Did You know - outdoor edition

[Magicman]

Did you know they grow rice in Africa?

Did you know that there are huge rice fields in N. Louisiana and S. Arkansas? 

[Texas Ranger]

Did you know they grow rice in Africa?

Did you know that there are huge rice fields in N. Louisiana and S. Arkansas?

And Texas.  Back in the day I worked for the USDA inspecting crops for crop insurance.  One of the largest rice  tracts was owned by the Arch Duke of Lichtenstein and grew a rice that smelled like popcorn when cooking, we get a bit of it here, but the Arabs pay a premium for it, so most goes to their marked.  It was and is good rice, the name of which eludes me. It is a Basmati rice.  It is sold as Texmati, and one of the best.  Had to work on that for a while.

[Ljohnsaw]

Northern California is a huge exporter of rice.  Most of it heads to Japan.  I bought a 30 or 40lb bag of rice (it was a big bag!) off my favorite bidding site for something like $8.  It had a colorful label and Japanese writing on it.  Not sure if it was imported from Japan.  Down at the bottom, in tiny print, it said "Product of California" :D

[WV Sawmiller]

   I knew they grew rice in Mississippi, LA and Texas. I knew they used to grow it in SC but don't think they do now. I did not know they grew rice in California.

LJohn,

  Do they actually grow rice in CA or do they just package and export it from there? I knew the USA exports a significant amount of rice.

  Did you know Viet Nam was referred to as the rice owl of the Orient and was one of the main reasons it has been the center of conflict for so long.

BTW - don't they flood the rice fields in the southern USA and raise crawfish after the rice is harvested?

[Magicman]

BTW - don't they flood the rice fields in the southern USA and raise crawfish after the rice is harvested?

Absolutely but I will admit that I had misplaced that information.  Oh yes now I remember, my last birthday ate it.   :

[Ljohnsaw]

LJohn, Do they actually grow rice in CA

The Sacramento airport was once surrounded by rice fields.  Now it is housing and all the people are complaining about the noise!:

Oddly, there is little rice grown south of Sacramento.  But going north, there is probably 80 miles (probably more) of patties you see on the sides of I5 and 99/70 and extend out east and west as far as you can see.  Lots of water to be had out of the Sacramento river (Lake Shasta up in Redding is huge followed by Lake Orville in Chico).  Sacramento has a massive rice silo collection at the Port of Sacramento.  There is a deep water canal just for the rice haulers.

[Tacotodd]

My home state of AR has what some call "the rice capital of the world" town of Stuttgart. It also tends to be a duck hunting paradise. I have never had the "right" opportunity to go. I also understand that it's just as much of a social event as a dove hunt would be. Although the duck hunt would be much colder, and you better make sure that your waders don't leak ;D

[WV Sawmiller]

   Did you know they grow peanuts in Africa? They are a staple food item for many of the tribes over there. We watched a Koma tribeswoman wearing only a belt of beads with green leaves stuffed in front and back for attire as she took a short handled hoe as she grubbed through the dry soil digging up peanuts that she had planted there. Her tribe had only been contacted by outsides about 15 years earlier so apparently they had been growing peanuts for hundreds of years before that. We watched a pygmy woman grinding peanuts with a river rock and a flat stone very similar to what MagicMan posted here earlier. She added the ground peanuts to the soup or stew she was cooking as a thickener. In Cameroon peanuts were often called "ground nuts". Women and street venders sold roasted peanuts on nearly every street corner in Douala. They rubbed the husk off with their hands and packed them in 1/5 gallon whiskey bottles and sold them for about 1,000 cfa to foreigners or 500 cfas to locals. They packed them so full there was no room for another single peanut. They used a wire that looked like a piece of a coat hanger. They used this same wire to wash the bottles using run off water from the street drains. When they were not washing bottles or packing peanuts with them they used these same wires to do each other's hair into braids and such. :

[WV Sawmiller]

    Did you know in Saudi Arabia and possibly other countries in the mid-East you could buy pretty good salted peanuts off street vendors. The vendor would have a wok filled with salt and they would have a gallon can full of air holes underneath filled with charcoal for a brazier. They would get the salt hot, add the raw peanuts which would cook in the hot salt. When done the vendor would remove the peanuts with a slotted spoon, shaking them well and returning most of the salt to the wok for continued use. The peanuts were poured into a rolled up green and white lined computer print-out made into a tube and sold for one riyal (about 26 cents). They tasted very much like the salted peanuts we buy in the stores here in the USA only better because they were fresh and hot.

