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Peter Hendra April 30th 07 03:39 AM

Ping Larry: Sintered Bronze
 
On Mon, 30 Apr 2007 01:37:56 +0000, Larry wrote:

Certainly a different type of farming than that of New Zealand.
Seasonal snowfalls do sometimes cause a few problems in some parts of
the high country in the South Island but the stock - sheep and beef
cattle - is still left outside. In the rest of the country the grass
still grows in the winter, albeit less prolifically than in the flush
of spring and autumn - we don't experience a "fall" as the leaves of
the native trees stay on - much more sensible. I suppose that is why
New Zealand butter and cheddar cheese is able to be sold here in
Trinidad - low cost of production.

It sounds terribly romantic to have such snowfalls, to be able to ice
skate, ski and make snowmen outside your back door and feed the cows
in a barn, but the romance obviously pales to the farmer. If we want
snow, we have to drive several hours to the mountains, and only for a
couple of months of the year. My youngest son had to wait to get to
Afyon in central Turkey at the age of ten in order to make his first
snowman. Still, it was a beautiful setting. It was in the grounds of
the great mosque there which, with its 15th century spirally tiled
onion domed minaret is a work of art in itself. I had gone in to pray
and they (owner and son) played in the snow outside. I was amazed at
the locals who took off their shoes and socks to wash their feet in
the freezing water of the fountain before prayer and who walked
barefooted on the ice to the door. Still, they were used to it. The
streets were covered in solid ice. Difficult to drive and walk. The
housewives were putting the ashes from their fires on the snow in a
line so that people could more safely walk. Magical to us though. No
other tourists - apparently wrong season.

Did the power lines break because of the weight of the snow or due to
the copper becoming brittle with the intense cold? N ever seen such a
thing.

cheers
Jerry Attrick


Peter Hendra wrote in
:

As the winters are mild in God's
own we never used silos but stored bailed hay in open sided barns,
grew feed crops for "break feeding" in the winter such as green maize,

I've spread manure across snow behind the tractor when it was -40F on a
COLD winter's morning. We had a canvas tarp on both sides of the old
John Deere's engine compartment so the "cooling" air from the fan behind
the radiator would blow in your face to keep your hands from freezing to
the steering wheel. The tractor I drove was of WW2 vintage when gasoline
was strictly rationed. It ran on kerosene, not gasoline, even though it
had spark plugs. To start it, you built a fire under the carburetter
(Did I still spell that right in Queen's English?) and boiled the
kerosene to vaporize it for consumption before the exhaust manifold was
hot enough to keep it boiling when the engine was hot. Then, you opened
both cylinder petcocks to relieve the pressure so you could rock the big
flywheel back and forth, finally building up enough momentum in the heavy
flywheel to shove it over the TDC of the piston, praying THIS time was a
charm and it would fire! After several tries, she'd come to life making
an awful racket with fire spewing out those petcocks until you got around
to quickly close them and raise the compression back up to ??
5:1??...hee hee. Once started, it would be left running all day until
you were completely done with it and parked it back INSIDE the barn with
the WARM cows to keep it from freezing solid until spring...ready to
start it at 5AM once the milking was almost done.

If the power went down, we also had a leather belt-driven alternator,
about 8KW, that would run off the old John Deere's outer clutch housing,
which spun the belt (and anything else that caught it) when you engaged
the big clutch lever, even in neutral. When the snow brought the power
lines down, that tractor powered the whole farm for a week, 24 hours a
day pulling on that belt.

I can still hear that rhythmic John Deere 2-cylinder thumping, 50 years
later....(c;

I'm pushing 62 in January. Just like the rest of the "almost
Altzheimers" patients, I can remember that tractor.....Now, if I could
just remember where the damned truck keys are located....(c;


Larry


Peter Hendra April 30th 07 03:54 AM

Ping Larry: Sintered Bronze
 
On Mon, 30 Apr 2007 02:03:24 +0000, Larry wrote:



I have a picture of Mark Twain, one of Nikola Tesla's favorite friends,
holding a lit flourescent tube in his hand in Tesla's workshop with no
wires....(c; The picture is on the net.

Larry


Would you be so kind as to post or send the URL to my email address?
He is one person who I would really like to have met. When he was
broke, he undertook a speaking tour of the world in order to improve
his finances and pay off his debts. He came down this way (actually
'down there' as I'm about to leave Trinidad) and talked to packed
houses. I'm only 59 and missed him by a few years.

