I’ve written before about Phoebe the hummingbird and her awesome live webcam in Southern California. You’ll recall she had the chick, Sassy, who did not develop normally and died despite last-minute human intervention. Since then, she has been incubating two new eggs in another nest in the same lovely rosebush. They are due to hatch this weekend, probably in the early morning, according to the knowledgeable folks who visit the site.
Phoebe's eggs are the size of Tic-Tacs, in a nest the size of a golfball.
Just a few miles from Phoebe is another hummer webcam. This one features Buzzie Bea and her two chicks, Velcro and Zipper. These adorable little guys will steal your heart. You can see their fuzzy colors, something poor Sassy never developed. Viewers are now betting on when these two hummers will fledge, or leave the nest. Many are guessing it will happen this weekend.
Things are getting snug for Velcro and Zipper, even with Mom away.
Both webcams are well worth visiting, if only to soak up the luscious spring color and the sounds of light breezes, windchimes, and birds calling in the background. Great balm for the winter-weary soul.
Oops!
Next time you see one of those Falling Rock signs along the highway, pay attention. Sometimes the rocks look like this:
Monday along I-70 in Glenwood Canyon west of Denver, there was a rock slide, to put it mildly. Some of the errant boulders were bus-sized. They punched holes through two lanes of bridge decking and shattered across all four lanes. Luckily the slide occurred during the night, when traffic is lighter, and no one was injured.
A 17-mile stretch of the Interstate is closed now, and no one knows when it will be re-opened. Because the area is in a narrow canyon, no nearby detour is possible, so a daily average of 25,000 vehicles will be forced to drive some 200 miles out of their way.
Yep, those signs are in ALL CAPS for a reason.
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Update, March 10: Nature has a cruel sense of humor. Today a woman riding in a car along one of the I-70 alternate routes was killed when a basketball-sized boulder smashed through the roof of the car.
Regarding health care reform:
“I’ll just tell you this, if this passes and it’s five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented — I am leaving the country. I’ll go to Costa Rica.” – Rush Limbaugh
Hey, Washington, hurry up with that bill!!!
I just caught Philadelphia’s Mayor Nutter on CNN talking about his city’s proposed tax on soda. In the last few years I’ve often heard about proposed “fat taxes” on sodas, snack foods, and other items deemed unhealthy for Americans.
Until now, I sort of shrugged off the whole idea. Yes, I’m still furious that laws about cooking with animal fats ruined McDonald’s french fries, but a couple of extra cents for a a bottle of soda wasn’t going to bother me, except in principle. However, as the Philadelphia story was running, I noticed the info at the bottom of the screen: the proposed tax is 2¢ per ounce. Per ounce! I checked one of the 2-liter bottles I had in the kitchen: 67.6 ounces. That’s a tax of $1.35 per bottle!
Damn! That would be more than $5 a week for me! Just in soda taxes. And I’m not even a soda sinner. I only buy the diet stuff.
Where does the government get off telling us what we can and can’t eat, anyway? Keeping us safe from contaminated food, mislabeled food, meat from diseased animals, etc. Fine; that’s their job. Requiring detailed, accurate nutrition information on food labels. Great idea; I appreciate it. But telling us what we can and can’t eat, and then enforcing it with laws limiting or penalizing our choices? Absolutely not. We never voted to establish a food police department.
And don’t try to justify such a tax by telling me fat people and their health problems are costing us all a lot of money in health care. Penalizing my food choices because someone else has a weight problem is wrong. What I eat is none of your damn business. My doctor’s, maybe. But definitely not yours.
So there. End of rant.
Education funding cuts
Cutting funding to education? No wonder students are protesting today. The resulting tuition hikes in many cases will be so large that students already on tight budgets won’t be able to stay in school. Teachers will be fired, some classes will be eliminated, others will get much larger. I don’t agree with the students out there chanting “Education should be free”; that’s just plain pie-in-the-sky naive. But cutting funds to education, especially in the form of sudden, large, unexpected chunks, is ridiculously short-sighted. Students are the future of this country. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot …
Bing searches
Doing an image search on Bing? Maybe you’ve noticed, as I have, that although your search may turn up hundreds of thousands of results, noted proudly at the top of the returns page, you can only view the first 1000. I’ve been frustrated for months, seeing all those returns and not being able to get to a “page two” of search results. Finally wrote to Bing about it. They say it’s that way on purpose. There is no way to see the 1001st image or beyond. As gamers say, “working as intended.” I guess Bing thinks their “decision engine” is so good that whatever I want is sure to be in the first 1000 images they turn up. They think wrong. And I still don’t see why they brag they’ve found a gazillion results if they aren’t going to show them to me.
Starbucks and guns
Starbucks has announced that pistol packin’ customers are welcome in its stores. Saying it’s legal to do so wherever state laws allow gun carrying is all well and good. But they and other businesses should know that where firearms are in evidence, my patronage won’t be. I don’t care if it’s legal. Everyday citizens who feel a need to carry firearms in public worry me. Starbucks also had the option to ban firearms in their stores. They had to decide which segment of the population they wanted to serve — those who choose to carry guns or those who prefer not to be around people who carry them. Personally, I’d have guessed most of their customers and potential customers fell in the latter category. But they’ve decided. And so have I.
Kids in the control tower
Kids in the JKF air traffic control tower? Not cute. Don’t try to tell me it was okay because nothing happened … this time. Don’t tell me it was okay because the planes in question were on the ground. Lots of airline accidents happen on the ground. Air traffic controllers are supposed to have extraordinarily good judgment and the ability to make correct split-second, life-and-death decisions. However experienced they might be, I’d say this dad and his supervisor have amply demonstrated they lack the judgment to be in a control tower.
Health care reform bill
I thought I had a pretty good idea of how reconciliation works in Washington. With both the House and Senate having voted on their respective versions of a health care reform bill, I thought it now went to a committee, which would somehow cobble a merger of the two and spit out the result, dictated by the majority party, as a finished bill for the president to sign into law. But I heard an explanation last night that made it sound like even after the president has signed it, the bill goes back to the Senate to be tinkered with some more. I guess the pundits were right when they said reconciliation is an arcane process understood by very few people.
As for whether this bill deserves life, breath, and the light of day … uh, no. Not anymore. It’s been nitpicked to death by both houses of Congress to the point where there’s probably not a politician in there who could pass a pop quiz on its contents. And even though Pres. Obama jumped in this week, very belatedly, and called for an up-or-down vote in the next few weeks, the damage has been done and the opportunity lost. This is an election year, and there’s not a politician in Congress who isn’t weighing his or her vote with an eye to election results this fall. The interests of the American public no longer have any bearing — if they ever did.