  BTW - I had been buying peanuts in the shell in the local souqs and roasting them for 5 riyals/kilo (About $1.30 for 2.2 lbs) till one day I happened to ask the vendor how much the shelled peanuts beside them cost. He told me "5 riyals/kilo". Duuuh! My mama didn't raise no fools. From that time on I bought the shelled ones. I still don't understand the economics involved there.

  I assume the peanuts were imports as I never saw or heard of them being raised there.

[WV Sawmiller]

   Did you know Castor plants, often referred to as Mole Hill Beans because the seeds were supposed to kill or chase moles away, grew in central Africa. I remember seeing them growing throughout Cameroon when working and living there. I was not sure what other uses they had to justify someone bringing them to America. Reading up on it I see it was used to make castor oil and could also be used to may Ricin. My maternal always had a big one or two growing in his chickenyard.

[wisconsitom]

Popular ornamental plant.  Yes seeds contain ricin.  There are records of children having eaten whole castor beans and later pooping them out unharmed.  Tough seedcoat.

Crack that open though, and enough poison for a very poor outcome.

[Don P]

My grandmother always had a few growing as ornamentals I suppose. When my Dad was little he had a runny nose and fixed the problem by stuffing a castor bean seed up each nostril. A seed meeting warmth and moisture, especially a big one, swells dramatically. Trips to the doctor were rare but this got one and years of being told on :D. 

[WV Sawmiller]

   I'm thinking if you drilled a tap hole in each one of those castor beans then screwed in an appropriately sized eye bolt you could tie a strong string to each and pull them out pretty easily. One thing is for sure, after Dr. WVS got through working on your dad's medical issues, he would never stick another castor bean up his snout. :D

   Did you know a big cause of flooding issues in this part of the country this time of year comes from dry leaves collecting in street drains and on wire fences and such? This creates a dam effect and holds back the water. I have lost large sections of field fence because it held back the water in run-off areas. Even barbed wired fences can collect and hold back enough water to break or tear up fence posts and such.

  The first thing I did this morning was go out to my mail box and make sure the leaves on and upstream from the cover on the street drain beside my mailbox was clear. Its about 30" square and covers a box about that cubed. The slots between the steel bars are about 3" wide. Many times the leaves back up and flood the road 6" deep down there and even get over and flood my log barn down on my lot. 

[KEC]

If you look around in your travels, you will see no shortage of proactive maintenance  that is not being done. People ignore leaf choked storm drains, tree limbs and debris blocking culverts, trees growing over the road and around power lines, etc.. Many times I've seen people throw sticks and leaves in the ditch by the road. So they say, many of those fires out West were from power lines contacting trees. Here, the local electric company and highway departments do limited proactive tree trimming. They act only when there is a problem or complaints. Power Co. will tell people who call about trimming by the wires to call when the line gets pulled down and then they will come trim the tree and put the wire back up.

[WV Sawmiller]

   Yeah the county road dept is responsible here when these drains get stopped up. I went out one time to clear the drain when I saw it flooding and just before I got there the county road truck came by and dropped his blade in the 6" deep water and washed my mailbox off the post. I can't say much more about that because the statute of limitations has not run out and I hear they are still looking for the body. : Usually they do nothing and I clear it when I see it. In this case the truck was supposed to be going somewhere to push some fallen rocks off the road. Creating a Tsunami was interesting and I am sure the guy thought it was funny but it did nothing to clear the drain and stop the problem and I still had to remove the clog with my trusty shovel. Usually I'd just punch a hole in the leaf matter which would start a serious whirlpool and start sucking the debris down and lower the water level till the pavement could be seen and was dry again. I'd just keep moving stuff around to make sure it all got sucked down and out of the way. Truth be told its actually kind of fun but it does solve a serious road hazard.

