Wierd.

People who own horses creep me out.

Too many words about a moive i could care less about.

Scallion?

I'll personally vouch for that mention in the article about zebra mussels radically improving water quality in the Great Lakes.

I remeber going to Lake Erie as a kid and not being able to see my feet when I wasn't even in up to my knees. The first time I saw the lake after the mussels had been around a few years my jaw dropped - the water had turned clear and has a beautiful azure blue color in the summer months now.

Wacky.

They shoot horses, don't they?

Go zebra mussels, go!

The people who made this movie...are NAZI's!

Algae is alive and well. So are the fish - which is more than you could say a few years ago.

My favorite phrase in the article is -
And, there are more beavers in Massachusetts today than when Paul Revere made his midnight ride in 1775.

Paul Revere, Midnight, ride, beavers. OK, I'm pathetic, but it makes me giggle.

Is this guy gonna comment next about how people who want to take over the world, like Pinky and the Brain, really don't know what they're getting into?

I t ' s a c a r t o o o o n ! ! !

sheesh.

Nightsweat - it's even funnier when you consider it's true for both kinds of beavers. ;-)

My childhood memories of Lake Erie always center on the condoms and fishing lures we had to dodge while swimming.

BU graduated last week, the beaver count in Boston went way down almost overnight.

I used to eat glue.

Ok, you guys got me. I eat glue.

Most folks call 'em green onions, but they're really scallions.

I've seen the previews for this movie. The animation looks terrible!

Goldberg is a brilliant commentator and intellectual. Read the rest of his material and you'll realize a large portion of it is written in jest.

And yet, this article really has nothing to do with the movie.

Spirit, Hollywood insiders predict, has a good shot at being the must-see cartoon movie of the summer.

Never mind that Disney is releasing a movie that actually looks FUNNY... not to mention we get a movie with the Whoopas... I mean, the Powerpuff Girls.

Any insider who think Spirit is the "must-see cartoon movie of the summer" probably also thinks every acting Oscar of the year should go to Ep2.

I would question some of the statistics used in the story. Not that I know better or different statistics, but I wonder if criteria for what is considered "Forest" in the state of New York in 2002, is the same criteria for determining "Forest" in the state of New York in 1880.

I would like to know that it is the same.

Perrin - yeah, the great lakes (Erie especially) used to be open sewers. It's really incredible how much they've improved.

I wouldn't call Erie "pristine" - nor would I yet eat any fish from it, but I have recently and still do swim in the lake with no problems. It used to be that you had to make sure you current on your tetanis shots before going for a dip.

The rest of the article is pretty farking funny though.

"Mustang meets mare"? that should read..."Mustang Stallion meets Mustang Mare".....sheesh
/rant

So if you're ever watching a Western set in the 1860s and you see tumbleweed roll by, you can annoy everyone in the room by shouting, "Anachronism!"

[sarcasm]Ooooo.. I can hardly wait![/sarcasm]

TheAnusThatAteManhattan: The plus side of the pollution was that I do have a nice collection of fishing lures now.

The bit about the tumbleweed was the single redeeming factor in this article for me...

Frankly, I'm just excited about the beavers.

Heh. We used to call those floating condoms "Coney Island white fish."

A horse is a horse of course, of course, and nobody can talk to a horse of course, unless of course the horse is the famous Mr Ed.

Wow am I showing my age!

"Now, one could argue that having more trees and beavers isn't good news."

Yeah, but who would?

I'd love to have more wood and beaver.

This is typical Republican, anti-conservation hogwash. Anyone who has ever actually studied the environmentalist position knows that there are trade-offs with anything that concerns the environment. Yes, horses are non-native species. But what are we going to do with them, kill them all off? Ship them off to someplace else? Even if we environmentalits did want to get rid of the cute horsies, face it, that would be bad P.R.

