For your weekend-ending evening reading pleasure: a rant, only recently inflicted upon another Substack comment section and it's innocent and unsuspecting patrons. Just like all of you!!
RE: “When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments... when, in short, a people becomes an audience..."
America has become an audience awash in a sea of all manner of dreck... political, moral, cultural.
Where to start? Well...
Want to take a simple but meaningful sounding on the depth and health of American culture and society today? Toss your line & lead into the depths of the menu for any cable or satellite TV provider and read the titles of the *entertainment* available. An infinitesimally small sampling from an absolute ocean of similar dreck, much of it referred to as, of course, *reality TV*, absent all cable news shows... for those are in a class unto themselves and I'm not looking to include propaganda as both news and entertainment here, since things are complicated and bad enough without that:
Holiday Wars, Cake Wars (who knew cooking would become a blood sport?); Weather Gone Viral (like the weather outside my window isn't entertaining enough on any given day); Real Housewives of Everywhere on the Planet; Parking Wars; Storage Wars; Aliens in Alaska (and who knew Alaska was a hot bed of immigration woes?), UFO Coverup; 1000-lb Sisters; My 600-lb Life; World's Biggest, Tallest, Ugliest, Mostest ... Anything; House Hunters, Zombie House Flipping; Billion Dollar Buyer; Mobsters, American Gangsters, America's Most Wanted; Sex and Murder, Fear Thy Neighbor; On Patrol, Body Cam, the never-ever-to-leave-syndication-series Cops (whatcha' gonna do?), Real Policewomen of (fill in the blank. again), Jail, anything on any Lifetime channel, Life After Lockup, Love During Lockup...
You just can't f**k up trash TV.
That is an impossibility as the near countless and endless offerings of it on said menus proves every day... proving that dreck sells, sells big, and the shallower and more meaningless and less challenging to the human intellect, the better it sells as entertainment... all this a mere dollop of that "apocalypse of moral idiocy in the age of mass media."
You'll not be counting off any fathoms on that cultural and societal sounding lead, no matter where the hell you toss it American waters these days, I'm afraid.
And a free people must maintain a certain minimum depth to their culture and society if they aspire to not let that freedom evaporate in a pursuit of trivia as a mass audience in the age of mass media, all learning with the help of that very media the availability and price of absolutely everything. But the value of absolutely nothing.
Except, perhaps the worth of a big bag of popcorn as the American version of that particular apocalypse proceeds apace.
So. Am I laughing at my however feeble attempt at a little humor throughout this small rant against one of the things that's so seriously wrong with us as both a culture and a country? Hell no I'm not. Because there's really not a damned thing funny about it.
Thanks for the inspired rant! There’s a lot of goodies to discuss in there—maybe as a future reprieve from me trudging over burnt-to-a-crisp-by-now-won’t-you-please-shut-up-about-it-finally-! territory.
Thanks for the report, Cynthia! As a lifelong conservationalist and tree lover, this made my day! Of course, also being a lifelong book and magazine addict, I can't imagine living without paper, so I'm glad to know there's a company like this one, making paper with ethical and ecologically positive practices. My funniest paper story is involves the year the Nelson Atkins Art Gallery hosted a massive exhibition from China, featuring Chinese art and craft. A fellow art student friend accompanied me through the long winding exhibit with numerous placques showing all the Chinese "firsts" and inventions. At the end there was an exhibit claiming that the Chinese had been the inventors of paper. This was greeted with snorts from my fellow viewers, but I'm still unsure if it was false.
I could not do copyediting effectively without using paper in one step of the process.
When I was in college, I took a special class (lasting just a few weeks) where we actually produced and printed a book the old-fashioned way. I was on the paper-making team (among others). We used ground-up textiles (fabric) to make the paper by hand. This included processes for dipping a framed screen into the vat of wet pulp, and for squeezing the water out. I also learned to set type by hand. The text was selections from the Bible, so we wouldn't have to do original writing or deal with copyright issues. I was an English major. The art students did illustrations--woodcuts or lithographs. I still have my copy of the book. I never did get it bound, but I might still.
There’s a vivid genre of “artisan paper” and “artisanal paper” for sale online at places like Etsy and from specialty mid-scale makers—that’s what your comment reminded me of.
Of course, the first place I had a look was Instructables.com, where you’ll find how-to guides on artisan paper making, for instance from junk mail.
Good Sunday morning. Rainy here. I get the last of the backyard leaves raked and bagged yesterday (from my own trees) as well as those in the front yard (courtesy of my neighbor's tree).
Update on the Amsterdam pogrom from Times of Israel. In a weird mashup with our perennial topic of Climate-y bureaucracy:
** Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof said Saturday that he had scrapped plans to travel to the COP29 climate summit due to the scandal. “I will not be going to Azerbaijan next week for the UN Climate Conference COP29. Due to the major social impact of the events of last Thursday night in Amsterdam, I will remain in the Netherlands,” he said on social media platform X. **
> ... Israeli security services had identified a “flare-up” on Dutch social media ahead of the game with calls by pro-Palestinian groups to hold a violent protest near the stadium.
...some 3,000 [Israeli] fans... had traveled to see the match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax.
