Saturday, September 12, 2020

People, Cats and the New Unimproved Blogger

I'm writing this with the new blogger.  I really, really hate this software.

One of the (many) things I hate the most is they have taken away your ability to easily go back in time to edit an old post.  In legacy blogger you could skip through the old posts 100 at a whack until you got there.  Now you have to continue to scroll down as it loads more posts.  It's really time consuming and it makes me crazy because there was a better way to do it until the geniuses at Google decided we didn't need that functionality.

I read somewhere that new wretched blogger puts your photos in the post in alphabetical order.  I can't confirm this yet, but if true, this is also stupid.  I also hate the way they are displaying html.  It makes it very difficult to figure out how it relates to the actual text. 

This is a mule tail deer in the yard across the street.  The guy who lives there puts out water and food.  Both of these are forbidden activities in the neighborhood.  He's the reason why we have so many javelinas roaming around here.  For awhile he was putting out meat which was attracting coyotes and bob cats, which were facing off and defending turf.  Anyway, this is why we can't have flowers, only spiky things.

The lemon tree has set fruit, which is still very green.  It will be months before it's ripe.  It has also put out one solitary blossom.

This is part of the project to armor the gravel so the small animals don't make wallows in the dirt.  We did two more sections the other day.  So far they haven't moved the rocks around.

Steve Reed's post this morning was thought provoking.  There are too many people, which is tough on the animals.  In the Aleutian islands the sea otters are disappearing.  Their populations have dropped by about 90%.  The salmon are gone because people ate them and destroyed their habitats.  The orcas are starving and eating the otters.  Because the otters are not there, the sea urchin populations are exploding.  The sea urchins are eating the kelp and the algae reefs.  The entire ecoystem is collapsing.   More is at NYT.

Meanwhile, the otters in California are in decline.  Why?  Toxoplasmosis from house cats, and feral cats.  People clean out the litter box and flush it down the toilet.   The toxoplasmosis makes it through the waste water treatment plants and ends up out at sea where it accumulates in the kelp and the otters pick it up.  It destroys their brains.  So, put the poop in the trash so it goes to a land fill.  More is at NYT.

Meanwhile in Oregon, the right wing militia dudes are convinced that Antifa is in the area setting fires and looting.  So, they are manning road blocks and stopping people they think are suspicious.  They have guns and they're not blessed with an abundance of critical thinking skills.  Why do they believe Antifa is on their way?  They've been listening to police and fire scanners.  The Bureau of Land Management has been involved in discussions.  What do we call that bureau?  BLM.  That's it, there is a strong suspicion that the alt right guys heard BLM and figured Antifa was on the way.  It would be funny if there wasn't such a potential for tragedy.

4 comments:

  1. I hate the new blogger too and am still using the legacy version and will until it is no longer available. the new version is so much more difficult and time consuming. in the legacy I can just drag an image from my finder into the blog post body. one step. can't do that in the new version.

    oh yes, we humans are destroying all other life which in turn is destroying the very ecosystem that we need to survive. humans are so stupid for being so smart.

    and why the fuck aren't those right wingers being arrested for illegal roadblocks and questioning people? they have no authority to do so.

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  2. I was so confused with a comment you made about toxoplasmosis and house cat waste. It never occurred to me people were flushing the litter boxes. Living on a septic system for close to forty years. it never crossed my mind. It does not alter the rate at which we are flushing the entire ecosystem.
    I think post election we will have to figure out what to do about militias. They were a sort of joke for most of my life, but now, like so much undealthwith stuff, they are very real and very much a problem

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  3. Thanks for the mention. At every turn we're hearing dire news about the ecosystem in one way or another. There was a time when I thought major changes to the planet wouldn't happen in my lifetime, but now I'm not so sure that's true. There could easily be a lot of essentially extinct species by the time I (now in my mid-50's) become extinct myself. It's paralyzingly depressing. Thanks for those links, BTW -- I read the Times every day but I'd missed both of those stories.

    The paranoia about Antifa is just so, so bizarre. There's not even any such thing as Antifa, at least not in an organized sense, but right-wingers make it sound like a monolithic presence.

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    1. Oh, and re. New Blogger -- I have found that I now have to upload photos one at a time, positioning them where I want them in my post. Otherwise New Blogger doesn't keep them in the proper order. I didn't realize they were being organized alphabetically (or numerically?), but something is definitely out of whack.

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