Category: Oddities

I have no idea what’s going on around here any more…

Those northbound CH-47 Chinooks looked to be barely over treetop level, but the rotors are 60 feet in diameter and they were much higher than they seemed. Shook the house and brought all hands outside to watch the show.

I remember getting a tour inside one, a long time ago, at a military air show.

While I was puttering around outside (an admittedly rare occurrence), a deep thuttering over the northern horizon eventually resolved into a formation of four helicopters. Hard to tell at this range, but they looked like Black Hawks southbound for the Stewart Air National Guard field.

Our Larval Engineer reports that the college ROTC contingent includes some pilots-in-training who regularly land Black Hawks on the campus outfields.

We are, fortunately, not in a part of the world where Bruce Cockburn’s commentary applies…

Abraham Lincoln once observed that calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg, which seems to apply perfectly to this situation:

Surely, the real reason boils down to:

• A warehouse full of boxes with pre-cut hand holes
• A stack of returns due to guys poking their hands too far into the boxes
• A desire to disallow said returns

I bet they pick up the box that way, too.

The local construction equipment supplier deploys otherwise-idle yellow iron in all the parking lots in preparation for snow season. They haven’t gotten much use this year, which is OK by me.

A Komatsu excavator behind a bank sports some puzzling warning placards:

This one seems to mean you should stay out from underneath the bucket, which makes sense:

But what’s this one mean? You may be crushed, so keep your distance from doors?

Maybe read the manual before / while being backed over?

Even though this stuff has become entirely too abstract for me, it’s just another day in the life for Stickman!

A combination of neglect and last year’s storms demolished much of the Red Oaks Mill dam:

The linear “rocks” just downstream of the dam are sections of the concrete cap:

With the cap gone, the concrete-and-rock fill should disintegrate in short order:

Upstream of the rubble, the Wappingers Creek dropped about three feet, exposing bedrock and undercutting the old shoreline:

Downstream, not much changed. This wasn’t a catastrophic dam break that wiped entire towns off the map.

In February 2005, the fishing must have been pretty good:

It’s endured quite a few floods like this one in February 2008:

But in June 2008, after the waters receded, you could tell things weren’t right:

Looks like a shovel-ready project to me…