Scouting out fishing spots

 

Unusual bark on this tree

OH!!! These are Kentucky Coffee Trees (Gymnocladus dioicus). Folk wisdom is that Native Americans used the large seeds for a betting game and inadvertently spread this species when they lost the seeds.

Hmmm! I might need to cut a few branches so my cast doesn't get caught.

Viewed from left-to-right, looking downstream

Looking straight out

Looking upstream

The current is closer to the other side. I think these are "shallows" in front of me and probably get very weedy in the summer. Still, a fine place to fish in the spring.

Grab bag

The REAL Woodpilereport.com can be access through the Wayback Machine website. You may have to fiddle with it to find what you are looking for. There are no new postings since Remus slipped his mortal coil.

My crystal ball informs me that sometimes-commenter Gary has skills in this area. Maybe he can direct us to a more elegant way of accessing the old postings.

One example.

Fence posts

Grab-bag of interesting vegetables and apple cultivars

Mangels (giant beets)

Daikon radishes

Black winter radishes 

Rutabagas

Lehigh potato 

Mt Brushy Limbertwig apple 

King David apple

Golden Russet apple 

Little Ice Age, the growth of cities

One unexpected outcome of the famines of 1816-1820 were the fact that rioting in cities due to bread prices caused fearful governments to subsidize the cost of bread in the cities and only in the cities. That resulted in a depopulation of the countryside as people fled to where "services" were available.

That famine was short-lived because it was caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora. One has to speculate that if the root-cause resulted in a longer disruption of grain production that perhaps the rush to the cities would result in them being death-traps. 

Sirach

Sirach is one of the books that is included in the Roman Catholic Bible as "Divinely Inspired and Unerring word of God". During the Protestant Reformation, it was consigned by the reformers to an appendix called The Apocrypha which are books that the early reformers considered "Holy but not Divinely Inspired and Unerring". 

Which books that were to be tossed and which were to be kept was an intense debate. For instance, some reformers wanted to remove the Book of James but their arguments did not carry the day.

Sirach is very similar to the Books of Wisdom and Proverbs. It is filled with many short, high-impact quotes that have high signal-to-noise ratios.

Some of my favorites are:

Touch pitch and you blacken your hand; associate with scoundrels and you learn their ways.

Do not lift a weight too heavy for you, or associate with anyone wealthier than you. How can the clay pot go with the metal cauldron? When they knock together, the pot will be smashed:

The rich do wrong and boast of it, while the poor are wronged and beg forgiveness.   From Sirach 13

Those are timeless. Given social media and today's culture and its worship of celebrities, athletes, and "influencers", those words are as fresh today as the day they were first written.

If you choose you can keep the commandments, they will save you;
if you trust in God, you too shall live;
he has set before you fire and water
to whichever you choose, stretch forth your hand.
Before man are life and death, good and evil,
whichever he chooses shall be given him.   From Sirach 15

My son, be steadfast in honoring your father; do not grieve him as long as he lives.

Even if his mind fails, be considerate of him; do not revile him because you are in your prime. Kindness to a father will not be forgotten;

A stubborn heart will have many a hurt; adding sin to sin is madness.

When the proud are afflicted, there is no cure; for they are offshoots of an evil plant.

The mind of the wise appreciates proverbs, and the ear that listens to wisdom rejoices.   From Sirach 3

The woodpile report

With my beautiful snow-highway melting, my attention now turned to processing the wood that I brought up near the house.

An aside: I beat the heck out of my body hustling to cut and move the wood from the back corner of the property to the house before the snow melted. I am coasting to give my body some time to heal. In particular, the tendons on the insides of my elbows.

Tendons are not well supplied with blood so they heal slowly. Push too hard and you will be unhappy for the long time that it takes them to heal.

 

Some of my pallets still have snow on them. I decided to wait a bit before stacking wood on them.

Some of the wood I hauled up from "out-back"

Some more of that wood.

This is my plan. Slit the bigger pieces into halves and stack bark-side-up to shed rain.

Pieces that are on-deck waiting for the snow to melt.

