My cousin Thorin just sent me some postcards with this excerpt from The Honolulu Star Advertiser...sigh, lol! -

The Central Pacific Region, which includes the Hawaiian islands, is expected to experience another season of below-average tropical cyclone activity, the Central Pacific Hurricane Center announced today.

The Center, along with the National Weather Service, has predicted there will be a 70 percent chance of the Central Pacific having a below average season, a 25 percent chance of having a normal season, and just a 5 percent chance of having an above normal season.

The season begins June 1 and goes through Nov. 30.

Spring rain is a good thing...

By Dr. Karen Becker -

Cats require specialized care, which is a fact even many cat lovers don't realize.

Ten common mistakes people owned by cats make:

1.  Using products intended for dogs on their cat. Under certain circumstances, this can prove to be a fatal mistake. Never assume any product designed for dogs is safe for cats as well. Use only products that clearly state they are safe for kitties. (That includes catnip.)

2.  Giving human medications. This, too, can prove fatal. Always consult your veterinarian before medicating your kitty. (Or getting it drunk.)

3.  Allowing Fluffy to grow obese. Over half the domesticated cats in the U.S. are overfed and under-exercised. (Even I disagree with this one...lol.)

4.  Inattention to the litter box. Cats are extremely clean creatures. They don't like dirty, smelly litter. They also have individual preferences when it comes to types of litter and litter boxes. (Get cleaning human.)

5.  Taking a hands-off approach to your cat. It's true kitties are independent and self-sufficient by nature, but your furry feline still needs your help with brushing or combing, nail trims, dental hygiene and even the occasional bath. (pamper me dang it...)

6.  Not taking Garfield to the vet for regular wellness checkups. Just because kitty doesn't like to visit the vet (or even leave the house) doesn't mean he shouldn't. Housecats are much less likely to see a vet regularly than their canine counterparts, to the detriment of their good health. (Again, I totally disagree...lol.)

7. Feeding dry food. Dry kibble is hands-down the worst thing you can feed your precious kitty. Most brands are devoid of exactly the kind of nourishment your cat needs to be healthy all her life. If you're feeding your cat dry food, I recommend you start today to make gradual improvements in her diet. (Or cheezburgers!)

8. Misinterpreting behavior changes in your kitty. Cats are stoic creatures. As a result, it can be challenging to know when your favorite feline isn't feeling well. One thing to look for is any change in his behavior, and in particular his litter box habits. Never assume a kitty that suddenly starts eliminating outside his box is misbehaving just to misbehave. Something about his health or his environment is causing the change, and he's depending on you to help him sort it out. (That's not what I meant...)

9.  Assuming it's normal for your cat to throw up. It's not. While it's true too many cats vomit too often, throwing up is a sign of an underlying problem that requires attention. There are reasons kitties throw up. Hairballs are just one of them. (Only where you walk in it human.)

10.  Not brushing those tiny teeth. Dental disease is one of the most common reasons cats visit the vet, and also one of the most costly. Dental disease isn't always confined to the mouth, either. It can lead to a host of other health problems for your furry feline. (Try it, I DARE you...lol!)

Dr. Karen Becker is a proactive and integrative wellness veterinarian. You can visit her site at: MercolaHealthyPets.com.

Her goal is to help you create wellness in order to prevent illness in the lives of your pets. This proactive approach seeks to save you and your pet from unnecessary stress and suffering by identifying and removing health obstacles even before disease occurs. Unfortunately, most veterinarians in the United States are trained to be reactive. They wait for symptoms to occur, and often treat those symptoms without addressing the root cause.

By reading Dr. Becker's information, you'll learn how to make impactful, consistent lifestyle choices to improve your pet's quality of life.

For more by Dr. Karen Becker, click here.

For more on pet health, click here.

