Wisconsin Wedding Traditions

We have a family friend, Justin, who recently attended a wedding in Wisconsin.

He informed us of a Wisconsin wedding tradition named after Uncle Buck.  It involved the consumption of large amounts of cheese.

When he asked about the reason for the cheesy gluttony he was informed, "It binds them."

The Last Banana

We never eat the last banana of the bunch. It matters not whether it started out a large bunch or a small bunch.  The last banana sits forlornly in the fruit bowl, getting older and more tired until somebody takes pity on it and finally puts it in the chicken bucket.

Is it a family culture thing?  Is it a vestigial practice from the days when taint and food poisoning were common?  Perhaps the implicit assumption is that the second-to-the-last banana must have caused intestinal distress or been sub-par because the person who ate the second-to-the-last banana did not eat the last banana. 

We see something similar in human pairings.  Watching the pairing off in my kids and remembering back:  Pride prevented one from even considering the potential partners your buddies had summarily rejected.  Our self-awareness may have labeled it as "Pride" but there may have been survival value in it.  A potential partner who was rejected out-of-hand by a friend must have had some obvious and glaring defect.  Why risk (no matter how small the chance) chaining one's genetic gift to the future to tainted goods

It was considered acceptable to date a friend's former boyfriend/girlfriend after a suitable waiting period.  It was common to 'poach' boyfriends and girlfriends.  But the summarily rejected were never scooped up by the girl sitting next to the primary target.

Primary target

Rick Harris once coached me (and a few others) on his method for collecting beautiful girl friends.  Rick had three older sisters who helped him develop his method. 

According to Rick, you can go into any college bar and watch the following script play out.  A young man (or men) will stumble out of the daylight into the dimness of the bar.  They will scan the room as their eyes adjust to the dimness.  They will identify the table with the prettiest girls.  They will walk up to that table and hit on the most strikingly beautiful girl at that table.  They will go down in flames.  Then they will go to the table with the second most beautiful girls.  Lather, rinse, repeat until they finally get some civil conversation.

The feeding order is immutable.  It is as if the tables had numbers.  The prettiest girl in the bar can barely get in a swallow of beer between swatting off the suitors.

The Rick Harris method is to be a little bit patient.  Girls 2, 3 and 4 at each table get zero attention.  In all likelihood, the second prettiest girl in the bar is sitting at the same table as the prettiest girl.  Perhaps the second most strikingly beautiful girl is a strawberry blonde rather than a platinum blonde, or perhaps her sweater does not fit her with all of the cunning and daring of the most strikingly beautiful girl's. 

That girl's ego is a bit battered.  And she is awesomely beautiful.  The Rick Harris method is to walk up to the strawberry blonde and to give her 100% of his attention.  The girl who everybody else is falling over?  He gives her the amount of attention he would give to a dish of dog food.  He treats her in a civil manner but he makes it clear that she is an unwelcome distraction from the most interesting person in the room.

Back to bananas

The chicken's gain was my loss.

I need to buy some more bananas.

Mosquitoes Bite!

Mosquitoes are the deadliest animal on the planet as well as being a major annoyance.

Much of the upper mid-West is having a very wet summer.  In fact, it is raining outside my picture window right now.  All that rain is great for the corn crop.  It also produces a bumper crop of mosquitoes.

My oldest daughter is spending her summer in Miami, Florida....right down town in Little Havana....right next to open water.  Miami and Southern Louisiana have a very dynamic and complex mix of Caribbean and Central American immigrants.  Some of them enter the US via "undocumented channels".

According to the CDC, denghereue, yellow fever, malaria, chikungunya fever are all endemic to the Caribbean and Central America, all persist in the carrier's blood stream and are all vectored by mosquitoes.

What attracts mosquitoes?

Good article here .

Some people are "super attractive" to mosquitoes.  It is not just one thing that attracts mosquitoes, it is a complex stew of CO2, exhaled metabolic byproducts, skin odor, humidity, blood type, "secretor status".

While I don't plan to stop emitting CO2 for another forty years or so, there are some easy things one can do to reduce one's attractiveness to mosquitoes.

There is no absolute way to prevent every and all mosquitoes from biting you. Rather, mosquito bite prevention is an endeavor of trying to lessen the amount of bites than trying to eliminate the possibility all together. As professor Verhulst said above, a multi-faceted approach towards inhibiting mosquito bites is often the best strategy anyone can take. From here

Buy and use fans

Yes, AC is a wonderful thing.  I am not proposing using fans instead of AC.  Rather, I propose using many fans with AC.

