This-and-that

I finally hit my ideal weight. The breakthrough came after I learned that doctors typically deduct 5 pounds for clothing.

I now wear a knit cap, PJ top and bottom and two socks when I step on the scales. Five pieces of clothing at 5 pounds each means that I can deduct 25 pounds from the weight that I read off the scale's display.

My BMI is now exactly 25.

Big day planned

Due to the rain we received, I will stay out of the gardens for a few days to avoid compacting the soil.

I will be going with Shotgun to pick up the barrels in Caledonia this morning. The gentleman selling them had multiple entries on Craigslist but only one of them listed his address and hours. He answered one email but he didn't include hours or his address. I finally stumbled across the one listing that had that information and am going to act on it.

Then I will be working in the orchards. Wind speeds of 3mph predicted and low humidity. No rain forecast for the next ten days. It is the perfect day for spraying herbicide.

I used to shoot for May 1 for spraying herbicide beneath the trees. That is great for controlling grass but some classes of vegetation (like woody vines) leaf-out much later in the spring. So, over time, the orchard floor becomes a jungle in the places where you cannot mow. 

Other tasks include grafting and putting cages around trees to protect them from deer.

Scams and fraud

The general buzz on the streets is that scams and fraud have become more aggressive over the last few months. Various forms of identity theft are the high runner with the EASIEST way to do it being to steal a senior citizen's phone and guess the password (1111, 2222, 1234, 1212 and so on). Then they open their Amazon, Walmart or payment apps and buy a bunch of stuff with gift cards being the item-of-choice.

The most common PINs start with "1", "0" or "2"

 

The least common PINs start with "8", "9", "6" or "7"

The point is to use a unique PIN or password, to treat your phone like it is a wallet with ten, $100 bills in it.

I must confess to being willfully ignorant about payment apps. I watch people pay for things by opening their phone and scanning QR code and that seems risky. Again, I am ignorant, but linking my phone to a bank or a credit account gives me the willies.

Luanda, Angola: Population 8.8 million

 

I am not going to do a lot of editorializing.

Angola is not a rich country.

Based on the walls and bars across every opening, it is not a high-trust society.

Trash is thrown into the street and is helpfully packed into the deepest ruts and potholes.

The torrential rains are more than the streets/drains can accommodate and the very foundations of the city are under-cut by erosion.

The high point of the video is when the videographer walks past a Catholic school at the 3:45 mark.

Catholic teachings on "birth control"

At this time, the mainstream Catholic teaching on artificial (i.e. not abstinence or (in some cases) barrier methods) birth control is that it is the equivalent of homicide because a fertilized egg is denied its right to implant into the endometrium of his or her mother's uterus. It is theologically considered the equivalent of not allowing a baby to nurse from his/her mother's breasts and letting him/her starve to death.

Catholic teachings evolve...but they evolve very slowly.

For instance, it was once taught that rape was a less grievous sin than masturbation. The "logic" was that a potential good (a baby) was possible with rape that was not a possibility with masturbation. That teaching reversed when the the debate expanded to include not just the sinner and potential offspring but to also include the woman (or man) who had been violated.

In the glacial pace of the Eternal Church, similar arguments are evolving where the greater social consequences of exceeding the carrying capacity of the land are being introduced into the debates. Every person who dies by starvation or communicable diseases that are exacerbated by over-crowding is a potential "player" in the calculus of sin-and-salvation.

Personal space: Duck Edition

All four ducklings made it through the night alive.

This morning they were getting trained on "personal space". The ducklings were raised in a crowded pen and their idea of personal space is much less than that of the girls with seniority.

Ducks are gregarious animals. They find safety in flocks (or "rafts" when they are on the water). They have a natural desire to be close to each other, but how close is variable that depends on the environment.

It looks to me like the senior girls are setting up a zone-defense as one might see in the game of basketball. They want a certain amount of space between each player...not too much but not too close, either.

My guess is that there is an optimum range between ducks when they march abreast foraging. That is, each duck has a lane that she can efficiently forage and she will not tolerate another duck cutting into that lane.

As she marches up that lane, she shoves her bill beneath every wad of vegetation, under every dirt clod, under every board...searching for snails, slugs, centipedes, cut-worms and other tasty bits of protein. That said, the lane is something like 12"-to-18" wide, which is about twice as far as she can reach by pivoting her body and extending her neck.

