Brusqueness

For all you fans of Kid Rock, I bet you have often wondered how young he was when he first started out in the music business. Well here we have a picture that shows he was in fact a baby when he started.

A 90-year-old woman who dropped out of school to help her family during the Great Depression has finally recieved her high school diploma.

With the Final Four upon us and the WNBA draft taking place next week, it’s time  to take a look at the new class of professional ballers.

Last year was considered the deepest class in WNBA history. This year there isn’t as much depth but with roster reductions, the competition for spots in the league will be equally fierce.

Two of the top picks will be playing this weekend in the Final Four so be sure to catch UConn’s Renee Montgomery and Oklahoma’s Courtney Paris in their final collegiate contests.

Montgomery is the whole package. She could be a starting point guard for almost any team she goes to. She’s a great leader who exudes confidence and knows how to build team chemistry. She’s smart, knows how to play both ends of the floor and has extemely high basketball IQ.

Six foot four Paris knows how to bang the boards and is a strong presence physically and mentally. She got a lot of attention last month when she offered to repay her scholarship if Oklahoma didn’t win a national championship this year so the stakes for her are high.

Atlanta Dream has the first pick in the draft followed by the Washington Mystics and there’s a good chance Montgomery and Paris will go in early rounds. But  Louisville’s Angel McCoughtry, the Big East conference’s defensive player of the year, and Maryland’s Kristi Toliver and Marissa Coleman are also considered top picks.

The Terrapins are going to have to face life next year without seniors Coleman and Toliver. Toliver is a shooting point guard always willing to go for the big shot. She’s going to fit best with an uptempo team such as Phoenix.

Who else will have a chance to play with the pros? Look for Cal’s Ashley Walker,  the second leading scorer and top rebounder in program history, Rutger’s Kia Vaughn, and Duke’s Chante Black. Both Vaughn and Black might be a good fit for a team like Connecticut.

All these players know how to play under pressure. They’ve got the necessary work ethic and each brings a unique set of skills to a team. Once the top players are picked, it will be like a game of dominoes to see how the rest fall.

The goal of a competitor is to play as long as possible so those not picked for the WNBA draft will probably look at their prospects for playing overseas. Stay tuned.

"Legalize marijuana and take all that money and invest it in teachers and in education. . . . I really believe that as soon as we legalize and decriminalize marijuana we can actually afford a really good governor who won't keep taking money away from education and from teachers and send him back to Hollywood where he can do 'D' movies and we can get an 'A' governor."

- Musician Carlos Santana weighs in on the marijuana debate, explaining that legalization will help California get better political leadership.

The recycling logo – those three arrows going around in an endless loop – is lying to you. While glass and plastic can be recycled indefinitely (at least in theory for plastic, which is usually “upcycled” or “downcycled” into products that can’t be recycled), paper only gets so many go-rounds through the circle of life.

On trash day, the paper in our recycling bins goes to a recycling center and then a paper mill, where it’s put into vat called a pulper. The pulper, which also contains water and some chemicals, is essentially a giant blender and shreds the recovered paper into small pieces. The paper-liquid mixture is then heated so the paper breaks down into little fibers. The resulting mush is called pulp.

Contaminants are removed from the pulp by cleaning and screening. The pulp is cleaned in a spinning cone-shaped cylinder that separates heavy contaminants like staples. Screening is exactly what it sounds like. The pulp is forced through various screens to remove smaller contaminants like bits of glue.

Some recovered paper is de-inked, and some is not. De-inking can be done in two ways: washing or flotation. During washing, chemicals are added to the pulp to separate the ink from the paper fibers. The pulp is then rinsed with water and the ink is washed away. In the flotation method, the pulp is put in another water-filled vat called a flotation cell. Surfactants are used to loosen the ink from the pulp, and air is passed through the cell. The air bubbles float the ink to the top of the mixture and the resulting froth skimmed off the top.

The pulp is then beaten to separate large clumps of fibers and make the fibers swell so they’re better suited for papermaking. At this point, if white recycled paper is being made, the pulp is also bleached to make it bright white (if brown recycled paper is being made, say, for industrial paper towels, the pulp doesn’t get bleached).

To make the pulp back into paper, the recycled fibers are blended with new wood fiber (virgin fiber) to give it extra strength and mixed with water. A paper machine sprays the watery pulp in a wide jet onto a wire screen conveyor belt. As the pulp travels on the belt, water drains through the screen and the paper fibers begin to bond together. A series of press rollers squeeze out more water and heated metal rollers dry the paper, which, now finished, is wound into a roll that can be cut into smaller rolls or sheets.

Phew. As you can see, paper goes through quite a bit of abuse during the recycling process and each time recovered paper goes through the whole song and dance the individual wood fibers become shorter and more brittle and lose their strength. Paper industry folks say that the average paper fiber can survive recycling six to eight times before its short enough to slip away during the screening process.

« Older Entries