Meanderings, 23 October 2021
Good morning, friends!
MILWAUKEE, Wis. -- A Wisconsin man grew the heaviest pumpkin in the country this fall, weighing in at 2,520 pounds. However, it's not going in any record books, because it was disqualified from the competition.
"This is a giant pumpkin. Weighs in - it weighs in at about 2,520 pounds," said grower, Mike Schmit.
Despite its unmatched weight, this pumpkin won't get the recognition it deserves because it was cracked.
Schmit grew this gargantuan gourd about 30 miles west of Fond Du Lac.
"Pumpkins are like ice cream, everyone loves them," said Schmit. "Some people say we're crazy, but you know, we're just people who like to have a little fun out in the dirt."
But unfortunately, from internal pressures and the awkward way it was growing, it cracked.
"This pumpkin would have won this year and so you're looking at a pumpkin that would have been worth $20,000," he said.
That crack disqualified him from all competitions this year.
Christian travelers visit Jerusalem to retrace Jesus' final footsteps along the Via Dolorosa, Muslims to revere the Dome of the Rock, and Jewish people to insert written prayers into the cracks of the Western Wall.
Some people do all three.
Come December, travelers will have a new option available to them when visiting Jerusalem. They can go underground to experience a portion of the Old City as it existed some 2,000 years ago.
Following an excavation that lasted more than 150 years, a buried building constructed around A.D. 20 is set to open to the public this year.
The subterranean building is located steps from the Western Wall, a retaining wall on the western side of the Temple Mount, which is the holiest site in Judaism and the place where Jerusalem's First and Second Temples once stood.
WEST ALTON, Mo. – Chad Hester was doing some overnight fishing this week in the Mississippi River near West Alton. Hester was with a friend when they couldn’t believe what they saw early Tuesday morning.
“I freaked out,” said Hester. “I was like holy cow.”
Using Asian Carp as bait, Hester caught a rare piebald blue catfish. The fish is distinct because it has both white and black markings. Hester quickly took some photos and weighed the fish at 36 pounds.
Ryan Busse, choosing against our rampant gun culture:
Behind closed doors, Busse was starting to question some of the political positions he’d accepted all his life. His wife, Sara, who also came from a Kansas hunting family, challenged Busse to think deeply about whether the Republican party really stood for his values. “With every school shooting, things became more and more fraught,” she told The Trace. When two teenagers killed a dozen of their classmates at Columbine, Sara called her husband at work to ask if he felt complicit in the tragedy. Whispering into the phone, Busse protested that Kimber rifles were usually too expensive to be used as crime guns. But Sara balked. “That’s what you have to say for yourself?” Busse remembers her asking. “That they didn’t use your guns?”
“She was asking me some pretty hard questions, and I didn’t have awesome answers for her,” he said. “And that sort of started the evolution and opened my eyes.”
Several scary workplace incidents also caused him to question unregulated gun ownership. Once, Busse writes, a Kimber employee accidentally fired his gun in his office. Another time, an employee who was going through an emotional crisis fired his gun at his dog outside the office, leading employees to be ordered to stay away from the windows.
“Guns are inherently dangerous, and just because we’re gun experts doesn’t mean that we’re immune from the bad things that guns can do,” Busse said. “Like if you take a thousand people and give them all cars, eventually there’s going to be a car accident.”
The moment that really sealed Busse’s turn away from the conservative movement was when the Bush administration announced its intention to allow drilling for gas and oil in the Badger Two Medicine area near Glacier National Park in 2003. The breathtaking public lands were deeply important to Busse, who had always thought of conservation as inextricably linked to gun rights and hunting. Without thinking twice, he agreed to speak against the Republican president’s proposal at the National Press Club. …
In the summer of 2020, Busse accepted a position as an adviser to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, and last summer he was hired as a senior advisor to the gun violence prevention group Giffords. He wrote the book, he said, because Americans deserve to know how the country got so polarized, and to encourage the ocean of silent moderates that he believes are out there to find their voices.
CHICAGO -- Football has always been a sport dominated by guys, but two Windy City sisters are showing the guys a thing or two this season.
