What Could Go Wrong

Woolly mammoth set in a winter scene environment. Realistic 3d illustration.
Credit: Getty

This headline in my news feed caught my attention big time:
A New Company Wants To Resurrect The Woolly Mammoth

First, haven’t these people seen Jurassic Park? Hint, it ends very badly for a lot of people.

Secondly, this creature thrived in the Artic Tundra and by the time they work out all the issues with DNA editing, and more importantly, creating an external artificial uterus for gestating the embryos, will there be any artic tundra left with the current global warming situation?

At least they didn’t want to start with velociraptors…

Blacked Out

Back in Aiken the only team MLB.TV blacked me out from watching the Red Sox play was the Atlanta Braves which are 140 miles away. This was never a problem because our cable system carried TBS which broadcast the games. I could watch the Red Sox play their division rivals in Tampa and Baltimore, the next closest teams which are 200 miles away.

The Red Sox are currently playing a 3-game series against the Seattle Mariners and I am 370 miles (as the crow flies) from T-Mobile Park, but in spite of that distance, I am blacked out from viewing the game.

Out here I am blacked out from the San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics games as well, both places being around 310 miles away. I can see either of the Los Angeles teams, Dodgers or Angels because they are about twice as far away as the Bay Area teams.

None of this is a real problem anyway because I subscribe to a VPN which lets me pretend to be where I’m not. Right now I’m virtually in Denver.

The only issue with this is I have to watch the game on the desktop PC or the cell phone. I can watch it on a TV, but I’d have to get the game up on the PC and then use an HDMI cable to the TV, which is usually not worth the effort.

Sport, Off-Road, Touring

Tangled Up In Blue Edition of SORT
As of Monday, September 13, 2021 at 9:00 PM pacific time:

Sport Off-Road Touring
2016 Porsche
911 Carrera		 1978 Chevrolet
K5 Blazer		 2002 BMW
325i Sport Wagon
If they sold me just the die-cast replica I probably couldn’t even afford that. Probably a lot larger than I’d like in my 4X4, but man this thing is beautiful. This has an M3 engine swap, what could go wrong?

Here is what last week’s cars sold for, or bid to, if the reserve was not met.
Sports: 2002 Panoz Esperante Sold for $45,000 on 9/8/21
Off-Road: 2005 Mercedes-Benz G500 Sold for $125,000 on 9/9/21
Touring: 1957 MG Magnette ZB Sold for $21,250 on 9/12/21

I Miss Fish Tacos

Today is Friday and quite possibly is should have been Fish Taco Friday, but today we had chili. It could have been Fish Taco Friday because ever since we have lived in Klamath Falls every other Friday was a visit to a food truck that served them and this might have been the day.

Unfortunately that food truck has stopped serving them on Friday. Two out of the last three times we visited the truck on Friday she didn’t have them. On our next try, there were no fish tacos, so three strikes and you are out. I did ask why this last time and she replied that there wasn’t enough interest in them.

On the first no fish taco day we drove around looking for another place that we wanted to eat at. No joy, one of the other food trucks (not strictly Mexican) we’ve eaten at before and liked, but they weren’t in their spot.

The second no fish taco Friday, we tried a different Mexican food truck. They didn’t have any, so we tried some of their food and was not really good at all.

After the third no fish taco Friday we were just going to head home, but when we passed the spot where that other truck that we ate before was, it was there. We were going to get a burger, but she had a sign in the window that said “Fish Tacos”, I decided to get a couple, Donna opted for Fish & Chips.

Well, the fish was good, but the taco package was not nearly as good as our previous suppler. The tortillas were not heated and too chewy, there was lettuce instead of cabbage and the pico de gallo was just chopped tomatoes. The fish & chips was plentiful enough that we though maybe we could come back every other Friday and split the meal between the two of us, but that will probably not happen.

So, I miss fish tacos, but I’ve lived long enough now that I miss a lot of things, what’s one more…

Jigsaw Puzzle Madness

As I mentioned the other day, we have been doing a lot of jigsaw puzzles here during pandemic quarantine/avoidance and smoky summer days.

