Our new bird feeder has been operational since Christmas day. A pair of hummingbirds use it but so far only one “regular” bird, the little goldfinch there on the left, and it’s only interested in the hummingbird nectar, not the seed. In time, we expect, other birds will discover the feeder and start to visit. The camera activates when it sees movement and records for ten seconds. A solar panel powers it for a 24-hour cycle, so no batteries are required (at least here in southern Arizona). To date we have over a hundred short videos. When we start getting a wider variety of birds (and bats at night, once they return from wintering in Mexico), the videos will become more interesting.
Speaking of which, the videos are stored in the cloud, and here I speak of things I know almost nothing about. We subscribed for the cloud service the manufacturer recommends. The introductory month is cheap, but then the price goes up to about $35 a year. I think we’ll just have to suck it up. There’s no internal storage, and we’ll want to store and share videos, especially once a wider variety of birds start using the feeder.
My Facebook feed has been almost taken over by informational posts from groups and entities I don’t follow — it’s like flipping through back issues of Popular Mechanics in a hoarder’s attic. You know, posts about things Facebook’s algorithm thinks users might be interested in and offers up as “recommended content” and “suggested follows.” There’s so much of it I sometimes wonder if Facebook is suppressing the posts I came there to read (TBF it isn’t, but I have to scroll and scroll to find them). Sure would be nice if we could set up a separate tab for posts from people and groups we do follow, but that would be woke socialism or something.
The latest news, that Facebook will no longer moderate disinformation and bigotry, is going to get everyone talking about a mass migration, but that’s happened again and again and we’re all still there. Give up Facebook? I’m ready when you are … let me know when everyone agrees on a better platform.
We’ve become big fans and regular watchers of RailCowGirl’s YouTube channel. She’s a Norwegian train engineer who records cab-view runs on various routes in that country, hauling passengers and freight. Every now and then she’ll do a “chat” episode where she answers questions submitted by viewers. These are my favorites, and I’ve learned a lot from them (ask me what the lights and symbols mounted alongside railroad tracks mean and I’ll know the answer).
Last night I sifted through the hundred or so episodes on her channel and found what I think is the first chat episode she recorded, titled Train Driver’s Chat: Quarantine Day 1. She recorded it in January 2020 after a hasty and unscheduled return from Orlando, Florida, where she’d been on vacation. Hasty and unscheduled why? Because that’s when Covid hit the Western world and everything was shutting down. She flew back, first on a practically empty United flight from Orlando to New York, then on a crowded SAS flight to Stockholm, filled with Scandinavian tourists and businesspeople in a hurry to get home. She made a connecting flight to Oslo, where she and her fellow Norwegian passengers were met planeside by military troops and escorted to individual hotel rooms for 14 days of quarantine. She had with her video of a December train run she’d meant to edit and put online while she was on vacation in the States; instead she used it as background for a live online chat session with viewers and subscribers from her room in the quarantine hotel.
All this was just four years ago and I don’t know about you, but I’d forgotten the sense of immediate threat we experienced, the scariness of how quickly everything changed during the first weeks after Covid hit here and in Europe, so it was fascinating to listen to her talk about it in real time as it was coming down. She has a popular YouTube channel with thousands of viewers, so naturally she tries to keep her comments and observations non-political and focused on train stuff, but the viewers on this live session knew she’d just made an emergency return to Norway and was in mandatory quarantine, and they wanted to know how she was reacting. So she answered.
Among her observations and impressions, recorded just one day after flying home and going into mandatory quarantine: the lack of leadership and common purpose in the States, compared to that in Europe. Here, states and even cities were being forced to take what actions they could, mostly unenforceable ones, as the man at the head of the federal government undermined and sabotaged their efforts, insisting that there were only 15 known cases of Covid in the U.S.A. and that the virus would mutate and be history in a couple of weeks. In her country, as in most of Europe, the fact that the military was mobilized to help place returning citizens into mandatory quarantine kind of spoke for itself, illustrating the difference in how our leaders and theirs reacted to the threat. They pulled together from the top down; we pulled, when and where we did, from the bottom up.
Trump’s response to the current and ongoing fire disaster in Los Angeles makes it clear the lack of leadership he displayed during his first term will prevail in his second. If anything, it’ll be worse this time around, because the people he’s nominating for positions of power in his new government are far more sycophantic then they were the first time around, and will almost certainly follow his lead in responding (or, more likely, not) to natural disasters and emergencies. Hold on to your hats, everyone!