May 04, 2008
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CB monitoring pays off
I don't usually monitor the squawky CB but this afternoon I had it on for a while and I got lucky. As I was approaching Dayton OH eastbound on I-70 conversation began to center on a tie-up just east of the I-75 interchange. When it began to dawn on me I could spend the next hour or so creeping through the mess or I could spend it in my livingroom (ah, the joys of having a home on your back) with a cup of coffee I pulled off at the next exit.
A little Googling turned up a couple of traffic cameras that showed traffic backed up. Bleck! It might take a while for traffic to get moving again and at 4:30 in the afternoon the alternate routes don't much appeal to me. Generally I don't like to backtrack but it's only 3 miles back to the Wal-Mart in Englewood, OH. It's time to call it a day.
A meijer hypermarket
By chance when I exited I-70 I ended up at the meijer hypermarket in Englewood. Put Wal-Mart Superstores in a design competition with this meijer hypermarket and the meijer wins hands down. This is one good looking design. While cut from the same hypermarket cloth this is a nice fresh store with nice fresh produce in a larger grocery section than Wal-Mart's. These stores are so similar in concept one might wonder which came first - who's borrowing from whom here?
Night camp:
Wal-Mart parking lot, Englewood, Ohio
Five Trillion Spiders
Spiders begin their hunting with a few handicaps. They're often smaller and weaker than their prey, and they have no wings to give chase in the air. Some species extend their legs by hydraulic pressure, using the same liquid that carries oxygen from their lungs, so they have a hard time running and breathing at the same time. Even their poison may be no match for their victim's: a crab spider's bite is to a honeybee's sting as "an air-gun compared with an elephant rifle," John Crompton wrote. Yet spiders kill at an astonishing pace. One Dutch researcher estimates that there are some five trillion spiders in the Netherlands alone, each of which consumes about a tenth of a gram of meat a day. Were their victims people instead of insects, they would need only three days to eat all sixteen and a half million Dutchmen.
From Spider Woman by Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker magazine, March 5, 2007, page 69