Ring of Copper

In 1963, the U.S. launched millions of copper needles into space to try a new radio communication strategy. Months later, the needles fell out of orbit.

View the video that tells all.

A Visit from the Bing Maps Streetside Car

About 4:30 PM today, the Bing Maps Streetside car came through our neighborhood. 

My daughter saw the car go down the street and we knew it would have to come back our way because we live in a neighborhood of dead ends. About 5 minutes later, it came by again. We waved as it passed and the driver honked at us, but it remains to be seen if we will be on the map! 

The Google Maps car has yet to make a visit in our neighborhood, so it was nice to see the Microsoft-mobile!

Oliver and Shaq

Oliver and Shaq

Our family lost a member Thursday morning: our first cat, Oliver. 

As a kitten nearly 16 years ago, he followed my wife home when she was walking our first dog QT-Pie and he moved in after some pushback from me. Turns out, Oliver and me hit it off and he became my best buddy, my "Big O" and always greeted me when I came home from work.

Oliver and QT-Pie were the only males in our menagerie and they became best friends. After QT-Pie died three years ago, one of our female cats, Shaq, seemed to replace QT-Pie in Oliver's life. The two cleaned each other and usually slept with each other.

After Oliver died, Shaq seemed to be lost looking all around the house for her friend. Friday night, when I took our second dog, Pumpkin Pie, out for last call, Shaq got out. She seldom gets out, but must have thought her friend was outside, so she went looking for him. Shaq was out until nearly 3 AM. 

I think Shaq found Oliver because the next day, I found a dead mouse neatly placed right in the middle of Oliver's grave!

What’s wrong with this picture?

I received the above envelope from a Boston area eBay seller containing stamps I purchased for my collection. 

At first blush, the envelope looked innocuous: three commemorative stamps, 4¢, 20¢ and 25¢ denominations adding up to 49¢, the current rate for First Class Mail for 1-ounce letters.

I did not notice anything unusual until I took scissors to the envelope to clip off the stamps. Only then did I notice that the 25¢ denomination stamp was not a U.S. stamp; rather it was a United Nations stamp (Scott #284 from 1977)!

UN stamps (or any foreign country’s stamps) cannot be used for postage for mail originating in the U.S., yet this one got through the USPS system with a Boston, Mass. postmark.

Believe it or not!

12-13-14

12-13-14 is today's was yesterday's date. We won't see that happen again for awhile!

A very cool radio

In the mid-1950’s, Philips introduced a refrigerator with a built-in radio. It was sold in Europe and as it ads proclaimed “even America does not know about it yet!”

Here is a French advertisement for the Radiofrigo.

Here are photos of the unit from an exhibit at Musee EDF Electropolis, Mulhouse in France:

Christmas in Connecticut

This is nuts! December 22, 2013, the temperature at 2PM is 64 degrees Fahrenheit here on Compounce Mountain.

Mushrooms

Look what I found growing in my backyard over the weekend. That mass of mushrooms is about 30 inches wide.

A friend says they are edible. I say anything is edible once.

What Did I See?

Yesterday, I was sitting in my car in the parking lot at 1132 Meriden Road, Waterbury, CT. At about 5:30 PM EDT, I looked up toward the east-southeast and saw a plane travel just above the treetops from left to right. It caught my eye because it looked like it had pontoons.

While watching the plane, I noticed the an object traveling in the opposite direction beyond the plane about 30 degrees above the horizon. The object was much farther away than the plane. It was just a point of light, a reflection of the sun moving very slowly out of a stratocumulus cloud into the clear sky.

The object did not travel in a straight path, but seemed to twist and turn slowly. As it did, the reflection would dim and the object would become a darker object momentarily, then the object would twist and turn again and become a point of light or reflection of the sun. It was as if one side of the object was very reflective, while the other side was dull and not reflective.

While I watched it, it traversed about 15 degrees in about 10 minutes along a generally horizontal path. Then it encountered another cloud bank and faded away into the cloud bank.

Weather conditions were partly cloudy, temperature 85ºF, a light westerly breeze, and no precipitation.

What did I see?