Hundreds of those fans were also filmed chanting racist slogans against Arabs before, during and after the game, and tearing down Palestinian flags... <
Two groups of people with a centuries' long deep-seated animus and overt hatred toward each other, all in close physical proximity in the age of blanket social media penetration of societies and cultures, bringing with it the effects of *influencers* and overt malign actors on people already itching for violence and primed to go by various "permission structures" propagated by said internet elements...
Throw in an international soccer milieu and its attendant built-in craziness, in which people of all human persuasions often leave all reason behind and act hatefully and at times violently toward each other for no other reason than supposed *fandom* for a specific *sports team*...
Nothing to see here, folks. Nothing to see here. Other than what one might reasonably expect. Move along now.
And as I'm moving along, I'll try not to let my complete and absolute disgust with *all* involved show too awfully much.
There is a lot of denial in Europe about the impact of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, immigrants that mostly have not and will not assimilate into the national cultures of their host countries. Antisemitism is only the most obvious result.
Yeah. There seems to be a lot of anti-assimilation going on these days in an awful lot of places, leading to some awful results. (And no, I'm not *really* joking or trying to be a smartass about that with the alliteration; I do have momentary fits of seriousness every now and then, often by accident, but occasionally on purpose.)
That was a very interesting travelogue, thank you! I almost went into the forestry field....... maybe someday in another life. Actually, while reading your article, I've been sitting in a private PA woodland camp, cooking up deerburgers for sons and some friends who have been archery hunting this morning. Son # 2 got lucky today!
What I remember about the Pee Dee River was silly comments about it's name from two juvenile males while passing through the state on our way to Florida.
The velocity vectors are just crazy. I know these woodlands well. Our cabin just north in Greenbrier County WV (sold when we moved west), looked so much like these forests.
They point out an interesting but devastating effect of aerodynamics. The velocity and pressure changes caused by changes in terrain topology. The canyons/arroyo/valleys/ravines or in WVa speak, swills.
You didn't include the full sensory experience, so I am wondering if the pulp/paper mill had the very strong "fragrance" I experienced in the past (many years ago now) around pulp mills upstate.
Speaking of old, I ran across this a while back and thought you might like to see it. But I'm old and ... um, I'm old and for... what's that word? Got it right here on the tip of my, um... my...
Some of that misunderstanding comes from the different ways men and women communicate among themselves. Sure, there are men who are more sensitive and women who are more direct, but at the polar ends of the range, there’s where the conflict is hardest to avoid.
Thank you! Very interesting. Her article, particularly the "B***tch can weld" account from another woman, jangled with the things I have been thinking about and working on putting into words.
Maybe I was too thick headed or just young enough to accept some criticism as potentially legitimate, but "mansplaining" and doubt of my capabilities has only begun to irritate me over the past year or two. (It, too, might have something to do with getting old...). It happened several times during early voting. Dropping the information, 'Yes, I've been doing this for over 20 years, things frequently change from election to election," generally helped establish a better foundation for communication.
More on the differences between the fabrication shop and the academic classroom after church. Where does the time go?!
I've welded before...No well, but I've done it. It's a skill.
In college I worked in a warehouse, so I am comfortable with handling pallets, driving a forklift, etc. it surprises people I know how to use my hands.
Not my oldest son: he cringes whenever I reach for the chainsaw.....
I learned some very basic welding in high school shop class and did a little here and there for some years afterward. Haven't struck an arc in so long now I doubt I could hold one.
Great article, Cynthia. I watched all of the videos, and shared them with my husband. I often read, out loud, parts of articles I particularly like, and so he really enjoyed this too. How on earth do they keep that truck in place when it is being tilted at what looks like close to a 90 degree angle? I told my husband that the big wood chipper seemed like it could be part of a plot to one of my crime novels!
That was a fascinating report. I learned something from it, and enjoyed it. What I remember about the Pee Dee river is that it was a rejected name by Stephen Collins Foster. He had an inspiration for a song (that became the Suwanee River song), but Pee Dee River didn't fit what he had in mind. So he called his brother Mitt for the names of some Southern rivers. Mitt suggested the Yazoo, before theyf inally settled on the Suwannee River. To think the song could have been the Pee Dee river song.
Growing up, my Mom had a book, "Stephen Collins Foster and his little dog Tray". I loved that book! But the last few pages are torn and missing, so it wasn't until I was an adult that I knew of his death at such a young age.
All this Pee Dee talk sent me on something of a wild goose chase...
Which, fair warning, you have here a chance to follow if you're into chasing wild geese. But if not and you go on anyway, you don't get to cry fowl at the end, since you were warned here ahead of time.
One of the tools a Toolroom Machinist like I used to be needs to know how to use is a set of "thread measuring wires". That is simply a collection of wires ground to several precise diameters, matched in groups of three of the same diameter, and used three at a time in conjunction with a micrometer to measure a particular dimension related to cutting both U.S. and metric series standard 60* machine threads and Acme series threads on a lathe, different wire diameters being needed for different series of each type of thread.
Now that you already know more about what's needed to cut accurate machine threads than you ever wanted or needed to know in your entire lives and you're no doubt wondering "What the...?"...
Well, one of the most common brand names of thread measuring wire sets is... wait for it...
