Grandpaparazzi's Neighborhood

4/26/2020

BC Comic Strip Is The Greatest

Today's strip is very appropriate in this time of untruth from the highest office of the land.

BC Sunday April 26, 2020

2/21/2020

Our Democracy Is Under Attack

From the Russians?
Yes.
But that is not the worst...
The largest threat to our democracy is the man currently occupying the office of President of the United States.
He is systematically dismantling the very framework of our Constitution, step by step.
His most recent, and perhaps most egregious action to date, is the pardoning of his (duly convicted and sentenced) long time crony, who committed equally bad crimes as governor of Illinois.
This follows his pattern of surrounding himself with appointees to high offices in the government who swear allegiance only to himself, rather than to the United States.
He refuses to submit his appointees for proper approval by the Senate, but rather keeps them as 'acting' so that he can appoint anyone he wants (regardless of experience or knowledge, as long as they are loyal to him), and fire them at will if they happen to cross or resist his flagrant disregard for the law or the Constitution.
He has managed to bully every Republican member of the Senate into cowed submission to his whim.
He has conned a large part of the American public into believing that he is actually interested in the welfare of America and Americans.
He is not. The only -- ONLY -- thing he cares about his himself, his own aggrandizement, and power.
If he is elected for a second four years in office, he will do everything in his power to extend his hold on the office indefinitely, effectively making himself America's first -- and probably last -- monarch.

6/02/2019

Bike Ride To Smokies

I went a a bike ride to Clemson and North Carolina, to meet and ride with some friends from Louisiana. Unfortunately, I forgot to take photos most of the time.

An important stop the first day was at a McDonalds.

Fayette, Alabama was a neat small town, with a very nice courthouse. It was built in 1911 and is still in use as the county courthouse.

When our group went riding near the Smokey Mountain National Park on Wednesday, one of the motorcycles gave up the ghost. Efforts to revive it came to naught, so it was abandoned...here.

After returning to Clemson, three of us drove back up to the Smokies to camp for a night and to see the "synchronous fireflies".
Info about fireflies
The next day, we hiked to Laurel Falls.

We made it -- Laurel Falls.

Back home, Fly was practicing the yoga "Dead Dog" pose.

3/15/2019

Google Helps the Man Watch You

I thought this link Bruce Schneier mentioned in his CRYPTO-GRAM newsletter today was interesting:

Law Enforcement Request System

Bruce says: "Police departments across the country have been knocking at Google's door for at least the last two years with warrants to tap into the company's extensive stores of cellphone location data. Known as "reverse location search warrants," these legal mandates allow law enforcement to sweep up the coordinates and movements of every cellphone in a broad area. The police can then check to see if any of the phones came close to the crime scene. In doing so, however, the police can end up not only fishing for a suspect, but also gathering the location data of potentially hundreds (or thousands) of innocent people. There have only been anecdotal reports of reverse location searches, so it's unclear how widespread the practice is, but privacy advocates worry that Google's data will eventually allow more and more departments to conduct indiscriminate searches.
Of course, it's not just Google who can provide this information."

I only mention this so we can inform our kids/grandkids how things work nowadays... :o)

11/01/2018

One Month of Plastic Waste

Just to see how we are contributing to the problem in our everyday lives, we decided to collect our 'single-use' plastic waste for one month.

These photos show the amount of 'single use' plastic waste that the two of us accumulated during the month of October 2018.

It weighed 6.3 pounds (101 ounces).

Spread out to a single layer, it covered 30 square feet.

Extended to 1 year, it would weigh 74.3 pounds and cover 353 square feet.

If everyone in the United States (350 million) generated the same amount per person, the total would weigh 13.0 BILLION pounds and cover 1.42 MILLION acres or 2,217 square miles.

We had nearly no choice but to create this accumulation of non-degradeable rubbish, when we bought the products we regularly use.

This is why the world has this BIG problem!

(Yes, I know there are many other BIG problems facing the world; this just happens to be the one that caught my attention. :)

10/01/2018

Plastic

This is not meant to alarm anyone or otherwise cause angst or distress...

There was a segment about plastic waste on PBS the other night. So I did a quick search and learned :
In the last 60 years the world has produced approximately 1.1 metric tons (2400 pounds) of plastic for every man, woman, child and infant alive today. 79% of that has accumulated in landfills or litter, much of which ends up in the oceans. There is more and more -- the annual production of plastic resin and fiber produced has been doubling every 15 years.

My mind stumbles at the thought of my very own ton of plastic waste piled up in my back yard.

I am now trying to avoid purchasing single-use plastic items: straws, cups, packaging, ziplok bags, take-away containers, medicine bottles...on and on.

It is hard to do that - it is so ubiquitous. Today I bought a gallon of milk in a throw-away plastic jug. I would have paid 4 times as much if I had chosen half-gallons of milk in paper cartons. Maybe I should have.

For the month of October, I am going to accumulate all the plastic waste for our household, to see what it looks like (if there is enough room in our back yard. :)
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Reference:
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/plastic-produced-recycling-waste-ocean-trash-debris-environment/
http://www.theworldcounts.com/themes/our_environment