But, they were wanted. We’re old enough now to want practical items while still maintaining a childish nerdy side. So here’s some highlighted Christmas gifts:
Safety first!
I wanted a rechargeable water fire extinguisher for our various wood fires. We have a fireplace, a deck solo stove, a charcoal grill, and a fire pit. If things were to get out of hand, I did not relish the idea of spraying things down with a chemical ABC extinguisher. Plus, since I can recharge this myself, it’s more fun.
No safety!
A custom gift from the sister-in-law. Everyone needs a viking hand axe, acid-etched, and engraved with runes evoking eternal feasting and battle!
Let it roll baby
We are not rock nerds. Prosaic pontification pertaining to geological aesthetics never cranked my shaft, so to speak. But machinery and pretentiousness? Absolutely!
We saw an episode of Dirty Jobs where Mike visited a hotel that offered a coin-washing service. It was a mutual curiosity, so I got Liz a tumbler. I’ll go into greater depth on a later post as some trial and error was involved. And of course don’t do this with any coins of significant monetary or collector value. But it was definitely fun!
I suppose that unless you’re an early radio history nerd, this isn’t very interesting. But as a general enthusiast for all things history, it was enough for me to jump out of the car and awkwardly snap a couple photos, while normal passersby no doubt wondered what that goofy guy was doing in the parking lot.
It’s that unique shape that defines it. One of a handful that still exist, their design outdated and less effective than the skinny towers. They’re also AM radio towers, so how many will continue to be maintained? I think they just remain as emergency communication infrastructure, although WLW the station still broadcasts news radio and baseball games. This one also has a couple tidbits of its own historic use, as explained by its marker:
It was also the second of its kind to have been built. Additional coolness points.
Do I care that I’m posting this? Obviously the answer is no, because when deadbeats get misassociated with my contact information I start to lose my patience with the eternal onslaught of – in this case – modern carpetbaggers. I myself get the occasional clickbait version of a mailer in my mailbox to sell my own home, but the frequency at which the texts come in soliciting sales for this place lends me to think that something’s not going well.
According to the Montgomery County Auditor, Fred bought this abode in 1993 for $17,000. It’s now worth $15,380, and owes taxes of $34,356.81. Ouch. But it has well water, I think. And a bad storm sewer? The tax assessment codes are hard to understand.
But maybe Fred’s a nice guy. Maybe he just fell on hard times or simply held onto the property for some reason. One never knows the full story, and I don’t care to find out more, so stop texting me about it!
I was watching No Reservations recently and noticed that Anthony was eating some kind of mollusk in a long straight shell. He described it as a razor clam. This is an unremarkable observation in and of itself.
However, the shell was very familiar to me, and I eventually pieced together why.
I was in an especially anti-Boomer mood for some reason (easy to do when the internal monologue digs up resentment towards American economics, and Anthony Bourdain was doing one of his self-gratification episodes). And so my thoughts had turned towards my wife’s aunt, who is in many ways the personification of Boomerism. While quite kind in her own way, she has a predilection for Boomer opinion stereotypes, such as taking hearsay at face value, and maintaining a preference for mediocre chain restaurants that serve needlessly large portions.
I’ll chalk that last one up to simple generational preferences, and the fact that she doesn’t enjoy cooking. You can’t really blame someone who doesn’t like to cook for their pre-prepared food preferences. But it’s that first observation that’s the theme of this post.
The other reason she came to mind was that she is a resident of St. Augustine, FL – and the place where I first saw these clam shells. She also told me that it was illegal to pick up rocks off the beach and take them home when we last visited. I refer specifically to coquina – those cool rocks of compressed shells that the Spanish used to build forts out of.
But back to the clam. The shells of these creatures were all over the Atlantic Florida beaches. Not knowing them for what they were, I was informed by said aunt that they were the hardened outer skins of mangroves. I did not question this, probably because I was on vacation and intentionally trying to avoid thinking too much.
A brief internet search revealed that the Atlantic Jackknife Clam (a type of razor clam, which I already linked to above), is indeed a very common shell to find on the Atlantic beaches, and there were no apparent references to petrified mangroves.
I then attempted to determine definitively if picking up coquina from the beaches of St. Augustine was in fact illegal. I found two references to the topic that said yes it is: 1) A personal blog by a resident, and 2) A private local newspaper that didn’t cite any legal statutes. The examples given in both were extreme, claiming that tourists go out to the beaches and chip lots of coquina away from major outcroppings. A somewhat different situation than some guy who picked up a rock sitting on the sand.
I also found out that commercial licenses are issued for the wholesale harvesting of coquina for the purpose of selling it to tourists. This leads me to believe that there are no environmental or archaeological concerns involved, and that it’s simply control of local economics. So locals don’t like tourists, but have no problem with taking their money. I’d hazard to say that this is common sentiment amongst small communities in desirable locations.
She had tricked me into not keeping a cool clam shell I found because I falsely believed that it was an unremarkable sliver of wood that would just dry out and rot away. But I didn’t believe taking a rock was illegal, so when she wasn’t looking I pilfered a sizeable chunk.
Contraband!?
And here it sits on my deck now.
I’m still not convinced that taking it was illegal, both because of the misinformation I already received and that the only internet references I can find to this mysterious rule exist on non-credible websites. It wouldn’t surprise me if she was just messing with me, but I’d equally believe she took these fallacies herself to be truth.
Okay, I’m getting silly now and making some of these up. But weather encourages superstition, with all its violence and unpredictability. And Al Roker. Fuck that guy. There’s no way he’s human. Humans don’t smile like that. Humans aren’t that ecstatic to look at a Doppler map first thing in the morning.
Anyway, so one of these portents of climactic evil is the Moon Ring. I remember these well from the Lubbock years, probably because the sky was very open and clear, and as such these events were dramatic. Also since they indicate fronts, it always meant tornadoes.
Ohio isn’t quite as tornado-y (although it’s certainly getting there). But nevertheless these are still cool. Here’s a picture from a few days ago:
November 13, 2024
And it did indeed rain for a day following that. So there’s some potential truth in the old adages. But really, it’s just the coolness factor.
And if you want to read way too much about their formation, they’re called 22° halos, because that’s the geometric alignment at which they form, via suspended hexagonal ice crystals.
