MaxRedline

  With just four weeks left in office, Mayor Bill de Blasio launched the country’s first legal  shooting galleries  Tuesday morning, calling them safe havens for addicts — shortly before five people overdosed at just one of the clinics on opening day. Oopsie! Goodbye!

The Amazon worker who went  viral in October  after a woman was filmed leaving the back of his truck said the attention the video received got him fired.    The former delivery believes the virality of the video is what got him fired, telling TMZ: "It was just the incident went viral, that's what cost me my job." Excuse me while I find a mirror so I can practice my "shocked" face.  “This why my packages always late.”

  Prices of processed turkeys are up 40.7 percent compared with a year ago, data from the Department of Labor’s Producer Price Index showed Tuesday. That’s even after falling a seasonally adjusted one percent in October. It may be hard to even find turkeys in some parts of the country this year. The  Wall Street Journal   reported  that turkeys were 60 percent out of stock. Cranberries, yams, and sweet potatoes are also low in stock. Grain prices are 40.8 percent higher than a year ago, driving up the prices of our largely grain-fed turkey crop. Beef and veal prices are up 41.5 percent compared with a year ago. Overall, food prices are running 10.5 percent higher than a year ago. Getting to the family Thanksgiving will be costlier with gasoline prices are up close to 90 percent, according to the Producer Price Index. Home heating oil is up 114.8 percent. Residential natural gas prices are up 28.7 percent. Residential electricity prices are up 5.6 percent. Well, it's ...

  FLORENCE, Ore. - A 45-foot, 8-ton whale washed up on the beach near Florence on Nov. 9, 1970. Three days later,  the whale's tale exploded into history  - and became what some people regard as the first-ever viral story. "It had to be said the Oregon State Highway Department not only had a whale of a problem on its hands," Paul Linnman reported for KATU more than a half century ago. "It had a stinking whale of a problem." "So dynamite it was, some 20 cases or a half ton of it," he said. "The hope was that the long-dead pacific gray whale would be almost disintegrated by the blast." "After they blew it up, everyone is watching in awe, and then 30 seconds later - blam blam blam - then everyone's going, 'There's huge chunks of whale blubber getting thrown on us,'" Umenhofer said in 2015. The plan was to obliterate the whale into tiny pieces that seagulls would eat. But as Linnman and former KATU Photojournalist Doug B...

  During the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 28,000 tons (25,000 metric tons) of pandemic-related plastic waste, such as masks and gloves, have ended up in the ocean, according to a new study.  That's more than 2,000 double-decker buses  worth of waste,  The Guardian reported . And within a few years, a portion of those plastic gloves and packaging materials from pandemic purchases could be swirling around the North Pole. The analysis found that 193 countries produced about 9.2 million tons (8.4 million metric tons) of pandemic-associated plastic waste from the start of the pandemic to mid-August 2021, according to The Guardian.  The majority of the plastic — about 87.4% — was used by hospitals, while 7.6% was used by individuals. Packaging and test kits accounted for about 4.7% and 0.3% of the waste, respectively, the authors reported in a recent study, published online on Nov. 8 in the journal  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Do not hospita...

You've doubtless heard or read about Alec Baldwin and his "accidental" shooting of two production crew members on the set of his film. But what was a live gun doing on the set in the first place? Watch this video to learn about the best use of a prop in film and television and how props are often capable of enhancing a script.  https://artdepartmental.com/blog/props-matter/

  San Luis Obispo County farmer Lisen Bonnier of Vintage Organics has a stretch of her farmland that has never grown crops well. It floods and has always been generally “problematic,” she said. So when an opportunity arose for her to re-think how the area could be used and she was able to obtain 170 native plants attractive to pollinators such as monarch butterflies and bumblebees, Bonnier jumped at it. “This is something I can make a difference with,” she said. “I would like to have good pollinator habitat here, and we need to think more about not just ourselves, but the impact on everyone — my neighbors who grow pumpkins and squash and other crops who also need pollinators.” Bonnier is one of several grantees across San Luis Obispo County and California who have received free native pollinator-friendly plants from the  Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation . “One of the reasons monarchs and other pollinators are declining is a loss of habitat. So anything we can add m...