SAN FRANCISCO, California (Reuters) — San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to become the first U.S. city to ban plastic bags from large supermarkets to help promote recycling.Under the legislation, beginning in six months large supermarkets and drugstores will not be allowed to offer plastic bags made from petroleum products. [Link]

Great job San Fran. Personally, I prefer paper bags anyway. The only change that I would request is that the paper bags have handles on them, so they can more easily be carried from car to house. Albertson’s doesn’t have this option, but other stores do (Trader Joe’s, Corti Bro’s), so I would lobby for this to be a new option if they get rid of plastic.

As for recycling, we’re pretty good about using the plastic bags for that purpose. We load them up with wine bottles, diet pepsi cans, and other household items that eventually wind up in the big blue recycle container, but unfortunately, most people don’t do that.

Anyway - just a quick news story to encourage others to be more mindful.

Sacramento is on fire ladies and gentlemen. Well, not the entire city, I mean this isn’t like LONDON IS BURNING or anything like that. But we’re sure as heck having a big problem at the moment.

A section of railroad basically exploded into flames this afternoon around 5:45pm PDT, with the entire trestle (wooden framework holding up the rail lines) going up into a big ball of blackness that, as you can see, spread its way across the Sacramento area.

The news was all over it of course, breaking into every show they possibly could, and the news anchors beginning a workout of adlibbing everything they were saying. Helicopters flew overhead with live video of the blaze…We heard from railroad reps, and we heard from crew on-the-scene, we even heard from a guy who works at the Sacramento Railroad Museum. We discovered that passenger trains were heavily delays, with impacts to exactly ONE person at the station.

We also watched as hundreds of absolute idiots decided to stop their cars in the MIDDLE OF THE HIGHWAY to watch what was going on, and the even more dense idiots walk up onto the track to watch the fire first-hand.

We watched as brave firefighters hosed the thing down, while trying to get more supplies of water to the area which is pretty remote, and thus has no fire hydrants. (They did a really awesome job BTW…it was incredible watching them work)

Here you can see the massive billowing black smoke coming from the burning pillars underneath the railway. From a distance, it looked like rope light…all in a neat row, sparkling and shining, but then of course you saw the 2000+ foot plume of blackness, and yeah, it’s not really that sexy any more. Bill Thompson, our railroad volunteer who was kind enough to talk to the silly KCRA reporters, gave us details about those wonderful pylons covered in flammable material.

We also heard from the doc, who reminded people not to go into the smoke. Thanks doc. Helpful hint. Glad you stuck around after the 5pm news.

Big excitement. Which we really needed on a pretty dull Thursday. I mean, something had to take the place of no American Idol tonight.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as of March 7, 2007, 425 people in 44 states have now been infected with the strain of Salmonella Tennessee found in Peter Pan and Great Value peanut butter products.However, although 71 people were hospitalized there have been no fatalities.Most persons infected with Salmonella develop diarrhea, fever, and abdominal cramps 12 to 72 hours after infection.The illness usually lasts 4 to 7 days, and most recover without treatment, however, in some people the diarrhea may be so severe that the patient needs to be hospitalized. [Link]

You know…I’ve had diarrhea like that before. It happened after we got back from Mazatlan last year. It wasn’t, thankfully, caused by Peanut Butter (which is one of my personal addictions in life), but was most definitely caused by the 2lbs of fresh shrimp we consumed on the last day of the trip.

The article goes on to say, “Initially, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said all Peter Pan peanut butter bought since May 2006, and all of Wal-Mart Inc.’s Great Value peanut butter with the batch code 2111 should be discarded.”

Oh the irony of “Great Value”…I wonder if they were rolling back prices to get that off the shelf. While I’m not averse to Wal-Mart, I am averse to the ones in the Sacramento area, due to the…how can I put this delicately enough so that people won’t think I’m a stuck up, pretentious *ss. Nope, there’s no way to do that. Classless. Ok, that was moderately delicate. I mean, I didn’t use the term white-trash did I? No, because I don’t like that term. No one is trash. However, some people are not necessarily well kempt.

I think you know what I’m talking about…it all goes back to wearing sweat pants in public. Sick and wrong for so many reasons. Not only do they put it all out there for everyone to see, but they are also incredibly unflattering to anyone who has more than 1% body fat. But we’re really digressing away from the story here.

Peanut Butter. I’ve NEVER been a fan of the stir-it-yourself variety, you know the ones with an inch of oil at the top of the container that you must stir into the thick mush in order for it to be edible? Yeah, I pour it right off the top into the trash can and deal with the brick-like paste. It doesn’t work for me.

Anyway…please be careful about the Peanut Butter you choose. Cheaper is not always better, and really, why would you EVER buy a grocery item at Wal-Mart? Please go to your local Albertson’s or Raley’s and pick up something healthy, and salmonella-free.

