April Fool’s and Zombie Bunny Cakes

ByJohn Brown

 We are fast approaching one of the most important days of the year–April 1st. Not only is it an excellent day to have a birthday, it’s also a good excuse to eat bunny cakes and torment loved ones.

So in the spirit of this fine day, please share some April Fool’s gags so I may replicate. Last year’s tape-the-sink-sprayer-in-the-on position was a hit (thank you Ms. Barlow). Mostly because I kept forgetting I’d taped it and sprayed myself a number of times. Doh!

Also here’s the google of “bunny cake recipe.” If you have one that you’ve tried and loved, please share. The most often used pattern in the Brown house results in a bunny like this one. Although I must say Eriks H’s is entirely too happy. I’m feeling the need for a zombie or fantasy version. I’ve also moved away from frosting–too sweet. Now my cakes must be topped with real whip cream.

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    Buffett’s Letter to Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders on 2008

    ByJohn Brown

    I got my masters degree in accounting and information systems. While going to school I started an investment club and learned about a man named Warren Buffett.

    Warren Buffett is humble, full of folksy humor, and trades places with Bill Gates as the richest man in the world, depending on the year you’re counting. His annual letters to his shareholders are a delight to read. This year’s is full of wisdom about the current financial crisis. Moreover, within a few minutes of reading you will be able to get some key insights that can help as you evaluate the plans being hatched in Washington and how to prevent this particular type of crisis from happening again. 

    If you’re not that into finance, I recommend reading:

     

    1. The introduction starting on page 2 and ending on page 3
    2. The “Finance and Financial Products” section starting on page 10 and running through page 12

    Once you’ve read those, if you want to laugh and see Buffet’s humor, skip to page 21 where Buffett talks about the annual meeting of shareholders. Tell me you wouldn’t want to attend.

    The Berkshire Hathaway homepage

    This year’s letter to shareholders (you will click on 2008 because he’s discussing the results of that year)

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    Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin + Interview

    ByJohn Brown

    I have read few books more interesting than Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior.

    In it she describes her world of autism and how it helped her a perspective into animals unlike any other expert in the field. She can literally see what we block out. It’s part of what helped her make a huge impact on the meat packing industry.

    And it’s had an impact on her. When she was visiting her grandparents once in Arizona, she saw a squeeze chute in operation on a ranch. She saw the cattle calm, for the most part, in the chute. “Watching those cattle calm down,” she says, “I knew I needed a squeeze chute of my own.” So when she got back home she built a human-sized one with the help of her teacher. “I got through my teenage years thanks to my squeeze machine and my horses.”

    Grandin is not a vegetarian activitst (she eats meat herself) or a brutal slayer. She has taken the middle ground between the fantatics that want to prevent the consumption of all meat, on one hand, or totally disregard the life of animals on the other. She writes, she says, “because I wish animals could have more than just a low-stress life and a quick, painless death. I wish animals could have a good life, too, with something useful to do. I think we owe them that.”

    Temple has dozens and dozens of insights into animals, which she shares here. You’ll learn about rapist roosters and the problem of one-trait breeding, whether prediators find it “fun to kill a groundhog” (yes, she says, they do), whether animals have true cognition, and so many other things it’s impossible to list them here. I was fascinated on every page. If you have anything to do with animals, you’re going to LOVE this book.

    Get the book. Read it. In the meantime, watch a 27 minute interview of Temple by Doug Fabrizio on Utah NOW. I caught this on TV flipping through the channels and couldn’t look away. This is a fascinating interview of a fascinating woman.

    Source:Temple Grandin on Utah NOW

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  • Bloodless Grammarians

    ByJohn Brown

    I’m beginning a study of linguistics. Well, an author’s study, which is different from getting a degree or anything like unto it. I’m looking for what’s useful for a specific project. And when I want to know about a subject, I’ve found it’s best to start with the juveniles and encylopedias so I can get the big picture and the actual pictures (who said picture books were for kids?) and then move to more detailed and specific stuff. Well, I came across a marvelous quote within the first 30 seconds of Wikipedia’s entry on Linguistics:

    Linguistic inquiry is pursued by a wide variety of specialists, who may not all be in harmonious agreement; as journalist Russ Rymer put it:

    “Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, anthropologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians.”

    Whatever blood can be got…

    (grin)

    That’s going in a story, somewhere, I gotta use that somewhere.

    Zing, Baby!

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  • Hitler’s Father and Snake Venom

    ByJohn Brown

    Hitler

    I’ve just begun HITLER by Ian Kershaw. Fascinating. And full of zing. Did you know that Hitler’s father:

    • Smoked like a chimney
    • Went to beer table after work instead of home
    • Took little interest in family and had multiple affairs with women
    • Beat Adolf almost daily, his gentle mother sometimes waiting outside the door while he thrashed his son
    • Had a passion for bee-keeping

    See, it’s weird, unexpected, almost against-type details like the last one that always seem to stimulate the zing meters.

    3 ways that snakes kill

    Let’s see: digest you, hundreds of blood clots, and brain attacks. Cool visuals of how the 3 types of venom work!

    And article explaining more about venom and why, for instance, sea snakes have such quick killing venom or why cobras have venom that could kill an elephant with one bite.

    So after reading this, I’m thinking of Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake where in the future this woman uses snakes to manufacture medicine. Not in a factory, but in the snakes themselves. And she delivers them through natures brilliantly evolved hypodermics.

    But what other applications are there of this to a story? Heck, a murder mystery where you’d need to know the type of venom and the snakes nearby, a new type of dragon’s breath (instead of fire, could they breathe out a fog of one of the three toxins?), some new enzyme protein cocktail that leads to…superhero skills or is it immortality?

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    “How It All Came Crashing Down” by Peter B. Gardner

    ByJohn Brown

    Everybody knows that we got into this recession because banks began lending money to people who had terrible credit ratings, right? People who didn’t have to prove they even had a job. I mean, how long are you going to stay in business when you keep handing out dough to people you never hear from again?

    But is that all there is to it? And was it really just the fault of congress because they told Freddie Mac and Fannie May (the organizations that purchased loans) that they had to start purchasing these highly risky things? Or was it all those greedy Wall Streeters?

    In this must-read article, “How it All Came Crashing Down,” BYU econ professors explain how we got into this mess—and what we can learn from it.

    But that’s not the end of the story. Ira Glass and the folks at This American Life uncover deeper causes of the problem in their must-listen show “The Watchmen” (no, not the movie). I mean, come on, we were told these high-risk loans were as dangerous as milkshakes. Shouldn’t SOMEBODY have seen it?

    President Obama keeps saying that the root of the problem was that there wasn’t enough government oversight. Sounds good, doesn’t it?  We’ll get disinterested Uncle Sam to protect us from all these investment bullies. But if we dig a bit deeper, it appears that Uncle Sam was one of the major players at the root of the mess.

    Ouch.

    Read. Listen. They are two fabulous pieces.

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