Coffee Klatch

Yes, you’re reading it correctly. A PINK dolphin was seen in a lake in Louisiana a couple weeks ago. Apparently they’re a rare but not-unheard-of type of albino dolphin. They say it’s a bottlenose dolphin and not related to a pinkish breed of dolphins that live in the Amazon River.

Story by FOX News.

In other marine news, a WHALE was caught in June off the coast of Alaska that had the head of a nineteenth-century harpoon embedded in it. Whales are reported to live for up to 200 years, but this is the first time one has been documented so precisely (between 115 and 130 years old).

The American Film Institute (AFI) has again published a list that film buffs are talking about. Last year it was the Top 100 Most Inspiring Movies. This year it was the Top 100 Movies of All Time. They first created this list 10 years ago and they’ve now updated it for the 10th Anniversary. Yes, there were some changes.

First, here’s the Top 10 of the list:

1. CITIZEN KANE
2. THE GODFATHER
3. CASABLANCA
4. RAGING BULL
5. SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN
6. GONE WITH THE WIND
7. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
8. SCHINDLER’S LIST
9. VERTIGO
10. THE WIZARD OF OZ

Citizen Kane is AGAIN at the top of the list. Raging Bull and Vertigo are new to the Top Ten list (in 1997, they were ranked #24 and #61). The Graduate and On the Waterfront WERE in the top ten, but have moved down to #17 and #19. Films that are new to the Top 100 list are The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (#50), Saving Private Ryan (#71), Titanic (#83), and The Sixth Sense (#89). Visit the AFI website for more trivia and info about the list.

And visit the AFI’s Top 100 Interactive Tour to see them all in groups of ten (requires Flash).

This morning I heard on NPR’s Morning Edition that the average computer keyboard has more germs on it than a toilet seat! BLEH!!

So they talked about ways to clean a keyboard, including a story that’s going around the internet about using a DISHWASHER! (Bottom line people have tried it, sometimes it doesn’t hurt the keyboard, sometimes shorts start occurring which results in keys not work. Manufacturers say it’s not a good idea. Unless they’re someone like Seal Shield which designs the keyboards to be dishwasher safe.)

Read or listen to the story here.

If you’re interested in learning any more about rum, here’s a good overview of the various regions where rum is produced and what the quality is like (provided by Tastings.com’s “All About Rum“). For what it’s worth.

The Caribbean is the epicenter of world Rum production. Virtually every major island group produces its own distinct Rum style.

Barbados produces light, sweetish Rums from both pot and column stills. Rum distillation began here and the Mount Gay Distillery, dating from 1663, is probably the oldest operating Rum producer in the world.

Cuba produces light-bodied, crisp, clean Rums from column stills. It is currently illegal to ship Cuban Rums into the United States.

The Dominican Republic is notable for its full-bodied, aged Rums from column stills.

Guyana is justly famous for its rich, heavy Demerara Rums, named for a local river, which are produced from both pot and column stills. Demerara Rums can be aged for extended periods (25-year-old varieties are on the market) and are frequently used for blending with lighter Rums from other regions. Neighboring Surinam and French Guyana produce similar full-bodied Rums.

Haiti follows the French tradition of heavier Rums that are double-distilled in pot stills and aged in oak casks for three or more years to produce full-flavored, exceptionally smooth- tasting Rums. Haiti also still has an extensive underground moonshine industry that supplies the voodoo religious ritual trade.

Jamaica is well known for its rich, aromatic Rums, most of which are produced in pot stills. Jamaica has official classifications of Rum, ranging from light to very full-flavored. Jamaican Rums are extensively used for blending.

Martinique is a French island with the largest number of distilleries in the Eastern Caribbean. Both pot and column stills are used. As on other French islands such as Guadeloupe, both rhum agricole (made from sugar cane juice) and rhum industriel (made from molasses) are produced. These Rums are frequently aged in used French brandy casks for a minimum of three years. Rhum vieux (aged Rum) is frequently compared to high-quality French brandies.

Puerto Rico is known primarily for light, very dry Rums from column stills. All white Puerto Rican Rums must, by law, be aged a minimum of one year while dark Rums must be aged three years.

Trinidad produces mainly light Rums from column stills and has an extensive export trade.

The Virgin Islands, which are divided between the United States Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Island. Only the US Virgin Islands still produce Rum, predominately making light, mixing rums from column stills, although there are some fine dark and aged sipping Rums made by the most significant producer Cruzan. These Rums, and those of nearby Grenada, also serve as the base for bay Rum, a classic aftershave lotion.

Guatemala and Nicaragua are noteworthy in Central America where a variety of primarily medium-bodied Rums from column stills that lend themselves well to aging. They have recently begun to gain international recognition

Brazil produces vast quantities of mostly light Rums from column stills with unaged cane spirit called Cachaça (ca·sha·sa) the best-known example.

Venezuela makes a number of well-respected barrel-aged golden and dark Rums.

The United States has a handful of Rum distilleries in the south, producing a range of light and medium-bodied Rums that are generally marketed with Caribbean-themed names.

Canada’s 300-year-old tradition of trading Rum for dried cod fish continues in the Atlantic Maritime provinces of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia where golden Rums from Antigua, Barbados, and Jamaica are imported and aged for five years. The resulting hearty Rum is known locally as Screech.

Europe is primarily a blender of imported Rums. Both the United Kingdom and France import Rums from their former colonies in the Caribbean for aging and bottling. Heavy, dark Jamaican Rums are imported into Germany and mixed with neutral spirit at a 1:19 ratio to produce Rum verschnitt. A similar product in Austria is called Inlander Rum.

