soapbox

Intro story: we’ve been doing a good bit of Craigslisting the past couple weeks, and interestingly enough the best acquisitions have been free: flower pots, an analog multimeter (with working 9-volt battery!), and a hummingbird feeder. The flower pots have so far been not fully realized, with just a small basil plant planted, but the multimeter allowed me to fix a lamp (that we had previously acquired FOR FREE), and the hummingbird feeder has been very successful.

We cleaned, filled, and set up the feeder yesterday afternoon, and by the evening we’d seen four different hummers! A couple females, one male which we have come to nickname “fatty”, and another smaller male, maybe of a different species. I think we’ve seen Calypte Anna (Anna’s Hummingbird), and also a Broadtail?

Which brings us to this post’s headline: I was using a crappy little digital with minimal manual features, plus the hummingbirds are skittish about big moving creatures inside the apartment so I had to be careful. B/c I’m shooting into the sky, both photos are backlit, and the females flew off before I could move the screen door out of the way (thus, the camera autofocused on the screen and not the birds.)

In case you haven’t seen this article, it’s kind of interesting. Some people thought a meteor landed near their village and large scale sickness and nausea resulted.

The really lovely thing though is one of the quotes where U. Chicago geophysicist Larry Grossman says “”Sometimes these things land hundreds of thousands of miles away from where [people] think they will land.”

Given that the circumference of the Earth is only a few tens of thousands of miles, I’m wondering where all these things are landing. Then again, maybe the reporter confused “of” with “or”.

Scientists Doubt Meteorite Sickened Peruvians

Online, it’s all too common to see “you’re” and “your” switched or the various their/there/they’re permutated in unholy ways. Why don’t you see people talking about naval piercings though? That seems like it should be a very easy mistake.