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Summer Dreams – Art Print – Mitchell, Steven – Buy at AllPosters.com

Watermelon straight from the fridge is very refreshing in summer, but it can be fiddly to prepare and awkward to eat. Most of the complication is due to the many pips.

There are basically two approaches. You can leave the pips (seeds) in the melon, and deal with them at the time of eating, or you can prepare the melon so that most of the pips are removed.

If you are happy to leave the pips in the melon, you simply slice it into thin wedges and serve it outdoors. People take the slices in their fingers, bite off bits of the juicy flesh, and spit out the seeds onto the lawn or into the bushes. This approach works well at barbecues, particularly if people are prepared to stand as they eat, because then they can lean forwards and let any drips of juice fall onto the ground instead of onto their clothes.

If you want to serve something a bit more genteel, you need to de-pip the watermelon in advance. There are an enormous number of pips in a watermelon, but here are a couple of tips you can use to make the preparation much faster.

With a long, sharp knife chop off a piece of melon about 2 inches (50mm). You will see that the pattern of seeds is not at all random. The seeds fall in specific lines. The aim is to make the next series of cuts along those lines so that you expose most of the pips. Cut the melon into bite-size pieces along the pip-lines.

Each pip is anchored by a thread-like stem at one end, and you will find that some of your bite-size bits are pip-free already. Move those pieces to the serving bowl, and work through the rest one-by-one. For each piece, you need to remove the exposed pips. If you use a sharp-pointed fruit knife, you can cut-and-flick these pieces out quite quickly. The trick is to use the tip of the knife to sever the stem of the pip. As soon as you feel the stem break, change the movement of the knife to flick the pip out. With practice you can combine the cut and the flick into one smooth movement, and work your way rapidly along the line of pips.

Sometimes your cut-lines won’t be exact, and a seed is completely under the flesh. No problem. The flesh is slightly translucent so you can see where the pip is, and you will have already worked out at which end the pips are attached. Just push the tip of your knife into the melon with surgical precision to sever and eject the pip.

What to do with all the leftover pips? Around the world—but particularly in the United States and Australia—there are watermelon seed spitting competitions (video) and weird watermelon festivals.

This map provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shows the uneven distribution of lightning strikes across the planet. Units are in flashes per square kilometer per year. PD-GOV.

There are few common displays of nature that are more dramatic than lightning — happening in an instant, a lightning strike is hotter than the surface of the sun and creates a sound that sometimes can be heard as far away as 25 miles or 40 kilometers. It’s no wonder that since ancient times lightning has been associated with the gods, and that even today being caught in a thunderstorm can be a frightening experience.

Surprisingly, scientists are still learning precisely about how lightning is formed. Although researchers don’t know all the details of how, a lightning strike begins as part of the everyday cycle of water evaporation and condensation. Water on the Earth’s surface is warmed by the sun, causing it to evaporate, and the water molecules are eventually lifted high in the atmosphere, where they eventually condense to form clouds, which are nothing more than collections of tiny water droplets. As the water molecules rise, they collide with other molecules. In that process, some of the electrons — subatomic parties with a negative charge — are knocked off the rising water molecules. The result is that the rising water molecules are ionized, meaning that without all their electrons they have a positive charge, while the electrons left behind have a negative charge. The result is a huge disparity in charges — a positive charge on top of the cloud, a negative charge far below.

Under certain conditions, the differences in charges becomes so great, making the sky something like a huge battery — the positive “terminal” at top, the negative at the bottom. Nature doesn’t like such a great disparity in charges, and eventually under the right conditions the difference can become so great that the surplus of elections “breaks through” the air, forming what amounts to a gigantic spark.

This all happens quite quickly — the electrical bolt travels at about 60,000 miles or 100,000 kilometers per second. And that electric current creates so much heat — it is around 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit or 30,000 degrees Celsius — that it causes the area immediately around it to expand with explosive force, which we hear as thunder.

Most thunder strikes take place within clouds, but they can also hit the ground and cause considerable damage. About 100 lightning strikes occur each second somewhere on the planet. Lightning storms are most common in central Africa, but they occur over all the Earth’s land masses other than Antarctica.

Wisconsin holiday - State Street, Madison - courtesy puroticorico - CC-BY

Wisconsin tourism focuses mainly on water and there is a lot of it. Wisconsin borders Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Michigan.

