The Lighter Side of the News

[gwillybj]

and wild beavers in North America!

The New York Times
Science
Reversing Course on Beavers
By JIM ROBBINS
OCT. 27, 2014

BUTTE, Mont. — Once routinely trapped and shot as varmints, their dams obliterated by dynamite and bulldozers, beavers are getting new respect these days. Across the West, they are being welcomed into the landscape as a defense against the withering effects of a warmer and drier climate.


In Washington State, beavers are being trapped and relocated to the headwaters of the Yakima River. Credit Manuel Valdes/Associated Press

Beaver dams, it turns out, have beneficial effects that can’t easily be replicated in other ways. They raise the water table alongside a stream, aiding the growth of trees and plants that stabilize the banks and prevent erosion. They improve fish and wildlife habitat and promote new, rich soil.

And perhaps most important in the West, beaver dams do what all dams do: hold back water that would otherwise drain away.

“People realize that if we don’t have a way to store water that’s not so expensive, we’re going to be up a creek, a dry creek,” said Jeff Burrell, a scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society in Bozeman, Mont. “We’ve lost a lot with beavers not on the landscape.”

For thousands of years, beavers, which numbered in the tens of millions in North America, were an integral part of the hydrological system. “The valleys were filled with dams, as many as one every hundred yards,” Mr. Burrell said. “They were pretty much continuous wetlands.”

But the population plummeted, largely because of fur trapping, and by 1930 there were no more than 100,000 beavers, almost entirely in Canada. Lately the numbers have rebounded to an estimated six million.

Now, even as hydroelectric and reservoir dams are coming under fire for their wholesale changes to the natural environment, an appreciation for the benefits of beaver dams — even artificial ones — is on the rise.

Experts have long known of the potential for beaver dams to restore damaged landscapes, but in recent years the demand has grown so rapidly that government agencies are sponsoring a series of West Coast workshops and publishing a manual on how to attract beavers.

“We can spend a lot of money doing this work, or we can use beavers for almost nothing,” Mr. Burrell said.

Beavers are ecosystem engineers. As a family moves into new territory, the rodents drop a large tree across a stream to begin a new dam, which also serves as their lodge. They cover it with sticks, mud and stones, usually working at night. As the water level rises behind the dam, it submerges the entrance and protects the beavers from predators.

This pooling of water leads to a cascade of ecological changes. The pond nourishes young willows, aspens and other trees — prime beaver food — and provides a haven for fish that like slow-flowing water. The growth of grass and shrubs alongside the pond improves habitat for songbirds, deer and elk.

Moreover, because dams raise underground water levels, they increase water supplies and substantially lower the cost of pumping groundwater for farming.

And they help protect fish imperiled by rising water temperatures in rivers. The deep pools formed by beaver dams, with cooler water at the bottom, are “outstanding rearing habitat for juvenile coho salmon,” said Michael M. Pollock, a fish biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle, who has studied the ecological effects of beaver dams for 20 years.

Restoration is not usually as simple as bringing beavers in; if left unchecked, they can do serious damage. Here in Butte, for example, beavers constantly dammed a creek where it ran through a culvert under a pedestrian walkway, flooding nearby homes and a park.

Enter the “beaver deceiver.” Beavers have evolved to respond to the sound of running water by trying to stop it, because their survival depends on a full pond. (A Yellowstone National Park biologist reported that when he briefly kept a beaver in his basement with plans to reintroduce it to a local stream, it kept frantically clawing at its cage to reach the sound of a flushing toilet.) So local officials installed the deceiver, a large wooden frame covered with stout metal mesh that blocks beavers’ access to the culvert but allows water to keep flowing. Even if they try to dam up the box, the water will still flow, and eventually they give up and move on.

Meanwhile, big, prized cottonwoods and other trees are being wrapped in wire or covered with paint that contains sand to prevent beavers from gnawing them.

In some other places, humans are building beaver dams minus the beavers. On Norwegian Creek, a tiny thread of a stream that flows through the rolling grassy hills on a cattle ranch near Harrison, Mont., volunteers came together recently to build a series of small structures from willow branches to slow the flow of water that had been eroding the banks to a depth of 10 feet or more. In just a year the stream bed has risen three feet, Mr. Burrell said, and in a couple more years it could be entirely restored at virtually no cost.

New dams, even natural ones, can have unintended consequences. Julian D. Olden, an ecologist at the University of Washington, has studied new beaver ponds in Arizona and found that they were perfect for invasive fish such as carp, catfish and bass to displace native species.

