Light reading on Arcitc extinction, spicing up minor league baseball and a kook wants his neighborhood to secede from its town

- I don’t know about you, but from time to time I like to cap my days with a little light reading. You know, something fun, fluffy and easy on the mind to wind down at the end of a long, stressful day. In keeping with that habit, I recently sat down with a copy of the new report by the U.S. Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and UK-based Care for the Wild International (CWI) on the predicament of other endangered Arctic species and was stunned at what I learned. While flipping through the pages of "Extinction: It's Not Just for Polar Bears," I found out that not only are sad, destitute polar bears floating around on icebergs and wondering how they will survive, but many other Arctic creatures are having just as tough a time keeping themselves from joining the extinction list as polar bears. The report highlights seventeen Arctic animals are and Shaye Wolf, lead author and climate science director of the CBD, explained the purpose of the research. "The plight of the polar bear due to global warming is very well known and familiar. But many other Arctic species are suffering a similar fate -- from plankton all the way to the great whales," Wolf stated. In the report, Wolf and his team cite the impacts of climate change as "unfolding far more rapidly in the Arctic than any other area on the planet" threatening its ecosystem. According to an unrelated study done in 2009 study by Donald K. Perovich and Jacqueline A Richter-Menge -- "Loss of Sea Ice in the Arctic" -- the sea ice extent in 2007 was one million square miles below the average figure recorded between 1979 and 2000. This and other recent studies have scientists prognosticating that summer sea ice could completely disappear in the Arctic by 2030. That date seems a long way off, but the loss of ice coverage is already impacting marine mammals like the Pacific walrus and the harp seal. Population declines are evident in these and other species and according to Wolf, as many as 20,000 walruses are currently holed up on Alaskan Arctic coastline due to sea ice loss.” In addition to shrinking sea ice, ocean acidification -- caused by increased uptake of carbon dioxide -- is occurring much more quickly in the Arctic than in warmer waters and shell-building marine creatures like the sea butterfly are in grave danger because of this trend. Even land animals like the Arctic fox -- found on the southern edges of the Arctic tundra - find themselves facing major threats from climate change, including shrinking sea ice and tundra, declines in prey and increased competition from other species that are relocating because of climate change elsewhere. "The Arctic is ground zero for climate change and we're already pushing many species towards extinction. The key to preventing their loss is reducing our greenhouse gas emissions -- specifically carbon dioxide -- to a level of 350ppm or below. That is a level many leading scientists have called for to restore Arctic sea ice," Wolf said. It’s definitely an uphill battle but one worth fighting if you value diversity and the various species that make the world a more interesting place………

- Minor league baseball is generally a drag. Not even dedicated baseball fans pay attention to it for the most part and unless it’s for some wacky, zany promotion like “Brett Favre Waffle Night,” the topic of minor league baseball doesn’t come up in the mainstream sports media. However, it would come up a heck of a lot more often if more minor league games were like Game 2 of the South Atlantic League championship series between the Greenville Drive and the Lakewood BlueClaws in Greenville, S.C. On the surface, it was just another 6-1 victory at Fluor Field for the BlueClaws, but the box score can’t show what made this game truly great. To find that, you need to track down video of the awesome, benches-clearing brawl that erupted at the end of the fifth inning. The two teams - battling for the title for the second consecutive year — launched a bench- and bullpen-clearing brawl that saw four player ejections, numerous punches thrown and the setting of an awesomely angry tone for the rest of the best-of-five series. Now, carry that hostility to Lakewood, N.J. for games 3 and 4 (and Game 5, if necessary) starting Thursday will be a tall task and if Greenville manager Billy McMillon has anything to say about it, the fight won’t carry over to the rest of the series. “Hopefully, the stuff that happened today, everybody will forget about it,” said McMillon, who clearly has no concept of what makes minor league baseball interesting. This fight was touched off when Greenville’s Derrik Gibson went flying shoulder tackle into BlueClaws catcher Sebastian Valle while trying to score the tying run from second on a single by Reynaldo Rodriguez. Gibson was tagged out at the plate and an emboldened Valle spiked the ball into the ground like Adrian Peterson celebrating a fourth-quarter touchdown. Somehow, Lakewood pitcher Julio Rodriguez worked himself into the fray and he and Gibson were soon face to face, jawing and trading spit. From there, both benches and bullpens emptied and it was freaking on. The brawl raged on for so long that play didn’t resume for 13 minutes and when the action restarted, it was without Drive players Gibson and Michael Almanzar and Lakewood players Julio Rodriguez and Leandro Castro. Unfortunately for the home team, they were unable to capitalize on the energy and testosterone of the brawl and fell short in a loss that tied up the series. Having said that, I don’t know that any game of this series is going to be anywhere near as good as Game 2, even if the game ended with both teams still two wins from clinching the title………..

