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 |   Tales from real life |
| Well, if they're not true, they oughta be! |
"What's your sign?" was a common pickup line back in the disco era. Many a hot babe would choose her dance partner based on the supposed compatibility of their signs. A really smooth operator knew what sign to claim for himself to pique her interest. Astrology is less popular today, but it's still widely followed. Newspapers still print them. And even though newspapers are going the way of disco, there are thousands (millions?) of web sites to choose from. Even the venerable and respected Washington Post has a daily horoscope section in their online edition. I rarely look at it, and I don't put much stock in the predictions, but I do know my sign. I'm a Gemini. Or am I? I don't know who wrote out the first astrological tables and defined the 'characteristics' of the signs, or by what authority they did so. There must have been a time when someone first charged a fee for providing celestial guidance. I do know that the signs are based on the constellations of the zodiac. And the zodiac is the belt-shaped backdrop that the sun moves through during a solar year (as viewed from Earth). The moon and the planets also appear to travel around the zodiac. The stars that make up each constellation may appear to be in a two-dimensional grouping when viewed from earth, but they are actually separated by vast distances in the 3-D universe. Those pictures we see in the sky are totally dependent on our personal perspective. So the shape of the constellations can change over time as our solar system makes its way through the cosmos. The astrological signs are also linked to calendar dates, but calendars were notoriously inaccurate for many thousands of years. In western culture, we use a modified version of the calendar from ancient Rome. That moon-based calendar wasn't a good match for the solar year. So, the Julian reform had to make the year 46 BC 445 days long to get their calendar back in sync with the spring equinox. Imagine how long it must have seemed to wait for New Years Eve! The Julian calendar was better, but still not perfect. In 1582, the Gregorian reform dropped ten days out of the calendar to sync things up again. October 5th was followed by October 15th. Some countries resisted the change and waited until things got even worse. Britain had to drop twelve days from their calendar in 1752. It's really weird to realize that the date in Europe depended on where you lived for almost 200 years. My point is that even ten days difference in the calendar would make me a Taurus instead of a Gemini. It's all too confusing and arbitrary for me. I'll just go with the Chinese year of the Rooster. I learned that I'm a Rooster from the paper place mat in a Chinese restaurant. Now there's a system that actually makes sense! |
I recently read an article about data backup that described the 3 - 2 - 1 system. Three copies on at least 2 different media with at least one copy off-site. It sounds like a lot of effort, but it assures that your work will survive any disaster. And with wildfires constantly in the news, it seems frighteningly possible that your computer, your backup drive, and your printed copies could go up in smoke with little or no warning. So, what to do? Multiple copies and different media are fairly easy, I alternate data backups between an external HDD and an SD card. All I back up are my data files, so a lot will fit on even a 32Gb SD card. And I print out my finished work from time to time as a third copy. My WDC portfolio qualifies both as a third copy and as off-site storage. Cloud storage would serve the same purpose. At WDC, I have a couple of hundred finished pieces and a book with numerous entries that are set to private. Those entries contain odd ideas, poem fragments, partial stories to be completed 'later', and various things that are actively in-work. My book doesn't back up everything, but it has most of the important stuff. |
Lilli 🧿 ☕  raised the subject of potatoes in her forum today: Question of the Day!  I won't try to choose one recipe or even a specific type of potato to call a favorite. For me, the potato is simply a fact of life: always present, always welcome, and never disappointing. Some people have potatoes every day. I have potatoes with every meal. It's rare for me to sit down to eat without some form of potato on my plate. Hash browns, french fries, streak fries, jo-jos, tater-tots, chips, mashed, boiled, roasted, scalloped, baked, twice-baked, and of course there's my wife's excellent potato salad. I even have potato pancakes for breakfast at our local diner. You could say that potatoes are in my blood. They're certainly well-established around my middle. If we are what we eat, then just call me spuds. When I was a child, my family grew our own. We had a half-acre garden and half of that was potato patch. In the spring, I would cut last year's left-over potatoes into wedges and plant them with their 'eyes' pointing up. I'd weed them and 'hill' them up in the summer. Mom would pay me fifty cents to gather a pint jar full of potato bugs and then drown the nasty little buggers. When the vines succumbed to Autumn's frost, I'd dig potatoes for days and haul them to the root cellar. There were wooden cribs along the back wall where the potatoes would keep until next spring. And the cycle would repeat. And the cycle would repeat. |
Deb and I had breakfast with friends yesterday and we reminisced about things that used to be considered normal, but would freak people out today, like playing with mercury. I remember quite clearly that there was a small bottle of mercury on a shelf at my grandmother’s house. I think it was ‘liberated’ by one of my uncles when he worked in the underground copper mines in Butte, Montana. The thick glass bottle was rectangular rather than round, and it had a wire bail cap that kept the mercury safely sealed inside. The label was long gone so I don’t know if was originally used for liquor, patent medicine, or perhaps that was just the way mercury was packaged back then. The bottle looked old-fashioned to me even in 1967. Liquid mercury is a fascinating thing for a ten-year-old, bright silver and mysteriously viscous as it flows back and forth. The most startling thing, though, is its weight. I don’t think that bottle contained more than six or eight fluid ounces, but it hefted like a five-pound sack of sugar. My uncle would smile when one of us kids would fail to pick it up on the first try. A really small kid might have to use both hands. And such a treasure was too difficult to resist, so I took a cue from my uncle and ‘borrowed’ a spoonful to show it to my fifth-grade friends. Everyone was as impressed as I’d hoped, but my bottle wasn’t as secure as the one at grandma’s house. The mercury ‘escaped’ one afternoon as it was being passed around on the school bus. Soon, there were little beads of bright silver rolling up and down the grooves of the rubber mat in the aisle. Every time the bus slowed or went downhill, the beads rolled forward. They rolled back again with acceleration or an uphill climb. We all giggled hysterically for the rest of the trip that day. I couldn’t say anything to the bus driver, of course, and I’ve sometimes wondered if he ever figured out what was going on. Maybe he didn’t even notice, mercury is quite volatile, so it would have evaporated by the next morning. The only real evidence was the unseen damage to our bodies from the toxic mercury vapor. Several years later, I learned out about the danger of mercury fumes when our high school science teacher decided to make a barometer from thin glass tubing and liquid mercury. He used a Bunsen burner to soften the glass tubing and bend it into a J shape. Then he put a dollop of mercury inside and closed off the short end by melting it with the Bunsen burner. The end result is an air bubble trapped in the short side of the J-tube that changes in volume depending on the outside air pressure in the long side. The level of the mercury in the short side can then be used as a barometric pressure gauge. It took Mr. Foulis a number of tries to perfect his technique and he spilled mercury onto the lab bench once or twice as he worked. Heat from the Bunsen burner only exacerbated his exposure to the mercury vapor. By the time he developed a cough, nausea, and bleeding gums, it was already too late to take precautions. The cumulative effect of breathing toxic fumes over a span of several days landed him in the hospital. Fortunately, he recovered and returned to school a few weeks later with a truly convincing lesson about the dangers of mercury poisoning and the need for lab safety gear. Today, this story reminds me of the woke movement. I'd certainly feel less guilty about exposing my classmates to toxic mercury if I'd never found out about the danger. On the other hand, awareness of the problem is the first step in protecting future kids from being poisoned. And systemic racism is like toxic mercury, the damage isn't obvious until it's already too late. It builds up in the very bones of our society until injustice is accepted as the norm. Treating the symptoms can take many years. Woke is just the first step in preventing damage to future generations. |
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