Environmental IDIOTS Block - Wind Power?

Bad words! No <g> rating! You have been warned!

Stories like this one make me so ashamed to be known as "environmentally conscientious."

Their concerns that "400-foot turbines would loom over an adjacent wilderness area" is such a load of shit that I am just about struck speechless.

Really, when people act like total assholes like this I depair, and I think maybe we deserve to go extinct. Would they prefer a nice tail of nuclear fallout from another melted-down power plant "looming over" their precious effing wilderness area?

How about all the other wilderness areas in the world, they should all get placed under pollution stress because these dickheads are worried about one wilderness area being "loomed over?"

Pack of NIMBY assholes, I hope someone shits in your gardens and buries you and your fucking dog in oil sludge and soot and greenhouse wastes!

And to my regular readers, I sincerely apologise - but I hope that just ONE of these people reads this article and gets their head out from up their arse long enough to realise what a pack of pettyfogging shitheads they look like to the rest of the world...

Get More From Your Solar Array!

I've just posted an article to the Zencookbook Dot Com site which is hopefully the first of many, this one concerns an improvement that can be made to most solar array installations to produce a bit more output from both new or existing installations. I've also asked for someone to sponsor me with this and other experiments, so if you can help please contact me.

I've taken the step of just putting the whole idea online because right now, anything that gets more energy out of existing technology and thereby makes it cheaper to own, is desperately needed, and I'd rather see this idea in use than argue and fight with (so far) dozens of stupid company people who should know better but are all too tight-arsed to reach in their pocket and help develop an idea...

So it's public domain for non-commercial use, and if you find it useful maybe you can sponsor me or donate something I can use for further development.

Zencookbook Has A New Home!

After countless dropped-out connections thanks to the total crap Telstra are allowed to serve up and call phone lines in a capital city, I've moved Zencookbook to a hosting service, and while I was at it also changed from the rather ordinary HTML only pages to a a CSS based and hopefully compliant format. That means that only the front page is there as yet, but that's a start... Rest of site is now just a matter of transferrinf text to the new framework.

Jatropha. New fuel crop or regrettable mistake?

Keep an eye on jatropha - if this is half as good as they say, I'd say we'd be fools not to look into places where it can be planted. A lot of our farmers here in Western Australia in the last few years have discovered how much the drought can suck.

I'm not advocating turning a whole property over to jatropha production - again, as for the Mali farmers, food production should not suffer for fuel crop production - but in a drought, a crop that can produce income without needing the guaranteed rainfall might not be a bad idea...

Now for the negatives. Haven't we learned from cane toads and rabbits and tilapia? But apparently the Mali farmers manage to grow it between rows of crops, and that gives hope that it would be controllable. Also, I'm thinking of one other "weed" that I've found a use for.

Growing wild over enormous amounts of the land here are these small yellow melons, which are treated like a weed and which grow pretty much anywhere, unassisted. You can cook them into a pretty flat tasting melon pie, but the real value of them is in the seeds.

See, the seeds are similar to pumpkin seeds, and when dried and roasted, are a snack that seems to be rich in antioxidants and may possibly be an addition to the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook diet. Pumpkin seeds are one suggested food that helps our bodies to reverse cancer, but the seeds have tough outer shells and that means either nasty chewy splintery bits when roasted, or a lot of hard work hulling the seeds before roasting.

The pigmelon seeds have thinner outer coverings. Also, with pumpkins, you need to get the seeds when pumpkin is being processed, or grow pumpkins especially for seed. These pigmelons are pretty much good for nothing else but their seeds, except that the pulp and stems and leaves would make a good return to the soil of organic matter - since you're extracting the seeds, you can be pretty sure the plant won't get away under your crop because there's no seeds to grow from.

So it makes sense to me to grow some of the things that don't need precise rainfall and pH and NPK ratios, during the worst years of drought, and revert to mostly food crops and a bit of "insurance cropping" during the better years. And if demand for these products grows, who knows we may open up a whole new belt for more eco-sensitive farming.