Category Archives: Over the Transom

April Foolishness

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Back again on Easter Monday, April 5. Happy Easter to all.

On a day like today, and in fact today and no other day, I wake up and think, It’s April, fool. I could do that each day for the next 29 and still be right, but it’s not the same somehow.

Well below freezing this morning, but such temps won’t last. Not long ago I was pleased to see clover underfoot.

I’ve seen two (?) four-leaf clovers over the years. I can’t remember exactly. I know I spotted one in Nashville years ago. This source at least, claiming an empirical survey, says that one clover per 5,076 has four leaves, so it is a rarity. And five-leaf clovers are one in 24,390. Never seen one of those, or the one-in-312,500 six-leaf clover.

How is that most “clover-leaf” interchanges have four circular ramps, like the variety we aren’t likely to see? Shouldn’t we think of another name? Maybe Buckminster Fuller did. Quadrocircles or something.

A cell tower I saw last weekend near Jelke Creek Bird Sanctuary.

Why take a picture of something so pedestrian? It occurs to me that members of some future generation might quarrel about preserving some of the last standing cell towers as reminders of the 21st century. Most were long gone, having outlived their usefulness after everyone had those satellite-receiving transponders implanted behind their ears.

Also: more about governmental units from the Census Bureau. Jay once told me that Texas is fond of setting up specialized governmental districts, and so it seems.

“Texas ranks second among the states in number of local governments with 5,147 active as of June 30, 2012,” the bureau says. No townships — the Republic of Texas originally spurned such notions, perhaps, and maybe the state banned them in the 1876 constitution (everything’s in there) — but there are 2,600 special district governments.

Besides ordinary things like school districts and housing authorities, they include (and this isn’t a complete list) advanced transportation districts, coordinated county transportation authorities, county development districts, fire control and prevention and EMS districts, freight rail districts, fresh water supply districts, groundwater conservation districts, irrigation districts, levee improvement districts, local mental health authorities, intermunicipal commuter rail districts, multi-jurisdiction library districts, navigation districts, municipal power agencies, noxious weed control districts, rural rail transportation districts, rural and urban transportation districts, soil and water conservation districts, water improvement districts, sports and community venue districts, sports facility districts, and underground water conservation districts. What, no fire ant control districts?

Also: the Edwards Aquifer Authority, Palacios Seawall Commission, Riverbend Water Resources District, Ship Channel Security District, and the Upper Sabine Valley Solid Waste Management District.

Whew. To cross Texas is to cross a welter of districts. Who is number 1 in governmental units, if vast Texas is second? Illinois, with 6,936 as of June 30, 2012. What about the state with the least governmental units? I’d think it was Idaho or Vermont or Little Rhody, but no: Hawaii, with 21. Rhode Island is no. 49, with 133.

I understand that the Louvre has made all of its works available for viewing online, so the other day, I looked up “L’Arbre aux corbeaux,” by Caspar David Friedrich — “Krähenbaum” or “The Tree of Crows” (1822).

This is what I saw.

At Wikipedia, you can see this.

Both images unretouched. What’s up with that, Louvre?

From a press release that came my way recently: “Over the last few years, we’ve seen the rise of cleanfluencers from Mrs Hinch to Clean Mama. Like others, they’ve made the jump over to TikTok to provide us with their best tips and tricks, but how much could they potentially earn from their videos?”

Cleanfluencers? As usual, I’m behind the curve. As usual, I don’t give a damn. And of course, the reaction to this sort of nonsense isn’t new either.

Seen at Walmart

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People of Walmart has been around a while, but I don’t go to Walmart enough to see anything that strange. Until I did. Not long ago, I spotted a fellow sitting at the post-vaccination waiting area in a Walmart, paying attention to his phone. Nothing odd about that.

He had a swastika tattooed on his face (right-facing 卐), and I have to say that’s just a little odd. I didn’t have my good camera with me, so it’s a little hard to see. But it was there.

He might claim that it’s an ancient symbol of spirituality, and of course he’d be right. Except that it was so completely shanghaied by the Nazis that the symbol in our time comes with, let’s say, some insurmountable baggage. Yeah, he said to himself at one point, I want that inked on my face.

Pine Removal

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Not long ago, I noticed that a tall pine tree in a neighboring yard was dead all the way up. It had long been one of those pines whose lower branches died off, but whose top branches were still green year-round. No longer.

Our neighbor must have noticed this too, because one fine morning recently at about 8, the noise of tree removal started. I heard that, of course, but what really got me out of bed was our dog, who took a loud interest in the goings-on. I was thus up, so I figured I might as well take a few pictures.

By the time I got around to that, the crew has stripped off the lower branches of the tree and feed them to a chipper. That was the real source of the noise, not the cutting of the branches.tree removal '21Rather than remove the top limps, the pro tree-climber got into position —tree removal '21— to cut off the whole top.tree removal '21 tree removal '21 tree removal '21Repeat until the whole tree was gone. But I didn’t stick around for that, breakfast was calling.

