Tired of drinking his own urine, Vegan clothing line founder eats an egg, and is tossed from his own company

Yes, we’re living in the Crazy Years.

A vegan YouTube star has been forced out of the ‘ethical’ clothing company he founded after he confessed to eating raw eggs and salmon.

Tim Shieff, a vegan campaigner and world champion free-runner, released an emotional YouTube video last November in which he admitted abandoning his plant-based diet because he was ‘desperate’ to boost his health.

Mr Shieff, 30, told how he visited a local farm after completing a ‘35-day water fast’, in which he consumed only distilled water.

Seeing chickens ‘running around, completely free’, he bought two eggs and ate them raw. ‘It sent me questioning everything,’ he said. ‘A few days later I bought some wild salmon and tried that.’

His confession prompted a fierce online backlash from militant vegans and an apology for his behaviour from his colleagues at ETHCS, the vegan clothing company he founded three years ago.

Six years ago Mr Shieff, whose YouTube channel has more than 180,000 subscribers, became a vegan and he has used his online platform to promote veganism and extreme fasting and diets, including drinking urine. He has drunk his own each day for two years.

He has previously said that going vegan takes ‘real bravery’. He told The Mail on Sunday that his departure from the company was a ‘mutual decision’.

Some naif is about to discover the cold hard facts of life. Lesson to be learned: shut up!

Teen earns $35,000 plowing snow during Seattle’s snow storm and, foolishly, brags about it.

Eighteen-year-old David Holston owns a landscaping and snow plowing company in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. He was visiting his mom in the Seattle area for her birthday, and he brought along his plowing equipment thanks to a friend’s suggestion.

Holston says he put an ad on Craigslist when the storm started, and his phone rang constantly.

By comparison, most websites like Homeadvisor.com put the average snow removal hourly cost at about $110, ranging from as low as $30 an hour to as high as $400 an hour.

Holston says his customers didn’t seem to mind the price but were just glad to have someone to plow.

David, now that the authorities are on to you, they’re going the suck you dry: 15% social security tax, right off the top, then state and federal income tax, then sales tax and, this being Seattle, probably a number of fingers will be put into the pie, all demanding a slice.

You run a cash business: keep it that way, and keep your success off the Internet — the enemy is watching.

Got to admire a man who says, "enough's enough", but is it?

78 Zaccheus Mead lane shed almost $3 million today from its initial October price of $12.750 to $9.875. It’s a truly remarkable house on a great street, but the $13 million this owner paid for it in 2006 was probably ill-advised (and aren’t I glad I didn’t represent him). It was returned to the market in 2012 at that same $13, removed in 2013, and came back last October with a new broker but the same price.

Maybe $10 million still won’t sell it, but I respect the owner for acknowledging a bad trade and making an aggressive effort to move on. I see this ultimately in the $7s, but who knows? It’s a fine property.

Academia lost

I am woman, hear me shriek!

“Academia: the environment or community concerned with the pursuit of research, education, and scholarship”.

UC/Scripps will host a symposium on microbiomes, no boys allowed

An article on mission creep might be appropriate here — why is a once-respected institution dedicated to oceanographic research worrying about bladder infections? — but this is more interesting, to me:

During the first day of this event, leading researchers will present on the emerging science of the Urobiome and its recently discovered implications for human health, including common conditions such as urinary tract infection, urinary incontinence and bladder overactivity. 

The following two days will feature high-impact presentations on the latest discoveries in microbiome sciences, with sessions on topics ranging from the microbiome in human disease and wellness and the metabolome, to primate microbiomes, to environmental and ocean microbiomes. For this first edition, we have decided to demonstrate that it is possible to have a large representation of women presenters in a scientific meeting by inviting only women speakers. 

Is there really a difference between female and male research, sufficient to justify banning one while admitting the other? If so, then “settled science” is not so settled; not if it’s dependent on the sex of the researcher.

And will scientists identifying as females be permitted to perform their own studies? If so, how will their results be classified?

We’re in trouble.

Price war in Old Greenwich

If you want to see an active market at work, look in the low $1 range. 100 Wesskum Wood Road, Old Greenwich (on the corner of Sound Beach Avenue) listed for $1.195 million and buyers fought for it immediately. Closed today for $1.277 million. A 1975 house, nothing special, but right on Binney Park, and at very much the right price.

I almost always discourage clients from engaging in bidding wars, but in this case, I think the buyers did okay.

UPDATE. Funny story; we bought the original owners of this home’s Steinway A piano back in 1975, loaded it into a rented U-Haul and brought it to the Brighton/Alston student slum where I and my brother Anthony, a student at BU’s music school, shared an apartment. We were met there, as pre-arranged, by “Turtle Truckers”, a hippy outfit that advertised on the local Boston free-form radio station, but despite my telling them exactly what was involved: moving a grand piano up to our third-floor apartment, the stoners were shocked when we slid open the gate: “wow, man, that’s a piano!” So they fled, leaving me stranded on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, with a piano in a rented truck, due to be returned that day.

Using the Yellow Pages — remember them? — I found “Black Movers” in, I think, Roxbury, and they agreed to let me store the piano with them over the holiday and deliver it the following Tuesday. Which they did: Tuesday morning, a trio of movers appeared, all living up to the name “Black Movers”. The largest of them, who could have been a linebacker in the NFL, dismissed his helpers, strapped a belt around his head and the piano and carried the damn thing on his back all the way upstairs. A huge, generous tip was awarded, gratefully, but I also got a memory that, obviously, I’ve never forgotten.

The fringe areas cringe

15 Mountain Laurel Drive dropped $300,000 today, and now asks $3.2 million. I don’t think this will do it, but it sold for $3.7 million in 2004 ($4.930 in current dollars), so there’s a hammering going on here.

The owners have been trying to sell this 1996 house since 2013, when they started at $4.595, without success, which only illustrates how illiquid real estate “investments” can be. It’s always informative to hit the Tuesday-Thursday broker open house tours, and see the historical waves of development. A paleontologist would have field day, surveying each boom and bust of the Greenwich real estate market, starting with the earliest years, through the Rockefeller days of Deer Park and Khakum Wood,and then through the decades thereafter. When the market’s been hot, builders stretch out, seeking cheaper land. They prosper, for a while, then retreat when the market retracts — picture a tidal action.

Mountain Laurel Drive is a product of the 90s, and now finds itself stranded, like many other developments on our outskirts. In the past, the market has always rebounded, and these areas have recovered, but with our increasingly perilous state budget woes and the change in tastes of buyers, I’m not so sanguine today.

39 years ago today, USA hockey team beat the U.S.S.R.

Do you believe in miracles?!!!

Fabulous memory. I’m not a huge hockey fan (I went to my first game this past Christmas holiday with Pal Nancy and the girls, and enjoyed it, but that was probably due more to the company), but this was one special game. No one thought a group of college-kid amateurs could beat professional Russians, but they did.

Amazing.

And therein lies the difference between the Democratic Party of old and today's

Wouldn’t stand a chance

Bernie Sanders: Watching Kennedy attack communism made me want to puke.

Today, the only complaint his party has about Bernie is that he’s a white male; period.

There is a God, and his name is Allah

see ya

Idiot terrorist takes selfie, forgetting that it’s triggered.

Smollett — it's all over except the plea bargain

Proving he’s as good — or as bad — an actor as his adopted victim, here’s don lemon’s shocked face

District Attorney’d “proffer” here. Nothing that we (blogger and guests) hadn’t already guessed, but the details are interesting.