“There’s a lot of unknowns before we can say what the return of beavers means for these arid ecosystems,” he said. “The assumption is it’s going to be good in all situations,” he added. “But the jury is still out, and it’s going to take a couple of decades.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/science/reversing-course-on-beavers.html

[Geo]

 

[gwillybj]

BBC News
Strange & Beautiful
Termites or Gophers: Who Made the Mima Mounds?
Presented by Jane Palmer

These strange hillocks might be the work of gophers, termites, or something else entirely

Mima mounds, mima mounds everywhere (Credit: Morgan Davis, CC by 2.0)
Standing in a native prairie near the city of Olympia, Washington, the view resembles an expanse of giant grass-covered bubble wrap. Broad, metre-high hillocks stand in formation, in line but not touching, across more than 600 acres of land, providing an oasis of green in the otherwise shrub-infested grasslands.
These humps are called mima mounds and they're believed to have dominated the landscape for thousands of years. Charles Wilkes, a US naval officer and explorer, thought they were ancient Indian burial mounds when he first encountered them in 1841, but when he ordered his men to dig up three mounds they found no bones, only a "pavement of round stones". Native American legends say a falling star dropped them like pebbles onto the earth and modern day urban myths say they are the work of aliens.
Over the last 150 years, the explanations have become less fanciful but no more conclusive. Mima mounds continue to mystify natives and scientists alike.
While the mima mounds in Washington draw tourists in hordes, they're far from unique — similar formations exist in other US states and on every continent except Antarctica. They are known as hogwallow mounds in California and Oregon, prairie mounds in New Mexico and Colorado, and pimple mounds in the southeastern states. The South Africans call their sandy hill-like features "heuweltjies", or little hills, and the Brazilians call the places they occur "campos de murundus", or mound fields.
So when is a mound a mima mound?
"Mima mound refers to very specific features that we find in the western US, one or two metres high, about seven to 10 metres wide, very circular, very symmetrical and when you find them there are thousands of them," says Emmanuel Gabet, a geomorphologist at San Jose State University in California.
Scientists call other larger, broader, flatter, less circular and more dispersed mounds mima-like mounds.
No mere curiosity, these puzzling mounds create their very own ecosystem. In the western US, for example, fresh water pools known as vernal pools collect between them, allowing a variety of endemic animals and plants to thrive.
On the plains of South Africa, millions of mima-like mounds that cover a vast area are home to distinctive flaura and fauna. "If you consider that many of our landscapes here are very nutrient-poor, you have these landscapes that are occupied by the mima mounds that are relatively nutrient-rich," says Michael Cramer, a biologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. "So they are a really important part of the ecosystem."

