Lincoln Sadler eyes one of his favorite fishing spots, Great Rock, from a distance, but times his approach around an oncoming boat so as not to reveal the rock’s secret location. He has already hiked two miles in the boiling heat of an August North Carolina day followed by two miles of swimming and wading in the Pee Dee River.
Lincoln can wait a moment longer.
He reaches below the water and extends his arm into a dark cavern under the boulder. Enthusiastically wiggling his fingers in a dark underwater hole, Lincoln hopes a catfish bites him. Once Lincoln’s fingers are in the catfish’s mouth, he jerks the beast to the surface.
Near the Arkansas-Oklahoma border where I’m from, we call this noodling. In the Carolinas, the term is hand grabbling. Either way, it ends in a Greco-Roman grappling match where noodlers across the South, like Lincoln, wrestle very large catfish from their underwater holes. But this fishing story started long before Lincoln Sadler began his pilgrimage to Great Rock that August morning.
In the Beginning
Fifty million years ago, when bats, rodents, and elephants were also getting their start, large catfish species began diverging from their smaller brethren. Today, of the 49 catfish species in North America, 34 would not stretch across a dinner plate. Those 7 species of catfish prized by noodlers are the blue and channel catfish, and the flatheads. The latter can reach lengths of five and half feet. Work by Michael and Lotta Harman suggest these three species originated 35-40 million years after the original split between the large and small catfish, making them among the oldest of living catfishes.
Fast forward 11-15 million years and Lincoln is catching his largest catfish, 60 pounds, at Lost Rock, another of his secret locations on the Pee Dee. Lincoln’s prize catch is just 3.2 ounces light of the record largest catfish taken by Chad Lamb a few years later during the famous Okie Noodling Tournament.
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Epicurious “Savor 100,000 recipes from Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Self, cookbooks, chefs, and home cooks. Learn from holiday food guides, get healthy, quick and easy, and kid-friendly menus, and watch cooking videos.”
Approximately 90% of people with Type 2 diabetes are obese. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
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Europe after the war was a scene of both physical and moral destruction. The author of Savage Continent recommends essential reading for understanding the suffering, dislocation and fighting after the war was over
It’s very convenient to think of wars as having neat beginnings and endings but that’s rarely the case, especially World War Two. Perhaps you could describe for us continental Europe in the months and years immediately after VE Day in May 1945, the date when hostilities officially ended.
Europe, after what we call the ending of the war, was a continent in complete chaos. There were literally millions of displaced people wandering around not knowing where to go. More than 35 million people had been killed and there was physical destruction everywhere. There was also a sense of moral destruction across the continent. People didn’t really know what was right and wrong any more. They were so used to seeing violence and destruction around them that they had begun to look at it as something that was quite normal. That’s the general atmosphere that existed when formal hostilities ended.”>
Europe after the war was a scene of both physical and moral destruction. The author of Savage Continent recommends essential reading for understanding the suffering, dislocation and fighting after the war was over
It’s very convenient to think of wars as having neat beginnings and endings but that’s rarely the case, especially World War Two. Perhaps you could describe for us continental Europe in the months and years immediately after VE Day in May 1945, the date when hostilities officially ended.
Europe, after what we call the ending of the war, was a continent in complete chaos. There were literally millions of displaced people wandering around not knowing where to go. More than 35 million people had been killed and there was physical destruction everywhere. There was also a sense of moral destruction across the continent. People didn’t really know what was right and wrong any more. They were so used to seeing violence and destruction around them that they had begun to look at it as something that was quite normal. That’s the general atmosphere that existed when formal hostilities ended.
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The chances are, you have a Facebook profile yourself: by July, a billion people will have one. But have you thought about what it’s doing to real life? Robert Lane Greene reports, starting with a visit to Facebook’s offices…
Wooooh! yeah! Hoots, hollers and dance music played on a full-volume boombox, assail the conference room where I am quizzing a data scientist at Facebook. It takes 20 seconds for the noise to die down enough for us to continue talking.
