Author: Steve

 

The wealth difference between billionaires and us is staggering.  We’re just a speck on any scale that includes their numbers.  Then we cross the border and the people that are begging for coins; their wealth is just a speck on any scale that includes our number.  From their perspective, there is probably no difference between us and billionaires.

 

 

 

I know I’ve talked about the pigeons I raised as a kid.  I started off with homers.

Dad would drive away with them in the morning and let them go on his way to work.  I’d wait at home for them to show up back at the home roost.  My partners in pigeons were Danny Murphy and David Frazier, two other kids in the neighborhood that I could swap birds and bird stories with.

 

I also had some fancy pigeons as well.  I recently looked around the internet and found some pictures of the pigeons I used to breed.  There were Fantails.

When Fantails are ready to strut, they open their tail like a peacock.

 

Helmets.

Kind of an understated elegance to helmets.

 

We had Pouters.

Although Pouters were more David Frazier’s specialty than mine.

 

We had tumblers we could fly.

Some of the fancy pigeons don’t really fly much anymore.  They’re more for standing around than flying.  But tumblers can be flown.  They’ll fly around in circles overhead and periodically do a bunch of backwards somersaults, then pick right back up flying again before they hit the ground.  It’s kind of a weird thing to do.

 

There was the almost-mythical Jacobin.

We saw pictures of them in books from the library, but they were not a local bird.  None of us were ever able to get our hands on one.

 

And my specialty, the Frillback.

They were the most expensive pigeon I could get – I think they were fifteen dollars a pair – and I had success breeding them.  One pair of pigeons will raise two chicks at a time, and have several broods a year.  Many a high-school class of mine was spent calculating how many Frillbacks I would have to raise and sell to be rich; richer than I would already be, just by having that many Frillbacks.

 

Alas, when the free-range guinea pigs I had in the enclosure behind the garage, where the pigeon coop was, escaped into the neighbor’s yard and the neighbor called the police because she thought she had been invaded by giant rats, the police notified us that there were no rules about loose guinea pigs, but the pigeon coop was in violation of local codes.  I had to get rid of all the pigeons.  Coincidentally, I was ready to move on to other things anyway, like girls and cars, so I sold the whole pigeon stock to David Frazier and went my way.

 

 

Did I ever tell the story about introducing Judy to grunion hunting?  Living in Long Beach, a few blocks from the ocean, if we paid attention, we’d find newspaper articles about when the grunion were running.  Then, all we had to do was go to the beach and watch the waves.  The waves would break, roll into shore, slide up the beach, then slip back into the ocean without event.  Except at just the right time, one of those waves would leave the sand full of small fish, all wiggling to get their tails down into the sand to lay their eggs, before they got washed back out to sea by the next wave.

(Not my photos.)

 

 

 

We waited and waited, and sure enough, right around midnight the next wave brought in swarms of grunion.  Judy was amazed.  She was impressed.  And she was surprised.  Turns out, all this talk about grunion hunting, she thought it was just an elaborate excuse to go make-out on the beach at night; like a snipe hunt or watching the submarine races.  She didn’t know we were actually going to see fish!

 

 

 

I used to settle for a sluggish mouse on a decorative mouse pad.  That didn’t work well.  I discovered that a wireless optical mouse and a slick mouse pad make life easier.

.

 

 

 

 

After a year or so the effectiveness of the mouse pad starts to degrade and it’s worth it to replace it with a fresh one.  We want to be quick to spend a few dollars on tools that will make us more comfortable and productive at work.  Every little bit helps.

 

 

We know that, due to the rotation of the earth, hurricanes in the northern hemisphere rotate counterclockwise.  Typhoons in the southern hemisphere rotate clockwise.  But what if a tropical storm forms south of the equator and moves north.  Does the equator kill it and the storm goes away?  Would the storm continue, but without rotation?  The storm winds would be so much stronger than the rotational force of the earth at that latitude, could the storm cross the equator and keep the same rotation, which would break the rules?  Would it die as a clockwise cyclone and be reborn as a counter-clockwise hurricane?