Henley's Twentieth Century Formulas, Recipes, and Processes

This is one of my favorite books. It contains "ten thousand selected household, workshop, and scientific formulas, trade secrets, chemical recipes, processes, and money saving ideas." The edition I have was published in 1912. I discovered this book when I was staying at the Flying Karamov Brothers' bed and breakfast in Port Townsend, Wash., while I was at the jazz festival there. It is an endlessly fascinating book, telling you how to make, well, just about everything there was to make in 1912.

The book tells you how to cook up just about everything. It none only tells you how to set up a lab, but walks you through creating some extremely complicated potions and concoctions. It has forty pages on adhesives alone. Aabsinthe, amalgams, antidotes for poison, beverages, celluloid, ceramics, cider, candy, cosmetics, tooth powders, dyes, essences, lemonade, mayonnaise, waterproofing, candles, varnishes, skin whitener (remember, this is still 1912), perfume, toothpastes, and embalming fluid! Blasting powder! Dynamite! Fertilizer, how to detect formaldehyde, copper, saccharine, and dozens of other substances in food, fumigants, glass, household formulas, ink, how to tan leather, how to make matches, how to make paint, dozens of recipes for photographic solutions, rat poison, rubber, soaps, alcoholic spirits, syrups, liquor. . .and about 9,950 other things!

You can usually find a copy on Amazon or EBay. I also see the book on survivalist sites, and maybe even our local nutjob book purveyor Loompanics stocks it. It was selling for $100 on some of the wacko sites.

I have been periodically dipping in and out of this book for twenty years. . .and always have fun.
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My ten favorite albums: Elvis Costello & The Attractions' Get Happy

[I'll get to the other ten albums sooner or later]

From My Aim Is True, This Year's Model, Armed Forces, Get Happy, up to Trust, Elvis Costello was a songwriting and song performing machine. These five albums are, in my booklet, the best music to emerge in those years (77-81). And they had some pretty stiff competition from Talking Heads, The Clash, The Ramones, and many others. . .I mean at that point, even Motown was still a force. Elvis is the best composer to emerge from either side of the Atlantic.

In album four, Get Happy, Elvis achieved a masterpiece. Elvis's embrace of Stax/Motown is stunning. And it had twenty songs-- a miracle on vinyl. It is a shimmering, blazing tribute to soul. It may not be his greatest album (Imperial Bedroom or maybe Armed Forces takes that prize), but it is my favorite, and the favorite of a lot of long-time fans. On the re-mastered version that came out a couple of years ago, Elvis included an incredible 30 bonus tracks, ranging from demos to alternate versions. It is a tribute to Elvis that he almost always made the right choices--I have yet to hear an alternate version that was better than the released one.

As with previous albums, this one was recorded in an alcohol-fueled frenzy. The songs tumble out jackhammer style--some of them are less than two minutes long. Nick Lowe was once again the producer and somehow he pulled it off, despite his production methods, which Elvis once said consisted of

"a fader in one hand and a vodka bottle in the other."

These songs were frequently written and recorded in canon blasts, like the boast of "Possession" being written in five minutes after an afternoon infatuation with a cocktail waitress. The Attractions' mission was to pump out as much music as possible, as soon as possible.

Album five, Trust, was another excellent album. And then things got spottier. But ten great albums, or whatever it is. . .not many can match that. Maybe only one other band. And now, I'm thinking I've been a bit hasty. . .do I really like this album better than This Year's Model, Imperial Bedroom, or Armed Forces? Well, I do today.
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Happy Belated 60th Birthday Mister President!

"There has been an alarming increase in the number of things you know nothing about" (thanks for the quote, Ashley Brilliant).

Happy Birthday, Prez. I don't feel so bad about being late, since I saw the list of some of the swag people sent you..
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Alien Lore No. 78 - The Greys Are Calling Us

According to Dr. Steven Greer, SETI has recently received multiple extraterrestrial signals. For the first time ever!!!!

This news is confirmed by senior employees within the SETI program. This is pretty hairy news! This project has been going for years and years with complete silence from Out There. Does this mean that someone is trying to get in touch with us??? Wouldn't it be nice to hear from our cousins Out There?? Bring it on! Let's send a map and roll out the welcome mat. We've always assumed anyone coming here would have hostile intentions. That's because we've always had hostile intentions.