For those of you who have studied defensive warfare, those lanes are analogous to "fields of fire". There is a certain amount of overlap that is desirable but too much overlap defeats the purpose. 

Today's work-ticket

Stretch a short fence across the middle of the fenced in garden. The beans are starting to come up and I don't think they will survive the ducks. I anticipate that I can dispense with the fence in about 10 days. By then, the beans should be tall enough and well enough rooted to brush-off the duck's foraging.

Ducks, rain and durable clothing

 

I purchased four straight-run, Khaki Campbell ducks. My intention is to go from 2 Rouen and one Khaki Campbell to all KC ducks.

The male (called a "drake" in the business) wss acting very aggressively toward the ducklings. He is spending the night in a dog-crate while all of the girls (until proven otherwise) spend the night together. When I left the girls, the two grown-up were schooling the newbies on the pecking order.

Odds of all four ducklings being male are (1/2)^4 or about 6%. Odds of them being all female are the same. So there is an 88% chance that the four new ducks are of mixed sexes and I will have a flock of both KC ducks (i.e. girls) and I will keep one drake. 

Speaking of which. One of Southern Belle's male rabbits gave birth this morning. She had assumed Bingo was a boy based on what the seller told her...she never checked.

 

Looking up the rows of the potato patch.

We had about a half-inch of rain today and the weather-weenies promise another half-inch tomorrow. We needed it. That will bring our total May rainfall up to about 1.5"

If you zoom in and look for a horizontal row of tiny green sprinkles across the center of the frame, you will see that the rutabaga seeds are up.

How long will well cared-for clothes last? 

I cajoled Mrs ERJ into modeling her favorite jacket for the blog.

This is her spring/fall, walk-in-the-woods and camping jacket. It is over 40 years old.

She also has a pair of sweat-pants and a matching sweat-shirt that is at least 38 years old.

One of Mrs ERJ's most endearing traits is that she values paid-for, reliability, quality and steadfast endurance over new-and-shiny.

Scarifying Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) seeds 

I opted for the boiling water treatment, a method that still strikes me as impossible.

The literature from scholar.google.com suggested that 10-to-15 seconds of dumping the seeds into boiling water and then a quick cool-down by adding tap water. Then a 24 hour soak in water at room temperature was a good method.

The literature universally give soaking in concentrated sulfuric acid higher germination rates but boiling water is easier to come by.

I brought about one quart of water up to a boil in a 3 quart pot.  I dumped in 50 grams of Black Locust seeds that were harvested in 2024. Due to fiddling around, the time was closer to 15 seconds than 10 seconds.

I weighed the seeds after the 24 hours of soaking and they weighed 142 grams, so the impermeable seed-coats on most of the seeds were breached.

The seeds will be mixed into clay balls and planted in the next week. They are sitting in the refrigerator until that can happen. 

Harris said she would implement price controls during her campaign

Some people believe that price-controls could never happen in the United States.

However, Kamala Harris made enacting Federal Law to eliminate "price-gouging" a significant part of her campaign for President. The words she chose were slightly different, but she did that to "spin" the message into the most favorable, emotional light.

One of the enormous failings of the Soviet economy was the lack of a mechanism to address dire shortages. Suppose it is the start of planting season and an employee at the warehouse failed to put air and oil filters into the delivery for the tractors. In a market-economy, the maintenance boss would call around to other farms to see who had extra filters. Then he would hand a trusted mechanic whatever amount of money it took to buy the filters and the keys to a truck.

24 hours later, the tractors would be out in the fields planting...even if the maintenance boss had to pay a three-hundred percent mark-up.

The same thing happens in every ice-storm in Michigan. Ice-storms might be 300 miles long but they are rarely much more than 50 miles wide due to the narrow temperatures which allow them to happen.

All of the generators at the big-box stores sell out in a heart-beat due to power-outages.

Enterprising people hop into their pickup trucks and drive 75 miles to Indiana or Ohio and buy as many generators as will fit in the bed of their truck. Then they go back home and put an ad in Facebook Marketplace "GENERATORS, New in Box" and list them for twice the normal selling price.

If any are left, they drive them back to where they bought them and return them for a refund.

So, if you basement is flooding because your sump-pump isn't pumping, or if you have an emotionally fragile kid going bananas...you cheerfully pay an extra $600 to have a generator delivered to your door while you calm your kid and keep humping buckets of water up the stairs and dumping it outside.

