{"id":5210,"date":"2024-05-06T14:32:05","date_gmt":"2024-05-06T21:32:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5210"},"modified":"2024-05-06T14:32:57","modified_gmt":"2024-05-06T21:32:57","slug":"daywander-and-then-some","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5210","title":{"rendered":"Daywander and Then Some"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hey, I\u2019m still out here. Have been scarce lately since I\u2019ve been putting all the energy I can spare into finishing The Everything Machine<\/em>, my big drumlins novel. I\u2019m at 108,000 words and just finished the first climax. There is another climax, a little wrapup, and then it\u2019ll be done. I\u2019m guessing 115,000 \u2013 120,000 words or thereabouts, which is only a little longer than Dreamhealer<\/em><\/a>, and certainly shorter than The Cunning Blood<\/em><\/a>. Once it\u2019s done I\u2019m going to take a break and catch my creative breath before embarking on anything that ambitious again.<\/p>\n

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The Sun is getting feisty, and sometime last night emitted a Class X4.4 flare. I haven\u2019t seen one that big in quite awhile. We\u2019re heading for a (possibly early) sunspot peak, and Bob Zimmerman of Behind the Black lays out a chart of solar activity since 2008<\/a>. Predictions of solar activity are fraught, as we really don\u2019t know what the underlying mechanisms are. What I see in the chart is that predictions for Cycle 25 aren\u2019t panning out. It won\u2019t be a fizzle, as many said it would. It may not be a roar (like 1957-58) but the truth is we\u2019re just going to have to wait and find out.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019ve been on Facebook a lot less recently, mostly because it\u2019s a bad use of my time compared to finishing a major novel. When I logged in yesterday, I found something truly bizarre: Some(one|thing) had tagged me not once but eight times, and for what? photos of mothers breastfeeding infants. Relatively modest ones, too. (The posts point to content on YouTube. I have not and will not follow those links.) It\u2019s not porn, though I wouldn\u2019t go so far as to claim a breastfeeding fetish is impossible. (No fetish is impossible.) The account names are all different, but all follow a similar pattern. Here\u2019s the latest: \u201cFunny Art 40306 OK\u201d The pattern is two words, a 5-digit number, and \u201cOK.\u201d I\u2019m pretty sure it\u2019s a bot, though what it\u2019s trying to accomplish is unclear.<\/p>\n

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This summer, Illinois will be ground zero for something rare and…peculiar: Two large broods of cicadas will emerge at the same time<\/a>. Cicadas don’t bite, and the racket they make–hell, I grew up under the approach to the main runway at O’Hare Field. Cicadas got nuthin’ on Boeing 707s.<\/p>\n

While an occasional dog will develop a taste for cicadas, their primary predator is the cicada killer wasp, Sphecius speciosus<\/em>. The linked item explains how the wasps kill cicadas; I won’t summarize <\/a>here because I just ate. But thereby hangs a tale:<\/p>\n

Back in the two summers we lived in a suburb of Baltimore, we would see these big honking wasps doing search patterns up and down our driveway and across the lawn. I was new in the area and concerned that Mr. Byte & Chewy could get stung. I wasn’t about to catch one and look it up on google–wait a second, this was 1985. So having been raised on sitcoms like Green Acres, I did the obvious: I called the county agent. I described the wasps to the man, who replied in a bored sort of voice: "The wasps by your driveway are cicada killers–but don’t worry, they’re harmless." Carol had been worried about the dogs too, so I called her at the therapy office where she worked. She was with a patient, so I gave the good news to the receptionist. When Carol got home, she showed me the note that the receptionist took down in longhand over the phone: "The things by your driveway are psychotic killers, but don’t worry–they’re harmless."<\/p>\n

And you wonder why texting is so damned popular!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hey, I\u2019m still out here. Have been scarce lately since I\u2019ve been putting all the energy I can spare into finishing The Everything Machine, my big drumlins novel. I\u2019m at 108,000 words and just finished the first climax. There is another climax, a little wrapup, and then it\u2019ll be done. I\u2019m guessing 115,000 \u2013 120,000 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[93],"tags":[41,263,262],"class_list":["post-5210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daywander","tag-astronomy","tag-bots","tag-insects"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5210"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5211,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5210\/revisions\/5211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}