Cross that solution off the list of alternative energy sources

How much oil can be extracted from humans?

Rush Limbaugh, specifically.

Just asking.

I keep myself warm by burning Bibles, Qurans and flags.

Why does everyone think Nantucket was the whaling center of the world back then? They didn't whale squat. New Bedford Ma. was the whaling capital of the world at that time, not snotty Nantucket.

Since the average adult rabbit is around 2 kg of mass, I estimate you should be able to extract 300-400 mL of unprocessed oil per bunny. Therefore, you should be able to get the equivalent of 47.6 barrels of crude per every 25,000 bunnies or so----or, alternatively, supplant our present production of petroleum by the annual 'harvest' of 15 trillion or so conies.

All we have to do now is find a planet big enough to house all these critters, and our energy crisis is solved!

#1 - Heck, I'm sure a few hundred gallons could be squeezed out of me!

And please, don't squeeze the oil out of bunnies; I'll have to start adding oil to the frying pan if the bunnies are dry...

I see that PZ is trying to set the atheist community fighting against itself again. There are many of us who are supported by The Atheist Conspiracy program of puppy grinding.

Burning animals for fuel has a long history. For a while it was whales.

What we are doing today isn't much different. One of the leading alternative fuels is ethanol. Made from corn, the leading grain in the USA.

Essentially what we are doing is burning food for a gasoline substitute. So corn is almost double what it was a few years ago and wheat is triple what it was. Go the the grocery store. Food prices are noticeably higher.

This doesn't strike me as a viable idea especially when the world has 6.7 billion people and a very thin margin of food to people.

The only dumber idea was to trade blood for oil. Not only did we waste some lives but oil is at a record high of 83 bucks/barrel and gas is $2.80/gallon. Both at least double what they were when the Iraqi war started. It didn't work.

Must be a better way to power our cars than blood or food. Offhand I can think of other power sources but can't tell if they are feasible. If there was an obvious choice, presumably we would be pursuing it.

Lago (#3), blame Melville.

Geothermal's the answer.

Pipe seawater down to where it's heated to steam. Use the steam to drive turbines to generate electricity. Condense the steam and you have distilled water.

What more could you ask for? You get clean, renewable power with drinking water as a by-product, both of which are in short supply. Easy.

Somebody did mention earthquakes as a possible side-effect but look on the bright side, geologists and seismologists gotta eat too.

Don't burn bunnies, pups, or whales
(for one, they're too darn yummy!)
But if you can believe the tales
The new alt-fuel: the mummy!

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_1_43/ai_56750465/pg_13

"The scholars that accompanied Napoleon to Egypt in his campaign of 1799-1800 saw Arabs burning mummies as fuel (Manniche 98), and Twain joked in Innocents Abroad that Egyptians burned "mummies three thousand years old, purchased by the ton or by the graveyard" to power locomotives (2:386)."

Is it too late to get the puppy quote into Expelled?
Maybe it could be read aloud to sounds of tearing flesh, or fludderblasts that sound like it.

I've often wondered how they can sell a 20 oz. bottle of baby-oil for $5. I mean, sure you get some extra out of the second pressing, but there can't be that much profit margin left after the exorbitant prices the orphanage charges.

Speed limits should be reduced, drastically. Cars ahould be reduced in size too, along with their engines. This would directly affect emmission of CO2. To help encourage slower driving, the law should be changed. At present, in the UK, careless driving that results in the death or serious injury of a vulnerable road user is treated as, simply, careless driving. This attracts a small penalty, because the careless action, in other circumstances, might have had no consequences. Careless drivers have little legal responsibility in the UK, & this encourages speeding.

I can see a kind of logic to the law as it stands, but it seems more appropriate to another age, when only the upper classes drove cars & the same people also administerd the law. It is totally inappropriate now, & should've been then.

I think that we should have the same legal situation as generally obtains in Europe, where any driver who kills or injures a vulnerable road user is held to be responsible unless they can demonstrate that the victim caused the accident.