- Tech dorks, I know you greet the release of every now smartphone with the same giddy excitement most of us reserve for truly meaningful life events, so I’m sure that Tuesday’s announcement of three new Symbian^3 smartphones by Nokia at its Nokia World event were the highlight of your day. The world was introduced to the Nokia E7, Nokia C7 and Nokia C6, the latest offerings from the tech giant and precursors to the upcoming Nokia N8, which is (according to Nokia, anyhow) the only N-series device which will be based on Symbian^3. The E7, C7 and C6 will share the same OS as the N8, but they are different phones in their own right and aimed at different segments of the market. The E7 is clearly targeted at business users and the full QWERTY keyboard, a 4-inch, 640×460 pixel touchscreen with Nokia’s ClearBlack technology for improved outdoor visibility, an 8-megapixel camera capable of recording 720p video and the capability to create PowerPoint slides would definitely be useful to the businessperson on the go. Of course, a price tag of $638 is going to discourage most would-be buyers, as not even the priciest incarnation of the iPhone has reached that lofty number. The C6 and C7 are the most similar of the trio, with both featuring an 8-megapixel camera with dual LED flash and the ability to record 720p video and AMOLED screen with ClearBlack technology. The C7 also has a case made of stainless steel and glass with up to 350 MB of internal memory and 8 GB of storage memory. Both the C6 and C7 have memory that is expandable with a 32 GB microSD memory card. The price tag on the C6 is $334, while the C7 retails for $430. All three devices should hit the market by the end of the year, but one has to wonder how these costly models will sell……….

- Local video stores are in a perilous position right now. Whereas they once occupied a prominent position on the entertainment landscape, services like Netflix and iTunes are slowly elbowing them out of that position and even dollar-a-day kiosks like Redbox are eating up a growing chunk of the market. Faced with possible extinction in the face of technology marching forward, many video stores are adopting the “evolve or die” mentality and finding a unique way to attract customers: be slamming cancer boxes (a.k.a. tanning beds) into their stores. According to the Video Buyers Group, an trade organization for video retailers, approximately 35 percent independently owned video-rental stores have added a tanning salon to their stores. With approximately 10,000 independently owned video stores around the country and larger, national chains suffering similarly, combining movie rentals with tanning beds is an unexpected yet increasingly popular move, unfortunately. But the allure is clearly there because a good cancer box can cost upwards of $15,000 and run a customer 50 cents per minute to use, so any video store taking on that expense had better be certain that it’s worth the risk. Oh, don’t forget that you also have to mix in the massive boost in energy use that a tanning bed will necessitate and you can see what a major investment it truly is. A VBC study found that a video store with a half-dozen beds typically will garner 40 percent of its revenue from tanning and 60 percent from DVD rentals. It may not be an ideal solution, what with being a part of the fake-bake crowd and playing a significant role in drastically upping the chances of thousands of people getting skin cancer, but I suppose that video store owners will take that option over going the way of the 4,000 Movie Gallery and Hollywood Video stores that have already have been liquidated. Blockbuster has also closed 600 of its stores and plans to close as many as 800 more, along with facing possible bankruptcy if it can't make a $42 million payment to bondholders by Sept. 30. On the surface, the closing of national chain stores would seem like good news for local, independently owned stores, but the impact hasn’t been significant in terms of increased profits. Americans are simply renting fewer DVDs and when they do rent them, they’re looking for the nearest Redbox or ordering them from Netflix. Something tells me the chance to jam into a cancer box for 10 minutes before picking out a video isn’t going to change that fact………

- Every neighborhood has one. You know them; they’re the kook who is always ranting and raving about an annoying neighbor, an unpopular decision by the local government or just the unjustness of the world in general. They are the person you spot while out in the yard and immediately make a beeline for the house so you won't have to interact with them and hear their very pointed views on the new land ordinance that will restrict the height to which a person’s shrubs are allowed to grow. In East Pennsboro Twp., Pa., Jim Massey is that neighbor. Massey, who lives in the West Creek Hills development in East Pennsboro, is extremely unhappy about a proposed apartment complex that would be built near his neighborhood. How unhappy? Well, it seems this kook wants to hearken back to Civil War times and…..wait for it…..wait a little longer….secede! Yes, Massey wants his neighborhood to secede from East Pennsboro. In the next step of his grand plan, the neighboring town of Wormleysburg Borough would adopt the West Creek Hills development, incorporate it into its borough and then kill the planned apartment complex. No word on whether he also hopes to spark a civil war between Wormleysburg Borough and East Pennsboro, but here’s hoping. To help fuel the feud, Massey has erected several signs in his yard to alert passersby to his neighborhood’s plight, One sign reads, “IMAGINE 672 CARS HERE,” another screams, “ORDINANCE CHANGE HURTS TOWNSHIP” and of course, there’s the kill shot: “SECEDE.” In case you can’t read between the lines and figure out from those signs why he’s so against the proposed apartment complex, Massy believes that it would create a major traffic headache for he and his neighbors. Something tells me that Jim Massey is the neighbor in West Creek Hills that people spot out and about and immediately dash inside their home for fear of ending up in a conversation with him…………