountain Music

By Melanie D.G. Kaplan
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, October 4, 2009

I arrive at the Marathon gas station in Stuart, Va., just above the North Carolina border, to find a man eating beans out of a can and a collection of animal heads peering down at an understocked convenience store. I am at my first stop on the Crooked Road: Virginia's Music Heritage Trail -- a 250-mile path of music venues in the Blue Ridge and Appalachian regions of southwestern Virginia -- and I don't see anything that resembles the jam session I expected.

But soon, a 70-year-old man named G.C., a third-generation musician from town, brings his guitar over to the picnic table outside the store. Then a fiddle shows up, followed by a banjo. One by one, gray-haired men climb out of pickup trucks with their instruments and amble over to the patio, home of the Thursday night State Line Grocery Jam Session. And by the time I leave, two hours later, I've fallen under the spell of mountain music.

It's not the first time. Last year, I joined a friend for my first bluegrass concerts in Washington and was drawn to the music so suddenly that I had barely learned which instrument was the mandolin before I'd bought one. Now, after six months of lessons and calloused fingers, I am bravely, naively joining the Thursday night crew in a corner of Virginia where it seems that everyone plays a "git-tar" or fiddle, and plays it well.

"There's music everywhere here," says Joe Wilson, one of the architects of the Crooked Road, which was established in 2004 to support tourism and economic development in one of Appalachia's distressed areas. Wilson is a folklorist and the longtime director and current chairman of the National Council for the Traditional Arts. Earlier this month, he received a Living Legend award from the Library of Congress.

"Americans don't know diddly about their music," he says. Traditional American mountain music came about when the African banjo and European fiddle met in Virginia, he explains. "Appalachian music has been the most accepting music -- whoever you are and wherever you are, you're welcome to play it. It's the sound; it has a joy to it. It's working-folk music."

It's also infectious. Even though I can't keep up with the State Line crew (I should have practiced a few years longer), I want to sit here all night, next to G.C., singing from his songbook, and the banjo player, simultaneously pickin', smokin' and drinkin' coffee. I am in the company of folks who make good music with less effort than they make simple conversation. For them, it's just another Thursday evening, doing what they do. But for me, it's the beginning of a whirlwind trip exploring 188 miles of the Crooked Road and listening to some mighty fine tunes.

The Crooked Road mostly follows Route 58, the longest roadway in the state; this part of it is a two-lane mountain route that passes idyllic farms, moseying cows, sparkling rivers. The trail covers 10 counties, three cities and 19 towns, including Floyd, Galax, Damascus, Abingdon and Bristol along the North Carolina and Tennessee borders, then Norton and Clintwood bordering Kentucky. In every spot, nearly every day of the week, you're bound to find a concert, a festival, a square dance or a jam. Take it slow, and keep both hands on the wheel. The route looks like an intestine on my GPS device, and, as a local says, "The roads are so curvy, you can almost see your taillights 'round the bends." As I leave the jam Thursday night, after 9, G.C. gives me a stern warning about deer on my hour-long mountain drive to a B&B in Floyd. "They'll jump outta nowhere, right in front of your car," he says. "Be careful."

Friday night in Floyd (home to Floyd County's one stoplight), there's no question that I'm in the right spot for music. I show up early at the Floyd Country Store for the Friday Night Jamboree. The store, celebrating its centennial next year, sells everything from Carhartt overalls to sweet potato biscuit mix and still records sales in a steno notebook. The show is held in the back of the store, but when the weather's nice, pockets of music (and some nights, as many as 1,000 people) spill out onto the street. An hour before the first band, always gospel, I find seats saved, some with tap shoes.

Woody Crenshaw, the store's owner, welcomes everyone. "We have two gallons of blueberries picked in Floyd County this week, and we're making fresh blueberry milkshakes!" he announces. After gospel hour, another band takes the stage, and flat-foot dancing, which looks a lot like Irish dance, begins. The crowd is largely "down-home folk," old-time regulars who come every week. But there are also Floyd transplants who have moved here recently for the music and the farming, a handful of students from nearby Virginia Tech and visitors from as far away as Denver and Edinburgh, Scotland.

The next morning, one of Miracle Farm Bed and Breakfast's owners brings breakfast to my cottage door, featuring pears, rhubarb, cape gooseberries, tomatoes and eggs, all from the farm. I set off with my beagle and mandolin traveling west on Route 58, stopping at several towns along the way. My radio's tuned to WBRF (98.1 FM), which plays bluegrass and old country: Merle Haggard, the Stanley Brothers, George Jones. The DJ reads an advertisement for a chain-saw company.

The region boasts a high concentration of luthiers, or stringed-instrument makers. So I stop in Galax, home of the Old Fiddler's Convention, to see one of the best: Jimmy Edmunds. He learned the trade from his dad years ago and recently opened a shop in his wife's garden center. He shows me pieces of guitars in production and one he is making for Kenny Rogers's guitarist. He says he makes about 25 instruments a year and has 100 on order. I tell him where I'm headed, west into the mountains, and he says it's "a few hours and a couple brake pads" away.

That night, I take the Crooked Road past Bristol into the middle of nowhere, otherwise known as Hiltons, Va. It's home to Clinch Mountain and the Carter Family Fold, a large, rustic theater that hosts weekly acoustic-only concerts in the tradition of the original Carter family. At that evening's concert, which is dog-friendly, the concession stand sells dollar sodas and ham biscuits, and folks in the audience trade cowboy boots for dance shoes.

The bluegrass band is terrific, but I'm equally taken by everyone offstage and the friendliness one can encounter in the middle of nowhere. The ticket lady shows me pictures of her dogs, I chat with a few couples I'd seen in Floyd the night before, I get smiles from a little girl dancing with her grandfather, and a volunteer takes time to fill me in, at length, on Carter family history (and lets me sit in a rocking chair that belonged to Johnny Cash, who played his last concert here). Maybe the mountain air is clouding my senses, but I feel as if in no time at all I've been folded into the Crooked Road family.

As I head back to my car and mandolin, I pass the volunteer. "It was nice talkin' to you," he says. "Now watch out for the deer."

Melanie D.G. Kaplan is a Washington writer.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/28/AR2009092802858.html?hpid=features1&hpv=local