chromedome

Shared on FB by my daughter, the horticulture student...

Gratuitous cute bunny photos. As I've mentioned upthread, we try to ensure that all of our rabbits are comfortable with being petted and handled. Most come to like that (a few remain shy, which is fine), but if you want them to be comfortable with being picked up and held, you have to start early and really keep on it. As it happens, our granddaughter has been madly in love with a couple of the little ones in this litter, so these 7-week does are utterly spoiled (I think of them collectively as "the princesses"). Not only do most of them enjoy being held and cuddled, they'll resist being put back in the cage if they don't feel they've had enough loving yet. In fact, they'll throw tiny, adorable, foot-stamping tantrums over it. This gray one (not backward at putting herself forward, as they say) is our granddaughter's favorite, and has been dubbed Rose. She, and the butterscotch-colored one just visible at the rear (Buttercup), are the most princess-y of all.

I've mentioned from time to time that we cultivate specialty mushrooms from grow kits. We've had a few flushes in the past couple of weeks, so in the absence of much else going on in my garden at present I'll post a few pics of those. Here's a nice batch of blue oysters, which came to almost a pound: Oysters aren't one of those mushrooms that simply pop right up after a rain. Here's a time lapse of our elm oysters, taken over three days: ...and the end result (day five). That's just over a pound, for the non-metric among us. We also had a big flush of winecap mushrooms from our old spot under the apple tree, after a big rain. They didn't come up in the original bed itself, but from the soil under the apple tree. Winecaps grow on hardwood, so this is what we'd hoped/planned for when we situated the bed in that spot. Unfortunately we also had a very large flush of slugs pop up after the same rain, so I was only able to salvage a few. Winecaps, unlike oysters, *are* the kind of mushroom that goes from "small button" to "overblown and sporing" in the course of a day, but for mycophiles spore prints have a certain beauty of their own: They're primarily used as a tool in doubtful identifications (sometimes you can distinguish between two visually-similar mushrooms by comparing spore prints for color, spore shape/size, etc), but I have also seen some very artistic and beautiful spore prints. In those, the photographer chooses a surface (usually paper) with a texture and color that will complement the spores' color, and then lights it and adjusts the white balance to show the spore pattern to best effect.

Saw this a few days ago, and made a mental note to drop in and check out the corresponding thread here when time permitted. Was surprised to see that there isn't one (or if there is, I didn't find it). A couple of links: https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/entertainment-celebrity/anne-burrell-found-unconscious-and-unresponsive-as-details-of-celeb-chef-s-shocking-death-are-revealed/ar-AA1GVjY1 https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/anne-burrell-obit-1.7564257

As someone who writes at times for sites like these (not those specific ones) I can assure you that many of these repetitive phrases are used and reused, especially in titles, because they perform strongly in searches. Some companies have their own internal algorithms, perform A/B testing and suchlike, while others rely on tools like Google Trends (or non-Google competitors) to pit keywords and phrases against each other and decide which will perform best. Now everybody's trying to find ways to "disrupt" search (speaking of overused tropes) using AI (ditto), which may perhaps dent Google's dominance (don't bet on it) but in the short term will instead disrupt the entire online economy that's built around attracting eyeballs to sites. If I had any reason to expect that the outcome might be better search results for everyday users, instead of ever more-focused bubbles of attention management/manipulation, I'd be more open to it despite the short-term impact on my own industry. As it is, even leaving out issues like AI's wild inaccuracies and resource-intensiveness, I don't anticipate it being anything more than a new level of what writer Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification."