But while scientists agree on the ecological importance of the mounds, they don't necessarily agree on their origins. Multiple theories have been proposed, including earthquakes, glacial flooding, gas venting, whirlpools, and the shrinking and swelling of clays. Some suggested causes have persisted since the late 19th century, such as the idea that gophers or termites created them or that they are formed by the accumulation of wind-blown sediments around clumps of vegetation.
"One of the challenges with mima mounds is that, in many cases they are actually very old, and that makes it very difficult to work out what might have been going on," Cramer says. Scientists estimate that some of the mounds could be as much as 30,000 years old with an undisputed slow growth rate that presents a challenge for traditional field experiments.
"The difficulty here is thinking of a way to test any of these ideas," says Cramer. "What experiments are you going to be doing? What are the measurements that you should be taking to determine whether it is actually gophers or termites or plants that are causing these mounds?"
It's a problem that Gabet decided to try to overcome from the comfort of his desk. Rather than heading to the fields to observe the mounds grow at glacial speed, he created a computer model to create a virtual "mima mound world". His starting point was a study by George W. Cox of San Diego State University in 1987. Cox believed that pocket gophers — burrowing rodents that weigh less than a quarter of a pound (100g) and sport fur-lined "pockets" in their cheeks — were pushing soil uphill to create the mounds. To test the theory he seeded the soil with metal tracers in a mima mound field in San Diego. Using a metal detector, Cox found that the soil moved uphill. Assuming gophers were doing the moving, this implied they were purposefully building them.
Gabet used information from Cox's study, building information about soil conditions and gopher behaviour into his model. "It basically simulates the gophers searching for the nearest high spot and then pushing of the soils towards that high spot," he says.
Gabet then pushed the "time machine button", sat back, and watched what would happen in the decades and centuries to come. "The first time I ran it, the mounds were starting to emerge. I was just stunned."
The mounds built by the digital gophers bore a striking resemblance to the real thing in terms of height, width and spacing, Gabet says. But why would animals that typically only leave piles of earth in their wake bother with such a giant construction project?
"The idea is that the gophers are more likely to build up these habitats where the soil would be less saturated," says Sarah Reed, an environmental scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
Gophers are half blind and avoid going above ground because of the threat posed by predators, Reed says. But as landscapes age the habitable soil layer becomes thinner and the foundational layer hardens to the point where, when it rains, the topsoil becomes saturated. This leaves the soil levels in which the gophers live without sufficient oxygen.
"These gophers spend 99% of their lives underground so they are very easily affected by any changes in the soil," Reed says. The theory is they build up the mounds to get above the water table.
Hard Work
Faced with skeptics who suggested gophers were incapable of summoning the energy to build the humps, Reed designed a model to estimate how much energy it would take for one of them to dig through the soil and push it uphill to create a mound. She then balanced this effort against its energy intake. "I found from an energetic perspective it is entirely feasible," she says.
Gabet is certainly confident the mystery is solved. "The gold standard for any scientific theory is: Does it match the facts and the observations?" And so far the gopher theory does that at least on the west coast, according to Gabet. "So I feel like we've nailed it, but as far as mounds forming elsewhere, it could be other burrowing animals or it could be a plant-based theory."
Where does that leave those trying to explain similar features in other, gopher-less places? In drier climates the prevailing theory has been that termites build them, much like the African Macrotermes termite species that build large conical structures up to nine metres high.
"These termites do different things in different environments," says Joe McAuliffe, an ecologist and research director at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona. "Sometimes they'll build very small conical nests no more than a metre high, almost as hard as concrete. It is a protective because all kinds of animals, including aardvarks, will have them as their dinner."
It was a theory Cramer didn't question until he went on a tour of the mima-like mounds near Cape Town. "I noticed that there were quite big rocks on the surface of the mounds," he says. "It was kind of hard to explain how the rocks would get onto these mounds courtesy of a termite."
McAuliffe is also skeptical because the amount of soil in a mima-like mound two meters high and 30 metres wide would be immense. "It is massive and how could, even over thousands of years, a colony of termites move that amount of soil into a central place?" he asks.
Interest piqued, Cramer then developed a hypothesis based on earlier research done in the US and inspired by the regular pattern of the mounds in the landscape. His idea was that individual plants, or clumps of plants, spread their roots and drained the surrounding soil of water and nutrients. As the plants competed for resources, the emerging landscape was one of vegetation clumps at regular intervals — not so close to run dry of water or nutrients, but close enough to make best use of the soil's assets.
These plants spurred the creation of nutrient-rich islands surrounded by barren soil that encouraged tall, thick vegetation and attracted opportunistic animals such as termites and porcupines. According to Cramer, one of two processes might then be responsible for the formation of mima-like mounds: as the wind whips across the desert, the plants either protect their island from erosion, leaving a standing butte-like mound, or they capture wind-blown sediment which accumulates over time.
McAuliffe believes in the latter theory. "The dense, tall vegetation reduces wind velocity and causes the windblown it is carrying to drop," McAuliffe says. "So that occurs over hundreds and thousands of years and you eventually have a two metre high little hill."
And rather than discounting the termites, McAuliffe believes they play a critical role in the process by bringing in plant nutrients and helping to build up the vegetation. "You have to go past some critical point where you can have a flush of vegetation so the wind breaks are there," he says. "So termites probably do play a very important role in how this whole thing gets moving."
Cramer, with his colleagues at the University of Cape Town, plans to investigate where stone layers occur in the mounds as an indication as to whether the mounds have been deposited by the wind or not, and also to look more closely at what causes their regular spacing.
"One of the questions that we are wrestling with is what actually drives that spacing," Cramer says. "Is it just competition between plants or is there more to it?"
One Solution Fits All?
So could the vegetation-wind theory be behind North America's mima mounds too?
"Hills of dirt are a fairly generic feature and part of the confusion comes about from trying to state that all these different types of features are formed by the same process," Gabet says. "So the ones found on other continents, those are probably not strictly mima mounds."
But other researchers believe mound-like formations across the globe at least partially share common causes.
"I think there is more than one thing going on, and in particular I think there is an interplay between erosion and deposition," Cramer says. "I think those two things might play out differently in different circumstances, but I am pretty convinced that vegetation patterning is at the heart of it."
And while Reed is a strong believer in the gopher hypothesis, she recognizes it is far from proven.
"Part of the intrigue of the mima mounds is the controversy," she says. "There has been more than a century of controversy, and I don't think there is enough evidence to immediately stop the controversy at this point in time."

