Yesterday, I started to see Christmas with the Kranks with Mel, but the projector broke…(I think we got lucky there.. it was sort of weak, but had some funny bits.. not worth restarting by any means. I think Tim Allen is better suited to the Santa Clause Movies.) so we went to Coral Square mall, and I reminisced about going there in the golden years of gaming with GrayPumpkin, Katt and the rest of the RPG crew.

Then we picked up a spot of din-din and hung out for a bit. It’s really nice having an excursion, hang-out and conversation partner. We’ve been in talks about going to the gym together, too.

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I think I’m overdue on updating my 125 things.

changes to – 15, 32, 35, 56, 98, amongst others.

On my internal “monkey vs robot” the monkey is winning lately. By a landslide. He’d got bananas and bazookas. Robot’s just a wind up toy.

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Nice photo of Saturday’s Sunset in Ft. Laud by Mike3k.

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Metro FreeFi: Serving up free wireless hotspots to Metro Areas and beyond (Here’s the list in Fort Laud, so far. I added Joe Picasso’s.)

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Happy zombies spin around…
Happy zombies hit the ground …
Happy zombies eat some flesh …
Mostly folks from Bangladesh!

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Random Mel factoid: She’s a “screen toucher”, in that when she points to things on the monitor, she leaves a teeny-tiny semi-circular finger print behind.

Random Scotto factoid: Not Too crazy about little finger circles on my monitor, but too polite to chastise her. I clean the screen when she preens in the latrine. hooray for rhymes!

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Fire leaves Minnesota town coated in butter

NEW ULM, Minn. – (KRT) – Tons of butter melted by a factory fire spread through the streets of New Ulm, Minn., late Wednesday and early Thursday until they were overtaken by the chill of the icebox weather.

On Thursday afternoon, amid the fatigue from hours of fighting the massive blaze, the slippery surfaces and the wreckage of the plant, even Fire Chief Curt Curry recognized some humor in the incongruous scene.

“We were looking for 40,000 loaves of bread at 2 o’clock this morning,” he said, trying to wind down with a smile after working the intense fire all night.

Work crews used backhoes during the day to slice through a pond of partially resolidified butter that spread from the Associated Milk Producers Inc. plant.

Heat from the fire caused much of an estimated 3 million pounds of butter to melt, burn or seep out the loading dock doors. Some of it flowed three blocks downhill into the Minnesota River before dikes were built to create a block-long pond that stood 2 feet deep in parts. That is when the Minnesota weather finally helped.

“Once it cooled, it gelled,” said Greg Palmer, the fire department’s second assistant chief. Most of the butter was contained to the block surrounding the plant.

It will be a while before the extent of the damage is known. Firefighters fear some of their safety gear was damaged beyond repair. Streets remained closed for several blocks near downtown as work crews scraped up the slippery goo. And about 180 workers are left to wonder what will become of their livelihoods.

The plant is Minnesota’s largest butter making and packaging plant, AMPI spokeswoman Sheryl Meshke said. The company runs about a dozen plants in four states.

It was too early to know what will become of the New Ulm site, AMPI’s only butter plant, she added. The building was not completely lost and some butter was salvaged, she said. And about six workers were back on the job Thursday, accepting milk from farmers for other AMPI operations.

The fire, whose cause remains unknown, was spotted just after 6 p.m. Wednesday near the plant’s second-floor cooling towers. About 30 employees were evacuated. When crews from the New Ulm volunteer fire department arrived, flames were visible on the roof, Curry said.

The butter stored below began to melt. Much of it burned.

“It’s like if you’re cooking,” Meshke said.

That only made it worse for firefighters from New Ulm and neighboring communities, who were already dealing with freezing temperatures and the slick mess created by the melting butter accumulating on the ground. The butter became a fuel. At first crews tried to pour water on the burning building. Finally, when they were able to collect enough fire extinguishing foam, they sprayed the blaze and suffocated the flames.

The fire was under control by about 4:45 a.m. Thursday. No one was injured, Curry said.

A number of AMPI employees filed by the site Thursday to get a glimpse of the scene. They hope to hear soon what will happen to their jobs, said Bob Gnekow, a maintenance worker for AMPI. He could see the fire’s glow over New Ulm on Wednesday night from his home 10 miles away in Lafayette, Minn.

“It was a really good place to work,” Gnekow said while peering into the charred remains of the plant.

“I don’t know where we are all going to go,” said fellow employee Gary Widmer of Springfield, Minn.

Both said AMPI has been a good employer, and they hope the company will be able to salvage the operation in New Ulm.

Joel Albrecht, the mayor of the Minnesota community of 14,000, is expected to give a tour of the damage today to state and federal officials and discuss ways to help the city and one of its largest employers recover. Curry expects to meet with Albrecht to talk about replacing their firefighting suits, now coated with butter. They are concerned the butter and the intense washing required to remove it will damage the suits’ fire-retardant capabilities.

On Thursday, fire crews power-washed their hoses and trucks, which were caked in butter and grime. Even their electronic radios “were covered in a quarter-inch of butter,” Curry said. But the trucks were ready to respond in case of another emergency, he added.

