Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

According to the pundits who write zoo labels, seals feed their babies a milk that is “very rich”.

“In celebration of the working person’s holiday, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao has announced the Bush Administration’s plan to end the 60-year-old law which requires employers to pay time-and-a-half for overtime.

I’m sure you already knew that — if you happened to have run across page 15,576 of the Federal Register.”

For the rest of  this story, check out Greg Palast’s story for August 29th….

Yesterday, I explored the Falun Copper Mine–miles of cold and dimly-lit tunnels where the Swedes started tunneling and exploring more than 1000 years ago. Our tour guide looked just like Legolas. Instead of noble faraway look, he had a chuckle and a sense of humor, but I think that is a definite improvement.

I’ve been spending time here in the footsteps of Carolus Linnaeus–http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/linnaeus.html–a Swede who created the double-barreled scientific naming system that Home sapiens has been using ever since. He did other good stuff too–for example, the original Centigrade temperature system had water freezing at 100 degrees and boiling at 0 degrees. Linnaeus had the sense to turn that scale upside down.  

Now, I’m not digressing, but do you have a big table for people to eat around–even a room or a big area of the kitchen devoted to housing that great big dinner table you need only when you’ve decided to feed a bunch of guests? Well, I do, but Linnaeus was smarter than that.

Linnaeus had a bunch of little tables around the edges of his dining room. Only when dinner time rolled around did he move just as many tables as he needed that very night into the middle of the dining room. He would stick together a bunch of little tables to make a big table exactly the right size that night.

Okay, forbid me for harping on this but the idea makes so much sense, I can’t believe Linnaeus thought of it 250 years ago and nobody bothered to tell me about it! A big dinner table that takes up a big fat space spends all its spare time bumping people who try to walk through said space. Furthermore, if you have 4 little tables instead of one honking big one, you can make 3 little separate messes–errr, I mean “work areas”–on the separate tables you don’t need that night.

So I’m not spending all my time gazing at Legolas and Galadriel lookalikes–although that would be tempting. I’m computing how much money Peter Jackson could have saved on blue contact lenses and platinum hair dye if he he’d come to Sweden….