Randy’s Blog

Saturday morning Wendy and I went on our first trail ride of the season.

It was sunny and warm, with highs in the 80s. Great bike riding weather. Instead of getting on the trail close to McHenry and riding north, we drove north, got on the trail, and rode south. The advantage to this is that we get the hard part -- a long, gradual uphill climb -- out of the way first. Then we have a much easier and more enjoyable ride when we turn around and head back.

Distance: 6.03 miles

One of the nice things about working from home is being able to go on a bike ride around the neighborhood during lunch. Thanks to those rides, my season total is at 43 miles (last year my total was 205 miles).

Saturday evening, a little after 10pm, I made some tea (mango ginger, delicious!). While it was steeping, I stepped out on the deck to look at the stars. After a couple of minutes, I noticed what I thought was a plane flying overhead. But then I saw another one behind it, and then another, and another... and I quickly realized it was a chain of Starlink satellites that just happened to be flying overhead right then! I yelled to Wendy to come look. We stood and watched as dozens of them slowly flew by. They were easily visible, as bright as any of the stars. Three or four would be evenly spaced, followed by a slightly larger gap, and then another three or four evenly spaced. I would guess we saw about 50 of them total; we lost count around 30 or so. It was kind of a crazy sight, but cool.

We looked up more information about them afterwards. A new batch of Starlink satellites was launched on May 15; that's probably what we saw. They stay in a chain formation for a while, but over time they spread out to their own orbits. The satellites are owned by SpaceX (Elon Musk's company) and are used to provide Internet access.

And finally, as of today it has been 2 weeks since my second dose of the vaccine, so I am now fully vaccinated!

This past Sunday, 60 Minutes aired a segment on UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon - a modern term for UFOs). They interviewed Navy pilots who have seen strange craft, and they showed declassified video of those objects. The Pentagon confirmed the videos show craft that they can't identify. Here's a link to the segment:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-military-intelligence-60-minutes-2021-05-16/

Note that there are 3 separate videos on the page. Each is worth watching. I've been asked what my thoughts are, so this blog post is my answer.

Some random thoughts:

It was a really interesting segment. Kudos to the pilots for coming forward, especially considering all the ridicule they faced immediately after their encounter. Government acknowledgement of these things has to start somewhere and this is as good a place as any. Another video was released last weekend; it shows a UAP flying along the ocean surface and diving into the water. I'm hopeful that all of this results in even more evidence being released and that it allows the topic to be discussed openly and intelligently in public.

At the same time, it's frustrating. UAPs/UFOs have been around for at least 70 years. We should be much farther along than this. The government program referenced in the segment, AATIP, was started around 2007 and had a budget of $22 million dollars. That's pocket change. There have got to be much deeper programs within the government (more likely military) with infinitely more money that have been studying this since the beginning. The military isn't stupid; if there's any chance of gaining an advantage by studying these objects and potentially reverse engineering them, they would do it in a heart beat. So the 60 Minutes program is surface-level disclosure. I would bet there's still a deeper level to go. But you have to start somewhere.

Some even stranger thoughts:

The 60 Minutes program focused on pilots who saw something strange flying through the sky. Let's not forget that for decades people have reported encountering occupants of those flying objects, and have communicated with them! If any answers are going to be found to this puzzle, it will most likely be from studying those people and that communication.

I said earlier that UAPs/UFOs have been around for at least 70 years. I think it's more likely they are as old as humanity, given that similar descriptions are found in folklore, fairy tales, myths, and ancient and religious texts. So what are they? It's easy to jump to the conclusion that they're beings from another planet. But every culture that encounters these things interprets them differently, according to their cultural beliefs. It's unlikely that our culture is the one that finally gets it right.

Here's one non-extraterrestrial hypothesis (I think I read this theory in the book The Super Natural): In the far future, humanity hits an evolutionary dead end. So they travel into the past to nudge us down a slightly different evolutionary road. Thus, humanity is evolving both forwards in time and backwards in time.