We have probably bought a couple of dozen brand new. We visit our local independent bookstore once a month on haircut day and Donna usually buys one, while I buy an actual book. We have also bought a few at Fred Meyer when we catch them on sale.

But most of the puzzles come from thrift stores, Goodwill sells them for $1.99 or $2.99 and one place in town has all of their puzzles priced at ninety-nine cents, otherwise we probably couldn’t afford our habit.

And what a habit it is too, for the last 10 months there has always been a jigsaw puzzle going on what used to be our dining room table. I have been posting photos of every puzzle we complete on Instagram and early on I was just using the hashtags #jigsaw and #jigsawpuzzle, but after completely a bunch of them I started to add #jigsawpuzzleanonymous, a play on Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous, to them because it was looking like we were addicted.

As it turns out, so far, I am the only one using that hashtag, so when I want to know how many puzzles we have done so far all I have to do is look at the #jigsawpuzzleanonymous page and count the posts. There is one post with three small puzzles in it and for one panoramic puzzle of Portland, Oregon I created a triptych with 3 posts so the counts works out perfect. Right now we sit at 93 puzzles in 275 days or about one every 3 days.

Yesterday I had someone like a photo of a puzzle from a few days ago and I went to see his page, to see how he connected with me, and he posts time-lapse photos of his puzzle building. Five hundred piece puzzles in three hours…yikes, but it is fun to watch: For some reason, none of the puzzle builds are available on his YouTube anymore…

Sport, Off-Road, Touring

Labor Day Edition of SORT
As of Monday, September 6, 2021 at 9:00 PM pacific time:

Sport Off-Road Touring
2002 Panoz Esperante 2005 Mercedes-Benz G500 1957 MG Magnette ZB
Hand-built in Georgia of aluminum & carbon fiber with a 5-litre V-8. This one is sort of hand-built as well, it started as a regular enclosed SUV. A British midsize car that is already left-hand drive from the factory.

Here is what last week’s cars sold for, or bid to, if the reserve was not met.
Sports: 1964 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia Sold for $34,888 on 9/4/21
Off-Road: 1977 Volkswagen Fargo Dune Buggy Sold for $5,100 on 8/31/21
Touring: 1962 Volkswagen Beetle Sold for $11,750 on 9/3/21

All Jumbled Up

We used to do the crossword puzzle, 7 Little Words and the Jumble out of the semi-daily local paper. We would do the crossword together and Donna would do the 7 Little Words & Jumble. If she got stumped, I would help out.

Then back in December last year we made a seemingly innocent purchase of a jigsaw puzzle. But we got addicted to doing jigsaws and the word pencil games no longer got done. Our noses have been stuck inside square cardboard boxes filled with cut pieces of cardboard with brightly colored images glued to one side of them since then. But Donna has still faithfully cut out the newspaper puzzles and we have amassed quite a pile of them. Every once and a while she’ll grab a month’s worth 7 Little Words and hand me the same sized pile of Jumbles so we can try and keep the backlog around six months worth. This morning I got a stack of Jumbles from March.

I get the Jumbles because they, for whatever reason, are in my wheelhouse. I also have a better grasp of the pun like answers involved in the cartoon. Most of the time I can get the top two 5-letter words without having to use paper to unscramble them. More often than not I do have to use some paper to figure out what the bottom two 6-letter words are. Sometimes just writing those six letters down in a different order will let me see the word and others I have to shuffle them around a dozen times before I get it. Every once and a while I’ll get totally stuck on a word and I will cheat by checking for the scrambled word answers at jumbleanswer.com. Also, every once in a while, I’ll get three of the four words and the cartoon answer, which allows me to solve that word.

The Sunday puzzle is more difficult than the other six days because instead of 4 jumbled words, it has 6 and all of them are 6-letters long. Plus the cartoon answer usually has well over a dozen letters in it. Today, I almost hung up my Jumble pencil for good because I did something that was pretty improbable. I got to the first Sunday Jumble of March and I aced it. I could figure out all six of the six letter words and filled in the cartoon answer without having to write anything down on paper to solve. I’m not ready to start doing them in pen just yet, but boy did that feel good.