NOT since Ben Hurâs chariot went up in smoke when Cecil B DeMilleâs original wooden studio caught fire has the film world suffered such a loss. Just as the makers of Wallace & Gromit were celebrating their number one success at the US box office, a storage warehouse containing characters and sets from their previous hits was burning down.
The three-storey Victorian building in Bristol contained the âentire historyâ of Aardman Animations. Sets from films such as Chicken Run and the Wallace & Gromit series were destroyed in the fire. Lucy Wendover, a company spokesman, was holding back tears as she described what had been lost. She said: âThere was Wallaceâs bedroom from The Wrong Trousers and Gwendolineâs wool shop from A Close Shave. I canât want to go into the details of everything weâve lost. It is such an emotional time for the company.â
The sets were part of Aardmanâs archive dating back to its creation in 1972. It included scripts, storyboards, props and several characters created long before the Plasticine figures of Wallace and Gromit were a gleam in the eye of their Oscar-winning animator, Nick Park. In the beginning was Morph, the original animated character who appeared in the childrenâs television programme Vision On. Several early Morph figures stored in aluminium flight cases are among the casualties, although the box from which he emerged was safe in his creator David Sproxtonâs office cupboard.
Also missing feared melted are the stars of the television shorts Creature Comforts, including Frank the sporty tortoise, Fluffy the hamster, Pickles the dog, who works as a social services carer, and Terry the nervous octopus. Mr Park, who is responsible for Aardmanâs best-loved creations, was taking a philosophical view of the disaster yesterday. He said: âEven though it is a precious and nostalgic collection and valuable to the company, in light of other tragedies today it isnât a big deal.â
A lot better than I could have done in his place.
Ten fire crews fought the blaze as flames leapt 100ft into the air from the Aardman building in central Bristol in the early hours yesterday. Avon Fire and Rescue Service is trying to establish the cause of the fire and says it has not ruled out arson. The fire came on the same day that Aardmanâs latest film, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, topped the US box office.
The film made $16.1 million (£9.1 million) on its opening weekend, compared with the thriller Flightplan, which was in second place with $10.8 million. Kieran Argo, 37, the companyâs events and exhibitions manager, said: âItâs a bittersweet day. We were all meant to be celebrating the fact Wallace and Gromit went straight in at number one in the US box office and is proving to be a huge success. Yet we came in to find this news this morning.â
One of the largest items to have been incinerated was the pie-making machine from Chicken Run, which took thousands of hours to build. Mr Argo said: âIt was one of the largest pieces of set we have kept. It took months to research, develop and build at huge cost and was the centrepiece of many of our exhibitions over the years.â One of the few bits of good news was that none of the sets from the latest film was damaged. Others items of Aardman history also escaped because they were on display elsewhere, including the rocket from A Grand Day Out and Hut 17 from Chicken Run.
By their very nature, film sets are not built to last, but the small size of Aardmanâs creations meant it was able to keep much of what it produced. More than 250 people worked on The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, painstakingly sculpting six-inch-high Plasticine figures by hand rather than resorting to computer graphics. In comparison, little of Hollywoodâs output has been preserved. One exception is Cecil B DeMilleâs original studio, which was rebuilt after it burnt down in 1996. Among the casualties that could not be saved was the chariot used in the 1926 version of Ben Hur.
AARDMAN LOSSES
Among the pieces of Aardman history feared lost in the fire are:
* Plastic figurines, storyboards, sets, scripts and props from the Wallace and Gromit films A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave.
* Plasticine and latex figures of Wallace, his sidekick dog Gromit, Shorn the Sheep from A Close Shave and the Evil Penguin from The Wrong Trousers.
* All paraphernalia relating to Chicken Run â including the famous chicken pie-making machine.
* Plasticine figures of all the animals in the Creature Comforts adverts.
* Several early figures of the childrenâs TV character Morph
If you are not familiar with the superb work being done by Nick Park, you owe it to yourself to rent all of his work and view it. I have shown his animation to Vietnamese Buddhists, Fundamentalist Christians, toddlers and octogenarians alike and all of them have simply adored it.
Park has successfully marketed his work in the Chevron talking car commercials and Serta Mattress ads with the numbered sheep. As an artist and fan of high quality animation this is nothing short of a catastrophe. My heart goes out to Nick Park and all of his crew. How sad that just as their latest feature length film entered the American movie market in the TOP SLOT, they are confronted with this bittersweet victory.
I urge all of you at Rantburg to attend "Wallace and Gromit - Curse of the Wererabbit" as often as finances will allow. Parks and crew need all of the financial support they can get during this horrible turn of events. I hope others here at Rantburg will contribute their own reviews of Park's work.
In my distress, I neglected to enter the link or even my correct monicker. This is a tremendous loss of priceless animation history. Again, I welcome others to post their own impressions of Park's work.
