Things I Learned Over The Weekend

  1. That goat isn't being friendly. He's trying to establish dominance.

    How does he know I'm a male, anyway?

  2. Don't engage in dominance games with a goat.

    It encourages the goat, and you'll just end up embarassed.

  3. Mushrooms are not so common as you might think.

    Even in shady, damp, wooded areas, off the trail, I only managed to find a couple of 'shrooms, probably highly toxic, which weren't morels anyway.

    Nettles, however, were everywhere.

  4. Cats are frequently abandoned in Wilderness Park.

    Friendly
    Charles II of England

    Technically, I learned this today from our vet, but the reason it's even a topic for discussion is we rescued a very friendly, very hungry, young unfixed male cat out there, when he emerged from the undergrowth to say hello and feed me. He's a charmer and currently a resident of the spare bedroom.

    Because we were looking for mushrooms at the time, I suggested we call him Morel, but Barbara's holding out for something better. Maybe Lorenzo or Pierfrancesco or Charles II of England in keeping with the Medici theme we started with Cosimo.

    Dignity and comportment forbid further discussion of the sort of person that would dump a cat in the park.

  5. Either I don't understand document.evaluate() or the mozilla implementation has a bug.

    I'm using document.evaluate() and an XPath expression to extract some data from a web page. It returns a set of nodes that match the expression, but when I try to use one of the nodes as the context, as opposed to using document, to further refine the search, the result is always NIL.

  6. A hurdy-gurdy sounds just like bagpipes.

    And looking inside one, you might think, I can't believe this thing works at all.

    I've never been quite sure what a hurdy-gurdy is or what it sounds like, being acquainted with them only through liner notes. All I knew was that it was a box with a crank on the side. Now I wonder how many times I've heard one and thought it was pipes.

  7. Getting from home to 16th and K by bike is a bit daunting.

    First Christian Church, where Musica Antiqua Lincoln was playing Sunday, is on an island surrounded by massive, four-lane, one-way arterials. No problem for an experienced cyclist, but intimidating for a n00b.

    It's an interesting exercise getting around town with a casual cyclist, like Caitie, who isn't entirely confident in her ability, doesn't see road rash as a badge of honor, and isn't interested in showing SUVs who's boss. It opens my eyes with regard to Lincoln as a bikable city.

    16th and 17th between, say, South and the fairgounds look to me like prime candidates for the next round of bike lanes.

    Until people like her feel comfortable jumping on their bikes to go from here to there, wherever here and there might happen to be, bikes will remain a marginal mode of transport, whatever changes we might make to the comprehensive plan.

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 22:28

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