Forget the firetruck Louisiana gave New York, look what we gave New Jersey. 

Apparently the first nutria have been spotted in the Garden State. This news report says that the hardy little Cajun beaver arrived in Maryland and Delaware in the 1980s. Perhaps the lack of marshlands slowed their progress into Jersey, but the nutria is nothing if not persistent. 

New Jersey pest control association official Leonard Douglen isn’t worried though. He told the New York Post, “We’d probably trap them wherever there are sightings.” He added, “Just because a new species comes around doesn’t mean you reinvent the wheel.” 

Ok then. They seem to have that situation under control. 

By the time global warming does away with polar bears, Canada should be ready to welcome nutria — unless the Canadians have some sort of trapping techniques to handle the new arrivals. 

Just when absinthe was becoming respectable again, some of its biggest fans are trying to kick the rehab. Marilyn Manson has teamed up with a European producer to market Mansinthe.

Absinthe was both popular and misunderstood from the beginning. But its reputation was sealed in 1905 — in the Twinkie defense of its era — when a Swiss farmer named Jean Lanfrey went on a drinking binge (a couple bottles of wine, brandy, a glass of absinthe) and killed his family. He blamed the absinthe. He was found guilty, but by 1912, absinthe was banned in most of Europe and in the United States.

Absence made the liver grow fonder, and its reputation as a wildly intoxicating hallucinogenic spirit grew. By the 1990s, reports of absinthe drinking began filtering back from European outposts like post velvet revolution Prague, where cheap, imitation absinthe (no wormwood, just bright green dye in cheap liquor) was again widely available. Most of the faux absinthe offered all the charms of battery acid. It was far from the spirit that bohemians and artists like Van Gogh hailed as the green fairy. Read the rest of this entry »

by Sam Winston

On blogwatch today, first a look at what’s been cracking here on our roll-sheet.

Down by way of hip-hop tragedy a la Tupac and Biggie smalls, was Evel Knieval offed by Kanye West in an ongoing dispute between the two? A sausage love confession spurring good Christmas gift ideas? FBI agents posing as Congressmen Bill Jefferson’s limo driver and a Kentucky Derby celebration in search of high priced hookers? Why not.

Elsewhere, one blogger sees more than a connection between housing mortgage crisis, the homeless in Duncan Plaza, and people in FEMA trailers, but warns Read the rest of this entry »