The USA is the world's leading producer of:

Almonds
Blueberries
Cow Milk, Whole, Fresh
Cranberries
Grapefruit and Pomelos
Green Corn (Maize)
Indigenous Cattle Meat
Indigenous Chicken Meat
Indigenous Pigmeat
Indigenous Turkey Meat
Maize
Nuts
Sorghum
Soybeans
Strawberries
String Beans

The US is the second-highest producers of:

Apples
Cherries
Game Meat
Hen Eggs
Honey
Hops
Lettuce
Mushrooms
Oranges
Pistachios
Spinach
Tomatoes
Walnuts

The USA is the world's third-highest producer of:

Asparagus
Avocados
Carrots
Grapes
Hazelnuts
Linseed
Oats
Onions, Dry
Peaches and Nectarines
Pears
Peas, Green
Raspberries
Safflower Seed
Sugar Beets
Wheat

And the USA is the world's fourth-largest producer of:

Chillies&Peppers, Green
Garlic
Groundnuts in Shell
Pumpkins, Squash, Gourds
Tobacco Leaves
Watermelons

France, in comparison, is the world's leader in only duck meat (edging out Malaysia!) and sugar beets, while Germany is the world's leader in hops.

So who then is edging out the US in apples and many of the commodities where they are listed second? Not Russia, whose world-leading products are sunflower seeds and gooseberries... but of course China, who is kicking the tail of the US in sesame seeds, groundnuts, and reelable cocoons.

Take a look for yourself!

You may be interested to know that Burkina Faso is the world's second largest producer of "Indigenous Ass Meat"

Comment! (1) | Recommend!

Today the Secret Adventure Club went on its second official adventure. This time it was to Purgatory Chasm, a crazy jumble of rocks and trickling waterfalls and mossy banks in southern Massachusetts just a little ways over the border. I went with Thalweg of the Admirality Islands and her boyfriend Graham. We had giant cookies and chocolate soymilk for dinner and then we were off. We found some pretty sweet KAl2(Si3Al)O10(OH)2 (muscovite) and some orthoclase, and a lot of smoky quartz that came in great veins the girth of an elephant's leg. Muscovite always comes in very thin sheets. It's named after the Muscovy region in Russia where it is very common. There the muscovite grows in sheets so large that townspeople would pull it out of the ground and use it for windows back in the olden-days before everyone had glass.
We did a lot of climbing even though I had crappy shoes on. I should learn to be more prepared, because you never know when adventure will strike. Graham climbed the Devil's Pitchfork, and we sang from the Devil's Pulpit, and Teresa sat where the Devil had Shat, but eventually it dried.

Then we spent some time pretending we were that kind of dinosaur like in Jurassic Park when he's purring and the guy comes close and then he opens his hood and hisses and spits in the guy's face!!! If only Justin Clark knew how far his legacy has spread. Of course the most famous time must surely be when we actually accidentally spit in some girl's face when Ranor and I were wearing capes and running around the second floor of smiley. But she still thought it was funny.

Then it was necessary to run around like raptors and ambush Graham from the sides while he was distracted looking forward (classic raptor technique! He should have seen that coming!). A raptor fight ensued between Graham and Teresa, and I was impressed, because any 32-year-old guy whose first thesis draft is due on Thursday and who can still come out in the middle of the forest and run around like a velociraptor is surely a man to be admired. In the end the night grew dark and Graham led us across a river on a slippery log, and when we had climbed the rocks and swung on some swings and imitated Steve Irwin to our hearts' content, we piled in Graham's station wagon and went on home, our adventure and the daylight exhausted for the time being.

But NEXT TIME..........!

I had written Sam telling him that once again for the zillionth time I can't come to the bar for beer and wings. I told him that I was going adventuring to a place very far away and that I probably would not be back in time.

He wrote back simply,

"What's his name?"

What can I answer..... Thalweg and Graham?

THE DEVIL, PERHAPS?!!?!?!!?

Comment! (2) | Recommend!

::Edit:: "He" and "She" aka "They" are two of the 8, sometimes 9 people who live in my house. :::


So we went to the movie Bridge to Terabithia. Don't read if you don't want to hear about the ending.