But here's another idea, one that I really like: Just as fish have no idea what's happening on land, humans have no idea what's happening on some other aspect of the Earth. It might turn out that humans aren't even the most evolved species on the planet, because we haven't realized what "the planet" fully means.

Of course, I might be wrong about everything in this post, so take it all with a grain or two of salt.

Last night's videos from the trail cam were the most exciting so far! It recorded 8 videos throughout the night and early morning: 1 of a raccoon and 7 of a fox, including one where the fox jumps over the neighbor's fence!

Each video is roughly 10 seconds long. I've combined them chronologically into one file so it's easier to view. Here's a breakdown of the action:

0:00 (7:18pm): Fox trots across the yard
0:10 (8:01pm): Raccoon appears
0:20 (9:01pm): Fox runs near the fence
0:30 (4:04am): Fox seems very interested in what's behind the fence
0:38 (4:20am): Fox runs through the yard with something in its mouth! (I hope it's a chipmunk)
0:47 (4:59am): Daylight, and the fox jumps over the fence!
0:57 (5:04am): Fox runs through the yard to the right.
1:07 (5:05am): Fox comes from the left, pauses, and heads to the fence

Here's the video:

I hope we get more excitement like this in the future!

Here's the latest on our backyard animal sightings, thanks to my new trail cam:

First up are two videos of an opossum:

I went down a small rabbit hole (opossum hole?) while writing this post trying to figure out whether I should use "possum" or "opossum" and whether to use "a" or "an" in front of "opossum". I read articles from mentalfloss, grammarly, and english.stackexchange.com before deciding on "an opossum".

Fortunately, a fox has no such confusion. It's the next animal on this brief tour:

And finally, a coyote... I think?

That's the end of the tour. No skunks or raccoons yet, but I'm sure they're out there.

Several years ago I wrote this blog post about a book of word-search puzzles I bought at Sam's. I've still got it, and for the past week I've been solving a puzzle each day. Last night I worked on a puzzle where each word in the list started and ended with the same letter. At one point I found the word SPANK, which was not on the word list. Eventually I realized that spelled backwards it formed the beginning of the word KNAPSACK, which was on the word list. I had never realized that KNAPSACK contained SPANK in reverse.

Which got me thinking, what other words contain words spelled backwards? I looked online to see what I could find, but all the search results were focused on palindromes (words that read the same backward and forward, like "madam") and semordnilaps (words that spell a different word when reversed, like "war" and "raw"). But that wasn't quite what I was looking for. So I did what any nerd would do: I wrote a computer program to figure it out. My Linux system came with a standard dictionary of around 100,000 words, so I used that since it was readily available.

Reading through the results, I was struck by how funny some of the combinations were. Below is a list of some of the more notable ones. The first word on each line contains the second word spelled backwards.

adrenals => nerd
aerobic => bore
alright => girl
anemone => omen
benevolence => love
whorehouse => hero    (I can't stop singing this to the tune of "Juke Box Hero")

Episcopalians => snail
amoral => aroma
asparagus => sugar
cardiovascular => avoid
chestnuts => stunt
cognate => tango
cohesion => noise
deviant => naive
drowsy => sword
herons => snore
knapsack => spank   (proof that my program worked!)
lameness => enema
lightning => ninth
matrons => snort
muffins => sniff
myriad => dairy
nightlife => filth
revolt => lover
spacecraft => farce
strafe => farts
televangelist => navel
vegetarian => irate
weightlifter => filth

Tylenol => lonely
dairymaid => myriad
drawers => reward
excitement => emetic    (I had to look up emetic -- it means inducing vomiting!)
explained => denial
partner => entrap
werewolf => flower

phenomena => anemone

sensuousness => sensuous

I can't get over that last example. What are the odds that the word "sensuousness" contains "sensuous" spelled backwards!

Anyway, this was my idea of a fun Friday night.

We had many more video recordings last night! Most of them were of rabbits. This one is notable because all you can see are two glowing, darting eyes in the distance:

I thought it was kind of creepy at first, until I realized they were rabbits. Later videos showed them more clearly, but I'll skip those and get right to the good one:

We think it's a fox. What do you think?

