Bruce Letters: Slime mold and Battle Bugs

Sunday, June 26, 2016

Slime mold and Battle Bugs

Guess ‘who’ moved into the neighborhood:

A pair of barn owls had a pair babies this spring, so we now see one of them fairly often:

They normally sing the fun and familiar ‘who cooks for you’ song, but at night they occasionally make a really scary jungle monkey sound. At least we hope that is them making those sounds.

The hope is they are not big enough to carry of little doggies. Just in case, we have instructed the fat Buddha to act as doggy’s bodyguard:

If that doesn’t work, we can use this. Believe it or not, this is a fully functional flare gun:

This is where you should fire it … outside. It sends a bright flare 100 feet into the sky:

This is where you should NOT fire it:

It is surprisingly easy to fire :)

Speaking of fire, my subwoofer decided it wanted to try smoking by flaming out a transistor, to the right of that yellow transformer:

I spent a few hours replacing it:

Only to discover the transistor was not the problem. But now I know how to turn a 3 legged transistor into a 2 legged one:

Having concluded that a 2 legged transistor is not too useful, I got a new subwoofer. While I was at it, I now had an excuse to upgrade our TV audio into a 3rd dimension. Those 2 speakers 15' up are to play a new audio format called Dolby Atmos:

In other projects, we gave doggy got a summer hair cut:

This him trying to look noble while someone fiddles with his butt hair:

I found a 6" yellow puddle on one of our new trails. Looked like one of the owls ate a fleet of canaries and pooped them out, paintball style. But the next day it collected itself into a 1" marshmallow like blob: