respublica

Holes in the ground

All of a sudden i'm seeing holes in our backyard. They are in various areas and have popped up almost over night. I have no idea what is causing them but have to guess it's some sort of animal. But what kind of animal. We have long had a huge hole behind the garage which we know is from a groundhog. Our next door neighbor has the same type of big hole under his deck. We all figure one hole is the groundhog's front door and the other his back door. But these other holes are small but well formed. Rabbit? Too small and I don't think they are from squirrels digging areas to bury nuts. It's a puzzle.

More weird news

The news we get just keeps getting stranger and these stories are no longer confined to The National Examiner type papers. This story is on every mainstream news site.

"Dentist who extracted a tooth while on a hover board has been convicted on dozens of charges." 46 charges to be exact.

How weird we've become.

I don't get this choice of photo

WTOP, in Washington DC put up a picture with the caption: Apple picking Fauquier County. Does this picture seem kind of creepy to anyone but me?

Of all the apple picking pictures in this country, they chose this? Maybe there is some fad out there I have missed.

Your weird behavior story of the week

It is 2020 after all but this just about tops it. Commercial airline pilots at LAX reported seeing a guy in a jetpack flying about 300 yards off their wing while on final approach to the bustling airport. At 3000 feet! Pilots on landing approach were from Southwest, American, and  Jet Blue.

We don't see this sort of thing anymore

This popped up last night and I spent a fair amount of time reading the old ad as well as giving it a lot of thought. This actually could have been available when I was a kid, but I do not remember it. It was a less obsessively careful time back then. Click to enlarge to make it bigger and easier to read.

One thing bothers me about this set up. The little girl has her hand right near the wheels.

The Zombie cicada enters into 2020 lore

It just figures that this is the year a weird cicada story would appear. I mean those guys are underground for 17 years and now they're popping up with some sort of strange fungus. It's their covid-19. Scientists say the insects are under the influence of a psychedelic fungus called Massospora. The fungus has compounds like the ones found in hallucinogenic or "magic" mushrooms. The infected cicadas unknowingly trick other insects which leads to effective disease transmission. The Massospora causes infected male cicadas to move their wings in the way females do during a mating invitation. This tempts other male cicadas into being infected.

If that isn't enough for you, and you have had your own run in with noisy cicadas, you can read the whole thing right here.

A new tech conumbrum

We've had to make adjustments to setting up our televisions since we moved back to Collinsville. Work has been done on the house and the cable line to the bedroom tv was taken out. We called Spectrum to have the line put back in and here lies the issue which is a mystery to us. The Charter guy came out and took a look around and then suggested a way of using that tv without an actual cable line.

I have no idea if this will work so I'm going to try to explain it here.

He told us the best and cheapest way to get that bedroom tv up and running was to skip the cable box and line and instead go out and get a Roku steaming player. Put that into an HDMI outlet on the tv and it will communicate with the downstairs cable box through our wireless network. This sounds too good to be true and I wonder if this was just his way of not having to go through all the work involved in setting up cable lines. 

I am going to go out and get the Roku, but I'm skeptical of the tv working with what we have and instead be filled with options we have to pay for individually. How does this work exactly? He said it is being done all the time now, we shall see.

The tv hooked up to the downstairs cable box is not a smart tv, the movers accidentally broke our only smart tv and will hopefully replace it. That had wireless the current one does not so I do not see how the bedroom tv will communicate with it.

Where has all the change gone?

Lots of stories about stores not having any coin money and have begun taking credit or debit cards only. If you pay cash, they haven't the coins to give you change. How weird is this? What happened to all of the quarters, dimes and nickels, not to mention pennies? It seems this is just one more thing to be blamed on the Coronavirus.

On the other hand we are drowning in loose change. Over time I've rolled up coins when I was bored, most often we toss loose change into a big bowl or drawer. While helping us pack up for our move, our oldest grandson came across a box which held a bunch of rolled up coins and he counted them. He came up with 254 dollars in that box alone. 

So I guess I'm wondering what I can do with all of this change. Will a bank take it? I'd love to take it all to our bank and have it put into my checking account. When our bank was Home Federal, a very nice locally run bank, we could do this. In the past few years that bank has been taken over by another bank and changed names twice. So I don't know what the procedures are there now. 

We must not be the only ones piling up change in our homes or there would not be such a shortage.

What was that noise?

Last night after we went to bed I was awake reading while Dale slept like a rock. Suddenly out of no where came the loudest sounds. At first I thought the noise was coming from birds in the tree outside our bedroom window. Maybe something disturbed them, I thought. But the sounds, not chirping exactly, not singing, just an angry sounding choir of birds.

I got up and looked out the window but saw nothing, not surprising since it was dark. But the sounds kept coming. Then I thought maybe it wasn't a living thing but a problem with our outside air conditioning unit which is down below. So I got up and went down to see if it was the air conditioner. As soon as I opened the front door and stepped onto the front porch the noise was ear shattering and coming from everywhere. It was so loud and I had no idea, but was still thinking birds. No. Not birds.

I got to thinking about what I'd heard on the news lately and realized it could well be Cicadas. We weren't expecting this, but the loud noises made a bit of sense. And the number of them must have been enormous. This morning while sharing all this with Dale, he said he'd read we could be seeing the Cicadas. I did a Google search and found this headline:

They're Back: Millions Of Cicadas Expected To Emerge This Year

This story centered on Virginia, North Carolina and West Virginia but this story came from St. Louis' KSDK: Thirteen-year cicadas were not expected to appear in the St. Louis area until 2024 but they’ve emerged four years early, according to experts who study cicadas around the country.

Leave it to 2020 to just keeping on keeping on.

I also came across a story about swarms of Japanese Beetles showing up and devouring soybean fields in Nebraska or somewhere, I've lost the link.

What is the explanation?

I've been really puzzled over the sudden taking down of statues of Christopher Columbus. I've seen news reports with video of this being done in St. Louis and now Sacramento California. But I don't hear exactly why this is so important. What did he do that offends people today?

What's next? The removing of portraits of presidents in the halls of Washington DC?

And now this from St. Louis:

More name changes and monument removals might be forthcoming in our area, after a statue of Christopher Columbus was removed from Tower Grove Park

St. Louis County Executive Dr. Sam Page says he has ordered staff to review all roads, parks and statues for potentially problematic names.