[gwillybj]

Yahoo! News | Odd News | see video at site
Adorable Baby Bat Hospital Will Change the Way You Think About Bats
By Mia Fitzharris
November 7, 2014 1:48 PM

Over the years, bats have gotten a pretty bad rep. Halloween doesn't really help the cause either. Bats don't conjure up cuddly images in your mind the way kittens and puppies always do — until now.



The Tolga Bat Hospital in Atherton, Australia, is showing the tiny creatures in an adorable new light. The hospital rescues and releases hundreds of baby fruit bats each year, thanks in part to the volunteers who travel hundreds of miles to the nonprofit center. About 300 bat pups are orphaned in the area annually, usually when their mother becomes too sick to feed them or they fall ill to tick paralysis.

The care for the winged babies is very similar to that of human babies. They drink milk from a bottle, love to be swaddled in a blanket, and are bathed in a sink. After a bath, baby bats also have their fur combed.



In addition to caring for babies, Tolga also rehabilitates injured adults. Some bats even come here to retire after a long career at a zoo. Here's a travel tip: If you find yourself in Far North Queensland, you can actually visit the little guys.

The hospital, which offers tours, charges $18 for adults and $10 for kids.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/oddnews/adorable-baby-bat-hospital-will-change-the-way-you-think-about-bats-184825729.html

[Geo]

First thought those were dog pups.

[gwillybj]

A follow-up story.

BBC News | Devon
14 November 2014 Last updated at 02:37 ET
Beavers on River Otter in Devon Could Stay Free

Beavers living on the River Otter in Devon could be allowed to remain in the wild if free of disease.

The government had intended to capture six beavers, test for disease and re-home them in captivity.

It is unclear where the beavers came from, but campaigners say they should be allowed to stay.

The government has now indicated that the beavers could be tested near the river and released if disease-free.

In October, environmental charity Friends of the Earth, launched a legal challenge over the government's claim that the beavers were non-native, could be diseased, and should be removed.

It is believed the group, including three juveniles born this year, are the only wild beavers in England.

'Positive Steps'

A spokeswoman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said: "Our priority has been to ensure humane treatment for the beavers while safeguarding human health, so we'll be testing the beavers close to the River Otter which will be better for their welfare than moving them elsewhere.



"We have a licence to capture the beavers, which we need to do to test them humanely for the disease EM (Echinococcus multilocularis) which has the potential to be very harmful to human health should it become established in the UK."

She said that the government agency Natural England was "expected to make a decision soon" on an application by Devon Wildlife Trust for the beavers to be released if clear of the disease.

FoE campaigner Alasdair Cameron said: "These are positive steps in the right direction, but until this issue is resolved, we will continue to make the case for these beavers to remain free."

A wild population of more than 150 animals has established itself on the River Tay in Perthshire, in the east of Scotland, while a smaller official trial reintroduction project has been taking place in west Scotland over the past few years.

[gwillybj]

BBC News
Russia: Passengers 'Get Out and Push' Frozen Plane
By News from Elsewhere...
...media reports from around the world, found by BBC Monitoring
26 November 2014 Last updated at 06:32 ET


Homeward bound: Frozen brake pads were no match for these passengers

Passengers due to take a flight in Siberia had to get out and push the aircraft after its brake pads froze solid, it's reported.

The plane was trying to take off from the Russian town of Igarka, but was unable to move after the temperature fell to -52C (-62F), the RIA Novosti news agency reports. Passengers on board the flight, many of them shift workers, apparently offered to lend a hand, fearing that otherwise their journey home would be delayed, The Siberian Times reports. The Katekavia airline flight later took off and landed safely in the city of Krasnoyarsk. "According to the initial account, the air temperature dropped to -52C, and the braking system in the plane's landing gear froze in the parking position," Oxana Gorbunova, a senior aide at the Western Siberia state transport prosecutor's office, tells RIA Novosti. "The pushback tractor was unable to budge the aircraft onto the taxiway, and the passengers decided to help give it a push, which is not permitted, as this can damage the aircraft skin." Prosecutors are now checking whether the airport, the airline, the crew or the passengers broke any air safety laws.

