Two songs I heard tonight on the Big Mo Blues Show on KCCK 88.3 radio out of Cedar Rapids & Iowa City, and I can’t pick the best one. One is new, by John Primer, “Hard Times,” out in 2022 and speaks to how hard times are right now.
The other is old, by B.B. King, from 1971 and speaks to how hard times could be back then.
Things did not go according to plan last night with the critter cam. It took zero pictures. What gives? I’m sure I had the timer settings right. It’s a 24-hr. military time clock and it was set for 1930 to 0730 starting yesterday evening. The grate was undisturbed and maybe that’s the explanation.
Could there be a problem with taking night time pictures? I checked a web site about that, “Trail Camera Not Taking Night Photos? 7 Things to check.” As far as I can tell from the list, there is nothing seriously amiss.
The area of interest is well within our camera’s 65-foot detection range. I suppose the problem might be the alkaline batteries, but it took pictures in dim light of me just fine. The memory card is brand new, formatted and I deleted any test pictures I took so there was plenty of storage. The camera is rated to 13 degrees below zero and it didn’t get close to that last night. It’s not shooting black pictures—it’s taking no pictures.
I could be wrong, of course, but I don’t think it had anything to do with night time. It took pictures of me in dim light and daylight just fine. The camera was pointed in the right direction according to the daylight test shot I took this morning.
No pictures might just mean no action. That doesn’t mean unusual things can’t happen. I ran across a headline today on the web, “Mountain Lion sighting in South Central Iowa.” The animal was filmed in Madison County, which is not far southwest of Des Moines.
Anyhow, I got an idea about a different approach today. I think I figured out how to mount the camera on the stand with base included in the box. Feel free to point out any mistakes I made putting it together. The manual didn’t include instructions on how to assemble it. I also could not find any YouTube or other internet guidance. It’s like nobody else thought it was important enough to tell newbies how to do basic things with trail camera field mounting.
I know the stand is supposed to be secured to something with screws, but I couldn’t find a suitable place to install the tiny wood screws with funny looking plastic sleeves.
Instead, I placed the camera with the stand along with a couple of heavy rocks on the base on a patio block. I took some test pictures, which looked OK. You can tell which pictures are which by the time stamp. The post mounting shot was at 9:46 AM; the stand on the block picture was at 11:23 AM. I think the latter would be as secure as the post mount.
There were either no trigger events or there was a malfunction. I doubt it was the latter, but I’m not the handyman or modern age Daniel Boone kind of guy.
For now, my new plan is to use the critter cam stand and rocks setup and try again, maybe tonight. I can just hear people groaning, “Rocks, are you joking? Extraterrestrials will just blast them with their ray guns!”
I would like to try video, but for now I want to just make sure it’ll take photos as programmed.
We’re trying to catch a glimpse of whatever or whoever has been removing one of our tile drain grates in our back yard for the last few weeks. It happens only at night. We bought a critter cam and it’ll go live tonight!
Today I ran the critter cam through a few tests to see if it would work in the dark. I set it up on a footstool, turned it on and clowned around in a dimly lit hallway. It wasn’t completely dark, and it seemed like I had to dance a fair amount to trigger the Passive Infrared Sensors (PIRs)—but it worked! Check the slideshow below.
I have no experience with these things and I don’t know whether the PIR Sensitivity might be set too high because we’re in autumn and the leaves are falling. It makes me wonder if the camera will trigger too much, making the image yield low. But there’s only 3 settings: high, medium, and low. Because I want to make sure I catch whatever is messing with our drain grate, I plan to leave the setting on High.
Sena and I mounted the camera on the nearest post supporting the sun room. She clowned around while standing next to the drain tile grate and it triggered and got her picture. We hope the rigging holds. I’ve set it to come on at sunset tonight and turn off at sunup tomorrow. It’s set to take photos, not videos for now.
It’s chilly out there; only 49 degrees. I don’t know how that’ll influence Bigfoot activity out there tonight.
I removed the rocks but left the worm gear clamp attached. Keep your fingers crossed!
University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics has announced a list of myths about the flu which are debunked. Don’t forget your flu shot!
We finally played our Zombie Cribbage game in honor of upcoming Halloween this month. We filmed it on an interesting sort of high-top table with just enough room on it for the board and playing cards.
Zombie Cribbage is played on a on a 61-hole cribbage board, replete with images of creepy bony fingers poking out from under a manhole cover and a chainsaw to battle zombies. The game naturally plays a little faster than the usual 121-hole board.
The face cards and two jokers are decorated with grisly zombies. The pegs are tiny but equally grisly.
The background Halloween images are free from Pixabay.
I was in my usual form—making miscounts and the like, yet incredibly I won the game. We didn’t try to make a video without errors. That’s impossible because my brain is pretty much bran. I did omit the part where I almost knocked over the camera tripod.
The critter cam was delivered and I’ll need to get some batteries and a micro-SD card for it. I’ll also need to learn how to mount it to one of the posts supporting our sun room.
The rough distance from the camera to the drain grate is about 40 feet, so it should be well within the camera’s range.
