Fun time Friday

Huzzah!  It's starting to clear up, at least for today.

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Gentlemen, what do you think the girl in the yellow sweater at about twenty seconds is saying?

Turn on the close captioning in YouTube and all will be revealed.  Cute commercial, though, one I haven't seen before.  The looks on the adults' faces are priceless; the kids are alright.

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You can sign me Not A Fan, or No Nascar Ken.

Aw, c'mon; don't be such a fuddy-duddy.  There is something delightfully absurd and surreal about the whole situation, very much in keeping with the wacky zeitgeist of Chicago.  A couple or three weeks is hardly shutting down Grant Park for "much of the summer."

I was surprised how slowly those cars are expected to be running, with speeds "up to 100 mph."  I've done nearly that myself a few times, not saying where or when.  Should be a good time, anyhow, with the exception of those with more delicate sensibilities.

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So, what do you guys do at the picnic of Champaign oldsters?  Do you sit around and ponder the past or are you conspiring for the future in anticipation of the impending Zombie/Alien Apocalypse?  Myself, I am making preparations to completely rebuild civilization.  And what's the deal with old farts and hard candy?  I have developed an unnatural fondness for Werther's Original caramel hard candies.

My bad

 Forgot to include the link, which is here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8DzgPzAoOo

And I will admit that I do watch too much tv.  Namely CNN.  It is on basically all day unless I am actively watching something else.  Don't want to miss any breaking news you know, but mostly because it is always on I don't hear a thing it says.  

Something oh, a little fishy about that No Fish Lake.  Googled it and came up with a couple lakes called No Fish Lake, none of them in Michigan and not much information any one of them.  

the water was so clean, no fish, no turtles, and no weeds or algae. 

There could be a lot of reasons (likely chemicals) other than it being clean that there were no critters, and especially no algae.  I wonder if any of those locals that were so happy to splash around in the 'clean' water are still around to tell their tale.

Our Nascar weekend approaches us.  Some sort of race tomorrow and the big race on Sunday.  Smelly, noisy, rude, our lovely Grant Park sealed off from the citizens for much of the summer, and all that for not very much money.  You can sign me Not A Fan, or No Nascar Ken.

Monday I will be leaving for the annual Champaign picnic of dwindling oldsters who used to go through two kegs and a late run for a pickup truckload of cans, and now a shopping cart of cans will be plenty.  Back on Wednesday and we will be in the middle of the good old summertime.

So long for now my good old Institute buddies.

Huh?

Here is a commercial that I have been seeing a lot of.  Gentlemen, what do you think the girl in the yellow sweater at about twenty seconds is saying?

Another imaginary posting, Uncle Ken?  You might be watching too much TV.

 

The Smog Story

 I've been seeing smoky pictures of big cities on TV, and now on our own institute.  I seem to remember a time when our cities frequently looked like that, not every day, but sometimes when the weather was just right for it.  In those days, some of the smog generated by our cities would blow over to more remote regions hundreds of miles away, causing the locals to complain about it.  They said that it was causing "acid rain" that was poisoning their pristine woods and waters.  I read about a small lake in the Upper Peninsula that was pronounced "dead" by some visiting scientists because of it.  Unlike those scientists, the reporter who wrote the article interviewed some of the locals who told him that the lake had always been like that. Indeed, they called it "No Fish Lake" and liked to swim in it because the water was so clean, no fish, no turtles, and no weeds or algae.  They didn't know about the acid, which apparently was not strong enough to adversely affect those who swam in it.  Now it wasn't called "No Fish Lake" on the maps, it was just what the locals had called it for as far back as anybody could remember.  

We have been having our share of the Canadian smoke, but it has mostly stayed in high enough in the atmosphere to remain a minor annoyance.  Yesterday, though, the whole state of Michigan was under an air quality alert.  They said that old people and people with respiratory problems (that's me) should stay indoors, but I was out in it for an hour or so and didn't notice any ill effects.  I suppose that I have developed an immunity from all those years of smoking.  You think? 

just a couple short things

 How nice to see the Deagan Tower, the Eiffel tower of Ravenswood.

