Early Motor Porn

like a boss...

Mountain lion in the neighborhood

Maybe four or five miles from me a neighbor had a steer attacked by a mountain lion yesterday.  The state game warden says to keep your animals inside and to watch you children (yikes!).

The pleasures and perils of living in a rural area.

Reason TV shows Katie how it feels.

Dog creeped out by magic

Why buck the log when you can load it on a truck like this?

?

The case for the imperial crown of the Holy Roman Empire, after 1350.

Air Power

Interesting fact: When Orville Wright died, Neil Armstrong was already 17 years old.

Orville: August 19, 1871 – January 30, 1948

Neil: August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012

Factoid via American Digest

Here it is the end of May, and it looks positively wintery in Yosemite.

I could be wrong, but that looks like some snow among the trees on the bottom left.  That's the sunny side of the hill, so if it is snow, it had to have fallen in the last 48 hours.

Nice

But is it real?

The Cinder Cone

I kept seeing this guy's wood heated hot tub and tree house on tumblr, so I looked it up.


The Cinder Cone from Farm League on Vimeo.

Must be nice to have all the time and money in the world.   I'll bet that treehouse is an interesting ride during a windstorm.

Baby carrots were invented by one Mike Yurosek, a California carrot farmer.

The baby carrot, like so many inventions before it, was birthed by necessity.

In the early 1980s, the carrot business was stagnant and wasteful. Growing seasons were long, and more than half of what farmers grew was ugly and unfit for grocery shelves. But in 1986, Yurosek, itching for a way to make use of all the misshapen carrots, tried something new. Instead of tossing them out, he carved them into something more palatable.

At first, Yurosek used a potato peeler, which didn't quite work because the process was too laborious. But then he bought an industrial green-bean cutter. The machine cut the carrots into uniform 2-inch pieces, the standard baby carrot size that persists today.

When Mike Yurosek & Sons, Yurosek's now-defunct California company, delivered his next batch to Vons, a local grocery chain, he included a bag of the new creation. He suspected he was on to something but hardly anticipated such an enthusiastic response.

"I said, 'I'm sending you some carrots to see what you think,' " Yurosek recounted in a 2004 interview with USA Today. "Next day they called and said, 'We only want those.' "

Vons wasn't the only one impressed. Grocers, distributors, carrot buyers, and, most importantly, some of Yurosek's most formidable competition took notice. In the years that followed, baby carrots ballooned into big business, nudging the biggest carrot producers in the country to join in and feed the frenzy.

And once again, a simple farmer, through ingenuity and a bit of pluck, turns waste into something useful and profitable.  The American Story.

It's hard to know whether Bernie and Hill are gonna kiss or bite each other's faces off.