#4
Stunned adults and weeping children watched a preview in disbelief as Papa Smurf and Smurfette were blown to bits when bombs rained down on their village.
Oh, be still my heart!
I SMELL OSCAR!
Only baby Smurf survives the carnage,
far worse than anything dished out by their usual enemy Gargamel.
Final argument for massive defense R&D spending increases towards optimizing Throw Weight to Kill Ratios in all categories of conventional munitions.
Now, if they'd only go after that purple dinosaur
That last line is what I come here for. Apologies in advance ...
[Airline Steward Voice]The maximum ranting light is ... on.[/ASV]
What you read is posted by a man who most often features Bugs Bunny upon his "Informal Friday" necktie at work. I wouldn't have it any other way. Mel Blanc, Chuck Jones, (and the entire vintage Warner Brothers cartoon crew) produced some of the most beautifully intelligent, artistic and irreverent animated film ever.
That said, The Smurfs and Barney the Dinosaur represent some of the most hideous animated character manifestations of all time. I will cite two very specific and utterly unredeeming ways both of them revolt any sort of common sense.
1) Per the Smurfs: Note carefully how frequently the plot line pivots upon individuals who often fail where groups instead succeed. A cast of unvarigated skin tone homogenizes any denominator of accurate cross-cultural identification and instead enters upon a world utterly lacking in credible individuality.
FREE CLUE to MOONBATS: DO NOT let philosophically amorphous and largely featureless entities play any significant role in your child's upbringing. Especially lest these entities should have an opportunity to say such a thing as, "I love you" to your child more often than you do yourself.
Barney and the Smurfs represent a most hideous perversion of artistry and message. We lose Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy, Keaton, both Marx & Warner Brothers, Hannah & Barbera, Walt Kelly, Eyvinde Earle plus The Three Stooges.
We obtain a disinfectant homogeniety sufficiently prophylactic against individuality so as to render mankind immune to the rare genius (See: Jared Diamond - "Guns, Germs and Steel").
I dread and fight against such a sterile world by denouncing politically correct thought, socialistic doctrine and its endless load of least-common denominator programming pap and so-called "news.".
Please go and see any sort of Nick Park's work. You'll be transported into an artisan's world of rare and decent humor.
The inverse nature of such programming as Barney or the Smurfs does not merit further discussion.
[Airline Steward Voice]The maximum ranting light is ... on.[/ASV]
Genetically modified mosquitoes could soon be released into the wild in an attempt to combat malaria. Scientists at Imperial College London, who created the GM insects, say they could wipe out natural mosquito populations and save thousands of lives in malaria-stricken regions.
Led by Andrea Crisanti, the team added a gene that makes the testicles of the male mosquitoes fluorescent, allowing the scientists to distinguish and easily separate them from females. The plan is to breed, sterilise and release millions of these male insects so they mate with wild females but produce no offspring, eradicating insects in the target region within weeks.
#2
Clever idea, but of course the mosquitoes from the next region over would gradually diffuse into the mosquito-free regions, unless the target region is really, really big. Still, anything is better than the current situation.
#8
Yeah, the methods used may have, over time, an unintended effect of increasing the size and aggressiveness of the species - read, [human] blood-sucking GIANT buggers, with all the reputation and attack frenzies of Africanized bees. DANG BETTER MAKE SURE THEIR RESEARCH IS D*** THOROUGH AND CORRECT A'FORE DOING ANYTWANG!?
Japan conducted a successful test flight of a supersonic jet in the Australian outback on Monday, taking a step closer to its goal of developing a successor to the Concorde.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said the prototype supersonic jet was launched on the back of a rocket from the remote Woomera rocket range in the South Australian desert and completed a 15-minute flight. Japanese developers hope that a new supersonic jet could some day make the trip from Tokyo to New York in just under six hours -- less than half the current time.
"We were able to conduct a test flight and to gather data as planned. We think we have marked a major step in the development of (supersonic flight) technology," Kimio Sakata, executive director of JAXA, told reporters in Tokyo via audio link from Australia.
JAXA hopes that its research will eventually lead to the development of a commercially viable supersonic jet after clearing technological hurdles such as improving fuel efficiency and reducing noise levels, agency officials said. It will "probably take another 15 years" for the project to become commercially-viable, Sakata said.
But doubts have been raised about whether the project will ever be commercially viable given that the Concorde, which was retired two years ago, never managed to turn a profit. The new jet would carry 300 passengers, three times as many as the Concorde, and travel at Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound, roughly the same as the Concorde.
The Concorde was developed jointly by Britain and France in the 1960s. In July 2000, a Concorde taking off from Paris crashed, killing 113 people.
A previous test in 2002 ended disastrously when the unmanned prototype dived to earth and exploded in the Australian desert.