Wouldn't you think that if the Greys, or aliens, or whoever they are, came here they would have so far transcended our bellicose nature that they would show up on Earth just to save us from ourselves? Whenever I think about the arrival of our cousins, it's not about the warlike creatures we have so often imagined, but about a race of folk not unlike Klaatu from The Day The Earth Stood Still?

Maybe, I'm naive, but I've always thought they might just show up with hearts brimming with love and fellowship.


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Alien Lore No. 77: Celebrity sightings and thoughts on UFOs

Muhammad Ali: "If you look into the sky in the early morning you see them playing tag between the stars."

Jimmy Carter during his 1976 campaign for President: "If I become President, I'll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and scientists. I am convinced that UFOs exist because I have seen one."

the late President Ronald Reagan: "I looked out the window and saw this white light.It was zigzagging around. I went up to the pilot and said, Have you ever seen anything like that? He was shocked and he said, "Nope." And I said to him: "Let's follow it!" We followed it for several minutes. It was a bright white light followed it to Bakersfield, and all of a sudden to our utter amazement it went straight up into the heavens. When I got off the plane I told Nancy all about it."

the Late Arizona Senator and Presidential Contender Barry Goldwater: " I can't believe that God or whomever is in charge would put thinking bodies on only one planet. So I'm a firm believer that something can fly around here that the Wright Brothers didn't have anything to do with."

Capt. Edgar Mitchell Apollo 14 Astronaut: "The evidence points to the fact that Roswell was a real incident and that indeed an alien craft did crash, and that material was recovered from that site. We all know that UFOs are real. All we need to ask is where do they come from, and what do they want?"

Astronaut Gordon Cooper addressing the United Nations in 1985: "I believe that these extraterrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets, which are a little more technically advanced than we are on Earth. I feel that we need to have a top level, coordinated program to scientifically collect and analyze data from all over the Earth concerning any type of encounter, and to determine how best to interfere with these visitors in a friendly fashion.

Sammy Haggar, former (maybe current) rock front man: "I'm a real firm believer in aliens, right? They're definitely out there. I've had contact. Yes, I have and they're smart son of a guns, man' 1967, was the summer of love. In Fontana, California. I was lying in bed, in my room. And, all of a sudden, I felt like something was going on' And I was sleeping. I was sleeping. It was 3:00, 4:00 in the morning. And I opened my eyes, my body couldn't move. And my room was pure white, I mean, like as bright as you could possibly imagine. "

Jimi Hendrix: "There are other people in the solar system, you know, and they have the same feelings too, not necessarily bad feelings, but see, it upsets their way of living for instance - and they are a whole lot heavier than we are."

David Bowie, Singer/Musician: "They came over so regularly we could time them. Sometimes they stood still, other times they moved so fast it was hard to keep a steady eye on them."

President Harry S. Truman, 1950: "I can assure you that flying saucers, given that they exist, are not constructed by any power on earth."

Chuck Clark, Author and amateur astronomer: "People need to give it some serious thought. Too many credible people have reported things that are impossible by our understanding of physics."

Jackie Gleason on a trip he said he took with President Richard Nixon: "Next, we went into an inner chamber and there were six or eight of what looked like glass-topped Coke freezers. Inside them were the mangled remains of what I took to be children. Then - upon closer examination - I saw that some of the other figures looked quite old. Most of them were terribly mangled as if they had been in an accident."

President Gerald Ford: "I have taken special interest in these (UFO) accounts because many of the latest reported sightings have been made in my home state of Michigan...Because I think there may be substance to some of these reports and because I believe The American People are entitled to a more thorough explanation than has been given them by the Air force to date..."

Wayne Green, Founder of Byte Magazine and CD Review: "The more you look into [the UFO phenomenon], and the more people that you talk to and read about that have done serious investigations, the more you know that this stuff is real."