Fans move air.  That disperses all of those odor/attractants your body is spewing like a bonfire burning tires on a crystal clear, dead- calm October day.  Every fire department in three counties can see the smoke plume.  Moving the air disperses the odor trail.  Moving the air quickly enough makes it turbulent and that really mixes the odor trail...to the point where it cannot be followed.

Moving air also tends to cool exposed skin.  Mosquitoes also find prey by infrared emissions.  Cool skin is good.  Sleeping in a cool room also keeps you under blankets.  The less uncovered skill, the better.

Fans are energy efficient.  One fan uses about 10% of the electricity of an air conditioner.  Nobody with a brain would ever suggest running the AC out on the patio (in part, because the cool air is not contained and would disperse.)  However, you will be considered brilliant if you run a gang of fans.

This class of fan is often used to dry wet floors.  It is the cat's meow for deterring the mosquitoes that bite ankles.

One of the beautiful things about ceiling fans is that they create air movement at ground level.  That is where most of the mosquitoes loaf as they await their next meal.  Be mindful that running fans for outdoor mosquito control means you need to create air movement from ground level up to 8' elevation.

As a final note concerning fans, mosquitoes do not need to bite you to keep you awake.  The simple hum of a mosquito will keep most people awake.  This may be biologically hardwired into us!  The white noise from a fan will mask any hummers and help you go to sleep. 

Bathe

Skin odors attract mosquitoes.  Take a quick, cool shower before going into high mosquito environments.

Protective clothes

Long pants.  Long sleeve blouses/shirts.  Blouses and shirts long enough so that no midriff is exposed. Mid-calf socks.  Light colors are less attractive to mosquitoes than darker colors.  There are good reasons why all of those tropical explorers wore light tan and khaki colors.  You still see the guys hoeing onions on the local muck fields (drained swamps with wet ditches around the perimeter) dressed the same way.  Long sleeves, loose fitting except for cuffs, light colors.

Mosquito netting

Consider mosquito netting over your bed.  Canopy beds were not just cool or romantic.  They were highly functional.  That canopy was there to support mosquito netting during the warm months.

You may consider a functional canopy to be quaintly old fashioned but consider the effects of a direct hit by a hurricane:
-Broken windows
-Breached house exterior (limbs and blown trash punching holes in the roof and sheathing.)
-Pooling water everywhere
-Power outages (No AC.  Fans are a possibility if you have a generator, but not AC)

Pre-made canopies can be had for $45.  Mosquito netting runs about $4 a yard (72 inches wide!) from local fabric stores.  You will not be able to buy it for love or money after a hurricane.

Diet

So far there is no conclusive evidence that diet can make you more-or-less attractive to mosquitoes.

Anecdotally, some people swear by eating lots of garlic.  One must wonder if the folklore regarding garlic repelling vampires was inferred from the effectiveness of garlic repelling mosquitoes or vice versa.  The inability of science to verify garlic's effectiveness may be due the fact that most states harbor between 50 and 80 species of mosquitoes.  That, compounded with the variation in human scents may confound the results, i.e., interactions.  In simple English, garlic may work for some people but not for others.  Garlic may repel some species of blood suckers but not others.

The prime mosquito attractant in human breath (after CO2) is octenol.  Octenol is a metabolic byproduct of linoleic acid.  Linoleic acid is a major component of most vegetable oils.  Mosquito avoidance is just one more reason to reduce the amount of oils (and fats) in your diet so they contribute less than 30% of your calorie intake.

Rainbow Gathering in Heber, Utah

UINTA NATIONAL FOREST, Utah (AP) — About 4,000 members of a counterculture group known as the Rainbow Family have poured into the woods about 60 miles east of Salt Lake City for an annual festival that culminates in a four-day celebration beginning Tuesday.

Members began arriving about two weeks ago; flooding neighboring Heber City, where residents question how much the gathering will cost their town. They say they're wary of visitors rummaging through their trash or urinating in public. Police there have doubled their force with help from state agencies.

The Rainbow Family has no official creed or website, and doesn't publicly identify any leaders or list of members. It revolves around peace and nonviolence, various unofficial websites say.