I and many of the Machinists and Toolmakers I knew who regularly did lathe work had a set of these in their toolboxes. They've been around for so long they're sort of the OG thread wire set. So, I found myself wondering, what's the Pee Dee River or the Pee Dee region of S.C. or the Pee Dee Indians have to do with thread wires long manufactured by an outfit named Fisher Machine Shop all the way on the other side of the country in California.
And the answer is... I don't know. Google's failed to provide a link - yes, Phil and / or Cynthia, pun intended - and I have sent an email to Fisher requesting an explanation, darn it, because I spent near 5 decades using one of their products and think it's about high time they let me in on the secret.
And if the secret turns out to be that one of the critical dimensions of a machine thread that thread wires are designed to help measure is the thread's *P*itch *D*iameter, I'm gonna' be reeeaaally disappointed.
This ends the unscheduled machine shop education portion of CSLF programming for today. Now back to your regularly scheduled program...
I'm not one to brag, but it is pretty hard to beat.
All right! All right! Everybody settle down!!
Turns out there's a growing number of folks on this side of the pond who really do appreciate that kind of quality in a tool, as I have it on good authority that a construction company down in Ohio has a newly minted contract with these Brits for them to be the exclusive supplier of all the tools they use in their work. An arrangement that both companies hope will help seriously raise their profiles in their respective markets even further.
Will let you know if I hear anything back. Guessing they don't work weekends, or at least not the office folks. Meantime, for your learning pleasure...
Careful, though. You don't want your friends or neighbors to find out you've obtained this knowledge, or the next time they need a 3 1/2'-4 UNC 3A LH triple-lead thread cut, they'll probably come knocking on your door wanting you to do it for them while offering some lame excuse for why they can't do it themselves.
I want to go on that field trip. I love being in the woods. We have 44 acres of woods that are in a managed forest program. They came and thinned it out a few years back. It looked like a tornado hit as they don’t have much use for the tree tops so they leave them. Thank goodness we have a friend who likes to cut wood so he’s cleaned it up quite a bit. I wonder how much the demand for paper has gone down in the past 20 years.
When we lived in Massachusetts, we had a farm in Greenbrier County WV. About 80ac, 50ac 100 yr old beautiful hardwood. I bought the timber rights back.
It was just wonderful deep woods. Little on the ground but ferns and deep wood flowers. Oak tree trunks grow 30 40ft amd more before a branch due to shading of the canopy.
Funny in a way. I’d heard there were covid paper shortages, at least for certain grades of paper, which ended up to the benefit of Amazon’s on-demand printing operations. Amazon can print, bind, and ship whole books on demand at soft-cover prices and have a respectable profit on each unit, someone explained to me a few years ago.
I’m sure there are gradations and standards that didn’t exist when we were kids, but are now essential for all sorts of tech-laden processes.
There’s a popular belief among civilizational pessimists who find we haven’t had the types of technological leaps our forebears experienced from 1900 to 1950, when cars, aircraft, telephony, radio went from non-existent to ubiquitous. But in the decades since, the refinement of technologies and materials has kept expanding the portion of global humanity able to enjoy all those civilizational goods at reasonably affordable prices.
Really interesting. I like the video of the truck being tipped up. It reminded me of videos where someone ignores the flashing lights on a drawbridge and ends up in that situation. What do they use, besides the truck's brakes, to keep it from rolling? That's a lot of weight to just use "chocks" behind the wheels.
When I first moved to Flint back in the early 70s there was a Paramount Potato Chip factory (of Slim Chipley fame) in town on a major highway. They had a hydraulic-ramped semi-truck unloader for dumping the incoming tons of spuds similar to the one in the video.
The plant was visible from the highway, but as I recall, the view of the unloader was partially obscured by some trees so that when you drove by and a truck was being emptied, what you basically saw was the tractor and about the first 1/3 of the trailer behind it sticking up at about a 40* angle above the tree tops and nothing of the unloader ramp. Just sort of looked like it was hanging up in the air like that all on its own.
Never having seen anything like that before in his life, I've gotta' say 18-year-old me was pretty freaked-the-heck-out the first time he came driving by and saw that!
Hydraulic airbrakes that modern commercial vehicles have for parking and emergency use are locked tight as can be on pretty much all wheels. Some road safety regulations still require chock blocks in breakdown situations, iirc.
I worked on some parts waay back like 1980s. Learned that, at least back then, airbrakes for big rigs had an interesting design feature.
Airbrakes are always "ON".
The air system is used to push the brakes away from the rotor or braking surface. Pushing the pedal closes the brake by releasing pressure. Into a reservoir.
The safety idea, is if the brake lines leak or fail, the brakes go on. Not sure if they still work this way
You've probably seen one of those sets of super dark and distinct 18-wheeler uninterrupted skid marks leaving, say, an interstate lane and traversing over to and down to a stop on the shoulder? "Catastrophic air system failure".
As I mentioned to Cynthia after prepping the post, her report inspired some nostalgia for school trips and such to teach young kids something about how things are physically made in this world—some appreciation for heavy industry.
In my area, it wasn’t so much that we had factories or heavy industrial plants that kids could visit on class trips, but we did get to see old films from industry when teachers were out of ideas of what to do with a room full of kids eight hours a day, five days a week… I would think with our aging and still urbanizing human geography, the tendency for kids to grow up thinking electricity comes from the wall outlet and food comes from the grocery store to be overwhelming.
