Taken the same day as yesterday's pic, just about an hour earlier.
Evening Sun
Sunset Behind Babia
One of the things I love about visiting Babcia is the ability to walk out ten minutes from the house to see things like this. Now that I'm back at our own computer, I'll be going through photos and re-editing them in Lightroom. Prepare yourselves!
Changing
The Girl has a love/hate attitude toward her hair. She loves it because, well, she just does. I say she hates it because she really doesn’t take care of it. On our days off, if K or I didn’t remind her to brush her hair, she wouldn’t. At all. And yet it literally took us years to talk her into cutting her hair the first time.
This time, she went even further — just to the shoulders. Her concern: can I still put it in a ponytail? Our concern? Will it be easier to brush out tangles?
The unexpected side effect: a hair style that almost perfectly reflects her personality: a bit silly, a lot of fun, and simply, sweetly alluring.
Growing with the Pup
Having a puppy is like having a newborn in the house -- that's what we'd heard. There is a certain amount of truth in this: Clover requires a lot of time and attention. And like a baby, she can't be just left unattended. But the attention is easy to give: she's such a sweet puppy, always eager to get a belly rub or a scratch behind the ear. Eager to please. Genuinely remorseful-looking when corrected. Or is she just playing us? Probably a bit of both.
And she's so curious. Those two things combine to torture our cats. Bida tends just to hiss. It's all it takes after a snoutful of claws a couple of times. But Elsa runs, and so what does Clover do? Chase her, of course. Isn't she just trying to play? It's not just Elsa and Bida, and that's a little worrying. There's a little black cat that comes around often enough, and Clover tried to make friends with her, to no avail.
She remembers the encounter with Bida that left her with a slightly bloody ear, so she kept her distance.
The Boy is having a bit of trouble with her, too. She's still trying to herd him, and the herding is getting more intense. She nips at his shoes, chases him when he walks in the room -- the tail is always wagging, but like Elsa, the Boy is starting just to avoid her at times.
Unless there's a toy to play with, like a stick.
Still, despite it all, we're all pretty much wrapped around her paw.
How could we not be?
Learning
The kids are learning how to clean. The dog is learning how to walk on a leash. I’m learning to take a break from this.
Too Big
Clover is a Border Collie, which means that chasing and herding are as instinctual to her as barking and tail wagging. That dog will herd anything as long as it's only slightly bigger than she. She chases the Boy around the yard, nipping at his ankles, then crouching down in front of him as soon as he stops.
Apparently, it's the same with basketballs and soccer balls.
Passing Along Info
This is a short piece about a recent experience I had online. I am thinking about using it as part of my curriculum for assessing internet information information. I knew from the start, before clicking on the link, that it was bogus, but since my audience will be thirteen-year-olds, I took a step-by-step approach as if each little discovery slowly confirmed my suspicions.
I recently saw a link in social media to an article that made me raise my eyebrows considerably.
http://www.truthandaction.org/nasa-admits-spraying-lithium-into-the-atmosphere/
I've heard about conn trails and the suggestion that it's some government agency spraying chemicals on a hapless population, but I wondered: In what context did NASA admit this? Was it a news conference? Will there be a video in the article with an official NASA spokesperson admitting this? Will there be a document from NASA?
I read the article and found it lacking from the opening paragraph.
New evidence emerged this week regarding NASA spraying unusual substances into the atmosphere. Officials state these chemicals are “harmless to the environment”. But the real question we need to be asking is, are these substances safe for humans?
Notice: the article cites "new evidence" but never supplies that evidence. Instead it simply summarizes the purported evidence. There's a quote that lacks any attribution whatsoever: these chemicals are "harmless to the environment." The quotation marks indicate that it is a direct quote from some source, but that source is never named or even explained. A search of the exact phrase "harmless to the environment" provides "about 2,230,000 results" from Google (source) and 306,000,000 results from Bing (source). So even if this is a direct quote, there's no telling where it came from.
Next, the paragraph lists as their authority unnamed "officials." Who are these officials? Are they insiders acting as whistle blowers? How many officials exactly are there?
The rest of the article continues in a similar vein, without listing a single source or providing anything beyond commentary.
But truth be told, I had my doubts from the beginning. The moment the page loaded, I was suspicious.
Three ads in the top fourth of the page? I immediately began thinking that this was a web site set up by one individual simply to earn money from ads. The fact that this is a WordPress.com site (See the WP logo in the clipped fragment at the top? WordPress, which also runs this site, automatically adds that if it is a site it hosts.) also makes me wonder that this might just be an ad-farm site set up by one individual. Whois confirmed this:
The domain is registered by one Bill McIntosh. he's also the admin contact and the tech contact. I know from personal experience that when one registers a domain name, there is an option to include as admin contact and tech contact the same data supplied for the registrant contact. Most news organizations have very different data for this.
Here's CNN's registration information.
And here's Fox News's registration information:
Very different indeed.
Who is this "Bill McIntosh" behind Truth and Action? It's not immediately obvious, and it's not very easy to find out. What are his credentials? Who has he hired to work for him?
This too is questionable because there is a link suggesting that readers themselves can "report for" the web site. This suggests that just about anyone can write something for this site.
Finally, there's the other content on the site itself. Articles include
- "The Nazi Origins of Renewable Energy and Global Warming"
- "The Most Secretive Treasury in History…Meet the Rothschilds"
- "Who Really Owns, Controls the Military Industrial Complex?"
Applying a little background knowledge, it becomes clear that this is a site that peddles conspiracy theories as its main fare.
I commented to the original poster,
And the source? A document? A press conference? What about the web site itself? Who's saying this? Do they have any credentials at all or is it Joe Blow in his basement making money off the ads for this site?
The poster replied that she was "just passing info" and pointed out that she "did not voice an opinion." Pointing out that "person is free to do their own research" she encouraged me to "research for yourself please." And so I did. What I found was confirmation of my initial suspicions: nothing but nonsense.
The question, though, is whether or not this is "info." If its on the internet, is it automatically "info"?
Clover Growing
Tatra Panorama
Click the image for a larger view.
Tatras from Zubrzycz
