Raw Milk

Yeah, that's what I said. Raw milk. As in straight from the cow, do not pass pasteurizing, do not collect 200 hormones.
When I was a kid we used to drink raw milk from the neighbor’s cow. Periodically it would show up on the porch in the classic galvanized milk jug. When you popped the top there was a layer of cream that Mom would carefully scoop out and set aside for cooking. Then my brother and I would fight over who got the first glass of the heavy, creamy, ice cold goodness.
That first glass was always chugged down in a style that would prove perfect preparation for the college years and would leave you staggering around with a crusty white mustache and a bloated milk-belly. You couldn’t move much after a glass of the raw milk, but as long as the taste was in your mouth you didn’t care. As an adult I only see this sort of beverage euphoria produced by a fresh keg of beer on a warm summer night, but it never fails to resurrect the memory of milk.
Then the neighbor took his cows and moved away and the new farmer had sheep instead. There aren’t words invented yet to properly describe the resentment one 9-year-old girl had for those sheep. I hated them and what they represented: DairyGold Pasteurized Milk. Busted down to store-bought milk. Each glass tasted exactly like every other one. No cream to scoop off. And worst of all, it was thin and runny and came out of a cardboard box.
By the end of the summer I only drank the one glass that Mom forced onto me at breakfast every morning, and now that I’m a grown woman living on my own I rarely have milk in the house. The raw milk of my youth has been relegated to that portion of the brain where all good childhood memories reside. It’s tucked there between jumping off the rocks at the swimming-hole behind our orchard and racing the sunset on my Arabian gelding in an effort to make it home before full dark.
In the years since it has become illegal to sell raw milk, depriving countless children of a true milk-drunk stupor. To be fair, it also deprives them of the possibility of botulism from poor handling and transportation. However some resourceful and organic-minded people have found a way around that: Cow-Sharing.
For about $70.00 you can purchase one share of a milk cow, which will get you roughly one gallon of raw milk per week. You can then either go to the farm and pick up your milk yourself, or you can trust another shareholder to bring it to you. I think it’s pretty cool. Sure it’s potentially dangerous, but the best things in life hold some element of risk.

Written by: Twisted

For a complete write-up on Raw Milk pick up today’s Portland Tribune.

Vanished!

As a U.S. citizen I'm used to getting blamed for a lot of crap my government does, as well as a lot that it doesn't. But this one takes the cake:


From the Pravda

A large lake disappeared in Russia's Nizhni Novgorod region overnight. Residents of the village of Bolotnikovo discovered a huge trench instead of a million cubic meters of water on Thursday morning. No other lake appeared in the area.

There are only 300 meters between the lake and the village, Russian NTV channel reports. The landscape on the forest edge near the village looks like the water has gone under the ground from an unplugged gigantic bathtub. Village residents asked Russia's emergency services for help.

Specialists arrived at the site of the incident and examined the bottom of the lake seeking possible victims. Luckily, there were no people near the lake when it was virtually emptied. Dmitry Zaitsev, the chief of the local firefighting brigade, said that a large number of trees had been sucked under the ground. "If a human being finds himself in the middle of such a disaster, there will be no chances for a person to survive," Zaitsev said.

Local residents were shocked to find out that their lake had literally vanished from the area. Village fishermen came to the lake early in the morning. "I was amazed to see that there was no water there. All I could think of was - oh, my God," a local resident said. One of the men assumed that the USA had been involved in such an amazing natural phenomenon: "I think that America got us here," a man said.

An official from a neighboring village, Alexander Kluyev, believes that the lake has flown into an underground river. "I think that the vault of a large underground cave came down and connected with a river there. We believe that there is a certain underground river flowing here in the area, and the water of the lake has gone under the ground," said he.