I don't know if Hawaii still has a State speed limit of 50 mph, buy one soon gets used to driving at that speed. Where I live, I sometimes see people doing over 60 mph through my village (which has a 30 limit). Youngsters, in particular, like the two grinning idiots I saw this morning, sometimes do over 60 on our narrow, twisting lanes that accommodate two lanes of traffic at best, & sometimes only one.

A firm crack down on speed would reduce emissions substantially, save injury & lives, & encourage cycling, which benefits health. It's win-win-win! So why don't politicians do this?

How about Chroogloeocystis siderophila?

#12 Post of the Month

Richard, The US is gigantic, and in the age of instant communication, we want instant travel, too (or as close as possible). Reducing the speed limit is in direct violation to this imperative, and thus can never happen.

Tearing up the Interstates and replacing them with high speed, high-volume rail is a pipe-dream, because of the spectre of collectivism that mass transit invokes.

#1 and #12

PostS of the month.

Laughed until laughter could no longer come. Morbid. Morbid, morbid funnies.....

Posted by: Penon
"Lago (#3), blame Melville."

Yeah, Melville's character left New Bedford and went to Natucket before he set sail, but Melville himself actually went whailing out of the New Bedford Whaling Fleet on a boat out of a suburb of New Bedford, Fairhaven. So even Melville gave credit to Nantucket, yet never sailed out of there...

Stogoe @ #16, the USA is'nt so bad. I once got done for speeding just minutes after crossing the Quebec / NY border. I hadn't had time to adjust to the lower speed limit that applied in NY compared to Canada.

I live in the UK now, & it's a different situation to North America with the vast distances between even small cities. But I do seem to recall a 50 limit, not just in Hawaii, but in the contiguous states too, when there was an oil crisis in the 70's. It's just a different crisis now. This time, there's plenty of oil, but we could be wiping out whole ecosystems within our lifetime. Not to mention loads of poor people in third world countries.

I tried to squeeze some oil out of my cats but all I got was furballs. They burned really bright (good for spelunking?) but not for very long. Fat content from rendering is I would predict really small, so I won't go there. Since I work in a hospital, maybe I could contribute a few of my heavier patients. The fat content should light up Boise, Idaho

"Is it too late to get the puppy quote into Expelled?
Maybe it could be read aloud to sounds of tearing flesh, or fludderblasts that sound like it."

I agree completely. I think it would supplement the movie perfectly.

Here's another idea: force car taxes and car insurance to be pro-rated for mileage. Everyone in America NEEDS a car. That's not going to change. The problem is that once you BUY the car, it costs almost nothing to USE it. The costs are all up-front. If use my car 4 times a day, or if I use it 4x a month, my car insurance stays the same. My property taxes on the car stay the same. It's still cheaper to take my car than to take the train, because it's 20 bucks in gas, but 30 bucks for the ticket...

I'm riding my bike to work, but it doesn't really save me all that much money.

Also -- baby oil? Brilliant.

Venezuela has about 15,000 oilbirds living in caves in Guacharo (the caves are about 17 miles long). These birds are so rich in oil I was told they used to tie them to a stick, light them and use them for a lamp. I am sure if you squeezed all those birds you could get enough fuel to run a big SUV for a month or so.

47 barrels of oil per whale, at $72 a barrel, means each whale is worth $3,384.

How long do you think it will before the russians and the japanese figure that one out?

Uh oh.

I agree the speed limit should be 50mph on all highways. N mph over that punished by a fine of N^2 dollars or impounding, etc. But nothing will change unless there's a possibility that people will face discomfort.

Of course, you could argue that 40,000 auto fatalities per year in the US is a big discomfort - but it's spread out over the whole population over a whole year, so it doesn't have the effect it should. And a person driving 90mph can always think to themselves, "I'm being careful - not like those idiots who crash". Of course, everyone who crashes probably also thought that.

Now if there were some way of making all those people die within an hour of each other, on the same road, then the politicians might start talking.