Looking somewhat subdued.  

This is the best I could do.  Was up and down State Street this morning, smelled like wood burning, but not too hard on my lungs in the short run anyway.  Sort of seems unfair.  Cheboygan is just across the water from Canada, and yet we get all the smoke.

Here is a commercial that I have been seeing a lot of.  Gentlemen, what do you think the girl in the yellow sweater at about twenty seconds is saying?

We're #1!

From The Chicago Tribune:
According to the monitoring site IQAir, Chicago had the worst air quality out of 95 cities worldwide Tuesday.

This morning's view from The Geezer Chateau...

art and science

 What more encouragement can an artist hope for than you're getting there!  That's what we want you know, to be getting somewhere if only not to be where we once were.  Oh and look at that a whole table tiled with Uncle Ken's greatest hits.

The next photo shows the greatest hits buried under what appears to be mostly the tools of the gentleman (or mad, potato potahtoe) scientist.  Is that digital printer poop in the lower right?

And what's this, a digital microscope.  Way back when I was a bit of a youth scientist, a possibly budding biochemist (See the Gage Park Year Book 1963), I bought myself a microscope.  I had three or four aquariums holding tropical fish and all I had to do was dip an eyedropper into the somewhat murky waters and splash it on the slide and there was a whole world of outlandish critters going about their business unaware that they were being observed by a godlike hairless ape with a ginormous brain.  Unaware that is until I added the salt and they all exploded.  Not all gods are good all the time.

Once when my nephews were young and seemingly drifting I had the great idea of getting them some kind of kiddie microscope to nudge them unto the road of enlightenment.  But those were the pre internet days and I couldn't find any, and subsequently they shunned the shining path of science.

And of course I wanted one for myself also.  But I just scratched my head and figuring such instruments were not to be found, carried on with my life.

Until now.  I have been using that google photos thing where you keep pressing the little magnifying glass with the + inside and watching as I fall into the leaf from a great distance and that tiny vein becomes a monstrous artery feeding a forest of tinier veins, and then deep beyond that to the quantum foam.  Well actually just to where separate square pixels take over the screen.  But close enough.  Nobody knows what quantum foam looks like.  I think.

But suddenly I learn that there are affordable digital microscopes!!! 

Off to the Amazon and oh my sweet lord an armada of instruments, from like ten bucks to like five hundred bucks and each one with different capabilities I assume.  I could use Old Dog's experience and sagacity at this point.  In exchange I could gladly fill in the gaps in Uncle Ken's greatest hits for his table.  Perhaps we could continue this matter through emails.

Haven't done much with the leaves.  Have been taking photos of them every day and well just interesting things.

Another Monday

Last week as I was returning from downtown after hobnobbing with some swells at the Lyric Opera, I happened to pass by the Ten Cat and Lookie Here!  Uncle Ken's show is still up!  I must admit, those watercolors look a whole lot better in the full light of day than they do on a web page, to say nothing of some improvements in technique and execution.  Keep at it, you're getting there!

I managed to go inside and score one of the promotional post cards to add to my collection.

 

Too bad they are all obscured by the day to day realities of life in The Geezer Chateau.

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I've also been following, though lurking is more like it, the postings of Uncle Ken's watercolor group and his recent forays into plant life and turning over a new leaf, Yuk, Yuk!  Almost the same kind of thing I've been studying for a while now.  Earlier this year, through the good graces of Amazon and our good friends in China I scored a little digital microscope.  Dandy little item, and it records video that you can transfer to your computer.  What I really like about it is that it isn't like the old high school microscope where everything had to be on a slide, up close and personal.  With a little clever fiddling you can be about 6 inches from the item of interest and get some amazing images.  I've been using it on our patio where we have a little public garden spot and taking some nice shots although you need a tripod.  Lot of fun to go outside and invade the privacy of spiders as they prepare their dinner.  This little guy is only a couple of millimeters long.

