Very Swirly - if you see a National Park Ranger with green hair - well let’s just say I might have a kinda good idea where Smokey the Bear lives - this summer it’s on an island -
In 1976, for 8 months, I was a park technician at the Washington Monument. For some reason, living quite close ( via Metro), I have never gone up in the Monument again despite being on the National Mall many times
Obama really invested in strengthening the NPS. I am sure they have a very well trained social media marketing team that does a variety of posting. I get their "beautiful animal" post in my IG feed.
That is one of THE most entrancing, mesmerizing images of the northern lights I've ever seen. With all of the trees and mountains in my region of the nation the opportunity to see this celestial light show just isn't available.
These guys are as much a national treasure as the parks themselves. I once stopped in at the park rangers office somewhere in the Rockies to get some advice on taking a hike. The fellow told me if you go here you can see such-and-such, and if you go there you get a nice view of some other thing. The fellow was blind.
Love forest service peeps. My undergrad focused mostly on Pre- Health proffession of Wildlife management for a biology degree. Wildlife peeps were my fav peeps to hang around. Esp in CA they also have an AWESOME park service and amazing rangers too. We are into biology cuz we LOVE and are curious about life. We love to share our love too (see 'Clint's Reptiles' dude on youtube, dude has a soul like mine). We just don't often have the same taboos as most and that can put those who crave control, off. We like nature in it's wild and wriggling full form.
Our love of sharing can cause us also to talk too much too, see above. lol
Watched 'All the Light We Cannot See' (based on a true story) this weekend and was truly awestruck, highly recommend, very inspiring on multiple levels.
I love the folks at The National Park Service, too. I did once see a Mississippi State Park ranger, in full uniform, wearing white patent leather loafers with gold colored buckles, feeding ducks.
The shoes seemed both incongruous and unsurprising at the same time. The ducks did not mind.
When I was growing up, my maternal grandparents lived just a couple of blocks from what's officially known as Fountain City Lake, but everybody in Knoxville calls "The Duck Pond". Sometimes, when we visited Granny and Pappy, we'd take some bread and feed the ducks. Those are some of my favorite childhood memories.
Now, there's one downside to that -- when I was home at Christmas, I went to the duck pond, which now has signs pointing out that bread kills ducks. (They also have "gumball"-style vending machines where you can buy a handful of duck food for a quarter.)
I researched that some, and it's not directly true that bread kills them. But...
1) They fill up on bread, which has little nutritional value to ducks.
2) Ducks that are regularly fed bread by humans lose their natural instincts to find their own food.
I learned early on, after 7 or so, that bread is bad for ducks if it is too common. They are better off getting fats from newly-hatched minnows or whatever, but a 7 year old wants to feed ducks!
You are right about duck ponds though, bread swells and has little nutritional value. No fat, like I said, so those feed machines are actually a good thing. in that environment. If you go to real duck ponds, you will mostly see a mother and ducklings feeding at night and doing the diving for real food.
One time, recently, in April, it got very cold and I noticed a pair of mating geese (The smaller ones, not the ones that will tear your brains out- see my other posts about those) But they were huddled in a parking lot looking for any kind of detritus from trucks or whatever, and I while they didn't trust me, I balled up a hotdog bun I just bought and threw the pieces their way. They eventually got to eat something as I walked away and I think it really helped. It's a thing I remember.
I once watched a flock of geese walking down the road, at a VERY leisurely pace, blocking both sides of the road for all traffic. I needed to cross the street, so I cut through the middle of the flock to get to my car. An older black man yelled at me "Lady, you are BRAVE!!!!!!!!"
They probably made jokes all day long to themselves about "why does the human cross the road?" and also made bitchy comments about my shoes.
The Canadians call them "snapping cobra chickens" I believe?
I've encountered them in the wild, the big ones that don't even mess with humans, don't even pretend to want to be around humans, and they are huge and you stay 10 meters away from them.
