Month: January 2021

The White House animals have a Twitter account.

Cloth measuring tapes can be wrong out of the package. Like, vastly wrong. Off by an 1/8″ per inch. Better measure them against a known ruler when you open them up.

You can look at the original topo maps of Switzerland! This is fun.

I may not survive Zoom school this year. God help us if we don’t get back to school by next September.

I learned (really learned, not just “kinda sorta”) what a Primary Source is. I’ve always been a bit confused about whether newspaper reporting (or digital news reporting now) can be considered “primary.” Yes, it can, as long as the reporter is speaking/writing to actually-observed events. Anderson Cooper, as an Anchor at the desk is not doing my primary reporting. Tia Mitchell, who was actually there, is a primary source for actions that took place in the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

It is exceptionally weird to be awoken at 2:30 AM by the local tornado sirens but it be otherwise completely silent. No rain. No wind. Fortunately, no damage either, at least around here. We all piled downstairs into Jacob’s room, including the cat, who seemed delighted to have all his people together in one spot.

Turns out there are at least three, maybe four, tornado sirens within earshot of my house. I’ve only heard two of them before.

Actually turns out there are five sirens within 2.5 miles of my house, ranging from 1.3 to 2.4 miles away. Given last night’s noise conditions, we probably heard all of them.

Birdhouse sales and accoutrements are a complete scam! At least, the majority of items that I hit upon a google search are entirely devoted to $$ rather than helping a homeowner attract birds. For example: “build a birdhouse from scrap lumber” gets you some good information. “How to erect a birdhouse/mount a birdhouse” or many other searches get you pages with responses such as:

Mounting Mechanism: How the house is mounted affects its safety and security. Many birdhouses are designed to be attached to a tree, building, or pole where they will be stable and comfortable to birds. Some designs can also be hung with hooks, wires, ropes, or chains. Some birds don’t mind a bit of swinging, though other species will avoid less stable houses. To be safe, research the mounting mechanism your backyard birds prefer before putting up the house.

While that paragraph is accurate, it’s also useless and it is representative of the web sources out there.

If you do a lot of digging you eventually find authoritative sources such as the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Nest Watch website, where I finally found good information. BUT! Even there, while searching for information on HOW TO MOUNT THE DAMN BIRDHOUSE, it wasn’t until I accidentally clicked on one of their YouTube links that I finally got good, experienced advice on the fastest/easiest/cheapest way to install a birdhouse on a pole. What I found most gratifying about this accidental click is that I’d finally sat down a brainstormed on how I was going to put these birdhouses up (on poles) and decided that electrical conduit and conduit brackets were the way to go. Their YouTube video agrees and further advises on a quick method for getting the pole into the ground, which is a #4 rebar, pounded with a mallet into the ground, used as a base for the conduit pipe.

Online purpose-built equipment for birdhouse pole mounting starts at $50 and goes rapidly up from there and honestly most of it looks like chincy crap that will fall apart or be difficult to install. However, 10 feet of 1/2″ electrical conduit, a pack of 25 double hole conduit straps, a 4′ section of rebar, a coupler, a bunch of screws and a sledgehammer will run you about $30. Then, you’re only paying $9 for each birdhouse for a piece for conduit and rebar until you run out of conduit straps. Throw in the cost for an inexpensive drill, and you’re still under $100, which puts you ahead of the more costly pole options available from bird-specific markup houses.

There is a fun, modular, diy dungeon terrain system.

If you use a magnetic locator to find your property pins in the woods where someone in the past erected barbed wire fence but now it’s mostly buried…you spend a lot of time digging up barbed wire.

Nevertheless, success.

Griffin and I found the really important propert pin (!!!ppf!!!) that will define the edge where we may place a fence.

I’m proud to say that despite our fudging and guesstimating and eyeballing, the pin was 5.2’ from where we placed a stake as our “place to start looking.” pic.twitter.com/ICcxWo22Yk— Goats (@bruhsam) January 16, 2021

Turns out, you can rent survey equipment.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is one of my podcasts. This week I learned again that there are people who experience the world in ways that are very different from me. Synesthesia. I’ve heard discussions of this before, but this one in particular was evocative due to the people on the episode who have synesthesia describing how sounds and other sensations make them feel. Come for the excellent podcast quality, stay for the dude’s description of his Blue Meal.

Lots of Goats this week. We had a herd of Goats clearing off our front hill and they did a great job. They left behind more of the English Ivy runners than I expected, but honestly, I don’t care. The business we got the goats from is Red Wagon Goats.

Goats will EAT YOUR TREES if they’re bored with other foods. They’ve ring-barked a few trees I figured would be fine. Surprise, they’re not fine anymore.

Last week I talked about the book Civil War Atlanta by Robert Scott Davis. I stopped reading it because I found one incredible factual error that puts the rest of the book in serious question. The author said (paraphrasing) in June 1862, an Atlanta-raised unit of 1050 men went to war and by the following September “only 35 remained standing.” I don’t know how much you know about the kinds of casualties that American Civil War units withstood, but that number is pretty high. Laughably high actually, and easily looked up and disproved. So, that book is done for me.

