the Walnut Diary

This morning’s article about the massive goose die-offs among migrating geese in Manitoba piqued concerns about avian flu virus. Then I recalled a marked decrease in goose droppings on lawns during visits to lock stations along the Rideau Canal. Further, at the farm our autumn days are usually punctuated by local flocks of geese barely clearing our hilltop house on their way from local harvested fields to their Big Rideau roost. Some with a load of corn aboard, have taken shortcuts through our orchard in their attempts to gain enough altitude to get across the meadow without walking.

So I asked Google AI, naturally. For some reason it assumed that I had asked about 2024, and so it reported that there was no concern, and flock leadership often devolves to a young member of the group, and routes and foraging patterns vary as a result. It said there is no evidence of bird flu affecting geese in Ontario.

I responded that this answer will not do, in the context of CBC reporting on die-offs of geese in Manitoba this morning, and that I was asking in the fall of 2025, not 24.

The response instantly reversed itself. AI stuck to the younger-goose-leads theory, but now reported that avian flu is a real concern in Southern Ontario among Canada goose populations.

I wonder: from its perspective, is a bird is any different than a car?

The Ontario Government has released a massive report on intimate partner violence which sparked a furor in the House yesterday. The NDP had sicced their AI sniffer on the document and indeed discovered that the PCs had produced a manuscript with fictional references in some cases, and multiple errors in documentation. No one gave evidence of having read the thing, including the academics called upon to comment on it. Towards the end of the Globe article came a mention of 47 cases of femicide in the last year, though I don’t recall if that was for Toronto, Ontario, Canada, or North America.

O brave new world that has such people in it!

Since last Christmas my wife has maintained that this year the tree would be shorter than she has had since we moved to the Farm. My standard procedure has been to find a nice, straight white spruce from our many evergreen stands, preferably one which had waited a few years to grow from the initial planting, and then cut it to fit so that its top branch just cleared the bottom of the beam above the intended site, a height of about nine feet. This required the services of an eight foot ladder for the upper parts of the decoration process, of course, and used up a generous amount of floor space in that corner of the living room.

This year we set out on a brisk Saturday morning to find the sacrificial spruce. Without our granddaughter to provide a third set of eyes for this procedure, we settled on a tree of good texture and colour, and a somewhat shorter height. As I crawled under its branches with my little electric chain saw (a great tool, btw) I realized that the lower part of this trunk reminded me of the scotch pines we harvested and sold locally as a fundraiser for a trip to New York City in grade 13. These things all had dog legs in the lower trunk to the point that it was hard to tell which way was up when cutting them.

I thought no more of this until I had hauled the new tree into the auto shop and set out to trim it for the stand. The bottom foot of the trunk deviated about 15 degrees. So I took my usual wild-ass guess, made the cut, screwed the plastic plate to the bottom, and prepared to set it into the tub amid four screw clamps which buttress the thing into place. At each step things looked worse. One buttress screw ran out of threads. This has never happened before. The second cut was even worse. Shimming the plate with a screw produced no benefit. The tree was crooked to a fault.

In desperation I removed all of the mounting apparatus and stood it, teetering, in the back of the UTV. Then I discovered that my very clever wife had as yet no concept of scribing a line around an irregular object. She soon learned how to use a chunk of 2X4 from the shop floor and a black magic marker to establish a line for the chain saw cut. By this point we had used up nine inches of the dog leg, but we had selected this tree because it was shorter than the others, and could cope with a further diminution of its height.

So now it sits in its stand on the auto shop floor, its tank still dry in case we decide this afternoon to move it into the house before the coming snow storm.

I heard Melanie Jolie say that the benefits from the F-35 program are simply not enough, so I asked Google AI to document them. 3.2% of a 200 million dollar airframe is the value to Canadian industry. It seems the Minister has a point.

I further asked AI to attempt to quantify the proposed industrial benefits to Canada of the Saab proposal for the production of Gripens in Canada. It fudged a bit but eventually concluded with the number 100% benefit to Canada.

Your results may vary, but it would be wise not to believe proponents of the F-35 program when they praise the ongoing benefits to Canadian industry of their pet bird.

On the morning after Game 6 of the current baseball marathon I find myself curiously numb. Myriad thoughts dimly remembered tug at my attention as I reel from coffee to cereal to rows of pills. This brain fog seems to be an adaptation to endure the repeated cavalcade of commercials which have countered each brief instance of athletic brilliance on the field.