 

And here's a leaf pic I took some time ago but I forgot what it came from, just another dead leaf from one of the many.  Lot of nice textural things going on with this one, it could be anything.

leaf it to me

 Well that's what you get, as the old oleo commercial said, when you fool with Mother Nature.  Everything works out pretty well when you let Mother Nature use her cruel but efficient tool of natural selection to guide genetics.  But when Man, Mother Nature's bad boy, takes it upon himself to guide genetics, he does the critter no good.  Well in the case of working dogs, I guess you need a hot dog dog to get into those badger holes but anymore dogs don't do much work, but madmen still work maintaining these breeds and it's just vanity and doesn't do any good for the dogs.

I have been going to my garden recently for inspirations for my hobby.  I first started taking photos of my garden in 2007 and now I have sixteen years of photos to choose from.  Normally I would do the flowers but this time my attention has been diverted to leaves. Beagles knows this because every Sunday he 'likes' whatever I have posted for the weeks.  Sometimes I get the feeling he is just doing this pro forma and isn't even paying attention to my deft use of burnt sienna, but hey, we all want to be popular don't we?

As a man of science what particularly fascinates me is the veins.  All the leaves on the plant have the same shape, and there must be a optimal vein pattern that gets the nutrients to every cell in the leaf.  Shouldn't they all have the same leaf pattern?

 

 Well they sort of do in general, but when you stray from the general plan you notice that they are sort of winging it.  What's going on on the left is not the same as what is going on with the right, and the more minor and further away from the main veins there is considerably more variation.

I suppose it has something to do with how much sunlight the leaf was getting at various points over time, maybe the flow of sap has something to do with it.

Anyway, as a good gentleman scientist like Old Dog, I intend on doing more research.

News you can use

A timely coincidence?  Dogs with shorter snouts face greater risk of developing sleep apnea...

https://studyfinds.org/dogs-shorter-snouts-sleep-apnea/

The Test

I have seen pictures of those sleep studies where the subject is observed while actually sleeping, but mine was not like that.  All they did was give me this thing to take home with me and wear overnight.  It consisted of a small computer-like device with two wires coming out of it.  One wire connected to a thing that slipped over my finger, and the other one connected to a sticky pad that mounted on my chest.  The device somehow senses and records the amount of oxygen in your blood and your heart rate (pulse).  

With sleep apnea, you periodically stop breathing for a second or two, which causes your blood oxygen level to drop dramatically.  This wakes you up, although you are not conscious of it, which starts you breathing again.  Even though you may think you are sleeping straight through, you are not getting "quality sleep".  This causes you to become sleepy during the day, and subject to drifting off at inopportune times, like while you are talking to somebody or driving down the road.  

Sleep apnea - Wikipedia

flotsam and jetsam on a Monday morn

 Beagles, I don't believe that you ever wrote about taking the sleep apnea test. you know where they wire you up and I guess kind of watch over you.  I assume they don't go to all that bother for just one person so I imagine they have a big room, or set of rooms where there are all these wired up folks tossing and turning while the white coats oversee them and jot down notes and whisper medical jargon to each other.  Like some sci fi Guardians or Lords or something.

At one point they, you know THEM, wanted me to take a test but I don't think I could ever sleep wired up like that in a big group and I'd just be tired as hell in the morning.  Still I wondered what it would be like and would love to hear your observations.

I have heard people rave over how much better their lives are now that they sleep in a space helmet, so I am wondering if you aren't feeling it if maybe that is not the problem.  Keep us informed, and don't forget to tell us about the test.

Jumping Jack(fruit) Flash is indeed a gas.  You wonder about those little buds that bud out even though there is no hope that they could ever produce fruit and carry on their legacy.  Reminds me of those very late tomato flowers that burst out all yellow with big ambitions of becoming a big fat red fruit, but my the days are short, and rather chilly out there too.

I think my apartment is a little further to the left.  There is an amazing doc about how they put it up casting pancake after pancake and putting them atop the other.  Made by the company that made the cement, probably a cyber sleuth such as Old Dog could find it on the web somewhere.  Not too long after I moved in I had a screen door put on my bedroom.  I thought with all those doors it would be a standard thing, but they each had to be made individually.  After they installed one of the pancakes inevitably it would lean just a tad in one direction or the other so they would have to adjust the next one to make everything level again, but they would never get it quite right so they would have to adjust the next one too and so on and so on all the way to the top, so every door is just a teence different.

