I just told Ms. Pinki, I love "old Sh**" or stuff. I opened my Sam Adams OctoberFest with my 90 year old US made CANCO can/bottle opener.
Love to keep using old stuff, maintaining it.
The MOST environmentallly friendly and best life-cycle cost (lowest), is use, use, use, reuse, reuse, reuse. Avoiding new, is significantly more impactful than Recycle etc.
Definitely. Wanna do the world a favor? Renovate an old building that is going to be torn down. My 100 year old apartment building could have ended up in a landfill if someone (me) didn't resurrect it.
I presume you found that incurring the restoration costs would ultimately be recovered. The problem is that old buildings that have fallen into disrepair often cant be economically restored.
In a broader sense (and I don't like this), most people find it cheaper to buy new and throw out old, than make do with old.
The larger issue is folks just don't wanna do the work on old buildings because it requires special knowledge and skills. There is, of course, a break point where sometimes it does simply cost more than the building is worth, and that point is most often passed because of no maintenance or ongoing repairs. But, folks don't even know how to calculate those break points anymore. It's just easier to tear it down and run new building standard practices. The "can't be economically restored" has a lot to do with what customers want, which increasingly is they don't want old building stuff, not that the work can't be done economically.
Lots of old buildings just don't have the layout or size to adapt to new customer demands. The historic building thing was largely a baby boomer phenomenon. Younger folks don't want the old stuff. I read an article about this, where folks that restored an old place can't sell it. Of course, there's specific markets where people want it...Cambridge, MA is one example. San Francisco's "painted ladies" is another.
I got lucky with my building. Solid masonry and extremely well built in the first place.
Another perspective on original analysis and that fabulous and fun video.
It is a very sad story.
On September 8th, 1994, I was on business trip close to my home town and visited mom. I was driving back home to Western Massachusetts.
Anytime I'm near, I go to Gettysburg. Probably visited 15 times since 1962/3. I was on Little Round Top about 30 minutes after sunset, 530pm in twilight. Looking around where Chamberlains 20th Maine had "Fixed Bayonets", and rushed downhill at Hood's 15th and 47th Alabama and routed them.
My cell phone rang. It was my secretary. I said hello. She said, "Thank god you are okay. We thought you were on the plane." I asked, what plane??". She said that a USAIR flight had crashed going in to Pittsburgh. It was from Chicago and my Marketing department thought some of could be on that flight. None were thankfully. 132 fatalities.
My sad brain, standjng on Little Round Top, thinks, about 10,000 died here. Another 40,000 casualties.
So roughly, brain thinks, actual time, 75 hours, or about 133 killed per hour. But thats nighttime too. Combat hours were 25 so 3x 133.
That is a Boeing 737 crashing every 20 minutes.
Over a 2 mile x 2 mile battlefield.
That is how one might more easily relate to the Gettysburg battle. More fatalities than all of 9/11, Gulf War, Iraq Invasion and Afghanistan combined.
Yes. I know all of this part of America. Sad. I first flew the no overhead doored shelf binned 1960s BAC-111 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_One-Eleven into Allegheny Airport. Enroute to Logan for college.
I loved that video. I do a lot of this looking for original sources. Or deriving from first principles wizziks me.
On the length of a human blood vessel, I was starting to compute the transport rate of oxygen and across the blood cell into and thru the capillary wall. Then ROM the area and use cardiac output around 6 Liters/minute and estimate an average diameter..then length. Fortunately for me, the video was shorter!!
I learned and was later taught these quick ROM estimates. My brain is messed up.
Made it up north without hitting any deer, that's always the worry this time of year. A little snow up here, just enough to make the trees look gorgeous. At dawn's light we saw the dock guy removed the boat lift but didn't install the dang bubbler! We have a permanent dock so we have to ensure there's open water around it in the winter. Always something!
At about 4am, driving 3 paying passengers and me from Cambridge for 1973 Thanksgiving break, I hit a deer on I 70 right before the Carlisle exit. Stumbled to the gas station. Three deer went across earlier in my headlights. This fella had to wait and caught my right side bumper, headlight and radiator of my 1965 Buick Lesabre. Had to add water every 40 miles down to Wood County WV. Next year, nearly missed getting hit again south of Carlisle north of Pittsburgh
I think it's more interesting to know the length of our intestines, about 15 feet. I asked my MD husband how long he thought the arteries etc. would be in a human and he guessed 10,000 miles.