I've encountered a black bear and I knew to stand my ground so it would eventually walk away. I've been more afraid of what seemed like a 5-foot tall goose that looked at me menacingly from a long ways away, because I stumbled upon her wetland. I backed away.
That sounds like the start of a joke, but if there are eggs or babies around, they get nasty fast. I called them "mini-emus" but emus have claws that can gut you. Ducks just have deceptively strong beaks.
A duck wandered through our yard yesterday and appeared to be scouting for a nest site. I told her about the neighborhood cats and she waddled away. That was my moment of zen
Seriously, feral and domesticated cats are seriously depopulating local and national bird populations. It is having seriously adverse, direct effects. DON'T FEED WILD HOUSE CATS
Remember when Los Lobos came out and they said they should have got most of the writing credits on Graceland? I'd link to the interview but it's lost on the interwebs.
If you have never seen Carrie Fisher’s one woman show “Wishful Drinking” there is a cultural deficit. I believe it lives on Amazon. I loved it so much I bought the digital copy. Others may have seen it on stage, but she can’t do that any more. Child of Hollywood royalty et al.
So Mr Demi and I both took an online Autism Spectrum Quotient. One of us scored a 12/50, the other scored a 42/50, and neither of us are surprised, lol.
I take it you haven't seen/heard Wishful Drinking, much of which is about Fisher's childhood. Her (actor) dad left her (actor and singer) mom for *Liz Taylor*. Now there's a properly fucked up Hollywood childhood.
WRT the Solar here in CA. Apparently being not dependent on PG&E pisses them off so whether you use their services or your own, they want to charge you at least a monthly fee of $25. Also any solar that is over your usage goes to their grid. Our power is costly. For some reason the electricity at our house has gone up tremendously and we do not use AC, have a wood burning stove and a gas stove/oven. It’s crazy. Used to be around $20/mo and now it’s up to $60 and we’re not there for weeks.
I have solar in California. I'm grid-tied with LADWP, even though I live 240 miles from Los Angeles. They may be evil (they are evil) but they only charge me $10 a month for the net meter. I have almost $1800 worth of electricity banked, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how to "spend" it. There's one or two months every year that I don't make as much juice as I use--always December and sometimes January. They charge me for my overage rather than deduct it from my bank.
That said, I never expected it to pay off in my lifetime. The fast-rising price per Kwh is accelerating my payoff quickly.
I saw Carrie Fisher live when she was doing her "Wishful Drinking" tour. She just talked about her life and stuff but she is so funny. She said people asked her about being married to Paul Simon and she said "I was??" in a way that let you know she did not want to talk about it and the memories were not pleasant. So hmmmm.
As a latchkey kid, I really itch at the amount of helicopter parenting we seem to be expected to do. It's only been 9 months since the police brought eldest home from the park around the corner. He's 10. At ten I was responsible for not only me but also my 8yo sister until Mom could get home from work.
"California, you’re killing me. I love you. I don’t miss you though, nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded."
We're working on that. We've already taken out Big Sur and all the ferries to Sausalito. Once we close Yosemite to the public, we're going to Disneyland.
Homeboys is a short walk from Union Station in LA, well worth a visit for breakfast! Also too the pop of our deprecated state is now increasing again, according to the By God LA Times.
Oh hey, I’m dropping by with your source info, from our darlings at the National Park Service: https://open.substack.com/pub/martiniambassador/p/the-magnificent-aurora-borealis-over
Hey Glamour lady!
Have you seen this? Spark any ideas?
Merlin Recargado on X: "Coreografía de drones https://t.co/mdZPPgXnzR" / X
https://twitter.com/RecargadoMerlin/status/1758549722761928908
Incredible! I can't imagine how long it would take to program this spectacle!
🤩
Eclipse-covering local news idiots might call this TABS an "interstellar event"
I have no words for how ignorant that is. It is right up there with "post-birth abortion"
And thanks for that becoming right-wing dogma, Donnie.
