Heloise, Cedar chips around your car tires.

Oh, Heloise!  My unrequited love for you (dare I say, unnoticed?) is again on display.  I read your hints; I heed your requests for suggestions from your readers such as me.  Alas, my submissions go unnoticed.  So today, as I spread cedar chips around the tires of my car, I thought; perhaps this time she’ll acknowledged me.  

I don’t know if you, Heloise, live in a land with the changing seasons, a land occupied by small wild creatures such as I do in the scruffy Appalachian forest.  If you do, you know that at this time of year, the mouse population that has been growing all through the summer days of plenty is looking to find a home for the winter.  Once one mouse has explored the engine compartment of an auto, and left their scent, all will follow.  I love mice; they feed the weasels, hawks, and owls that live here on my land.  Unfortunately, mice love to chew on things, really almost anything, including automobile wiring.  So this time of year, I have to put kill traps under the hood of my car.  

Sadly, in the past, I have killed up to ten mice in as little as two weeks with these traps.  That’s a waste, no hawks or owls have benefited at all.  But I have learned that if I sprinkle some freshly chipped American red cedar around the tires of my vehicles, it discourages the mice from climbing in and finding my traps.  

From some things, we would like protection, for many things we would like prevention (not, I would venture, the attacks by scammers, robots, and thieves that send me mail and call my home many times a day.  From those entities, I would prefer REVENGE, but that’s another story).  

So, I intend to dissuade the mice from wasting their little lives on my traps, and you Heloise, can pass on a hint to all your readers that will spread this information.  Maybe this time you will.

PLEASE! make up your own curse. It's time for new improved ones

 

Curses!  We Need New Ones

We all need short-cut ways of showing our disdain for other people, ideas, or just plain WTF? is going on here and now (I hit my thumb!).   Recently, some folks have wanted to say; "F*CK YOU" to somebody; but were trying to be cute about it.  We all have curses.  I would like to suggest a few.  This week, I had to amend this and add the following:  The most necessary curse will now be:  "You fucking Crumley!"

If this doesn't become the poster child for clueless, vicious, negligence, then we are missing the chance to enhance our language, not to mention improving on: "Oh Shit!" 

Following were my previous efforts: 

“Charles Lewis” (the man convicted of the extortion of Tylenol by claiming to be the poisoner) should be a curse.  We need to be able to name the people who have so incredibly fouled the world we live in.  Their names should replace the meaningless curses we use today.  The “shoe bomber”, "Richard Reid" is the guy that has you hopping around the airport on one foot trying to put your shoe on.  Do you think that the airlines will ever invent something to sit on, like a bench?  So maybe "Airline" should be a curse too.

How about Pope "Urban II"?  Starting the Crusades was a Christian undertaking, right?  Nothing bad ever came of those actions.  Apparently, several Popes have declared themselves to be infallible and most if not all of them have been declared to be wrong (by other infallible Popes)?  It sounds like dueling excommunications (which actually happened when two or three popes between 1378 and 1417 were throwing encyclicals at each other).   If it’s all about completely improvable positions, can it possibly matter?  And was EVERY ONE of the first 35 Popes really all that “Saintly”?  Catholic dogma will all eventually have to be edited.  The Earth's centricity, stillborns in Limbo and twelve kinds of angels; they’ll all have to be changed (and maybe changed back again) if the church lasts long enough.   

We laugh now, thinking of the pinheads that seriously debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.  But, now we have literal believers in Noah’s Ark; kangaroos, anacondas and polar bears, oh my!  And, remember; today we have people debating when JFK is coming back to life; so maybe things aren’t really very different.  After 700 years of ascendancy, do you think the Romans in 408 AD thought that people would ever forget how to pronounce the Latin written word?

Oh! and let's burn some books while we're at it.

Stewart, Cohen and Pratchett "The Science of Disc World"

 

It is almost impossible to communicate any more. 

So, as tempted to apologize as I was… (and I didn’t).  Today I told some JMU senior biology students who were beginning some of their very first field work, exactly what I tell my 5^th graders:  “Write it down.  Write it all down.”  These students, 20 or so of them, were about to wander around on some of my 100 acre scruffy Appalachian forest.  They were being professorially directed to begin a wide open, perhaps, ill defined, (that’s science: asking questions; not necessarily expecting the answers that you want) exercise in field data collection in my woods.  As to whether or not they were well prepared….  I cannot say.  I will say that two young women were unprepared to meet their individual digestive bodily functions without the use of our toilet about a ¼ mile away.    Anyway. 

 

I have told my 5^th graders this.  I told freshmen biology 001 students 40 years ago, and I’ve tried to tell any number of people that I am acquainted with, just what “science” is.  It is observation at the most precise and obsessive level that you can imagine… and it is recording those observations as obsessively as you can imagine… and if it can’t be measured in some way; then you have to be even more obsessive and precise as possible.  So, write it down, write it all down.   You will NOT remember enough otherwise. 

 

 Have you ever read about Charles Darwin’s decade of studying barnacles?  You have no idea of what “obsessive” means.  And sometimes it leads to nothing more than:   “THAT DIDN’T WORK.”   

 

Negative results; It isn’t THIS, but at least I know it isn’t THAT.  

It's the opposite of "God is always right".