Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   much of their mental energy on grievances
Tuesday, July 9 2019
Sometimes at work it's just more comfortable taking advantage of the great outdoors back behind the buildings than it is to use the bathroom facilities provided. I was headed that way with some urgency when I scared a deer down in the bushy fringe of a mowed half-acre-sized lowlands surrounded on three sides by low, steep wooded escarpments. At the time I was about 50 feet away, in the forest at the top of one such escarpment, and a speckled fawn evidently was as well. Usually they keep calm and hide, but this one went to make a break for it, immediately running into an old, mostly collapsed woven wire fence. It was momentarily trapped, and made a pathetic squawk. But then it broke free and headed out into a nearby field. Later, as I was driving to the Red Hook Hannaford for my weekly provisions, I saw a mother deer and fawn crossing a street separating that area from the suburban neighborhood to the northwest.
On the drive home from work, I had some landlording chores, so I stopped first at the Home Depot, mostly to get a stake, some cable, and cable clamps with which to address a minor landlording crisis. There will be more on that in a paragraph or two. I also got a cheap (but complete) set of drill bits to keep in the Subaru (my landlording car) with my hand-powered drill (a battery-powered drill would have a dead battery on the few occasions I actually needed to use it).
My first destination was the Downs Street house, where the dryer up in the third floor unit had a problem with a failing latch lock. I poked at the latch with a screwdriver and felt it click, but it wasn't apparent what exactly was wrong or how to fix it. It was also very hot in the cramped attic space where the washing machine lived. So I took the Maytag manual with the hope maybe it would at least give me something I could type into Google.
My other destination was the Brewster Street house, something of a problem child in our real estate empire. The neighbors to the north of the rental are a pair of really unpleasant sociopaths who (I'm told) got in trouble for fraud several years ago. They complained a few times as we rehabilitated our house, threatening to sue our general contractor over minor issues when they really should've been overjoyed that there would no longer be an abandoned house next door. Later these neighbors had a number of run-ins with the tenant, but mostly they'd stopped being an annoyance. Recently, though, they redid their yard, throwing dirt all over the side of our house in the process.
People who are the way these neighbors are spend much of their mental energy on grievances, and with all the enemies they develop, it's hard to stay focused on any one for long. They'd probably been distracted by bigger problems. But eventually they decided to focus yet again on our tenant, hoping to cause her problems using the authorities. They started calling the building inspector about minor issues (and perhaps also, over the winter, an ugly above-ground swimming pool), causing the Kingston building department to have to investigate. Apparently today (or recently) they went over to the Brewster Street house to look into a complaint about the boundary fence leaning against the back of their shed and also some pipes. The building inspector reported back that the pipe complaint was bullshit but that we should do something to make the a section of the fence more plumb. That was why I was at the Brewster Street house driving a stake into the ground and then using some thin cable to pull the top of the boundary fence closer to plumb. While I was doing this, the tenant came out and told me all the obnoxious things the neighbor had been doing, including referring to her daughter's boyfriend as "asshole." At some point I saw between the slats of the boundary fence the female half of the obnoxious neighbor come out of her house to sit and eavesdrop as the tenant kept talking. "And they threw a lot of dirt up against the house," I added.
In all fairness to the obnoxious neighbors, there is definitely a squirrelly vibe to the Brewster Street rental house. There's always people on the front porch, usually people I've never met. And other randos are constantly showing up. When I arrived today, there were two little black girls on the porch whom I'd never seen in my life. And as I was leaving, the little black girls had been replaced by the tenant's daughter and a youngish white girl with very straight hair.
Later tonight, after I'd taken a bath and crawled into bed, Gretchen played a long rambling message left on her cellphone by that eavesdropping neighbor. She accused our tenant of being up at all hours having domestic disturbances, smoking pot, and having big bonfires in a fire pit (I'd seen that fire pit today, and it looked legit to me). The eavesdropping neighbor then promised that she would keep calling the building inspector and the police until, well, she didn't say. She also said it would be on us if a fire from that fire pit set the neighborhood on fire.

Lately I've been very interested in persistent oddball branches from the stem of large, important biological taxa (such as birds, dinosaurs, mammals, amphibians, and even vertebrates). Of particular interest has been multituberuclate mammals, a group of non-placental/non-marsupial rodent-like creatures that lasted from the Jurassic well into the Cenozoic. While in the bathtub tonight, I was trying to find yet more info about multituberuclates on the web when I ran into a website dedicated to one person's crackpot hypothesis about animal evolution. The author is E. M. McCarthy, and his radical take on evolution is that the production of new species often is the result of hybridization. And these hybrids aren't just the odd cow mating with a bison. McCarthy seems to believe animals of arbitrary distance on the tree of life can produce viable offspring. After much beating around the bush, he presents his biggest, most radical theory: that humans are the result of hybridization between chimpanzees and pigs. He offers no supporting evidence other than a list of cherry-picked traits that humans have that chimpanzees lack, all of which he claims were provided by pigs. He doesn't bother with any genomic evidence or confirmed examples of cases were such distantly-related animals managed to produce offspring, though he does have some crazy-looking video of deformed animals with human-like faces. It's rare that I find such wacky material on my own (without being directed to it by sites such as BoingBoing.net).


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?190709

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