Making the Hurdle

My pop was born on February 29 making him a leap year baby.  As a consequence he only had a birthday every four years.  The inside family joke was that he didn’t technically attain adulthood until 80 years of age.  In any event – what’s the story behind this calendar oddity?  Why an extra day every four years – and why February? 

We happen to owe this to the Egyptian civilization that was among the first to conclude that the calendar year and solar years did not completely mesh.   That is because it takes the earth slightly more than 365 days to circumnavigate the sun.  365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds, to be exact.  If you neglected this circumstance for 100 years our calendar would be off by roughly 24 days.  The answer to this was to periodically add an extra day to solve this conundrum. 

It was the Romans that first designated February 29 as leap day – but the 16^th century Gregorian calendar came up with a more precise solution.  This identified February 29^th at leap day only in those years divisible by four – 2020, 2024, etc. 

The solution persists to modern time. 

Sunset

click on images for a closer look

As the day's grow longer the sun is setting further to the west.  
 
Tonite's sunset sort of snuck-up on me.

Started at 5:25 PM

And got better by 5:48 PM....

 

Friday Music

After a three year hiatus from the blog this Australian quartet has returned.   

They arrived on the musical scene in 1962 when folk music as a genre was near its apex.  They were also the very first group from the ‘Land Down Under’ to achieve major successes in both the charts and record sales both here and in the UK.   

The Seekers achieved their fame with Judith Durham on (vocals), Athol Guy (double bass and vocals); Keith Potger (twelve-string guitar, banjo, and vocals) and Bruce Woodley (guitar, mandolin, banjo, and vocals).  

This was recorded in 1967 and 53 years later this song still has more soul and persistence than most of what passes for music nowadays.  Of course, I'm an old guy.  Now get off of my lawn!

Here they are live, in-studio, with their first hit…

Tweet of the Absurd

In the interest of full disclosure and fair play I would point out that Vice President Pence not only lacks any sort of medical or infectious disease background plus his public health record is a wee bit sketchy.  

Including denying that smoking kills - Time for a quick reality check, despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn't kill.  

Condoms do nothing to prevent the spread of sexually-transmitted disease - Condoms are a very, very poor protection against sexually transmitted disease.      

And as governor of Indiana he opposed a clean-needle exchange program amid an AIDS breakout among drug users resulting in hundreds upon hundreds of IV drug users to contract HIV.        

A science denier who claimed smoking didn’t cause cancer, who abhors the use of condoms to slow the spread of disease and enabled a HIV outbreak with his stance against needles – now the Coronavirus Czar!   Other than that he's a likeable-enough guy.

If this COVID 19 (coronavirus) shit wasn't so serious this would be hilarious. 

Stay tuned.....

Report From Deer Country

Ahem (clearing throat).

It is time to submit the annual winter update on the health and happiness of the local whitetail population.

click on the images for a closer look

Most every evening at dusk brings the materialization of anywhere from eight to a couple dozen deer only a few hundred yards north of the house browsing down at the big pond adjacent to Silver Creek.  Ordinarily we don’t see deer gathering in numbers like this.  However, this is farm country and when the crops are off the fields the deer become concentrated in the natural cover for the duration of winter and until green-up in the spring - at which point they begin to disperse.  The annual fawn drop follows shortly thereafter.

You might conclude that a couple of dozen whitetails might make for a tempting target.  Sure, we have the local coyotes but they’re not much match for an adult deer.  We have few if any ‘apex predators’ around here.  While not unheard-of, wolves and black bear are infrequent to rare on the peninsula - and certainly not in sufficient numbers to be regularly problematic.  You don’t hear about a wolf pack taking-out someone’s herd of alpacas or dairy calves.  As a consequence we have a larger than normal deer population.

I share the opinion of people that know more about this than I do that deer numbers remain too high around here.  Don’t take my word for it – you need look no further than the browse lines on the trees for evidence.  Regeneration of new trees in the forest understory suffers too.  Regrowth of cedar is nonexistent.  Such is the result of shoving-aside simple science and biology and allowing politicians with an axe to grind to make one-size, fits-all, deer management decisions.  Bar stool biologists they are.  Sigh.

On the other hand deer hunting is rather spectacular and everyone has a good time, our freezers are filled and the food pantry network benefits on a grand scale.  From my stool I would say to harvest more does and let the little bucks walk – but that’s just one man’s opinion.  I digress.

Back to the state of the local deer herd and their health and happiness.  I am pleased to report that through February - and by all outward appearances - the local whitetails are looking both fat and sassy.

For you city dwellers concerned about your people-habituated deer this winter I would advance the notion that they are likely doing equally well and in many cases better than their wild brethren.  If you live in an urban setting or within the urban-rural interface there is far more deer-friendly edge habitat and an abundance of yummy landscaping for their dining pleasure.  Better yet – many homeowners will grumble in the spring about the deer browsing their hydrangeas and will promptly plant replacements in the buffet line.

In closing I would point out that the days continue to grow longer and the sun is setting further to the west.  Spring turkey hunting is on-deck.

Sunrise

 

Big dog woke me up for this. 

Yup, the sun rose again today.  I take a measure of inspiration from the predictability of simple stuff like this and remain encouraged. 

8  F at 6:48 AM. Froze my tuckus to take the photo in my PJs.

Nice day on tap....

Noteable Quoteable

It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump.  Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus.... Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.  

 – Rush Limbaugh

Sunrise

click on the sunrise for a closer look

Sunrise from the hinterlands. A perfectly tropical 25 F at 6:43 AM.

That celestial body (upper and center-right) is Vega. 

The ‘double’ sunrise is either a consequence of light refraction low in the horizon or the eccentric orbit of Mercury positioned so closely to the sun. 

Looks like a nice day shaping-up.....

Delving Into the Divide

At an LGBT campaign fundraising event in New York City back in 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton had this to say:      

I know there are only 60 days left to make our case – and don't get complacent; don't see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think, ‘Well, he's done this time.’ We are living in a volatile political environment.        

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.    Right?  They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic – Islamophobic – you name it.  And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric.  Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.     

But the ‘other’ basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here:  I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that ‘other’ basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they're just desperate for change.  It doesn't really even matter where it comes from.  They don't buy everything he says, but — he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different.  They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.   

 -September 9, 2016         

That sure seems like another million years ago, eh?  However crudely Clinton stumbled into this – Donald Trump picked it up and ran with it.  All the way to the Whitehouse.  

I may despise Donald Trump (the person) but I absolutely get how his base feels.  Yeah, I get it.  It is real.  The more I read those words the more unsettled even I can get.  My neighbors are Americans.  While we may not agree on each and every last of the few differences we might have they are my countrymen.  Parsing them into ‘baskets’ and calling them ‘deplorable’ is wrong.   

Words have consequences, eh?