"Pipe seawater down to where it's heated to steam. Use the steam to drive turbines to generate electricity. Condense the steam and you have distilled water."

What do you do when the deposited salts and minerals clog the pipe?

I'm just shaking my head in sadness. Falwell died too soon. He could really be of some help right now.

Actually what we need to do is find a way to distil sleaze into oil, then Sean Hanity could just be locked in a room and used to power a large city. Just think of what we could get outta Ann Coulter!

This doesn't strike me as a viable idea especially when the world has 6.7 billion people and a very thin margin of food to people.

That is not true. Currently, there's food for twice the world population.

That will change after peak oil, though.

And let me mention that, from a European perspective, the US speed limits on highways are ridiculously low. Over here it's 130 km/h. Higher taxes on gas would probably be a good idea (why do you think the average car in Europe needs so much less gas than the average car in the USA?), and more public transport is necessary.

On topic: Ambrose Bierce's classic short story, "Oil of Dog."

Roadkill is actually used in some Biodiesel production methods, so a lot, I'm guessing. We'd get more if we used commercial hemp seed oil, but drug laws stupidly say it's illegal to use. As a bonus, we could use the stalk fibers as an alternate source of paper. Plus, hemp can grow in marginal land with little added water. It also nitrates the soil.

Nah, you'll get nowhere with puppies and kittens and babies. Too much water & protain. inkadu (#23) has the right idea--we need to concentrate of species that give the most oil for the least cost; something really, really oily...

maybe da boid dat gets da woim?

Maybe if we just ran cars *directly* on blood, so as to cut out the exorbitant profit of the military middleman?

Such shortsightedness. Really, I'm surprised at you all.
Obviously the paucity of whales in the wild prevents any kind of sustainable harvest, so the solution is plainly an intensive whale aquaculture project.
There are massive tracts of otherwise useless land in the Western U.S. that we could simply flood and grow whales in. Of course, the cattle industry will complain about us using up their free government-sponsored grazing land, but until they can get this kind of oil yield from cows, I think it is their duty to our country to move aside and make way for fuel cetaculture in their place.

Melville didn't say Nantucket was the whaling capital, so if everyone thinks that then they need to read the book again. New Bedford had long passed it as the whaling center but Nantucket had historical primacy, and also lots of people on it named "Coffin" (still true, by the way) which had literary advantage.

"Besides though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolizing the business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original--the Tyre of this Carthage;--the place where the first dead American whale was stranded.

CalGeorge:

How much oil can be extracted from humans?

Rush Limbaugh, specifically.

Just asking.

That's not oil.

Why can't we just ride the whales around? That would save a lot of rendering effort. Pump them up with hydrogen and tie a cabin to the bottom, and there you go.

Or, just go one step down the food chain, and ride the giant squids around.

@29, I agree. Very, very stupid. Blame the wood-paper industry.

That is not true. Currently, there's food for twice the world population.

But eventually, if global warming continues unabated, there will be less water to grow all those crops.

Here's what the Union of Concerned Scientists says about California's agricultural situation:

Roughly 75 percent of California's precipitation falls in the winter, north of Sacramento. However, the greatest demand for water comes during the spring and summer from users south of Sacramento. California relies on snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains for water supply during these dry months. Rising temperatures, potentially exacerbated
by decreased precipitation, could lead to severe reductions in the snowpack and make water shortages more common in the future.
[...]
As global warming continues, decreasing snowmelt and spring stream flows, coupled with increasing demand for water resulting from a growing population and a hotter climate, will likely lead to more water shortages. By the end of the century, if temperature increase reaches the medium warming range (5.5 to 8°F) and precipitation decreases, spring streamflow could decline up to 30 percent. Agricultural areas are expected to be hard hit, with farmers able to access about 25 percent less water than they need.

"How much oil can be extracted from humans?

Rush Limbaugh, specifically."

