More Fawns

From the trail camera trapline there are more fawns.

Whitetails all over the dang place.

The gift that keeps on giving. 

                                                      Can you spot the twins?

  

Oops From The Oriole Ranch

The orioles are making a liar out of me.  Watching the news last evening I spotted a juvenile on the feeder just outside on the feeder.

The bird cam is still on the porch and two of the three jelly feeders were empty.  Empty feeders do not necessarily imply orioles feed at them as other birds like grape jelly.  Nevertheless, I swapped-out the memory card to check on who's been visiting.

And from yesterday afternoon there was an oriole and a house finch and a solo female oriole. 

 

Brief Economic Briefing

 

Once upon a time you could count on Republicans to stand for lower taxes.  No more.  In case you missed it, last Friday, July 24, President Trump imposed new tariffs of 10% to 12.5% on 60 trading partners covering 99% of U.S. imports.  In a fit of pique, an additional 50% retaliatory tariff singling-out Canada was imposed as well.

Because the cost of these additional trade taxes are paid by consumers, the Yale Budget Lab now estimates that Mr. Trump's tax increase will cost American households an average of $1,100 per year.  That is double what it would have been had the president declined to impose higher taxes replacing the global tariff that expired on Friday.  

Notably, this tax increase wipes-out the $300 - $1,000 increase in average tax refund generated as a result of Trump's Big Beautiful Bill.

Five months into the Iran war the national price of gasoline is around $4 a gallon; so there is that additional household budget item. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed.  The Red Sea's Bab el-Mandeb (Gateway of Tears) is now threatened by the Houthis.  U.S. bases throughout the Gulf States remain vulnerable to attack.  And oil is trading close to $100 a barrel.

Naturally, it should come as no surprise that with the imposition of new and higher tariffs, rising energy costs, Iran war supply chain disruptions; businesses are raising prices.  Which increases the threat of rising inflation pressures. 

In closing this has pushed yields on the 10-year treasury - a major benchmark for setting consumer borrowing costs - above 4.6%.  The bond market looks spooked.  This impacts commercial loans and pushed the 30-year fixed rate mortgage rate to its highest level of the year, a move that could chill the housing market.  Notably, this is higher than where they stood following Mr. Trump's Liberation Day announcement that sent the bond markets into a tailspin. 

Admittedly, updates and briefings are incomplete.  For instance, unemployment for the month of June was 4.2%, ticking down from 4.3% in May.  According to the US Bureau of Labor statistics total unemployed persons stood at roughly 7.09 million, reflecting a stable labor market.  

Watch the Fed today. 

Final Update From The Oriole Ranch

I’ve been checking the bird cam on the porch and for the last several days I haven’t gotten an oriole photo. 

 

Neither of us has spotted any in the yard. 

 

I’ll keep the camera out for a while longer just to be sure; but if my diary is to be believed the orioles have departed. They’re winging their way south already for their wintering grounds in Mexico, Central and South America. 

 

One of the last photos was July 23

 

 

They arrived May 7 and left, on or about, July 25. 

 

Last to arrive - first to depart. 

 

Anecdotally, 2026 has been a bumper year for house finches and Monarch butterflies….

 

 

July Night Sky

2023 Full Buck Moon

The names associated with our full moons are frequently derived from the names given by the indigenous peoples that inhabited North America.  The tribes used a calendar to track the seasons by means of the names given to the return of a full moon.    

In the northern hemisphere the full moon that greets us today is called the Buck Moon in recognition of the rapidly-growing, velvet-covered, antlers of the whitetail deer.  It will appear at its fullest tonight and tomorrow night.  Look for it to rise in the east after sunset; highest at midnight and setting in the west at dawn.

With the arrival of European settlers two additional monikers come to mind:  the Meade Moon which coincides the harvest of honey used to ferment this drink and the Hay Moon as the first cuttings of cattle fodder occur.  

Makes My Teeth Ache

This is an interesting bit of breakfast cereal lore that dates back to the mid 1960s.  Post Sugar Sparkled Rice Krinkles and their animated mascot, an Asian boy named So-Hi (because he was ''so high").  I missed-out on this opportunity as this cereal wasn't part of our household line-up; nevertheless, each box included the So-Hi Rickshaw Racer.

For the time it was rather nifty; including easy-to-assemble parts featuring a tiny figure of So-Hi pulling a two-wheeled rickshaw.  The kit included some string and a small plastic bucket which functioned as a counterweight.  Tie the string to the rickshaw, put a coin in the bucket, hook it over the edge of the kitchen table and let the weight drop.  The falling weight would cause So-Hi and his rickshaw to zip across the table at high speed.  Fun stuff and you were always one box away from a replacement once it broke.

At the time Madison Avenue didn't have any of today's qualms about cultural tropes like gongs, a broken-English accent, conical hats or rickshaws. So-Hi was intended to be a fun and lighthearted replacement for an unsettling clown mascot dating back to the 1950s; he even had a role as a regular character on Linus the Lionhearted, a Saturday morning cartoon show funded entirely by General Foods (Post) where the characters were literally cereal mascots.

Naturally, this era used cultural characters to foster instant identity.  Frito Lay had the Frito Bandito, Pillsbury used Funny Face drink mixes with flavors like Injun Orange and Chinese Cherry.  Post had So-Hi.

Post eventually retired So-Hi realizing that Rice Krinkles didn't need the baggage of a clown that creeped-out children or a mascot becoming a textbook example of racial stereotyping.  In 1971 they repurposed their puffed-rice operation and launched a licensed and inoffensive mascot; Fruity Pebbles.  Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble became pitchmen for sugary children's breakfast cereal.

 Now you know the rest of the story. 

Is It Real, Or Is It Memorex?

This was a popular advertising slogan from the 1970s for cassette recording tapes that Millennials are unlikely to identify-with as they're not going to recognize the marketing campaign.  Nevertheless, if you are a baby boomer you already know that the Memorex brand audio recording tapes claimed to offer such an authentic playback experience that the listener would not be able to differentiate a live performance from an audio recording. 

I still have a soft-sided case of Memorex mix tapes in my pick-up truck that are the industry's contribution to bootleg music recordings.  But I digress.

I'm sharing this anecdote as further evidence that nowadays you cannot expect that everything you see on the interweb or social media is real.  It may very well be an AI fake.

For instance this advertisement for the Spacematic Food Spinner 2000, boldly marketed by the Spacematic Corporation as The Futuristic Food Preparation Center for Today's Space Age Family!   According to the ad it is an all-in-one tabletop unit that can spin, mix, blend, heat and serve an entire meal visualized thru a See-Through Dome.  It comes equipped with a One-Touch Control Panel and a Revolutionary Gyro-Mix Feature that cooks food evenly in individual wedges.  All of this George Jetson Family space-age technology is yours for only $19.95 (plus tax).

Pretty cool, eh?

Nope.  It's all made-up.  It never existed.

This is a clever piece of AI-generated art that perfectly captures the atomic-age aesthetic of the late 1950s or early 1960s.

How to tell?  

The text lacks any specific details ordinarily included in a vintage Sears or Montgomery Ward advertisement. The capsule structure behind the tidy nuclear family looks like a spaceship instead of a suburban kitchen.  The food in the spinner is indistinct and doesn't include any jello.  Finally there's the RetroFuture Vault watermark in the bottom right corner.

It's certainly entertaining; but you won't find one on EBay....