how to prevent hurricanes

If you know much about weather, you know that mankind does not possess the ability to stop a hurricane.  Hurricanes are kinda like a migraine headache in that regard — unstoppable once it gets going.  In fact, a migraine feels kinda like a hurricane in your head.  Or a tornado.  But I digress.

Anyway, we cannot stop a hurricane once it gets started.  I’ve heard that Hurricane Katrina contained the energy equivalent of 150,000 atomic bombs, and released enough of that energy to power the United States for a year.  Amazing!   If only we could capture a fraction of that power.  But that’s another discussion.  (I almost digressed again…)

satellite photo of Hurricane Jeanne from 2004So obviously the key to stopping a hurricane is to prevent it from forming.  That may sound impossible, and it almost is, but I learned from The Discovery Channel where hurricanes (affecting the U.S.) come from.  The whole process starts from hot, dry air from the Sahara Desert.  Pockets of that hot, dry air get released over the ocean about every three days, and then convection and evaporation and condensation and stuff take place, and hurricanes are formed.  So one possible solution would be to destroy the Sahara Desert.   I know, that sounds crazy, but think about it — the climate of the Sahara is such that its inhabitants have to live elsewhere.  So who would it inconvenience?  It would save a lot of money when we don’t have destructive hurricanes!

I can see some people opposing that plan.  Fortunately there’s another potential way to stop hurricanes.  During the convection process, clouds form and begin to rotate because of the rotation of the Earth.  So obviously if we stopped the Earth’s rotation, that would prevent hurricanes from forming.  However, this plan would have some major side-effects, like perhaps altering gravity, and we might lose the Moon.  I’m sure some other bad things would happen too, so I can see this idea being vetoed.

Perhaps instead of destroying the Sahara Desert, we should just cover it with solar panels to capture the heat.  And since the Sahara Desert is one of the hottest places in the world, this could also reduce global warming, and it would be a clean, green, unlimited, renewable energy solution.  Sounds perfect, right?  That could be quite expensive, which is probably why it hasn’t been done.  But it would produce untold amounts of clean energy, which everyone wants these days.  Since a large up-front investment is needed, you can start sending in donations, and I’ll do this whenever I get enough money, and it’ll be a win-win for everyone.  You can give using various denominations of cash, check, credit card, and bacon.

celebrating 300,000 pageviews

If you ever glance at the counter near the bottom of the sidebar, you might’ve noticed that yesterday we went over 300,000 hits / pageviews.  That’s quite an accomplishment, I think.  Perhaps that will prevent certain other bloggers from calling this blog obscure (not that we listen to them anyway, especially when they don’t even visit their own blog!).

Anyway, I think this calls for a celebration.   It’s a big milestone (albeit arbitrarily chosen, but it’s a large round number with many round numbers).  I suspect many blogs never reach that many viewers.

I’d like to take all the regular readers out for pizza, but unfortunately it’s not in the budget.  Actually, there is no budget, because there is no money.  Nobody has made any donations.  And that’s okay, because we don’t ask for donations.  We’ll gladly receive them, should anyone feel generous, but we don’t ask for your money.  We like to keep the humor here free, where all can enjoy and participate for no charge.  So that’s why there’s no pizza party.

It’s not just a few posts that get a lot of pageviews — there are actually 33 posts that each have over 1,000 views.  That’s amazing to me, that so many people have read my ramblings!  I’m sure most of you regulars can guess what the top posts are, but how many of the top 10 could you name?  Here’s the listing:

1. random Monday quotes
2. add your own captions, basketball photo
3. Halo costume
4. Dr. Bunsen Honeydew & Beaker – top boffins
5. funny quotes about Mondays, part 2
6. some random quotes for your Monday morning
7. viewer mail, issue #6
8. the special days of April, pt 2
9. Toilet Facts
10. Man vs Food — Carnivore Pizza Challenge

Some of those are very predictable.  For those of you who are curious, here are the next 10:

11. some quotes for your Monday
12. caption contest, unfair sumo wrestling match
13. I want a tank to drive around town
14. the special days of April, pt 1
15. Wendy’s new Baconator burger
16. Exercise Is Bad For You, New Study Shows
17. man vs food – super burger challenge
18. offended at poop
19. Get your super-powers here
20. a new Tower Defense game

Have you read all of those?  (I wonder how many of the regular readers have read everything here.  You should get a gold star!)

Of course, these are not necessarily the top 20 posts in terms of quality, but the public has spoken.  Is your favorite post missing?  (Or does anyone even have a favorite post?)

caption contest, car jumping over edge, on fire

It’s that time of the week again — time for another caption contest!  This week’s photo is action-packed, featuring a car jumping over the edge, and it’s ON FIRE!  Surely there’s an interesting story behind this picture.  It’s up to you to figure it out.

(To see the other caption contests, click on the “Say What?” category in the sidebar.)

deep-fried butter

Here at Buffet o’ Blog, we’ve been known to experiment with various new food creations (see our Buffet o’ Bacon series), and we enjoy discussing the potential of new ideas.  Something we heard about is deep-fried butter, which debuted at the Texas State Fair this year.

The creator says it tastes like a mix between a biscuit or a croissant that is stuffed full of butter.   He also offers varieties with flavored butters: garlic, grape, or cherry.

Apparently the Texas State Fair has started a tradition of trying everything deep-fried, because this year they introduced many new deep-fried dishes: twisted yam on a stick, peaches and cream, fried pecan pie (picture that one!), pork chips, and more.  Previous years have featured deep-fried lattes, fried banana splits, and chicken-fried bacon.   (The latter is one I’d like to try, with a gravy dipping sauce.)  The creator of deep-fried bacon has also introduced deep-fried cookie dough, Coke, and peanut butter and jelly and banana sandwiches.

He also made a radical new creation called Fire and Ice.  It consisted of deep-fried pineapple chunks topped with strawberries, strawberry sauce, and banana-flavored whipped cream flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen.  So when you were eating it, smoke would come out of your nose or mouth when you exhaled.

The creator of deep-fried butter has found such success as a concessionaire that he quit his job as a computer analyst, which he had done for 14 years.  Supposedly he works for about 3 weeks a year now.  I knew concession stands at fairs were highly profitable, but had no idea you could make that kind of money.  Perhaps I need to take that up as a job on the side… I can come up with some great deep-fried goodness.  🙂