Joe Firmage, Founder of USWeb: "We have objects in the sky. . .they have been spotted millions of times worldwide"

Sarah McClendon, late White House Correspondent: "The real danger to the U.S. and perhaps this whole planet is the government has placed such a heavy blanket of secrecy upon this issue. So much secrecy, those in government who have knowledge showing UFOs are identifiable feel the subject cannot be discussed by those in the know without serious repercussions. Others are afraid their friends and co-workers will think they are crazy if they even so much as insinuate that UFOs are identifiable as manned craft from outside the earth. This particularly applies to newspaper editors and publishers, reporters and analysts. Thus the U.S. is denying itself the chance to learn more about UFOs or to encourage research despite the fact the U. S. stands to gain from such discussions.

May Pang, "assistant" to John Lennon, describing an object they saw from Lennon's balcony in NYC: "It looked like a flattened cone with a brilliant light on top."

from John Lennon's Nobody Told Me:
"There's a UFO over New York
& I ain't too surprised,
Nobody told me there'd be days like these,
Strange days indeed..."

Dennis Weaver, a late actor: "I think there's alot of evidence that we've made contact."
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The Enumclaw beastiality story is now to become a motion picture

For some reason, this horse-human story still brings people from Google here every day, a year later. Now, the Seattle Times tell us the story is about to become a movie:

The Seattle Times's Moira Macdonald writes today that the "Infamous Enumclaw horse sex case [is] to be made into a movie. . .Seattle filmmaker Robinson Devor has begun filming this month for his new documentary, "In the Forest There Is Every Kind of Bird." The film examines the widely reported 2005 incident of a man in Enumclaw who died after having sex with a horse." Read the story about the film here.

Previous Enumclaw postings on All This Is That:

• Further ruminations on Enumclaw
• Horsin' around: update on Enumclaw
• Another shocking revelation
• Beastiality in south King County
• The final horse/beastiality update
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The 4th of July, 2006 & The Mortality of Presidents

click painting to enlarge

Three Presidents have died on July 4th. . .something like seven percent of all Presidents. You think you know what's coming next. I won't say it. Former presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day in 1826 and five years later, former president James Monroe died.

click painting to enlarge

Links to paintings and microbios on All This Is That:

POTUS 5: President James Monroe
POTUS 2: President John Adams, The Only President Defeated For Re-election By His Own Vice-President
POTUS 3: Pres. Thomas Jefferson
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The Declaration of Independence & Parallels between King George & President George Bush

Happy 4th of July! Note the bold sections below. Several groups of people have averred that President Bush is as guilty of these offenses as King George of Britain was. . .in fact, one group is suing The President over these very statements in the Declaration...

(Adopted by Congress on July 4, 1776)

The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.



He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.



He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton

Massachusetts: John Hancock, Samual Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery

Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott

New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris

New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark

Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross

Delaware: Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean

Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton

North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn

South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton

Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton
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Alien lore No. 76 - UFO crash in Siberia

98 years ago this week, an Unidentified Flying Object allegedly crashed near the Tunguska River in Siberia. Mid-morning on June 30th, 1908, an explosion so humongous that it caused damage 400 miles away occurred. Heat from the explosion was felt hundreds of miles away. You may be thinking "it's just Jack. . .off on one of his alien tangents again," but scientists agree that something terrible and unexplained happened in 1908. And, yes, I am aware I juxtaposed the words Jack and Off. If I was on the radio, I would be fined $50,000 and probably fired for that. . .

The blast was estimated to be as powerful as 15 megatons of TNT. An estimated 60 million trees over 830 square miles were knocked down.

For several nights all over northern Europe, the sky was so bright it lit up the streets of London. Conventional wisdom assumed a massive meteorite had crashed into Earth.

In the nearly hundred years since the blast, it has engendered speculation and controversy about its genesis in the scientific community.

Theories offered by scholars range from it being a meteorite, comet, or nuclear explosion to more paranormal and speculative explanations such as a black hole, an anti-matter rock, or an alien spacecraft (my personal favorite). Since no nation was known to have developed nuclear technology--we were practically still using flintlocks in war--that theory ties in with the extraterrestrial explanations. A nuclear explosion could only have come from Out There.

In 1927 an expedition was [finally] mounted to investigate the crash site. The expedition failed to locate any trace of a meteor, which puzzled them, because a meteor would have to have been very, very large to create such a blast.