Igarka lies 100 miles (161km) north of the Arctic Circle, so chilly winter temperatures are not unusual. But -52C is significantly colder than normal; the average low temperature is closer to -30C (-22F). Igarka's airport is a regional airline hub used by 100,000 passengers a year, many of them working in Russia's Arctic oil and gas fields.

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-30208605

[gwillybj]

Nevada Goats Help Eat, Recycle Christmas Trees



RENO, Nev. (AP) — Goats are known to eat just about anything, but it didn't dawn on Vince Thomas until recently that the menu might include Christmas trees.

"They'll eat the pine needles and leave the skeleton of the tree," said Thomas, a longtime volunteer firefighter who has come up with a new use for his family-owned goat herding business, "Goat Grazers."

"It basically looks like Charlie Brown's Christmas with a scrawny tree that has nothing but the branches," he told the Reno Gazette-Journal (http://tinyurl.com/kctx67s).

Thomas is launching a new program with the Truckee Meadows Fire Protection District on Friday to use his 40 goats to help recycle Christmas trees.

He says he got tired of watching people discard the trees in landfills or dump them on public property, where they became a fire danger.

"It was amazing to me to see how many Christmas trees people would just toss out there," he said.

Thomas said his goats have been used in the past to help graze in areas with fire-prone weeds along the Sierra's eastern front.

"We thought, 'What a great way to get rid of the weeds,'" he said. "We had the idea of doing just that with the recycling program and we thought about the trees.

"And the goats are great employees, they love their job and they don't complain."

Thomas said he noticed not long ago that no weeds were growing at his daughter's home in Spanish Springs northeast of Reno where she raises rabbits, pigs and goats.

"It was my daughter's goats. They ate every single weed in our yard," he said. He became curious and tossed a piece of pine tree to the goats, and they devoured it — pine needles and all.

"I did a lot of research on that, and it's OK for the goats," Thomas said. "With cattle and some of the other animals, it can cause miscarriages. But for goats, it's a natural dewormer, and pine is very high in vitamin C, so it's healthy for them."

Keep Truckee Meadows Beautiful is among a number of groups in the area that recycle trees and are glad to have the help from the goats.

"A lot of people dump it out on the desert and that's really a problem because people think it's a natural thing and it will decompose," said J Merriman, communications manager for the group that has been chopping recycled trees into mulch for 24 years. "But because we're out in the desert, they don't decompose, it will just get drier and drier and it really becomes a serious fire hazard."
http://news.yahoo.com/nevada-goats-help-eat-recycle-christmas-trees-184812588.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Hippo jumps from moving truck in Taiwan, startling locals
AFP  16 hours ago



An injured hippo lies on the ground after it jumped from a truck in Miaoli county, Taiwan, while being transported to a farm (AFP Photo/Ashley Kuan)



A hippo that panicked while being transported by truck in Taiwan jumped from the vehicle, breaking a leg and causing confused residents to report spotting a dinosaur on the loose.

Television footage showed the enormous animal lying on the road with a white fluid oozing from its eyes after it jumped through a truck window and landed on a parked car before falling onto the road on Friday.

The sound of the collision startled people nearby who flocked to see the animal and contacted the police in central Miaoli county.

One woman was quoted by the United Daily News as saying that she ran out of her house after hearing the crash and thought she saw "a dinosaur" lying on the road.

The truck driver was quoted by the newspaper as saying that he saw the hippo "flying out" of the vehicle after getting spooked during the drive.

The injured animal, named "A Ho" after the Chinese name for hippo Ho Ma, lay on the road for a few hours before being put into a cargo container and taken back to its farm in central Taichung city, officials said.

Taiwanese authorities said Saturday that the animal's owner could face a fine of up to Tw$75,000 (US$2,400) for violating animal protection laws after the hippo suffered a broken leg and damage to its teeth.

Local media said the hippo was a star attraction at its farm and had even appeared in a popular television soap opera several years ago.

http://news.yahoo.com/hippo-jumps-moving-truck-taiwan-startling-locals-080719580.html

[gwillybj]

Wild Ride for Arizona Bobcat Stuck in Car Grille
By The Associated Press
Published: January 4, 2015, 11:39 am
Updated: January 4, 2015, 7:10 pm

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (AP) — An Arizona bobcat may have used up one of its nine lives after it survived getting stuck inside an oncoming car.