Appearances would indicate several kilos of oil. He provides a continuous supply of natural gas, though.

"How much oil can be extracted from humans?"

Ya know, with Americans getting bigger and fatter all the time and dying off of heart disease...well...that's an awful lot of big, greasy corpses going to waste.

Just saying is all.

... that's an awful lot of big, greasy corpses going to waste.

Eureka! Human bio-diesel!

More than sixty percent of Americans are overweight and the Norwegian's firm in Miami, Florida is in the process of signing an agreement with US hospital giant Jackson Memorial. This deal would give Venøy & Co. around 11,500 liters of human fat a week from liposuction operations, which is enough to produce about 10,000 liters of bio-diesel.

http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1559489.ece

What we are doing today isn't much different. One of the leading alternative fuels is ethanol. Made from corn, the leading grain in the USA.

Essentially what we are doing is burning food for a gasoline substitute.

Thought there was something odd about that statement, so went looking:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol#Cellulosic_ethanol

"Deployment of this technology could turn a number of cellulose-containing agricultural byproducts, such as corncobs, straw, and sawdust, into renewable energy resources."

Oh, and as to this comment:

Speed limits should be reduced, drastically.

Glad you later stated that Hawaii was a good example, since 50 mph is generally the "sweet spot" for engines. Anything too far under or over that generates more waste than it burns, so its less efficient. However, its still bloody stupid, since the problem isn't the speed the car can travel at, its the method of getting power from the engine to the wheels that makes it inefficient. The advantage Hybreds have is that when the engine in them "is" running they run at optimum RPM, since the power isn't going straight from the engine to the wheels, this means they waste less fuel anyway, because they only ever operate in the sweet spot for the engine, and because they engine isn't needed 100% of the time.

Its still going to be a far better situation when they finally start making "real" batteries for pure electrics though, and develop better solar panels. If you need to charge your car, go into a station that can fast charge it, which also runs its generator at optimum speeds, and only while people *are* charging them. Duh! Yeah, if you are stupid, and you tie the whole system into the electric grid, its going to make things worse, because the grid is on 24-7, not just "on demand". And, because of this, its unlikely that they have real efficient systems "providing" that power, since they need to be able to cycle up/down as power demands rise and fall. That isn't efficient in the slightest.

I don't know how much you could cut by just limiting the number of things that run on the main grid, where efficiency is usually probably only thought of in transmission, not production (mostly because the later may not allow for it), but its got to be some. In the end, its going to be more self reliance (i.e. local power of power production at your home, where it *can be* more efficient), less grid, unless you are selling some of yours back into the system, which might itself be more efficient in some cases, and cars/other things that require less power, because they are not relying of stupid BS like converters that drop from 110v to 12v to run your alarm clock and computer, or even your lights *which in many cases can run on 12v too), or the bigger idiocy you often get with something like solar, where you lose efficiency upping it from 12-15v to 110v, just so you can have the transformer in your clock, computer, etc. convert it "back" to 12v again.

A lot of stuff we are doing is just so boneheaded its nuts, and its all based on nothing but the fact that, "Well, this is how we have done it for years, so its going to be "difficult" or "costly" to fix it, so I am not going to bother, I will just build my house with all the old reliable shit thats inefficient and stupid. That some people have been advocating how stupid it was/is since like the 1920s or farther back... :p

"This deal would give Venøy & Co. around 11,500 liters of human fat a week from liposuction operations, which is enough to produce about 10,000 liters of bio-diesel."

We're slip-sliding right into a bizarre sci-fi novel future, aren't we?

Render unto Caesar?

LOL!

A few random thoughts:

How far down do you have to drill for geothermal? Could that be done anywhere or does it need a special type location, like near a volcano or something? Electricity and fresh water? definitely worthwhile.

I recently read an article about compressed air powered cars. That sounds like a workable idea. The pressure tank could be filled quickly enough (at a gas station properly equipped) to be convenient, it's non polluting at the car level, and you could have an onboard pump to run off electricity at home or work to recharge the tank during the time the car is parked.