What I admire is his cynicism - not the current negative view of the
term as a sneering deprication but the original - one who sees what
is, not what should be. Hemingway wrote that all American literature
starts with Mark Twain. I can see why someone like Tesler would enjoy
his friendship.

Peter

Joe April 30th 07 05:35 AM

Ping Larry: Sintered Bronze
 
On Apr 29, 9:54 pm, Peter Hendra wrote:
On Mon, 30 Apr 2007 02:03:24 +0000, Larry wrote:

I have a picture of Mark Twain, one of Nikola Tesla's favorite friends,
holding a lit flourescent tube in his hand in Tesla's workshop with no
wires....(c; The picture is on the net.


Larry


Would you be so kind as to post or send the URL to my email address?
He is one person who I would really like to have met. When he was
broke, he undertook a speaking tour of the world in order to improve
his finances and pay off his debts. He came down this way (actually
'down there' as I'm about to leave Trinidad) and talked to packed
houses. I'm only 59 and missed him by a few years.

What I admire is his cynicism - not the current negative view of the
term as a sneering deprication but the original - one who sees what
is, not what should be. Hemingway wrote that all American literature
starts with Mark Twain. I can see why someone like Tesler would enjoy
his friendship.

Peter


It is not a flourescent tube, Twain is arching a gap.
Here is the close-up: http://www.twainquotes.com/teslalab.jpg

Larry has the long shot with Telsa in the bkgd, it's hard to tell in
the picture.

Ever read Telsa Queen Bee rants?

Joe


Joe April 30th 07 05:41 AM

Ping Larry: Sintered Bronze
 
On Apr 29, 9:54 pm, Peter Hendra wrote:
On Mon, 30 Apr 2007 02:03:24 +0000, Larry wrote:

I have a picture of Mark Twain, one of Nikola Tesla's favorite friends,
holding a lit flourescent tube in his hand in Tesla's workshop with no
wires....(c; The picture is on the net.


Larry


Would you be so kind as to post or send the URL to my email address?
He is one person who I would really like to have met. When he was
broke, he undertook a speaking tour of the world in order to improve
his finances and pay off his debts. He came down this way (actually
'down there' as I'm about to leave Trinidad) and talked to packed
houses. I'm only 59 and missed him by a few years.

What I admire is his cynicism - not the current negative view of the
term as a sneering deprication but the original - one who sees what
is, not what should be. Hemingway wrote that all American literature
starts with Mark Twain. I can see why someone like Tesler would enjoy
his friendship.

Peter


PS: Telsa was a fool. Brilliant, but lacking in seeing what is, and
fighting for what will never be. It cost him billions.

Joe


Larry April 30th 07 06:19 AM

Ping Larry: Sintered Bronze
 
"Don White" wrote in news:escZh.29371$PV3.313547
@ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca:

Yeah, yeah...and you walked 20 miles to school...uphill both ways!



Nope. I lived behind the school property for most of high school. The
elementary school was the old one about a half mile away. The farm was on
the edge of the town.

Larry
--

Ruby Vee April 30th 07 06:29 AM

Ping Larry: Sintered Bronze
 
On 2007-04-29 21:37:56 -0400, Larry said:

Peter Hendra wrote in
:

As the winters are mild in God's
own we never used silos but stored bailed hay in open sided barns,
grew feed crops for "break feeding" in the winter such as green maize,


I've spread manure across snow behind the tractor when it was -40F on a
COLD winter's morning. We had a canvas tarp on both sides of the old
John Deere's engine compartment so the "cooling" air from the fan behind
the radiator would blow in your face to keep your hands from freezing to
the steering wheel. The tractor I drove was of WW2 vintage when gasoline
was strictly rationed. It ran on kerosene, not gasoline, even though it
had spark plugs. To start it, you built a fire under the carburetter
(Did I still spell that right in Queen's English?) and boiled the
kerosene to vaporize it for consumption before the exhaust manifold was
hot enough to keep it boiling when the engine was hot. Then, you opened
both cylinder petcocks to relieve the pressure so you could rock the big
flywheel back and forth, finally building up enough momentum in the heavy
flywheel to shove it over the TDC of the piston, praying THIS time was a
charm and it would fire! After several tries, she'd come to life making
an awful racket with fire spewing out those petcocks until you got around
to quickly close them and raise the compression back up to ??
5:1??...hee hee. Once started, it would be left running all day until
you were completely done with it and parked it back INSIDE the barn with
the WARM cows to keep it from freezing solid until spring...ready to
start it at 5AM once the milking was almost done.