[Don P]

Do be careful when clearing a choked drain, water is more powerful than we give it credit for. A friend was trying to clear a jam of leaves and branches clogging their little bridge and threatening to cut around it. He got overbalanced in a tug of war with a branch and went in. Luckily he didn't get hung up on anything and could tell the tale.

[doc henderson]

we had flooding near Albany, NY and the news reported crews trying to rescue a kid swimming in the flooded creek.  part of his body got sucked into a culvert and they were not able to recover him alive.  

[Ljohnsaw]

Back in the early '80s, we lived in a small, ground floor apartment.  The units were actually built up on a bit of a berm (~3'+) along a wide 2-lane road.  There was a torrential rain storm that caused some local flooding.  We were at the low spot in all the surrounding roads so the water got up to 2 feet deep at the curbs.  Probably 6-9" in the middle of the street.  We were high and dry and the rain had stopped so everyone went outside to check it out.  Of course, the parked cars got a little wet inside.  Someone got the bright idea to pop manhole covers to let the street drain.  Like a toilet bowl!  I just kept thinking, not a bright idea.  No one got sucked down but there were some foolish folks messing around them!

[WV Sawmiller]

   Since you mentioned manhole covers - did you know why a manhole cover is round instead of square? Surely it is easier to cut a square plate out of a sheet of metal than a circle. The reason is a round cover cannot fall through the opening while with a square cover, if you angle the cover from corner to corner it can fall in.

[KEC]

However, WV, I'm pretty sure those covers are cast iron. Sometimes, when scrap iron prices are high, there will be morons who will steal them and sell them as scrap. Some are savy enough to sell them far from where they stole them making it hard to catch them. They have little regard for the dangerous open manholes they leave.

[HemlockKing]

However, WV, I'm pretty sure those covers are cast iron. Sometimes, when scrap iron prices are high, there will be morons who will steal them and sell them as scrap. Some are savy enough to sell them far from where they stole them making it hard to catch them. They have little regard for the dangerous open manholes they leave.

It be good entertainment see a skinny meth head try to pry one of those up then lift it lol i can't recall too well but I believe they are fairly HEAVY 

[WV Sawmiller]

   The worst low life scrap dealing meth heads are the ones who go break up the bronze veteran markers on the graves in the cemetery and sell them to the scrap dealer. Well, the scrap dealer who buys them rates pretty low on the low life list too. >:(

[WV Sawmiller]

   Did you know the most hardy domesticated animal in Mongolia is the horse? When the herders take their herds/flocks out into the "pasture" (Miles and miles of grasslands) they send them in this orders - Horses, followed by camels (If they have any), followed by the cows and yaks, followed by the sheep and goats. The horses are smart enough to dig through the snow to expose the buried, cured on the stem, grass below. The herders keep the animals moving so the horses expose but do not eat all the grass then the follow on animals come eat their share. In extreme weather when there is a die-off of the stock it is in the reverse order as listed above with the sheep and goats dying of starvation first and the horses being the last to die.

[WV Sawmiller]

   Did you know animals besides cows and goats are sometimes used for milk production? In Mongolia horses are commonly milked and they also milk sheep and yaks to make cheese and butter and such. In Saudi Arabia I saw some types of cheeses made from sheep so evidently they milk them there too. Camel milk was very popular there too and the locals said it was good to settle your stomach. 

   I was given some horse milk to drink in Mongolia and found it to be a thin sweet drink. I often drank a 1/2 liter of camel milk in Jeddah with a 100g Cadbury with hazelnut chocolate bar. Very tasty!

[firefighter ontheside]

I knew that, but I choose to let cows make all the milk I drink.  People often ask if I get milk from my goats.  I then inform them that I have two castrated males.