The small bowel. Cillia. The osmotic pump. My wife lost hers due to a gross error at um a place. Massive surgery required to open lavage. Almost lost her 2006. Sigh.
It's a vital organ. No mechanical or artificial transplants.
Yes she eats normally. 2006, famous clinic. Precancerous pollups removal. Some colon to be removed, plumbing reconnected. They wanted to discharge her Sunday but, I pointed out she was bleeding from the exit port. They did absolutely nothing. Overnight the plumbing connection which was leaking or bleeding went septis. He small bowl wall swelled from nominal 2 mm to 8mm. And no longer works. 3 days of induced coma ICU.
"The length of a human intestine, including both the small and large intestine, is typically around 15 feet long, with the small intestine measuring approximately 22 feet and the large intestine around 5 feet long."
I asked Microsoft CoPilot the same question. It came back with about six metres for the small intestine (about 20 feet) and 1.5 metres for the large intestine (5 feet) for a total of 25 feet. Slightly different answer, but at least the addition is correct.
Google is spending at least $3B on AI Data Centres this year. Perhaps once that investment has been made, they will have produced software that can successfully add 22 & 5.
I once researched the claim that women's fertility peaks at age 27. "How could they know?" I asked. "How could they assemble a study population of women with naturally functioning reproductive systems who are regularly engaging in natural sexual behaviors with men who also have healthy reproductive systems?"
The answer was, they did not. They counted how many children women in a small, "plain-living" German religious sect had, and at what age. (I think it was in the 1960s.) They found that, after age 27, child-bearing slowed among these women.
That's it: the whole #Science. From this, they generalized a biological loss of fertility, across the whole female sex, at age 27.
You'd think there'd be enough weirdos out there wanting to conduct additional studies of women's fertility peaks!
Not me of course!
I was speaking to a student today, her parents are doctors. She recommended having my youngest shadow a gynecologist her parents are friends with (the parents are MDs). Apparently he is well known for his research, and loves to encourage students to pursue medical school. Although he also has pet spiders in his office. I may try to talk my youngest into shadowing him.
Health and medicine are rife with this sort of stuff, like “Drink at least eight glasses of water a day!” It’s a good idea not to get dehydrated, but otherwise, it’s a magical number once conjured out of thin air and handed down over generations. For instance, what do you mean by “glass”, doc? How many ounces?
My dietary sojourn has led me past a whole garden of unsubstantiated claims and beliefs in that field. No one has ever demonstrated that fiber is essential. Vitamin C does not only come from vegetables, but is also present in meats*. Red meats do not contain only saturated fats, but also significant amounts of mono- and polyunsaturated fats.
[*The Inuit people subsisted for half a year on mainly seal meat and blubber without needing C supplements or getting scurvy. They didn’t get fiber, either. The research anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson who lived with them for a year replicated the experience for a year at a research hospital and remained healthy throughout.]
I firmly believe that regular doses of red wine will keep me healthy and alive to a ripe old age. Please don't disillusion me with your "alternative facts"!
That was a fun video, trying to find an obscure bit of information. It reminded me of the blogger who decided to try to find why a little-used pedestrian bridge over a freeway was originally built. The result is the saga of the "Bloomfield Bridge" that was put online last year: https://tylervigen.com/the-mystery-of-the-bloomfield-bridge
Warning: don't click the link unless you have a free half hour or so!
Charlotte City Manager Marcus Jones is getting a pay raise of 5%, Mayor Vi Lyles announced at Monday’s City Council meeting. The raise will bring his base salary to about $474,530. For the second year in a row, the City Council did not vote in open session on the raise, a potential violation of North Carolina open meeting laws.
Council members also didn’t vote in open session last year on raises for the city clerk and city attorney. A pair of attorneys told The Charlotte Observer at the time that was a likely violation of North Carolina open meeting laws.
That does seem like a tad much for a City Manager. There's more than enough Scofflaw opportunties to let both party's have at it. If I had only been willing to pay Boris Epshteyn $40K per month, I might have gotten a cabinet post!
If it was a very well-run city, he might be worth it. The fact that the Council is trying to hide it is a clue as to how the residents would feel, if they knew.
