Strange Fish - Smallmouth Buffalo

Perhaps because it is the "in between" times where not much is happening, but some of my hobbies might be getting a bit out of hand.  Several years back I picked up Geocaching.  It's harmless enough.  You follow gps coordinates and clues, you find something, you sign your name on a log.  Easy.   

But I decided it was more fun to make custom geocaches.  And series of hides.  Hence the Strange Fish series.  

The latest entry features this guy.  The Smallmouth Buffalo.  

This is actually an impressive fish.  It can get big, the Wisconsin state record is 81 pounds.  They can live a long time, perhaps a hundred years.  And while you've probably never caught one, or if you did thought it was just a carp, they are an important fish commercially and a prized target of bow fishermen.  This combination of growing big and being targeted by both commercial fishing nets and arrows has put their populations into a decline of late.....

So I needed a really good container for this geocache.  I started out with a slab of weathered, broken up railroad tie.  These are full of creosote and therefore pretty water resistant.  Here's the cache....

I think that's sneaky enough to avoid the casual eye..... But to those looking closely.....

These letters are engraved with a Dremel and highlighted with Sharpie.  A bit too evident at the moment but they will "age in" nicely in a month or two.  Oh, and if you open it up...

Hinges are straps of nylon from an old deer hunting harness.  Feet belong to me and to Hank the Dog.  Looking closer....

I've carved out a fish shaped hollow in the lower section to contain the waterproof inner container.  The latter has a laminated, hopefully waterproof picture of a Smallmouth Buffalo.  To help keep it waterproof there are various drain holes drilled into the bottom of the cavity.  The whole thing locks together with a peg that you can't see in this view.  Next time around I think I'll add some sort of locking pins making it a "gadget cache" to be figured out.

Here's the cache designation and coordinates.  Strange Fish #14.

Evil Smurfs

This started as me reading too quickly.  And without my glasses on.  Someone had written a piece about the lackluster summer movie season and among the listed films I saw The Smurfs 28 Years Later.  Of course there was a comma in there that I missed, but the idea of a Smurf Zombie movie intrigued me.  I mean, they already start out a sort of putrid blue color, and frankly zombies capable of biting you on the knee cap is a disquieting thought.

Because we live in times that defy satire I can report that the nasty little critter shown here is not a figment of my imagination.  No, there is a subgenre of Smurf lore in which some of them are not the cheerful little hypoxic Communards they usually try to pass for.

There actually was a Smurf episode called The Purple Smurf in which one of the standard blue Smurfs - Lazy Smurf as it happens - gets bitten by a weird insect and turns into effectively a zombie.

He becomes angry and hostile, hops around saying "Gnap, Gnap, Grnap!" and bites several other Smurfs who also transform.

Papa Smurf of course saves the day.  How?  Don't matter, most Zombie stories are short on logic and actual science.

The Purple Smurf episode aired in 1981, so just a few years after Dawn of the Dead.  The episode is considered by aficionados of Smurfdom to be a bit of a spoof.

But I ask you, is it fair that Smurfs be portrayed as villains?  Darn right, because that's basically what they are and always have been.

The Smurfs were created by a Belgian cartoon artist named Pierre Culliford, aka Peyo.  They first appeared in 1958.  They were a spin off from an earlier (1947) series he did called Johan and Peewit, which was set in Medieval times.  In it the titular characters encountered a little guy with blue skin.

If this sounds a bit, well, derivative its because  it is.  Or if you are being charitable there are only so many sources of inspiration, and Sleeping Beauty dwarves, the Roman era adventures of Asterix, even the Hobbits of the Shire all have common themes.  Asterix btw is roughly contemporary with the Smurfs, while JRR and Uncle Walt's creations were earlier.

The pointy hats, well, those are what are called Phrygian caps.  These are very well known from Roman times, and are sometimes called Liberty Caps.  Here's a coin commemorating the assassination of Julius Caesar....

Some Roman deities also went Smurfy style.  Notably Mithras and his attendants.  Oddly, the goddess Libertas usually did not.

As to the Smurfs being villains, well, sure.  But it was not as pejorative term as you might expect. The late Roman era and the early Medieval times had no sharp demarcation.  Rulers changed. Latin, which was probably not much spoken by the rustics anyway, moved over to the churches.  People mostly still lived in the same places as before, mostly did the same work.  Even Roman villas, the upgraded farmsteads where a gentleman could supervise his peasants then enjoy a hot bath and a bit of culture were not totally abandoned.  They just had new owners with a bit less class.