My patience is starting to pay off! For several weeks my new trail cam recorded absolutely nothing. But the past few days, things have started happening!

First, the mount: I wasn't sure what to mount the trail cam to, so originally I strapped it to a wooden board and leaned the board against the side of the house. That worked fine, until we had several very windy days, and the board kept blowing over. I did some research on the internet, where I discovered many creative and unique ways to mount a trail cam. In the end, though, I decided to buy a special mount just for trail cams that can be pushed into the ground to anchor it. There's a small screw at the top to attach the camera. So far it's been great:

And now, the videos! As the weeks ticked by and nothing was recorded, I started wondering if the trail cam might not be sensitive enough. I figured if there were animals crossing our yard, they would probably be small, and cross on the far side of the yard, by the fence. Well, ask and ye shall receive, because a few days later the camera recorded a squirrel running across right by the fence:

As videos go, it's not too exciting, but I was glad to have proof that the camera works as expected.

Then a few days after that, we got a video of a bunny in the middle of the night. When Wendy saw it, she said she hoped we'd eventually get to see videos of other animals, like coyotes. Once again, ask and ye shall receive, because last night we recorded two animals! One was another bunny:

And the other was... a coyote? Or a dog? Anyone care to offer their opinion?

Regardless, I'm happy the trail cam has started to record animals. I can't believe I didn't think of doing this years ago!

Finally, continuing the theme of ask and ye shall receive, I hope we get videos that show how so much bird food got knocked out of the feeder. And I hope we get videos of Sasquatch.

For the past 9 years, every time we heard a random creak on the stairs, we would look up and see Mr. Gordon going up or coming down the stairs. For the past month, every time we hear a random creak, we instinctively look up. But there's no one there. Do we have a ghost cat? Or just creaky stairs?

***

I haven't mentioned the bird feeder in a while. A couple weeks ago I noticed something strange: a quarter of the food in the bird feeder disappeared over night, but there was a pile of bird food on the ground underneath it that wasn't there the day before. How did it get there? Did some animal come along and shake it out? This happened several times over the course of a week. So a few days ago I bought a small motion-activated/night-vision trail cam, set it up in the backyard, and configured it to record only at night. Two nights later, the level of food in the feeder hasn't changed and the camera has not recorded a single thing.

I must channel my inner Sonny Crockett, and be patient.

Truth be told, I'm really hoping it's a sasquatch!

Here's a collection of quotes I've encountered over the past year or two that have really stuck with me. Some are funny, some are profound, some are just random.

Miscellaneous Quotes

"You're dirty, ace. And I'm patient."
--Sonny Crockett, talking to the leader of a drug cartel, in the Miami Vice episode "The Prodigal Son"

"The less we know about our own evil, the more we see it in other people"
--Jungian analyst Deldon Anne McNeely on the Speaking of Jung podcast, Episode 13

"There is a higher power, somewhere up there looking down on us, watching everything we do. That's why I'm very careful never to pick my nose!"
--Resident of Cobblestone Canyon in the video game Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age

Quotes from the Columbo TV show

"An exciting meal has been ruined by the presence of this LIQUID FILTH!"
--Wine connoisseur (and murderer) in the Columbo episode "Any Old Port in a Storm"

"Lieutenant Columbo, you're remarkable. You have intelligence. You have perception. You have great tenacity. You've got everything except proof."
--Doctor (and murderer) played by Leonard Nimoy in the Columbo episode "A Stitch in Crime"

"This happens to be Lieutenant Columbo of the LAPD, who is your everyday, average, typical, downtrodden, American husband. Don't you agree?"
--A celebrity TV chef (and murderer) in the Columbo episode "Double Shock"

Quotes from the Edgar Cayce readings

"(Q) Kindly give me any advice that will benefit me spiritually, physically, mentally.
(A) ... It isn't the great things. No great deeds of valor are accomplished without AGES of preparation in the SOUL of one that accomplishes same. It is just being kind, just being gentle, just being patient, FIRST with self and self's relationships to thy fellow man."
--Edgar Cayce reading 416-7