Good morning. Not raining here, and getting light. Temps in the 40s. We may see the legendary Great Light in the afternoon.
The mothership is covering the latest developments in Israel, including the ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu, his former defense minister, and (in an odd attempt to appear even-handed where even-handed-ness is not called for) a possibly dead Hamas leader.
The sun made a very brief appearance Sunday on our way to pickleball and it lit up the dog park prairie field. It was just glimmering gold, so pretty. Then the sun went away and I haven't seen it since.
Rain here. Disturbing what was a good 6 inches at the end of last week and the snowmaking efforts of the mountain crew. But a significant storm could be on the way...
Here in TX it looks like our six month summer might finally be over. 49 and sunny now. We’ve been waiting for this since early May. My coffee tastes extra good sitting in the back yard.
The Free Press is covering ... something about a French trader making bank with Trump's election. Not sure what happened to their newsletter, but it never happened yesterday. Just a note on a feature. Is anyone driving over there while Bari has cocktails with B list intellectuals?
lol, I just heard from my Canadian co-author, who wants to meet up Thursday! I'll duck out of the kitchen for half an hour to chat at him.
Katie and I had planned to walk a 5k together, the "jingle jog" through the Christmas Lights our little town's display. But the forecast is rain, so she decided not to. I was bummed; who doesn't love to walk 3 miles in 30 degree weather when it is raining? 🧐But she called her partner and offered to switch morning and evening shifts, plus she is working Thanksgiving day. Her partner is a new grad, and this gives her partner a 4 day weekend to spend with family back home in VA.
Everyone likes their holidays. But I'm not sympathetic to "news" people who only publish when the family isn't in town. I worked for newspapers that published every single day. Granted, that Christmas day paper was usually pretty weak -- what with early deadlines to make life better for the delivery people. But it happened. People got their funnies and their crosswords and whatever we could cobble together. Bar and Nellie can't be bothered, evidently.
That may be a labor issue. The cost of holiday pay for carriers can be prohibitive with newspapers already operating on tight margins -- or more likely at a loss.
Great little reminder this morning. It's the telephone game, IRL. In my business life, I never ceased to be amazed at how passed along "facts" became the "truth".
Here, it's Chinese whispers. In the village, gossip whispering was the primary means for relating the news, and as it passed from person to person and village to village, it of course became altered from it's original, but still accepted by all as the truth.
Today’s special animal friend is the banded mongoose, Mungos mungo. We’ve moved westward from Lake Kariba to Victoria Falls, where these sturdy little carnivores thrive in the wet environment. They have a head-and-body length up to 18” and a tail a little shorter than the body. Their build is kind of hefty in the abdominal area, their fur is rough and gray-brown, and they have attractive vertical stripes that make me think of a 9-banded armadillo.
In the Herpestidae family of mongooses and mongoose-type-things such as meerkats and kusimanse, there are 34 extant species in 15 genera and 2 subfamilies. They’re all very cute, in that cat/weasel/otter way that many small predators are cute. As the moniker “Herpestidae” indicates, the family members are known for eating reptiles. Some species in India famously fight cobras, but the banded carnivore is a generalist, with millipedes and beetles making up most of its diet. They also eat many other invertebrates, small amphibians and reptiles – including snakes – and birds and their eggs.
Like meerkats, but unlike many other mongoose species, banded mongooses live in extended-family groups. The average group size is 20, but it ranges from 7 (dad, mom, and pups) when food is scarce to 40 in extremely well-resourced habitats. These groups get along pretty well with limited hierarchy, although there is some competition within the group for mates. All the females are permitted to mate, but older females have larger litters with a better survival rate. If a group gets too big, young females may be pushed out, often joining an unattached male to start a new group. The group dens together in termite mounds, rock shelters, or thick brush. They move their residence every two or three days, if possible.
There is a high level of aggression between groups. Territories are scent-marked and patrolled, but incursions are frequent, and fights often result in injury or death. Meanwhile, females will sometimes mate with outgroup males during the confusion. I’m sure there’s a species-level genetic advantage to this. Infant mortality is high, with about 50% of pups dying before 3 months of age.
