Yarr She Blows Young Scurvy Lads'nLasses!

3 Hurricanes? Ok, well two and a possible third. Tis the season to be destructive!

Check this out, lined up like freight trains they are:

Environment Canada's track forecast

Never mind that 'yellow X', it's a 'tropical depression' that has faded away since last night.

Hurricanes are no exact science to track, even though if you check out Youtube you'll find tons of 'pros' claiming that they have the inside track on what's going down. 

But being that time of year and given that hurricane Arthur smote Fredericton in July, don't rest on your laurels and think all is safe! One can be safe and be prepared.

Some important links to keep tabs on potential hurricane threats:

National Hurricane Center (yeah, it's for the US, but sadly, Environment Canada's site is severely lacking in info and technology): https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/

Environment Canada's Hurricane Center: https://weather.gc.ca/hurricane/index_e.html

GOES EAST Satellite (This satellite is AMAZING!) Replaced the old sats with massive tech!:

https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/satellite.php

Here's a list for a 'basic' disaster emergency kit (With additional notes by me):

• Water - one gallon of water per person per day for at least three days, for drinking and sanitation * Screw "three days" - Have enough set aside for a week or more, whatever you have room to store! Water as we all know is precious and in times of disaster who knows when you might get fresh running water again!
• Food - at least a three-day supply of non-perishable food* - Same with food, store as much as you can to last as long as you can. When I'm shopping and think of it, I'll grab a couple extra canned foods to stow away... Like my chipmunks do!
• Battery-powered or hand crank radio and a NOAA Weather Radio with tone alert
• Flashlight
• First aid kit
• Extra batteries - Of every type! C, D, 9V, big ones, small ones!!
• Whistle to signal for help
• Dust mask to help filter contaminated air and plastic sheeting and duct tape to shelter-in-place
• Moist towelettes, garbage bags and plastic ties for personal sanitation
• Wrench or pliers to turn off utilities
• Manual can opener for food
• Local maps
• Cell phone with chargers and a backup battery
• 
  
• Prescription medications
• Non-prescription medications such as pain relievers, anti-diarrhea medication, antacids or laxatives
• Glasses and contact lense solution
• Infant formula, bottles, diapers, wipes, diaper rash cream
• Pet food and extra water for your pet
• Cash or traveler's checks
• Important family documents such as copies of insurance policies, identification and bank account records saved electronically or in a waterproof, portable container
• Sleeping bag or warm blanket for each person - Emergency blankets
• Complete change of clothing appropriate for your climate and sturdy shoes
• Household chlorine bleach and medicine dropper to disinfect water (water purification tablets)
• Fire extinguisher
• Matches in a waterproof container
• Feminine supplies and personal hygiene items
• Mess kits, paper cups, plates, paper towels and plastic utensils
• Paper and pencil
• Books, games, puzzles or other activities for children
• A hatchet in case you need to chop wood OR as happened in New Orleans, when flood waters forced people in their attics, they had no way out, some starved to death, while others drowned. Had they a hatchet or ax, they could have chopped their way onto the roof.

And remember when the hurricane hits, Stop, Drop And Roll!

Jerkface The Wonder Squirrel Is A Weirdo!

So, this squirrel, there's two of them really, but one is the one I call Jerkface The Wonder Squirrel, is it's been a jerkface all Summer.... Bullying the chipmunks, being weird to me. It's like Buddy, it has no fear of me. So as you know I've taken to blasting it with my ketchup bottle squirt gun, this has been working quite well...
So Jerkface, I've seen it straddling the fence top, dragging itself across the top of the fence between it's legs... Maybe it has fleas and ticks on it's nards, maybe it feels good, maybe it has an STD, but it's DAMN weird!
I've seen it doing crazy parkour moves around the trees, attack it's friend that tags along with Jerkface sometimes...
I have seen it in the trees, laying flat out, like it's, I don't know, maybe pretending or thinking it's invisible.. Who knows...
But earlier today I go outside and around back and well... The videos always explain it much better....

Just so people know. After I shut off the camera, Jerkface did get up and saunter off, it appeared to be not injured in any way, nor did it appear as though it was sickly. I think, it was just sunning itself.. Or, it maybe have been laying in wait for me to come closer, then jump on my face and dig out my eyeballs....

