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Pat Shingleton: "The Jack Rabbit and Soda Popping..."

4 years 9 months 1 week ago Wednesday, June 19 2019 Jun 19, 2019 June 19, 2019 9:00 AM June 19, 2019 in Pat Shingleton Column
By: Pat Shingleton:

Nature provided the black-tailed jackrabbit with a means of keeping cool. Easily identified by its oversize ears, these trademark appendages increase the hare’s audio range to avoid predators. Due to the abundance of blood vessels, its 7-inch ears are also a cooling mechanism that dissipate heat and regulate its body temperature.  The black-tailed jackrabbit also has a voracious appetite and can easily adapt to the heat and climate of Death Valley.  Like many desert animals of this region, it gets its water from plants. To adjust to the seasonal changes it switches its grazing patterns by waiting until the hot summer to load-up on water-filled cacti and grasses, often eating several times its body weight per day to stay hydrated. From the desert to "uptop..." The sun is 868,000 miles across and is about 100 times the diameter of our planet. Its light is produced by atomic fusion.  I realized the sun's power as a kid. Most of the time it was the effects of a sunburn and especially when we made our own root beer. Upon the instruction of my Mom, we would retrieve a mixing crock from the basement. She would mix a root beer extract with sugar and yeast. After cleaning pop bottles, we'd funnel-in the root beer and cap the bottles with a manual bottle-capper.  We'd place the bottles in the sunlight, spinning them occasionally to eliminate the sediment.  It took four days to get the effervescence just-right.  Before the fourth day, some of the bottles would explode. The power of sunlight and the power of the yeast gave us an extra pop to our soda-pop.

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