Covering cracks with toilet paper

Littleton, Colorado road crews are placing toilet paper over freshly sealed pavement cracks. 

The TP, applied with a paint roller, absorbs the oil from freshly laid tar as it dries, keeping it from sticking to people’s shoes or car and bike tires. With the paper’s protective abilities, asphalt isn’t tracked all over the city or splattered on wheel wells. And the biodegradable paper breaks down and disappears in a matter of days.

But... "Don’t use two-ply bath tissue... the upper ply doesn’t absorb the oil and ends up blowing into people’s yards."

Clever.

Via Nothing To Do With Arbroath.

Welcome to the Galapagos

An excerpt from the initial program in the new Planet Earth II series on BBC.

Holy cow.

Remembering Selma Finseth

In the 1920s and 1930s, Selma Finseth (nee Distad) raised seven children on a family farm in south-central Minnesota.  Her parents had emigrated to the United States from Distad, a small village on Norway's Fjaerlandfjord - a northern branch of the Sognefjord.

In the 1980s three members of our family visited some very distant relatives in the Fjaerlandfjord.  They kindly copied a lineage for us from a family bible -  a complex tree of Distads, Olsons, Endresons/Andresons, and Torsons back to Endre Distad (my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather, born in 1623).  The Distads and other Norwegian families had followed the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply, but the arable land in Norwegian fjords limited the degree to which family farms could be subdivided to future generations, so in the mid-1800s the Distads and many other Scandinavians joined a diaspora to the fertile farmlands of frontier America.

Selma married Knut Olaus Finseth and settled in to family life in Goodhue County in south-central Minnesota.  She was determined that her children would be "Americans," not Norwegians, so she forbade the speaking of Norwegian in the home (except when the parents wanted to keep secrets from the children).   In about 1927 she gathered her four daughters for a family portrait (clockwise from upper left: Ona Thilla Finseth, Edith Gertrude Finseth, Sylvia Beatrice Finseth, Marian Agnes Finseth).

"Selma told the girls to put on their summer dresses and to stay clean while waiting for the arrival of the photographer. Well, little Marian (who described herself as the maverick of the family) decided to climb a tree to look inside the robin's nest and climbed back down in a dirty dress. Selma instructed her to go and put on her winter dress, which is what she is wearing in the photo. "

The guiding principles were a strong Christian faith (and Lutheran doctrine), a devotion to family, and hard work.  That work began as soon as children were able to walk; the first chores for a small child would be to take a basket around the farmyard and barns to find where the chickens had hidden their nests, and gather the eggs for breakfast.  Edythe Finseth remembered proudly her contributions as a youngster.

"She wore a huge bonnet in the summer sun, so that neighbors said it looked "like a big hat was driving the rig." She learned to drive that team of horses in a straight line so the cultivating tines wouldn't disturb the planted corn. She was 8 years old at that time."

Those girls and their brothers lived through the Great Depression, served in WWII, married, and scattered around the United States.  After Sylvia Beatrice Finseth married and raised her own family, she went back to school to study for an M.A. degree.  One course requirement was the writing of an essay, for which she chose to profile her mother Selma.  That essay is reproduced below, not just to archive a family history, but to offer to some interested readers additional insight into the daily lives of farm families of that era:

(last page larger not for emphasis but as a result of the photocopying process).

Selma Finseth's job in Chicago was as a housemother for female students in a nursing school.  She eventually retired to a room in a Minneapolis hotel, and died in 1964 at the age of 74.  She was justifiably proud of the successes of her children, and would be even more pleased and amazed at the diversity and achievements of the next two generations.

Addendum:  When I originally posted this story, I inadvertently omitted the 7th page of the text, which dealt with the Dust Bowl years and the foreclosure and loss of the family farm.  A big hat tip to a reader who noticed the discontinuity in the text.  Fixed now.

Tom Rush still sings to my generation

YouTube link. 

When I was a student in Boston in the 1960s I occasionally visited a "folk music club" called Club 47. The most memorable evening was the one I spent sitting on the floor at the feet of a young woman with a guitar and a crystal-clear voice; her name was Judy Collins, and she later moved on to larger venues.