While the damage to the factory is extensive and the cleanup on the streets under way, crews do not believe the fire caused much pollution. A relatively small amount of butter reached the Minnesota River through a storm drain, said Nancy Miller, spokeswoman for the state Pollution Control Agency.

Butter in the river was treated like an oil slick, with booms placed around a storm sewer outlet. The booms were hampered by floating ice. The butter that got through will break down naturally in the river, Miller said.

“It could have caused some dissolved oxygen problems in a different time of year because of how it would break down,” Miller said. “But with the cold water and the amount of turbulence, there should be plenty of oxygen and it will naturally break up.”

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ABOUT THE PLANT

_Associated Milk Producers Inc.’s butter factory in New Ulm is a cooperative owned by 4,600 dairy farmers in the Upper Midwest.

_It processed 5.2 billion pounds of its members’ milk last year at its 13 plants, including facilities at Rochester, Dawson and Paynesville in Minnesota, and at Jim Falls, Portage and Blair, Wis.

_The New Ulm plant is the company’s only butter making facility.

_The plant is Minnesota’s largest in butter making and packaging.

_It employs 180 people n Cheese production and marketing account for the majority of AMPI’s $1.1 billion in annual sales.

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Freuds theorized that there are 5 stages of psychological development. At the oral stage the main issue is dependency, at the anal stage the main issue is self control, at the phallic stage the main issue is sexual identity, at the latency stage it’s skill development, and at the genital stage its creativity and productivity.

Freud theorized that psychological problems are related to problems during one or more of these stages. For example, being too cared for or too neglected causes someone to be orally fixated, too much or too little control causes someone to be anally fixated, insufficient parental role modeling causes phallic fixation.

An orally fixated person is either irrationally dependent (expects what they want to just appear) or irrationally independent (always refuses help).

An anally fixated person is either irrationally self controlled and servile to authority or has no self control and is compulsively defiant of authority.

A phallicly fixated person is either a sexual compulsive (sexually inappropriate/promiscuous) or sexually repressed.

Freud did not classify any latent fixation but I think it is as plausible as those at the other stages. I speculate that people that like to learn and acquire knowledge without any purpose or people that are compulsively non curious represent both dysfunctional ends of the latency spectrum.

The genital stage is the final Freudian developmental stage and according to Freud people don’t all succeed at this. Freud believed the ideal for human happiness is to be happy in love and work, problems in one or the other cause unhappiness.

Like any personality system, Freud’s developmental levels are just a theory, so, be speculative about your results.

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Tramp buried instead of Nikolas II, Russia’s last emperor

Specialists discovered the absence of fillings in the teeth of the skeleton

Remains of the last Russian emperor Nikolas II, which were buried in Peter and Paul Cathedral in St.Petersburg in 1998, do not belong to the Russian Tsar, the president of the center investigating the details of the Romanovs Royal Family’s death, Vadim Viner said on Thursday.

According to the historian, specialists discovered the absence of fillings in the teeth of the skeleton, which had been buried in the cathedral. Scientists, therefore, believed that the remains belonged to an absolutely different person.

“Nikolas II has notes in his diary. The tsar wrote that he had visited a dentist. The tsar’s doctor Maria Rendel has similar notes too. The records contain a detailed description of the dental work, the fillings in particular. Forensic medics examined the skeleton, which was considered to be the remains of Nikolas II, but did not find any tooth fillings,” Vadim Viner said.

The expert assures that the authorities violated the legal procedure of burying the remains: “From the legal point of view, it is a homeless person who is buried in Peter and Paul Cathedral instead of Tsar Nikolas II,” Viner said. The historian added that it was not the court that made the decision regarding the burial: “Everything was decided by the executive authorities, although they had no right to do it,” said he.

“They simply ignored any doubtful and disputable facts that we and our colleagues found. In other words, they decided for themselves from the very beginning that the uncovered remains belonged to the tsar and no one else. No expertise was conducted. They had only to make the society believe that it was the tsar’s skeleton,” the expert concluded.

Vadim Viner said that the center for the history of the royal family, “The Fate of the Dynasty,” was going to file a claim to the Supreme Court of Russia to dispute the decision about the burial of the remains. “The center is currently preparing an address to the Supreme Court with a request to review the legal ground of the decision to bury the remains uncovered in Ekaterinburg,” Viner said.

“The Fate of the Dynasty” center was founded in 1994. In September of 1995, the center became a member of the Russian committee of foreign experts for investigating the fates of the Russian emperor’s family members. The center also officially represents the “400 Years to the Clan of the Romanovs” foundation in Ekaterinburg.

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1 year ago – Rainy-day wakeup, old LL passes the torch, aces & eights, oldest penis, trampled shopper

2 years ago – Danny and I send dopey “Sven” emails to companies for no good reason, bro brings me eggnog, I scare the living tar out of a lippy kid

3 years ago – gestapo gives c’s pal grief about aiming, reptile people, lj bump, world tour, Toliken Movie desire

4 years ago – Sims, accused of being an alien, dead milkmen, cannibal the musical lyrics, I’m a warmer