And as for zebra mussels, sure they cleaned up Lake Erie, but watershed protection and less pollution would have had the same effects. And those methods don't clog up intake and outlet pipes, don't smother native mussels, and don't encrust boats and other watercraft, like zebra mussels do. And you know what? Zebra mussels clogging pipes (like those in nuclear power plants) is dangerous and expensive to control.

The environmentalist movement is more than just black and white, and those of us who are sensitive to these issues, see the shades of grey. The person who wrote this article is mean spirited and simple minded. Probably because his readers are too.

This is the problem with funding for environmentalist projects. Often salvation projects are not directed at the microbe that could tip the balance of the oceans and cause slgal blooms killing thousands of schools of fish, but at the Charismatic Megafauna, the cute squirrels, fuzzy mammals, giant lizards that, while meriting protection, still get all the funding when a more equal distribution could be key.

Kymry

I wonder if Debra Norville has a smelly anus.

Lareine-
Goldberg is not a Republican. He is a conservative, bordering on libertarian, but not wholly ascribing to either party.

Get rid of all the "wild" stallions and burros. Out here in the desert, the beautiful desert bighorn sheep clings to marginal rocky outcrops. The burros aggressively take over the few water holes and scrub patches, forcing indigenous species out. The same thing is repeated all over the west. I don't understand the preserve-the-west conservationalists who, at the same time, insist on "saving" these species. Contradictory.

You farkers know what Jell-O is made from? Check it:

http://www.chefandy.com/

"Syphillis and Kudzu (good name for a crime-fighting duo)"

- my favorite line from this article

Uh, what?

ring-around-the-tuna sounds nasty anyway you look at it.

I just got a fax from some polling company asking if "Should the wild horse population be halved?" It seems that the Bureau of Land Management is trying to get the Mustang population reduced to increase farming area for ranchers.

They make mention that there were 2 MILLION wild horses 100 years ago. Now there 47,000. They don't mention that wild horses didn't exist 400 years ago.

It also states "There are now fears that the [sic] if something is not done, the horses could soon become extinct."

Horses, extinct?

Lareine - I didn't say zebra mussels were without their own set of problems, just saying that I could personally vouch for what the article claimed.

As for the same effect from watershed protection and less pollution - uh huh. Historic accounts vouch for the fact that the lake waters were actually even more turbid in the past then in recent times, mainly due to organic particles (rotting plant material mostly) in suspension in the water. The mussels have actually done more to improve the water's quality than if the lakes had been left in their pristine historical condition.


Still, they have made it hard on public utilities and boaters. I spoke with a biologist from OSU that taught a class of mine a few years back. He'd been involved in a study of the mussels in which they'd measured growth rates by submerging an old VW bug body in the lake for 3 months. When they pulled it out the thing had a uniform 2 inch coating of mussel shells over every inch of it. That kind of thing gets REAL expensive REAL quick.

Blue Otter,
Is jerry Lewis in it?

Whats wrong with smothering native mussel populations? If they can't compete with the zebras, then its time for them to make way. That is true nature. Those who suggest that anything human related is un-natural are kidding themselves. We just happen to have a big impact on the ecosystem, that doesn't mean we aren't part of it.

I'm tired of the extreme left causing chaos because they know how to run my life better than i do. That pipe bombing nut out in Kansas who wanted to get our attention so that we would stop hurting the planet. The Unibomber who wanted us to live more 'natural' lives. And of course the radical vegeterian who assassinated Pim Fortuyn. These extreme leftists are a danger and we need to keep an eye on them.

Anus Where are you from? I'm in Cleveland, and although I wouldn't eat a fish from Lake Erie, the water up by the Islands (Middle, South Bass, Kelley's) is just beautiful..I'd swim in it, no problem, just not on the put-in-Bay side.

I've always thought there was a certain amount of racism inherent to the propagandistic glorification of the American Indian

I've always thought there was a certain amount of racism inherent to the propagandistic glorification of the insert race of choice here

This guy is a farkin twat. Yeah, propagandistic glorification of the American Indian might be a problem, if there were any of them left.