Vintage Procrastination Cards

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A few years ago, I found a yellowing envelope at my mother’s house tucked away in some files that obviously hadn’t been touched for many years. It wasn’t sealed, so I looked inside, intrigued. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a stash of high-denomination bearer bonds or some such.

Instead, there were six large note cards of an odd size, 7⅝ ” x 5¼ “, printed on white paper only slightly yellowed. There’s a theme to them all, with this sentence running over each of six different cartoons: I would have written sooner… but…

Procrastinator cards. Just Google that term and you can see it’s a small genre.

The cards include an illustrative cartoon and caption. This is one of the six.Country Cousin cards - Inertia Smith

If I had to guess, I’d say 1950s vintage. They don’t strike me as anything my mother would have bought. Maybe someone gave them to her — maybe one of my aunt’s many gag gifts to her. That would have been in character, anyway. It also would have been in character for my mother to tuck them away, even though she had no intention of ever sending them. She might have considered them too silly to use.

They are silly.
Country Cousin cards - Inertia Smith
Actually, the term dopey comes to mind, but that’s just me. Of course, humor doesn’t age well, but it could be that even in the 1950s, these weren’t very funny. At least, my mother probably didn’t think so.
Country Cousin cards - Inertia Smith
The back of each card attributes them to an outfit called Country Cousin of Lake Placid, New York, but there’s no address or date or copyright mark. A simple search turns up nothing about it. The illustrations are signed “Inertia Smith.” That name doesn’t turn up much except two people using it for a name on Facebook.

Those are the only three I’m going to scan, because the other three include hopelessly racist caricatures, featuring Africans, American Indians and Chinese characters. The one depicting Africans manages to work “mau-mau” into the text, a more direct clue pointing to the ’50s. Best to leave them in the envelope. You could argue that standards were lower then, as indeed they were, but I wouldn’t be posting them in the 1950s, I would be in the 2020s.

Thursday Kibble & Bits

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Sunny day, but not much meltage. Bitter cold night ahead, and another half-foot of snow forecast for the weekend. Before that, we’ll get Thai takeout at Ann’s request on Friday, and a birthday pie, to make staying at home more pleasant.

Earlier this month, when we were in Naperville, we came across a small park: Central Park. Among other things, there’s a weatherworn obelisk to memorialize local soldiers from the Black Hawk War, the Mexican War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. It looked like new wars had been chiseled in as time passed.

Not far from that was a Civil War cannon, looking pretty new, because it was refurbished in this century.
Central Park Naperville cannonIt’s a Confederate cannon.
Central Park Naperville cannonA prize of war, in other words, formerly shot off by the people of Naperville for “Independence Day, parades and other civic activities” in a less safety-conscious (-obsessed?) time. That’s what we could use a little more of in our time, though I suppose in some places edgy folks might mistake it for hostile gunfire, and maybe they’d be right to.

Willard Scott Jr. was this fellow, no relation to the weatherman, it seems. Among other things, this Willard Scott marched through Georgia, doing his bit to invent modern total war.

Shucks. No evidence of life in the clouds of Venus.

Google “Venus floating platform” and one of the first hits is about the Venus Atmospheric Maneuverable Platform (VAMP) at the Northrop Grumman web site. My estimation of that company just went up a notch. It’s at least thinking about flying a plane over Venus.

“The Venus Atmospheric Maneuverable Platform (VAMP) air vehicle is an aeroshell-less hypersonic entry vehicle that transitions to a semi-buoyant, maneuverable, solar-powered air vehicle for flight in Venus’ atmosphere,” NG says. “VAMP AV will be transported to Venus by a carrier/orbiter spacecraft… It is then released and enters the atmosphere, floating down toward the planet almost like a falling leaf.

“During the flight phase, the AV flies in the Venus upper- and mid-cloud layers and collects science data for transmission to Earth. VAMP AV will be capable of orbiting the planet for a long duration — up to a year.”

Of course, the company is no stranger to space, having built the Lunar Module and Pioneer 10, just to name two marquee projects. These days its marquee project is the James Webb Space Telescope, which can’t get into space fast enough, as far as I’m concerned.

Recently I’ve been getting press releases that say these sorts of things:

X will teach you how to:
Reframe your life experiences as growth opportunities
Rewire your mind-set and embrace spirituality as a lifestyle
Connect to your higher self and integrate healthy lifestyle practices
Tap into universal energy and transmute pain into power
Manifest your new reality and claim your authenticity
Change the world!

***
For your upcoming stories on female disruptors, please consider Y, Founder of Z, helping visionaries reconnect to SOUL, and Live FREE to become their most successful, influential and positively impactful versions. Y teaches women to embody the energy of money and become a vibrational match so it flows consistently and predictably.

Hm. My name seems to be drifting onto all sorts of lists, at some distance from commercial real estate. Though I do like that phrase, “energy of money,” and the idea of it flowing “consistently and predictably” certainly has appeal.

