Fish for Friday

Andrea Rutigliano in Emptying the Skies

Edited by
Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

I'm forwarding you the link to a NY Times review of a new documentary, "‘Emptying the Skies’ Follows the Rescue of Songbirds at Most Any Cost" [Neil Genzlinger], because it's based on an essay I just read in Jonathan Franzen's book Farther Away: Excerpt:

Two types of people will be tempted to ignore Emptying the Skies, a documentary about bird poaching based on a Jonathan Franzen article [of the same title, in the New Yorker]: people who don’t care about birding, and people who care passionately about birding. Both groups would be missing out on a thoughtful bit of filmmaking, one that at heart is not really about birds at all.
    The film, by Douglas Kass and Roger Kass, introduces us to migrating songbirds that funnel through the Mediterranean, and to people who hunt them illegally in places like Cyprus. The birds are considered a culinary delicacy in some cultures, so they are captured by the thousands as they fly by, snared in nets that are strung up in trees, stuck on branches covered in a gooey substance, crushed under rocks precariously balanced on sticks, and so on....
    For the first 45 minutes or so, you think the anti-poaching guerrillas are insane, risking a hostile reaction from landowners for the sake of freeing a small fraction of the birds being captured. But the film turns when they admit their own limitations.
    “You save thousands of birds,” one says, “but they kill millions.”
    That’s when you realize that Emptying the Skies is about the commitment to living out your beliefs, no matter how quixotic. Their example is stirring somehow, no matter what your passion.

Nanosecond photo:

Madeline was in the fertilized egg business. She had several hundred young "pullets" and ten roosters to fertilize the eggs.
She kept records and any rooster not performing went into the soup pot and was replaced. This took a lot of time, so she bought some tiny bells and attached them to her roosters. Each bell had a different tone, so she could tell from a distance which rooster was performing. Now, she could sit on the porch and fill out an efficiency report by just listening to the bells.
    Madeline’s favorite rooster, old Butch, was a very fine specimen, but this morning she noticed old Butch’s bell hadn't rung at all!
    When she went to investigate, she saw the other roosters were busy chasing pullets, bells-a-ringing, but the pullets hearing the roosters coming, would run for cover. To Madeline’s amazement, old Butch had his bell in his beak, so it couldn’t ring. He’d sneak up on a pullet, do his job, and walk on to the next one.
    Madeline was so proud of old Butch, she entered him in the Dowerin Show and he became an overnight sensation among the judges. The result was the judges not only awarded old Butch the “No Bell Peace Prize”: they also awarded him the “Pulletsurprise" as well.
    Clearly old Butch was a politician in the making. Who else but a politician could figure out how to win two of the most coveted awards on our planet by being the best at sneaking up on the unsuspecting populace and screwing them when they weren’t paying attention?

Pyramid of German helmets Grand Central Terminal 1918

18th of 18 Photos from The Smithsonian’s “Wilderness Forever” Photo Contest:

Sunset Paddle, Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Minnesota

I do hope this has been helpful

Railroad tracks.^{See editor's note below} The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates designed the US railroads.
    Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.
    Why did "they" use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
    Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.
    So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England ) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.
    And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels.
    Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.
    So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder What horse's arse came up with this?, you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses' arses.)
    Now, when you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah.
    The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.
    So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's arse. And you thought being a horse's arse wasn't important? Ancient horse's arses control almost everything – especially in our country....
    [Editor's Note: Snopes.com has a nice discussion of this story, which has been cited many, many times on the Internet. From the Snopes article:]

This item is one that, although wrong in many of its details, isn't completely false in an overall sense and is perhaps more fairly labeled as 'Partly true, but for trivial and unremarkable reasons.' Marveling that the width of modern roadways is similar to the width of ancient roadways is sort of like getting excited over a notion along the lines of 'modern clothes sizes are based upon standards developed by medieval tailors.' Well, duh. Despite obvious differences in style, clothing in the Middle Ages served the same purpose as clothing today (i.e., to cover, protect, and ornament the human body), and modern human beings are very close in size to medieval human beings (we are, on average, a little bit taller and heavier than we were several centuries ago, but not so much), so we naturally expect ancient and modern clothing to be similar in size....
    "Very interesting, educational, historical, completely true, and hysterical"? One out of five, maybe.