Very Swirly - if you see a National Park Ranger with green hair - well let’s just say I might have a kinda good idea where Smokey the Bear lives - this summer it’s on an island -
Have a lovely park ranger schooling the kids on how to get down:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKNhCjA0pdU
If this doesn't make you smile, you are a canned clam eating monster!
It didn't just make me smile, I giggled!
They all seem to be having so much fun! I love the ending so much.
I’ll share this here from when Mr S was in Alaska. I’m so jelly. Except the cold and snow. It was winter and very cold.
https://substack.com/@tootsstansbury/note/c-52460218
Gorgeous!
NPS is also very funny and clever and fluent on their social media, which makes me think they’ve put some millennial or gen-z rangers in charge of it.
In 1976, for 8 months, I was a park technician at the Washington Monument. For some reason, living quite close ( via Metro), I have never gone up in the Monument again despite being on the National Mall many times
Obama really invested in strengthening the NPS. I am sure they have a very well trained social media marketing team that does a variety of posting. I get their "beautiful animal" post in my IG feed.
That is one of THE most entrancing, mesmerizing images of the northern lights I've ever seen. With all of the trees and mountains in my region of the nation the opportunity to see this celestial light show just isn't available.
These guys are as much a national treasure as the parks themselves. I once stopped in at the park rangers office somewhere in the Rockies to get some advice on taking a hike. The fellow told me if you go here you can see such-and-such, and if you go there you get a nice view of some other thing. The fellow was blind.
Love forest service peeps. My undergrad focused mostly on Pre- Health proffession of Wildlife management for a biology degree. Wildlife peeps were my fav peeps to hang around. Esp in CA they also have an AWESOME park service and amazing rangers too. We are into biology cuz we LOVE and are curious about life. We love to share our love too (see 'Clint's Reptiles' dude on youtube, dude has a soul like mine). We just don't often have the same taboos as most and that can put those who crave control, off. We like nature in it's wild and wriggling full form.
Our love of sharing can cause us also to talk too much too, see above. lol
Watched 'All the Light We Cannot See' (based on a true story) this weekend and was truly awestruck, highly recommend, very inspiring on multiple levels.
I love the folks at The National Park Service, too. I did once see a Mississippi State Park ranger, in full uniform, wearing white patent leather loafers with gold colored buckles, feeding ducks.
The shoes seemed both incongruous and unsurprising at the same time. The ducks did not mind.
Oh ...nice gif.
White patent leather shoes with gold buckles? Are you saying he was Herb Tarleck from WKRP?
It actually was during that era.
Heh!
Ducks pay no mind. Unless you really fuck with them and they just become mini-emus.
Ducks are some of my favorite animals.
When I was growing up, my maternal grandparents lived just a couple of blocks from what's officially known as Fountain City Lake, but everybody in Knoxville calls "The Duck Pond". Sometimes, when we visited Granny and Pappy, we'd take some bread and feed the ducks. Those are some of my favorite childhood memories.
Now, there's one downside to that -- when I was home at Christmas, I went to the duck pond, which now has signs pointing out that bread kills ducks. (They also have "gumball"-style vending machines where you can buy a handful of duck food for a quarter.)
I researched that some, and it's not directly true that bread kills them. But...
1) They fill up on bread, which has little nutritional value to ducks.
2) Ducks that are regularly fed bread by humans lose their natural instincts to find their own food.
The Annals of Improbable Research website has much to tell us about ducks. Here's a good place to start: https://improbable.com/2018/08/24/savoring-some-salacious-scientific-discoveries-ducks/. There's also a post where a scientist who is known for his research on ducks talks about feeding them bread: https://improbable.com/2022/04/09/prize-winning-duck-biologist-quacks-at-rotterdam-ban-on-feeding-bread-to-ducks/.
I learned early on, after 7 or so, that bread is bad for ducks if it is too common. They are better off getting fats from newly-hatched minnows or whatever, but a 7 year old wants to feed ducks!