A balloon is my guess: a silver metallic balloon that they sell in stores for parties with graphics on one side (the dull side) and nothing on the other side (the reflective side).

The only thing that contradicts that guess is that if it was your standard party balloon, could I even see it considering how far away it seemed to be. The object came out of one stratocumulus cloud and disappeared into another. Stratocumulus clouds top out at about 6500 feet and these were at a 30 degree angle above the horizon not overhead, so who knows how many miles away the object was located.

Could I see a 12-inch wide balloon X miles away?

Whitney Houston Haunts My iPod

Whitney Houston died last weekend. I own her greatest hits CD containing 36 tracks, which I uploaded to my iPod years ago.  (My iPod is a sixth generation “Classic” with 160 GB capacity.)

With a total of 14,121 tracks stored on my iPod, Whitney's tracks represents a mere 0.25% of the iPod's contents.

I play my iPod during my 35-minute commute between home and work everyday and I usually listen in "shuffle" mode, which means the iPod randomly selects the tracks that it plays. In shuffle mode, the odds are 1 in 392 that the iPod will play a Whitney Houston song .

Believe it or not, my iPod played a Whitney Houston song every day last week during my morning commute. This morning, the first song my iPod played was a Whitney Houston song.

Weird!

It is still nuts!

It is the first day of February and the temperature reached 58.5° F early this afternoon on Compounce Mountain. Some locales in the state were in the 60s.

But cooler temps will prevail on Groundhog Day.

This is nuts!

It is the last day of January in west central Connecticut and the temperature reached 53.5° F early this afternoon. It is 9:50 PM as I type this and the temperature is 44°.

Tomorrow is supposed to be even warmer.

Go figure!

Wonder How Much an Apostrophe Costs?

Wenatchee, Washington

Valentine Day

Driving home from work today playing my iPod in random shuffle mode, a song comes on just as I turned on to the street where my house is located. The song is an instrumental that I don't recognize.

As I drive up to the driveway, I glance at the iPod to see what it is playing. It was a Paul McCartney tune from his first solo LP, McCartney. The name of the song was Valentine Day.

With 12,355 songs on my iPod, what are the odds?

Abbott and Costello Live

This actually happened on an episode of Antique Roadshow that I watched last night.

Very old gent brought a portrait of a woman to get an estimate of its value.

The antique expert says, "We think it was painted by a man named 'Ware.'"

Old gents asks, "Ware?"

The antique expert replies, "From Vermont."

I thought I was hearing a lost Abbott and Costello routine.

White Stuff

It snowed this morning, which represents the first frozen precipitation of the season. There was no accumulation, but in my opinion, it is too early for the white stuff to start falling from the sky.

Number 49

I assume it was the black bear tagged 49 that visited us on Saturday evening.

I was watching the news, then the screen went blank, and we lost the signal from the Dish Network satellite. That had never happened before, so I went outside to see if the dish had fallen off the roof.

It was in place, but as I was going back indoors, I hear my neighbors shouting to other neighbors, “There’s a bear in your yard!”

I did not see a bear, but the bird bath was knocked over and I didn’t do it.

By the way, I stopped feeding the birds after the last bear visit two weeks ago. I will resume feeding them when the snow flies.

Big Rock Candy Mountain

Late Sunday afternoon, I joined my harmonic and her boyfriend on a hike through the woods around our premises. We went on a trek that they had done before, but some of it was new to me.

About 30 minutes into the hike, they showed me a huge outcropping of quartz. I have seen small outcroppings in our neck of the woods before, but nothing like this.

In addition to the mountain of quartz, there were shards of loose quartz in a variety of sizes scattered throughout the area. Some of the pieces were sharp (I have a small puncture wound on my hand to prove it). Some of it looked like rock candy. I had never seen anything like it before.

The photo shows me on the side of “big rock candy mountain” taking it all in.

5.72 inches

Since the early morning hours of Sunday until now, the WA1LOU weather station has recorded 5.72 inches of rain!

Google-Verizon plan: Why you should worry

Dan Gillmore blogs that “Ominous references to the ‘public Internet’ inescapably suggest something else entirely.”

Read the rest of the story here to find out why you should worry.