Again one wonders if, in a Spanish-speaking county, people know what the English phrases on their tee shirts mean…

I saw a lady at a bus stop today with a tee shirt that said…

COMPOST OCCURS!

From today’s Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel newspaper…

Lighthouse Point woman accused of domestic violence hours into marriage

Newlyweds from Lighthouse Point spent their first morning as husband and wife telling the story of their honeymoon night — to police.

Bernadette Besario Catan-Keeler, 30, was arrested and charged with domestic violence battery Sunday morning. Police said she attacked her husband and bit him.

The couple told authorities they got married Saturday.

Judge John “Jay” Hurley set her bond at $4,500, and ordered Catan-Keeler to stay away from alcohol and her husband.

“For newlyweds, this is not starting things off on the right foot, for sure,” he said.

A while back I got hit with a particularly nasty virus and had to take my computer back to its original state. That is so that it was back to the way it was the day I bought it. Fortunately I regularly back up projects I’m working on and such things as my photos, etc., so I didn’t lose any of the really important stuff. However, I did lose all my bookmarked links. That had the small blessing of eliminating literally hundreds of links I rarely visited. But today I decided to check out some of the links I have here over on the right-hand side of the page to see what they’ve been up to…started with:

http://70point8percent.blogspot.com/

If you love all kinds of boats and the sea you really need to bookmark this blog! It also led me to this site that you absolutely have to visit.

http://1001boats.blogspot.com/

The name of the blog says it all.

http://www.oldsaltblog.com/

There’s a bunch of us “old salts” hanging around out in cyber space.

http://dory-man.blogspot.com/

More posts about small boats.

http://boatbits.blogspot.com/

Lots of maintenance tips and tool links.

http://tugster.wordpress.com/

If you’ve been out of sight of land a little too long you’ll love the photos from the Mermaid Parade.

http://indigenousboats.blogspot.com/

Learn about small craft outside the western tradition.

But there are others I check out all the time like:

http://shoreacres.wordpress.com/

Linda’s very literary blog.

http://epiac1216.wordpress.com/

My friend Omar in Panama City. If I spend the rest of my life working to learn Spanish I’ll never get as good as he does with the English language.

http://www.chiriquichatter.net/blog/

Don Ray keeps me up to date on what’s happening in the area where I live.

There, now you can fritter away the rest of your day like I did.

We all wonder about silly stuff. At least I think people do. For example, the comedian Steven Wright wonders what it would be like to skate on the OTHER side of the ice.

In October 2009 I wrote a post called “Who In Hell Figured Out Coffee.” One of those things I wondered about every now and then.

Yesterday at the supermarket I made an impulse buy of a 1 lb. package of pancake mix which set me off to wondering, once again as I have over the years about wheat.

Thanks to the serendipity of the internet I got answers to some of those things I’d wondered about.

For instance, more foods are made with wheat than any other cereal grain. Like pancake mix when you take out the other things in the one pound box like, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid, sugar, sodium bicarbonate, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate, dextrose, nonfat dry milk, partially hydroginateed soybean oil, salt, wheat gluten, calcium carbonate,  defatted soy flour, sorn syrup solids, soy lecithin, sodium casseinate, mono and diglycerides, soybean oil and lactic acid. ( I may rethink the whole idea of pancakes for breakfast after writing this out.)

One of the things I wondered about the most was how much space did it take to produce that pound of flour?

In the United States, one acre of wheat (depending on wheat class and where grown) yields an average 42 bushels of wheat.

One bushel of wheat contains approximately one million individual kernels.

One bushel of wheat weighs approximately 60 pounds.

One bushel of wheat yields approximately 42 pounds of white flour.

One bushel of wheat yields approximately 60 pounds of whole-wheat flour.

A bushel of wheat yields 42 commercial loaves of white bread (one-and-a-half pound loaves).

A bushel of wheat makes about 90 one-pound loaves of whole wheat bread.

One bushel (Weird word, bushel. Say it over real fast a half a dozen times in your head.) takes up 1/42 of an acre. There are 43,560 square feet in an acre, so 1/42 of that is 1,037.14 square feet.  The size of the average American home today is 2,700 square feet which is up from 1,400 square feet in 1970. To get one loaf of this

you need an area roughly 5’X5′ and that loaf of whole wheat bread grows on less than half that space.

So now I’ll just have to find something else to wonder about.

It used to be very rare to see more than one piano player performing at a time simply because there would only be one piano available. With the advent of the electronic keyboard it’s possible for several pianists to get together and play.

Way back in the mists of time for this blog I posted a video of Professor Longhair, Tuts Washington and Allen Toussaint playing together for a PBS special.

Today I stumbled on this video with FOUR great piano-pounders on one stage, Ann Rabson (from Saffire, the Uppity Blues Women), Dona Oxford, Arthur Migliazza and Daryl Davis. I know that Ann is the woman sitting at her keyboard. I’ve seen her perform before and talked to her between sets. So, by elimination the other woman has to be Dona Oxford. I’ve never seen or heard of the two guys before but other YouTube videos show that Arthur is the guy sitting at his keyboard.

The dancers are also great.