Hong Kong may have banned imports from the UK due to an outbreak in Oxfordshire, but that didn't help them much. A few days later, imports from China were suspended as yet again H5N1 was found at a Hong Kong market. Five out of twenty excrement samples tested positive, states that last article, but what that means is a little unclear; is it one chicken per excrement sample? One vendor per sample? What is the rate of false positives/negatives? Do chickens test positive only when the virus is active, or will a chicken which "won out" continue to test positive for however many months afterwards? As usual, most news articles don't go into the depths that the obsessive would appreciate.

Flu Sign

The above is a picture of a warning sign taken earlier this year, at the Hong Kong Botanical and Zoological Garden. They're pretty paranoid over there about bird flu and other scary emerging illnesses. It isn't without reason; through trade contacts, Hong Kong has intimate ties with the rest of Asia, where poor people with bad health systems are in close contact with all sorts of different animals (and their diseases).

[...] yes I am a Syrian you little small town maggot, I come from the land where history started, not from some hick country town such as your self... we do not grow corn where I come from, we do not marry our cousins, nor [$%^&] our sisters, so please go back to watching nascar, and saving to pay for the family farm...

1. Syria actually does grow corn, as people following the Israeli raid on the Syrian nuc-- er, "research institution" can attest:

DEIR EZ ZOR, Syria: Foreign journalists perused the rows of corn and the groves of date palms pregnant with low-hanging fruit here this week, while agents of Syria's ever present security services stood in the background, watching closely, almost nervously.

"You see — around us are farmers, corn, produce, nothing else," said Ahmed Mehdi, the Deir ez Zor director of the Arab Center for the Studies of Arid Zones and Dry Lands, a government agricultural research center, as he led two of the journalists around the facilities.

2. More to the point, the percentage of marriages between first cousins in Syria is a whopping 30%. This is low by middle eastern standards -- it's around 40% in Iraq, and 55% in Qatar. This advocacy group claims an overall US cousin marriage rate of .1%, which may include second cousins.

A CDO is clever financial agglomeration of bonds, derivatives, and loans. A lot of subprime loans in the housing market are winding up in them. It's fortunate that housing always goes up in value and subprime borrowers are great at making payments on time. Right?

And who is heavily investing in CDOs?

The Dallas Police and Fire Pension Fund invested in its first CDO about two years ago to boost returns, according to Richard Tettament, administrator of the $3.2 billion fund.

``We were beefing up our risk and we were hoping for a greater return,'' Tettament said in an interview from his Dallas office. ``We have an unfunded liability to pay off.''

Tettament said he isn't sure what type of collateral backs the CDO, though he thinks returns exceeded 20 percent last year.

Emphasis mine. Geez.

The Economist magazine's blog has further discussion. Unfortunately, they fail to mention the principle-agent problem. The taxpayers and pension fund managers are not necessarily sharing the same viewpoint. A pension fund manager whose fund does extremely well for ten years before sinking like a stone has made out like a bandit, while the taxpayers get it in the shorts.

Props to Megan McArdle, guest blogging at Instapundit, for the link.

Apropos to this page, from his New York Times obituary:

Chicken was the prime ingredient in Nissin's global success. "By using chicken soup, instant ramen managed to circumvent religious taboos when it was introduced in different countries," Mr. Ando wrote. "Hindus may not eat beef and Muslims may not eat pork, but there is not a single culture, religion or country that forbids the eating of chicken."

I wish I'd found them sooner, as I've been out with the flu all week and this would have been something good to watch. Better late than never -- right now I'm "taking" Integrative Biology 131 - Human Anatomy.

Props to Joanne Jacobs for the link.

UPDATE

Actually, Berkeley's webcast page is better interface. Better layout, more courses. I think what they're doing is using Google video as their archiver. Quality is a bit clearer on Google, plus you can download the videos as opposed to just stream them.

Unfortunately, Republican hands are not entirely clean with respect to this sort of behavior. My congressman, Tom Davis, threatened to have Major League Baseball's antitrust exemption looked at if George Soros' consortium won ownership of the Washington Nationals. Here's the DCCC
quoting Roll Call.