Bar in NYC the night before prohibition began 1920

Someone who "knows everything" told me that Snopes.com is not always correct. He said the site is owned and run by a husband and wife team who sometimes have their own agendas. Whether the part about agendas is so or not, it does seem to be a husband and wife team. From Wikipedia:

Snopes.com, also known as the Urban Legends Reference Pages, is a website covering urban legends, Internet rumors, e-mail forwards, and other stories of unknown or questionable origin. It is a well-known resource for validating and debunking such stories in American popular culture, receiving 300,000 visits a day.
    Snopes.com is run by Barbara and David Mikkelson, a California couple who met in the alt.folklore.urban newsgroup. The site is organized by topic and includes a message board where stories and pictures of questionable veracity may be posted....
    Snopes aims to debunk or confirm widely spread urban legends. The site has been referenced by news media and other sites, including CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, and Australia's ABC on its Media Watch program. Snopes' popular standing is such that some chain e-mail hoaxes claim to have been "checked out on 'Snopes.com'" in an attempt to discourage readers from seeking verification. As of March 2009, the site had approximately 6.2 million visitors per month.

Mt Rushmore before sculpting 1920s

Albert Einstein:

• Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
• I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
• In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.
• The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead.

Curfew: The word "curfew" comes from the French phrase "couvre-feu," which means "cover the fire." It was used to describe the time of blowing out all lamps and candles. It was later adopted into Middle English as "curfeu," which later became the modern "curfew." In the early American colonies homes had no real fireplaces so a fire was built in the center of the room. In order to make sure a fire did not get out of control during the night it was required that, by an agreed upon time, all fires would be covered with a clay pot called-a "curfew."

Traffic jam in NY City 1923

Having a bad day?

A project manager, a civil engineer, and a mechanical engineer are in Ft. Lauderdale for a two-week period helping out on a project.
    About midweek they decide to walk up and down the beach during their lunch hour. Halfway up the beach, they stumbled upon a lamp. As they rub the lamp a genie appears and says, "Normally I would grant you three wishes, but since there are three of you, I will grant you each one wish."
    The civil engineer went first. "I would like to spend the rest of my life living in a huge house in St. Thomas with no money worries." The genie granted him his wish and sent him off to St. Thomas.
    The mechanical engineer went next. "I would like to spend the rest of my life living on a huge yacht cruising the Mediterranean with no money worries." The genie granted him his wish and sent him off to the Mediterranean.
    Last, but not least, it was the project manager's turn. "And what would your wish be?" asked the genie.
    "I want them both back after lunch," replied the project manager.

I've been thinking about weather forecasts, the way meteorologists run these computer models of winds, temperatures, etc., etc. (I don't begin to know all that goes into such a model), and the models forecast the weather. I wonder whether a neuroscientist-programmer might create a model for forecasting what an individual human being might do over the next 48 or 72 or 96 hours. The model would access a detailed database describing a particular human's past experiences, behaviors, tendencies, etc. Like the weather, the human psyche is very complex, so the forecast would have to be re-run every day to take into account the particular subject's actual behavior over the preceding 24 hours, in order to factor it in for the next forecast....Surely this is not a new idea, though. There are probably sci-fi stories out there based on such an idea.

Another box you can eat after you eat the chocolates inside [if you have room]:

Limerick of the week:

A swimmer whose clothing got strewed
by breezes that left her quite nude
    saw a man come along,
    and unless we are wrong,
you expected this line to be lewd.

[A favorite limerick in the collection at ExtremelySmart.com]

Copyright © 2015 by Morris Dean