I remember how much I liked it when I saw that old film projector sitting out. I knew we were going to get to watch something I’d enjoy. I also loved field trips!
We had a set of VHS tapes about industry and transportation, titles like "There Goes a Truck!" and "There Goes a Train!" The kids watched them all the time.
Some people were recently talking about how great Quebec is, and I said, "Quebec is where they filmed 'There Goes a Snowplow!'," and F and D were aghast.
My first husband worked for Caterpillar. One time he brought home a video of a choreographed equipment show CAT pur on for employees. Marching band/ballet but with humongous heavy equipment. It was really cool.
When my oldest was a toddler, I bought a VHS video, 'The adventures of Hard Hat Harry, the construction genie!". It was about really big trucks! And you saw them in operation. We loved that video!
Growing up, my family lived on a large farm that was turned into a hunting preserve. We had bulldozers for making roads, and cranes to create ponds from areas that had natural springs. I haven’t thought about that in a long time.
I knew alligators were in SC - they even find them in NC occasionally - but I was surprised they were common in the Great Pee Dee River, so close to home.
When I was younger, alligators were just in the Gulf states like Louisiana and Florida, and protected. More recently they can be hunted with some limitations. (They say gator meat tastes "just like chicken".)
I've had fried 'gator, at a Seminole reservation in Southern Florida. It's very greasy, very chewy, almost rubbery. February 18th, 1992.
How do I know the day? Pam and I got married on February 15th (Saturday), and we went on a Tuesday. I was an hour late getting to the wedding ceremony. I arrived 11 minutes before the ceremony was to begin, so at least ten minutes early! Pam was pretty relaxed about it. I was driving from Indy to Greenfield, and a semi crashed on I-70, a mile past the Mt. Comfort road exit. Stuck in traffic for roughly an hour.
For your weekend-ending evening reading pleasure: a rant, only recently inflicted upon another Substack comment section and it's innocent and unsuspecting patrons. Just like all of you!!
RE: “When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments... when, in short, a people becomes an audience..."
America has become an audience awash in a sea of all manner of dreck... political, moral, cultural.
Where to start? Well...
Want to take a simple but meaningful sounding on the depth and health of American culture and society today? Toss your line & lead into the depths of the menu for any cable or satellite TV provider and read the titles of the *entertainment* available. An infinitesimally small sampling from an absolute ocean of similar dreck, much of it referred to as, of course, *reality TV*, absent all cable news shows... for those are in a class unto themselves and I'm not looking to include propaganda as both news and entertainment here, since things are complicated and bad enough without that:
Holiday Wars, Cake Wars (who knew cooking would become a blood sport?); Weather Gone Viral (like the weather outside my window isn't entertaining enough on any given day); Real Housewives of Everywhere on the Planet; Parking Wars; Storage Wars; Aliens in Alaska (and who knew Alaska was a hot bed of immigration woes?), UFO Coverup; 1000-lb Sisters; My 600-lb Life; World's Biggest, Tallest, Ugliest, Mostest ... Anything; House Hunters, Zombie House Flipping; Billion Dollar Buyer; Mobsters, American Gangsters, America's Most Wanted; Sex and Murder, Fear Thy Neighbor; On Patrol, Body Cam, the never-ever-to-leave-syndication-series Cops (whatcha' gonna do?), Real Policewomen of (fill in the blank. again), Jail, anything on any Lifetime channel, Life After Lockup, Love During Lockup...
You just can't f**k up trash TV.
That is an impossibility as the near countless and endless offerings of it on said menus proves every day... proving that dreck sells, sells big, and the shallower and more meaningless and less challenging to the human intellect, the better it sells as entertainment... all this a mere dollop of that "apocalypse of moral idiocy in the age of mass media."
You'll not be counting off any fathoms on that cultural and societal sounding lead, no matter where the hell you toss it American waters these days, I'm afraid.
And a free people must maintain a certain minimum depth to their culture and society if they aspire to not let that freedom evaporate in a pursuit of trivia as a mass audience in the age of mass media, all learning with the help of that very media the availability and price of absolutely everything. But the value of absolutely nothing.
Except, perhaps the worth of a big bag of popcorn as the American version of that particular apocalypse proceeds apace.
So. Am I laughing at my however feeble attempt at a little humor throughout this small rant against one of the things that's so seriously wrong with us as both a culture and a country? Hell no I'm not. Because there's really not a damned thing funny about it.
Thanks for the inspired rant! There’s a lot of goodies to discuss in there—maybe as a future reprieve from me trudging over burnt-to-a-crisp-by-now-won’t-you-please-shut-up-about-it-finally-! territory.
I'll take "inspired"; at least you didn't call it insipid.
BTW... you might find something here to help with your trudging. But fair warning, it could be a bit pricey, 🔥🔥🔥🔥
https://thefirestore.com/first-responder-footwear/firefighter-structural-boots
Thanks for the report, Cynthia! As a lifelong conservationalist and tree lover, this made my day! Of course, also being a lifelong book and magazine addict, I can't imagine living without paper, so I'm glad to know there's a company like this one, making paper with ethical and ecologically positive practices. My funniest paper story is involves the year the Nelson Atkins Art Gallery hosted a massive exhibition from China, featuring Chinese art and craft. A fellow art student friend accompanied me through the long winding exhibit with numerous placques showing all the Chinese "firsts" and inventions. At the end there was an exhibit claiming that the Chinese had been the inventors of paper. This was greeted with snorts from my fellow viewers, but I'm still unsure if it was false.
