Fire Ant Flickers (#12)

Howdy, y’all! Please pretend that today is August 5th (ignore your computer/phone/tablet calendar; time is an artificial construct anyway), and it’s National Underwear Day. Of course, it’s also National Oyster Day, and I’m sure I don’t need to explain to you the significance of those two observations appearing together.

“You’re so Venn…”

As momentous as those preceding observations may (or may not) be, yesterday was a more remarkable day, being the anniversary of the birth of John Venn, creator of the much (mis)used Venn Diagram. He also created a bowling machine, although in typical British fashion, that doesn’t mean what you think it means, nor what it should mean in proper American terms.

Tangentially, Venn did not refer to them as “Venn Diagrams,” but rather as “Eularian Circles,” and your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to study the differences and similarities between the two without asking ChatGPT for help. Please be prepared to show your work.

Oh, and there’s extra credit if you bring a slice of pie, preferably cherry.

Banking on the Goose

Take a gander at this:

This is a 27″ tall coin bank that currently sits in the corner of our breakfast nook. We bought this goosey bank (well, what would you call it?) when we were living in North Texas, sometime in the late 1980s, making it three or so decades old, and we’ve been feeding it on and off for that entire period. Young children also get a kick out of putting coins in its gaping mouth.

It’s now almost full and I’ve often wondered about the potential value of the accumulated coinage, with the thought that I could at least get a range of possible value based on the weight. I put the bird on a digital scale and the readout showed 100.4 pounds.

The bank is made from some lightweight material, almost like thick papier-mâché, so the unloaded weight probably isn’t more than two or three pounds. I’ve taken the liberty of rounding up the estimated weight of the coins to an even 100 pounds to make the math easier.

I then googled up the approximate number of US coins in a pound, and came up with the following table. The right-hand column is the computed value of the contents of the bank if all the coins in it were the same (they’re not). As you can see, the possible range of value is pretty wide.

Coin Denomination	# per US pound	$ per 100 US lbs
Pennies – Copper	145	$145
Pennies – Modern	181	$181
Nickels	91	$455
Dimes	200	$2,000
Quarters	80	$2,000

If you’re curious about the dual entries for a penny, the composition of that coin changed in the early Eighties from copper (except in 1943 when pennies were minted in zinc-coated steel due to a wartime shortage of copper) to copper-coated zinc. Copper pennies weigh slightly more than the zinc models.

It wasn’t intuitive to me that the value of a goose full of dimes would have the same value as a goose full of quarters, and it hurts my brain to work it out without a bit of cipherin’. I’m going to assign you a second bit of homework…show me the math that supports the conclusion. (Here’s a hint: the weight of a dime is disproportionately less than its relative value compared to a quarter.)

This approach of potential valuation is a purely academic exercise as I have no idea about the mix of various denominations inside the goose. We did start out depositing only pennies, but soon banked all of our coinage as we transitioned to a cashless approach to commerce. I suppose one approach would be to simply average the potential values; that yields a possible value of $956.

By the way, the largest real goose on record is a Canadian goose named Maxie who weighed in at around 24 pounds. Maxie is commemorated with a 40-foot tall statue in Sumner, Missouri. That statue weighs two tons. So, our goose is not an outlier, statistically speaking.

[Over]Analyzing Song Lyrics

I’ve had this song going as an ear worm for most of the day:

Roger Miller won five Grammy Awards for King of the Road in 1966, and it still gets regular airplay on SiriusXM. It’s a easy listening song, not necessarily in the same way that easy listening is applied as a musical genre or radio station format, but that it’s a comfortable, laid-back song that’s easy to sing along to, and the lyrics seem to flow organically without being forced into an artificial context.

OTOH…

It perhaps doesn’t pay to listen or think too closely to some of those lyrics, especially this phrase:

…and every lock that ain’t locked when no one’s around.

I’ll leave the implications to your imagination.

Others have spent more time than me analyzing all the lyrics. Check out this entry on the Song Meanings website. Beg, borrow, steal is a phrase that is employed a few times…kind of a dark slant on a simple tune, right. Of course, there’s one person who puts an even darker twist to the reference to the train engineers’ children, but he (or she) is rightfully chastised for a misinterpretation.

Anyway, song lyrics — the best ones, anyway — are poetry and thus are subject to varied interpretations which may or may not be true to the writer’s intentions. Shoot, even the accompanying music itself can be wrangled into a something else. Wonder what Miller thought about R.E.M.’s cover?

Trivia of the day: Roger Miller’s first wife (of three), Barbara Crow, was born in Shamrock, Texas, which happens to also be my birthplace. Is there a Venn diagram that illustrates that connection between me and Miller?

PSA: Beware of falling…

And speaking of trivia, Debbie and I participated last night in the Horseshoe Bay club’s monthly Trivia Night, where teams test their knowledge of stuff that nobody really cares about. It’s important to note that our participation mainly consisted of second-guessing our teammates’ correct responses, so we don’t expect a future invitation. But that’s a subject for another time.

One question was of particular interest (and frustration), and it went something like this:

The Greek playwright Aeschylus was killed when which of the following fell on his head:

1. Anvil
2. Axe
3. Tortoise
4. Serpent

After vigorous and ill-informed debate, the team settled on the obvious answer: an anvil. (I briefly argued against the anvil, until someone pointed out that people must have used them since the Bronze Age to shape metal, and that period greatly preceded Aeschylus’s life. This argument represented the pinnacle of our intellectual discussions for the evening.)

It’s probably obvious that our answer was incorrect (we also didn’t correctly respond to the meaning of LL Cool J’s name, which was Ladies Love Cool J, nor did we know that the first cloned organism was a tadpole). The correct response to the above question was, of course…wait for it…a tortoise. What the…?!

According to Wikipedia (the ultimate authority on all things that people don’t care much about), a dude named Valerius Maximus, who apparently was an early writer specializing in obscure trivia, wrote that Aeschylus was killed when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald noggin, mistaking it for a rock. It’s not known whether the tortoise survived or if the eagle had to be content to dine upon Aeschylus himself.

Now, while Aeschylus’s death is now a bit more well-known, thanks to Trivia Night and also the Gazette, it’s worth noting that such avian behavior is not all that unusual. As this article points out, at least 23 species of gravity-wise birds are know to drop food on hard items in order to make it easier to eat. And while the odds of you being another victim of this otherwise generally innocuous behavior, those odds aren’t zero. So, a word to the wise, especially those who are unburdened by a thick head of hair: always wear a hat when going outdoors. And if you really want to be safe, make it a motorcycle helmet.

Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Closing Shot #1: Sad Venn

Closing Shot #2: Sorry/Not Sorry