But the peasants who worked there?  Well for them it was pretty much Same Old.  By the Middle Ages, the period in which Peyo set his early work, the term Villain appeared.  Around 1300 if you want to be specific.  At that point villanus, meaning farm hand, had the connotation of "base, or low born rustic".  From there it was pretty much downhill, as in a few centuries it meant a man capable of any manner of gross wickedness".  Villainy if you prefer.

Well that's a long march from my mistaken - or actually was it? - concept of Smurfs as zombies.  One of the other people commenting on the initial discussion did run the basic idea through Chat GPT, asking for a synopsis for a movie script.  AI of course spat out predictable and unremarkable drivel.  I suspect that's all it will be capable of for many years to come.

Responding to the Bat Signal

In the course of exploring Forgotten Brewery Caves and other underground places I occasionally encounter bats.  This has led to collaboration with the Department of Natural Resources and their "bat people".  With the emergence of White Nose Syndrome and its disastrous impact on hibernating bats I sometimes show them new places where bats exist.  In return they've taken me on the occasional bat counting survey.  So I know my Wisconsin bats pretty well.

I can't say I'm a big fan.  They are still creepy, and if they bite you there is the matter of painful rabies shots.  Also, they have issues with boundaries.  More on that presently.  But I'm appreciative of all the bugs they eat, and on some level I am rooting for the under loved underdog species.

Recently I've gotten acquainted with some Big Brown Bats.  In the last month or so there have been five that have turned up in our house, usually doing frantic circles around our bedroom.  Here's a pleasant face to abruptly wake up to:

Yes, no fun to have that whispering squeak nothings in your ear, even if they are largely out of the range of human hearing.

In an old house this happens, so there's a routine.  I'm alerted to the presence of a bat.  I get out of bed, collect my gear, don additional garments, catch the bat with a fish landing net, then release it to the Great Outdoors.  How exactly they are getting access to our Great Indoors remains a mystery.

The other night I did a nifty mid air interception and brought the captive out to the front porch.  But his wing was pretty tangled up in the netting.  I tried this and that, eventually putting on gloves and snipping some parts of the net free.  Bat hopped, flopped and chittered away.  I hope all is well, there still seemed to be some net stuck to one wing.  I'm only going to do so much for my squeaky pals, not gonna risk rabies shots.  But it was time for an upgrade.

The landing net was now basically useless for fishing purposes.  Guess I'd snipped a few more strands of net than I'd figured.

So I decided to modify it as a dedicated bat catcher.

On the right is an old pillow case.  It almost but not quite fits over the aluminum parts of the net.

I affixed the pillow case to the inner aspect of the net, with the extra ballooning out the now enlarged holes in the net.

This way I can dispense with the trash can I generally bring on bat missions.  With this it should just be net 'em, then flip it over and trap the bat in the long "tail" of the net.

Various things could be used to make the attachment.  I had brown duct tape on hand.  And I figured Big Brown Bats might like it.

And of course, I asked my long suffering but occasionally appreciate wife to take a picture of me kitted out for the next Bat Capture.  Probably this level of preparedness means they'll quit sneaking in.  That would actually be ok.

In the Shadow of the Great Prairie Dog

I have not been traveling much this summer.  But some family members are.  Steeling themselves for the ordeal of long distance vacation driving my son and his family headed Out West.  Somewhere generally around Phillip South Dakota, on the edge of the Bad Lands, they encountered the World's Largest Prairie Dog.  It watches over a sort of gift store.

 

Well, that's not actually one of the pictures they sent me.  I borrowed it from Roadside America.  The latter is a fun site, I've sent them a few curiosities over the years.  Here's their write up on The Ranch Store and its guardian totem. 

The picture I actually was sent was taken as the blistering sun was getting low in the sky.  Still, it was 102 degrees at 5:30 pm.  Yikes.  I think the big guy looks a bit sinister seen from this angle.....

Mooching around in the only available patch of shade are a batch of actual prairie dogs.  They live there, enjoying an indolent existence where there are no predators, but a steady stream of tourists willing to feed them for one dollar a bag of "Dog" chow.

