Noted in passing

The wife of one of my former coworkers passed away earlier this month and I will be going to the "visitation" this afternoon.

While I wasn't exceptionally close to this particular coworker, the trajectories of our lives were parallel. His wife worked in the same field as Mrs ERJ. Our marriages were within a few months of each other and Mrs ERJ and my coworker's wife were born in the same year. They lived in a small, very inexpensive house in a dumpy, working-class neighborhood on the south side of Lansing for the first few years they were married. We lived in a dumpy, working-class neighborhood on Lansing's east side during those same years. When we moved out of Lansing, they relocated north of town and we relocated south of town.

I purchased that house in 1984 for a half-year's salary and sold it in 1991 for the same price. It was not an investment. It was a place to live. 

Fertilizer

Cruising the internet, I see TSC does not offer urea or ammonium sulfate on-line.

Family Farm and Home (a local chain) still has it but does not ship. A 50 pound bag of urea (46-0-0) costs $40.

Blue Ash

If you live in the green area you might have a Blue Ash on your property.

A high percentage of Blue Ash trees are resistant to the Emerald Ash Borer and Blue Ash seeds are selling for $20 an ounce, retail. (A tip of the hat to Lucas Machias)

Blue Ash twigs are very distinctive because the young twigs have four, corky ridges ruling along their length giving the twig a faintly "square" shape in cross-section.
 

I anticipate light-blogging until Saturday

I have places to be and things to do.

"Give it a drink, Danny"

I vaguely remember a writer sharing that his father had a unique way of telling him to step back and get some perspective.

"Give it a drink, Danny"

Even though the writer grew up in a city, I assume the saying had its origins in plough-men and their horses. When your team is flagging, 'tis not the time to bring out the whip but it is the time to find a bit of shade and a bucket of water.

So, "Danny", as a young man, had a habit of becoming consumed with whatever event was immediately in front of him. He hyper-focused and became difficult to live with.

Sometimes, wisdom resembles simply being too tired and having run out of other options. Danny's dad would trudge up the stairs to Danny's room and stand in the doorway leaning against the frame. The advise wasn't loud. It was weary. The voice of a man who worked too many hours a week at a job that was arduous and boring.

"Give it a drink, Danny."

Then his father would turn and trudge back down the stairs to (perhaps) drink his nightly allotment of Old Milwaukee or Carling long-necks. 

"Give it a drink, Danny" might be timely advice given the tensions and distractions of today 

Saint Patrick's Day

The Medieval Church sprinkled the year with "Feast Days" to the tune of about one every three weeks. Local custom added more. They were wedged in between the crush of planting and harvest. There were winter/early spring festivals and there were mid-summer festivals.

Saint Patrick's Day falls in the middle of Lent, perhaps as a respite for those whose abstinence/penance became too heavy to endure the entire 40 days. St Paddy's Day is a bit like the Seventh Inning Stretch in baseball.

This Lent, I gave up my liquid libation in the evening. Mrs ERJ noticed that I am much more fidgety and seem to need less sleep.

I notice that I am losing weight and may have to punch another hole in my belt!!! Not only am I forgoing the calories but that "fidgeting" means I am moving more. I do not plan to indulge tonight, but for those of you who do, please be safe!

Fine Art Tuesday

 

The Calling of Saint Matthew

Caravaggio was born in 1571 in what is now know as Milan, Italy and died in 1610, possibly from lead poisoning, syphilis, sepsis acquired during a brawl in a bar or perhaps he was assassinated.

The Inspiration of Saint Matthew (as he wrote his account of Jesus)

 

Close-up of his head showing the detail and lighting

The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew

Saint Paul's Conversion on the Road to Damascus

Weather, Blow-guns and Nukes

This has been quite the year for "weather".

We are lucky. All we are getting is wind. Other parts of the state are got hammered with ice and deep snow. The last report I saw estimated 80,000 customers in Michigan are without electricity. Other states have been hit worse.

Spring

After a very warm first half of March, the second half of March is predicted to be "normal".

March daily high-low temperatures. Values on the left are actual and values on the right are predicted.

The first week of April is predicted to be close to normal and the last 20 days to be five-to-ten degrees F below average.

Homeschooling with Grandpa

 

11mm diameter "spit-wad" low and right-of-center.

Today's lesson was improvised weapons with an emphasis on blow-guns.

 

We started with tissue-paper softened with tap-water and will progress to 2" long bits of MIG wire in foam sabots repurposed from hearing-protection. The high school band will definitely put her in the brass section due to her enhanced lung capacity.

 

Wednesday's lesson will be the extraction of phytoalkaloids and insect-derived compounds using low-pH solvents.

Exit strategy

 

A very old bit of advice is to not enter a war in Asia before you have a robust exit strategy.

 

I hope our leaders in D.C. have given that some consideration.

 

In fairness to them, even though Afghanistan was a Goat Festival, especially the withdrawal; nobody has flown any airplanes into US landmarks since September 11, 2001. So maybe that counts as some kind of victory.

 

The leftists are claiming that Iran will eventually get nukes, so what is the point of our military action? Frankly, I would consider delaying their getting that capability by fifty years to be much more desirable than them having enough material to cobble together a Fat Boy in November of 2026. 

Rotting Cuttings and Building "sister" a house

The Hot-box report

The first flight of cuttings from the hot-box on the left. They are willow cuttings and I have a 20 Watt heating pad beneath it. Most of the cuttings are pushing leaves although the Crack Willow are lagging. I can see weeds sprouting which is a minor problem.

The second flight of cuttings are on the right. They came out of the box yesterday a couple hours before I took this photo. The buds are swelling. The bottom ends showed little sign of root development. I added wood-shavings on top of the potting media to provide insulation and to reduce evaporation from the potting media. There is another 20 Watt pad beneath it.