The 2005 flight at Woomera, an abandoned British rocket testing range populated with kangaroos and located in some of Australia's harshest desert, was delayed several days due to bad weather. JAXA's video footage showed the 11.5-metre (38 feet) dart-like model jet riding piggy back on the back of a rocket, and soaring into a clear, blue sky as the rocket booster left behind a trail of thick, grey smoke.
The jet climbed to about 20 km (12 miles) above the earth on the back of the rocket and then detached. It reached around twice the speed of sound and glided back to earth using parachutes, JAXA officials said. A picture released by JAXA showed that the jet returned to earth intact this time with no obvious signs of damage.
Data gained through the test will be used in joint research by Japan and France towards a next-generation supersonic jet following an agreement between the two nations in June, though the test itself is not a result of the agreement. Despite the successful test flight, however, Japan will not immediately embark on joint international development, Sakata said, adding that more work was needed first. No budget projections have yet been made for the entire project, but the costs are considerable.
#2
Bluestreak was a very successful if politically ill-fated rocket. Not one failed in 11 launches, an amazing record for the time, equalled only by the Saturn 1-B and the incomparable Saturn V. (The failures of the ELDO satellite launcher, for which Blue Streak provided the first stage, were caused by the European provided upper stages).
Russia's beleaguered space industry suffered another setback yesterday when officials suspended launches of a rocket system that had been used at the weekend in a failed attempt to put a European polar monitoring satellite into orbit.
Tends to happen when your rockets blow up.
State television said yesterday that Russia's space agency would not launch another Rokot missile until it had found out why a rocket crashed into the Atlantic. It was carrying the European Space Agency's Cryosat satellite, which monitors depletion of the polar ice-cap and gives vital clues on climate change. The £93m satellite was destroyed in the crash.
The Rokot, a converted SS19 intercontinental ballistic missile, took off from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in northern Russia at 3pm on Saturday. The ESA said yesterday that the onboard computer had not turned off the rocket's booster early enough, thus burning up all the fuel, and prompting the rocket to crash. The ESA said Yuri Bakhvalov, head of the Russian arm of the project, confirmed a faulty launch sequence had caused the crash.
The Cryosat was to spend three years monitoring the thin ice sheets covering the polar seas and the miles-thick ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. Russian officials stressed that six previous launches of the Rokot had been successful. But the crash capped a bad week for the Russian space industry, with the failure of another joint Esa project on Friday. Russian officials admitted they were unable to locate a collapsible craft launched from a nuclear submarine.
Posted by: Steve White ||
10/10/2005 00:29 ||
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#1
Sometimes I think we're wasting a lot of money on ABM projects.
#2
"It was carrying the European Space Agency's Cryosat satellite, which monitors depletion of the polar ice-cap and gives vital clues on climate change."
I think that could have been phrased better.
It's a great loss. Whichever side of the global warming fence you sit on, CryoSat would have produced incontrovertible and very useful data concerning ice mass dynamics in the Arctic Ocean. Bummer.
BERLIN - Conservative leader Angela Merkel said Monday she had reached a "good and fair" deal that will make her Germany's first female chancellor in a power-sharing agreement that would end Gerhard Schroeder's seven years in office.
Under the agreement, which ends a three-week political deadlock, Merkel would have to give most of the seats in the new Cabinet to Schroeder's Social Democrats as the price of governing, including top jobs such as foreign minister.
Merkel also said good relations with the United States â another possible sticking point with Schroeder's party â would be a priority.
"I am convinced that good trans-Atlantic relations are an important task and that they are in Germany's interests," she said.
Merkel said the parties had agreed "there is no alternative to a reform course" for Germany, addressing fears that such a government will be so divided it can't take tough action to address Germany's problems with slow growth and high unemployment.
She didn't trumpet her achievement in reaching the top job. "I feel good, but I have a lot of work ahead of me," she said, referring to the coalition negotiations that will hammer out the details.
The talks should be completed by Nov. 12, she said, expressing confidence that her Christian Democratic Union would find agreement on a common foreign policy with the Social Democrats.
The chairman of Schroeder's party, Franz Muentefering, said his side was committed to a stable government that could last the entire four years of parliament's term. He said Schroeder would take part in coalition talks, but there was no decision on whether he might play a role in the new government.
Germany's leadership stalemate began when voters ousted Schroeder's ruling coalition of Social Democrats and Greens on Sept. 18 but failed to give a majority to Merkel's preferred center-right coalition. That forced the Social Democrats and her Christian Democrats to seek a power-sharing deal across the left-right divide.
Merkel forced Schroeder to drop his demand to be chancellor, saying that as head of the party with the largest number of seats, the job belonged to her. She would be the first woman to lead Germany and the first person from the formerly communist east to hold the job.
