This guy was a great model. The hummer who’s claimed the front garden as his territory this year is not as happy in front of a camera.

[insert old man yelling at cloud meme here]

Everybody’s pissed off because things are crappy and they used to be better. I know I certainly am. But it’s not “regulations” or “wokeness” that forces me to buy a $56 part to fix the dishwasher because a 5¢ switch embedded in an un-openable assembly burned out.

When we first moved into this house twenty five years ago, there were plumbing problems I had to fix. The kitchen faucet was leaking. In those days, there was B&B Hardware, an old style hardware store. I brought the weird brass fitting from the faucet to B&B, took a number at the plumbing desk, and eventually talked with the guy there. He cast a sardonic eye on the fitting, and said “You’ve got a 1950s Moen. In the 60s they changed this to have an additional flange right here for an o-ring, and in the 70s they stopped making this style altogether. The good news is I have a compatible part.” He went up on his ladder and sorted through some boxes and found me a part. It was expensive — nearly 15 dollars. But it worked.

Well, the kitchen sink’s been redone in the interim, and the faucet replaced with a very low-end wall-mount double-handle bridge faucet which lasted about seven years before being replaced by the new (yet not parts-compatible) version. And the new one’s leaking. So I took it apart, grimaced at the cheapness of the thin metals and plastic fittings. I headed to Home Depot, since B&B is long gone. At the big box, I got a shrug from the worker. No, there aren’t parts for those. They don’t sell that model, but new kitchen faucets are on aisle 6, and washers and stuff are on aisle 11, bay 9.

When I finally found washers and o-rings on aisle 12 bay 15, they didn’t have a replacement for the cracked plastic compression retaining ring. So I bought new o-rings in the hope that screwing down the conical ring cap tightly would continue to work. I went through the self-checkout, where the scanner pulled up the wrong price for the item and the employee that came over sneered at my mask and low-key accused me of shoplifting when he saw the old, broken part I’d brought along.

Eventually, it worked out. The sink is not leaking, I have 8 more of the o-rings (potentially saving me from buying another $2.92+tax set next time, if the smog doesn’t degrade them in storage), and I can go on to do other chores.

So your site was using too much bandwidth, and you converted all those animated .gif images to .webp using the WebPShop plugin.

But how many bytes have you actually saved? The command line will tell you:

ls -l *.gif | awk '{ print $5 }' | paste -sd+ - | bc 

ls -l *.webp | awk '{ print $5 }' | paste -sd+ - | bc 

Of course, this assumes that all the files in the current directory are the images and their conversions, and there aren’t a bunch of other files with one of those extensions. If that’s not the case, you’ll need to be more specific than *.extension in the ls command.

When I was a kid, many years ago, August and September would be the month my parents’ back yard was filled with big orb webs. These webs would have a whitish zig-zag pattern in the middle, and would be occupied by large yellow and black spiders that sat with four legs swept way forward and four legs swept backwards. Looking them up today, they were almost certainly Argiope aurantia (black and yellow garden spider).

Today, my mother’s garden is still host to many orb weavers, but primarily the squatter, orange-brown Araneus diadematus (European garden spider). There haven’t been any of the black and yellow spiders in the garden for years.

Similarly, when I moved into my in West Los Angeles, we would have several Peucetia viridans (green lynx spider) every autumn among the coneflowers, where they would guard a giant egg sac that would hatch out hundreds. We haven’t seen a green lynx spider in the garden for over a decade.

So what’s happened? Have these species been out-competed by the influx of other species? Araneus diadematus are now common in both places, as are Latrodectus geometricus (brown widow spider), neither of which were common before (at least as far as I can remember). Or is it a change in microclimate? Our winters haven’t been getting as cold, and our summers are longer in both places.

It’s strange being old enough to notice systemic change in an environment. In the grand scheme of things, fifty years isn’t that long. But in that timeframe, atmospheric CO₂ levels have gone up by over 100PPM, and somewhere around 85% of all plastics ever produced have been made. Smog levels in the LA Basin have decreased (or at least changed: lead levels are way down, ozone levels are way down, microparticulates are up). These changes may be completely unrelated to the spider situation, though.

From (relatively) recent reading.

“[The prison] was an immense and solid building, erected at a vast expense. I could not help thinking, as we approached the gate, what an uproar would have been made in the country, if any deluded man had proposed to spend one half the money it had cost, on the erection of an industrial school for the young, or a house of refuge for the deserving old.” — Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“Most of the men seemed to have been raised in hardship by stern, desperate parents. What struck me was the good they thought it had done them (I had yet to meet an adult man with a poor opinion of himself) and their desire to impose the same broken fortunes on other people, particularly on the young -though not their own young, of course.” — Mavis Gallant, “Between Zero and One”

“In the end, the bottom line was this: everything worked. Wherever you looked, you found. That was everyone’s worst nightmare. That was the excitement of it all.” — M. John Harrison, Light

“In the same way bad money drives out good, misinformation drives out information… Unless information is stabilized by a strong evaluative filter, such as science, with its controlled experiments and repeatable results, it gets swamped by simpler, stabler misinformation. If the people who design and run the Web don’t develop reliable ways to evaluate and stabilize information, the Internet may become the agent of social chaos.” — Samuel Delany, “Future Shock,” The Village Voice, 28 Dec 1999

“One of the biases of retrospection is to believe that the moral crises of the past were clearer than our own—that, had we been alive at the time, we would have recognized them, known what to do about them, and known when the time had come to do so. That is a fantasy. Iniquity is always coercive and insidious and intimidating, and lived reality is always a muddle, and the kind of clarity that leads to action comes not from without but from within. ” — Kathryn Schulz, “The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad”, The New Yorker, August 22, 2016