Tag Archives: dumpster

ANNOUNCEMENT!

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Woe !  Despair !  Agony On Me !

“Where has the blog gone?” you say. “What’s happened? Have they found you?” is another question we get. “Is The Institute under siege?” No nothing so dramatic but that doesn’t mean we don’t have dramatic crap happening around here, because we do. Lots of it, and it’s the really dramatic kind too.

It’s computer trouble. How many times do you hear that now days? “We’re sorry but our computer system is down and we can’t you the results of your brain transplant until our tech gets here and he’s helping the folks at Burger Bloat get their system back online. They’ve got big trouble over there with people demanding their Giant eleven pound AchyBurger and Soggy Fries. We should have your results in the very near future, Sorry for any inconvenience.”

As you know if you know anything at all about The Institute, is that we try to keep our computer room rat-free. This has always been paramount to the running of our Cray computer system, the fastest, largest super-computer system in the English-speaking world, and we’ve been moderately successful given that our Cray computer is set up in a Tuff Shed so the heat it gives off doesn’t burn down the main building. We’d really be in a pickle if that happened, and as we were in a hurry to get it set up we decided against pouring a slab under the building and chose to set it on the bare ground instead. This was a time saving decision because we wanted to get it plugged in so we could get email and stuff. We see now in hindsight that it would have been better to pour the slab, as those pesky rats can burrow like some kind of demented badger, but it easy to throw stones now. It seemed like a good idea when we did it.

Unfortunately the Cray is where we store all of our images on those new little 3.5 floppy disks that are so handy. Well to cut to the chase here and save you some valuable time, some kind of Super Rat or maybe even a bunch of them found that the cables leading into the Cray tasted just like chicken and during this last snowstorm chewed through many of them and even ate some of the capacitors we hard wired into the cable for extra power. Well that tore it. Now we are scrambling like one of those monkeys with his football to try and salvage what we can. It looks like we are going to be able to save all of them (we hope) and will be back on the air, or I mean the page soon.

We are hoping that the government, that would be our government, seeing our distress would step in and provide us with one of their cast off NSA computers that they just throw in the dumpster if they get too many of them, suitably erased of all secret stuff of course, so we could get back to providing you with all the news and exposes, and events of little importance that you’ve come to depend on. So far they turned a deaf ear to our pleas. Perhaps if you wrote your representative a long letter asking them to intercede on our behalf they would show us some mercy and get us a computer muy pronto. But it would take all of you with some of you even writing two, or maybe several hundred letters to get their attention. So if you’re not doing anything right now, sit down and write like a crazy person. It may help, or it may get you on one of those lists the government keeps, we don’t know, but the effort counts. Thanks in advance for your support and we hope to be back up and running like the well oiled juggernaut of information you’ve come to love.

Redtail Hawk 1 Rattlesnake 0

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As they say out here in Colorado “The mail needed picking up” and since we occasionally get financial remuneration via snail mail and we haven’t had any interns able to pass the strict bonding requirements we have here at The Institute, it fell to the Director to go and get  the mail.

Our mail box is located down the five mile dirt road that gets you up and down from the mountain top The Institute is located on, to the modern one lane highway below. On the way down the ‘hill’ you run the chance of seeing wild animals being wild, such as turkeys walking around trying not to get eaten by the coyotes, elk in both male and female forms, mule deer of course, bears, just the black ones not the big grizzlies that roam further north, foxes, the red ones, the aforementioned coyotes, Eagles mostly Goldens but once in a while a bald one will fly by, and lots of birds. Everything from songbirds to grouse and now some Chukar. Hawks, falcons, pelicans flying by to get to somewhere where there is enough water, lots of migratory birds and our favorite species the Redtail hawk.

The Redtail is the hands down favorite because it does one really neat thing. It hunts, kills, and eats rattlesnakes. Rattlesnakes are what takes the fun out of running barefoot through the tall grass. Rattlesnakes bite. We had a neighbor near us, who was minding her own business doing absolutely nothing provoking, get bit and besides costing what a small Korean car costs it made her foot swell up to the size of your standard microwave oven. And she said it hurt too. A lot.

Most people in this country don’t like rattlesnakes. I mean, there’s a few that like them but they are not the majority by any means. People who don’t like them, the rattlesnakes not the people who do like them, generally hit them with a shovel until they’re dead. It is said by those folks who do like rattlesnakes that one of the reasons we should take these rattlesnakes close to our bosoms, are of the opinion that they do good by eating rodents, therefore let’s have them hang around doing that. Others say “Nope. Don’t think so. Gonna kill ’em”.  We believe that if they, the rattlesnakes, want to act that way they should do it way, and I mean way far away from where good American taxpaying citizens hang around. So there is a difference of opinion there.

It’s amazing that the Redtail hawk sides with the shovel smacking people and kill every one of those rattlers they see. They also pass this trait on to the young Redtail hawks by bringing home the snake, often still wriggling, for their little ones to eat. We at The Institute believe this is laudable behavior and compliment the Redtail parents on their good sense whenever we chance to speak with them.

The image above, which was taken just across the highway from our mailbox, shows the Redtail parent in the act of taking the rattlesnake it has just that moment caught, to a tall telephone pole where it would begin the process of making it not alive. Then it flew it back to the nest for the young to eat. We cheered and gave it the universal thumbs up gesture of approval before returning to sorting out the bills from the junk mail, then throwing the entire mess in the dumpster. I know, you’re saying if you’re just going to throw it all in the dumpster why bother sorting it out. We sort because every once in a while there is a check in there and then we’d have to go back and do dumpster diving which is not very dignified for a Director of a major Institute like ours to be doing. Which of course brings us to, if you’re looking for nominations for the “Most Useful Bird of the Year” award we heartily recommend Nature’s helper the Redtail hawk. Remember vote now and vote often. These birds need our support.