Australia produces a substantial amount of white and golden Rums in a double- distillation method utilizing both column and pot stills. Rum is the second most popular alcoholic beverage in the country after beer. Light Rums are also produced on some of the islands in the South Pacific such as Tahiti.

Asia Rums tend to follow regional sugar cane production, with white and golden Rums from column stills being produced primarily in the Philippines and Thailand.

So I was wondering the other day about how rum is made. Obviously it’s fermented and distilled, but what’s the core ingredient? You probably already know.

It’s not corn or rice. Not even honey, but that’s getting closer. It’s sugar! More specifically, it’s molasses. When sugar cane is juiced and boiled, you can take out crystallized sugar. The sticky residue that’s left is molasses. They ferment it, distill it, and then age it for different lengths of time.

This explains why rum is THE spirit of choice in the Caribbean–that’s one of the main places in the world that grows sugar cane. (There are many other places (see this map), but the Caribbean is one of the most famous.)

So there you go. You probably already knew all this, or would if you thought about it for a minute. I chose not to think but to Google. Just like so many college students today!
Current music: Steel Band Music of the Caribbean

I was listening to Car Talk this weekend and a caller had a question about getting different gas mileage when she drove the same car on the same city streets than what her fiancé got. So they started talking about driving habits and shifting and all that (it was a manual transmission). Here are some of the conclusions they came to:

• Downshifting when slowing down for a stop (shifting from 4th to 3rd to 2nd to 1st) is unnecessary. In fact, it might save the brakes but it will wear out the transmission faster (which is much more expensive).
• Your gas mileage will change the most (with a stick-shift) based on how fast or slowly you shift.
• The longer you wait to shift, the higher rpm the engine is doing and so the more gas you use.
• For best results, you should upshift as early as possible.

So there you have it. Advice from the experts. If you want to save gas and you drive a manual, don’t wait for the engine to get higher or louder before shifting. Continually upshift as early as you can in the acceleration process. If you think about it, that’s typically what automatics do anyway. By shifting up each time as soon as your engine allows for it, you slow down the rpm and you burn less gas.

For samples and highlights of their radio show, automotive news, crash test scores, buying/selling help, and much more, visit cartalk.com. While you’re there, make sure you visit Time Kill Central.

So now that I’ve cut down all the vines that were killing the tree in our front yard, the tree looks really nice and is now a good climbing tree. The boys are up there quite frequently. I took a rope and put some knots in it and tied it to one of the branches so that it hung down against the trunk to help them climb up to the lower branches. It still can be kind of hard, so I took the rest of that rope (which was longer) and tied some loops along it so there were places to put hands or feet while climbing.

It’s not very easy to tie loops in a rope and have them stay when you pull on the ends. So I googled for loops and knots and found this:

It’s called a Butterfly Knot (or a Lineman’s Loop). It’s pretty firm and holds well even when the ends are pulled. What’s really cool about it is that you can do it even with both ends of the rope connected to something (as you can see by the pictures).

So there you go. A solid loop knot that can hold weight and is easy to tie. Now you know.

We all know that lemmings migrate every so often and end up jumping into the oceans to drown in large groups, right? Turns out that’s a myth. An urban legend. Snopes.com tells us that while Disney was filming White Wilderness back in 1958, “the film crew induced lemmings into jumping off a cliff and into the sea in order to document their supposedly suicidal behavior.” Click the link to find out more about the filming of these lemmings. Turns out it wasn’t even a migration. They only had a small amount of lemmings that they filmed “deceptively” in order to make it appear like huge herds.

The trivia section for this film in the Internet Movie Database says: “This picture was filmed in Alberta, Canada, which is not a native habitat for lemmings. They were imported from Manitoba for use in the film, and were purchased from Inuit children by the filmmakers. The Arctic rodents were placed on a snow-covered turntable and filmed from various angles to produce a “migration” sequence; afterwords, the helpless creatures were transported to a cliff overlooking a river and herded into the water. The entire sequence was faked using a handful of lemmings deceptively photographed to create the illusion of a large herd of migrating creatures.”

Now you know.

Since I’ve begun shaving my head with a razor and shaving cream in the shower (instead of using an electric shaver, for instance), I’ve been using shaving cream on my head, which can be “invigorating” when it’s got menthol in it. But a friend of mine, Topher, who was one of the first people I knew who shaved his head, has been telling me about shaving cream alternatives for a while now.

I’ve noticed that using body wash (or shower gel) always leaves the skin feeling slicker and smoother than soap does (which is half the point), so I decided to try that on my head this morning instead of shaving cream. Turns out it works great! It doesn’t take as much, has a good smell to it, and will save me money because I won’t have to buy shaving cream any more. Plus, since I have three different kinds of body wash in the shower, I’ll have my choice of scents for using when shaving my head.

Pretty cool.

Hurricane Andrea began this year’s hurricane season early by 3 weeks. It fizzled before reaching the coast, but that got me thinking about hurricane names and I found a great website that the National Weather Service put together, listing the names for all the hurricanes for the next 6 years!

Visit Worldwide Tropical Cyclone Names to see what they’ll all be called.

For the record, here are the names that will be given to hurricanes this season:

Hurricane Names for 2007
Andrea
Barry
Chantal
Dean
Erin
Felix
Gabrielle
Humberto
Ingrid
Jerry
Karen
Lorenzo
Melissa
Noel
Olga
Pablo
Rebekah
Sebastien
Tanya
Van
Wendy