"We" as in me, Him, Her, and Her Friend. He didn't have any cash, as usual (last we he and I went to see The Last King of Scotland and I had to pay because they don't take credit cards--- it's ok because he bought me that bottle of Tylenol the one time.) Don't see that movie, by the way, the Last King of Scotland. I highly recommend never seeing it. You pretty much hated all of the main characters and you sat there waiting for them to do one thing (just one thing!) that would make you like them or be sympathetic towards them, and it just never happened. Instead, it got worse. So instead you sat there waiting, and hoping, for them to meet the deaths they so richly deserved.

SO anyway, I didn't have any cash either, after last week, so I paid in dimes. She had enough for Herself, but not enough for him so he had to borrow money from her visiting out-of-town friend. Awk. Ward. Her friend was totally cool though, we got to talking.

He led us to a row where we were sitting in front of a bunch of little kids. Awesome. The father clucked his annoyance because we were 15 minutes late for the movie (NOT my fault) and we we're all taller than his kids. I immediately slouched down in my chair so the kid could see over me and he rewarded me by smacking the top of my head. I was just like wtf? And I slouched lower, for the whole movie. ow. You couldn't even see my head above the seat.

Just as the movie was reaching one of its most important parts (I've already read the book, you see, that's why I didn't even want to see the movie in the first place, but I didn't think I could accurately explain why I didn't want to see it without giving it away, so I decided to go see it anyway since it's only two bucks) He and She decide that they're going to leave, and they make a commotion getting out of their seats in front of the children. The Friend leans over to me and says, "They said that they're going for a walk." Despite the fact that this girl is friends with Her, I can't help but exclaim, "WHAT?!?!" But I recall that he has often told me that they've skipped large parts of the movies because they go and talk, and sometimes they never return at all. She doesn't like movies that are unpleasant in any way, which sometimes precipitates these "walks". So they leave. Pretty much everything important that happens in the movie happens during this time. Like, including Terabithia being awesome and then the freaking girl DROWNING IN THE RIVER. I told you I was going to ruin it, don't come crying to me. Then the great emotional parts of the movie go by, I mean, it's BtT, come on, I cried when I read it in 6th grade, I cried again tonight (O how I wept!). Then They come back. Once again a ruckus is raised getting them back into their seats, and He says that he almost didn't recognize our row because I looked like a twelve-year-old. what??? What happened? She asks. What happened? What HAPPENED? WHAT HAPPENED IN THE 30 MINUTES THAT YOU WERE GONE FROM THE MOVIE THEATRE!?!?! You've got to be kidding me! "Did she die!?!?!" She exclaims. He chimes in, "Is she DEAD?!" The Friend answers yes, she is dead. They watch the last five minutes when her family moves out, and then the boy builds the Bridge to Terabithia at the end. When I look over, She is crying, her tears brimmed over with emotion. WTF???? How can you be crying? You just saw a little girl meet a little boy, and then at first not like each other, and then become friends, and then you went for a THIRTY MINUTE WALK, and then someone TOLD YOU that eventually she dies, and you see her parents move out, and then you're CRYING?!!?

They were full of praises for the movie after it was over, but He said that he didn't care for it much because "fantasy stories are really boring. I mean, some fantasy is good, like Lord of the Rings, but really most fantasy is so boring."

OK, first of all, I have to disagree with him. Fantasy is not boring, thank you very much, but ok, I guess that's a matter of opinion. SECONDLY, THIS WAS NOT A FANTASY MOVIE, AND IF HE HAD ACTUALLY WATCHED IT, HE WOULD HAVE KNOWN THAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

But then we went home, and he told us all again the rollicking good story about how he saw this young girl get grabbed by some hoodlum from the side of the street near her broken down car while she was talking on her cell phone and then he saw them fighting and she kicks him in the nuts and then he punches her in the face and then she gets thrown into an SUV, and how he bravely drove like hell away from there and rounded up some Providence Police from the Dunkin' Donuts. Ok, so I made up the Dunkin Donuts part, but it's probably true. He said that she was a nice pretty, young girl but you never know, maybe she was a prostitute and that guy was her pimp, and so why should he intervene? But he did tell them that the SUV had Georgia plates. What a hero.