A puzzle of the expedition was the pattern in which the trees were felled--in an outward motion. But at the center of the blast, an area of trees were still standing, with their bark and branches destroyed.

Later, photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were shockingly similar to the pattern of fallen trees. Some scientists speculated a nuclear explosion had taken place--which would explain the tree formation.

Witnesses to the original crash spoke of seeing an oval-shaped mass move across the sky, as well as seeing the object change course. In fact, some people spoke of the object falling to earth, and then, taking off again. However, we know of no meteors that have re-animated after falling to earth.

The first report of the explosion appeared in the Irkutsk newspaper dated July 2, 1908, published two days after the explosion:

"... the peasants saw a body shining very brightly (too bright for the naked eye) with a bluish-white light.... The body was in the form of 'a pipe', i.e. cylindrical. The sky was cloudless, except that low down on the horizon, in the direction in which this glowing body was observed, a small dark cloud was noticed. It was hot and dry and when the shining body approached the ground (which was covered with forest at this point) it seemed to be pulverized, and in its place a loud crash, not like thunder, but as if from the fall of large stones or from gunfire was heard. All the buildings shook and at the same time a forked tongue of flames broke through the cloud. All the inhabitants of the village ran out into the street in panic. The old women wept, everyone thought that the end of the world was approaching."
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Poem: The Way We Were

1
The way we were
Was not the right way
Not the way

God planned it
It started to rain
And didn't stop

2
The windows of heaven opened
The fountains of the deep opened
And it rained 40 days and 40 nights

Until even K2 and Everest
Were hidden beneath
20 feet of water



3
Noah built a getaway ferry
With one door
450 feet long 75 feet wide

And 45 feet high
And grabbed two
Of every creature

That stomped flew and crawled
With enough groceries for them all
And brought them on board

To ride out the storm
With his wife and his boys
Ham Japeth Shem and their lovely wives


4
Half a year later
The waters slowly returned
To their source

The ferry came to rest
In the Ararat mountains
The water receded for 40 days

And other mountains emerged
Noah sent out a dove
She came back

Because the ferry
Was the only place to land
A week later she went again

And brought back an olive leaf
He sent her a week later
And she never returned

5
Noah and his family
And all the animals left the ferry
To begin the happy business

Of multiplying
While God
Invented the rainbow.
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Sixty-nine years ago today, Amelia Earhart disappeared

On July 2, 1937, a Lockheed airplane piloted by aviator Amelia Earhart and her navigator Frederick Noonan was reported missing somewhere between New Guinea and Howland Island ( the nearest land 2,227 miles away), in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. A Coast Guard cutter, The Itasca, was in sporadic radio contact with her as she approached Howland Island. They received messages that she was lost and running low on fuel and the ship began sending out huge plumes of black smoke. She was unable to ever locate the ship, to land near it, or on it. She radioed that she was running out of fuel and may have tried to ditch (e.g., "land" on water and get in their lifeboat) in the ocean. No trace of Amelia or her navigator was ever found.

She became famous as the first woman to perform several feats of daring, including a transatlantic flight to Europe, and a solo nonstop across the United States (longer, but with a lot more places to land!). For duplicating Lucky Lindy's flight, she was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross by Congress.



In 1935, in the first flight of its kind, she flew solo from Honolulu to Oakland, California, and won a $10,000 award posted by Hawaiian businessmen. Later that year, she was appointed to a sinecure at Purdue University. They bought her a Lockheed Electra airplane as a "flying laboratory." This is the plane that carried her, a couple of years later, into the great unknown.
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Photograph: LBJ in Vietnam

Click photograph to enlarge

This is a photograph of LBJ in Vietnam, glad-handing some of the troops he sent there. LBJ may have been a hawk, but judging from historical accounts and oral biographies, he agonized mightily over every single decision he made in that war.

Ed. note: Re-reading this later, I feel the need to amend that last sentence, or rather, add one more sentence::::::::::::::

That doesn't mean that nearly every single decision he made in "the fog of war" wasn't wrong. As much as I loved the man for his actions for equal rights, and against poverty, the war was his Achille's heel. That doesn't change the great things he did, but still, a dark cloud hangs over his legacy. /jb
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