A thread for miscellaneous stuff...

[oldE]

I have an apology to those who were complaining about the stop/start function on vehicles they had driven. My previous experience was with a Kia Cee'd in 2010 in the UK. It worked flawlessly.
Last weekend I had the opportunity to drive a Nissan Pathfinder. The stop/start function felt like it was engaged with a jackhammer. Not smooth at all.
The designers of the gear selector deserve a good swift kick as well. It has a "selector lever" which will allow you to engage Drive or apparently Low gear. To select Park, Reverse or Neutral, there are push buttons on top of the gear selector. Let me tell you, that was fun figuring that out in the rental garage. KISS!

Best
Les

[rockfan4]

Shrinkflation is messing with my Thanksgiving!

I'm making a side dish that calls for 18oz of frozen corn.
All the bags are 14oz or 12oz.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by flatbutt

Hobby horse dressage etc.

I've seen several of the vids of competitions and people practicing, and to me they are absolutely bizarre! Makes me wonder if these are folks that are going to be into "pony play" later (if they aren't already).

[masraum]

The whole "step counting" thing that took off with smart watches and fit bits is nothing new. Folks were counting steps in the 19th century.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/from-jealous-spouses-to-paranoid-bosses-pedometers-quantified-suspicion-in-the-19th-century-180985504/

Not the full article, just the first bit...

The Indiana woman seemed not to know that such devices were already available, used by land surveyors and others to measure distances. But one Boston woman managed to perform exactly the kind of surveillance she described. According to a report in the October 7, 1879, Hartford Daily Courant, “A Boston wife softly attached a pedometer to her husband when, after supper, he started to ‘go down to the office and balance the books.’ On his return, 15 miles of walking were recorded. He had been stepping around a billiard table all evening.”

Keeping track of individual activity—a kind of close certification or surveillance—was not limited to domestic relationships. Initially markers of wealth and power, pedometers adapted to serve individual accountability, especially in work settings. The Washington Evening Star ran a story in the fall of 1895 in which an admiral gave his junior watch officers what looked to them like a common pocket watch but was really a pedometer. The admiral tracked the junior officer’s night watch activities. To the admiral’s dismay, the morning reading showed just two and a half miles traversed overnight, suggesting that the ensigns had been sleeping or resting during most of their watch. The next night, those same ensigns ordered an apprentice to take the watchful pedometer and shake it while the night watchmen took their normal rest. The hack worked insofar as the pedometer registered more miles traveled and it also freed the men from the watchful device. The admiral read the 89 miles traveled in 12 hours as evidence that the device was broken; meanwhile, the news story clearly invites the reader in for a laugh at the admiral’s expense by detailing that one of the lieutenants ordered a subordinate to “take this instrument and shake it violently for four hours” as punishment for being absent without permission.

Another story in the Railway and Engineering Review included a similar hack attempt by a night watchman in Portland, Maine. Having previously been caught mechanically rigging the button-pushing work of his nightly rounds, the watchman was given a pedometer to ensure that he was manually completing his work. Although this use of quantum media—media that count, quantify or enumerate—to more closely monitor the watchman’s activities seemed to work for several nights, he was eventually found sleeping in the engine room, having attached the pedometer to a piston rod.

These 19th-century hacks presage a 21st-century example: In response to insurance companies that offer discounts for those who use fitness trackers, the satirical project Unfit Bits suggests ways to trick your step tracker, such as by attaching the device to a metronome. This form of performance hack aims at subverting corporate and insurance surveillance of human activity. As the pedometer became a vector for surveillance by those in power, people who were able quickly developed hacks designed to frustrate such efforts. Likewise, as the pedometer began to mediate lives rather than survey land, the impacts and risk shifted to the individual being measured, who might face domestic discord or the loss of a job.

Consider Hannibal Jackson, a husband being tracked by his wife because she was concerned that he was not following his doctor’s orders. According to a 1904 anecdote published in the Buffalo Enquirer, Mrs. Jackson proudly shared her husband’s pedestrian cure with friends one night, only to then hear his close friend report that each day, Hannibal had walked to the corner store, bought a cigar and shaken the pedometer until it read five miles instead of taking his daily dose of activity. When his wife expressed shock and disbelief, Hannibal confirmed his friend’s story and asserted that the joy of this ruse had in fact “cured” him of his previous ennui.

As Hannibal’s story suggests, by the turn of the 20th century, quantum media tracking of human activity not only was tied to a particular body but also remediated these largely white, male elite bodies in ways linked to health and labor activities as opposed to the territory mapping seen elsewhere. By the 1890s, we see a marked uptick in newspaper reports of activity tracking as part of health and recreation. In the last quarter of the 19th century, large outlets like Scientific American as well as more local publications such as Pennsylvania’s Elk County Advocate and Michigan’s Lake County Star all ran stories on the health benefits of walking with a pedometer. Athletic clubs and physicians appear in the papers throughout the last decade of the 19th century, each using the pedometer to track the wearer’s activities for the purposes of self-reporting fitness or health.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by flatbutt

Has anyone used this? It feels a wee bit phishy to me.

https://www.amazon.com/prime/offer/earnify/prime-deal?ref=ellis_BP_US_outbnd_TnsEmail

There are also websites where you can get notified of price changes of items on Amazon. I would love to know about price changes, but I don't want/need to be tracked more than I already am.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by flatbutt

https://www.yahoo.com/news/duct-tape-banana-art-sells-025021039.html

and he's going to eat the banana.

Needs to be beyotch slapped.