"Anyone" slipped into the kitchen while you weren't looking, and carefully balanced still yet another piece of trash on top....following the unwritten rule that whoever places the last bit of trash on the Jenga Tower and causes it to topple over is responsible for taking out the trash.
I just told Ms. Pinki, I love "old Sh**" or stuff. I opened my Sam Adams OctoberFest with my 90 year old US made CANCO can/bottle opener.
Love to keep using old stuff, maintaining it.
The MOST environmentallly friendly and best life-cycle cost (lowest), is use, use, use, reuse, reuse, reuse. Avoiding new, is significantly more impactful than Recycle etc.
Definitely. Wanna do the world a favor? Renovate an old building that is going to be torn down. My 100 year old apartment building could have ended up in a landfill if someone (me) didn't resurrect it.
I presume you found that incurring the restoration costs would ultimately be recovered. The problem is that old buildings that have fallen into disrepair often cant be economically restored.
In a broader sense (and I don't like this), most people find it cheaper to buy new and throw out old, than make do with old.
The larger issue is folks just don't wanna do the work on old buildings because it requires special knowledge and skills. There is, of course, a break point where sometimes it does simply cost more than the building is worth, and that point is most often passed because of no maintenance or ongoing repairs. But, folks don't even know how to calculate those break points anymore. It's just easier to tear it down and run new building standard practices. The "can't be economically restored" has a lot to do with what customers want, which increasingly is they don't want old building stuff, not that the work can't be done economically.
Lots of old buildings just don't have the layout or size to adapt to new customer demands. The historic building thing was largely a baby boomer phenomenon. Younger folks don't want the old stuff. I read an article about this, where folks that restored an old place can't sell it. Of course, there's specific markets where people want it...Cambridge, MA is one example. San Francisco's "painted ladies" is another.
I got lucky with my building. Solid masonry and extremely well built in the first place.
Excellent observation, DougAz.
Another perspective on original analysis and that fabulous and fun video.
It is a very sad story.
On September 8th, 1994, I was on business trip close to my home town and visited mom. I was driving back home to Western Massachusetts.
Anytime I'm near, I go to Gettysburg. Probably visited 15 times since 1962/3. I was on Little Round Top about 30 minutes after sunset, 530pm in twilight. Looking around where Chamberlains 20th Maine had "Fixed Bayonets", and rushed downhill at Hood's 15th and 47th Alabama and routed them.
My cell phone rang. It was my secretary. I said hello. She said, "Thank god you are okay. We thought you were on the plane." I asked, what plane??". She said that a USAIR flight had crashed going in to Pittsburgh. It was from Chicago and my Marketing department thought some of could be on that flight. None were thankfully. 132 fatalities.
My sad brain, standjng on Little Round Top, thinks, about 10,000 died here. Another 40,000 casualties.
So roughly, brain thinks, actual time, 75 hours, or about 133 killed per hour. But thats nighttime too. Combat hours were 25 so 3x 133.
That is a Boeing 737 crashing every 20 minutes.
Over a 2 mile x 2 mile battlefield.
That is how one might more easily relate to the Gettysburg battle. More fatalities than all of 9/11, Gulf War, Iraq Invasion and Afghanistan combined.
Crazy mind
Gettysburg is not that far away, maybe 100 miles or so, from where United Flight 93 went down outside Shanksville PA.
Yes. I know all of this part of America. Sad. I first flew the no overhead doored shelf binned 1960s BAC-111 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_One-Eleven into Allegheny Airport. Enroute to Logan for college.
I loved that video. I do a lot of this looking for original sources. Or deriving from first principles wizziks me.
On the length of a human blood vessel, I was starting to compute the transport rate of oxygen and across the blood cell into and thru the capillary wall. Then ROM the area and use cardiac output around 6 Liters/minute and estimate an average diameter..then length. Fortunately for me, the video was shorter!!
I learned and was later taught these quick ROM estimates. My brain is messed up.
Made it up north without hitting any deer, that's always the worry this time of year. A little snow up here, just enough to make the trees look gorgeous. At dawn's light we saw the dock guy removed the boat lift but didn't install the dang bubbler! We have a permanent dock so we have to ensure there's open water around it in the winter. Always something!