But she would see her ability to push through her agenda to reform the economy limited by sharing extensive power with her labor-backed former opponents, the Social Democrats.
Under the terms of the agreement, the Social Democrats would head the foreign, finance, labor, justice, health, transport, environment and development ministries.
Merkel's Christian Democrats and their Bavaria-only allies, the Christian Social Union, would get the defense, interior, agriculture, families and education portfolios. The CSU leader, Edmund Stoiber, would become economy minister. Other than that, officials did not say who would occupy which ministerial post.
Parliament must convene by Oct. 18 but is not obliged to vote immediately on a new chancellor if coalition talks are still ongoing.
Merkel's forces have 226 votes in the 614-seat parliament, while the Social Democrats have 222. A coalition needs 308 seats for a majority.
Many Social Democrats had indicated that they would find it hard to support Merkel without gaining an exceptionally favorable coalition deal in return.
The prolonged negotiations have delayed action on key issues such as high unemployment and slow growth. Merkel campaigned on pledges to shake up Germany's highly regulated labor market and get the stagnant economy going again.
Schroeder's party fought its way to a better-than-expected election result with pledges to protect the welfare state and workers' rights.
Muentefering said "fighting unemployment" would be the government's top task, and that both sides had to work together. "Such a coalition can be successful if both partners ... know they are responsible not just for the ministries they hold but for the entire spectrum of policy," he said.
In several rounds of exploratory talks, the two parties identified several areas where they believe they can work together, including reforming Germany's tangled federal system and shoring up the government's overdrawn finances.
#1
Is it really a good idea to give the foreign ministry to someone from Schroeder's party? It seems to me they were the ones who mishandled things in the last administration.
#2
So Merkel will head a government in which all the domestic policy positions are held by the SPD. So, when the economy fails to improve because of the policies of the SPD ministers, the CDU/CSU will get the blame.
#2
Its been a long time since I've driven in France, but what I do recall is that I never saw a single car that didn't have a very visible dent in it. These Panzers would bring a certain c'est la vie in driving through narrow french streets.
#3
My Uncle Harold Mixon (lifer USAF NCO) drove one of these babies during a Brussels tour in '66-66.
Do they still freight over personal cars? BTW this Mercury had seatbelts and a black vinyl padded dash in '58. I have a picture somewhere of it threading thru a one lane street in an older part of Brussels.
#5
It appears Gaia isn't too pleased with the Kyoto crowd either. Goddess can be fickle like that. Just like Allen doesn't seem to stop the thumping and pain being brought upon his most vocal devoted and bloody handed acolytes.
Christian Democrats leader Angela Merkel is set to replace Gerhard Schroeder as Germany's next chancellor, in a political deal that will see the departure of Mr Schroeder from the national political stage, senior members of the ruling Social Democrats have told the Financial Times.
Hurrah! Goodbye, Gerhard! Write if you get work!
The newspaper said Ms Merkel's expected victory in the battle for the chancellorship was likely to be announced today, after a meeting yesterday in Berlin between Mr Schroeder and Ms Merkel, according to the SPD politicians, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The two leaders met on Thursday for four hours to agree the framework of a SPD-CDU coalition, but refused to disclose details, the newspaper said. The talks also include SPD leader Franz Muentefering, and Bavarian Premier Edmund Stoiber. Officials close to Mr Schroeder told the paper that the Chancellor would not become vice-chancellor and foreign minister in the coalition, despite pressure from within the SPD for him do so. "The chancellor has done what was necessary, to ensure the SPD is on an equal footing with the CDU in the coalition," one official said.
Posted by: Fred ||
10/10/2005 00:00 ||
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#1
i will also have a toast and big heeeehahahahaha
#3
EE - That's what I thought, too. I hadn't heard about Prop 77, before. As a former resident, 3 long yrs, of Laficornia, this could be monumental. The majority of the population is sane, as statewide proposition votes show -- you just wouldn't know it given their politicians. This might go a looong way toward returning the CA Govt back to them, if the BS and lies about this Prop can be effectively countered. Go Ahhnold!
#4
If this passes, and the judges actually do what the law requires, the net result is that you'll have more Republicans in Congress and in the state government in California. Because, proportiaonally speaking, Republicans (and conservatives) are far UNDERrepresented in California if you compare legislators to population percentages.
#5
Proposition 77 A YES vote on this measure means:
Boundaries for political districts would be drawn by retired judges and approved by voters at statewide elections. A redistricting plan would be developed for use following the measure's approval and then following each future federal census.
The problem with this measure is that the political fight will move from the legislature to some smokey star chamber. If anyone believe judges are not political, then I would like to introduce them to the 9th Circuit Court. Why not introduce a simple yet pithy criteria like "The total circumference of all legislative districts shall be a minimum." and let any citizen access the population data and come up with the most compact districts, instead of the meandering gerrymandered districts we now have.
