Dancing squirrels, and a fungi to be with....

[captainsblog]

Perfect Fall Day Week on the 4:30 Movie continues here.  The rest of life continues, as well.

Eleanor's already posted about the Dueling Squirrels we're constantly fighting at our birdfeeders. That post mainly concerned the jobbie nearest to our front picture window, a somewhat smaller and less bird-attracting getup than the one further into the front gardens. The latter is the one which I see far more of (with a view from the loo, dontcha know), and the one which the little varmints seem to take far more unfettered interest in stripping, not only of seed but of its supposedly squirrel-proof hardware.

Soon after Eleanor left today, I caught not one but two of the gorram rodents, faceplanted one beady-eyed grill apiece to either side of the feeder, and engaging, if not in full-on XXX squirrel sex, at least in a rather unfortunate form of foreplay.

Nylon wires where I literally yank their chains, pepper-based feed- none of it seems to dissuade the little suckas. I'm thinking of renting a powerwasher for the weekend and seeing if I can at least make them freeze their little tails off.

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Following that, and a reasonably productive workday (despite not having slapped on a suit, nor sent even a single letter for the entire month of October), my thoughts headed south to that magical land of Mythaca, for a couple of reasons.

First, I finished reading my 41st book of the year last night, keeping me well on track to beat a pace of one a week since I've been keeping track. I had a library DVD to drop off, and randomly selected #42 from the New Books section. Yup, another set in Ithaca, only this one actually by name:

In this riveting debut thriller by one of the leading researchers in nanoscience, the race is on to stop the devastating proliferation of the ultimate bioweapon.

When Nobel laureate Liam Connor is found dead at the bottom of one of Ithaca, New York’s famous gorges, his research collaborator, Cornell professor of nanoscience Jake Sterling, refuses to believe it was suicide. Why would one of the world’s most eminent biologists, a eighty-six-year old man in good health who survived some of the darkest days of the Second World War, have chosen to throw himself off a bridge?

Sounded intriguing enough, and all in all it's well-written and suspenseful so far, even if the major weaponry in the story so far is a 60-plus-year-old form of fungi pioneered by Japan before they lost the Second World War- but one piece of the literal suspension is a bit off.  I know those gorges like the back of my sunburned ass from swimming in them, and the bridges that cross them as well, none more than the one which our author used to plunge the 86-year-old laureate to his suspicious death. Yeah, this one, which gained this additional hardware the summer before I showed up in 1977:



So, basically, the Cornell Police (known in my day as "Safety Sucks") are being asked to believe that this octagenerian was also a contortionist, sufficiently able to plunge to his death over THAT.  Who knows- maybe he got a pre-leap boost from a vegan dinner at Moosewood....

Then, the New Yorker arrived, with an interesting story about the anonymous creator of a new form of currency called bitcoins. While the author of the piece didn't completely come out and say so, the speculation around the rest of Geekland is that he essentially did, outing the currency creator "Satoshi Nakamoto" as really being a twenty-something Irishman named Michael Clear.  The article did make clear (lower-case C) that Nakamoto has good reason to hide his real identity: the US Gummint doesn't like people competing with our currency, and doesn't hesitate to prosecute schemes that it thinks have the potential to do so, even when their "fake" denominations aren't backed by anything more than the same puffs of trust that our own Georges and Benjamins are.

This bit also brought me back to Cayuga's waters, since they've had an alternative form of bartering currency there for now close to 20 years, called Ithaca Hours. One wonders why Uncle Sam isn't as peeved by this effort as he is by one that has more potential to compete on a national or even international level with....

Oh. Right.  Nevermind....

Comments

[firynze.livejournal.com]

I was going to say, it's actually not all that hard to believe that someone would leap to their death in Ithaca. Happens all the damn time, or at least used to.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but there are far more plausible perches for this guy to have taken the plunge from. The automotive bridge over Fall Creek, for one, or Cascadilla in C-town.