A brief update, this time focused on the flocks. A couple of months ago my GF splurged part of her tax refund on a prefab run for the chickens, to keep them out of my garden and safe from predators. They've been living in there ever since, and the older of the chicks I'd mentioned above have now joined them (the younger ones will go out there in another week or so). Here are a couple of pics of them, loitering around the bottom of a "quail condo" we'd improvised from a 5-tier indoor greenhouse I was no longer using for its intended purpose. Quail are messy eaters, you see, so there are usually treats to be had. After using that original quail condo for a month or so, we've learned the shortcomings of our initial design, largely driven by a need for haste (we wanted them out of our living room, as the flock grew) and limited budget. So over the last couple of days I've built an improved version, from my typical "less than shoestring budget" selection of materials. Said materials included: a bread rack from a now-closed bakery, wire cut from a now-decommissioned rabbit cage, some wire mesh, zip ties, the wire used to hold the roll of wire mesh together in its packaging, some of the coated chicken wire left over from the chickens' run, a few pieces from my aunt's old deck, and clean-out trays for the droppings (a crucial "learned experience" addition) cut from the aluminum surround of our torn-out pool. Here's a rough construction sequence, showing how it all came together. First, we have the rack itself, with the top tier enclosed in bits of old rabbit cage. Shelves are the rack's original shelving, but with wire mesh added so the wee birds' feet don't just fall through. The brown cross-pieces are the scavenged bits of old deck, and will support the clean-out trays under each level. After I'd gotten that far, my GF realized that each shelf could in fact support two small sub-flocks. So the rabbit-cage enclosure at the top has now been modified to have two doors and a fixed center piece, and all three have dividers down the middle (the cardboard box was just a placeholder for the cleanout tray). From there, it was just a matter of enclosing the sides with chicken wire, and mounting the doors (zip ties serve as the hinges). ...and here's the end product, with clean-out trays in place. That gives us eight cages where sub-flocks can go, because we now have a whole bunch of different kinds of quail: the standard Coturnix quail, sometimes apparently called "Pharaoh" after their mention in Exodus (before the manna came quail, if you hadn't remembered that bit), as well as Andalusians, calicos, tuxedos in various colours, and many, many more (I think we have something like 10 or 11 breeds, now). So the plan for later today is to transfer our existing flocks into the new condo, clean out and renovate the old one (leaving the bottom tier empty, because it was just a PITA to get in and out of), and then separate some of the breeds further into standalone flocks of their own and move them back into the original condo. We do have one more cage we've picked up from the local classifieds, which I'll modify into an over/under "duplex" for the quail. There is apparently nobody selling breeder flocks or fertile eggs for most of these breeds anywhere east of Ontario (where our own supplier was located), so my GF sees the potential for us to generate a modest side income from selling the specialty quail. Some of them are very pretty, while others show more personality than the regular coturnix (the little "red range" quail are lively, feisty little birds, and make a funny grumbling, chuckling noise that the others don't). We'll see how that plays out. If time permits, later today I'll try to block out time to get pictures of some of the different quail.

In my neck of the woods we called that "swamp water."

Not the supermarket, as such, but it extends to the kitchen. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/home-appliances-swept-up-expansion-trump-steel-tariffs-2025-06-12/

Huh. I'm a boomer, and I've never run a tab as far as I can recall. Of course my tolerance for spending time in a bar is minimal, so I appreciate the freedom to leave as soon as the impulse strikes.

Rea and Bona brands of Genoa salami are being recalled for salmonella. Affects Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/rea-brand-genoa-salami-and-bona-brand-genova-salami-recalled-due-salmonella?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23

There are a lot of words on this label, and I can't make any of them fit together in my head.

Fruit through history... https://archaeology.org/collection/a-passion-for-fruit/

Pleased and relieved to see that this one didn't involve any physical damage.

Fun fact: Jack White of the band White Stripes was born Jack Gillis (he took Meg's name when they married), and his grandparents were Cape Breton expats. Some of the musicians mentioned above are distant cousins. As you might expect, it was a Really Big Deal back in the day when White Stripes included a Cape Breton date on their Canadian tour. https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/distant-relative-confirms-jack-white-s-n-s-roots-1.638620

At the risk of *utterly* hijacking Smithy's thread, I'd recommend catching the movie "Margaret's Museum" if you can find it. It's the film adaptation of a novel called "The Glace Bay Miner's Museum," by local writer Sheldon Currie. Helena Bonham Carter plays the lead role as the daughter and sister of coal miners, who swears she herself will never marry one. So instead she finds herself an itinerant bagpiper (yes, they were a thing in Cape Breton for generations, though after the advent of radio they quickly dwindled). It's a well-told story, and HBC and the other international actors don't get themselves into trouble by trying too hard to capture the local accent accurately (must of the supporting roles went to locals, anyway). It's not entirely what you'd call a feel-good movie, because coal mining was (and is) dangerous work, but it's well worth seeing if you haven't already.