Ms. Pinki makes some paper, but also "Junk Journals" - which should be googled !
"This was greeted with snorts from my fellow viewers, but I'm still unsure if it was false."
I think it's generally accepted that the earliest known paper, made from vegetable fiber pulp by the same basic process used today, was made in China.
I could not do copyediting effectively without using paper in one step of the process.
When I was in college, I took a special class (lasting just a few weeks) where we actually produced and printed a book the old-fashioned way. I was on the paper-making team (among others). We used ground-up textiles (fabric) to make the paper by hand. This included processes for dipping a framed screen into the vat of wet pulp, and for squeezing the water out. I also learned to set type by hand. The text was selections from the Bible, so we wouldn't have to do original writing or deal with copyright issues. I was an English major. The art students did illustrations--woodcuts or lithographs. I still have my copy of the book. I never did get it bound, but I might still.
There’s a vivid genre of “artisan paper” and “artisanal paper” for sale online at places like Etsy and from specialty mid-scale makers—that’s what your comment reminded me of.
Of course, the first place I had a look was Instructables.com, where you’ll find how-to guides on artisan paper making, for instance from junk mail.
https://www.instructables.com/Artisan-Craft-Paper-From-Junk-Mail/
Then I guess I should be referring to the paper I made as "artisanal."
That sounds very interesting.
Good Sunday morning. Rainy here. I get the last of the backyard leaves raked and bagged yesterday (from my own trees) as well as those in the front yard (courtesy of my neighbor's tree).
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-says-wave-of-violence-in-amsterdam-over-but-journalists-report-harassment/
Update on the Amsterdam pogrom from Times of Israel. In a weird mashup with our perennial topic of Climate-y bureaucracy:
** Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof said Saturday that he had scrapped plans to travel to the COP29 climate summit due to the scandal. “I will not be going to Azerbaijan next week for the UN Climate Conference COP29. Due to the major social impact of the events of last Thursday night in Amsterdam, I will remain in the Netherlands,” he said on social media platform X. **
> ... Israeli security services had identified a “flare-up” on Dutch social media ahead of the game with calls by pro-Palestinian groups to hold a violent protest near the stadium.
...some 3,000 [Israeli] fans... had traveled to see the match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax.
Hundreds of those fans were also filmed chanting racist slogans against Arabs before, during and after the game, and tearing down Palestinian flags... <
Two groups of people with a centuries' long deep-seated animus and overt hatred toward each other, all in close physical proximity in the age of blanket social media penetration of societies and cultures, bringing with it the effects of *influencers* and overt malign actors on people already itching for violence and primed to go by various "permission structures" propagated by said internet elements...
Throw in an international soccer milieu and its attendant built-in craziness, in which people of all human persuasions often leave all reason behind and act hatefully and at times violently toward each other for no other reason than supposed *fandom* for a specific *sports team*...
Nothing to see here, folks. Nothing to see here. Other than what one might reasonably expect. Move along now.
And as I'm moving along, I'll try not to let my complete and absolute disgust with *all* involved show too awfully much.
There is a lot of denial in Europe about the impact of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, immigrants that mostly have not and will not assimilate into the national cultures of their host countries. Antisemitism is only the most obvious result.
Yeah. There seems to be a lot of anti-assimilation going on these days in an awful lot of places, leading to some awful results. (And no, I'm not *really* joking or trying to be a smartass about that with the alliteration; I do have momentary fits of seriousness every now and then, often by accident, but occasionally on purpose.)
Placido Domingo, everyone. It's dark here.
Happy Sunday. It’s slightly wet here, but with a bright red sunrise. Much warmer than yesterday with its heavy frost.
That was a very interesting travelogue, thank you! I almost went into the forestry field....... maybe someday in another life. Actually, while reading your article, I've been sitting in a private PA woodland camp, cooking up deerburgers for sons and some friends who have been archery hunting this morning. Son # 2 got lucky today!
What I remember about the Pee Dee River was silly comments about it's name from two juvenile males while passing through the state on our way to Florida.
It sounds like you're having a good weekend.
I loved this piece. Thanks much.
You're welcome.
Where the trees once stood.
See how Helene wiped out North Carolina’s forests. WAPO gift article.
https://wapo.st/4elscqf
The velocity vectors are just crazy. I know these woodlands well. Our cabin just north in Greenbrier County WV (sold when we moved west), looked so much like these forests.
They point out an interesting but devastating effect of aerodynamics. The velocity and pressure changes caused by changes in terrain topology. The canyons/arroyo/valleys/ravines or in WVa speak, swills.
Looks like it was a fun field trip!
You didn't include the full sensory experience, so I am wondering if the pulp/paper mill had the very strong "fragrance" I experienced in the past (many years ago now) around pulp mills upstate.
The old smell of crossing the James River in Richmond, Virginia!
Speaking of old, I ran across this a while back and thought you might like to see it. But I'm old and ... um, I'm old and for... what's that word? Got it right here on the tip of my, um... my...
