Category: Life

Behold, the security of 3-bold locking:

I remember a different world and a different era where things literate people proofread marketing material before sending it to the printer for some expensive rendering on vinyl. But I remember a world that was different in so many ways.

In this 21st century, I keep checking the bottom of my shoes for dead butterflies of a distant era.

I’ll never understand why Labor Day isn’t nine months after Valentine’s Day.

So, how many times do you think the question “Twerking hard, or hardly twerking?” was asked in workplaces this week?

What have you done, o Sunflower, to hang your head so?

I’d say, “Open thread,” but the posts here are a whole lot of open and not a lot of thread.

As seen on Amazon:

You know what’s more humane to a cat than a declaw? Holding a cat down every month while you glue some press-on nails on each and every one of its claws, that’s what!

I’m surprised that the “Customers Also Bought With This Item” section did not include gauze, bandages, and scale mail armor. (Not chain mail, because that catches the cat’s claws uncomfortably. Take my word for it.)

We recently integrated three cats into our household as house-only cats, and at first the veterinarian was not in favor of a declaw and counseled us lightly against it. But as the end of their first week of isolation in my office, I thought about them moving into the household where, as we enter middle age, we’re getting nice furniture, and I decided to blunt them.

In my mind, here’s the humane scale:

1. They have a procedure, use special litter for a couple weeks, and get the run of the household with a loving family for the rest of their lives.
2. They don’t get declawed, and we worry every day of our lives that they will damage something. And when they damage something, we mourn it and/or have it repaired and worry every day that they will damage it again and/or shred our other declawed cats, which they very well might.
3. We either before or after something or somecat has been damaged place the bladed cats with someone else who might not take as good of care as them as we do.
4. We wrestle with them every month to get these things on them.

Some people have strange ideas of the humane treatment of animals. Forcing a cat to take medicine is bad enough. This sounds like torture to both the humans and the cats.

But I have made the links above Amazon Associates links, just in case you disagree and I can profit from your naiveté.

Well, I’m only speculating here, but no doubt future numbers will bear out that domestic drone surveillance use is or will soon cause big problems in the home skylight industry.

On the other hand, I’m looking forward to my new career as a home skylight tinfoil cover installer.

(Link via Ace of Spades HQ.)

Always drive with your hands on the wheel at the ten o’clock and the two o’clock position.

This can obstruct or obscure your spouse’s view of the speedometer and avoid commentary upon how fast you’re driving.

As I predicted:

Throughout Missouri and probably the nation, people are deciding that they want to raise chickens in their suburban and urban backyards (see stories in St. Louis and Springfield). These people are doing it as part of an environmental nutbar fad and they’re doing it with a bit of Internet research and without any experience in farming or treating livestock qua livestock instead of livestock qua food-providing-pet.

Ergo, when their circumstances change, when they get tired of them, or when they reach the end of the hens’ productive years, people are going to need to get rid of these damn birds. Are they going to slaughter them? Of course not! They’d just as soon slay their bichon frise or lifestyle accessory only child.

In 2013, the New York Post reports "Hipster urban farmers learn that chickens are hard to raise, animal shelters inundated with unwanted hens":

Raising chickens in backyard coops is all the rage with nostalgia-loving hipsters but apparently the facial hair obsessed faux farmers often don’t realize that raising hens is loud, labor intensive work because animal shelters are now inundated with hundreds of unwanted urban fowl.

From California to New York, animal shelters are having a hard time coping with the hundreds of chickens being dropped off, sometimes dozens at a time, by bleary-eyed pet owners who might not have realized that chickens lay eggs for only two years but live for a decade or more.

Amazing how the forward-leaning and forward looking don’t see very far forward, ainna?

(Link via Ed Driscoll.)

From a news story entitled "Visitor discovers nearly three carat diamond at Arkansas state park, I learned about the existence of Arkansas’s Crater of Diamonds State Park:

Arkansas The Natural State is blessed with an abundance of geological wonders. Crater of Diamonds State Park, the only diamond-producing site in the world open to the public, stands out as a unique geological “gem” for you to explore and enjoy.