One of the regular performers at Club 47 was Tom Rush. He performed blues and folk music that spoke to the concerns of my generation. He still does, but the concerns of my generation have changed...

(Found at Bits and Pieces)

Reposted from 2009 because this week I underwent some "neurocognitive testing" which involved choosing which shape comes next in a sequence and remembering lists of 15 objects and reciting 7-digit numbers backwards.

Guilty as charged

As an English major, I approve of this cartoon.

Tornado distribution in the United States

It's quite remarkable how few watches occur in New England and the country west of the Great Plains.

Data from NOAA/NWS via Paul Douglas' outstanding weather blog.

Reposted from 2010 to add this image:

Source.

Cosmic caterpillar

This is the larva of Eudocima phalonia, the Common fruit-piercing moth.

Image cropped for size from the original posted at the Pics subreddit.

Opening a new book

This is the method I was taught as a youngster.  Irrelevant nowadays?  I don't know.

Via Nag on the Lake.

Caption contest

One of the finalists in the 2016 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

Your bicycle needs a "pool noodle"

As reported in The Star:

Daily commutes used to be tough for Warren Huska, who cycles 18 kilometres from his home near the Beaches to his office in North York almost every day... 

But, for the past year, drivers have given Huska a wider berth. Now, when he mounts his trusty two-wheeled steed, Huska is protected by a pool noodle. Strapped to his bike’s frame with bungee cords, the floppy foam cylinder is a reminder to drivers not to get too close...

The change he noticed was “almost magical,” Huska said. “Suddenly all the cars are changing lanes to go around me.”..

“I’m unconcerned about looking good,” Huska said. “I’m concerned about my safety most.”

Photo credit Randy Risling / Toronto Star

Xray of a pregnant dog

Posted and discussed at the Pics subreddit.

"Marrying libraries"

This summer I received an unexpected phone call from Charlie, my roommate of 40 years ago, who
called to tell me that he was getting married.  He was a bit startled when one of my first questions was whether he and his new bride had considered the question of "marrying their libraries."

My question arose because I had recently been reading Anne Fadiman's delightful 1998 book Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader.  I'll let her explain:

A few months ago, my husband and I decided to mix our books together. We had known each other for ten years, lived together for six, been married for five. Our mismatched coffee mugs cohabited amicably; we wore each other's T-shirts and, in a pinch, socks; and our record collections had long ago miscegenated without incident, my Josquin Desprez motets cozying up to George's Worst of Jefferson Airplane, to the enrichment, we believed, of both. But our libraries had remained separate, mine mostly at the north end of our loft, his at the south. We agreed that it made no sense for my Billy Budd to languish forty feet from his Moby-Dick, yet neither of us had lifted a finger to bring them together. We had been married in this loft, in full view of our mutually quarantined Melvilles. Promising to love each other for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health—even promising to forsake all others—had been no problem, but it was a good thing the Book of Common Prayer didn't say anything about marrying our libraries and throwing out the duplicates. That would have been a far more solemn vow, one that would probably have caused the wedding to grind to a mortifying halt. We were both writers, and we both invested in our books the kind of emotion most people reserve for their old love letters. Sharing a bed and a future was child's play compared to sharing [our books]...

By far the hardest task came toward the end of the week, when we sorted through our duplicates and decided whose to keep. I realized that we had both been hoarding redundant copies of our favorite books “just in case” we ever split up. If George got rid of his beat-up copy of To the Lighthouse and I said goodbye to my genital-pink paperback of Couples, read so often in my late teens (when Updike’s explorations of the complexities of marriage seemed unimaginably exotic) that it had sundered into a triptych held together with a rubber band – well, then we would clearly have to stick together for good. Our bridges would be burned.

Charlie's response to my question was that he and Susan had blended their libraries long ago, so I knew then that their marriage was destined for success.

The embedded photo, btw, is of a bookcase in my home office.  I used that image in the introductory post for the series of about 40 posts I wrote featuring bookcases and libraries in the homes of readers of this blog.  It is a wonderful collection of eclectic libraries, and well worth your perusal.  Maybe I should fire up that topic again with more photos and stories from recent readers.

"Before the Flood" (National Geographic)

YouTube link.

Real Life Adventures

 

How to circum-incise your weiner

YouTube link. 

Totally safe for work.