Oh, hell. Here ya' go..
https://theconversation.com/only-5-3-of-welders-in-the-us-are-women-after-years-as-a-writing-professor-i-became-one-heres-what-i-learned-240431
Some of that misunderstanding comes from the different ways men and women communicate among themselves. Sure, there are men who are more sensitive and women who are more direct, but at the polar ends of the range, there’s where the conflict is hardest to avoid.
Thank you! Very interesting. Her article, particularly the "B***tch can weld" account from another woman, jangled with the things I have been thinking about and working on putting into words.
Maybe I was too thick headed or just young enough to accept some criticism as potentially legitimate, but "mansplaining" and doubt of my capabilities has only begun to irritate me over the past year or two. (It, too, might have something to do with getting old...). It happened several times during early voting. Dropping the information, 'Yes, I've been doing this for over 20 years, things frequently change from election to election," generally helped establish a better foundation for communication.
More on the differences between the fabrication shop and the academic classroom after church. Where does the time go?!
I've welded before...No well, but I've done it. It's a skill.
In college I worked in a warehouse, so I am comfortable with handling pallets, driving a forklift, etc. it surprises people I know how to use my hands.
Not my oldest son: he cringes whenever I reach for the chainsaw.....
I learned some very basic welding in high school shop class and did a little here and there for some years afterward. Haven't struck an arc in so long now I doubt I could hold one.
That was very interesting.
They do a lot of scrubbing of emissions now. There was a mild odor around the water treatment ponds, but other than that, nothing to speak of.
Wow, amazing. That’s real progress.
I worked with Dr. Khalpey and other Cardiac surgeons during one of my career adventures in mechanical circulatory support devices.
This is an awesome 3D cgi video of the thoracic organs during breathing and heart beats. The diaphragm movement I find cool
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/khalpey-ai_health-wellness-anatomy-activity-7260078499644780546-Kulm
That was cool!
Great article, Cynthia. I watched all of the videos, and shared them with my husband. I often read, out loud, parts of articles I particularly like, and so he really enjoyed this too. How on earth do they keep that truck in place when it is being tilted at what looks like close to a 90 degree angle? I told my husband that the big wood chipper seemed like it could be part of a plot to one of my crime novels!
If they had a paper mill in Midsomer.
Good one!
That was a fascinating report. I learned something from it, and enjoyed it. What I remember about the Pee Dee river is that it was a rejected name by Stephen Collins Foster. He had an inspiration for a song (that became the Suwanee River song), but Pee Dee River didn't fit what he had in mind. So he called his brother Mitt for the names of some Southern rivers. Mitt suggested the Yazoo, before theyf inally settled on the Suwannee River. To think the song could have been the Pee Dee river song.
Growing up, my Mom had a book, "Stephen Collins Foster and his little dog Tray". I loved that book! But the last few pages are torn and missing, so it wasn't until I was an adult that I knew of his death at such a young age.
Interesting person. Stephen Foster, a Northerner from Pennsylvania who wrote many songs romanticizing the antebellum South.
Lots of interesting side notes this morning. So nice to get away from all the political angst, and remember there’s a lot more to life!
Hear, hear!
So you bought the apple airpods with their hearing aid support?
WHAAAT?????? SPEAK UP!
That book sounds familiar. The Pee Dee River is probably in a country song or two. Allison Moorer mentioned the Tombigbee River in "Alabama Song".
All this Pee Dee talk sent me on something of a wild goose chase...
Which, fair warning, you have here a chance to follow if you're into chasing wild geese. But if not and you go on anyway, you don't get to cry fowl at the end, since you were warned here ahead of time.
One of the tools a Toolroom Machinist like I used to be needs to know how to use is a set of "thread measuring wires". That is simply a collection of wires ground to several precise diameters, matched in groups of three of the same diameter, and used three at a time in conjunction with a micrometer to measure a particular dimension related to cutting both U.S. and metric series standard 60* machine threads and Acme series threads on a lathe, different wire diameters being needed for different series of each type of thread.
Now that you already know more about what's needed to cut accurate machine threads than you ever wanted or needed to know in your entire lives and you're no doubt wondering "What the...?"...
Well, one of the most common brand names of thread measuring wire sets is... wait for it...
Pee Dee Thread Measuring Wires
https://www.fishermachine.com/product-page/pee-dee-thread-wires-case-charts
I and many of the Machinists and Toolmakers I knew who regularly did lathe work had a set of these in their toolboxes. They've been around for so long they're sort of the OG thread wire set. So, I found myself wondering, what's the Pee Dee River or the Pee Dee region of S.C. or the Pee Dee Indians have to do with thread wires long manufactured by an outfit named Fisher Machine Shop all the way on the other side of the country in California.
And the answer is... I don't know. Google's failed to provide a link - yes, Phil and / or Cynthia, pun intended - and I have sent an email to Fisher requesting an explanation, darn it, because I spent near 5 decades using one of their products and think it's about high time they let me in on the secret.
And if the secret turns out to be that one of the critical dimensions of a machine thread that thread wires are designed to help measure is the thread's *P*itch *D*iameter, I'm gonna' be reeeaaally disappointed.
This ends the unscheduled machine shop education portion of CSLF programming for today. Now back to your regularly scheduled program...
Looking forward to your lecture series on King Dick tools—and their famed quality.
https://www.kingdicktools.co.uk/index.asp
I'm not one to brag, but it is pretty hard to beat.