Jet Transits the Moon

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Space.com’s 2021 Full Moon Calendar: “This month’s full moon occurs on Thursday, Jan. 28 at 2:16 p.m. EDT (19:16 UTC), but the moon will appear full the night before and after its peak to the casual stargazer. January’s full moon is known as the Wolf Moon, though it has many other nicknames by different cultures.”

Just after 5 p.m. today, now a little before dark, I needed to go out to move groceries from one of our cars into the house. Though not subzero, the post-snow freeze felt pretty cold, maybe because I’d been inside all day.

Sure enough, the moon looked full, not far above the horizon to the east. As I stood outside my garage, I noticed a distant airplane flying (apparently) near the visible full moon. Then I saw it transit the full moon for a split second. Though looking small as a gnat, the outline of the plane was clear, backed by the pale moonlight.

I don’t remember that I’ve ever seen that before. Now I have. Right place, right time.

The Case of the Missing Article

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Got an email recently purporting to be from a financial services company that I do business with, X. It includes the X logo and small-letter verbiage directing me to visit the X web site in the normal way. Which I expect a lot of people don’t do, but rather click the message’s link.

The big lettering that forms the main message, with a highly visible link in the second sentence, says as follows, sic:

Thank you for your X account information. This message confirms your X account requires update.

To protect and keep your X account up to date, Please UPDATE YOUR X ACCOUNT immediately.

Ah, the want of an indefinite article gives the game away, if you didn’t know that companies like X don’t send messages like this anyway. As in, “your X account requires [an] update.” There’s also the matter of the errant capital letter in “Please.”

A missing article made me think of this scene. Remarkably enough, since I haven’t seen that movie since it was new in 1976. The scene was easy enough to find. I Googled “Murder by Death ar” (as in the first two letters of articles) and one of the auto-suggestions was “Murder by Death use your articles.”

Wintertime Social Zoom

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On Friday evening, I participated in another social Zoom, once again attended by old friends. Really old friends. As far back as I can go among my friends, since I doubt I’d ever be able to contact my best friend in first grade, whose name was Smith.

The recent Zoom involved two friends I met in elementary school and another in junior high, and who continued to be friends in high school: Steve, Rob and Kevin. After that, we weren’t in touch so much, with sporadic contact over that last 40 years, though Kevin went with me and two other high school friends to New Orleans in the summer of ’81.

Steve I met in 1968, Rob and Kevin in the early ’70s. As I said, taking things back as far as I can go. Only my brothers have known me longer.

Two participants were in Texas, one in New Mexico, and one in Illinois. Steve is a high school band director, Kevin a graphic artist, and Rob a retired computer programmer.
One of the things we did as a group in the mid-70s, beginning in junior high and petering out in high school, was play penny-ante poker at my house. Good fun, as I recall.

So was the Zoom call, though occasionally awkward. After all, there’s been a lot of water under the dam since we hung out.

Tempus Fugit, As You Sit and Watch

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As I was waiting for a call yesterday, a whim inspired me to check out the National Institute of Standards and Technology Official U.S. Time page — time.gov. (Does its existence upset certain people? That the federal government is trying to monopolize time itself?)

Anyway, it’s been a while since I looked at the page, and it’s been redesigned. Used to be fairly drab, but now it’s got spiffy color-coded time zones and digital clocks of the zones ticking away. There used to be a single clock, and you had to toggle between the zones. The new version isn’t just good enough for government work, I’d say, but better.

Remarkably, I happened to capture an image at exactly 4:00:00 Central, or x:00:00 to be more inclusive.
NIST MapI see that Arizona is still contrary when it comes to Daylight Saving Time, though for now it’s in sync with MST. Except that it looks like the Navajo do going along with DST — but the Hopi do not.

Though I cut them off in my image grab, to the side of the main map the NIST also provides the time in Puerto Rico (UTC-4), Alaska (UTC-9), the Aleutians and Hawaii (UTC-10), American Samoa (UTC-11), and the time used by the Chamorros (UTC+10), which I assume is both on Guam and the Northern Marianas.

In a slightly Orwellian touch, the NIST web site reaches out and calculates how far in error the clock in my laptop is, compared with the official time. At nearly 4 yesterday afternoon, at least, I was behind by 0.807 seconds. I think I’ll just have to live with that.

007 Sighting

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A blustery, cold, sometimes rainy weekend just passed. A classic northern November, in other words, and one of a number of reasons to stay home. Most of the time.

Spotted this truck on the street not long ago. A advertising tie-in between DHL and the Bond franchise that I didn’t know about before.
Apparently DHL has paid big bucks to be associated with the latest Bond movie, No Time to Die, whose release has been delayed to April, at the earliest, because now is No Time to Go To the Movies.

I’m not sure I’d want James Bond anywhere near my delivery vehicles. Let’s just say he has a long history of wrecking whatever mode of transit he finds himself in, or wrecking the vehicles of the bad guys chasing him, or both.