Fake rice: cheap, mass produced and toxic

What do you get when you mix potatoes, sweet potatoes and plastic? Mass produced and distributed rice.

The Korea Times reports that the Weekly Hong Kong quotes a Singapore media article that the fake, toxic rice is selling like hot cakes in Taiyuan, Shaanxi Province.

The rice is made by shaping potatoes and sweet potatoes like rice, then adding in an industrial strength synthetic resin. One Chinese official said that if you eat three bowls of this rice, you’ve eaten the equivalent of one vinyl bag. The fake rice is hard like stone, even when cooked, and “very harmful to the human body.”

The rice is hugely profitable and still sold in mass quantities, despite its discovery to be harmfully fake.

Kudos to Mike Elgan for finding this tidbit. How long before this rice hits US grocery shelves?

Beached Piano ‘Testament to Music’

The Coast Guard says that a grand piano, perched on the highest point of a sandbar at Biscayne Bay in Miami, Fla, is not a navigational hazard and therefore has no plans to remove it. There since last week, it’s probably not in tune, and no one knows who put it there.

Rumors abound. The New World Symphony opens this week, so is it a publicity stunt? Was it a prop left behind after filming a Kayne video? Or, was it a child’s imagination: "The Little Mermaid was not a work of fiction and the musically inclined lobsters and crabs dragged the piano out themselves." The NY Times even wants to put the person responsible on its list of 100 Creatives.

So, the piano picturesquely stands as a testament to music. It’s a nice change from the usual news story.

Major earthquake in Arkansas not “if” but “when”

This photo was taken in 1904 in Clay County, Arkansas and shows a fault trench left by the New Madrid Fault Line earthquakes of 1811-1812. Those earthquakes are known as the largest, greatest natural disaster the US has ever known and some say equaled the energy produced by one thousand atom bombs.

David Maxwell, the Director of the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management, predicts that an earthquake of the same magnitude will hit again:

"There will definitely be casualties, and depending on the time of day, we've got studies that run a model that show we would have a substantial fatalities, certainly a large number of people injured.”

Though a major earthquake has yet to hit, more than 500 temblors have occurred since September around Guy, Arkansas. Not new news for the state, but now getting national coverage and attention from CNN. Many question whether the recent increase in frakking for natural gas along the Fayetteville Shale Play, in particular, the practice of injecting drill water back into the earth via disposal wells, is behind the exponential increase in seismic activity.

“I think everyone recognizes that there is an increased number of seismic events occurring in and around this area. If you look at the maps, at least circumstantially, there appears to be evidence that they may be related to disposal operations," said Shane Khoury, deputy director and general counsel for the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission. "But we also know that this is an area that is historically active."

In not a matter of “if,” but a matter of when a major quake along the New Madrid Fault Line will happen.  In Spring, 2011, state and federal agencies will conduct a large-scale simulation of a natural disaster in order to practice earthquake response.

The Arkansas Dept of Emergency Management asks that everyone help by becoming as prepared as possible, and has put together an earthquake preparedness guideline for you.