All right! All right! Everybody settle down!!
Turns out there's a growing number of folks on this side of the pond who really do appreciate that kind of quality in a tool, as I have it on good authority that a construction company down in Ohio has a newly minted contract with these Brits for them to be the exclusive supplier of all the tools they use in their work. An arrangement that both companies hope will help seriously raise their profiles in their respective markets even further.
https://www.facebook.com/people/Superior-Erection-Company/100066399296642/
Seeing as how you seem to be in the mood, here’s some additional unfettered juvenalia from my favorite lewd Canuckistani enginerd:
https://youtu.be/-iz_Zo2OBfQ?feature=shared
I'm nothing if not occasionally moody, but let's see...
Hmmm... unfettered juvenalia referencing male genitalia...
I'm guessin' there's no violation of community standards here because... you don't have any?
Wait. You let me in here, didn't you? Well, I guess that answers that question.
And more threads in this thread? Sheesh!! But I'm guessin' that doesn't seem two nuts to you...
Tag. You're it.
I look forward to finding out what you learned. I've already learned that "thread wires" exist, and that's neat.
Will let you know if I hear anything back. Guessing they don't work weekends, or at least not the office folks. Meantime, for your learning pleasure...
Careful, though. You don't want your friends or neighbors to find out you've obtained this knowledge, or the next time they need a 3 1/2'-4 UNC 3A LH triple-lead thread cut, they'll probably come knocking on your door wanting you to do it for them while offering some lame excuse for why they can't do it themselves.
https://littlemachineshop.com/images/gallery/instructions/ThreeWireMethod.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkEVwpl2S4Q
As "Old School" as it gets... the way I learned to do it 50 years ago: 'manually'...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCZFmuYnotQ
How it's done now with CNC lathes and modern carbide tooling: much, much faster...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1C34QmGuIA
Edit: Back in the day I didn't get to listen to any snazzy music while I was learning to thread... ☹
Wow, I had no idea there was all that to screwing things up. You could forget they're shaving metal: it looks like they're cutting potatoes!
You want English or metric thread fries with that burger?
And that's just external (male) threads. There's internal threads too, ya know.
Them dern women... they come with a whole 'nother set of screwy things you have to figure out how to deal with.
I want to go on that field trip. I love being in the woods. We have 44 acres of woods that are in a managed forest program. They came and thinned it out a few years back. It looked like a tornado hit as they don’t have much use for the tree tops so they leave them. Thank goodness we have a friend who likes to cut wood so he’s cleaned it up quite a bit. I wonder how much the demand for paper has gone down in the past 20 years.
When we lived in Massachusetts, we had a farm in Greenbrier County WV. About 80ac, 50ac 100 yr old beautiful hardwood. I bought the timber rights back.
It was just wonderful deep woods. Little on the ground but ferns and deep wood flowers. Oak tree trunks grow 30 40ft amd more before a branch due to shading of the canopy.
They said demand went way down at the peak of the Covid shutdowns. Newsprint isn't the big seller it once was, but mailing boxes are a growth product.
Funny in a way. I’d heard there were covid paper shortages, at least for certain grades of paper, which ended up to the benefit of Amazon’s on-demand printing operations. Amazon can print, bind, and ship whole books on demand at soft-cover prices and have a respectable profit on each unit, someone explained to me a few years ago.
Is *toilet* a grade of paper? Askin' for a friend, of course.
"I’d heard there were covid paper shortages, at least for certain grades of paper ,.."
Yes, I'm sure "what kind of paper" was an important factor.
I’m sure there are gradations and standards that didn’t exist when we were kids, but are now essential for all sorts of tech-laden processes.
There’s a popular belief among civilizational pessimists who find we haven’t had the types of technological leaps our forebears experienced from 1900 to 1950, when cars, aircraft, telephony, radio went from non-existent to ubiquitous. But in the decades since, the refinement of technologies and materials has kept expanding the portion of global humanity able to enjoy all those civilizational goods at reasonably affordable prices.
Excellent point.
Really interesting. I like the video of the truck being tipped up. It reminded me of videos where someone ignores the flashing lights on a drawbridge and ends up in that situation. What do they use, besides the truck's brakes, to keep it from rolling? That's a lot of weight to just use "chocks" behind the wheels.
That looked scary to me! I have been wondering how they kept it in place because you know it was more than “chocks.”
When I first moved to Flint back in the early 70s there was a Paramount Potato Chip factory (of Slim Chipley fame) in town on a major highway. They had a hydraulic-ramped semi-truck unloader for dumping the incoming tons of spuds similar to the one in the video.
The plant was visible from the highway, but as I recall, the view of the unloader was partially obscured by some trees so that when you drove by and a truck was being emptied, what you basically saw was the tractor and about the first 1/3 of the trailer behind it sticking up at about a 40* angle above the tree tops and nothing of the unloader ramp. Just sort of looked like it was hanging up in the air like that all on its own.
Never having seen anything like that before in his life, I've gotta' say 18-year-old me was pretty freaked-the-heck-out the first time he came driving by and saw that!
We asked that. Nothing. It just has the parking brake on and sits there.
😳 I know you’re not lying, but that seems hard to believe!!
And it stays there what percent of the time?