Here you can experience a one-of-a-kind adventure hunting for real diamonds. You’ll search over a 37 1/2-acre plowed field, the eroded surface of an ancient volcanic crater that 100 million years ago brought to the surface the diamonds and some of the semi-precious stones lucky visitors find here today.

How cool.

We’re fostering three cats all of a sudden, and it’s been a while (seven or eight years, probably) since we’ve had young, jumping cats.

Which means we have to (as we’ve been reminded) jumping-cat-proof our house.

Which is just the opposite of child-proofing your house. Wherein you take dangerous and breakable things from low places and put them in high places.

Instead, we have to take the knick-knacks and bric-a-brac that we’ve come to display atop our bookshelves (which are the main type of furniture we own) and shove them back to the wall so that a cat won’t try to pass behind them. Also, I might have to move my row of paperbacks from the top of the to-read shelves in my office that seem to be falling like snowflakes every night.

On the plus side, gentle reader, you might be in line for another decade’s worth of cat pictures if our past fostering habits prove prologue.

Tree-climbing gains popularity as a full-body, outdoor workout:

Tree-climbing is emerging as a recreational sport, similar to rock climbing.

Local instructor Guy Mott says tree-climbing builds muscles and can lead to improved fitness and weight loss.

“If you engage in a tree climb, it is a full-body workout. It is much more interactive and therapeutic to be outside as opposed to a gym,” said Mott. “It helps people to gain an appreciation for nature.”

Not only is it reliving, albeit in a limited fashion, one of the joys of childhood, but it’s experiencing it in a way that we did not as children but that we’ve forced onto them. Namely, it’s highly ritualized, highly supervised, taught in the right fashion, and with a bunch of safety equipment. It’s regression for the scaredy-cat set.

Juxtaposed, another headline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch today: Worker for tree removal company dies on the job.

Really.

Well, the more people in trees, the fewer people hogging the pec fly machine at the gym, so to each his own when it’s not the pec fly machine at the gym, I guess.

Well, I obviously don’t have a schultüte now. Well, I guess it’s not obvious to those of you on the Internet who are not actively rifling through my boxes of personal mementos.

What is a schultüte? Let’s have a real-life former German explain it:

Since about the beginning of the 19th century, German school kids get a Schultüte on the first day of first grade. It’s a big cone made out of heavy paper, decorations on the outside and tied shut at the top with a bow.

. . . .

The Schultüte is filled with candy and small items useful for school (like colored pencils or erasers). They’re usually purchased commercially, but some families make them from scratch. The Schultüte is an extremely common thing in Germany, but I don’t think any other culture has the same custom.

Well, mine wasn’t a real schultüte, because I wasn’t in Germany and I wasn’t going into first grade.

But when I started (half-day) kindergarten at Douglas Road Elementary School way back in the day, Mrs. Noisworth had prepared a smaller rendition of that thing for us. I remember the paper cone filled with candy, trinkets, and a penny wrapped in aluminum foil.

I hadn’t remembered that for a long time until Marko triggered the memory. Good to know it’s still in there.

The manufacturer recommends this product for fifteen-year-olds and up.

Do you see a normal fifteen-year-old riding on one of these?

Me, either.

Listen, if you say a dog with rabies is rabid (and you pronounce the A sound differently in each for some strange reason)….

I can dang well say that a woman with babies is babid.

Ten Brands That Will Disappear in 2014.

It’s not 100% a match, but I do own JC Penney and Martha Stewart Omnimedia.

Why, if you only swapped in some AMD and maybe some Research in Motion, for Mitsubishi and Volvo, and it would look very close indeed.

(Link seen, in a roundabout fashion, on the Ace of Spades HQ Overnight Thread.)

I saw the strangest cloud blowing over Nogglestead on Tuesday night:

Click to embiggen. It’s a thin cloud that stretched pretty much from horizon to horizon below the other cloud cover.

I’ve never seen anything like that. But it’s been three years of that same feeling of wonder since I moved to the country.