Arizona Game and Fish Department spokeswoman Lynda Lambert said that the bobcat appears to have escaped any serious injuries and is awaiting evaluation by a veterinarian at an animal sanctuary in Scottsdale.

Officials say a couple driving in Scottsdale on Friday night hit the bobcat after it darted into their path.

Upon reaching their destination, the man inspected his Mazda sedan and saw the very much alive animal trapped in the plastic grille.

Game and Fish employees sedated the 7-pound animal and removed it.

Lambert says the bobcat will be released back into the wild.

Officials say its survival is a New Year’s miracle.
http://news10.com/ap/wild-ride-for-arizona-bobcat-stuck-in-car-grille/

[gwillybj]

'Dangerously Cold' Temperatures and Snow Across US
BBC News | US & Canada
7 January 2015 Last updated at 14:58 ET



Temperatures across much of the northern and eastern US are plunging to "dangerously cold" levels, the National Weather Service says.

High winds mean wind-chill temperatures are forecast to drop as low as -50F (-45C) in Minnesota.

The freeze has led to the closure or late running of schools from north to south, from the Dakotas to Alabama.

Winter weather warnings have been issued for 17 US states and for Ontario and southern Quebec.

In other developments:

• heavy snow and blizzards forecast in North and South Dakota
• temperatures will plunge to -44F (-42C) in Fargo, North Dakota
• schools are closed in Chicago, in -28F (-33C) temperatures
• a storm dumped about a foot (30cm) of snow in northern New York
• another foot of "lake-effect" snow is expected in parts of New York state over the next two days

In the north-east, temperatures were expected to drop further on Wednesday following an arctic blast of air that could produce wind gusts of up to 40mph (64km/h).

The National Weather Service warned "dangerously cold air" across the US combined with strong winds could result in frostbite if residents don't wear hats, scarves and gloves.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio urged residents to check in on neighbours and relatives who may be at risk.

School districts in Indiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota were also closed because of the cold.

Meanwhile in California, a winter heat wave has temperatures topping 80F (27C).

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30716563

Right now (4:25pm ET) it is +9F here near Lake George. It is expected to be 0 by 7pm, and -14 around 5am.

[gwillybj]

Really having to dig here...
Suspicious Package at NYC Bus Station Filled with 1K Condoms
Associated Press
Saturday, January 31, 2015

NEW YORK (AP) — Police say a suspicious package left behind a concrete barrier of a New York City bus station didn't contain any explosives but did have some unexpected contents — 1,000 individually packaged condoms for both men and women.

A spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police said Saturday that a canine unit was called Friday evening to the George Washington Bridge Bus Station.

Spokesman Joe Pentangelo says investigators with the help of the dogs checked out a silver messenger-style satchel that was left in the under-construction Manhattan depot. He says they cleared the bag of any explosives then looked inside to find condoms of multiple brands and styles.

He says no one has come forward to claim the bag and its contents.
http://news.yahoo.com/suspicious-package-nyc-bus-station-filled-1k-condoms-211005456.html

[gwillybj]

New Lottery Tickets Come with a Side of Bacon _ Scent
Associated Press By HOLLY RAMER
January 30, 2015 4:43 PM

HOOKSETT, N.H. (AP) — New Hampshire's new scratch-and-sniff lottery ticket is off to a sizzling start.

The $1 bacon-scented tickets with a top prize of $1,000 hit the market in early January. Lottery officials went with a conservative print run just in case they were a bust but now expect the tickets to sell out within three months. Sales are far outpacing other $1 scratch tickets, some of which have been for sale for as long as eight months.

New Hampshire isn't the first state to have a bacon-themed lottery ticket, or the first to have a scratch-and-sniff ticket. But it's apparently the first to combine the two.

Kelley-Jaye Rosberg, games manager for the New Hampshire Lottery, said officials first settled on the idea of an "I Heart Bacon" ticket, and only later decided to add the scent. Virginia also sells an "I Heart Bacon" ticket, but it costs $2 and is unscented.

Colorado lottery officials say their scratch-and-sniff offerings — coffee, chocolate and bouquet — from a few years ago were among their worst sellers, but Rosberg says bacon's pop culture cachet sets it apart.