At about 4am, driving 3 paying passengers and me from Cambridge for 1973 Thanksgiving break, I hit a deer on I 70 right before the Carlisle exit. Stumbled to the gas station. Three deer went across earlier in my headlights. This fella had to wait and caught my right side bumper, headlight and radiator of my 1965 Buick Lesabre. Had to add water every 40 miles down to Wood County WV. Next year, nearly missed getting hit again south of Carlisle north of Pittsburgh
I think it's more interesting to know the length of our intestines, about 15 feet. I asked my MD husband how long he thought the arteries etc. would be in a human and he guessed 10,000 miles.
The small bowel. Cillia. The osmotic pump. My wife lost hers due to a gross error at um a place. Massive surgery required to open lavage. Almost lost her 2006. Sigh.
It's a vital organ. No mechanical or artificial transplants.
Oh my Lord, that's tragic. So sorry. Can she eat in the conventional manner?
Yes she eats normally. 2006, famous clinic. Precancerous pollups removal. Some colon to be removed, plumbing reconnected. They wanted to discharge her Sunday but, I pointed out she was bleeding from the exit port. They did absolutely nothing. Overnight the plumbing connection which was leaking or bleeding went septis. He small bowl wall swelled from nominal 2 mm to 8mm. And no longer works. 3 days of induced coma ICU.
😞
Here 18 years later, Ms. Pinki still doesn't like her ileostomy.
But, she's alive, vibrant, extremely healthy. And happiest ever
Wow, that’s rough!
She's a 2nd gen Polish Prussian. Though lil girl. Scared me to death.
According to Google AI:
"The length of a human intestine, including both the small and large intestine, is typically around 15 feet long, with the small intestine measuring approximately 22 feet and the large intestine around 5 feet long."
Am I the only one who thinks 22+5=27 ?
I asked Microsoft CoPilot the same question. It came back with about six metres for the small intestine (about 20 feet) and 1.5 metres for the large intestine (5 feet) for a total of 25 feet. Slightly different answer, but at least the addition is correct.
Correct addition is an achievement.
Google is spending at least $3B on AI Data Centres this year. Perhaps once that investment has been made, they will have produced software that can successfully add 22 & 5.
I have faith!
Nope.
I was just thinking of the little skinny ones curled up in our gut, not the entire tract. Google AI can't add.
And it said 15 instead of 22. I mean, I'm sure some people's small intestine is 15 feet.
“It’s an intestine *so small* that it takes 22 feet to accomplish lengths that ordinary intestines achieve in ten!”
Hmm. 10,000 miles would be about 15,000 km. 🤔🤔🤔
I once researched the claim that women's fertility peaks at age 27. "How could they know?" I asked. "How could they assemble a study population of women with naturally functioning reproductive systems who are regularly engaging in natural sexual behaviors with men who also have healthy reproductive systems?"
The answer was, they did not. They counted how many children women in a small, "plain-living" German religious sect had, and at what age. (I think it was in the 1960s.) They found that, after age 27, child-bearing slowed among these women.
That's it: the whole #Science. From this, they generalized a biological loss of fertility, across the whole female sex, at age 27.
You'd think there'd be enough weirdos out there wanting to conduct additional studies of women's fertility peaks!
Not me of course!
I was speaking to a student today, her parents are doctors. She recommended having my youngest shadow a gynecologist her parents are friends with (the parents are MDs). Apparently he is well known for his research, and loves to encourage students to pursue medical school. Although he also has pet spiders in his office. I may try to talk my youngest into shadowing him.
Also, that wouldn't be scientific.
Drama Queen has a pet spider.
Health and medicine are rife with this sort of stuff, like “Drink at least eight glasses of water a day!” It’s a good idea not to get dehydrated, but otherwise, it’s a magical number once conjured out of thin air and handed down over generations. For instance, what do you mean by “glass”, doc? How many ounces?
My dietary sojourn has led me past a whole garden of unsubstantiated claims and beliefs in that field. No one has ever demonstrated that fiber is essential. Vitamin C does not only come from vegetables, but is also present in meats*. Red meats do not contain only saturated fats, but also significant amounts of mono- and polyunsaturated fats.
[*The Inuit people subsisted for half a year on mainly seal meat and blubber without needing C supplements or getting scurvy. They didn’t get fiber, either. The research anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson who lived with them for a year replicated the experience for a year at a research hospital and remained healthy throughout.]