If only we had say a large nuclear fireball nearby whose visible light radiation output could be harnessed to generate electricity using photovoltaic panels. Na, it would never work, after all where would we find something like that?

Cheers,
Ray

"We're slip-sliding right into a bizarre sci-fi novel future, aren't we?"

Sounds like we're here already. I'm sure someone in California will build a drive through liposuction clinic soon. Patrons will get a discount at the clinic's fuel pumps.

I once ran across some figures for how much the average US citizen is overweight. Just for fun I calculated how much energy was available in that excess fat. Sorry, I lost those notes. My personal thinking is that I am stockpiling energy to get me through the coming hard times.

I recently saw this news story.

Dr Paul Willis: So, what are we looking at here?
Ben Hankamer: We're looking at some photosynthetic green algae that produce hydrogen. They absorb sunlight and they split water and they produce hydrogen from the water.

(at the Australian National University)

Ouoth #26: "Actually what we need to do is find a way to distil sleaze into oil, then Sean Hanity could just be locked in a room and used to power a large city. Just think of what we could get outta Ann Coulter!"

Why can't we just corral these people and harvest the hot air? Picture huge concrete buildings. Thousands of conservatives and fundamentalist ministers, all attached to devices that extract the hot air and convert it to power. I leave the mechanics to the technical types.

I'm just an idea guy. ;-)

Well, what about teh stupid? It burns.

All we gotta do is figure out how to miniaturise the Discovery Institute and fit it in a gas tank. I'll bet a wireless card and a browser permanently pointed to UD could keep a smart car running indefinitely.

Deployment of this technology could turn a number of cellulose-containing agricultural byproducts, such as corncobs, straw, and sawdust, into renewable energy resources."

You need to be able to tell fantasy from reality. Cellulosic ethanol is the nuclear fusion of the motor fuel world. In other words, it doesn't exist except at bench scale in labs.

Briefly, there are huge problems with commercializing cellulosic ethanol. AFAIK, there is to date no commercial cellulosic ethanol production. It is a cute idea that may work someday, but someday isn't here yet.

Waving a magic wand isn't going to produce a solution to fossil fuels.

...has anyone actually suggested using whale oil to fuel our economy again? O.o

And here I thought whale oil was just a convenient example of something people were convinced there was no way our economy would survive if we abandoned it (along with slave labor of various sorts and, now, petroleum).

"Well, what about teh stupid? It burns."

You made my night.

@29, I agree. Very, very stupid. Blame the wood-paper industry.

Why? If there was a way to make hemp paper economically viable for anything but specialty uses, the wood-paper industry would be all over it. Mills are more interested in the bottom line than killing trees for its own sake.

There are many nations in Western Europe, Eastern Europe (Ukraine big time) and Asia without prolific sources of wood fiber. Many of these nations are also lacking the American puritanical knicker-twister attitude concerning hemp. Yet after decades, they still only have speciality and small trial hemp paper making projects. The numbers just don't work.

Our mill's fiber is about seventy percent softwood waste product from regional sawmills and about thirty percent virgin fiber from poplar farms. The numbers vary a bit during the year according to sawmill activity and is supplemented a bit with purchased hardwood fiber to aid in attaining physical characteristics of the final paper. The waste wood chips and sawdust can certainly not be beat. Incinerate, landfill or turn into paper. Pick one. Farmed poplars just plain turn out more biomass per acre per year than farmed hemp. If I recall correctly, ten to twenty percent more tonnage depending on climate and soil. The advantage swings heavily to poplars when you start figuring in the added costs of modifying the paper mill to handle hemp fibers.

Hemp fibers are amazing. Long and strong. That, unfortunately, is not a good thing for paper. Long fibers make for a poor sheet by giving a woven fabric appearance to the paper. It takes a fair amount of time and energy to chop the hemp fibers down to an acceptable size. Fibers also need to be roughed up through a process called refining before they become paper. This roughness helps the fibers stick together when they are formed into the sheet and has a huge effect of physical characteristics such as stiffness, tensile strength, ply strength and creaseability. Refining is also one of the most energy intensive processes in the mill. Hemp fiber takes loads of refining.