I didn't make it to the 'Paws For Punks' benefit last night. I was feeling pretty shitty all day yesterday and most of last night. It sucks, but such is my lot in life.
I am hoping to save my health and energy for the benefit October 13, the Rock for Donnie's kids benefit, which you can find on Facebook... Go check it out, there is a shitload of absolutely incredible prizes, from guitars and basses to Bluetooth speakers and more!
It's gonna be quite the night with some of the areas best bands playing and in our discussion group putting this together, we all feel that Donnie is up there smiling down on us. We think he'd be pretty stoked with what we're doing.
I know we are all stoked... I go fall down now.

PUNKS FOR PAWS TOMORROW NIGHT

Don't forget the animals need you! Tomorrow night at the Capital, cover is by donation.

4 massively awesome Punk Rock bands and Hard Loud muzac from 'Chainsaw Boogie', 'The Follow Ups', Local ancient legends 'Neighbourhood Watch' & 'Hard Charger'! Bring yer earplugs and some money to support the local SPCA!

And also in Saint John November 3rd At The Pub DownUnder 400 Main St. Saint John with:
'The Killdevils' 'The Virals', 'The Helfiends' and 'Neighbourhood Watch'!

H.P. Lovecraft, Burt Reynolds & the Critters

[Oh yeah, the Critters! Check back in 10 for an update...]

Bet no one would have ever thought they'd see Lovecraft and Burt Reynolds in the same sentence..erm title...
Anyhow, came across a really good H.P. Lovecraft documentary/biography the other night. One thing I didn't agree with was that there was racism in his stories (some of them)... He may have been of that nature as a person, but I certainly never picked up on it in his stories. Sure maybe some minor things here and there, but nothing more than Tom Sawyer or any other story from back in the day and I mean, when we're talking Lovecraft we're talking in the early 1900's.. It is NO excuse for racism, I just thing you need to have the context.

Check this out if you have the time and interest.

Ahh Burt Reynolds... I got a Burt Reynolds story....
When we were young and Dad had his sailboat, different times throughout our upbringing he had the boat moored at different harbours. At one point Mactaquac, the Fredericton harbour past the Princess Margaret bridge, the marina in Oromocto and the harbour at Grand lake.
So one Summer at Grand Lake, we come in from out sailing and there's this GINORMOUS pleasure cruiser, big honking motorboat. We'd not seen anything that size before in these parts. So when we asked the gas jockey about it, it turned out to be Burt and Loni Anderson's boat, they had come up the Atlantic coast from Florida or somethin.
So, no, we never saw hide nor hair of either of them, but we saw the boat!

Love watching old flicks like 'Cannonball Run' and 'Smokey In the Bandit'... Certainly 'Americana', that great decade of movie over indulgence of fast cars, women, booze, drugs and comedy.
Love my life up unto this point, the good the bad and the ugly, but what a time the 1980's were. The 1990's had a blast too, but the '80's were really something crazy. All those great movies, TV shows, music.
Rest in peace Burt, ya done some funny shit.

Feeling pretty accomplished. In the last week, all of the chipmunks from this Spring, have returned out of nowhere.
The first visitor was Chippy. I never got to hand feed Chippy before he 'disappeared' on me and I didn't see him until what was it, last month. I mean, the guys so fat now, he's probably sending Skit and the mom around for food because he's too bloated to move - Except for when I saw him last week here. The 'mom' of course I saw for a bit after the babies were born, then she disappeared too, until also recently.
I seriously thought she might've gotten taken out by a cat that I had seen around the fence in late Spring, but she totally blew me away the other day showing up. Her name was 'Skit'. The 'baby' not, Buddy, but I think I called it 'Noid' because it was paranoid and skittish. It's actually come back after disappearing too. Now I had not read anythig about the 'family getting back together' for Winter, but seriously I didn't see any of the 'munks but Buddy. I thought 'Noid had possibly been killed by the cat too. But Noids actually fed from my hand at least times since yesterday's return.
And then of course there's Buddy. I'm betting he won't be sleeping much this Winter knowing I'll be out there worrying about him haha. Dang rodents.....

At The Speed Of Light

Though I quit watching CBC news, I still use the CBC news site as a resource. They at least carry some good stories and are a newsworthy source.