I firmly believe that regular doses of red wine will keep me healthy and alive to a ripe old age. Please don't disillusion me with your "alternative facts"!
Never! Pickling is a viable form of preservation!
That was a fun video, trying to find an obscure bit of information. It reminded me of the blogger who decided to try to find why a little-used pedestrian bridge over a freeway was originally built. The result is the saga of the "Bloomfield Bridge" that was put online last year: https://tylervigen.com/the-mystery-of-the-bloomfield-bridge
Warning: don't click the link unless you have a free half hour or so!
I remember that article. It was cool.
A nerd’s work is never done.
Charlotte City Manager Marcus Jones is getting a pay raise of 5%, Mayor Vi Lyles announced at Monday’s City Council meeting. The raise will bring his base salary to about $474,530. For the second year in a row, the City Council did not vote in open session on the raise, a potential violation of North Carolina open meeting laws.
Council members also didn’t vote in open session last year on raises for the city clerk and city attorney. A pair of attorneys told The Charlotte Observer at the time that was a likely violation of North Carolina open meeting laws.
Read more at: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/article296148509.html#storylink=cpy
Darn those MAGA and their scofflaw ways! Oh, wait ...
That does seem like a tad much for a City Manager. There's more than enough Scofflaw opportunties to let both party's have at it. If I had only been willing to pay Boris Epshteyn $40K per month, I might have gotten a cabinet post!
You could probably get a cabinet door from Phil for cheap.
Good point.
If it was a very well-run city, he might be worth it. The fact that the Council is trying to hide it is a clue as to how the residents would feel, if they knew.
No question about it.
Some concerned citizen should organize a protest. Or maybe a lawsuit. 🙂
Fortunately, I'm not a Mecklenburg County or Charlotte resident.
Good morning. Not raining here, and getting light. Temps in the 40s. We may see the legendary Great Light in the afternoon.
The mothership is covering the latest developments in Israel, including the ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu, his former defense minister, and (in an odd attempt to appear even-handed where even-handed-ness is not called for) a possibly dead Hamas leader.
The sun made a very brief appearance Sunday on our way to pickleball and it lit up the dog park prairie field. It was just glimmering gold, so pretty. Then the sun went away and I haven't seen it since.
Rain here. Disturbing what was a good 6 inches at the end of last week and the snowmaking efforts of the mountain crew. But a significant storm could be on the way...
Here in TX it looks like our six month summer might finally be over. 49 and sunny now. We’ve been waiting for this since early May. My coffee tastes extra good sitting in the back yard.
We're supposed to get rain, maybe flurries. tomorrow night and Thursday.
Albrrrrrrta Clipper ftw! Amirite?
My brother in Moscow, PA, got 11" of snow. I haven't heard from Daughter A in Philly.
Lucky guy.
I don't know that he feels that way.
Yeah. Probably not.
Similar weather here. Supposed to get sharply colder over the weekend.
The Free Press is covering ... something about a French trader making bank with Trump's election. Not sure what happened to their newsletter, but it never happened yesterday. Just a note on a feature. Is anyone driving over there while Bari has cocktails with B list intellectuals?
Right, the last Front Page was November 21, last Thursday.
Who else would she have cocktails with?
She's pretty successful, time to step up her game. And yet, her inner circle doesn't always look much better than a Joe Rogan booking list.
As you might guess, I'm not a fan.
Do tell!
Gotta work on my poker face...
It's funny how people who have Real Jobs With Pay just take time off, while people who do everything for free just keep on working.
lol, I just heard from my Canadian co-author, who wants to meet up Thursday! I'll duck out of the kitchen for half an hour to chat at him.
Katie and I had planned to walk a 5k together, the "jingle jog" through the Christmas Lights our little town's display. But the forecast is rain, so she decided not to. I was bummed; who doesn't love to walk 3 miles in 30 degree weather when it is raining? 🧐But she called her partner and offered to switch morning and evening shifts, plus she is working Thanksgiving day. Her partner is a new grad, and this gives her partner a 4 day weekend to spend with family back home in VA.
I tell ya, I married not one, but two saints! 😀
Do they ever get together and compare notes? 🤣
Perhaps I should have added "but not at the same time"!