"The more and more each is impelled by that which is intuitive, or the relying upon the soul force within, the greater, the farther, the deeper, the broader, the more constructive may be the result."
--Edgar Cayce reading 792-2

"But do not put off today that which will bring hope and help to the mind of another. How did He say? "In a more convenient season I will hear thee"? Those things that make for the putting off become a joy never fulfilled."
--Edgar Cayce reading 877-9

Almonds. I like them, and always have. Wendy doesn't. She says they taste good for the first couple of seconds, but then it's like eating dirt. I can see why she says that, but for me they're still tasty.

Many years ago, back when we lived in Colorado, I remember trying a new flavor of Nature Valley granola bars: roasted almond.

They were really good. But I remember, as I was eating it, thinking "Huh. This tastes like birthday cake. That's weird." I didn't think much more about it.

Some time later, while visiting my family over the holidays, Joy made a comment about how the almond extract Mom adds to cake frosting makes it so delicious. The light bulb went on in my head, and the mystery of the granola bar was solved.

Mom learned to make frosting that way from a cake decorating class she took years ago. As I told her recently, that class certainly paid for itself in deliciousness!

There's more to say about almonds, but first I have to take a short detour. I've always been fascinated by the psychic readings of Edgar Cayce (1877-1945). I keep thinking I'll write a blog post about him, and I even have an outline of one, but it's too huge for a single post. There's a lot to say about him.

Basically, Edgar Cayce could be put into a trance (really a light sleep), and his higher self would answer any question that was asked. When the trance was over, Cayce would wake up and have no recollection of what was said. Eventually they learned the person putting him into trance affected the quality of answers, so his wife became the only one allowed to do so. Cayce became a minor celebrity; the NY Times wrote several articles about him, and many people sought his advice on how to cure their ailments.

He gave over 14,000 readings in his life. They were thoroughly documented, cataloged, and eventually digitized. The majority of those readings were health-related; the rest were on metaphysical topics.

Now, back to almonds. My hands have been very dry the past few months, as is typical of winter. A few weeks ago I was thinking about how Cayce frequently recommended massage, and that he had suggested several combinations of oils that were good for the skin, both as a massage oil and as a general skin lotion. I thought what the heck, I have nothing to lose, so I ordered one of the formulas, called Olivae Skin Lotion. It's a combination of peanut oil, olive oil, and... almond oil!

I've been using it for the past week or so, and I am surprised at just how much it smells like almonds. Basically, I smell delicious after putting it on. Just like birthday cake! From some of the reviews at the above link, people love it and have used it for years with good results, so I think I'll keep it up and see how it goes.

There's another interesting thing Cayce had to say about almonds. Several readings suggested that eating two or three almonds a day could help prevent cancer. Here are some quotes from the readings:

"Other characters of nuts are well, though especially almonds are good and if an almond is taken each day, and kept up, you'll never have accumulations of tumors or such conditions through the body. An almond a day is much more in accord with keeping the doctor away, especially certain types of doctors, than apples.  For the apple was the fall, not almond - for the almond blossomed when everything else died.  Remember this is life!" Reading 3180-3

"And know, if ye would take each day, through thy experience, two almonds, ye will never have skin blemishes, ye will never be tempted even in body toward cancer nor towards those things that make blemishes in the body-forces themselves." Reading 1206-13

"And, just as indicated in other suggestions - those who would eat two to three almonds each day need never fear cancer.  Those who would take a peanut oil rub each week need never fear arthritis." Reading 1158-31

Does this really work? Who knows. Almonds these days are pasteurized (even raw ones) so who knows if that changes anything. But, as Cayce said in one reading "Expect much, you will obtain much!  Expect little, you will obtain little!" (Reading 5325-1). Thus, a year or so ago I thought what the heck, I have nothing to lose, so I started a habit of eating a few almonds each day. As experiments go, it's certainly a tasty one!