Hot, Sick Trees and The Ear

Greetings Earthlings!  How are things in your neck of the woods.  They're hot in our neck.  This is what Weather Underground is showing in their forecast.  Our red maple is dropping leaves.  It is not happy with these temperatures.  I can't believe it's going to hit 108F (42.2C) on Sunday.  There will be no riding for us.

We did ride Monday.  It was warm, but not brutal.  First time in almost a month, and we could tell we had been off the bikes for awhile.  It was pleasant by the lake.  There is a new camp host with a large US flag, with its own solar light so he can leave it out at night.  I don't get why people feel compelled to show the flag all the time, especially the guys in the pick up trucks with the flag poles stuck in the stake pockets. 

This guy was heading out to fish.  He had a gallon of water for him, a bucket of water for the fish, fishing gear and a chair.  That's a person powered vehicle.

Winter of 2022-2023 there was a cold snap of epic proportions.  It was zero or less for about a week.  Several of the neighbors lost mature bushes.  Our neighbor the arborist suspects that the Rose of Sharon plants were damaged in that cold period.  They are only marginally hardy in this climate, so it's not surprising.  These are terrible pictures, but if you look closely, you can see some leaves, and then other branches with no leaves.

This is the other one.  It's looking very sad.

There is new growth at the bottom of the plant.  Maybe there is hope for these things.  I'm not going to dig them up just yet.

I've been running a slow hose on them for an hour every day, trying to breathe some life into them.  This is another plant I don't understand why people plant them here.

We had the yearly home owners' meeting recently.  The Firewise guy came to talk about urban fire danger.  One of the things they're stressing is think about what you choose to plant near your house; things like arborvitae, junipers and firs are a bad idea.  They go up like torches.  We put a juniper in the front yard in 2022, never occurred to me that it was a bad idea.  It has since grown like a weed.  We're on the fence about taking it out.  The surviving arborvitae in the back yard would have to be dug up by people we pay, they're old, have giant root balls, and they're too big for the elderly to remove.  It's always something.

The hydrangeas are a bright spot in the yard.

Here is the republican candidate yesterday at the RNC convention.  What do you notice?

Later he came out with a bandage on his boo-boo.  Today Eric Trump said that his father required no stitches what so ever.  Grazed by a bullet my dying ass.  Local police have said that all bullets have been recovered, and that the orange menace was hit by flying glass. 

Apparently the MAGA people have discovered that JD Vance is married to an immigrant from India, and they're fairly shocked and dismayed.  Nick Fuentes is quite upset about this, he feels that white people are currently under attack, and mixed marriages are one of the ways white people are being replaced.  Such lovely people.  Video is here if you want to watch him discuss this.

On the medical front, here is an amazing article.  I did not know this, leukemia can now be treated with immunotherapy.  Glioblastoma, a hard tumor that is invariably fatal, has been treated in three people in a new study.  Basically they remove T cells from your blood, gene edit them to go kill the tumor and inject them into your head.  It's not ready for prime time, and won't be for some time, but it's a technical miracle that any progress has been made on this front.  It's a long read, but it's written in regular English and is very interesting.

That's it, that's all I have to say.