#61
September 24: One more thing about
zapping mosquitoes! In the paper
yesterday it said that if you didn’t want to get bitten by mosquitoes, DON’T
DRINK BEER! It appears that not only are
mosquitoes attracted to our carbon monoxide, but they like us best when we have
beer or alcohol breath! That explains a
lot!! 9/19
#62
September 25: A suburb
of Damascus was bombarded from 2021 to 2016 and went from 80,000 residents to
8,000. A group of volunteers started
salvaging books from the rubble and opened an underground library in the
basement of an otherwise destroyed house.
It had a reading space and even a book club. Classes in English, math, and history were
taught. But the Syrian army finally
evacuated the town completely and the library was torn apart. And we worry about banning books! What if we had to have secret libraries! 9/24
63
September 26: We tend to think of the
wheel as the ultimate human invention.
But several useful items were invented first: boats, glue, musical instruments, and
alcohol. In fact, the wheel was first
used as a potter's wheel to make vessels to hold different brews. I'm surprised they didn't invent the mosquito swatter next! 9/24/2023
#64
September 27: My mom and dad had a
love/hate relationship with squirrels.
One day I would visit and Dad would have out his BB gun and either be
shooting them or capturing them and taking them away. He said to get rid of them, you had to carry
them across 2 bodies of water so he would cross a creek and take them across
the dam of the lake. The next time I
would visit my mom would have seed corn and would be feeding her “pets”. According to a researcher at the University
of Edinburgh, male squirrels actually get smarter in the fall when their brains,
particularly the hippocampus gets larger.
This allows them to gather more nuts and prepare for winter. The
slightly larger brain may also help them remember where the nuts are hidden! But my dad’s brain was bigger!! Lol 9/24
#65 September
28: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds is one of my favorite
movies. It was so scary and
fascinating. I think it was one of the
first movies that made me think about how special effects are achieved. Hitchcock
used two sources of inspiration for the epic horror tale. He was inspired by a short story by Daphne du
Maurier but also there was a similar incident of birds gone wild in Monterey Bay in 1961 about 2 years before he made
the movie. While not the crows and mix of birds portrayed in the movie, thousands
of crazed seabirds called shearwaters were seen going “crazy” and flying into
things. The birds were not attacking anyone but were poisoned by toxic algae. 9/24
#66
September 29: About twice a year, the
weatherman will alert me to a sighting of the International Space Station and
we will go up on the roof and watch it pass by.
It always amazes me that even with all of the light pollution in uptown
Charlotte, we can usually see it. The space station has been continuously
occupied for 23 years since its launch in 2000!
But the fact that really grabbed me was that it is the most expensive
item humans have ever created! It cost
$100 BILLION !! It is a combined collaboration among NASA, Roscosmos (Russia),
JAXA (Japan), ESA (Europe) and CSA (Canada).
9/24
#67
September 30: Another
new word for my vocabulary:
mondegreen. It is when you
mishear a word usually something sung.
Like hearing “Betty in a Dress” instead of “Bennie and the Jets”. It was coined in 1954 in a Harper’s essay by
Sylvia Wright. Her mother used to read
poetry and her favorite line was “And laid him on the green. She misheard it as Lady Mondegreen. 9/24
#68
October 1: Our national animal is the Bald Eagle, and England has the lion,
but the national animal of Scotland is… wait for it… the unicorn! To Scots, the mythical animal represents
purity, independence, and an untamable spirit. Unicorns appeared on the
country’s coat of arms starting in the 12th century. 9/24
#69
October 2: Green bell peppers are
just unripe red bell peppers. Yellow and
orange peppers are just somewhere in between.
As the peppers ripen, they become sweeter. Who knew?!
9/24
#70
October 3: I really found this
fascinating: there is no bridge over the
Amazon River, even though it is over 4000 miles long. There are a few reasons: waters rise 30 feet when seasons swing from
dry to rainy, the riverbanks are in a
near-constant state of erosion from soft sediment, and the jungle is so
sparsely populated there is little demand for a bridge. 9/26
#71
October 4: This was under “facts that
will change how you see the world”:
Continents shift at the same rate your fingernails grow, about 20 mm a
year. Sort of a useless fact, but I’ll
think about it each time I cut my nails. LOL 9/26
#72
October 5: Alaska is the
northernmost, westernmost, and easternmost state. An island called Semisopochnoi in the
Aleutians is 10 miles west of the prime meridian, making it the easternmost
spot! 9/26
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