So I read an odd but interesting article recently.

Scientists extract gasoline from cattle dung

As you may have guessed from the title…

It’s about getting gasoline out of poop.

Cow poop.

Some Japanese scientist figured this out.

The numbers in the article are based on Japanese Cattle statistics, so I was left wondering how viable a solution this would be in the US.

Here’s how it breaks down.

First the problem:

How much gasoline do we use every year in the US?

Well…

The United States consumes about 20 million barrels of oil each day.

A barrel of oil (which contains 42 gallons) will yield something like 19 or 20 gallons of gasoline, depending on the refinery.

Therefore, in the United States, something like 400 million gallons of gasoline gets consumed every day.

In a year, therefore, the U.S. consumes about 146 billion gallons of gasoline.

(source: How Stuff Works)

Fair Enough.

Now we know from our Japanese Scientist friends that you can get 0.042 ounces of gasoline from every 3.5 ounces of cow dung.

So the question becomes:

Is there enough cow poop in the US every year to satisfy a significant percentage of our gasoline needs?

Well…

There are roughly 100,000,000 (One Hundred Million) cows in the United States.

According to this article a well-fed dairy cow produces 120 pounds of manure every day.

That’s 40,000 pounds per year per animal.

Which puts the annual cow poop tabulation at an astounding 4,000,000,000,000 (Four TRILLION) pounds.

Wow.

You smell that?

Which converts to 1,814,369,482 (1.8 BILLION) metric tons.

Further we know that there are 35,274 ounces in a metric ton so…

Each year the United States produces 64,000,069,091,189.90 (64 TRILLION) ounces of cow poop.

Which (if we are to believe the Japanese) will yield 435,374,619,667,958 (435 TRILLION) ounces of gasoline.

… which equates to 12,342,649,534.16 (12 BILLION) Metric Tons of gasoline.

… 27,210,884,353,741.50 (27.2 TRILLION) pounds of gasoline.

NOW…

A gallon of gasoline weighs somewhere between 5.8 and 6.5 pounds.

For the purposes of this exercise I used 6 as a nice middle ground.

Which leaves us with…

4,535,147,392,290.25 (4.5 TRILLION) gallons of gasoline per year.

All from cow poop.

If the United States really does consume 146 BILLION gallons of gasoline.

The 4.5 Trillion gallons of gasoline we could get from cow poop is nearly 31 times what we need.

Clearly I think that covers any swag my numbers may have had.

Why the hell are we not doing this?

We’d pretty much END our dependance on foreign oil.

We’d have a USEFUL end for cow poop, which believe it or not is a big problem.

And we’d have enough gasoline left over WE COULD MAKE MONEY.

Talk about a cash cow!!

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Well it’s finally here.The long awaited sequel to the “Indiana State Fair Vlog part 1″I know it’s a little long, but I didn’t want to try and make it a three parter since it took so long to get Part 2 done.

I Hope you enjoy it.

If you need a refresher here’s a link to Part One.

** This is a bit longer than normal so it may take a moment to start to play. **

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This is what happens when Kevin and I hang out…

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Part One of the Indiana State Fair Vlog.Join us for our traditional train ride to the fair!

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This is an older video.I taped it before I officially launched Vlogs here on the site.Still… I hope you enjoy.

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Holy Matrimony in Seven minutes or less.My friend Doug Fant takes the plunge.
No Invite? No problem.This is a large file…
However it should stream pretty well.

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Happy Vlog Day!um… I mean 4th of July.So this is it!
The day we said we’d launch or Vlogs “for real”.

I’m still fixing some things on the site, but got enough done that I can at least present to you this:

The teaser I never launched.

Wow Day one and we already have a “long lost episode”!

Dave and I are still working.

With luck I’ll get an official 4th of July Vlog up yet today!

ALSO:

Check out Dave’s July 4th Video Blog!

Well it’s tax time again.

The downside:

I don’t have a lot full of cars I’m willing to sell you at 10% below factory invoice.

The upside:

… well there really isn’t an up side. I hate tax time.

I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.

Don’t get me wrong… I don’t mind paying my fair share of taxes.
I mean hey, I like having things like Police, and firemen.

My parents were teachers, and I enjoyed being clothed and fed as a child too.

But I HATE the paper work, and deadlines involved with filing a return.
I’m a pretty well read individual.. but I have NOT read the entire tax code.
And I doubt I’ll ever get Soooo scared of the IRS that I would ever endeavor to do so.

I know that the IRS is just a group of guys with a corporate bureaucracy as screwed up as any, and if there was ever an issue with a return I filed it would probably be a simple matter to correct.