At its best, baseball is a dull game. It is only at moments when the excellent control slips a bit that things get interesting. Last night a ball got stuck under a mat, and the outcome of the entire series teetered on the brink of the umpire’s call. The game was tied, but the play was reversed, leaving the tying runners on second and third. Chaos moved in and on the next play a fly ball improbably turned into a double play when one of the game heroes discovered that he had taken a step too far off the bag. And that was the game. Run commercials.

Oh well, there is another game tomorrow night.

I drove the 2014 es300h into the auto shop to add washer fluid prior to a drive to the city. My last project in there had been the unpacking and assembly of a large backup battery system, and the big problem had been lifting the 116 lb. battery out of the box, which had to be preserved in case of a warranty claim. I settled upon the car hoist for the dead lift. Two inch straps looped through the arms of the hoist made an impossible lift quite simple.

But then I neglected to lower the hoist. The rear arms remained in place, trailer-wide, and poised to nab the right mirror on the Lexus if its driver suffers from tunnel vision.

Kingston Lexus had the cover kit ready Monday morning, so I picked it up and set to work on the disassembly. What seemed like a simple job became a lot more complicated when I became aware of the number and variety of screws holding the break-away mirror in position. The mirror itself is quite sturdy, and can tolerate a fair amount of abuse, except for the overuse of lubricants, but I’ll get to that later. The part below the shell — I’ll call it the post for want of a better term — sustained a bit of damage in the low speed crunch. Because I didn’t really understand how a break-away mirror mechanism operates, I wasn’t certain that the repair would actually work until the end. The immediate problem was a spider web of little wires. There are two to the mirror to heat it. There is a pair in a coupler to perform more important functions, and the coupler was locked in the normal Toyota manner — easy for the members of the group to open but bewildering for anyone else. This much complexity I could handle. But then the bottom piece with whole bunch more wires fell off. One was a light with two wires, which mysteriously came on when I held it just so, but otherwise remained dormant. It is housed in a mouse-sized white enclosure which seems designed by some demon gamer. It defeated me for some time last evening, but this morning I realized that if it won’t go onto the bottom section with the classy signal light part, it must by exclusion fit into the upper-central part which holds the mirror.

If anyone had discovered that illuminating insight in my reading, I would have saved a lot of time and aggravation last night. For the record, the white mouse mounts up, and the classy signal light goes into the lower part of the thing. After many sessions with the couplers for these accessories as I worked them through the various cut-outs on the central part, I was rather pleased to discover that the tiny wires remained intact. This wiring did not come not from a box store.

Where I turned the corner on the job was when I gave up on screws and put a couple of bolts through to hold the middle parts together. This rigidity gave me a basis for more rewiring and eventual victory. Once I got the bottom part on, I carefully removed the supporting bolts and replaced them with screws from the collection. One missing screw was replaced with a 3/4″ x #8 Robertson wood screw. It worked fine to reach through two layers and bore securely into the highly visible eggshell cover.

The shell was now intact. I had wisely rerouted the mirror wires through a port near to the post. They connected readily. Then I remembered what somebody online or in a video said about putting vaseline on the mirror clips to help the installation. I delegated this task to my wife. For the record, too much vaseline on those four clips is a good deal worse than too little. On the brink of success, we couldn’t get the mirror to stay in place. I even sprayed the clips with brake cleaner. Don’t do this. Carbon tetrachloride seems to erode black plastic, making it look as though it had survived a particularly salty ride.
Fortunately the rest of the car was encrusted with salt at the time and the mirror frame didn’t look out of place.

This project was a test to determine whether our next car will be another Lexus, or a different brand and model. The dealership was helpful. The materials for the repair cost $168 CDN with taxes included. The battered post still does its job. The complexity of the assembly was a little worse for the bumbling amateur than the projects demanded by my previous shop toy, a 2004 Porsche Cayenne, though the Lexus has required virtually no repairs in six years, while the Cayenne kept me busy.

So Lexus has come out of this looking pretty good. It will definitely be a hybrid, as well.

Things were simple for Britain’s King John in the early 1200’s. He owned an island and gave out large parcels of land to those who would kiss his ring and pay him rent. His sole other income was from tariffs. His lords supported large standing armies to maintain control of his kingdom and compete with neighbouring feudal lords. The custom went directly to the King’s treasury.

Donald Trump seems to owe a lot to King John. Does he see tariffs funnelling America’s money straight to his personal coffers? So far the oligarchs have lined up for his benefices and he keeps making noises about the National Guard.

Of course King John overreached and the Magna Carta resulted in 1215, but Donald has given King John a fresh new start. What can stop the march of neo-feudalism in 2025? What will become of the Constitution of 1776?