Hemp is also a once a year product. A hemp based mill would require large storage facilities. Waste wood fiber and poplar farm fiber come in year round in a nicely efficient just in time manner.

Hemp also requires more processing before the pulping process even begins to remove impurities -- leaves, seeds and ordinary dirt. This adds more energy and equipment costs to the bill.

Few companies are adding new paper machines due to their very long return on investment. Even fewer are opening entire new facilties including pulping mills. Hemp would require such. There just doesn't seem to be a way yet to make the return on investment time period shorter than the expected lifespan of the mill equipment.

Even if humanity were to devote every acre of arable land in the world to the production of corn for alcohol, there wouldn't be enough land to produce enough alcohol to offset other than a fraction of the world's consumption of crude oil.

On a more serious note, if we're to consider sources of oil in the animal world, a nearly unlimited supply could be found among the world's creationists, fundamental bible thumpers, evangelical roadies, and fundies of other religions--the lot are extraordinarily oily in my experience.

#29: Re: the roadkill, you're probably thinking of steam rendering/reduction. That has a couple of pilot projects, but it hasn't really hit it's "price point" for the US yet (it'll probably take off in Europe first). IIRC, the pilot plants are "subsidized" by waste-disposal costs, which unfortunately wouldn't apply to anything we grew for the purpose, and shipping the waste any distance would tip the energy balance.

#41: IIRC the cellulose-to-ethanol conversion is still significantly more expensive than sugar-to-ethanol, well above the needed price point. Of course, the cost will drop with technology development, while the price point will rise with oil prices....

Off-topic:

PZ, don't miss the Beck-Hagee stupidfest on CNN:

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0710/12/gb.01.html

BECK: They`ve been saying, oh, you know -- the apostles said if Jesus is coming back -- they thought he was coming back right away. We`re 2,000 years down the line, and he still hasn`t come back. So what makes you think that we`re living in the end days?

HAGEE: Well, there are ten Bible signs that we`re living in the end of days. The Bible is the most phenomenal book that`s ever been written, because when it was written 25 percent of it was prophetic, telling the future. And these signs about the end of days do not require a theological knowledge.

So people who are watching this show, say, "Well, I don`t have Bible knowledge." You -- if you read a newspaper, you`re going to get this.

The first sign is the knowledge explosion. Daniel 12, the fourth chapter, God said to Daniel, "I want you to shut up the book until the time of the end." That`s a very important phrase. The end of days, when men shall run to and from and there will be a knowledge explosion.

From the Garden of Eden until the 20th century there was no knowledge explosion. In transportation people rode horses just as David, Julius Caesar, George Washington.

And then came the car, the jet, put people on the moon. We are that generation that`s having the knowledge explosion.

The same thing has happened in communication. From the Garden of Eden to the 20th century there was no differentiation. Then we came to the ability of telegraph, telephone, television, teleroaming (ph). You can reach somebody on an airplane...

Sean wrote:

Hemp is also a once a year product. A hemp based mill would require large storage facilities.

Now if we could just genetically modify hemp to be a year-round crop, we could pop hippie heads all over the globe. Hippe head exploding is a difficult energy source to capture, but it's fun to watch.

Who cares about oils? The potential marketting for "Natural Source" bottled water is mind boggling. Oil and organ harvesting, these are merely fringe offshoots that would provide vast sources of income.

But you take a parched southeast that already pays more for bottled tap water than they do for gasoline... gourmet meals and fine water to quench thirsts while they eat them.

I smell money

Changing World Technologies is producing fuel oil profitably from animals. They use waste products (offal) from meat processing plants. They claim their cost to produce a barrel of oil is about twenty dollars.