Massive stellar merger produces cosmic 'burp' travelling at near speed of light

As the jet from the neutron-star merger event emerged into space, simulated radio images in this artist's conception illustrate its extremely fast motion. In the 155 days between two observations, the jet appeared to move two light-years, a distance that would require it to travel four times faster than light — an illusion. (D. Berry, O. Gottlieb, K. Mooley, G. Hallinan, NRAO/AUI/NSF)

(cbcnews.ca) - - In October 2017, scientists announced the observation of a spectacular cosmic event: the merger of two extremely dense stars 130 million light-years away, the first ever to be seen.

Now, using radio telescopes, scientists have discovered a narrow jet of particles from that event moving at nearly the speed of light, travelling through interstellar space.

The merging pair were extremely dense bodies called neutron stars: just one teaspoon of it would weigh more than a billion tons on Earth.

The original merger was not only observed visually, but it also created a gravitational wave picked up by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo experiment here on Earth.

Artist's depiction of a neutron star collision. (Credit: NASA/Swift/Dana Berry)

Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time, first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 in his general theory of relativity. They went undetected until 2015 when these highly sensitive detectors picked up the wave from two merging black holes.

After the merger, the pair collapsed into a black hole, an object in space that is so gravitationally strong, nothing can escape its grasp. However, it also created a rapidly spinning disk, the source of the cosmic belch that astronomers observed, in the form of a short gamma ray burst or GRB. But it also produced something else: a cocoon.

"What creates these jets isn't known," said lead author of the paper published in Nature. Kunal Mooley, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and Caltech. "The mechanism is not known, but once it is produced, now we know from this event that it interacts strongly with the surrounding neutron-rich material to produce this so-called cocoon."

3rd gravitational wave detected, opening 'new window on the universe'
Why seeing a star crash is a 'watershed moment in astrophysics'
The big question for astronomers was whether or not the jets would choke out in the cocoon or break through it.

Using three telescopes — the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope and the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array — the scientists discovered the source of a radio emission had moved. The emission was first seen 75 days after the merger. However, 230 days later, it seemed to have moved two light years, and only a fast-moving jet could explain its speed.

Initially, the motion of the region of particles appeared to be moving four times the speed of light, which is not possible.

It only appeared that way due to a process called superluminal motion, which occurs due to a few factors.

The aftermath of the merger of two neutron stars: Ejecta (the material blown off) from an initial explosion formed a shell around the black hole formed from the merger. A jet of material propelled from a disk surrounding the black hole first interacted with the ejecta material to form a broad 'cocoon.' Later, the jet broke through to emerge into interstellar space, where its extremely fast motion became apparent. (Sophia Dagnello, NRAO/AUI/NSF)

First, the jet is quite narrow (only five degrees) and pointed only 20 degrees away from Earth. On top of that, it is moving at 97 per cent the speed of light. Put all that together, and it gives us the apparent motion of the jet (not the actual one).

The obvious one is that it teaches astronomers about these types of merger events: how they happen, what they produce and what happens afterwards.

But Kunal said that there are other ways it can contribute.

Astronomers see source of gravitational waves for 1st time
"It tells us a lot more about the physics of what is going on," Mooley said. "For example, in a different work, we showed that with this particular measurement we can also calculate the cosmological parameters such as the Hubble Constant. So there's a lot of physics that can come out of these observations."

The Hubble Constant is the calculation for the expansion of the universe, which helps scientists determine its size and age.

Mooley said that he's happy with the discovery, though he was particularly surprised by how fast the jet's apparent motion, four times the speed of light.

"This is somewhat of an exceptional jet, I would say," Mooley said.

Source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/neutron-star-merger-jet-1.4811336

- - -

Man, feel like hell today and it is such a beautiful day... Left knee is swollen, back is fucked... Elsa and I spent the day napping.
Hopefully it's just a one off...

Another surprise today, it would seem all the chipmunks are alive. Was out back and a chipmunk came around the far corner of the fence. I knew it wasn't Chippy, the Mom or Buddy, so it must have been 'Skit'... All of the chipmunks have now fed from my hand. At least one goal I made I stuck to.


Iron Maiden song that fits with the Blog title and story...

