Abu the Maggot Mullah Crawls Out

Indonesia today announced a new anti tourist strategy recently with the appointment of Abu Bakar Bashir as Minister for Abusing Westerners.

In a talk given in October last year, Bashir urged his followers to “beat up” western tourists, whom he called “worms, snakes and maggots”, The Australian reported today.

Why Australians would holiday in that country is a little beyond me. If ever there was a worm snake or maggot, it is him.

Human Rights for Worms?

In a sure sign of local councils having more money than sense a New Zealand worm business has been forced to prove that no worms were psychologically harmed by eating human poo during the development of their compost product.

A Kiwi who invented a toilet that uses worms to produce compost has had to prove the worms are not traumatised by the experience before authorities would approve his product. An Auckland Regional Council official told Coll Bell to get an expert's report on the psychological impact on the worms."She felt that the worms were being unfairly treated, being expected to deal with human faeces, and that it could affect them in a psychological way," Bell says. The official told him to find someone with the necessary qualifications to say the worms are happy. Bell says his "wormorator" was finally approved after a vermiculture expert reported the worms were in excellent health and breeding happily.

Well thank goodness for that. I regularly commit worm genocide by maintaining a worm farm in a hot part of the world. The worms are all around during the winter, but they get fried and disappear when the temperature hits 30 degrees. I wonder if I will be held to account for multiple counts of inhumane worm accommodation violations?

Wouldn't it be great to be a local council official with an open ended agenda and budget to investigate everything that needs to be understood better so that they can sleep soundly at night, not having nightmares about worms chomping down human faeces.

Thanks DD McNicolls from Strewth.

Warm Farms Warming Warning

It seems worms are nasty nitrous oxide emitting critters, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and attempts to associate them with environmentally responsible compost management has some weaknesses.

From The Telegraph

Worms may not be as environmentally friendly as the growing number of gardeners who use them to help compost their kitchen scraps and grass clippings believe, say scientists.In fact, the greenhouse gases emitted by a large commercial worm composting plant may be comparable to the global warming potential of a landfill site of the same scale, according to the Open University.

This is because worms used in composting emit nitrous oxide - a greenhouse gas 296 times more powerful, molecule for molecule, than carbon dioxide.

Landfill sites produce methane which is 23 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Jim Frederickson, senior research fellow at the Open University's faculty of technology, said: "We know from research in Germany that a third of the nitrous oxide emissions coming from the soil are associated with worms.

"What we found from looking at large worm composting systems is that their emissions could be comparable in global warming potential to the methane from landfill sites."

Based upon my own experience using worm farms in my back garden, I do know that worms become very unhappy when the thermometer heads over 30 degrees and vanish when it hits 40 degrees. This whole is disapointing and shall add it to the increasingly long list of things that I cannot or should not do because of my potential to warm the planet. Next up, lawn mowers, backyard barbeques.....

Thanks Mr Englishman