Ah yes, cold winter mornings. I grew up on a farm in Wisconsin --
didn't have electric milkers so we milked by hand. When it's 30 or 40
below zero, it's really hard to get the fingers working to strip a cow!
And mucked out the milking parlor with pitchforks and shovels . . .
piled the manure on the "manure pile" which was frozen solid until
springtime. (Oh the smell of a Wisconsin farm in the springtime!)

We'd park the tractor (and the cars) on a hill so that we could start
it in the morning by rolling it down the hill and popping the clutch.
The tractor usually started, but the cars didn't, so after Dad started
the tractor we'd be towing the cars down the road with the tractor and
a log chain to start them. I was 38 before I'd buy a car with an
automatic transmission -- how was one to start THAT in the wintertime?
I remember driving the milk to the cheese factory in back of the old
pick-up in those old fashioned cans . . . I was 12 and wasn't allowed
to drive on the highway. But farm kids driving milk to the cheese
factory in the morning was evidently allowed. I never got stopped,
anyway.


If the power went down, we also had a leather belt-driven alternator,
about 8KW, that would run off the old John Deere's outer clutch housing,
which spun the belt (and anything else that caught it) when you engaged
the big clutch lever, even in neutral. When the snow brought the power
lines down, that tractor powered the whole farm for a week, 24 hours a
day pulling on that belt.


We never worried about the power going down because we didn't have
power. We lived on Great-Granddad's farm, and he grew up without
electricity and didn't figure he needed it in his 80s! Didn't believe
in indoor plumbing, either. When GGD died, my folks put in plumbing
and electricity before the next winter, but I was in college by then.


I can still hear that rhythmic John Deere 2-cylinder thumping, 50 years
later....(c;

I'm pushing 62 in January. Just like the rest of the "almost
Altzheimers" patients, I can remember that tractor.....Now, if I could
just remember where the damned truck keys are located....(c;


I'm 51 -- I left the farm the minute I graduated from high school, and
haven't looked back. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

Ruby
--
Ruby Vee

Focusing on the negative only gives it more power -- Chinese fortune cookie


Larry April 30th 07 06:55 AM

Ping Larry: Sintered Bronze
 
Peter Hendra wrote in
:

On Mon, 30 Apr 2007 01:37:56 +0000, Larry wrote:

Certainly a different type of farming than that of New Zealand.
Seasonal snowfalls do sometimes cause a few problems in some parts of
the high country in the South Island but the stock - sheep and beef
cattle - is still left outside. In the rest of the country the grass
still grows in the winter, albeit less prolifically than in the flush
of spring and autumn - we don't experience a "fall" as the leaves of
the native trees stay on - much more sensible. I suppose that is why
New Zealand butter and cheddar cheese is able to be sold here in
Trinidad - low cost of production.


NZ sounds like South Carolina. We rarely get any snow at all and only
once or twice in a lifetime is there snow to close the place down. In
1973, the last snow storm in SC, the state was shut down for nearly a
week! Some trees shed in the fall here. Others shed in the spring with
the new growth pushing the very hard Southern Oak leaves out of their
sockets just in time for the flowers to bloom, then fall out in massive
flower storms to clog every port on every car they blow into...a real
mess.

SC farmers are, mostly, way too lazy to dairy farm. There are few dairy
farms across the state. They raise cash crops like soybeans, tobacco,
stuff that is nearly plant-and-forget-until-harvest, except for a few bug
sprayings, mostly from airplanes. The rich outer sea islands have very
fertile ground for vegetable crops, melons, we even have a historic TEA
plantation, the only one inside the USA, right here in Charleston. We
used to be famous, back in the plantation days, for rice. The place is
covered with abandoned rice paddies, now grown over with weeds just
itching to clog a prop if you get out of the channel.

It sounds terribly romantic to have such snowfalls, to be able to ice
skate, ski and make snowmen outside your back door and feed the cows
in a barn, but the romance obviously pales to the farmer. If we want
snow, we have to drive several hours to the mountains, and only for a
couple of months of the year. My youngest son had to wait to get to
Afyon in central Turkey at the age of ten in order to make his first
snowman. Still, it was a beautiful setting. It was in the grounds of
the great mosque there which, with its 15th century spirally tiled
onion domed minaret is a work of art in itself. I had gone in to pray
and they (owner and son) played in the snow outside. I was amazed at
the locals who took off their shoes and socks to wash their feet in
the freezing water of the fountain before prayer and who walked
barefooted on the ice to the door. Still, they were used to it. The
streets were covered in solid ice. Difficult to drive and walk. The
housewives were putting the ashes from their fires on the snow in a
line so that people could more safely walk. Magical to us though. No
other tourists - apparently wrong season.