[flatbutt]

This is cool...

https://people.com/tom-cruise-awarded-navy-highest-civilian-honor-8763212

[flatbutt]

and this is obscene

https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/tripideas/the-2025-golden-globes-gift-bag-is-worth-1-million-here-s-everything-inside/ar-AA1waA3x?ocid=msedgntp&pc=NSJS&cvid=cdf1f731fa8e4746a9a33500740e4a4f&ei=21

[oldE]

24 hours of hell. Last night after supper the wife reported her almost 30 year old Morgan gelding seemed to have colic and she had the vet on the way. None of the treatments worked so the vet ended the horse's suffering this morning. A fellow with an excavator arrived this afternoon and buried it. This was a horse my wife first saw when it was 3 weeks old. She trained it and broke it to saddle then babied him when he could no longer be ridden.



Goodbye De Lion ( he is the big guy closest to the dog.)

Best
Les

[flatbutt]

30 years! is that unusual?

My condolences. I'm sure that hurts.

[rockfan4]

Les,
My condolences as well. I hope the other horses are taking it well.

[oldE]

Thirty years isn't unheard of for an equine which gets appropriate feed and doesn't have a hard life. On the other hand, the phrase "healthy as a horse" sets my teeth on edge. Horses evolved in environments where they had to keep moving to get enough to sustain them, so when they get too much or too rich food,(clover, oats or the like) and not enough exercise, their gut rebells and they can die. This old guy had worn down teeth from almost three decades of chewing so he was on supplements . He was doing well until his bowel became obstructed. Then it was over.
Don't know what brought it on. We didn't have the vet do a necropsey.
And yes, the other horses came by and said their goodbyes. The donkey actually spent the morning in the stall with him after it was over. They were buddies. The donkey was the only one who could back him off his hay.
I did know a guy who had a Morgan horse that lived into its 40s. That was exceptional.
We are doing OK this morning, but it was hard going into the barn and missing that big goof.
All the best, folks.
Les

[Billiam 911 2.8]

My condolences to you and your wife, Les. Horses have a magic that is hard to describe.

[Scott Douglas]

Les, my dental hygienist had a horse that died from similar conditions. He was young, like 3-4 yrs old if I recall, but very big, 17 hands. She's been riding for a long time. She said it happens.
Give your wife my condolences as I'm sure a friendship of 30 yrs is tough to have end like this.

[oldE]

Here's a story on the other side of things.
This morning, while walking the dog around the marsh, we came across a raven which had been roosting on the parts of my dock. It didn't fly away, but flapped and hopped away from us. I called the dog back and noted the bird didn't go too far. After calling the regional wildlife rescue center, I rook some dog food down to the place where the bird had been hanging out. Over the next hour it ate that, so I went back with a crate and more food to get it used to changes in case we had to capture it. The raven walked and hopped about 100 yards away and didn't go back for an hour, but eventually accepted the crate and food. My next plan was to attach a long cord to the door and try to capture the bird, but about a half hour later it started making short, then longer flights. It was joined by another raven and a few minutes ago both birds were on the lawn close to the house. I don't know if the bird was cold and starving, sick or bruised, but it seems to have made a recovery!
After the weekend we just had, I guess I needed to feel I accomplished something.
Oops. Must have been other ravens flying around. It seems our charge is still dealing with limited mobility
Best
Les

[flatbutt]

She passed away in December after 116 years. Wow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomiko_Itooka

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by oldE

24 hours of hell. Last night after supper the wife reported her almost 30 year old Morgan gelding seemed to have colic and she had the vet on the way. None of the treatments worked so the vet ended the horse's suffering this morning. A fellow with an excavator arrived this afternoon and buried it. This was a horse my wife first saw when it was 3 weeks old. She trained it and broke it to saddle then babied him when he could no longer be ridden.



Goodbye De Lion ( he is the big guy closest to the dog.)

Best
Les

Rest In Peace De Lion. Than you for giving him a good life.
It kills me when our non-human friends pass on. Prayers and tears here.
This post deserves its own thread.

[oldE]

Update on the raven. This morning, my wife went down on the marsh to take some food for the bird and it startled and tried to escape through the wild rose bushes at which point it got stuck. The wife called for me to bring pruning shears and within minutes she had cut her way into the poor creature and got it out and into a dog crate. By 11 o'clock it was in care at a local branch of Hope For Wildlife. The young lady who received the bird confirmed it was underweight and observed its right wing seemed to not be tucking in properly. It is now in good hands.

Best
Les

[rockfan4]

My wife has a new man in her life.
Tonight she took me to meet him.

This is Zorey (sp?) He's a 6 year old Gypsy Vanner. His mane reaches his knees, his tail sweeps the floor. His butt is as wide as a bus. He's a lesson horse, but he isn't owned by the barn. He belongs to a friend of the owner, and she offers him for use for lessons in exchange for boarding. He's kind of out of shape, and I guess she's done this before, to get him some riding time and get him in better shape.

I called out the wife for tying that halter wrong, she just rolled her eyes at me.



One of the other trainers offered a good story when we got there. She had just finished a group lesson with 4 20 something young men. The guy who booked the lesson said he was an advanced rider, as he was from Oklahoma. A couple of them even had the proper hat, right out of the Yellowstone catalog. The advanced rider attempted to mount his horse from the wrong side, and put the wrong foot in the stirrup. Didn't know how to hold his reins either.

[flatbutt]

Today is 2/5/25...or...2525 one of the goofiest songs ever written.