Earlier today we were standing around talking about my friend who used to be kind of anorexic although I still don't know if she admits that. One day she and I were talking about our "spare tires", or that little bleb of fat girls have right above their pants from their belly button, and she told me that even at her very skinniest, she still never got rid of it. So she told me that it was pointless to worry about it, because it was just going to be there and you had to accept your body the way it was. At this point in my story He got very thoughtful looking and said, "Actually, if I took her into one of my plastic surgeon friends, it would just be like snip, snip, and then it would be gone! And it would never come back."

I think he missed the entire point of my story.

Anyway, in case you were wondering: Bridge To Terabithia: Very good. But sad. And I only paid $2, so there you go. And I think it should be spelled "Tarabythia" and I think it should be pronounced "Tera-BEETH-ia" instead of "Tera-BITH-ia".

I'm sooo getting new roommates this fall.

Comment! (7) | Recommend!

Yesterday I got a package from my old high school boyfriend, Brett. He's teaching English in Japan right now with i-jet. There was no card, simply this:



Rlook! A roaf-u of ba-readah! Kawaii! ^-^;;

Comment! (3) | Recommend!

Yes, there were early signs that she was going to be a multi-platinum selling rock star. In graduate school she was known for composing extremely moving songs that were so immediate to everyday life that it seemed like they spoke to each and every heart. Some early titles included the up-tempo heavy metal song,

"My Roommate Stole My Fucking Frying Pan (And I Have to Walk All The Way Downstairs to Get It Back)";

the bitter, mocking ballad,

"Could You Possibly Drive Any Slower?";

and in her first German album,

"Ich Habe Kein Regenschirm",

which was rumored to have been composed when she was forced to walk all the way from the Alfred Wegener Polar Institut fur Polar und Meeresforschung to the train station, in the rain, without an umbrella.

Comment! (2) | Recommend!

When he awoke he was facing a wall of blank blue ice. The half of the room where Dakar had been hours ago was gone. The ceiling had changed from a low, dusty white and bluish warp to a dome 20ft above Jasper’s head, frosted with a thousand icy white crystals like a polar chandelier. Had he been moved? Was he in a different place? He thought he saw the top of the ladder they had used to ascend into the cavity. It was now trapped several inches into the blue ice wall, leading nowhere. His eyes reluctantly moved to the far corner. The skeleton was still there. Now only one foot was visible and the skull… still cocked crookedly as if he were welcoming someone into his abode. The eye cavities were filled with frost. They looked like they were shining.

Jasper took a sharp breath. Why did he feel so dizzy? He heard a faint sound, like a whisper. The skeleton? No... it came from a small crack in the floor. It was leaking up into the ice from the bowels of the volcano below his feet. Gas.

Frenzied, he began tapping the walls of the ice cave, looking for weakness. There was nothing- solid blue ice on one side and an opaque stucco of packed snow-ice and rock on the other. The ceiling was too high to reach. The floor seemed to be the only weakness. If the gas was any indication, it led straight into the volcano's fiery vent.

“Dakar!” he shouted. There was more fear in his voice than he had hoped. “Dakar where are you?” With each shout there had to be a sharp breath that followed. Each one made Jasper feel like an invisible hand was reaching into his lungs and pulling them inside out. Emptying them of air.
The ice muffled his cries and returned only muted echoes. He collapsed back onto the cool ice wall where Dakar used to be. His body sank into the snow. He was sitting across from the skeleton. Over its face, slender, geometric ice crystals had begun to form. A wide smile spread over Jasper's face.

"Welcome," whispered the skeleton. Or was it the vent? It came from the whole chamber.
"Welcome to Erebus."
Jasper's eyes were blurring. Or was that just the frost, blurring the harsh contours of the skeleton's face? His eyes looked out of the side of his head at his hands. They were very far away. There were slivers of frost growing there, as well. How did he get here? He seemed to remember that it was important for him to return home for some reason. He couldn't remember why. His head was so fuzzy. He turned away from the skeleton, pressing his face against the hoary frost. If only he could extract the clean oxygen from this pure frost! Was he gasping? Was that him or the skeleton? It filled his ears and his mind. Maybe it was laughing?

"Jasper." It was the volcano whispering now. "Jasper.... I'm coming for you, Jasper. Are you ready?"

A sudden convulsion shook Jasper's haze. Such heat! His mind faded to black. The floor collapsed beneath him. He tumbled toward the heart of the volcano.

Comment! (3) | Recommend!