From The Daily Beast - “We've had a tough go of it this last year,” Cumulus CEO Lew Dickey said Tuesday morning. “The facts are indisputable regarding the impact certain things have had on ad dollars." Dickey told analysts on the earnings call that his radio empire’s revenue was down $5.6 million in the first quarter of 2013 on top of a boatload of debt. Why? Parse the weasel words (“the impact of certain things”) and you’ll see that Dickey is blaming one man for the precipitous decline of right-wing talk radio’s profitability: Rush Limbaugh. El Rushbo is still a giant in the industry, but the impact of slamming Sandra Fluke on his radio show one year ago persists—with some $2.4 million in losses attributed by Dickey to declines in the “syndicated-talk segment.” Insiders confirm that these declines are primarily due to the ongoing reluctance of national advertisers to attach their name to the toxic talk-radio format that first made Limbaugh famous a generation ago. “We’re watching the end of right-wing conservative talk radio,” says Jerry Del Colliano, publisher of the radio-industry tip sheet Inside Music Media. “The genre is dying among ratings and dying among advertisers ... Rush is at the end of his career. His constituency is all wearing Depends. And he’s getting himself into trouble he doesn’t need. So can you put Humpty Dumpty back together again? They have been able to improve their advertising picture, but they have not been able to come back.” “Sandra Fluke was simply the lightning that struck and hit an old building that collapsed,” Colliano says. “She didn’t do it. She helped to bring it down at the end, but it was falling apart on its own.” Rush slammed the 30-year-old graduate student Sandra Fluke last year, referring to her as a “slut” and a “prostitute” in response to her call to have her university provide insurance that covered contraceptives. He then doubled down on the attack in unusually creepy terms: “If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it, and I’ll tell you what it is: we want you to post the videos online so we can all watch." The blowback was immediate. Elected Republicans, usually loathe to offend the influential talker, distanced themselves from his comments. But more powerful was the boycott that ensued, with 98 advertisers pulling their support for the show. The numbers announced on Tuesday made clear the impact of the boycott. Rush's comments on Fluke came on Feb 29, leap day of last year, so the Cumulus numbers offer an apples-to-apples comparison: pre-Fluke and post-Fluke. While some advertisers have come back, the show has been unable to regain its footing, and the impact has spread across right-wing talk radio as advertisers have became increasingly gun-shy about association with the genre. “We’ve had concerned advertisers, and some have requested they not be placed in the Limbaugh show,” said an employee of one Midwest radio station, who declined to be named due to company policies. “But it’s more of an annoyance—a pain in the butt ... It’s pretty obvious as a listener. You hear the same national ads over and over, like LifeLock and Dick Morris’s ObamaCare Survival Guide.” The increasingly public posturing struggle between Cumulus and Limbaugh takes place as Rush & Co. seem likely to jump from the flagship New York AM station WABC—which Dickey took care to tout as “leading the pack in New York”—to the AM station WOR at the end of the year, when his contract expires. But the larger issue is the declining demographics of the right-wing talk-radio racket. “Look at the millennial generation,” says Colliano. “There’s 80 million of them coming of age. They don’t see color. They don’t see gender. And they’re civic minded: they don’t like bloviating. They don’t like yelling and screaming. So you tell me: how’s right-wing talk radio working for them?” As in the past, the aging right-wing talkers—several of whom are represented by Limbaugh’s agent and brother David—will angrily dispute any decline in their profitability or ratings. It’s all become part of their self-serving kabuki, but Colliano dismisses their reflexive playing of the victim card. “They read the ratings the way they read the Gallup ratings right before the Obama victory. It’s their metrics; it’s their way. But its not backed by fact.” By John Avlon -

It's that time of the year! - From eater.com

Is Austin's Franklin Barbecue about to get the highest honor in Texan smoked meats? Every five years Texas Monthly releases a list of the 50 best barbecue restaurants in the state, and every five years it causes a Texas-sized sh!%storm of people who agree/disagree with the rankings. The latest update will be released with the magazine's June issue, with the full list available online on Wednesday. Today they released the cover, and lo and behold: there's Aaron Franklin's signature brisket, ribs and sausage.

This is the first time Franklin Barbecue has even been eligible for the list: the original Franklin trailer opened in 2009, a full year after the last Texas Monthly Top 50 list crowned the then little-known Snow's in Lexington, Texas number one. Debuting at the top would be an incredible feat for the restaurant. Of course, there is no guarantee that cover placement means Franklin has the top slot. Stay tuned.

By Paula Forbes -  

For four and a half years the teabaggers have been spewing the same old thing.  Take a hint baggers; nobody believes your nonsense.

But here in Beeville you don't want to drink it.  Let's face it, pouring money into systems to make the water below us drinkable is not very economical.  BUY your drinking water (it's actually cheaper and healthier), and use this stuff coming out of the tap for washing.  It's called COMMON SENSE.  I know, I know, we seem to have a shortage on that too...

From Patch.com

Happy Mother's Day to all of you moms out there! Here are some fun facts about Mother's Day that you may not know about, courtesy the U.S. Census Bureau. 

How Did Mother's Day Begin?

The driving force behind Mother's Day was Anna Jarvis, who organized observances in Grafton, W.Va., and Philadelphia on May 10, 1908. As the annual celebration became popular around the country, Jarvis asked members of Congress to set aside a day to honor mothers. She finally succeeded in 1914, when Congress designated the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day.

How Many Mothers?