A roving courtroom returns to the site on Tuesday to handle misdemeanor citations handed to participants. Last week, Federal Judge Dustin Pead presided in a trailer, KSL-TV reported, processing such misdemeanors as drug possession and having a dog off a leash on national forest land. Another judge is expected to go through about 50 more such cases this week.

Authorities say a New Hampshire woman and a man from Texas at the celebration apparently died in their sleep. Police also say a New Mexico woman at the campsite last week stabbed a participant, seriously injuring him.

But most people at the campsite have been peaceful and have complied with rules restricting where they may set up camp and draw water, officials from the U.S. Forest Service and the Wasatch County Sheriff's Office told The Associated Press last week.

About 10,000 people are expected to arrive by Friday, the height of the celebration.

Last year, the same number of members set up camp in Montana.

The group there racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in law enforcement costs, officials said. The festival prompted U.S. Forest Service officials there to draw up a list of lessons learned for other states.

The last time the Rainbow Family set up in Utah was 2003, when members camped in Summit County. The group has convened every year since 1972.

One of the pressures that drove human organization beyond that of tribes and clans was the need to move clean water in and waste water out. A tribe might plateau at 120 people on a favorable site beside a fertile river.  That same river naturally carried away waste and brought in fresh water.  Very favorable location ===> maximum 120 people in high density.

The Rainbow Gathering engages in terminal "cuteness" as they carefully maintain their disorganization as a way shirking accountability.  The following quotes are from various LEO who have policed Rainbow Gatherings and dealt with the aftermath.

Last year’s gathering in southwestern Montana cost the federal agency about $575,000 in law enforcement and administrative expenses. According to Kathy Jo Pollock, public information officer with Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, this year’s gathering is expected to run the same, in the range of $500,000.  Link

Was part of a team that "Dropped In" on and Earth First "Campsite" up in the Spray Lakes Recreation area above Canmore Alberta, once......same area where "Death Hunt" was filmed...You really had to watch where you stepped, the site was SURROUNDED by a solid ring of feces. -Crossfireoops at 24hourcampfire

Since they don't have any organization, it's hard for the FL to require a permit or to take action against anyone for cleanup. It's more like 10k individuals camping out and they just happen to camp near or on top of each other. There's no central organization to take care of things. -Rock Chuck at 24hourcampfire

They are VERY well aware of the rules that would make them fall into an event requiring a Special Use Permit. The very second they charge admission, or sell anything at the event, they could be all kicked off in a less than a heartbeat.  (they are) very adept at skirting the rules.-Rockinbar at 24hourcampfire

My take is that they will hit a tipping point where poor sanitation will cause epidemics similar to what happened in Haiti after the earthquake. Cholera, hepatitis, typhoid.....third world diseases thrive in first world countries when we fail at waste disposal.  It will not matter if you showed up in a $300K motorhome.  Viruses and bacteria don't care what your W-2 reads.

Thank God that Eaton Rapids has too many mosquitoes to be hospitable to these "free" spirits.  It is "free" only as long as they can get others to pay for the costs they incur.

Walking the Walk (continued)

I started out in Springport, Michigan at 7:35 this morning.  Mrs ERJ dropped me off.

Mrs ERJ dropped me off in the parking lot of this church.  They clearly take John 21:15-17 to heart.  Notice the round bales on the right side of the picture.

Even the Amish are getting into the World Cup.  I don't know if anybody told them the US got knocked out of the competition.  It is not like they watch TV.

I made a bit of a game to see how many edible plants I saw along the way.  This is salsify, aka, oyster root.  I did not harvest any.

Lambsquarters (Chenopodium sp.)  I did nibble on some of this.

Some Jackson County (Michigan) corn.  Chin high.  My walk nipped the corners of Jackson and Calhoun Counties and through a chunk of southeastern Eaton County.

Feral Sweet Cherries.  They were OK.  I also ate some mulberries.  I did not encounter any trees bearing fruit with earthshaking quality.  I still sample.  It costs me nothing and is entertaining.

Daylilies (Hemerocallis)  You munch on the long green-bean looking buds.  Fear not, the common, orange daylily of ditch and meadow is a sterile triploid.  It bears no seeds and your munching will have zero effect on the population.  These are quite good and would be sold commercially if they had any kind of shelf life.

Many hazelnut bushes spotted along the walk.

This looks like a down year for hazelnut production.  You can see a cluster of nuts just a freckle above dead-center oft his photo.

Here is a close-up to show what a single nutlet on a hazelnut looks like in Michigan in early July.