Hydraulic airbrakes that modern commercial vehicles have for parking and emergency use are locked tight as can be on pretty much all wheels. Some road safety regulations still require chock blocks in breakdown situations, iirc.
I worked on some parts waay back like 1980s. Learned that, at least back then, airbrakes for big rigs had an interesting design feature.
Airbrakes are always "ON".
The air system is used to push the brakes away from the rotor or braking surface. Pushing the pedal closes the brake by releasing pressure. Into a reservoir.
The safety idea, is if the brake lines leak or fail, the brakes go on. Not sure if they still work this way
That’s still the system, to my knowledge. If the trailer brake lines come loose, the trailer brakes lock instantaneously.
You've probably seen one of those sets of super dark and distinct 18-wheeler uninterrupted skid marks leaving, say, an interstate lane and traversing over to and down to a stop on the shoulder? "Catastrophic air system failure".
Thanks, that's informative.
He's just chock-a-block full of info sometimes, isn't he?
The door 🚪 is that way ⬆️.
I'm going to assume the answer is "always," or they would add additional restraints. The cost of a disaster on one of those things would be enormous.
So, they use the brakes and let the chips fall where they may.
Since there are no chocks involved, I guess there's no chip-off-he-old-chock card to play here either. Drat!
Misfire.
Did I see Phil here this morning? He must have missed this!
Yeah, but I looked at the video again and thought I sawdust...
As I mentioned to Cynthia after prepping the post, her report inspired some nostalgia for school trips and such to teach young kids something about how things are physically made in this world—some appreciation for heavy industry.
In my area, it wasn’t so much that we had factories or heavy industrial plants that kids could visit on class trips, but we did get to see old films from industry when teachers were out of ideas of what to do with a room full of kids eight hours a day, five days a week… I would think with our aging and still urbanizing human geography, the tendency for kids to grow up thinking electricity comes from the wall outlet and food comes from the grocery store to be overwhelming.
I remember how much I liked it when I saw that old film projector sitting out. I knew we were going to get to watch something I’d enjoy. I also loved field trips!
And if we behaved we might get to watch the movie backwards!
Our teacher wasn’t that creative! 😂
I have a vague idea of how electricity is generated, but every time I think I have it down I have to go and forget it again.
Basically, they run a magnet through a coil of wires.
Yes, and boil water.
Which is heated by a coal furnace, or oil or gas burners, or maybe a nuclear reactor.
Turn a turbine.
The boiled water connects to the turbine!
The turbine connects to the magnet!
The magnet goes through the coil!
The moving magnet and coil generate an electromagnetic field!
I think…
Once properly mounted I wouldn't think it too easy to turn one of these things...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67i_orzH85A
We had a set of VHS tapes about industry and transportation, titles like "There Goes a Truck!" and "There Goes a Train!" The kids watched them all the time.
Some people were recently talking about how great Quebec is, and I said, "Quebec is where they filmed 'There Goes a Snowplow!'," and F and D were aghast.
My first husband worked for Caterpillar. One time he brought home a video of a choreographed equipment show CAT pur on for employees. Marching band/ballet but with humongous heavy equipment. It was really cool.
You could say that about almost anyplace in Canada, aka "the Great White North" (the title of a comedy album by 2 Canadian comics in the '80s).
When my oldest was a toddler, I bought a VHS video, 'The adventures of Hard Hat Harry, the construction genie!". It was about really big trucks! And you saw them in operation. We loved that video!
I had a Little Golden Book titled Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.
Me too!!! Maybe not everyone here has seen it? Let's share!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TpoVrKHtNE
The Bulldozer video included other construction machinery, and the Dump Truck one explained the process of road building.
Growing up, my family lived on a large farm that was turned into a hunting preserve. We had bulldozers for making roads, and cranes to create ponds from areas that had natural springs. I haven’t thought about that in a long time.
Good morning. High 30s now, supposed to reach the low 60s.
Thanks for the trip report Cynthia!
In addition to the paper-making process, I found it interesting that there are alligators in South Carolina. I never thought they were that far north.
They go into NC, at least as far north as Camp Lejeune.
My bro-in-law who was once stationed there would be interested to hear that.
Yeah, I thought that was interesting, too.
I knew alligators were in SC - they even find them in NC occasionally - but I was surprised they were common in the Great Pee Dee River, so close to home.
They are at least as far north as Camp Lejeune. There used to be a bunch of them around the visitors' center for the USS North Carolina.
When I was younger, alligators were just in the Gulf states like Louisiana and Florida, and protected. More recently they can be hunted with some limitations. (They say gator meat tastes "just like chicken".)
Maybe a future TSAF?
I've had fried 'gator, at a Seminole reservation in Southern Florida. It's very greasy, very chewy, almost rubbery. February 18th, 1992.
How do I know the day? Pam and I got married on February 15th (Saturday), and we went on a Tuesday. I was an hour late getting to the wedding ceremony. I arrived 11 minutes before the ceremony was to begin, so at least ten minutes early! Pam was pretty relaxed about it. I was driving from Indy to Greenfield, and a semi crashed on I-70, a mile past the Mt. Comfort road exit. Stuck in traffic for roughly an hour.
So you didn't have your best man make sure to get you to the church on time?
Curious... would you also describe alligator as "very chewy" if one were clamped onto your leg?
I think I covered the American alligator at some time in the past. I'll check the files!