David LaFerney

Remember this guy? I love this…

sinfest.net

Better to laugh than to cry - Thanks to Tatsuya Ishida at sinfest.net

This is from an Iranian website (I think) - apparently political sarcasm is a universal language.

Many more at www.lab-initio.com

As I mentioned in my previous post my wife and I went to Nashville for the 4th of July. A guy in the Wolf Camera store mentioned a good place to watch the fireworks was Love Circle Park, so we used the GPS to find find it and drove up to check it out.  The park is really nothing more than a big round flat circle on top of a tall steep sided hill right in the middle of a nice neighborhood.  The parking area is 75 feet or so below the top of the park with a steep set of concrete steps going to the top.  At the top of the stairs is this little brick building with no windows and razor wire around it -

There to the right of the brick building you can see a big green box thing with chain link and razor wire around it too.  After looking closely I decided that the Big Green Boxes (three of them spaced out around the park) are really large type air vents like you see on top of buildings.  Of course this made me curious and I started looking around to figure out what this “hill” really is.  Well, I’m pretty sure that it’s some kind of structure, because in addition to the access building, and the air ducts the flat spot on top of the hill is perfectly round as you can see in this image from Google earth -

It also looks to me like there is only a relatively thin layer of dirt covering the top of this big round structure by the pattern of dry brown grass on top that turns green at the edge of the slope -

There were a couple of other clues that something is under there - 2 big steel access plates bolted down to the ground on opposite sides of the hill (you can just see them - at the top edge right of center and lower edge a bit more right of center - on the satellite view) and you can still see where the drive in access to the project was at the base of the structure in the point of the “egg” in the satellite view. Also the little building on top has electrical service and antennae on it.

Whatever it is it’s been there for quite a while, because there were the remains of tree stumps on the sides of the slope that were 20 inches or more in diameter when they were cut down.  So enough time went by after the dirt was mounded around the structure for some trees to grow pretty big before being cut down.

So when we got home I Googled for the Nashville public works department - which has a pretty good web site for a municipal division like that - and filled out their contact form and asked what’s buried under Love Circle Park.  The form promised that someone would reply within a couple of business days, but so far no news.

Anyway, after a good bit of thought I think that it’s most likely nothing more than a municipal water tank under there.  Of course it could also be a secret nuclear missile silo, or a CIA listening post, or the world headquarters of KAOS. Whatever it is, Love Circle park looks like a great place to hang out and look at the stars with some good company and a frosty beverage.

However if you know, or think that you know what’s under there let me know in the comments.

My lovely Wife and I went to Nashville for the 4th of July, and spent the day just messing around seeing the sights along with all of the other tourists. We live about an hour and a half from Nashville and it’s “the Big City” to us, so we go there every couple of months or so for one reason or another - store-bought shoes and whatnot - but we usually don’t just explore.

Anyway, after the excellent fireworks at river front park ended we were making our way back to our car along with about a zillion other sweaty sightseers, and we randomly found ourselves in Printer’s Alley - Nashville’s traditionally seedy area of strip clubs, and various vices committed under a neon glow.

As we were exiting I urged Shirley to turn around and take a picture back up the alley. We never even noticed the sign advertising Nude Karaoke until we were looking at the pictures later. Quite an interesting looking place I must say - a couple of blocks north of lower Broad and west of the Cumberland river just in case you ever want to visit.

The fire works at river front park

Centennial Park

The Parthenon - Nashville’s full sized replica of the temple of Athena in Athens Greece.

All photos by Shirley LaFerney

photo credit: Felipe Skroski
I don’t really watch a lot of television, and in particular I’m not usually a big fan of reality TV. Nonetheless, I kind of got sucked into watching every episode of “Survivor Micronesia” this spring. Ever since I was a kid the idea of being castaway on a desert island has been fascinating to me. I read “Robinson Caruso” and “The Swiss Family Robinson” and poured over various survival manuals like the Boy Scout handbook - Yes, I was a Boy Scout.

Anyway, the interesting thing about it to me was the idea of making a decent life for your self with limited available resources. Which brings me to the subject at hand. I had never watched “Survivor” until this past season, and it was interesting to see the things that these people did and didn’t do to make their lives more bearable, but one thing really got my attention every time I saw it. The “Tribes” each had one pot for cooking, and apparently any time they had meat (fish, chicken, crabs, clams) to cook they were under the impression that the only thing to do was to hack it into chunks and boil it into a watery soup. Then they would take turns fishing chunks of it out with their nasty unwashed hands.

Ok, you gotta do what you gotta do, and they were basically starving by the end. However, they were eating coconuts every day, and there was bamboo everywhere, and they had at least a machete for a tool. Also, until they depleted the supply they were eating these giant clams the size of dinner plates. It amazes me that they didn’t whittle out some serving spoons, and chopsticks, and make some plates and bowls out of shells or coconuts - then at least they could eat like civilized people instead of like Neanderthals.

Did they not even think of this? Did they think they couldn’t making something as simple as chopsticks? Maybe the constant threat of being voted off the island made them feel that any such effort was pointless.  I don’t know, maybe they were too busy or too tired to do these kinds of things, but on the show you see them more or less just hanging out most of the time.

I’ve often seen people do tasks inefficiently over and over (in the workplace) when a bit of time spent making a pattern or a tool jig would make their work easier, better, and more accurate every day.  A very small number of people will actually take the time to tune up a tool, or file off a rough place on a handle, or make a spoon, while most of us just make do until something breaks or quits, or a task becomes un-doable.

Anthropologists tell us that tool making, and using is a hallmark of intelligence, and a key trait of humanity.  But after watching “Survivor” I’m beginning to think that it’s only a very small number of us that are actual tool makers.