Thriving livestock enterprises used to be scattered all across the mid-West.  Consolidation in the slaughterhouse industry made these farm unviable and the families found themselves with stranded assets.  This barn is a beautiful building. It is empty.

Yup.  He planted corn down the length of his driveway.  I don't know if he will make back the cost of his seed.

Still works.

Typical Southern Michigan farm pond.

It took five hours and four minutes to walk the 14 miles.  I dilly-dallied about and took a few pictures and ate a few berries along the way.  I drank less than a half liter of water per hour at the start but a bit more at the end when it was warmer.  The camera works OK. 

The bottom line is that a +50 year old guy who is forty pounds overweight can walk 12 miles in less than five hours....at a cost of some sore feet and some fantasies regarding cold beverages.

Walking the Walk

In an earlier blog post I railed on about the lack of fitness seen at Walmart and the Secretary of State office.

In that post I proposed a 12 mile walk as a reasonable, minimum standard for physical fitness.

Talk is cheap.

The plan is for me to drive myself to Springport, Michigan early tomorrow morning and park in a church parking lot.  Then I will walk home.  Mapquest.com says it is a bit over 14 miles.  The majority of the trip will be on Royston Road, a paved, two-lane road that runs straight North/South....until you bake in the up/down changes.

I will carry a small daypack because I cannot fit enough in my running fanny pack.  I plan on carrying the amount of liquid that I would normally consume if running that far, that is, a half-liter every 3 miles.  That will add up to about four pounds.  Add a couple of PB&J sandwiches, a couple of 4 oz applesauce snackpacks and it should be a walk-in-the-park.

It will give me a chance to use my "new" blogging camera, a used Fujifilm Finepix AX330 that cost $30 at Dicker-and-Deal.  It is a simple little camera.  It is a bit of a pain that the lowest resolution native to the camera is 2MP.

Weather is forecast to be 67 degrees F, partly cloudy, 10 mph breeze out of the west.  This will definitely NOT be the Bataan Death March.

I will report out when I have more to write.  Expect lots of pictures.

Bosses, Bullies, Politicians and other Jerks

The Onion is a magazine dedicated to satire.

Satire, like all humor, is the unexpected positioning of the contradictory.  Things are not funny because they are wrong.  Things are funny because each, individual element is true but the construct is unexpectedly false....or true.

Nothing is better than God.  Warm beer is better than nothing.  Therefore: Warm beer is better than God.  (Hint:  the word "nothing" is used in two different ways.  In the first element "Nothing" is used in the sense of "there is no thing".  In the second element "nothing" is used as shorthand for "no beer".)

Why do we allow idiots and jerks to rule us?

Link to story.

My answer is that nobody else wants the job. 

The company I once worked for commissioned a study to identify key motivators within people.  The theory in vogue in Human Resources was that people would be productive when placed in jobs that matched both their technical expertise and their motivational patterns.  The theory fell by the wayside when the company found itself with a surplus of Facebook surfers and Sudoku divas.

According to the study, only one person in forty (2.5%) of the population has "achieving results through other people" as a prime motivator.  That number drops even more when you comb out the incompetent sociopaths.

Here are a few excerpts from The Onion story that give their reason(s).

"...everyone across the planet acknowledged that the tradition of allowing an exploitative asshole to take charge of a given situation has been the principal system for group decision-making from the earliest formation of tribal societies to the present day, an admission that caused each member of the human race to either emit an exasperated sigh, shake his or her head, or mutter a profanity."

"...have inexplicably been granted commanding roles by the acquiescent masses."

"When pressed for further comment, however, every member of humanity agreed that the current system, though deeply flawed, remains far better than one in which they actually have to make decisions for themselves."

ac·qui·es·cent
pronounced: akwēˈesənt/
Ready to accept someanything without protest, or to do what someanyone else wants.


There you have it.  The jerks are in charge because there are not enough good guys who are willing to become leaders even when it is clearly a matter of self defense.  The jerks are in charge because most people do not want the risk or effort of thinking for themselves.  Additionally, the jerks are in charge because most people fall into the sloppy habit of binary thinking:  I either roll over like a female collie or I fight (and get fired). 

The craft of guiding one's boss through carefully planned nudges is a dying art.  I think some of that is because employees have become guns-for-hire.  Here today.  Gone tomorrow.  There is not enough time to study the boss and noodle out his/her decision making process. 

It is good to be watching from the sidelines.