Well What D'ya Know

Crazy how these little rodents have become a part of my life. So I was just outside coming back from my neighbors. Side track: I don't know about this, I haven't read it, but the female chipmunks seem (to me) to have a narrower, almost 'cutesy' face. So, there's a chipmunk up on the bird feeder and I start to head back there, the chipmunk dives off the birdfeeder, so this alerts me to think that this isn't 'Buddy' or 'Chippy', they are both brave and I haven't seen them do that kind of behavior since the Spring.
So this one dives off, but jumps up on the stoop by my 'Shack Out Back' and I offer it a peanut, it's quite hesitant, but eventually comes forward towards me. I'm wondering who this is and right when it's taking the peanut from my fingers, I see a 'dot' on it's hind end... It's the 'mother'!! I thought she had moved on or was dead... Usually what happens. I haven't seen her since the Spring. So I'm really surprised that she came to me and took the peanut from my hand because she had 'disappeared' before we got to that point. So that's very ... heartwarming that she's still around.

BREAKING NEWS!  - Just got video of the 'mom' feeding from my hand!

Earlier this morning when I first ran into Buddy, he came out from under the fence and had a mouthful of leaves and debris, this is the first I've seen of this, so I'm guessing that Buddy is getting ready for Winter, probably getting a lot cooler underground at night, in fact i think I saw a 'high' of +5C for tomorrow morning. Oh, I was wrong, i thought I read that they don't 'hibernate' during Winter, they do, BUT not for the whole season and you may see them out on 'warmer' Winter days.

I had planned on putting a stake or some kind of marker beside the hole he's been using for the backyard and kinda keep a watch to see when/if he comes out.. Though I imagine with the knowledge of showing it's face it gets a peanut, so he may be out this Winter.. We'll see.

Extra bonus video! Blog exclusive!! Only available on this blog!

Ain't she cute!? Until she slices into your hand!

On This Day, 159 Years Ago, Earth Had A Bad Day....

"159 YEARS AGO, A GEOMAGNETIC MEGA-STORM: Picture this: A billion-ton coronal mass ejection (CME) slams into Earth's magnetic field. Campers in the Rocky Mountains wake up in the middle of the night, thinking that the glow they see is sunrise. No, it's the Northern Lights. People in Cuba read their morning paper by the red illumination of aurora borealis. Earth is peppered by particles so energetic, they alter the chemistry of polar ice.

Hard to believe? It really happened--exactly 159 years ago. This map shows where auroras were sighted in the early hours of Sept. 2, 1859:

As the day unfolded, the gathering storm electrified telegraph lines, shocking technicians and setting their telegraph papers on fire. The "Victorian Internet" was knocked offline. Magnetometers around the world recorded strong disturbances in the planetary magnetic field for more than a week.

The cause of all this was an extraordinary solar flare witnessed the day before by British astronomer Richard Carrington. His sighting on Sept. 1, 1859, marked the discovery of solar flares and foreshadowed a new field of study: space weather. According to a NASA-funded study by the National Academy of Sciences, if a similar "Carrington Event" occurred today, it could cause substantial damage to society's high-tech infrastructure and require years for complete recovery.

Could it happen again? Almost certainly. In a paper published just a few months ago, researchers from the University of Birmingham used Extreme Value Theory to estimate the average time between "Carrington-like flares." Their best answer: ~100 years. In other words, we may be overdue for a really big storm..."
Source: http://spaceweather.com/ - If Archived: 09/02/2018


So, the best part about the 'Carrington Event? It could happen again someday. Are our cities prepared? Doubtful, maybe some in in North America, maybe some in Europe, but a 'potential outburst from our Sun', isn't on the top of the worry list of our leaders... Probably right up there with an asteroid hitting us or a 350 foot lizard stomping your local neighborhood....

In reality, we have not really ever seen a major 'outburst' from our Sun. Who knows the last time there was a massive solar outburst. Maybe our ancestors did eons ago. 

There's rock all over the globe that's mysteriously melted. Some scientists, like Dr. Robert Schoch believe that the 'Younger Drias' incident, was not only an asteroid, fragmented and hitting the globe in several areas, but also a massive solar outburst unlike we've not seen (or felt) since. Or a possibly plasma catastrophe of galactic proportions that left huemahns and animals dead and rocks melted. 

Some say that these ancient places on Earth where there's miles of man made caves, some with huge rolling rock doors, that sealed off the areas and kept it's inhabitants safe from radiation, plasma or crazy monsters.

There's a lot of things that could easily, like EASILY, snuff out life on this planet, some Earth borne other from the space that brought us life.... Would it be 'god's will' that does this? 

Naw, it'd just be a really, really shitty day.....