I suppose the Dems may be worse in terms of the number and prominent position of those making the current round of threats, but on the other hand it's something that's received more press. It's a shame; I was planning on voting "D" for the first time ever for Davis' Democratic opponent Andrew Hurst, but now I'll likely wind up throwing my vote away on the Libertarian.

I'd done some work in my front lawn last year to improve the grade, but my laundry room still got a bit of a ducking. I spent some quality time with the shopvac (best Christmas present ever!), and everything should be all right.

In honor of the mighty Potomac river, due to crest on Thursday, here's a relevant verse from Johnny Cash's "Five Feet High And Rising":

How high's the water, mama?
Three feet high and rising
How high's the water, papa?
She says it's three feet high and rising

Well, the hives are gone,
I've lost my bees
The chickens are sleeping
In the willow trees
Cow's in water up past her knees,
Three feet high and rising

Then I got drunk and caused a multi-car accident.

Then, after an explosion at my crystal meth plant, I carjacked someone and was racing to escape with my hostage when I ran off the road and into a pedestrian, and finally was shot through the chest after a gun battle with the cops.

How was your weekend?

No, it wasn't real. It was loads of fun, even if I didn't get to go up in a helicopter. A bunch of fellow EMT-B students and myself volunteered to be victims at the Night Ops training session for Fairfax Fire & Rescue Academy recruits.

Hammered home were the following lessons:

1. Pay attention to the scene! Don't just stop and focus all your attention on the first thing you see.
2. If you have time, go through the whole of the SAMPLE history and OPQRST. Make notes! If you don't know whether or not a question has been asked, go ahead and ask it again, if only because it gives you the chance to...
3. Reasses your patient's vitals and mental status. Notice if your patient stops breathing.
4. Don't let the patients get you flustered.

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight
But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.

I've no real pertinent thoughts to add, other than that Belloc was part of the last gasp of true poetry before the

nightmare of
free VeRsE!
Set in. Modern poetry is now only distinct from prose by
rand
om line breaks, oBsCuRe CAPitilization
or its lack, as in good old ee.
(Oh, YES! do not forget!... tricks-with!
pun.c.tuati.on. marks.)!!!#11

Anyway, as a comic poet, his skills are comparable to those of his contemporary, Ogden Nash. Check out a book of his poems from your local library.

• Hen's teeth are not as rare as you thought. At least in nonviable chicken embryos, thanks to a gene called talpid2:
  Mutant Chicken Grows Alligatorlike Teeth
  


• Life as a chicken culler in Bermuda:
  ‘I don’t hate chickens — I’m doing this for a job’
  


• Avian flu is not the only thing about which Indian chickens need to worry:
  15,000 chickens die of Infectious Bursal Disease
  

The downside is the herd of deer. Not a unique problem in my neighborhood; the only natural predator they have in Fairfax County is automobiles, and the extremely limited amount of hunting isn't sufficient to keep down the population. Results include my Mom brandishing a ladder to chase one away from her garden, as well as a now-leafless Daphne Odora that will need decent burial.

But I should count myself lucky. At least I don't have to deal with these:

Ted Hart isn't too fond of the flesh-eating vultures that live on his roof. Their droppings are everywhere, they destroy chimneys with their hulking frames, and they frighten his 14-year-old daughter so much that she doesn't like to walk outside anymore.

The solution in some places would be to grab a shotgun and call it a day.

But in Columbia, the planned community that prides itself as the definition of progressive living, anything that would harm the birds is off the table. Hart said the vultures might be "encouraged" to leave, but not by any show of violence.

"We are a community that is going to respect the fact that the birds have a right to be here," said Hart, president of the homeowners association of the Gables at Columbia. "We're not going to jump to the most mean-spirited, hateful option, even though it might be expedient." ...

Read the whole article. As my Dad said, "Smart birds."

A key component in the draft national high school curriculum proposes replacing much Norwegian, European, world and modern history with digital presentations of the Viking age, the rise of the Roman Empire and the development of medieval China...

The new program leaves out the world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, and does not mention the topics of Nazism or Communism.

From Anthony Trollope's Last Chronicle of Barset:

You remember nothing, and you forget nothing. You expect everything to be made smooth for you, and will do nothing towards making things smooth for anybody else.

Thanks to Joanne Jacobs for the link.