Today I introduced Quicksilver to the joys of The Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons.
Growing up and watching these cartoons, I somehow came to the conclusion that hand-grenades were a regular item of commerce and were a commodity that would be easy to obtain as an adult. Alas, if only it were so.
Most of the segments we watched were from the 1960-to-1964 time-frame.
In 1960 there were still cats and dogs alive that had been born while WWII was raging. Everybody who was over the age of six and not in a coma knew what a "Stuka" was, for instance.
1960 was seven years after the Korean Conflict went from HOT to SIMMER.
In retrospect, there were probably a lot of "off-books" devices floating around in 1960. If you were a trustworthy sort of fellow and were known to be able to keep your mouth shut, you could probably shoot grease-guns and toss pineapples and potato-mashers and play with det-cord, perf-caps and Serious Putty.
Canaries in Coal Mines
I know that I have at least one reader who is a young lad of less then fifty so please humor me if I tell you things that you already know.
Coal miners were known to take canaries into coal mines because the small birds were exquisitely sensitive to toxic and explosive gasses. A miner might attribute a headache to the home-brew he drank the night before, but if the canary went Tango-Uniform, they all hauled anatomy out of the mine and did not go back into it until after it was thoroughly ventilated.
In real-life (whatever that is) there is a dramatic tension between wanting systems that perform without providing irritating or distracting feedback .AND. the need to know when a system approaching massive failure.
Idiot lights are one solution to the problem. In biological systems like streams, orchards and fields we use indicator species.
In a stream there is a hierarchy of species that will tell you much about water quality. Grayling are the most demanding of oxygen and water quality. When they die off you know that the system is slipping.
In an approximate and descending order you might have Brook Trout, Rainbow Trout, Brown Trout, Walleye, Smallmouth Bass, Northern Pike, Channel Catfish, Suckers, Common Carp, Gar, Bowfin, African Walking Catfish.
In the orchard, apple trees are very sensitive to the toxins produced by Black Walnuts. Apple trees are expensive at $20-to-$60 a tree. A rational person would find a less expensive, highly-sensitive plant (i.e. Canary in the Coal Mine) if he were to trench around the orchard and wanted some assurance that all of the roots had been cut or if he wanted to visualize the leaching and decay of the toxic compounds.
Stated another way, why would I risk killing a $20 tree when I can test the soil with a tomato or marigold plant that cost me a nickel and a delay of a year?
Christmas Carols
I am 60% certain this is in Spanish
Handsome Hombre picked up Quicksilver this afternoon.
Quicksilver is of an age where language is absorbed with lightning speed. It does not seem like that because she hasn't figured out how to make all of the consonant sounds. You need a keen ear to decode when she asks "Please close the door" for instance. But all of the signs are there that it is all going into memory.
I asked HH what some of his favorite Christmas Carols are. HH grew up in a very religious family in a country where everybody speaks Spanish. Of COURSE they sang Christmas Carols.
I shared that this is an outstanding time to teach those songs to his daughter. Looking at his face, it was clear that the idea had never crossed his mind.
"Gimme a list. We can listen to Christmas Carols sung in Spanish just as easily as we can watch Roadrunner cartoons." Melody, meter and rhyme are all mechanisms that help our brains retain information. Song and verse are how information was passed down before the written word. It is hardwired into our brains. Not exploiting what God put there is to be a wastrel of the basest sort.
Wile E. Coyote is my spirit animal.
ReplyDeleteWalnuts. I don’t know of it’s only the roots that are toxic to other plants but a couple years ago mulched some fig trees, within a few weeks they started looking sickly and eventually died. Figs have a bitter sap that prevents most insect damage, no signs of mold or other disease. I’ve always wondered if the random load of wood chips I got from a local tree service company didn’t contain some walnut…
ReplyDeleteWe found the stage where children make up their own words particularly charming. For instance, a jogger ran past our house. Our daughter, not knowing that word, described him as "some-daddy-running".
ReplyDeleteJust heard the story of some fish restoration the Government undertook. The historical maps were clearly labeled Non Salmonoid streams because of the tannic water coming from the peat bogs.
ReplyDeleteThey just spent $12 million doing salmon habitat restoration. When the fact is pointed out, the response is "It could happen" .
Jerry
My mom is a native Spanish speaker....But she never taught me or my brothers spanis as at that time it was considered a bad thing as they all wanted to be Americans, not immigrants living in America...
ReplyDeleteI wish she had taught me as a child though, It would have given me a step up in life being bilingual.
Make sure HH teaches her. She will benefit from being able to speak spanish as well as english, and this is the time when it will be easiest for her to learn. Best to do "Spanish Days" once a week (or more) for her to learn.
"I know that I have at least one reader who is a young lad of less then fifty so please humor me if I tell you things that you already know."
ReplyDeleteIt's one thing to know the story, but it's another to have understanding. I think this piece is a great example of why it's helpful to read people who have some amount of understanding go do things.
You could brute force it. Test quarterly from randomly selected spots in a line mixed together. These days maybe some in-ground sensor could even accomplish it. Or, plant some flowers and understand what it means when they struggle or die off (but also carefully checking against deer/weather/drought/foot traffic).
Then you combine it with the "engineer work stories" and get something even more useful. By yourself or with a few people you can be sure of you can rely on deep understanding of a system. But... you deploy that more broadly and you can easily imagine it going wrong. Someone is told "watch these flowers, when they struggle/die back we need to remediate black walnut roots" and the deer or drought or foot traffic causes them to be cutting non-existent roots instead of watering more.
It's an interesting practical application of a story that can be a bit disconnected from modern experience so that it is hard to apply, until you see it applied like this.
The compound walnut roots exude is juglone. It is contained in all parts of the tree so wood chips of black walnut can have an effect
ReplyDeleteMuch of the 'juglone effect' has been overstated, and is primarily regurgitation of points from a single article printed over 50 years ago. While it is true that some plants (apples, tomatoes, rhododendrons) are sensitive to juglone, much of the suppressive effect exerted by black walnut on plants within its root zone is not from 'allelopathic effects' of juglone, but merely to being shaded and outcompeted for nutrients and moisture by a large mature-canopy tree.
ReplyDeleteI knew nothing of allelopathy or competition, when, as an 8-yr-old, I planted two pomegranate bushes that I had started from cuttings within 25 ft of a young (8" diameter)BW at my grandparents' home. For 35 years, they lived, but never fruited... until installation of a new septic line necessitated trenching between the BW and the poms... as close to the BW as the trencher could navigate. Cutting the BW roots resulted in the poms bursting into fruit production, which they have continued for the intervening 25 years... with the BW declining over a period of 10 years or so before it finally died.
Parts of the French Canuck side of my family are also very traditional (or were when I was growing up) - they did *not* let you sing *Christmas* carols unti Christmas Day. Before that, you were supposed to be singing Advent carols. I still love "On Jordan's Bank."
ReplyDeleteDuring a mine tour in Colorado I learned that besides canaries, another common practice was to sacrifice bits from your lunch box to keep rats nearby. They are very sensitive to vibrations - probably it's their whiskers - so if you were working a seam an all the rats take off, drop your tools and retreat with them - they are probably sensing an imminent collapse. Another prospector's tip was panning anthills. Let the little guys do the work, and you get a sample of what there may be, a few feet below.
ReplyDeleteWhere do pickerel fit in your fish hierarchy ?
ReplyDelete