You are right about duck ponds though, bread swells and has little nutritional value. No fat, like I said, so those feed machines are actually a good thing. in that environment. If you go to real duck ponds, you will mostly see a mother and ducklings feeding at night and doing the diving for real food.
One time, recently, in April, it got very cold and I noticed a pair of mating geese (The smaller ones, not the ones that will tear your brains out- see my other posts about those) But they were huddled in a parking lot looking for any kind of detritus from trucks or whatever, and I while they didn't trust me, I balled up a hotdog bun I just bought and threw the pieces their way. They eventually got to eat something as I walked away and I think it really helped. It's a thing I remember.
Drove past the pond yesterday. Harold and Maude seemed to be confronting a pair of mallards who would soon be disturbing their peace.
🎶 Be kind to your web footed friends cause a duck may be somebody’s mother 🎶
At our city's poncey park with a pond it's the GEESE who are the particularly antisocial bastards.
Geese are ill tempered boids.
I once watched a flock of geese walking down the road, at a VERY leisurely pace, blocking both sides of the road for all traffic. I needed to cross the street, so I cut through the middle of the flock to get to my car. An older black man yelled at me "Lady, you are BRAVE!!!!!!!!"
They probably made jokes all day long to themselves about "why does the human cross the road?" and also made bitchy comments about my shoes.
I would've observed your ambulation through that flock with similar bemused awe. You're a helluva lot braver than I am!
Yeah, but they thought of all the really snappy stuff after you'd gone.
Particularly right now when they are about to start their annual parades of single file goslings!
I give the parental geese units and their tiny fluff balls of pure SQUEEE a wide berth when I encounter them on my walks.
I would love to get closer.
But I definitely know better than to do that.
There's a reason ancient Rome had them guarding the walls
Romans knew shit...
And built the sewers to prove it!
A fierce flock of geese is ALL too well suited for such duty.
The Canadians call them "snapping cobra chickens" I believe?
I've encountered them in the wild, the big ones that don't even mess with humans, don't even pretend to want to be around humans, and they are huge and you stay 10 meters away from them.
I’ve seen a mama swan chase off a full grown bull moose that got too close to the nest, they are all dinosaurs 🦖
I've encountered a black bear and I knew to stand my ground so it would eventually walk away. I've been more afraid of what seemed like a 5-foot tall goose that looked at me menacingly from a long ways away, because I stumbled upon her wetland. I backed away.
Turkeys are also huge and have big clawed feet.
A Dück once bit my sister.
Rilly?
That sounds like the start of a joke, but if there are eggs or babies around, they get nasty fast. I called them "mini-emus" but emus have claws that can gut you. Ducks just have deceptively strong beaks.
There were three in back of my house yesterday. I did not ducks with them.
Darn auto correct.*
*It did it again
But isn't "autocorrect" one word ?
It didn't correct that, so it doesn't know either.
It's this damn site. It autocorrects the dumbest things.
I taught my phone my preferred term, automangle.
A duck wandered through our yard yesterday and appeared to be scouting for a nest site. I told her about the neighborhood cats and she waddled away. That was my moment of zen
“I find that a duck’s opinion of me is very much influenced over whether or not I have bread.”
― Mitch Hedberg
Mitch was so funny.
I tend to do the "You can quote me on that, but put a dash there so they know it was me" thing a lot here.
Seriously, feral and domesticated cats are seriously depopulating local and national bird populations. It is having seriously adverse, direct effects. DON'T FEED WILD HOUSE CATS
(waves) Love the gif! How are you?
Im great and I’m on vacation this week! But I still wanted to get to putting up the sources when I can 😁
How are you?
I’m doing alright! Just busy with work, ugh. It’s been hectic around here. Enjoy your vacation, I’m jealous! ☺️
Aurora Borealis!? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within TABS!?
That is a reference I (edit) just got and I love you for it!
