We’re just back from our New Year’s visit to David’s parents; we took the new route and once again, it was no faster, but is a lot less complicated. It’s cold, cold, cold, and it snowed all last night and most of today. As we came back, along a long, 2-lane country road that leads to the new extension of I-355, we watched threads of blown snow whip across the blacktop. There are still farms out there, but the blight is already taking root: all kinds of chain restaurants and big-box stores are creeping along, with more construction obviously coming. Still,…
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Wow! In spite of my sister Timmy’s poor opinion of my housekeeping skillz, the Xmess box is all packed up and sitting in the hall! Where it’s been for the last year. Actually, more than a year. Last year, I hauled it out of the garage sometime in early December, thinking that if I felt like it, I’d get around to putting up the Christmas tree and decorations. But last year was the first one after Mom passed away, and I never did get around to it, although I felt horribly anxious about the countdown to Christmas, and positively in…
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Salt Lake Tribune – As Cottonwood Mall is demolished, firefighters will train in the crumbling buildings As shoppers flood stores in search of last-minute gifts, firefighters already have bagged the perfect present: They got a mall. Through the end of January, the Unified Fire Authority will conduct extensive training exercises in Holladay’s now-nearly-empty Cottonwood Mall at 4835 S. Highland Drive. “It’s a once-in-a-career opportunity to go there and do drills and practices,” UFA Capt. Troy Prows said Friday. “We use structures that are ready to be destroyed for practice.” But rarely do those buildings come so super-sized – with 700,000…
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Mom used to love reading the obits in the Salt Lake Tribune – especially the ones best described as “over the top.” I wonder what she would have made of this one? For my part, it’s a sad, even tragic story… and whoever felt they needed to mention that the subject “drifted from his standards” should be ashamed of themselves. Because? Ew. Also, HIV and “Aids” are not two diseases, they are the virus that causes the disease, and the disease itself. This man sounds like a lovely, talented person – how sad that he had to reject himself in…
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Now this is journalistic excellence: staff members of the local alternative weekly paper in Salt Lake reports the big story, after decamping to the nearest bar to wait out the boring part of being evacuated because of a bomb scare at the bank building across the street. Not only is it insightful and edgy, but traditional and slightly boozy at the same time. Mom would have gotten the biggest laugh out of this, because in her younger days she knew a lot of boozy old journalists who would have covered the story from the nearest bar, too. CW Blog: Irregular…
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mullentown » Blog Archive » If You Were the Architect Yay! It’s coming back, and it’s nothing to do with politics: it’s the Walker Bank sign in Salt Lake City. As seen in the comments at mullentown, it sounds like the old Salk Lake weather icon may be making a comeback. In one of those weird Internets Tubes coincidences, my Uncle Charlie is mentioned on that Early Television site, as he was a long time radio enthusiast and tinkerer with new technologies in Salt Lake. In the 40’s and 50’s, he was involved with a lot of this stuff. I…
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Boing Boing: What it takes to bring you Fiji water Every bottle of Fiji Water goes on its own version of this trip, in reverse, although by truck and ship. In fact, since the plastic for the bottles is shipped to Fiji first, the bottles’ journey is even longer. Half the wholesale cost of Fiji Water is transportation–which is to say, it costs as much to ship Fiji Water across the oceans and truck it to warehouses in the United States than it does to extract the water and bottle it.That is not the only environmental cost embedded in each…
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Bella Vista Steamboat | Private Luxury Lodging Steamboat Springs, Colorado Spendy, but close to where we need to do something for Mom.
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This little item caught my eye: CW Blog: Irregular Blogging by Irregular Writers …: Urning Potential Evidently, the editors at the Provo Daily Herald have realized how useless online surveys are and have just whimsically started asking whatever nonsense questions pop into their heads. Here’s this week’s bizarre poll: Which statement best describes your view on cremation? ( ) Makes resurrection difficult; cremation should be avoided ( ) Cremation should be encouraged; God doesn’t care … because, of course, there are people in the United States who, after much thought, have realized that cremation is just a huge incovenience…
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A passing reference to maltodextrin, a sugar-based sweetener, on BoingBoing turned on the little lightbulb what hovers over my brain, and I Googled around to find this: Sugar substitutes and the potential danger of Splenda Saccharin, the first widely available chemical sweetener, is hardly mentioned any more. Better-tasting NutraSweet took its place in almost every diet soda, but saccharin is still an ingredient in some prepared foods, gum, and over-the-counter medicines. Remember those carcinogen warnings on the side of products that contained saccharin? They no longer appear because industry testing showed that saccharin only caused bladder cancer in rats. Most…