I would like to give a shout out to cotton, and a shout out to sheet manufacturers.

ST. PAUL, (eCanadaNow) - Weight loss surgery, such as gastric bypass surgery, can lead to a vitamin deficiency that can cause memory loss and confusion, inability to coordinate movement, and other problems, according to a study published in the March 13, 2007, issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

The syndrome, called Wernicke encephalopathy, affects the brain and nervous system when the body doesn’t get enough vitamin B1, or thiamine. It can also cause vision problems, such as rapid eye movements.[Link]

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - A woman who went into a vegetative state more than six years ago awoke this week for three days and spoke with her family and a local television station before slipping back. [Link]

I decided to take a brief break from AI posts when I saw this distressing article today about Christa Lilly. Frankly, this is quite depressing. Aside from the infinite medical costs associated with keeping her on life support while she “sleeps”…what kind of life is that to wake up for a few days, then go back to a vegetative state for a few more years before repeating the process?

I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t want to see a snapshot series of my friends and family once every couple of years. You’d basically watch them grow older while knowing absolutely nothing about them, and being no part of their lives.

And let’s be real - if you are out of touch with one of your friends for a year, and then suddenly they email you, are you really going to put a lot of effort into catching them up on your life over the past year? I don’t think so. MAYBE if they moved back and you saw them more often, but certainly not if you knew they were heading back to la-la-land in a few hours.

Now I don’t want to get flamed for being Anti-Vegetables here. But what kind of existence is this really? It was quite sad to get to the bottom of the article and see a quote from her mother, “The good Lord let me know she’s alright, he brings her back to visit every so often and I’m thankful for that.” Yes this is a very sweet quote, and I empathize, but…

If the lord was good, he’d wake her up and let her get back to her life, and actually LIVE it, instead of leaving her on a feeding tube forever. I choose to live through life, but a heart attack took that choice away from her. Here’s hoping she wakes up permanently, soon, or at least moves on to more peaceful pastures and her family gets on with their lives.

Besides, it’s got to be a bit freaky that while she’s been in this vegetative state since 2000, her eyes have been open.

On Friday, 2 March, I volunteered over at KVIE, our local PBS station, by running the teleprompter during their March pledge drive event. There were two shows that evening, Andre Rieu: Live in Tuscany, and Rolling Stones Rock & Roll Circus. Both shows were excellent, but directed at very different audiences. Although I’m not a huge Rolling Stones fan, it was actually a very entertaining show.

I’ve been volunteering at KVIE as a phone bank volunteer since 1996, but this year I decided that I wanted to get a bit more involved behind the scenes, specifically in the production control room. Evie Turner (volunteer coordinator) and I have been chatting off and on for almost a year now, and she presented me with the opportunity to get involved as a teleprompter. I’d never done it before, so I thought, what the heck, let’s give this a shot.

Early last week, I went over to the studio for training. The program that they use is EZNews, and it’s just a normal windows app that runs sporadically nicely under XP. (it seems to have this nasty habit of crashing if you choose to prompt only a certain part of the program vs. the entire program as a group, which is a bit of a problem if it happens right while the talent is reading on-air)

Here’s the basic training, for anyone who wants to run the teleprompter.

1. Left mouse button to start/stop the scroll.
2. Right mouse button to reverse the scroll.
3. Mouse wheel forward to scroll faster / backward to scroll slower.

The end. So of course I’m thinking, this is going to be a piece of cake! Though I was a bit frazzled because it took me almost 1.5 hours to drive 7 miles from my house to the studio and back, and it took 15 minutes to learn the software. So this was going to be fun and easy, but oh, was I wrong.

I arrived at the studio and got the system up and running, loaded the program, and did some spell checking for the producer, who had actually entered most of the text for the program. After I finished, the “talent” came in (that’s the term they use to describe the on-air personality who will be running the pledge drive and talking about the show) for a quick run-through of the script.

There were three “talents” on this particular evening, two for each program, with one overlapping both. (I would like to point out that only ONE of the guys, Kevin Smith-Fagan, actually introduced himself to me. I was also impressed that after several hours, he came back into the studio, addressed me by name, and thanked me. Now that’s a professional.)

I only got a short time to listen to them run through the script, before we were going live and I was in charge of everything they were going to say, except the adlibbing of course…but the adlibbing was going to prove to be my undoing. The actual scripted part went just fine. I adjusted the speed of the prompter as necessary for them to read at a good even pace. One of the guys read much faster than the other, but with that handy-dandy scroll wheel, I zoomed forward or slowed it down so they could catch up.