Posted by: ed ||
10/10/2005 16:06 Comments ||
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#6
Have the districts drawn by computer (without any political-alignment data). This is the home of sillycon valley isn't it?
#7
True, ed. What is there now sucks like an F5 on steeeeroids. Could this be worse? Dunno if it can get worse when you already have much of the state misrepresented. It's rather apparent that this has strong Republican support, so I presume they've done their homework and believe it will both rectify this travesty and be acceptable to the public at the same time. Of course, CA Pubs have a lousy track record on many fronts, but I figured it's mainly because the asshats have been pretty much running things since Reagan. Of course, they could definitely be wrong and I could be foolish to believe their solution will pan out.
Regards your idea ("minimum area") that rings and sings - should be part of every state's districting provisions.
#8
Not the minimum area -- minimum perimeter, and only simple shapes (discounting bodies of water).
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
10/10/2005 17:22 Comments ||
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#9
Until Ed presents his algorithm, this is a very good proposal. It will not be in a back room but open to public comment with hearing and subject to rejection by the people. The greatest benefit will be that more seats in Caliphornia become competitive. Because most seats are not competitive, the extreme candidate from the party that owns the seat wins in the primary. So Caliphornia gets extremely liberal donks and extremely conservative trunks (but not many). The real elections are the primaries. Thus victorious candidates will soon be much more moderate than current victors, whether Republican or Democrat. This will help Caliphornia and ultimately the whole country. Remember Boxer, Pelosi, Dellums, Waters, Waxman, Stark, and Burton all got their start in the Caliph legislature. It's the farm team for the Caliphornia House delegation that has 10% of the seats in the house.
It will also screw the real back room operators, the thugs that now run Caliphornia government; the teachers, prison guards, and indian tribes.
Posted by: Mrs. Davis ||
10/10/2005 17:28 Comments ||
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#10
I want to get the redistricting out of the hands of small groups who benefit from it (current politicians or judicial dealmakers with friends in high places) to the voters themselves. Create hard critera that is not easily manipulated and let any citizen come up with the best solution that satisfies those criteria.
If I were to draw districts, I would use something like the minimum circumference criteria and equal legal population, but using elementary school zones (closest thing we have to neighborhood boundaries) as the atomic unit. The problem then becomes manageable by either the political office with computer progammers or a kook with a map and a ball of string. But the final criteria (total circumference) can be easily ranked and the best chosen.
Posted by: ed ||
10/10/2005 18:10 Comments ||
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Approval from the food regulators is all that is holding back one US company from marketing cloned beef
About 129km east of Austin, out where the fire ants bite and men still doff their baseball hats when greeting women, 20 cows pregnant with calves cloned by ViaGen Inc have just arrived. Stampeding down a chute from a tractor trailer, the cattle join a menagerie of cloned pigs and cows that include Elvis and Priscilla, calves cloned from cells scraped from sides of high-quality beef hanging in a slaughterhouse. The cloning of barnyard animals has now become so commonplace and mechanized that ViaGen says it's more than ready to efficiently produce juicier steaks and tastier chops through cloning.
It now looks like federal regulators will endorse the company's plan to bring its cloned animal products to America's dinner tables. No law prevents cloned food, but ViaGen has voluntarily withheld its products pending a ruling from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Over the past three years it has worked to create elite bovine and porcine gene pools that can produce prodigious "milkers," top quality beef cattle and biotech bacon. It has aggressively gobbled up competitors and locked up patents, including the one granted to the creators of Dolly the sheep.
All that currently stands in ViaGen's way, besides a nod from the FDA, are squeamish consumers and skeptical food producers.
The FDA is widely expected to soon endorse the findings of a 2002 National Academy of Science report it commissioned that found the food products derived from cloned animals do not "present a food safety concern."
Acknowledging the many critics who have raised ethical objections as well as safety concerns, the FDA commissioner said on Sept. 19 that "within weeks" the agency was prepared to publish results of its examination of the issues in a scientific journal -- a rare move for the agency, which used a similar forum to make public its position on genetically modified crops in 1992.
But then the commissioner, Lester Crawford, abruptly resigned, leaving the top ranks of the FDA in turmoil. FDA spokeswoman Rae Jones said in an e-mail sent on Wednesday that Crawford "was talking about a draft risk assessment that the FDA is now preparing to release. This release was not related to commisioner Crawford or his recent resignation." But Jones said "we do not have a timeline" for the assessment's release.
So, without a government cloning endorsement, the deep-pocketed corporate customers ViaGen hopes to court are staying on the sidelines.