I also know that if it wasn’t a simple matter to correct I could go get any of 1000 local tax attorneys to help me settle the matter and maintain my freedom.

But still there’s that chance…

That one in a million chance the worst case happens…that I’ll leave some blank empty… or God forbid forget to mail an entire form… THAT’S what gets me nervous.

Like I’ll make some mistake on my 1040-EZ that then requires the filing of a separate form. Form FD-123-FUKDUG or something.

That’s the magical form for which omission has no settlement.
No way of atonement.

And then I go to prison.

I am WAY too pretty for prison.

With a new wife, a house, two business entities, and healthy fear of the US penal system how can I REALLY ever trust some CPA, or TurboTax type software??

It’s that horrible “what if” that makes every tax season feel like I’m making an offering to some Aztec god that, if not acceptable, will cause my innards to boil and pour out thorough my eye sockets.

Did I mention that I HATE HATE HATE tax time??

Recently I was in Orlando for a trade show.

It wasn’t as great as Orlando could have been…

I mean I was staying in the Disney Dolphin resort, and the weather was awesome, but all I saw was a hotel room, the trade show floor, and a few in-hotel restaurants.

But I did have one really memorable moment.

And I don’t mean a “I’ll always remember that moment at the trade show” type moment.. I mean “At the trade show I remembered that great moment”" type moment.

It sounds more complex than it is.

They say smell is the sense most strongly tied to memory.

I believe it.

The trade show had ended and we were all packing up.

The crew of the Dolphin was taking down the hotel’s stuff, and had some of the big loading bay doors open.

A warm breeze wafted in scented with a subtle mix of sea salt and orange. I’m sure the natives didn’t think twice about it, but that’s an experience you don’t get everyday in Indiana and I noticed it right away.

A flood of memories came back to me.

First the balloon ride Jana and I took when we first went to Florida together.

I really REALLY loved that trip.

I get all nostalgic thinking about it. We weren’t engaged or anything, heck we hadn’t even been dating all THAT long. But we had a BLAST. One of the highpoints was our hot air balloon ride.

We got up at dawn and lifted off from a hazy field as the sun came up.

I’d planned the outing for her… not expecting to get such a kick out of it, but it was really amazing. We swooped down over the orange groves and you could smell the oranges on the air.

Of course that trip was fun for a lot of reasons.

We walked the board walk, laid around clear water beach, and toured the Disney parks at length.

Really an awesome time.

And it all came back to me in about a tenth of a second.
Then (in the following tenth of a second) another memory came back.
This one much older.

Space Camp!!

Yeah space camp… like the movie.
But we never really made it into space.

When I was a kid Dave and I went to Space Academy (camp for the slightly older kids).
We were geeks.
We still are geeks.

But it was also a great time.

I met great people, and got to see/learn/do things that most people (of any age) will never get to do.

I mean think of this… both years I was there I was fortunate enough to be the commander of the shuttle that our team had for our simulations.

(and even though this isn’t an awards show I have to say that I was even MORE fortunate to have a really stellar team to work with. The pilot, the CAPCOM on ‘the ground’ all were great.)

Anyway… as a precursor to the BIG mission that concluded each year I was given a schematic of all the controls in the shuttle cockpit, along with a brief description of what they were for.

Same for the CRTS that would display various menu options.

More time was spent on the controls / menus that I would be needing in my mission of course. And as logic would dictate a very large part of my mission was successfully getting off the planet… and back onto it.

I can honestly say that if for some reason I ever find myself on a space shuttle, and the crew is incapacitated… I could land it.

Absolutely.

As long as the radio worked and I could talk to someone down there … I could land it.

How many of you can say that?!

But I digress.
We were talking about memories.

So in an instant I remembered the dorm I stayed in.

The full size shuttle in the center of the campus.
All the great people I met:

- Dave (Hilarious guy.. wonder what he’s up to)

- Crispy (My top notch Pilot)

- Jessie (The girl I had a crush on)

- And The Canadian (I can picture her .. but her name eludes me. When I’m home I’ll see if I can find a letter.)

The cafeteria…

Climbing into the flight deck.

Meeting all the “real life” astronauts.

It was a lot of fun.
And I hadn’t thought of it in a long, long time.

The flood of memory was interesting, and it made me think.
Will I remember these things so vividly when I’m 70?
Will the people I met remember me when they catch a familiar breeze?

Does it work the same for bad memories?

Does my Dad ever get flooded with memories of his buddies in VietNam on some random summer afternoon?

I guess time will tell.

I hope though that I can always remember those things so well.
Hopefully at home as well as in Florida.