When I was young, in the 1950's, NY state had terrible snow storms from
the Great Lakes "Lake Effect" snows. It was frigid cold and the local
lake, Owasco Lake, ring finger of the upstate Finger Lakes region, froze
so solid you could drive a snowplow-equipped dump truck out in the middle
of it and plow the snow off the ice to make a car/motorcycle race
track...right in the middle of the lake. I spent many days with my
grandfather, sitting in his gas mantle lantern-heated ice fishing shack
on skis we towed out at 3AM to clean out the ice fishing holes and set
the "tip ups", an automatic snatching rig, spring loaded to set the hooks
of any fish that bit the little minnow wiggling on the hook below. The
holes were augered into the ice with a special gasoline powered auger
drill and the ice was about 1-2 ft thick, where the fish wintered in
warmer water on the bottom. That same lake, now that the sun has
increased in intensity in one of its pulsating cycles, hardly freezes
over and certainly not hard enough to drive on, any more. My time in the
1950's is during the 1940-1975 cooling period the Global Warming Business
has amnesia about....right when Americans drove these awful gasoline
beasts, heated their houses with gun oil furnaces and lit the lights with
coal-fired huge electric plants. So much for man-made global warming
nonsense. It was DEATHLY COLD! Of course, that wouldn't create massive
government grants to fight global warming, which is caused by the big
thermonuclear star 93M miles away....(sigh). Man can't stand it when HE
doesn't control everything.


Did the power lines break because of the weight of the snow or due to
the copper becoming brittle with the intense cold? N ever seen such a
thing.


Not exactly. What would happen some time is the powerlines were simply
bowled over by shifting snow several feet thick, sort of like a mini
glacier. At other times, overzealous snowplow crews put too much snow up
against them and they broke off at the base. Cars drove in snow canyons,
especially after the invention of the snow blowers mounted on heavy
trucks. In grade school (primary school) we got Mimeographed handouts
from the power company, New York State Electric and Gouge, warning us NOT
to touch any high voltage overhead power lines we could reach with a
stick if we stood on top of the snow banks the plows had piled up after a
big storm. The banks were THAT high! My grandparents had a lake house,
where they lived most of the time. It had a back door on the first
floor, for summer, and on the second floor, for sometimes in winter when
the first floor was "undersnow".

This snow mass, near the edges of spring, would also melt during the day,
freeze hard again at night, creating a layered cake of solid ice over
snow over solid ice over snow by spring. Any warm spell made a new ice
sheet of the snow piled up everywhere....great for walking or hunting
until it got unstable and you fell through it on every step, ripping your
skin open on the jagged ice edges of the hole your boot made.

Every spring, of course, there would be a sudden warm period, melting
vast fields of deep snow quite quickly. This caused every stream to
become a torrent, every river to flood like hell and the lake to
overflow, flooding the whole valley even with the flood gates running
wide open. My grandparents' lake house, of course, took this into
consideration. It was on pilings, as were all the others, to allow the
lake to just run under it at will until it drained away. You parked way
up the road where it was out of the water and rode the aluminum fishing
boat with 7.5hp Evinrude Sportwin outboard to the house. There were
cleats by the back door and all the neighbors would help each other move
their lake docks up to the back doors of the houses during floods to tie
boats up to...creating each house as an island...complete with power,
heat, water, etc....an inconvenience, not a catastrophy like New Orleans.
The flood waters were 0.01C so we didn't do much diving off the roof into
the lake water covering up the road....(c; You had two choices to visit
the neighbors...take the boat or use your waders...your choice.

As this melt subsided, a wonderful little silver fish called "S'melt"
started running up every creek out of the lake to spawn. You were only
allowed 4 buckets of S'melt per day catch limit with your dipnets. There
were MILLIONS of them in every little creek for a couple of weeks until
the eggs were laid for next year. S'melt are amazingly easy to cook and
eat, being just bigger than a minnow. Their entire body was what you
ate. All their organs were contained right below the head just forward
of their gills. You simply cut them behind the gills and threw them into
the deep fat fryer you'd find us kids staring into waiting to see them
float (done) a few seconds later. To eat them, you simply put them into
your mouth, tail sticking out, lightly bit down just ahead of the tail
and pull the tail out....complete with all their bones....too easy! I
could still eat a hundred....(c; A little lemon sauce to dip them in is
nice. I'm not sure if they still run like that, now. The old lake is so
polluted by the damned sewage plants the Federal bureaucrats forced on
all the little towns there are huge algae blooms and lots of lake
pollution. When I lived there, you could drink the lake water, and we
did! Not any more. Everyone used to have cesspools and septic tanks
with drainage fields in the fast draining gravel soils of the valley.
How stupid to change what worked for 300 years.