"The National Milk Producers Federation does not at this time support milk from cloned cows entering the marketplace until FDA determines that milk from cloned cows is the same as milk from conventionally bred animals," said Chris Galen, a spokesman for the trade group, which represents the US$23 billion dairy industry. Dairy farmers worry that without federal government's blessing, US consumers will blanch at pouring milk from cloned cows on their breakfast cereal.
Beef and pork producers have similar concerns.
A March survey by the International Food Information Council, an industry trade group, reported that 63 percent of consumers would likely not buy food from cloned animals, even if the FDA determined the products were safe.
Rapid advances in genetic technology are increasingly being applied further up the food chain. It's one thing for traditional crops like corn to be engineered to be pest-resistant, and people already eat genetically engineered soy beans in all manner of processed food.
But biotech companies run into what bioethicists call the "yuck factor" when they begin tinkering with animals.
An application to market salmon genetically engineered with genes from other fish to grow faster has been formally pending with the FDA for more than two years.
That's why ViaGen insists that its work has nothing to do with combining genetic material of two different species. It likens it to now common reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination.
To clone, scientists replace all the genetic material in an egg with a mature cell containing the complete genetic code from the donor. Cloners argue that the resulting animal is simply the donor's twin, containing an identical makeup, yes, but destined for its own distinct fate influenced by environment and chance.
The coat of the first ever cat cloned, for instance, was a totally different color than that of its genetic donor.
So there are no guarantees that the cloned calf Elvis will yield the highest quality beef -- the USDA's "prime yield 1" designation -- that gave him his life, but it certainly increases the odds he will produce prime meat.
As it stands, "prime yield 1" ratings come along once every 12,000 cows. ViaGen's founder Scott Davis says knowing which cow is likely to yield premium beef could demand up to a US$250 premium per heifer, a big markup in the notoriously low-margin industry.
He said the price of a cloned cow continues to drop and, depending on the order volume, can cost as little as US$8,000 per animal. "Cloning is at a commercially viable place now," Davis said.
#1
We have been eating cloned food for many hundreds of years. Apples, pears, plums and bananas are all cloned. Of course you never hear this in the MSM.
#2
The "yuck factor" is some pretty funny shit. No 4-H folks in that group... These are the people who think meat just magically happens and don't know where eggs come from, heh. Bet they eat escargot, yet think snails are "icky". Morons.
#3
We're not talking about vat-grown protein, but farm-raised beef that happens to have an unusual parentage. Where's the (ahem) beef?
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
10/10/2005 7:27 Comments ||
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#4
I wonder what the implications are for the cow gene pool and the disease resistance of a herd of clones. But that's the cowmen's problem, not mine, until a problem forces the price of beef o the ceiling.
#5
The cow gene pool is already heavily manipulated. The bull 'stud books' are amazingly detailed as to the various characteristics of offspring, including feed to meat ratios, growth rates etc. A very large proportion of at least beef cattle are bred using frozen semen from selected bulls and I believe the same is somewhat true in dairy herds as well. Not only does this provide more predictable yields for ranchers/farmers, it also avoids things like brucellosis, a venereally transmitted disease that can cause the male to go infertile. (Not good for the female mammal either, and it can spread to humans through cuts etc.)
Eager to show it has learned from the slow responses to the Asia-Pacific tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, the White House announced Sunday evening that it would provide an "initial contribution" of $50 million for relief efforts in Pakistan. It also said it would dispatch helicopters and reconnaissance aircraft that are in the area hunting members of Al Qaeda.
The announcement came only hours after President Bush spoke to the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and after he held an unusual Sunday afternoon meeting in the Oval Office with a Pakistani diplomat. The speed, a senior administration official said, reflected the estimates of the death toll and the American desire to bolster General Musharraf when his help is badly needed in finding Osama bin Laden and repressing Islamic radicals.
"I was just told that this is going to be the worst natural disaster in the nation's history," Mr. Bush said after meeting with Muhammad Sadiq, the No. 2 diplomat in the Pakistani Embassy. "Thousands of people have died, thousands are wounded, and the United States of America wants to help."
The response was much quicker than the one in December when the tsunami hit. Mr. Bush was at his ranch then and did not speak publicly about the disaster for several days. The initial American commitments of aid were small, though they were quickly increased, and in the end the administration won praise for helping Indonesia, the world's largest Islamic nation.
The administration has also been assailed for its slow response to Hurricane Katrina. An administration official involved in the discussions on Sunday about putting together a package of cash and aid from the military said "it was very much on our minds" that a speedy response was important in Pakistan.
Mr. Bush said he had asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to "survey the assets that he may be able to move in the area," and on Sunday evening the White House said eight military helicopters - a mix of Chinooks and Black Hawks - would be sent to deliver emergency relief to remote villages. In his comments to reporters, Mr. Bush identified airlift capacity as the aid General Musharraf had said he needed most. "We're moving choppers," Mr. Bush said.