Wow this is a long Blog.
Generally not the best idea to make huge Blogs… but hey I’m feeling nostalgic.

Some other time I’ll tell you about riding bikes up the ramp at the empty YMCA building during my childhood .

So Jana and I had a really good time this weekend hanging out with the Hicks clan.

We talked of our plans to get rich and rule the world, smoked some quality cigars, and generally had a really nice time.

Jana and I even got a chance to baby sit for Avery and Carson.

I slept for the first two hours of baby sitting and let Jana handle everything.

When I woke up Avery and Carson had eaten, been cleaned up, were in Pajamas, and everyone was sitting on the couch watching some cutesy movie.

Wow Jana had done pretty well.

Since I slept through dinner I started snacking a bit.

The lights were low and the kids were finishing up the movie in preparation for bed time.

Jana ran next door for a bit since I was awake and all the big things had been taken care of.

Everything at this point should have been “Babysitting for Dummies”.

All I had to do was let the movie end and then it was bed time. Jana had already done all the real work.

But about 2 minutes after Jana left the kids realized they were alone with me.

And the games were afoot.

Let me set the stage.

Carson and Avery were supposed be winding down for bed.

They were on the couch watching Toy story.

They were in their Pajamas and the lights were low.

Hell I was getting sleepy and I had just woken up!

I was at the kitchen table eating tortilla chips and drinking a diet Dr. Pepper.

Jana left.

Five minutes later the lights were on, we’d changed movies three times, and the kids were at the table eating my chips.

A total loss of control.

At one point I was just walking in circles mumbling “Jana…jana… jana… jana..”

Here’s a timeline of how it went down…

00:00:00 - I wake up and all is well.

00:01:15 - I’ve said my hellos to everyone and started to get myself some snack food.

00:05:00 - I’ve sat down at the kitchen table and Jana informs me she’ll “be right back”

00:07:00 - The kids realize Jana’s left me all alone at their mercy.

00:07:25 - Avery asks if we can change the movie.

00:07:26 - Carson screams “NOOOOooo I van oo blah oy sory!”

00:08:00 - I decode that to mean “No I want to watch toy story” and decide to leave the movie alone.

00:08:10 - Avery, obviously bored with Toy story asks for her “letter book”.

00:08:15 - I decide that a reader is an educational item and if she’s bored with the movie then SURE.. Learn to read!

00:08:57 - Avery says “I need some light to read this”

00:08:59 - The lights are on.

00:09:05 - Carson is looking around now. Avery isn’t reading.

00:09:06 - Avery asks to change the movie again since Carson wasn’t paying attention.

00:09:10 - After much debate with the two of them “Santa Clause” is the new preferred movie.

00:09:15 - I’m messing with the DVD player when I realize the kids aren’t on the couch anymore.

00:09:30 - I coral the kids on the couch to watch the new movie “Santa Clause”

00:09:35 - I turn the lights back off.

00:09:36 - Both kids scream “NO NO NO we need the light on”

00:09:37 - The lights are back on.

00:09:45 - Neither kid is interested in the movie so I move to the couch to sit with them.

00:10:00 - Avery asks for a drink of my Dr. Pepper.

00:10:00 - I say no, and offer water.

00:10:02 - Avery spills water all over the couch.

00:10:03 - The kids are up again while I wipe up the spill.

00:10:15 - Carson has gotten out the poker chips and is dispersing them about the room.

00:10:16 - Avery is at the table eating chips.

00:10:20 - I get the poker chips away from the boy and start to put them away.

00:10:25 - My chips are almost gone and both children are eating them.

00:10:30 - I assume the fetal position and rock myself to my happy place.

Jana eventually came home.

Jana: “What’s going on here?!”

Doug: “I don’t know… I’ve lost control… I think they can smell fear.”

Here’s the timeline of events when Jana got home.

00:00:01 - The lights go out.

00:00:02 - The kids protest “hey we need the lights..”

00:00:02.5 - Jana: “No you don’t we’re going to bed anyway. Come on back to the couch”

00:00:03 - the lights are out and the kids are on the couch.

00:00:04 - the kids want a different movie.

00:00:05 - Jana: “You don’t need a different movie because we’re going to bed in ten minutes anyway”

00:00 06 - The kids: “No…”

00:00:06.5 - Jana: “Yep ten minutes so you better get to watching”

00:00 07 - The kids: “But we don’t want to see Santa Clause.”

00:00:08 - Jana: “Well you can watch this one for ten minutes or we can go to bed now.”

00:00:09 - The Kids mumble “watch the movie.”

00:10:00 - The movie get’s shut off and the kids are put to bed.

So there you have it.

I got played by a fiver year old.