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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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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 -- |
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 |
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; |
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 -- |
Ping Larry: Sintered Bronze
Ever read Telsa Queen Bee rants? Joe Hi Joe, No. Educate me. Peter |
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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