And, ya know, they are pretty cute little buggers.  Unless you happen to know a few things about them.  Like that they have been documented to transmit several diseases to humans.  Monkey Pox would be kind of bad.  And would require a bit of explaining.  But, helpful hint of the day, prairie dogs can transmit bubonic plague!!!  Lookin' a little less cute now???

And the Seasons Change

The official starting and ending dates of seasons are just dates on a calendar.  Life has other markers for change.  For instance, when I start to hear the sounds of the high school marching band practicing, summer is drawing to a close.

Of course there are other clues.  It's been a great year for growing things, so my hops are heading for a record crop.  Maybe I'll even brew beer with them this year.

The other day it was time to sign up for fall deer hunting tags.  Over the past months we've seen the deer on our land go from pregnant does, to skinnier does with spotted fawns, and now onto various family groupings.  The bucks seem to all hang out together, wandering around in a gang.  Sure, they all look friendly now, but when they all go crazy during mating season it will be another story.

No real summer trips.  Not much fishing, and only one new species to show for it.  Lots of robot stuff.  That season never really ends.  But it does have pauses.

We just finished the summer build with middle schoolers.  They did excellent work, and most of them seem to have caught the bug.  They've all signed up for our fall "Robot School".  And evidently invited all their friends.  So now I'm trying to figure how we can accommodate 20 students when we think our capacity for good instruction is about 12.  Hmmmm.

Well, its good to be busy.  In this brief interval between things I've got projects long delayed to take on.  And potentially some really big tasks in the year ahead.

See you around.

Ketchup, Mustard and their Little Pal RoboDog

I'm not an engineer, but its funny, there are some engineering concepts that translate to the real world.  Apply a lot of force to something and it moves.  Less force, maybe not.

Over the weekend we brought two robots to an off season competition.  One was "Mustard" the robot built by the high school team over a couple of months of  work.  Complex.  Had a rough outing at its first event but was heroic in the second tournament.  At its third event - the unofficial state tourney - it flagged a bit.  And it was mostly just sitting around since then.  A couple of the high school team members who had never driven it took a couple hours to see if they could learn it.

The other robot was Ketchup.  Built by middle schoolers over the course of 6 sessions.  Rugged, single minded, it was designed to do one thing.  Pick up those white pipes and drop them into the lowest tier of the scoring platform.  They worked hard on this project.

So....how did it turn out?

 Mustard, the high school robot struggled.  It was

designed to do one thing, score those pipes on the highest

scoring point.  Alas, just as one dog year equals seven

human years, so also with robots.  One month is about

seven human years, making Ketchup an old timer.

Old timers have aches and pains, things that go amiss

We had wiring issues deep inside the mechanisms, and

several matches the darn thing just sat there.  Worst

record of all robots there in the qualifying rounds.  True,

it got a bit happier towards the end.  Pit crew and the

new drivers learned a lot.  It got picked for an 

elimination round alliance based on how it ran its last few matches.

As for Ketchup, the middle school built machine...it was designed to do one thing and to do it very well.  Pick up those pipes and get them to the lowest scoring level reliably and fast.  10 per match please.  It's lining up for the shot in this picture, with its temporary number 9996.

And it did just that.  True, it only managed a bit more than 7 per match but to be fair it was called upon to play defense a few times or it would have come close.  The event kept detailed stats, and Ketchup finished ahead of several regular season robots in the won lost column (including its big brother Mustard) and number one in those L1 scores.  Design objectives achieved.

Ironically the two robot sibs were both on the same alliance in playoffs and did very well together.  They did not quite make it to the final round, but came close.

The matches will be available on Youtube in a few days.   I'll post some links then.  We may also put together a "Making of Ketchup" video down the road a bit.  In the meantime here's a bit of entertainment from the displays out in the lobby area.  Robot Dog.  Hank would go nuts seeing this...

Baby Bullhead Ballet

Immature bullheads are pretty darn cute.  Cuter than the adult version for sure.

I have not done much fishing this summer.  Lots of family stuff.  Lots of robot stuff.  But in my relentless quest to catch new species I have been out a few times.  Always in the odd places, backwaters, ditches, etc.

In one such place I came across a school of baby bullheads doing a very elaborate Bullhead Ballet.