Back to the weekend’s location of our property pins, given that we found a lot of barbed wire along our property line, I went looking to find out what our property used to be, prior to it becoming a residential subdivision. I couldn’t find a lot online about the previous owners of the property. I probably need to go into the Cobb County tax office in person to dig it up. But, just to get a sense of the transition from farm to suburb, I went through the USGS Historical Archive hosted by ArcGIS. All the USGS maps that are in the area you choose back through time. In the image here from 1967, my house is at the red cross-hairs and those purple buildings might be chicken houses. Would explain the barbed-wire on the property line if they had other livestock.

Back to goats: Our goats did NOT want to get back into the trailer. About 2/3 of them docilely did what their handlers wanted. The other 1/3, noped out and started wandering around, eating our juniper, then the stuff that’s poisonous to them. Then we were chasing three of them around the neighborhood. Eventually they all got piled in and loaded out.

Goat rental is both effective and very entertaining. We’re probably paying a 10-20% premium over what we’d have paid for people to rip out our English ivy, but this is way more entertaining. It’s worth the extra.

Bret Deveraux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, @bretdeveraux) is a four-square awesome writer and historian. He is one of those people who can take the intricacies of something dry and academic and make it accessible and interesting. I recommend his blog to anyone, but especially anyone interested in military history, A Song of Ice and Fire, Star Wars, gaming, or just interesting writing. (A confession: I did not learn about Dr. Deveraux this week, but he finished up his deconstruction of the Dothraki in ASoiaF this week, so it’s appropriate. He makes book recommendations in his posts that have been extremely helpful. I’ve picked up several great texts including Shattered Sword on his recommendation.)

There is a twitter account dedicated to retweeting people talking about dropping their AirPods into toilets. Because of course there is.

Unsurprisingly, the various Histories of Atlanta [still] gloss over the “…nastier aspects of the [city].” Latest offender is Civil War Atlanta by Robert Scott Davis. It deletes the forcible removal of the native tribes during the run up to the founding of Atlanta, and very much glosses over the horrendous conditions of chattel slavery. I suppose I can’t expect more of a 113 page book dealing with several decades of history, but it’s possible to do better. Do better, authors.

Coincidentally to the above comment, there was an AJC news article this morning concerning this very topic. A UGA professor, Claudio Saunt, recently published “Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory.” I’ve ordered it through my library.

Massachusetts may get a state dino. And that’s just cool.

Apropos of that last, GA has a state fossil. It’s the shark’s tooth. “In 1976, the shark tooth was designated the official state fossil. Probably one of the most sought-after fossils by amateur collectors, the shark tooth is a relatively common fossil in the Georgia coastal plain. In fossil form, the shark tooth can be traced back 375,000,000 years.”

Speaking of Georgia, during the beginning of this year’s legislative session, several State Senators who actively abetted the Stop the Steal Conspiracy have been removed from their committee chairmanships. So, good on that.

Speaking of State legislators who deserve to be punished for their anti-democratic and seditions positions, here’s a long thread of mine:

There are people in Georgia who went beyond the background hum of racism and bigotry common to our state and our nation. They actively stood up to disenfranchise us (and I mean ALL of us) to further their personal agendas. 1/— 917 FTW!! (@bruhsam) January 7, 2021

Captain Awkward has a great post on productivity. Even better, they cite Zoe Keating (who is the best Cellist, evah!) as great for productivity music (because she is!) which I totally agree with (hell yeah!)!!

The term “hectare” implies there is an “are.”

I’ll leave you with…goats.

Griffin calls the examination table at his Dr. the “healing table.” I is ded of cute.

I can’t go one day in the new year without screwing up the date.

There’s such a thing as self-healing concrete, and that titanium dioxide added to concrete will make it self-cleaning

“Mayor Pete” Buttigieg says he’ll do something about the years of racist transportation funding priorities that have disproportionately impacted the poor and black and other POC.

I learned about linktr.ee, a problematic link-shortening website that (apparently) was designed for Instagram. I missed it because I’m not on Instagram. (Twitter! LinkedIn (ugh)!) I’m not on Facebook because I deleted it. I have other social media accounts (reddit, pinterest, but I never use them.

The South Pole is ceremonial marked every year and the previous marker is retired to a glass case in the science station.

The word “prolix.” See the first sentence of Part I, Background. From Merriam-Webster, “Marked by or using an excess of words.”

That Trump is still a lying liar who lies because he can’t understand a world where he isn’t right, even when he’s wrong, but it’s not like we didn’t know that and if you voted for him in 2016 you’re either willfully blind, a bigot and racist, or both. [no citations because, jesus who needs them except for the willfully blind, see above]

And, apparently, civil insurrection and the despoiling of our federal legislature is what we’re doing now.