Presented without comment

According to an article in The College Fix 

80% (of Gen Z college students) said their parents have communicated with their manager at least once

Over 50% of college-age job seekers had their parents sit with them at an in-person interview, a January survey by Resume Templates found.  What’s more, over 35% of surveyed individuals reported parents either writing a cover letter or performing a test assignment for them. 

The survey polled young adults ages 18-23.  Parental involvement in this survey was defined as “the actions a parent took for their child during the job search process.”

The young adults surveyed reported parental involvement was often repeated.  They also said parents submitted applications (64%), completed test assignments (51%), and sat in on in-person interviews (51%). 

Additionally, 80% said their parents have communicated with their manager at least once, including 67% who reported multiple instances.  During these interactions, the most common topic was their schedule or hours (58%), and the second most common was workplace accommodations (38%).  

The first skunk of spring

I smelled the first skunk of spring as I took Zeus out to his run this morning.

The post on Election Integrity generated a lot of comments.

RJW eloquently argued the counterpoint.

It gives me no joy to state that I think the bus left the station. The trust is gone and must be re-earned.

Democrats in Michigan openly gloated that "Detroit and Grand Rapids delivered again". That is, they generated enough votes to deliver state-wide victories to the Democrats.  Actually, they said "Wayne and Kent counties".

Partisan judges stopping Trump from enforcing the laws (deporting illegal aliens) while they were blind to Biden illegally bringing them in on aircraft and bypassing the few, porous processes at the border.

January 6 protestors who were demonstrating to slow the certification SO IT WOULD BE MEANINGFUL (i.e. actually check out claims of wholesale fraud) were treated like foes of Stalin and all exculpatory evidence was destroyed. Does that look like integrity to anybody with an IQ over 90?

The list of betrayals, not of me personally but of their oath to uphold the Constitution, are endless. 

Our trust is gone. The other side burned through our good-will. The tank is empty. They usually tell lies to enrich themselves and increase their power but it has become such a habit that they tell lies just to stay in practice. 

Leigh, heads-up! Cleaning a traditional, masonry stove

Cleaning a masonry stove (Russia)

Leigh, this post is for you. I have no expectations that you will DO this, but it is informative to see how other people solve universal problems.

There is very little dialog explaining what is going on.

Based on the vegetation (Populus nigra, Acer platanoidies), available fish species (including Scomber scombrus) and the displays in the WWII memorial parks, I think this is in Russia on the east side of the Baltic Sea.

It looks as if the exhaust from the fire is drawn through a labyrinth (to the left of the fire) to transfer the heat to the bricks.

The grandmother scrapes off the plaster in a few places and "knocks-out" some plugs and cleans the passage ways of soot and masonry dandruff.

At the ten-minute mark, she mixes up mortar (perhaps as simple as sand and a bit of flour to bind it).

The mortar is mixed "soupy" or wet.

A person experienced in drywall repair would have figured out a way to secure the block being mortared into place with florist wire and a dowel so the mortar could have been aggressively troweled into place without pushing it into the space behind it.
 

Election Integrity

It is my opinion that at this time, there is no issue more important than "election integrity". Everything else in the political sphere is a distraction.

Election integrity is critical because the 10% who believe that the end always justifies the means are driving the nation off a cliff. Zealots are dangerous and they are able to illegitimately grab the reins of power through corrupt elections.

We can recover from an economic collapse. We always have. We can recover from bad policies and bad adjudication. We cannot recover from "Kings" or mandarins and the systemic corruption that results.

Look at Israel in the Old Testament. They survived 120 years from the coronation of Saul (the first King) to the end of Solomon's rein. Then the kingdom shattered into chaos. Absolute power corrupts at an absolute level.

The two sides (D. and R.) are going to quibble about which side "wants to be king". But how do

• One citizen, one (and only one) vote
• Vote in person
• No vote without picture ID from an authoritative source 
• Real-time reconciliation of voter to the rolls 

...result in "Kings"?

The argument that "it will suppress the vote" tells me that there are legions of would-be voters who simply don't care enough to go to the polling place and to vote in person...and yet, miraculously, their votes get cast. If they don't care, then "their vote" should not count.

The cynics will undoubtedly start commenting that "voting doesn't matter". If that is true, then the cynics would also have to support the contention that there would have been no difference between a Donald Trump administration and a Kamala Harris administration. I don't know anybody who would support that position.