Geothermal's the answer.
Pipe seawater down to where it's heated to steam. Use the steam to drive turbines to generate electricity. Condense the steam and you have distilled water.
What more could you ask for? You get clean, renewable power with drinking water as a by-product, both of which are in short supply. Easy.

Not to mention all that sea salt for the home chefs! It'll be cheaper than Morton's.

A firm crack down on speed would reduce emissions substantially, save injury & lives, & encourage cycling, which benefits health. It's win-win-win! So why don't politicians do this?

Don't know about your side of the Atlantic, but the auto manufacturers (not just the big 3, but all of 'em) have herds of lobbyists in DC to keep things hummin' for those big, fast cars with big, fast engines they like to sell so much.

The costs are all up-front. If use my car 4 times a day, or if I use it 4x a month, my car insurance stays the same.

In California, that only works if you lie to your insurance company; they wanna know how much you drive. I have a friend that gets a great rate for So. Cal. but only because she put down on her insurance application that she was unemployed. She actually drives 30 miles each way to work and back 5 days a week. If she told the truth, she'd pay about 3x what her premium is now.

We could just change our lifestyles and consume less energy.

It's a lot easier than trying to produce a magical technology that will meet our extravagant needs for energy.

#32, Can't you just melt down a few % of the population of Indiana* every year or so? Should be plenty of blubber in there for the price of a few big macs.
*I spent 2 uncomfortable weeks in Indianapolis for work in Sept 2001 (no it wasn't supposed to be that long, but some Saudis flew some planes into some buildings so I couldn't get out again for a while), and I have never in my life seen so many HUGE people.

DwarfZebu wrote:

The costs are all up-front. If use my car 4 times a day, or if I use it 4x a month, my car insurance stays the same.
In California, that only works if you lie to your insurance company; they wanna know how much you drive.

I'm an anxious guy. If I ever get into an accident, I don't want to have to keep making up lies about how I wasn't on my way to work. Knowing me, I'd say, "Yeah, well, I was just coming back from a realllly long night at the bar."

But I wonder what they'd say if I told them I rode my bike to work. They would look at their chart, and their chart wouldn't have anything about bicycles. I mean, even by the crappy standards of "trust me," the bicycle doesn't exist in the insurance adjuster's world.

#54, there are multi-million dollar Canadian hemp operations. Much of Eastern Europe is a shit hole.

Well, what about teh stupid? It burns.

ROTFL! But stupid oxide stinks. I bet it has nasty side effects.

"I have never in my life seen so many HUGE people."

You're right about Indiana, I grew up there. Most of my relatives battled, have battled, obesity.

A few years ago I went back and was shocked. I had forgotten how slow and unhealthy so much of the population was. I remember sitting in a steak house (Indianapolis?) and losing my appetite. I was surrounded by these big, fat, puffy-balloon people, and the image that came to mind was that they were turning into the cows they were eating. (Though I suspect the cows were healthier)

Good, hardworking, salt of the earth people mostly preoccupied with pork chops and Jesus. Mashed potatoes and gravy, biscuits and gravy, fried chicken everything and gravy, and lots and lots of butter (or hydrogenated vegetable oil margarine, for the health conscious). Mmmm....mmmm...that's good eatin'.

I lived in Eugene, Oregon for a while, years ago, and noticed something strange on my first day there. I finally figured it out--no fat people! Weird.

sailor: That's an idea. Maybe we could start to fishfarm oolichans too!

This doesn't strike me as a viable idea especially when the world has 6.7 billion people and a very thin margin of food to people.

That is not true. Currently, there's food for twice the world population.

That will change after peak oil, though.

And let me mention that, from a European perspective, the US speed limits on highways are ridiculously low. Over here it's 130 km/h. Higher taxes on gas would probably be a good idea (why do you think the average car in Europe needs so much less gas than the average car in the USA?), and more public transport is necessary.

Well, what about teh stupid? It burns.

ROTFL! But stupid oxide stinks. I bet it has nasty side effects.