It was a fantastic place to grow up. When I call my old friends I grew
up with who never left the town, I always ask them, "What day was Summer
this year?"....(c;



Larry April 30th 07 07:00 AM

Ping Larry: Sintered Bronze
 
Peter Hendra wrote in
:

On Mon, 30 Apr 2007 02:03:24 +0000, Larry wrote:



I have a picture of Mark Twain, one of Nikola Tesla's favorite friends,
holding a lit flourescent tube in his hand in Tesla's workshop with no
wires....(c; The picture is on the net.

Larry


Would you be so kind as to post or send the URL to my email address?
He is one person who I would really like to have met. When he was
broke, he undertook a speaking tour of the world in order to improve
his finances and pay off his debts. He came down this way (actually
'down there' as I'm about to leave Trinidad) and talked to packed
houses. I'm only 59 and missed him by a few years.

What I admire is his cynicism - not the current negative view of the
term as a sneering deprication but the original - one who sees what
is, not what should be. Hemingway wrote that all American literature
starts with Mark Twain. I can see why someone like Tesler would enjoy
his friendship.

Peter


Just put:

Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla

into the Google search engine. It will find all the stories, over
186,000 of them, you can read. Click on "IMages" for hundreds of
pictures of the two together. It's a huge collection.



Larry
--

Peter Hendra April 30th 07 09:29 AM

Ping Larry: Sintered Bronze
 



Ever read Telsa Queen Bee rants?

Joe


Hi Joe,

No. Educate me.

Peter

Jeff April 30th 07 02:13 PM

Ping Larry: Sintered Bronze
 
* Peter Hendra wrote, On 4/29/2007 10:10 PM:
....
As a general statement, during my childhood, only we Greeks in New
Zealand drank coffee - not espresso but the heat and wait for the mud
to settle type.


Was that Turkish style coffee? (ground very fine, boiled lightly in a
small pot, served in a small cup.) I've tried to reproduce this on my
own but its never palatable. I suppose I'll have to go to Greece or
Turkey to sample it made properly.

....

http://www.terroircoffee.com/

George Howell was the founder of Coffee Connection years ago, and more
recently created the Cup of Excellence program, where small farmers
are encouraged to produce the highest quality beans with country wide
competitions and small lot auctions based on the results.

Thanks. An interesting site.
I had heard of programmes like this in countries such as Costa Rica
where small famers are resisting growing Cocaine crops. They are being
encouraged to grow high quality, high value specialist coffee crops.
I know that I would pay extra if I knew that it was in a good cause.



The "Fair Trade" movement gets a lot of publicity today. Ordinary
small farmers get around $.65 a pound, whereas Fair Trade is paying
about double that to coops, which use some of the money to provide
basic services and schools. Starbucks gets mixed reviews for only
partially participating in the program, but to its credit, when the
bottom fell out of the market a few years ago, Starbucks insisted on
paying above market value, thus saving a lot farmers.

Fair Trade does have a few problems. There is absolutely no incentive
for any individual farmer to produce higher quality than the standard
set by the coop. Thus, it becomes both a price and quality ceiling,
not a floor. The "Cup of Excellence" program allows individual
farmers to get a serious premium - sometimes double the Fair Trade
level or even more. Of course, these farmers are only producing a
tiny quantity, sometimes 10 bags or less, so they have no impact on
the general market. If you want the best, you have to seek out the
small roasters that are looking for the best offerings each year.

Here's a list of vendors that purchased through the Cup of Excellence
program last year:
http://www.cupofexcellence.org/About...1/Default.aspx

And while I'm on a rant, the "Organic" movement is also a mixed
blessing. Its generally impossible for small farmers to be certified
organic, even though they don't generally use significant amounts of
nasty chemicals. Much of the organic is is from large plantations
that have been created by clear cutting rain forest. This is
especially true in Peru, so buying "Organic Blend" with "Peruvian and
other coffees" from Trader Joes just supporting clearcut agribusiness.


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