But why don’t we start with something that is not about water. Loyal fans, great games, and loads of fun, Green Bay and Lambeau Field is a mecca for NFL fans.  Go behind the scenes on a tour of the field, browse the Green Bay Packers Pro Shop, or grab a beer at Curly’s Pub.

A four-season travel destination that offers both rural and urban vacations, Wisconsin owes most of its popularity to its natural beauty and waterways. Wisconsin is home to two Great Lakes, Superior and Michigan, as well as the world’s most famous river, the Mississippi, and 15,000 inland lakes.You will find North Woods fishing and hunting, cabins, campgrounds,  gambling casinos, golf resorts, ski resorts, snowmobiling, white water rafting, cheese, cheese head hats and of course beer. Wisconsin scenery includes dramatic river bluffs, forests, Great Lakes, lesser lakes and rolling pastures full of cattle. Milwaukee blends fine museums with its blue-collar factories, and some fairly small towns, Spring Green and Richland Center, are graced by the architectural wonders of native son Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wisconsin is full of urban experiences as well. Milwaukee offers performing arts, professional sports teams, ethnic festivals, nationally-acclaimed zoo, natural history museum, fine restaurants and shopping. Madison, the state’s capital, has the Capitol building, beautiful University of Wisconsin campus and bustling, creative atmosphere.

Whether your Wisconsin vacations are spent in Milwaukee, enjoying the lakeside areas, or touring the rural farming communities, you will quickly fall in love with the gentle and peaceful was of life. In Wisconsin, they say that people matter, and you are always made to feel welcome wherever you go. Whether taking in the new Harley Davidson Museum in Milwaukee or playing in the Dells, Wisconsin is a family-friendly state for a holiday.

For more information about Wisconsin travel and tourism

Tuscany Vineyard (photo by rayced - CC-BY)

There is a thriving wine investment market, and some people manage to turn a reasonable profit by investing in quality wines at the right price, and buying and selling at the right time.

But there’s one way you almost certainly won’t make a profit—and that’s by buying into a wine investment “opportunity” that is offered to you by a “cold-caller” (someone who contacts you “out of the blue”) who promises reliable returns. For the truth is that wine prices are not recession-proof, and even when they do increase it’s irregular: they don’t provide a sure and steady rate of return.

If the returns were as high and reliable as implied by the marketing-driven “wine investment companies”, the operators of those businesses would obviously be investing in wine instead of carrying on as investment operators. Instead, their business model is to make a lot of money out of the investment process, to the detriment of the investor.

Here are some of potential traps:

• The price at which you are sold the wine may be way over the market price of the same wine.
• The wine is supposedly placed into storage, but sometimes the wine doesn’t even exist. Other times, the wine exists, but is stored in the company’s name, and you may lose it if the company goes bust.
• Even if the wine is in your name, and the price of the wine rises, you must factor in the annual costs of storage and insurance before you have made a profit. Also you need to discount for inflation and tax, before you have made a profit in real terms.
• In addition to the purchase price, there may be a large commission to pay on the transaction.
• Some operators not only charge the buying commission, but also charge the selling commission in advance. So if they go out of business before you sell, you will need to pay an additional selling commission.
• Despite the implications of the marketing headlines, the fine print will invariably acknowledge that the operators are not wine experts and have no expectation that you will make a return on your investment.

Jim Budd has painstakingly compiled news, history and advice relating to wine investment schemes and scams. He makes this information available to all at his website investdrinks.org. It’s eye-opening reading, and no-one should respond to a wine investment scheme “offer” unless they have read and digested the content of this site first.

Once you are an informed investor, you might find wine investment an interesting and potentially profitable activity. But there’s no guarantee of riches. The best advice comes from the InvestDrinks home page:

Do not invest more than you can afford to drink if it does not work out.

(Thanks to Bryan Clough for suggesting the topic of this article.)

Photo by Jason Rogers - CC-BY

Ale and lager are both types of beer. There are many subtle variations in the way beer is made, but the basic process is this:

• Barley grains are soaked, heated and turned in a process of controlled germination, to convert much of their starch to sugar.
• The grains are kiln-heated to stop the germination and to impart a flavor by roasting them.
• The grains are crushed and mixed with hot water to dissolve the sugar. The solution, called wort, is extracted.
• The wort is boiled with hops (a fruit), and sometimes with hop flowers too.
• The hopped wort is poured into fermentation tanks.
• Yeast is added. Yeast is a fungus which turns the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
• The fermented beer is poured off into conditioning tanks for a few days while its flavor develops.