That's what the guy told me and I think it is a damn good story.

My sunflowers have not popped out and I was thinking maybe the seeds were old so I popped into Target to buy new ones and as long as I was there I remembered I was short on bar soap so I was looking for it in some section where there were shampoos so how far can soap be, but I couldn't find it. So I asked somebody where is the bar soap and he asked somebody else and she asked me, Men or women's.  Well men's I guess, so she pointed me somewhere and when I went there all there was was this Axe stuff (Axe is stuff teenage boys slather all over their bodies in the hopeless hope that it will attract teenage girls), but, I asked, don't you have like Ivory or Dial or Irish Spring or something, and she said, oh, that's in the women's soap shelf.  So here I am soaping myself up in the morning with women's soap I bought at Target the notorious pro LBGTQ (or LBGTQIA+ for you hipsters), doing my part for my side in the culture wars.

Zucchini is my new visitor to the garden.  I don't expect to get much fruit from it, but I'd like to see how it grows, and tomatillos are returning for a second season.  Lately I have been growing heirloom tomatoes but I don't get all that much fruit from them, and their growth is somewhat lethargic and they are prone to mysterious plagues so I am growing mostly hybrids this year, because I like thick green growth.  I can always just buy heirlooms.

I did try a bird bath of sorts last year but they didn't show any interest.  I guess they are a bunch of dirty birds.

Checking In

 I don't remember if I told you guys about this or not.  When I fell asleep at the wheel last January 30 and ran my truck into a ditch, I told the cops about my medical condition, you know, how I had been falling asleep at inopportune times lately and intended to see somebody about it.  Over four months later, I was notified that I had to attend a "reassessment" meeting with somebody from the Secretary of State in Petoskey on June 8 to determine if I was physically fit to keep my driver's license.  I was, with two restrictions.  One was that I had to stay within a 50-mile radius of home, which I do anyway, and the other was that I couldn't drive at night, which I seldom do anyway.  These restrictions will be lifted in six months, if my health care provider sends in a form that says I'm all better now.

Meanwhile, I have gotten my CPAP machine and started using it.  It's not as bad as I expected, but it still blows.  I have heard enthusiastic reports about how it has benefitted many people, but I'll believe that when I see it.  In case you don't know what a CPAP machine is:

Continuous positive airway pressure - Wikipedia

Jumpin' Jack(fruit) Flash

My, how they've grown!  Yesterday's image was taken 5 days ago and here are some pix taken today.

This is the whole "stick" and you can see it only has one leaf left.  See that bud below the dead leaf?  Same bud, but today it's 20mm long, not the 2mm of yesterday's pic.

Here's a closer look...

You can see a tiny speck of green on the node below this bud; this little guy is only 1mm tall.

Further down the stem there's yet another little bud but the angle is wrong and you can't see it, ridiculously small at .5mm.  Crazy, huh?

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As a special treat for Uncle Ken, here's a pic I stumbled across the other day.  It might even be his condo but only he will know for sure.

Good day

I too have been reminiscing about my early life lately.

and

Sometimes the choices we make are neither good nor evil, they're just different one from the other.

Good ol' Mr. Beagles, once again bringing clarity to some of the conflicting ideas I've had about Uncle Ken's recent posts.  And let's not forget the words of the Pinstriped Sage, Yogi Berra, when he said "When you see a fork in the road, take it."

I don't do much reminiscing, what's done is done, but there are times when a name or idea will pop into my head and transport me many decades into the past and I'll ask myself, "Where did that come from?"  I don't dwell on these notions but I find them amusing, just another aspect of the marvelous human mind.

It occurs to me that as we age we develop our own personal philosophies which, if we had any sense, we would keep to ourselves.  And that's what I'll do.  You guys can create your own delusional realities; I'm happy with mine.