We plan to remove the rocks, but leave the worm gear adjustable clamp on the grate. There hasn’t been any new disturbance since my last post about it. The rock is still on top of the grate.
I’ll test the camera first just to make sure I’ve got it set up correctly, which could be a challenge for me since I’ve never done anything like this before.
We’re going to try our best to catch whatever has been messing with our drain grate. Wish us luck!
Update: I just formatted and installed the micro SD card, the 4 AA batteries, set the clock to the correct time, and quickly ran through the functions. It seems to work fine in Test Mode. It’s a little late now, so we plan to set it up for tomorrow!
We tried The Daily Crave Spicy Sriracha Lentil Chips and they’re pretty good. Extraterrestrials like the snacks and are apparently interested in cutting a deal with Jared Edy, who I think owns the stores. They want a piece of the action. They are bringing satchels of cash to the table along with proposals to cease and desist corn tassel abductions, which are old-fashioned in any case.
Their history of the corn tassel controversy is complicated. It’s based on the aliens’ misunderstanding of detasseling. In their corner of a galaxy far, far away, corn tassels are alive and kept as pets. They think they are rescuing the tassels by abducting them. They think walking corn fields to detassel corn, which involves yanking out the tassels at the top of the plant, amounts to cruelty to animals.
Time for the short story about detasseling from an Iowan who has done it. The tassel is the male part of the corn plant. It pollinates the corn ears, which are female parts. To make corn hybrids, farmers and seed companies must cross pollinate the corn. To make sure the right pollen from one type of corn gets to another, they must hire hundreds of people (often college students) to detassel the corn which isn’t earmarked (get it?) for cross-pollination.
I’ve done detasseling and it’s one heck of a chore. At the end of the day, my hands and arms were so sore I could barely lift them. I was exhausted, but when I tried to close my eyes at night, all I saw were endless acres of corn.
It turns out that careful explanations of what detasseling corn is all about on this planet cleared this up for aliens.
There are many stores across the country selling The Daily Crave chips. Several are in Iowa, mainly in the Des Moines area. That may be why some Iowans occasionally see UFOs.
The other day we went out for a walk on Scott Boulevard. There is an old barn right across the street from the Harvest Preserve entrance. It’s picturesque but on that day, it was festooned with Halloween decorations including goblins and ghouls and the ground was covered with gravestones inscribed with comical epitaphs.
We’ve been in the neighborhood for a couple of years and the old barn never looked like this. I recall reading something on the web about it undergoing this transformation in the past, but I can’t find it now.
I got in touch with Harvest Preserve and they told me that, while ACT owns the barn, they let Harvest Preserve decorate it. That is awesome!
The skeleton flying near the top of the barn is a spooky spectacle. What’s just as creepy is the mannequin inside the barn. There is a big door in the back that’s open and when the wind blew it creaked horribly.
If this were permanent, it would probably qualify for listing on the Roadside America web site.
The drain tile ghost struck again last night. You’ll recall a couple of days ago, I stacked two large rocks on the tile drain grate which has been the subject of numerous vandal attacks for at least the last couple of weeks.
It looks like the top rock was picked up and turned over on the ground about a foot away from the grate. The other rock, which is heavier, looks like it was pushed across the grate, seemingly to remove it. The grate is still attached with the worm gear adjustable clamp.
This happens only at night.
The only trouble is we don’t what’s causing the problem. It’s a mystery that drove us to order a critter cam, which is supposed to be delivered in the next couple of days.
We also don’t know why only one of 7 grates has been singled out for attention. They’re all the same. They help control drainage in our back yard. They all have water in them, which slowly drains. There is nothing else inside the pipe worth all the effort apparently being expended.
Over time, the major interest is not that this occurs, but who or what is causing it. So, for now we plan to leave the scene of the crime as it is. We’ll see what happens tonight.
I’m not going to post any guards. They’ve all been incompetent.
Back in August, my colleagues, Drs. George Dawson, MD and Ronald Pies, MD wrote a rejoinder in Psychiatric Times to a review article published in Molecular Psychiatry by J. Moncrieff, Mark Horowitz and others (Moncrieff J, Cooper RE, Stockmann T, Amendola S, Hengartner MP, Horowitz MA. The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence. Mol Psychiatry. 2022 Jul 20. doi: 10.1038/s41380-022-01661-0. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 35854107.)
The idea that most psychiatrists subscribe to the so-called “chemical imbalance” theory of depression has arisen again in an article by Mark Horowitz on October 7, 2022. Sena alerted me to the article which is getting a lot of attention. There were well over 600 comments and counting about it when we read it on October 7th.
I would like to refer readers to the Dawson and Pies article, “The Serotonin Fixation: Much Ado About Nothing New,” published August 3, 2022. Since the issue about emotional blunting from SSRIs resurfaced again on October 7th, it wouldn’t hurt to review their September 26, 2022, Psychiatric Times article, “Antidepressants Do Not Work by Numbing Emotions.”
Go Retire Psychiatrist 