The White House said a C-17 cargo plane carrying blankets, winterized tents and other supplies would arrive in Islamabad, the capital, early Monday. A second will arrive on Tuesday, and other missions will follow, officials said Sunday evening. Five thousand water containers and blankets will also arrive Monday. A seven-member Disaster Assistance Response Team is supposed to arrive early in the week to assess other needs - a step that took significantly longer after the tsunami hit.
A 23-member logistical support group was also being dispatched from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, the White House said.
American officials have struggled for four years now to find ways to demonstrate support for Pakistan that would help General Musharraf, who has been the target of at least two assassination attempts.
Posted by: Dan Darling ||
10/10/2005 01:01 ||
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#1
Let us just pray that this horriffic tragedy also crushed OBL and his crew of murdering scum. Perhaps the Lord has done for mankind what a lot of good men have been so far unable to achieve so that some good comes of this.
Posted by: Old Marine ||
10/10/2005 2:01 Comments ||
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#3
Eager to show it has learned from the slow responses to the Asia-Pacific tsunami and Hurricane Katrina,
Yeah, that's why he did it. It had absolutely nothing to do with humanitarian goodness of the American people. Where do they find the scum that reports for the NYT?
#7
OK, just what was the "slow" response to the tsunamis? As I recall, the US had ships -- with real, actual ability to resuce people, provide water and medical resources, etc. -- on the move within hours, while the UN spent weeks organizing meetings and bitching about US, India, and Australia having the gall to move without permission.
The Katrina silliness needs to be beaten out of the commentariat; we all know the stupidity there.
Damn, I hate the press.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
10/10/2005 10:40 Comments ||
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#8
Expect lotsa gratitude.
Headline in the local paper: "Survivors Beg World For Aid"
The government on Sunday confirmed the death of over 19,000 people after a massive earthquake hit Pakistan a day earlier, but unofficial estimates put the death toll to over 40,000. The worst-affected city was Muzzaffarbad, the capital of Kashmir, where 70 percent of the entire housing was destroyed by the earthquake. Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz told a press conference that the worst-hit areas were Muzaffarabad, Bagh, Mansehra and Balakot.
Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao told journalists after an emergency cabinet meeting that 11,000 people had died in Muzzaffarbad alone. âWe are facing the worst-ever earthquake,â he said. âThis is a test for the whole nation.â Sherpao put the death toll to 19,136 - 17,388 of them in Kashmir â and said that 42,397 were injured. In NWFP, 1,760 people had been killed and 1,797 injured, he said, while 11 had died and 83 were injured in Punjab. In the Northern Areas bordering China and Kashmir a further two people were killed and two injured, the interior minister said. The interior minister said that 114 army personnel had lost their lives in Kashmir, while more than 200 had received injuries. At least 500 school children were killed in Muzaffarabad when the roofs of their classrooms collapsed. The earthquake hit five districts in NWFP. âThe death toll has reached 2,000 in the NWFP,â Inspector General of Police Riffat Pasha told Daily Times from Mansehra, the most devastated district in the province. By Saturday evening, the death toll was over 1,000 and NWFP Minister Sirajul Haq feared that it could reach 7,500 as âthousands of bodies are still under the debrisâ.
Pasha said that the rehabilitation of the affected people will take months. âThe infrastructure has been badly damaged and the overall rehabilitation will need massive financial help,â he said. Balakot, the tehsil headquarters of district Mansehra, has been completely razed to the ground and thousands of people are still buried under the debris. Panic-stricken people and their families in Hazara have taken refuge in parks and open fields away from their homes. Torrential rain and hailstorm added to the miseries of the affected people.
In the Battagram district, wounded people were getting little medical treatment, since the only hospital had collapsed, a police official said. Haq said that more than 25,000 tents were needed. âWe have so far arranged 3,000 tents and the lack of tents is a great worry for us,â he told Daily Times. NWFP Chief Minister Akram Khan Durrani launched an appeal for international assistance to help the affected people in the province. The Mansehra District Headquarters Hospital was packed with people injured from the quake, many of whom were put in tents. In Garhi Habibullah, 200 bodies including 60 girl students of the Government Higher Secondary School have been recovered from the wreckage.
Posted by: Fred ||
10/10/2005 00:00 ||
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Israel has offered Pakistan assistance in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake, Israeli officials said on Sunday, in the latest sign that relations between the countries are improving. Israel and Pakistan have no official relations, but the two countries' foreign ministers met last month for the first time. Allowing Israelis into Pakistan to assist in the rescue efforts would be a breakthrough. "We've expressed a desire to help, and we're hopeful that it will be possible to help," said Mark Regev, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson.