The problem, of course, was when they decided to veer away from the script. In general, that’s not a problem. After the “talent” has been doing on-air work for a while, it’s not unusual for them to add in little anecdotes or personal stories while running the pledge drive, especially if they have some interesting trivia about the show we’re watching. Well these guys had a LOT of that. Suddenly, they were talking about things that had nothing to do with the script, and so I just sat there with it paused waiting…wondering…”will you ever come back to the script???”.

In some cases, they did not. They simply wrapped up the segment without ever coming back to tell the viewers what they could get for a $100 pledge. In other cases, they would read about half of what was written, and the go off into their own tangent for the rest of the segment. But on a few occassions, which were good for me, they read exactly what was on the script, start to finish.

The producer was begging them to come back to the script at some points, wondering where on earth they were going with the dialogue, but it always worked out in the end. They hit all their major queues, and the show went off without any major glitches. And, KVIE raised a TON of money for their programming, which was the best part of the night.

I had an absolute blast, and although it was sometimes scaring me that I would never be able to catch up with where they were in the script, we only had two software crashes during the entire night, and the director informed me that I must be doing well because the “talent” hadn’t complained to her yet :-).

Hopefully this is just the beginning - they have opportunities to run the cameras, coordinate volunteers on the phone bank, and of course, teleprompting. I think I’ll stick with left click right click for a while, but who knows, some day I might be referring to myself as a “personality”, and you’ll be able to see me begging you to pledge $1000 for two tickets in the first ten rows to see Andre Rieu live in concert at ARCO arena in Sacramento December 2. (you get free shuttle service from KVIE and a pre-event social as well, so pledge soon!)

Originally, I was happy to start a new post on something not having to do with American Idol. Not because I have lost my love for it, but because I’m sure that there are some of you out there who don’t watch it, don’t care about it, and don’t want my blog to be centered around it. (you’d be wrong of course, but I’ll humour you )

So, I was going to post a little diddy about Steel Magnolias, which David & I watched again for the umpty-millionth time last night, while socializing with Scott & Roque in their newly redesigned loft.

But then “news” happened. Ann Coulter called a straight person (John Edwards) a faggot, and Britney Spears became the antichrist. But I do want to deal with this in proper order.

Steel Magnolias. Quintessential viewing for anyone really, gay, straight, or whatever.

You’ve got every emotion here, laughter, joy, sadness, drama, absolute hilarity, satire, there’s really just about anything you want, without being cluttered up with special effects or useless action that doesn’t help the plot. Plus, where else can you come away with so many memorable quotes that should be used in everyday language?

Clairee: Janice Van Meter got hit with a baseball. It was fabulous.
Truvy: Was she hurt?
Clairee: I doubt it. She got hit in the head.

or

Clairee: You know, you would be a much more contented, pleasant person if you would find ways to occupy your time.
Ouiser: I’m pleasant. Damn it! I saw Drum Eatenton at the Piggly Wiggly this morning, and I smiled at the son of a bitch ‘fore I could help myself.

or my personal favourite

Annelle: …but today is a very special day, and my work tends to be too poofy when I’m nervous!

It’s just a very special movie, in so many ways. And with such a power-cast of actresses who were all overlooked for the Oscar that year, you’re sure to have a fun evening. Be sure to make cuppa-cuppa-cuppa, and perhaps a fun armadillo cake while you’re at it. (Or a snake, if you’ve got the counter space)

Now onto the next topic. Faggot. I posted about this one a little while back…is faggot a power word or a weapon word? You can draw your own conclusions on that question, but more specifically here, let’s address Ann Coulter. I have to say, I know absolutely nothing about her, other that what I have read today. But to quote the Gay Rights Watch, she is “disgusting…absolutely vile.” I’d have to say I agree.

This isn’t even her first foray into pushing the limits of free speech. She’s also been known to use the term rag-heads, and imply that we need to invade every Muslim country and forcibly convert them to Christianity (like that will solve anything).

In case you missed this “person’s” quote, here it is in all it’s ridiculous glory:

“I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.”

One positive outcome to all of this is that more people dislike/distrust/hate/loathe the republican party now :-). And kudos to John in turning it around to his benefit, by challenging supporters to raise money for his campaign, called “Coulter Cash”. But enough of that - she’s getting too much press as it is.

Finally we come to Britney Spears the antichrist. Apparently she’s been running around with “666″ written on her foreheard, claiming that she’s the antichrist. Nice try Britney, but that’s been done before (and before). Besides, “666″ might be the wrong number in the first place.

But aside from all that antichrist nonsense, what got me about this article was that she wants to REUNITE WITH KEVIN! Um…HUH??

And not only does she want to get back together, she thinks that having another baby will seal their relationship! Maybe I was wrong…maybe she really has become the antichrist. The dear girl has gone completely insane I do believe.

I think Edith Massey would have said it best, “Purrrr Britney; purrrr purrrr Britney.”