Their Instagram is so much fun!
Areola Borealis!
Pocahontas and me.
Areolae Uber Alles!
I see what you tit there.
To Drunk To Suck!
Oh, there you are! This is why we will never live on the moon. 14 straight days of TABS is too much.
Science joke and solar radiation joke and humans as a species cannot stand either for too long.
Well, if we went to live on the moon, we'd no doubt spend most of our time safe from solar radiation, toiling in the underground sugar caves.
Cheese mines, silly!
Remember when Los Lobos came out and they said they should have got most of the writing credits on Graceland? I'd link to the interview but it's lost on the interwebs.
If you have never seen Carrie Fisher’s one woman show “Wishful Drinking” there is a cultural deficit. I believe it lives on Amazon. I loved it so much I bought the digital copy. Others may have seen it on stage, but she can’t do that any more. Child of Hollywood royalty et al.
So Mr Demi and I both took an online Autism Spectrum Quotient. One of us scored a 12/50, the other scored a 42/50, and neither of us are surprised, lol.
4 years ago tomorrow
https://substack.com/profile/192824619-zorpern/note/c-54553088
I take it you haven't seen/heard Wishful Drinking, much of which is about Fisher's childhood. Her (actor) dad left her (actor and singer) mom for *Liz Taylor*. Now there's a properly fucked up Hollywood childhood.
I have, but it was at least 20 years ago!
WRT the Solar here in CA. Apparently being not dependent on PG&E pisses them off so whether you use their services or your own, they want to charge you at least a monthly fee of $25. Also any solar that is over your usage goes to their grid. Our power is costly. For some reason the electricity at our house has gone up tremendously and we do not use AC, have a wood burning stove and a gas stove/oven. It’s crazy. Used to be around $20/mo and now it’s up to $60 and we’re not there for weeks.
I have solar in California. I'm grid-tied with LADWP, even though I live 240 miles from Los Angeles. They may be evil (they are evil) but they only charge me $10 a month for the net meter. I have almost $1800 worth of electricity banked, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how to "spend" it. There's one or two months every year that I don't make as much juice as I use--always December and sometimes January. They charge me for my overage rather than deduct it from my bank.
That said, I never expected it to pay off in my lifetime. The fast-rising price per Kwh is accelerating my payoff quickly.
I saw Carrie Fisher live when she was doing her "Wishful Drinking" tour. She just talked about her life and stuff but she is so funny. She said people asked her about being married to Paul Simon and she said "I was??" in a way that let you know she did not want to talk about it and the memories were not pleasant. So hmmmm.
Trix: L.A. Times linky worked for me. I'm using a phone running Android, no anonymizing measures, if that helps y'all understand any problems.
Huh.
𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐨𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐚 𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐢𝐧 ‘𝐟𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐲’ 𝐛𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐡 𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐡 𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐬?
Boston College professor Peter Gray says screen time is less of a problem than people think.
As a latchkey kid, I really itch at the amount of helicopter parenting we seem to be expected to do. It's only been 9 months since the police brought eldest home from the park around the corner. He's 10. At ten I was responsible for not only me but also my 8yo sister until Mom could get home from work.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/04/22/metro/depression-teens-social-media-free-play-childhood/
"California, you’re killing me. I love you. I don’t miss you though, nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded."
We're working on that. We've already taken out Big Sur and all the ferries to Sausalito. Once we close Yosemite to the public, we're going to Disneyland.
Thank the gods for Homeboy Industries - a refuge for beleaguered youth, not to mention source of the best Christmas gifts in Los Angeles.
Paul Simon is a jive motherfucker
Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians self-titled album and Ghost of a Dog are totally awesome! I was crushed when she married Paul Simon though.
WRT Carrie Fisher, her show "Wishful Drinking" on Max was great.
Homeboys is a short walk from Union Station in LA, well worth a visit for breakfast! Also too the pop of our deprecated state is now increasing again, according to the By God LA Times.