85.4 million

Estimated number of mothers in the United States in 2009. Source: Survey of Income and Program Participation, unpublished tabulations

4.1 million

Number of women between the ages of 15 and 50 who gave birth in the past 12 months. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2011 American Community Survey

53%

Percentage of 15- to 44-year-old women who were mothers in 2010. Source: Fertility of American Women: 2010

81%

Percentage of women who had become mothers by age 40 to 44 as of 2010. In 1976, 90 percent of women in that age group had given birth. Source: Fertility of American Women: 2010

How Many Children

2,449

The total fertility rate or estimated number of total births per 1,000 women in Utah in 2010 (based on current birth rates by age), which led the nation. At the other end of the spectrum is Rhode Island, with a total fertility rate of 1,630.5 births per 1,000 women. Source: National Center for Health Statistics

20%

Percentage of all women age 15 to 44 who have had two children. About 47 percent had no children, 17 percent had one, 10 percent had three and about 5 percent had four or more. Source: Fertility of American Women: 2010, Detailed Tables

Recent Births

3.954 million

Number of births registered in the United States in 2011. Of this number, 329,797 were to teens 15 to 19 and 7,651 to women age 45 to 49.  Source: National Center for Health Statistics

25.4

Average age of women in 2010 when they gave birth for the first time, up from 25.2 years in 2009. The increase in the mean age from 2009 to 2010 reflects, in part, the relatively large decline in births to women under age 25. Source: National Center for Health Statistics

Jacob and Sophia

The most popular baby names for boys and girls, respectively, in 2011. Source: Social Security Administration 

68

Number of births in the past year per 1,000 women age 15 to 50 with a graduate or professional degree. The number was 57 per 1,000 for women whose highest level of education was a bachelor’s degree. Source: 2011 American Community Survey, American FactFinder

Mothers Remembered

16,182

Number of florist establishments nationwide in 2010. The 70,575 employees in floral shops across our nation will be especially busy preparing, selling and delivering floral arrangements for Mother’s Day. Source: County Business Patterns: 2010 

The flowers bought for mom have a good chance of having been grown in California. Among the 15 surveyed states, California was the leading provider of cut flowers in 2009, accounting for 75 percent of domestic flower production ($269 million out of $359 million at wholesale value) in those states. (The data pertain only to operations with sales greater than or equal to $100,000.) Source: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service

23,739

Number of jewelry stores in the United States in 2010 — the place to purchase necklaces, earrings and other timeless pieces for mom. Source: County Business Patterns: 2010 

By Sunde Farquhar

Tomorrow, Friday May 10, is commencement day at Coastal Bend College.  Congratulations to all the graduates!

From NASA -

WASHINGTON --  NASA is inviting members of the public to submit their names and a personal message online for a DVD to be carried aboard a spacecraft that will study the Martian upper atmosphere.

The DVD will be in NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which is scheduled for launch in November. The DVD is part of the mission's Going to Mars Campaign coordinated at the University of Colorado at Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (CU/LASP).

The DVD will carry every name submitted. The public also is encouraged to submit a message in the form of a three-line poem, or haiku. However, only three haikus will be selected. The deadline for all submissions is July 1. An online public vote to determine the top three messages to be placed on the DVD will begin July 15.

"The Going to Mars campaign offers people worldwide a way to make a personal connection to space, space exploration, and science in general, and share in our excitement about the MAVEN mission," said Stephanie Renfrow, lead for the MAVEN Education and Public Outreach program at CU/LASP.

Participants who submit their names to the Going to Mars campaign will be able to print a certificate of appreciation to document their involvement with the MAVEN mission.

"This new campaign is a great opportunity to reach the next generation of explorers and excite them about science, technology, engineering and math," said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator from CU/LASP. "I look forward to sharing our science with the worldwide community as MAVEN begins to piece together what happened to the Red Planet's atmosphere."

MAVEN is the first spacecraft devoted to exploring and understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. The spacecraft will investigate how the loss of Mars' atmosphere to space determined the history of water on the surface.

"This mission will continue NASA's rich history of inspiring and engaging the public in spaceflight in ongoing Mars exploration," said David Mitchell, MAVEN project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

MAVEN's principal investigator is based at the University of Colorado at Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. The university will provide science operations, science instruments and lead Education and Public Outreach. Goddard manages the project and provides two of the science instruments for the mission. Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colo., built the spacecraft and is responsible for mission operations. The University of California at Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory provides science instruments for the mission. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., provides navigation support, the Deep Space Network and the Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations.

To participate in the Going to Mars campaign, visit 

http://lasp.colorado.edu/maven/goingtomars

For more information on MAVEN, visit:  

http://www.nasa.gov/maven