Loose Ends

Turns out that Uncle Ken was right about Cervantes, but I'm not so sure about that Whistleblower thing.  I'm not saying that I believe what Trump said, but I'm not convinced that the other side is telling the truth either, not that it matters anyway.  I doubt that any investigating done by the Ukrainians could have a significant affect on our elections, but that's what I said about the Russians last time, so you never know.

I seem to remember that we used to call any kind of utility pole a telephone pole back in the day.  Maybe the telephone wires were strung on the same poles as the electric wires, and maybe they still do that in Chicago.  In Northern Michigan, however, most of the telephone wires are underground, and the rest of them are on their own poles.  They do string cable TV wires on the same poles as they electric wires, but not telephone wires.  At any rate, the transformers on the poles in question definitively mark them as electric line poles.  The voltage on most electric lines is too high to supply to individual buildings, and the function of the transformer is to step that voltage down to an acceptable level, which I believe is 240 volts.  Most household outlets are 120, which is commonly referred to as 110.  Similarly, the heavier appliances run on 240, although people usually refer to it as 220.  I think the voltage was increased at some point in history and people never got out of the habit of calling it by the old numbers.  In rural areas, each house usually has its own transformer, but one transformer might supply several houses if they are close enough together.

The reason I know this is, if a hypothetical guy cut down a hypothetical tree near a hypothetical transformer, and the branches of this hypothetical tree were to lightly brush against the two hypothetical wires that feed into the hypothetical transformer, setting them to bouncing so that they come close enough together to arc, the resulting overload might trip the circuit breaker in the hypothetical transformer, cutting off the power to any and all houses that are fed from that hypothetical transformer, necessitating two guys from the power company to drive out clean from Onaway, some 30 miles away, on a Sunday evening to reset the breaker...…..or so I've been told.