Amazonesia problems

ECHOES FROM THE LOAFERS’ CLUB MEETING

  I was in a rut, but I changed my life.

  How did you do that?

  I got a universal remote control. It changes everything.

 

DRIVING BY BRUCE’S DRIVE

  I have a wonderful neighbor named Bruce. Whenever I pass his drive, thoughts occur to me. I sat in a barbershop as a man had his beard cut—a process called pogonotomy. The growing of a beard is called pogonotrophy. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote, “It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.”

 

  The weather came in carts and baskets.

 

  We’ve had weather before, but it’s all new and different each day. It was hot enough to bake lasagna in the mailbox as I pushed my cart to where it could join a conga line of corralled shopping carts. I didn’t get enough items to fill the cart. I’d have used a basket instead of a shopping cart, but baskets don’t have wheels and combining that with how short they are makes baskets difficult to push.

 

I’VE LEARNED

  Our smoke detector came with a guarantee. If our house burns down because the detector didn’t work, the company will replace the smoke detector at no charge.

 

  The loud sounds coming from an open window of a car passing in the night are never from motivational speakers.

 

  The phrase “Rain follows the plow” falsely suggested that farming would increase rainfall in the Great Plains in the 19th century. This misconception, often propagated by land promoters, claimed that human alteration of the landscape would positively affect weather patterns, leading to more rain for crops. Drought and intensive agriculture practices, such as plowing up the native grasses that protected the soil, led to massive dust storms and erosion. The severe droughts of the 1890s and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s demonstrated the fallacy of the theory.

 

  It’s a good thing Friday the 13th never happens on a Monday.

 

  I look at a person’s face forever, and, eventually, I remember the individual’s name. This process is called glacial recognition.

 

  I enjoy a good breakfast. I like to believe there is some truth in what the character Ron Swanson of Parks and Recreation said, “There has never been a sadness that can’t be cured by breakfast food.”

 

BAD JOKES DEPARTMENT

 Amazonesia is the inability to remember what you ordered when an Amazon package arrives.

 

  When a daydreaming Uber driver drove past the destination, his backseat passenger gently tapped him on the shoulder. Startled, the driver drove through a red light and almost hit a bus before he pulled over. The passenger said, “I’m sorry I gave you such a fright.” “It was my fault,” said the driver. “This is my first day driving for Uber. For the past 25 years, I drove a hearse.”

 

  A limbo champion walks into a bar, and his winning streak ended.

 

NATURE NOTES

 Casey Madson of Hartland watched swallows hunt a farm field and wondered what kind of eyesight they have to be successful in catching flying insects. Barn swallows have exceptional eyesight, which is crucial for their aerial hunting style. They are two eyes with wings and have a bifoveate retina, meaning they have two areas of sharp focus (foveae) in each eye, one for distance and one for close-up vision. They share this trait with other predators like raptors, but most other songbirds have only one. The foveae are areas with a high concentration of cone photoreceptors, which are responsible for sharp vision and color perception. This allows them to track insect prey with precision while flying at high speeds. The elongated eye shape of barn swallows further enhances their spatial resolution, allowing them to perceive minute details and accurately judge distances while flying. Like many bird species, barn swallows can perceive ultraviolet light, which helps them find insects. The killing of egrets is often cited for inspiring the U.S. conservation movement, but it was the millinery trade’s impact on barn swallows that prompted naturalist George Bird Grinnell’s 1886 Forest & Stream editorial decrying the waste of bird lives. His essay led to the founding of the first Audubon Society.

 

  Becky Schuhmacher of Glenville asked why some sandhill cranes she has seen have had many brown feathers. Sandhill cranes are typically gray, but their plumage sometimes appears reddish-brown due to the preening cranes do with iron-rich mud. That may act as camouflage. The adults have a distinctive red patch on their head, while immatures (colts) lack this feature and have a more uniformly rusty brown appearance.

 

MEETING ADJOURNED

  “Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud.”—Maya Angelou.   Be kind