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Is there a name for this time of the year when it is not really springtime any longer but not yet full summer?  Whatever it is, I would call it lovely, giving my green thumb a workout.  Most of the plants are doing well but Monday I brought my little, sickly lemon tree to one of the planters on the 6th floor terrace in hope that plenty of fresh air and many hours of direct sunlight will give it a positive jolt.  It's cousin the Valencia orange is doing fine indoors so maybe the Fickle Finger of Mother Nature is just messing with me.

I had a pleasant surprise with the Jackfruit I planted last year.  It wasn't doing much, just a spindly stick with a couple of leaves on top and they turned yellow and dried out.  I thought the thing was dead but the other day I noticed a tiny bit of green on that stick, and then a few more.  So now there is fresh growth popping along that stick, and the growth is swift, noticeable from day to day.  Here is a pic of that first little bud, about 2mm tall. 

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How is the balcony doing this year, Uncle Ken?  Any new varietals in the planning?  I know that your condo rules frown on feeding birds but I was wondering if a birdbath would be acceptable?  It's gotta be better than that river water and no chance of getting snagged by a turtle.

Memorial Day 4

 As I am sure you guys are aware the USA spends more on defense then the next 10 military big spenders in the world.  Used to be the dems used to fight the reps to get more of that money to be spent on, you know, schools and roads and help out the poor, but lately they have begun to compete with with the reps to prove they are more patriotic, but whatever the dems propose the reps up it.

This was something I meant to get around to in the last couple posts, the awesome amount we pay the military and how little we get out of it.

But then along came Ukraine, the just war.  What could be more just than repelling a country that wanted to conquer you?  And what greater villain than Putin?  What better place to put those expensive weapons that have been in mothballs since we paid that big fat wad of cash for them?  

I began to think, maybe it was a good idea that we seemingly wasted that dough over all those years because now we had plenty of weapons to give to our allies who were fighting to defeat evil dictatorship?

I know you guys are not inside baseballers like me, but that budget deficit fight was a barn burner.  I really didn't think they would get there before the deadline but they did.

Unfair that the dems always give the reps a free pass on this while the reps always fight the dems and go on to spend like drunken sailors, but maybe that is an argument for another day.  For the nonce we had to give up something to keep the country from getting hit with a hammer, so we compromised.

What we compromised on was we gave them a freeze on all spending except of course defense.  That's not good enough for the freedom caucus maniacs and they are looking for some mechanism to spend even more on the military.

But like I said I am inclined to be lenient on this because maybe that largess goes to a good cause, namely the Ukes.

Except it isn't.  The freedom caucus doesn't want to spend on the Ukes anymore, some kind of fealty for Trump's warm and fuzzies towards Putin I suppose.  So they want to spend tons of dough on an institution but hold it in abeyance when it comes time to use it for what it is supposed to be used for.

What was that book that was so popular among the Birchers about sixty years ago?  None Dare Call It Treason?  Sounds like treason to me.

The Road Not Taken

 I too have been reminiscing about my early life lately.  I have made some good decisions of which I am proud, as well as some not so good decisions which I regretted after the fact, although each one seemed to me to be the right thing to do at the time.  Sometimes we can mitigate the effects of our bad decisions, but we can never completely undo them.  Sometimes the choices we make are neither good nor evil, they're just different one from the other.  We will never know for sure what would have happened if we had taken that other fork in the road, like Robert Frost said in this poem.  

Mountain Interval/The Road Not Taken - Wikisource, the free online library

Maybe we would have chosen differently if we had known better at the time, but we didn't, and by the time we knew better, the ship had already sailed.  It's like that old German proverb:

"Ve get too soon olt und too late shmart."

Memorial Day Observations 2

 As Vietnam hove into the view of the US, safe behind my 2-S, I was more or less for it.  I remember reading that in China only socialist realism was allowed in their fiction. No characters were allowed who weren't either without fault (commies), or totally evil (anti commies).  I hated that good guy vs bad guy thing.  Even at that young age I liked stories where the good guy wasn't all that good and the bad guy wasn't all that bad, and I had hopes of becoming a writer, and what would be the point of writing good vs bad?  