Both of these are covered with clear plastic and are underneath 4000K LED lamps.

The third flight of cuttings are in the box.  I am callousing cv. "Steuben", "GR-7", "V. riparia L50-s". I expect to add a few cuttings of "St Paul" later today. I expect to leave the grape cuttings in the box for two weeks.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to get large quantities of potting soil this time of year and the mix is wetter than I want it to be for grapes. (The misspelling in the title "Rotting Cuttings" was a Freudian slip that I decided to leave) They are not as tolerant of "wet" as willow or elderberries. I will probably lay some rags in the bottom of the box and poke some holes in the bottoms of the bags I placed around the cuttings in. 

Insulating a ceiling

The video where the older brothers insulate the roof of their sister's "house".

She came back to Ukraine after studying the German language in Germany. I get the impression that her arrival was sudden and unexpected.

Her "house" is a lean-to that was slapped together out of OSB and salvaged windows. They use old clothing that look like Goodwill Industry rejects to insulate the 12" between the ceiling and the roof.

This snippet is where the older brother makes her wood-stove. 

It is a case of making do with what is readily available. Adelaide, his sister, seems delighted with the effort.

At the 19:56 mark, if you read the subtitles you will learn about "Oleg", the youngest brother (9 years-old) who is a compulsive builder. He is a kid who can look at a pile of scrap-wood and see a castle...and then nail it all together. He must be the kind of kid who is unable to NOT build.

View inside her house as she finishes up the interior. This video is much faster moving the the one linked above.

Nothing new under the sun

William Shakespeare: Sonnet  IV 

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy?
Nature’s bequest gives nothing but doth lend,
And being frank, she lends to those are free.
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums yet canst not live?
For, having traffic with thyself alone,
Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.
Then how, when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
 Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
 Which usèd lives th’ executor to be.

 If you spend much time on Youtube (Alas, raising hand. Guilty as charged) you might run across videos of women taking men to task for not "wife-ing up" the "virtual goddesses" that inhabit our cities.

In fact, those same women are outraged that men are hardly paying any attention to those "virtual goddesses".

Their choice of words tells more than they know.

It seems as if many of these Instagram influencers have turned themselves into graven images that they themselves worship. "For, having traffic with thyself alone, thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive." Men sense that. They quickly figure out that they are a disposable accessory, like a handbag or a set of false eyelashes to the "virtual goddess".

Those graven images aren't getting too many takers. 

Tab Clearing

Satire

My apologies to Phil B and others who commented on the Fake News Friday post. It was intended to be satire. Phil B does make a good point, though. In some jurisdictions prosecutors will use any detail to make their case; examples include the color of your gun, bumper stickers on your vehicle and your posts on social media. In other, saner jurisdictions (Polk County, Florida comes to mind), the prosecutor is more likely to stick with the demonstrable evidence immediately before and during the event.

Hate Crime in West Bloomfield, Michigan

It was reported that a truck "filled with explosives" rammed into a synagogue in West Bloomfield Township. The armed driver later died of a self-inflicted wound. Fortunately for his intended targets, the perp was unable to exit the vehicle due to the doors being wedged shut during the crash-entry.

The truck caught fire at some point which totally sucked for the driver...trapped in the cab with containers of liquid gasoline and explosives.

Kudos to the security team for keeping the perp too busy to figure out how to exit his vehicle through the side windows and continue his attack.

Kudos to the investigation team who traced back the purchase records on the explosives. 

A fragment of data on mutation rate of ancient, written texts

A reader who identified himself as Recent Lurker asked about drift in written text over time in the post about "Turn the other cheek".

This is one of those cases where looking at a work that is not the Bible is useful because it blanks-out the emotional energy in the question.

There has been peer-reviewed research on that very question on the works of Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Like the Bible, it first propagated via oral tradition, then a combination of oral tradition supplemented by hand-transcribed written text and finally almost solely by written text.

The papyri reveal a transmissional watershed in the 2nd century B.C., a sort of textual standardization, delimiting the contours of the text inasmuch as it stabilized the number and sequence of verses and quite drastically cut down current variants. Just what kind of intervention this reflects is unclear. Thereafter the text continued to move in a constant state of flux, but a less volatile one; variants were multitudinous but minor, accretion was virtually confined to simple one-line additions, losses were strictly local and ephemeral. 

The text was much copied (the Iliad always more than the Odyssey) collation was fairly wide-spread (protecting against loss and disseminating accrual), and we have substantial pieces of manuscripts from every century down to the 7th: much activity, little change. Passage through the bottle-neck to the 9th and 10th centuries seems to have entailed overall relatively little loss of what had been current in the Roman period; the medieval tradition is a direct continuation of the ancient, inevitably attenuated but in its totality showing unusually good catchment of ancient readings (better for the Iliad than for the Odyssey),promiscuously distributed.

Before we proceed further with its shifting constitution, a few words are in order on the changing nature of its physical form. Modem readers, and even post-modern ones, read texts which present them with a succession of words and of sentences. Readers in the 3rd century B.C. faced merely a succession of letters, uninterrupted except by verse-termini   Source

For Leigh and her masonry stove

Source

I realize that people who post videos on Youtube "spin" the story to make it more entertaining or more "sticky".

However, this young lady in Ukraine appears to be very grateful for the "house" that her brothers built for her on the family compound and the wood-stove that one of them fabricated out of sheet metal and the masonry "mass" another one built to calm down the temperature swings.

In this video, the young lady is painting, free-hand, a design she saw on her phone (Pinterest?).  She is clearly looking at her phone for reference at the 2:35 mark. Nothing wrong with that.

If I had to guess, I would estimate that it has a footprint of about 12' wide by less than 15' long.