This is what Facebook’s offices are like, embracing at least the idea of “creative destruction”, violence to the establishment. Facebook will soon float its shares on the stock market, making several billionaires and many millionaires out of its staff and backers. But the sprawling new Menlo Park office complex is designed—perhaps a bit too designed—to look as if the kids just took over in a revolution. Walls are extensively, if rather meticulously, graffiti’d; the graffiti artist, who was paid in shares, will be among the new millionaires. Chalkboards line many of the remaining surfaces, so Facebook’s wandering young employees can doodle almost anywhere. There are blocks of conference rooms with whimsical names: one here based on Star Wars characters mixed with drinks (Darth Jager, The Empire Strikes Bacardi), one over there echoing Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream (Americone Dream, Half Baked). Signs abound reading “Move Fast and Break Things”.
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Warmth Best for Baby Pain Relief
A number of techniques are used to try and minimize babies’ pain during medical procedures like blood tests and vaccinations, but simply keeping the babies warm could be the most effective method of all. In a small trial of 47 healthy newborns, those who had been placed in a warming system prior to being given a vaccination stopped crying and grimacing more quickly than those soothed with sugar drops or a pacifier. More …
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Each year, big time developers in the sunshine state save millions in property taxes by, yes, renting cattle
State tax codes have a way of accumulating junk — quirky breaks and carve-outs that grow increasingly odd as they linger on the books, like tacky old legislative souvenirs. In Alabama, you can still deduct $1,000 for building a radioactive fallout shelter. In Arkansas, blind combat veterans may buy a new car every two years tax free. In Hawaii, residents can claim a $3,000 deduction for taking care of “exceptional trees” on their property — as long as an expert deems them “exceptional.”Often, these exemptions become the pet cause of some vocal interest group, making them near impossible to dislodge. Louisiana recently instituted an annual “second amendment weekend tax holiday,” which lets shoppers buy guns, knives, blinds, and other hunting gear sans sales tax each September. You can be sure that one will be around as long as there are deer to shoot in Cajun country.Some junk in the tax code, though, isn’t merely odd. During a visit to Florida this month, I became acquainted with the state’s own notoriously strange loophole which, unlike the basically benign examples above, costs untold millions of dollars every year.
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A true horror story: The abuse of teenage boys in a detention centre
First published online by Eric Allison and Simon Hattenstone.
“My name’s Kevin Raymond Young and I’m 52 years old.” There’s something desperate about the way Young says it, as if he’s clinging to the wreckage of his identity. Young was 17 when he was sent to Medomsley detention centre in County Durham. He’d already had a tough life – taken into care at two, sexually and physically abused by those who were meant to look after him – but this was something different. As soon as he starts to tell his story, he’s in tears.
His experience of Medomsley in 1977 has shaped, or disfigured, his life ever since. He was convicted of receiving stolen property – a watch his brother had given him; the first he had owned. The police asked if he knew where it had come from. No, he said. Could it possibly have been stolen, they asked. He thought about it – well, yes, possibly. He was sentenced to three months’ detention.
The morning after he arrived at Medomsley, Young was lining up for breakfast when he was picked out of the queue by Neville Husband, the officer who ran the kitchen. Young later discovered that Husband had asked for his file – he wanted to know everything about him; most importantly, whether he had family who were likely to visit him. Young was one of a handful of new inmates sent to work in the kitchen with Husband.
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America’s longest running war — the one against drugs — came in for abuse this weekend at the Summit of the Americas. The abuse is deserved. Forty years of increasingly violent efforts to stamp out the drug trade haven’t worked. And the blood and treasure lost is on a scale with America’s more conventional wars. On the upside, we know that an approach based around treating drugs as a public health issue reaps benefits to both users and the rest of us.
President Otto Perez Molina of Guatemala opened the rhetorical offensive against the drug war last week when he wrote that “decades of big arrests and the seizure of tons of drugs” have not stopped “booming” production and consumption. Molina argued that “global drug policy today is based on a false premise: that the global drug markets can be eradicated.” Drug abuse, like alcoholism, should be treated as a public health problem, he suggested. We should consider a move towards drug regulation — including taxation and prohibition of sales to minors. As this weekend’s discussion made clear, Molina’s statement represents region-wide concern with the business-as-usual strategy towards drugs. Indeed, most of Latin America has already moved towards decriminalization of drug possession in small amounts, and some are considering legalization.
