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My dinosaurs are cranky

Illustration by RJPalmerArt

Happy Leap Day!

I ran across a neat article about a dinosaur exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. I looked up the show only to find out it closed in January of 2017.

I hate the Internet sometimes.

Screw it. Still a neat article. It’s a NatGeo about feathered dinosaurs. I mean, we’ve known some had feathers for a long while, but the article went into more detail.

T. Rex was definitely feathered, apparently, because they fossils of his cousin, Yutyrannus Huali, have plumage.

I remind you that a chicken is a living dinosaur, and I wish to inform you my dinosaurs are very unhappy at the moment. It has not ceased to rain. I can recall on one hand the days without rain in the last six months. The lawn around the chicken run is mud, and the mud is now the consistency of chocolate pudding.

Three times a day, I pull on my wellies and squish out to feed wet, unhappy birds. The straw of their bedding just seems to suck moisture from the air. I can’t tell what’s mud and what’s chicken shit, I just know I come in covered in it. I’m sneaking heavy bags of wet straw and chicken shit into the household trash hoping I don’t get done for industrial waste.

I’m amazed none of the birds has gotten sick.

And tomorrow, we’re getting tropical storm Jorge (the Spanish named this one). High winds, rain and hail. I’m so utterly beyond sick of it, Oh My God.

But, hey, at least I didn’t mention the flu! Good weekend, everyone.

Comments


Comment from ExpressoBold
Time: February 29, 2020, 2:13 pm

No comments yet?

I know he was 96 but still sad to see an imaginative physicist pass on… if only Kneel deGrassy Trysome had his imagination:

Freeman John Dyson FRS (15 December 1923 – 28 February 2020) was an English-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician known for his work in quantum electrodynamics, solid-state physics, astronomy and nuclear engineering.

– wikipedia


Comment from Some Vegetable
Time: February 29, 2020, 3:56 pm

Stoaty, when I lived in Panama all the closets in the house had 100 watt incandescent light bulbs in them that were left burning on all the time. They generated enough heat to reduce the humidity in the closets and thus reduce the inevitable mold encroachment. I know electricity is expensive there, but it might help to have 400 or 500 watts of heat (about half of most smallest heaters) to reduce the chill and dampness in the coop and draw some of the moisture out of the straw. As they did in the closets you can shield the bulbs so they don’t flood the coop with light all the time and so that nothing flammable can fall on to the hot bulb itself.

Just a thought on a cold, dark, and damp particularly February day..


Comment from Bob Mulroy
Time: March 1, 2020, 5:48 am

Bring your birds in by the fire. It’s an opportunity to bond.


Comment from Durnedyankee
Time: March 1, 2020, 12:57 pm

Your helpful Virus update –

38% of Americans won’t drink Corona Beer right now.

I’ll leave you to contemplate that and it’s true meaning with regard to electing Presidents, Senators and Congr-asshats or anything these people have to say with regard to public and social policy of any kind.


Comment from Some Vegetable
Time: March 1, 2020, 2:55 pm

DurnedYankee –

I have been mulling the point you make in terms of the Bloomberg campaign. He’s really a very authoritarian uncharismatic figure, best known for having the cops rough up black kids with ‘Stop n’ Frisk’* and for attempting to ban big sodas for the peoples’ own good, like it or not.

Oh, and for being a charter member of ‘The evil top one percent of the Evil One Percent®️‘.

However he is (successfully?) testing the theory that if you advertise something, anything, enough, people will line up to buy it. We watch very little TV, and prerecord that which we do watch so as to be able to skip the commercials. Yet, as I flit past the ads at 3x speed, I see his grim countenance leering out at me for a second almost every time, almost exactly a subliminal reminder that “Big Brother Is Watching”

Despite all these negative factors, if you look at the daily national polls he is at 16.4 %, just behind Crazy Uncle Joe who is 18.8%, so he’s definitely in play. Of course Commissar Sanders is well out in front at 29.6% , but that is before his tragic heart attack at the Convention et hoc genus homne which will prevent him from being the nominee.

So Bloomberg may actually be able the nomination, and possibly the Presidency with raw cash.

I weep.

* I am not implying this did not produce the desired effect.


Comment from DurnedYankee
Time: March 1, 2020, 8:15 pm

Yeah, L’il Mike is an authoritarian, little doubt. And if we elect him he promises to give us Obamacare even better and harder than we got it last time. Glittering success that it was. We tried explaining deductibles to son #3’s friend when we were all keeping the health plans we had because we liked them. What a racket.

Then too, the fact that Sanders can run an open campaign, as a socialist, the sort of person we spent too many years fighting in ‘cold’ proxy wars all over the globe leaves me, well, these days, actually un-surprised.

The many years of promising we were going to take money from ‘the rich’ to pay for all this is paying off.

I’m right there with you weeping.


Comment from Mark Matis
Time: March 1, 2020, 11:13 pm

Do you need another one:

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/britains-loneliest-cat-looking-home-21608943

???


Comment from DurnedYankee
Time: March 2, 2020, 1:41 pm

Light Hearted question for the day:

Did you two take part in the Annual Wife Carrying contest this past weekend?

🙂

http://www.ecns.cn/hd/2020-03-02/detail-ifztzycc4785821.shtml

You could win a free trip to Finland for the finals!

Obviously virus zombies were ineligible.


Comment from Uncle Al
Time: March 2, 2020, 4:42 pm

@DurnedYankee – The wife-carrying contest was held in Dorking? HAHAHAHAAAHAAAHAAAHAHAHA!!


Comment from Drew458
Time: March 2, 2020, 5:18 pm

Some Veg – Beat me to it. A little electric heater with a fan might really help. Put a builder’s cloth screen around it, about 8″ out so the chooks can’t get too close. UK Amazon has the Auzkin model for £21; it has a fan and the low setting is only 600 watts.

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