De La Salle Institute in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood is all about girl power these days with not one, but two standout female kickers who are playing high school football.
De La Salle is the third oldest Catholic school in the city of Chicago, but the Meteors are making history for a different reason this fall.
This is Mia Loza's second season as the Meteors' starting varsity kicker.
"I'd say she's good from anywhere from the 40," said De La Salle Institute Football Coach Mike Boehm.
Coach Boehm's recruiting revelation happened as he watched Loza, who was a seasoned soccer player, at a practice last year.
"I was kicking the soccer ball, like shooting from long range. He saw my foot and he was like, 'let's try a field goal, maybe you could do it,'" Mia recalled.
"Hey, maybe she could help us. So you go over there, you bring your long snapper and your holder and she just starts booming 'em," Boehm said.
"I made it and he was like, 'let's get you on the football team,'" Mia said.
Mia's racked up more than a dozen extra points this season alone.
"At the high school level, when you're dealing with extra points and even field goals, those points are huge," Boehm said. "She's more consistent with PATs than any of the boys we have."
This year, another Loza has joined the De La Salle ranks with Mia's little sister, Sissi, kicking for the JV team.
"She watched that happen, she quickly wanted to do the same and there was no hesitation," said De La Salle Institute Principal Thomas Schergen.
hey have been waiting for three years, growing fat and long in the tumult of the Pacific Ocean. Now the salmon turn, inexorably, driven by some ancient smell, into the mouth of a river along the wild Northern California coast.
For millennia, Native Americans watched the fish enter the Klamath River. The tribes celebrated them as a gift from the gods, but the fish numbers dwindled. Once the water teemed with millions of fish; last year, only 46,000 chinook salmon migrated successfully.
Huge dams, proclaimed by newcomers to the region as wondrous monuments to their dominance of nature, and promoted by the U.S. government as a way to open the West to settlers, blocked the fish from their upstream spawning grounds and slowed the Klamath in torpid reservoirs.
Now humanity is set to surrender much of the river back to nature. Four large dams on the Klamath River are due to be torn down in what is called the largest dam removal project in American history.
“It’s massive. It’s huge,” says Amy Cordalis, a legal adviser to the Yurok Tribe, of which she is a member, as she watches a heron lumber along the Pacific coast. “For the tribes and for the Yurok, it’s the beginning of healing. We remove those dams, the river runs free, and the salmon can go home.”
The removal will mark a major victory for environmentalists in their campaign to restore once-wild rivers in the United States by tearing down unneeded dams. It will be a historic victory for Native Americans who were promised eternal fishing rights, only to see fish blocked from their rivers. And it promises to help salmon, once a massive driver of the natural life cycle here in the Pacific Northwest.
But it could be too late. Environmentalists already see fish migrations dwindling in tributaries of the Klamath – a warning of further decline to come – and tribes no longer can count on fish as a source of food and a central part of their culture. Farmers upriver, meanwhile, who depend on irrigation, will continue to lay claim to their share of water from the river system. All of which means that the contentious issues that have swirled around the mighty Klamath for decades won’t vanish with the removal of four massive walls of earth and concrete.
“We are in a race with extinction,” says Michael Belchik, a senior biologist for the Yurok Tribe, of the declining salmon stocks. “And we are losing.”
Underground home, not in Hobbiton:
This home isn’t located in Hobbiton, but in Princeton, Massachusetts.
For a listed price of $640,000, you’ll get three bedrooms and 2 1/2 bathrooms, and you’ll never have to worry about replacing the roof again.
“This truly one-of-a-kind, earth-sheltered home atop a private winding driveway into the woods, looks like it was lifted straight out of a James Bond movie,” according to the 166 Wheeler Road website.
“Even though it’s earth-sheltered, the complete south wall is windows end to end,” Sold Squad listing agent Greg Maiserr said. “I’ve had people call it a bunker, but it’s not really a bunker at all, it’s bright and spacious.”
The concrete interior may look chilly in photos, but Maiser said the home is well insulated and stays toasty thanks to a radiant floor heating system.
“The average heating bill is about $3,000 a year, which is great for this area,” Maiser said.