Month: December 2022

Cedar Waxwings Get Cold Breakfast

The morning of December 22, 2022 was one of the most frigid days in recent memory. The winter storm brought 30-40 mph winds and temperatures sometimes to down to 30 or worse.

I didn’t get right out there to shovel. Snow was blowing around until well after noon. This gave me a chance to watch a flock of Cedar Waxwings gather around the winterberry bushes in our backyard.

The berries must have been pretty cold. There was ice on them. One bird couldn’t seem to get a bill bite on them and dropped his breakfast on the ground a couple of times. I don’t think he got a bite to swallow.

And the city plows plugged our driveway as usual.

That means Sena and I had to get out there around 3:30 in the afternoon to shovel our driveway and sidewalks. It took us about an hour and I am considering calling whoever in city government is responsible for ordering up this weather.

Jazzed Up Mr. Grinch for the Big Arctic Blast

I heard this last Friday KCCK on ‘da Friday Blues with John Heim aka Big Mo, believe it or not. So it’s a little late, but I had trouble finding it. Stay warm!

Snow Day!

I wrote this post yesterday because I didn’t know whether or not we’d have a power outage because of high winds (up to nearly 50 mph) predicted for the Arctic Blast this week.

When we’re not outside scooping our walkway and driveway, we’ll probably be playing cribbage or, God forbid, Scrabble (which I always lose).

We’ve heard about the renewed interest in board games, one of them being Scrabble. We recently found an old Scrabble game at Old Capitol Town Center (formerly Old Capitol Mall). It’s Super Scrabble and it was on sale for $50 at a hole-in-the-wall shop lacking an entrance sign. The high price is because it’s a collectible relic from the past, although a quick internet search revealed it was made in 2004—hardly an antique. You can find them on eBay for $30. On the other hand, you can find them going for as much as $179 at an on-line store called Mercari.

We’ll also probably take a break by munching on our Christmas cookies.

I’m all set for the freezing weather. I’ve got my thermal underwear out and sweats out, along with my heavy gloves.

The wind will probably make shoveling pointless at times. We’ll probably bag it and then I’ll practice the juggling behind the back trick—another pointless activity.

Blockbuster Sasquatch Cribbage Game Antics!

Brace yourselves! Sena and I are going to break the internet with the never-before-seen YouTube video of our antic-filled cribbage game on our Sasquatch cribbage board—and playing with the Sasquatch cribbage cards!

This had an extremely rare outcome. Wait’ll you see what it is.

I also shared a few nuggets of knowledge about Sasquatch that I learned from the internet. One of them is that the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) credits the state of Iowa with 76 reports of Bigfoot encounters (not necessarily sighting per se, but so what?).

Awe is Powerful and Rare

I read the article by Dr. H. Steven Moffic, MD, “The Psychiatric Best of: In Awe of Awe” today. I agree that experiencing awe is powerful.

I’m not so sure you can go looking for it. I think of awe as an experience that just happens to you when you’re in a place that gives you a sense of how great the universe is and gives you an idea of how small your place in it is.

We didn’t go looking for awe when we visited the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona many years ago. And we didn’t look for it at Niagara Falls.

But we were awestruck.

On a smaller scale, we were awestruck by the total lunar eclipses this year, in May and November. I’ll admit the cold temperatures at 2:00 a.m. put a damper on my enthusiasm.

On the other hand, I’m more often dumbfounded. It’s not the same thing as awestruck. For example, I’ve been trying to learn how to do the behind the back throw in juggling. I hit my elbow, I drop the balls, and I don’t seem to learn much from watching YouTube videos of jugglers who can do it effortlessly. I’m amazed by their talent and achievement and appreciate the dedication to practice they underwent to reach that level of skill. And I respect them for it.

But it’s not the same as being awestruck. Awe seems to me to be a rare and wonderful accident, something to be treasured in memory, but which might be elusive if sought.

You can’t enter “Awe inspiring destinations” in your GPS. I’m sure everyone has seen tourists at the Grand Canyon or Niagara who seem to be too busy getting selfies with their smartphones to be receptive to awe.

I guess you could ask, “Can you cultivate a readiness to be awestruck?” There is probably no specific brain lobe to which awe is assigned.

And I think Dr. Moffic is right about constant awe being incompatible with living your life doing what you have to do every day to survive.

Awe, like all miracles, should be rare to be appreciated.

Sasquatch Playing Cards Arrive!

We got our Sasquatch playing card deck! The images of Bigfoot are strikingly similar to the carved image on our new Sasquatch cribbage board. And they both resemble the image of Patty, the female Bigfoot supposedly captured on 16mm film back in 1967 by Bob Gimlin.

That’s the legendary Patterson-Gimlin video of Bigfoot. There are two opposing views on the existence of Bigfoot which I think are probably influenced by Patty.

The TV show, The Proof Is Out There, aired an episode of experts who talked a lot about evidence for Bigfoot. I watched the show, which ran on December 3, 2021. The Daily Mail UK ran a big story about it. I honestly can’t remember what they decided.

On the other hand, there are a few people who claim to know for a fact that a guy has admitted that he put on a stinky monkey suit and played the part of Patty—and said he’s blowing up the whole thing because he never got paid for doing it. That was way back in 2004, and the story is all over the internet.

I tend to be skeptical about most things like Bigfoot and extraterrestrials. I’m not exactly saying they don’t exist.

But why can’t anyone find a corpse, roadkill, or a definite fossil of Sasquatch? Is that why people are starting to call Bigfoot an interdimensional being, coming and going through a wormhole vortex? And why does everybody still pay attention to the tale?

I think it’s because just about everybody likes a good story—which is what Bigfoot has always been.

The Proof Is Out There Airs Debunked Rerun of Simulated Reality

I watched one of my favorite TV shows last night, The Proof Is Out There, and I was surprised to see the rerun of a debunked segment from last year. It was the simulated reality spot in which a photo of a girl showing her reflection in a mirror with apparently two different facial expressions was determined to be an “unexplained phenomenon.” Even the forensic video expert was fooled.

It was the same photo that was debunked on the show last September because an alert viewer notified the show it was a smartphone camera trick which was done in panorama mode. The effect had been known for years. I duplicated the trick and published a post about it, entitled “Proof of Simulated Reality—Or Cool Camera Trick?”

I sent an email to the show this morning and got an automated reply indicating the Proof Team received it, and indicating they might reply.

We’ll see. Anyway, Sena and I made updated weird pictures. I think motion creates artifact—which itself can look pretty cool (see the featured juggling photo in which we minimized it).