So there it was.  Socialist realism was bad and we had to head them off in Vietnam lest literature fall into the dustbin of history.  When the gulf of Tonkin crap hit the papers I was all for giving those impertinent reds a swat.

It's kind of a mysterious thing to me but sometime around 1965 I went from being pro-war to anti-war.  I don't remember a specific day when I sat down and thought it out, I just changed.  Maybe it was because my 2-S was closer to running out.  Maybe it was because of the people around me.  Maybe it was a reasonable analysis.  Anyway there it was.

Nowadays I think that war was stupid, but back in the day I thought it was pure evil, naked Amelican aggression.  To take part in it would be wrong.  Well there were draft counselors all over campus, and there I was filling out the form.  The tricky thing was that you had to be against all wars.  And I didn't know.  Should we have just sat on our hands and let Hitler take over all of Europe?  I kind of just mumbled over that and the draft board didn't care because the army had told them to stop sending them guys that didn't want to be in the war.  Just too much damn trouble.

And then there was Al Gore, son of a senator who was anti war, anti war himself and yet he enlisted and went to Vietnam.  I used to think he did it entirely to help his political career and that would make him a pretty big hypocrite.  But morals in uneasy times can be tricky.  There was the argument that troubled me when I was getting my CO, wasn't I just shirking my slot and leaving some poor schlub, who didn't get to go to college where draft counselors were a dime a dozen, go in my place?  I didn't have an answer for that.

I didn't believe all wars were wrong (WW II) so didn't that mean that I believed some wars were just?  And if some wars were just then didn't we need an army?  And what good was an army where the soldiers decide what wars they wanted to take part in? 

Memorial Day Observations 1

 Never a fan of the military you know. 

When I was a kid I had a set of those green army men, some trucks, some tanks, some green planes, probably a battleship or two, though they were way out of scale and hard to imagine how they fit in the battle plan, but an eight year old kid can figure that shit out.  We played all day, one kid's army against the other kid's army.  Probably the most strategic part of the battle was setting up your lines, those guys lying down with machine guns first, then maybe the guys who were standing with a rifle, maybe the bazooka guys were next, bazookas were way cool, and I guess the tanks and the cannons further back, and way, way, back that battleship or two shooting from some distant sea.  Then I think we took turns leading some segment into battle and the other guy countering, and so on and so on as the day went on, and I don't remember either side ever winning conclusively.  Likely the waft of a newly opened Monopoly game and the sound of those little crisp bills and the irons and hats and shoes tromping across the board stole our attention and there was an instant truce.

And the guns. Oh lord, those cool cap guns and fancy holsters, plastic space squirt guns, just you fingers if need be.  I remember the Christmas of the burp guns.  Every boy in the hood wanted one for Christmas and every boy got one and we spent all of Our Savior's birthday blasting the shit out of each other.

Army comics were cool and so were the movies.  I thought flame throwers were cool, but then I had a flash about what it would be like to be on the other end.  Still cool though.

I was surprised when I learned sometime in my early adolescence that the Korean war had been over for like five years.  What the hell, we weren't fighting the commies anymore?  Shouldn't we still be doing that?

I was a little proud at the age of eighteen to show up at my local draft office and sign up.  Felt like a man with that little white card (still have it in my archives) in my wallet.  The Korean war was way over and there was nothing on the horizon, but it seemed like everybody got drafted as a matter of course, seemed like a rite of passage that I expected I would have to go through and I don't remember feeling much one way or the other.

Because the University of Illinois was a land grant college ROTC was mandatory for all men for the first two years.  They dropped it after my first year and I did not feel bad about it at all.  It was all inspection and standing at attention and some asshole looking you and down and decided that either your shoes or your brass was not shiny enough.  They dished out demerits and you had to go to their office and do clerical crap to get them off your record.

The worst was saluting.  If you were going to or coming back from Inspection and wearing your uniform you HAD to salute any officer who crossed your path.  Fuck that shit, fuck that guy.  I didn't like it at all.