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US Federal Court Rules to Release Ezra Pound from Mental Hospital (This day in 1958)
An influential American poet and literary critic, Pound spent most of his life in Europe. At the end of WWII, he was arrested for treason by the US for making public broadcasts in Italy supporting anti-Semitism and Fascism. Judged insane, he was committed to a hospital in Washington, DC, until Ernest Hemingway and other friends secured his release 12 years later. In the early weeks of his incarceration, he began showing signs of a mental breakdown, possibly as a result of being locked in what? More…
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KUNDUZ — About 150 Afghan schoolgirls were poisoned on Tuesday after drinking contaminated water at a high school in the country’s north, officials said, blaming it on conservative radicals opposed to female education.
Since the 2001 toppling of the Taliban, which banned education for women and girls, females have returned to schools, especially in Kabul.
But periodic attacks still occur against girls, teachers and their school buildings, usually in the more conservative south and east of the country, from where the Taliban insurgency draws most support.
“We are 100 percent sure that the water they drunk inside their classes was poisoned. This is either the work of those who are against girls’ education or irresponsible armed individuals,” said Jan Mohammad Nabizada, a spokesman for education department in northern Takhar province.
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Of the many and conflicting stories about how The Huffington Post came to be—how it boasts 68 sections, three international editions (with more to come), 1.2 billion monthly page views and 54 million comments in the past year alone, how it came to surpass the traffic of virtually all the nation’s established news organizations and amass content so voluminous that a visit to the website feels like a trip to a mall where the exits are impossible to locate—the earliest and arguably most telling begins with a lunch in March 2003 at which the idea of an online newspaper filled with celebrity bloggers and virally disseminated aggregated content did not come up.
The invitation for the lunch came from Kenneth Lerer. He was 51 and casting about for something new, having recently left his position as executive vice president for communications at AOL. Lerer was a private man who was nonetheless comfortable in the presence of powerful people with whom he had earned a reputation for honing images in disrepair, most famously for the disgraced and subsequently rehabilitated junk bond trader Michael Milken. Lerer had made a good deal of money and a good many friends after having first made a name for himself in the quixotic 1974 New York senate campaign of Ramsey Clark (for which he was hired by the chairman of this magazine, Victor Navasky, who later recruited him for CJR’s Board of Overseers, which has no say in content). Lerer was splitting his time between New York and skiing at his vacation home in Utah when he came across a new book by a young sociologist, Duncan Watts. The book was called Six Degrees. Lerer was so taken by it that he took Watts to lunch.
He brought the book with him and Watts would recall that the copy was dog-eared, the flatteringly telltale sign of a purposeful read. Lerer had a plan and he wanted Watts to help him. He had set himself an ambitious target. He wanted to take on the National Rifle Association.
He told Watts: “I know the answer to this is somewhere in these pages.”
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Remember the figures on Easter Island? How deep do you think they are in the ground? I’m shocked. How did they do that?
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In the world’s largest brain study to date, a team of more than 200 scientists from 100 institutions worldwide collaborated to map the human genes that boost or sabotage the brain’s resistance to a variety of mental illnesses and Alzheimer’s disease. Published in the advance online edition of Nature Genetics, the study also uncovers new genes that may explain individual differences in brain size and intelligence.
“We searched for two things in this study,” said senior author Paul Thompson, professor of neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a member of the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging. “We hunted for genes that increase your risk for a single disease that your children can inherit. We also looked for factors that cause tissue atrophy and reduce brain size, which is a biological marker for hereditary disorders like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.”
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Air traffic controller and private pilot James Price has spent 12 years of free time converting the nose of a Boeing 737 into a full-on flight simulator in his California garage. Price did all of the simulator’s programming himself, and about 90 percent of the gauges and displays in the cockpit actually function. Price is one of only several in the U.S. to own and operate such a device.
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“Under construction” has taken on new meaning for a new luxury hotel outside Shanghai — 16 of the 19 floors are being built below ground level in an abandoned quarry. The 380-room InterContinental Shimao Wonderland, whose deepest floor will house a restaurant that will actually be underwater at the bottom of the quarry, is expected to open by late 2014 or early 2015.
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The most interesting man in Canada.
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