Let me offer a third example: Suppose there was a petroleum tank-fire on the west coast. Allowing the price of fuel to free-float would price "marginal uses" out of economic reach. Manuel cannot afford to drive to his landscaping job and more business gets done via Zoom. If legislation and legal entanglement cripple the price mechanism, Manuel and Vern drive until the remaining tanks are empty and then ambulances and emergency generators fall silent for lack of fuel.

Will the WOKE Utopian Ideal be durable?

The WOKE ideology can be categorized as a "Utopian Fantasy".

Utopian Fantasies require that human nature change for them to survive more than twenty years (basically, the prime years of their founders).

Rosabeth Moss Kanter studied 91 "utopian communities that existed between 1780 and 1860. Very few of them lasted more than 33 years...however, some of them did.

...Kanter noted these groups' rituals and clear boundaries for membership, as well as the "commitment mechanisms" that utopians utilized: sacrifice, investment, renunciation, communion, mortification and transcendence. She concluded that the more that a utopian community asked of its members, the more cohesive and long-lasting it was.   -Wikipedia

I think it is worth pointing out that the durable utopian communities required EQUALITY of sacrifice, investment, renunciation, communion, mortification and transcendence in all of their membership.

The WOKE movement requires those commitment mechanisms but only of certain groups. Other groups are exalted and lionized and not required to wear the sack-cloth and ashes.

Based on the historical data, it seems likely that the WOKE movement will be viewed by future generations as a campy aberration much like praying to crystals, hippies, transcendental meditation, chakras and macrobiotic diets.

That will come to a great shock to the SJWs who sold their souls to join the movement.

Yesterday's work-ticket

Four rows. The ten feet of each row closest to the goats are planted to potatoes. The ten feet closest to the camera are planted to "Bodacious" sweet corn.

You might be asking why I am planting sweet corn after I have posted material suggesting it might not be the best vegetable when the SHTF.

The short answer is "It is what the customer asked for." If my efforts can change people so they think of themselves as successful gardeners, then it is pretty easy for them to change what they plant.
 

Funerals

The mom of one of my high school buddies passed away this week. Her funeral is tomorrow. She may be the last of that generation among my friends.

There were several unusual features about my high school experience. I attended Catholic schools and the various parishes fed into the same high school. The schools at those parishes ended at different grades. Some schools, like the one I went to, stopped after 6th grade. Others went to 8th grade. Consequently, I started attending "Central" in 7th grade while others joined in 8th grade and 9th grade.

That created interesting dynamics as cliques or tribes or posses absorbed additional people, expanded and divided.

I didn't have a single "best friend" 7th-through-12th grade. It changed as circumstances changed.

However, my friend whose mother's funeral is tomorrow was generally in my top-three from 9th until 12th grade and even into college.

The Information Superhighway before the Internet

Kids will be stunned to learn that the information superhighway existed in the 1970s before the internet was invented. We called it "The Library".

If, by chance, you were on good terms with the librarian, then you had a very-high bandwidth portal to that highway.

My friend's mother was the librarian at our high school.

Another quirk about my high school is that it embraced the idea that kids naturally sought the knowledge they need, just like kids always choose the most nourishing foods and most wholesome activities. We were expected to do our own class scheduling (preparing us for college, don't you know) and to master academic material and take tests at our own rate.

Somehow, I did not have a single English/Language/Compostion class during my high school career. I did, however, probably, set a record for the number of hours I spent in the library reading the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedias of Science and Technology (go ahead, ask me about boron nitride or T-T-T curves or the Kreb's cycle). I should not have been allowed to graduate but I think the academic advisors were embarrassed by my falling through the cracks and they were willfully blind to my deficiencies.

Even after graduating from high school, the librarian continued to influence my life. I was scheduled to graduate from Michigan State with a BS in Engineering in March of 1981. It was during the low-point in the business cycle (Jimmy Carter's malaise). More of my class got jobs in Texas than in Michigan.

However, about two months before I graduated, the librarian called my mom and told her to tell me "Call this number and say 'I have skills in Computer Aided Engineering'." The librarian's husband had connections.

I made that call and got that job and was able to stay close to family (which was a very high priority for me). 

And so, tomorrow, I will go to the visitation and then the funeral Mass. I will not say very much. My role will be similar to a neutron absorbing rod in a nuclear pile or sound absorbing panels in a room. I will be "background" just like when I was when I was one of those nameless, faceless bodies who was in the library as reliably as the furniture.