"You can't get better than bacon. There's gingerbread, there's peppermint, chocolate, coffee — different states have played with different scents but nobody had played with bacon yet," she said. "Everybody likes bacon, and people who don't like bacon are almost afraid to admit it."



The state is promoting the new tickets by bringing The Bacon Truck, a Boston-based food truck, to various locations around the state to hand out free lottery tickets and actual strips of bacon. Those who tried both at a highway rest area Friday came away pleased, whether or not their tickets were winners.

"What's better than free bacon?" said Dale Mottram, 54 of Bedford. He didn't win anything, but said he would buy more tickets in the future.

"It smells very close to the bacon that's in my hand," he said. "It's fun."

Lauralee Lamontagne and Joan Farr, two friends from Manchester, made a special trip to Hooksett for the promotion, though both had purchased the tickets in recent weeks. Lamontagne, 48, said she has been sending them to friends.

Farr, 63, said she was skeptical of the scent before she tried it but is now a fan.

"It really smells like bacon," she said. "It was pretty surprising."
http://news.yahoo.com/lottery-tickets-come-side-bacon-scent-185400247.html

[Geo]

New saying: I love the smell of winning at breakfast.

[Buster's Uncle]

Coca-Cola pulls Twitter campaign after it was tricked into quoting Mein Kampf
#MakeItHappy campaign, which used an automatic algorithm to turn negative tweets into pictures of happy things, was hijacked by Gawker
The Guardian
Nicky Woolf in New York Thursday 5 February 2015 10.58 EST




For a couple of hours on Tuesday morning, Coca-Cola’s Twitter feed was broadcasting big chunks of Adolf Hitler’s text. Photograph: Wilfredo Lee/AP



Coca-Cola has been forced to withdraw a Twitter advertising campaign after a counter-campaign by Gawker tricked it into tweeting large chunks of the introduction to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

For the campaign, which was called “Make it Happy” and introduced in an ad spot during the Super Bowl, Coke invited people to reply to negative tweets with the hashtag “#MakeItHappy”.

The idea was that an automatic algorithm would then convert the tweets, using an encoding system called ASCII, into pictures of happy things – such as an adorable mouse, a palm tree wearing sunglasses or a chicken drumstick wearing a cowboy hat.

In a press release, Coca-Cola said its aim was to “tackle the pervasive negativity polluting social media feeds and comment threads across the internet”.

But Gawker, noticing that one response had the “14 words” white nationalist slogan re-published in the shape of a dog, had other ideas.

The media company’s editorial labs director, Adam Pash, created a Twitter bot, @MeinCoke, and set it up to tweet lines from Mein Kampf and then link to them with the #MakeItHappy tag – triggering Coca-Cola’s own Twitter bot to turn them into cutesy pictures.

The result was that for a couple of hours on Tuesday morning, Coca-Cola’s Twitter feed was broadcasting big chunks of Adolf Hitler’s text, albeit built in the form of a smiling banana or a cat playing a drum kit.

The bot made it as far as making Coke tweet the words “My father was a civil servant who fulfilled his duty very conscientiously” in the shape of a pirate ship with a face on its sails – wearing an eyepatch – before Coca-Cola’s account stopped responding.

By Wednesday, the campaign had been suspended entirely. In a statement to AdWeek, a spokesperson for Coca-Cola said: “The #MakeItHappy message is simple: the internet is what we make it, and we hoped to inspire people to make it a more positive place. It’s unfortunate that Gawker is trying to turn this campaign into something that it isn’t.”

The statement concluded: “Building a bot that attempts to spread hate through #MakeItHappy is a perfect example of the pervasive online negativity Coca-Cola wanted to address with this campaign.”

Coca-Cola is not the only company to have noticed pervasive negativity online. Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo wrote in an internal memo to staff that he was embarrassed by the company’s failure to deal with online trolls.

“We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years,” reads the memo, which was obtained by the Verge on Wednesday.

“I’m frankly ashamed of how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO. It’s absurd. There’s no excuse for it. I take full responsibility for not being more aggressive on this front. It’s nobody else’s fault but mine, and it’s embarrassing.

“We’re going to start kicking these people off right and left and making sure that when they issue their ridiculous attacks, nobody hears them.”

Coca-Cola is not the first corporate Twitter user to run into trouble over an automated bot created for advertising purposes. In November 2014, the New England Patriots were forced to apologise after an automatic bot was tricked into tweeting a racial slur from the official team account.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/feb/05/coca-cola-makeithappy-gakwer-mein-coke-hitler