Everyone likes their holidays. But I'm not sympathetic to "news" people who only publish when the family isn't in town. I worked for newspapers that published every single day. Granted, that Christmas day paper was usually pretty weak -- what with early deadlines to make life better for the delivery people. But it happened. People got their funnies and their crosswords and whatever we could cobble together. Bar and Nellie can't be bothered, evidently.
Our paper stopped printing on Saturdays and holidays some time ago, only publishing online on those days.
That may be a labor issue. The cost of holiday pay for carriers can be prohibitive with newspapers already operating on tight margins -- or more likely at a loss.
Great little reminder this morning. It's the telephone game, IRL. In my business life, I never ceased to be amazed at how passed along "facts" became the "truth".
Here, it's Chinese whispers. In the village, gossip whispering was the primary means for relating the news, and as it passed from person to person and village to village, it of course became altered from it's original, but still accepted by all as the truth.
Today’s special animal friend is the banded mongoose, Mungos mungo. We’ve moved westward from Lake Kariba to Victoria Falls, where these sturdy little carnivores thrive in the wet environment. They have a head-and-body length up to 18” and a tail a little shorter than the body. Their build is kind of hefty in the abdominal area, their fur is rough and gray-brown, and they have attractive vertical stripes that make me think of a 9-banded armadillo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRzFs39gNOs
In the Herpestidae family of mongooses and mongoose-type-things such as meerkats and kusimanse, there are 34 extant species in 15 genera and 2 subfamilies. They’re all very cute, in that cat/weasel/otter way that many small predators are cute. As the moniker “Herpestidae” indicates, the family members are known for eating reptiles. Some species in India famously fight cobras, but the banded carnivore is a generalist, with millipedes and beetles making up most of its diet. They also eat many other invertebrates, small amphibians and reptiles – including snakes – and birds and their eggs.
They’re creative in finding food sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXW_1i1pA0w
Like meerkats, but unlike many other mongoose species, banded mongooses live in extended-family groups. The average group size is 20, but it ranges from 7 (dad, mom, and pups) when food is scarce to 40 in extremely well-resourced habitats. These groups get along pretty well with limited hierarchy, although there is some competition within the group for mates. All the females are permitted to mate, but older females have larger litters with a better survival rate. If a group gets too big, young females may be pushed out, often joining an unattached male to start a new group. The group dens together in termite mounds, rock shelters, or thick brush. They move their residence every two or three days, if possible.
There is a high level of aggression between groups. Territories are scent-marked and patrolled, but incursions are frequent, and fights often result in injury or death. Meanwhile, females will sometimes mate with outgroup males during the confusion. I’m sure there’s a species-level genetic advantage to this. Infant mortality is high, with about 50% of pups dying before 3 months of age.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAxmAk7woyA
Banded mongooses are a species of Least Concern. They live up to 10 years in the wild and up to 17 years in captivity.
Mungos Mungo... yeah, sounds like a *banded* mongoose.
Where men are men, and the mungos mungo where the mangroves manwent.
And where women glow and men plunder? And the beer does flow and men chunder?
Mungos mungo, not to be confused with Mungo Jerry.
https://youtu.be/wvUQcnfwUUM?si=CMUU5lpgI60fwym_
Nice reminder of summer as we move ever closer to winter!
Long time since I've heard that one!
Women...messing around with the enemy behind our backs. Confusion? I don't think so.
Good morning. It's raining here. And dark.
Good evening. It's not raining here. But, it's dark. Because the sun went down.
The sun will come up here eventually.
I've heard that. Someone told me it's a 24 hour cycle, but can I trust that person? I mean, who did they hear it from?
I have it on reliable authority that:
The sun will come out
Tomorrow
Bet your bottom dollar
That tomorrow
There'll be sun!
Just thinking about
Tomorrow
Clears away the cobwebs,
And the sorrow
'Til there's none!
Probably an anonymous poster on X.
I wonder if anyone took the trash out.
"Anyone" slipped into the kitchen while you weren't looking, and carefully balanced still yet another piece of trash on top....following the unwritten rule that whoever places the last bit of trash on the Jenga Tower and causes it to topple over is responsible for taking out the trash.
"Anyone lived in a pretty how town,
With up so floating many bells down..."
Anyone also left dishes in the sink. Around here, "anyone" are known collectively as The Overnight People.