Israel, which has sent rescue teams to Turkey and Mexico to assist in evacuation efforts after earthquakes struck those countries, sent a message to Pakistan through 'official channels' and the United Nations, according a senior government official. Pakistan has yet to respond to the offer.
Posted by: Fred ||
10/10/2005 00:00 ||
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#1
Oh merciful Allen and Moon prophets to heaven..We cannot accept help from Israel for it will come with Jooooo cooties!
Earthquake triggered landslides and broken tracts of roads are hampering relief and rescue operations in some of the worst hit areas of the NWFP. "Saturday's earthquake has caused a total communication system breakdown in the effected areas. There is no phone link and no electricity from Batal to Batagram and from Batagram to Dasu," said Ghulam Farooq, the NWFP relief commissioner and Central Board of Revenue member.
Posted by: Fred ||
10/10/2005 00:00 ||
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MUZAFFARABAD: The Azad Kashmir capital was a scene of utter devastation on Sunday, 24 hours after a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck, killing about 18,000 people across northern Pakistan. âIt is a scene of utter devastation. It looks like a city of death,â said Reuters reporter Zulfiqar Ali, who was in Islamabad when the earthquake hit on Saturday morning. Hindered from reaching his hometown of Muzaffarabad by washed-out roads on Saturday night, Ali walked the remaining distance on Sunday morning into a scene of complete destruction. Most houses, government buildings and shops had collapsed, he said. âNo one knows how many have been killed or how many survived,â Ali said by satellite telephone. âThose buildings that have withstood the shocks are badly cracked and no one is going into them.â
The quake was centred in the forested mountains of Azad Kashmir, near the Indian border, and violently jolted large parts of northern Pakistan, as well as parts of India and Afghanistan. Thousands of people were killed in Pakistan, a presidential spokesman said. The quake also battered Indian Kashmir, killing more than 300 people there.
Frightened Muzaffarabad residents spent a chilly Saturday night in the open, camped in fields, parks, graveyards and cars. Most people had no food because shops or markets did not open. The army had set up camps and provided some food to survivors but much more help was needed, Ali said. Many students of the Azad Jammu and Kashmir University in Muzaffarabad were buried under the debris, residents said.
Posted by: Fred ||
10/10/2005 00:00 ||
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#1
The nature's way of population control is very effective.
#3
I agree, 2b. I give way to no one in my opposition to terror groups, but thousands of ordinary people died or lost everything in this quake. And things will get worse this week, not only due to aftershocks which are continuing, but to the difficulty of getting food, water, medicine and shelter equipment there.
If you aren't moved by the suffering, consider how this might bring down Musharraf and put an open Islamacist in power in Pakistan instead. That alone is a reason for donating ....
#4
Don't want to sound snarky but how many Jihadists who were saying New Orleans was a sign from Allah are now saying the same thing about this Earthquake hitting the Jihadist capital region and all.
#5
Anytime there's a disaster outside the US Bush should come out and deny any weather/earthquake experiments. The moonbats are going to blame the US anyway, might as well go for really freaking them out.
Posted by: Laurence of the Rats ||
10/10/2005 10:29 Comments ||
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#6
rjschwartz: Lots and lots and lots of them are saying this is punishment from Allah for not being aggressive enough in jihad... which may refer to the fact that India still controls Kashmir, or that Afghanistan is no longer a conquered province of Pakistan...
Posted by: Phil Fraering ||
10/10/2005 13:15 Comments ||
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#7
The earth's crust is expanding because of global warming, everyone knows that materials expand when they heat up. It's still Bush's fault.
Actually, if this leads to the discovery of a new faultline we could name it Bush's Fault(line). We might need to save that one for San Francisco area though.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Christian Democrats leader 
The government on Sunday confirmed the death of over 19,000 people after a massive earthquake hit Pakistan a day earlier, but unofficial estimates put the death toll to over 40,000. The worst-affected city was Muzzaffarbad, the capital of Kashmir, where 70 percent of the entire housing was destroyed by the earthquake. Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz told a press conference that the worst-hit areas were Muzaffarabad, Bagh, Mansehra and Balakot.
MUZAFFARABAD: The Azad Kashmir capital was a scene of utter devastation on Sunday, 24 hours after a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck, killing about 18,000 people across northern Pakistan. âIt is a scene of utter devastation. It looks like a city of death,â said Reuters reporter Zulfiqar Ali, who was in Islamabad when the earthquake hit on Saturday morning. Hindered from reaching his hometown of Muzaffarabad by washed-out roads on Saturday night, Ali walked the remaining distance on Sunday morning into a scene of complete destruction. Most houses, government buildings and shops had collapsed, he said. âNo one knows how many have been killed or how many survived,â Ali said by satellite telephone. âThose buildings that have withstood the shocks are badly cracked and no one is going into them.â 