Ales and lagers use different species of yeast.

Ales use Saccharomyces cervisiae in a process known as a “top fermentation”, which works best at temperatures from 15 to 25ºC (59 to 77 degrees fahrenheit). This is a quick process which can take as little as a week, and produces an “assertive and robust” taste.

Lagers use Saccharomyces Uvarum in a process known as “bottom fermentation”, which works best at cooler temperatures. Traditionally it was fermented from 5 to 10ºC (44 to 50ºF) in a process which may take several months, but nowadays temperatures up to 12ºC or even as much as 18ºC may be used (54ºF or 64ºF) for shorter fermentation time. This produces a smooth, clean and subtle taste.

Variations include the addition of sugar, the use of different strains of the yeasts, different degrees of roasting, the inclusion of some unmalted barley, the use of different grains including wheat, or the addition of some corn, rye or even rice to the barley. Some makers add flavors at the end of the brewing process.

Ale is traditionally served at “cellar temperature”, while lager is best at “fridge temperature”.

The following kinds of beer are all types of ale:

• Bitter, which is popular in English pubs, is a golden-brown ale: hoppy, not too dry, and … bitter
• Stout is a heavy, dark, rich-tasting ale, which includes some roasted unmalted barley in the process
• Porter is a heavy, bitter ale—dark but not too malty

The German word “lagerung” means storage. It’s likely that the making of lager was discovered when fermenting beer was stored in a cooler place such as a cellar or even in an ice cave over winter, enabling the slow fermentation process to occur.

Ales have been brewed for thousands of years. Even the Sumerians brewed something we would recognise as ale. Lagers, on the other hand, have only been known for a few hundred years.

For more information:

• “Making Beer“, by the Campaign for Real Ale
• The Beer FAQ

Pittsburgh evening - courtesy goose3five - CC-BY

Pittsburgh is the second largest city in the state of Pennsylvania.

Pittsburgh was named in 1758 in honor of the British statesman, Sir William Pitt, incorporated as a borough in 1794 and chartered as a city in 1816.

There was a time when “Pittsburgh” and “beautiful” were never used in the same sentence.  But this city of 446 bridges has made great strides and in 2005 the Economist ranked Pittsburgh, along with Cleveland, the top most livable cities in the United States.

Why all the bridges? Pittsburgh straddles three great rivers, the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet at the tip of downtown to form the Ohio River.  Where the old steel mills stood on the Golden Triangle, it is now a place of parks, fountains and a yacht basin. Not only are there many bridges, the city has 712 sets of stairs, totaling 44,645 treads and 24,090 vertical feet for getting around its many hills. Much hillier than San Francisco.  Also, Pittsburgh will host a G-20 Summit meeting in September 2009.

Downtown is jammed with theaters, restaurants and art venues. There are great museums, such as The Carnegie Institute’s Museums of Art and Natural History and the Frick Museum. Pittsburgh is also a sports center and the only city where all major sports teams, the NFL Steelers, the NHL Penguins, and the Pirates of the MLB, all share the same team colors, black and gold.

Pittsburgh has some notable restaurants including many ‘ethnic’ restaurants as the city was settled by people from all over the world during its industrial peak. The shopping is just about what it would be in any large American city with a selection of large stores and malls.

Pittsburgh is not the safest of cities. In 2003, statistics indicated that Pittsburgh’s murder rate is 2.61 times the national average, “violent crime” about twice the national average,and “property” or non-violent crime is about 1.11 times the national average. Even the tourist areas become ‘iffy’ after dark.

The warmest month of the year in Pittsburgh is July. The average high temperature is 83 F (28 C), with overnight low temperatures averaging 62 F (17 C). The coldest month of the year is January, when the average high temperature is 35 F (2 C).

Pittsburgh population is 316,718 (2006).  The Metro area is 2,462,571.

Pittsburgh is served by Pittsburgh International airport. Public transportation is bus, light rail, funicular railway, and taxi.

1 is the international calling code for the United States
412, 724, 878 are the area codes for Pittsburgh.

For more information about Pittsburgh