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Sly Comments

Author:	Emory Schley	Created:	10/4/2006 3:15 PM
Readers are invited to comment on any of the items or discussion seen below, or any matter of concern here in Beautiful Marion County!

Curious-looking rig draws glances – and questions
	By Emory Schley on 9/28/2007 4:56 AM

Last weekend, my wife and I traveled over to Rainbow Springs to attend the sixth annual Marion County Springs Festival activities held there. It was a beautiful autumn day though it was actually the final day of summer. Crowds were out in abundance, and every parking space in the park was filled, with still more cars having to park along both sides of the roadway leading out of the park. As I usually do when I go to Rainbow Springs, I took my camera rig with me. I call it a camera rig because it’s actually two digital cameras mounted on an aluminum bracket with an electronic flash secured above them. Wires go from a controller to each camera and to the flash unit. The cameras are in a side-by-side configuration and are both aimed in the same direction. ...

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Lessons my mother never taught me
	By Emory Schley on 9/26/2007 4:51 AM

Lots of card tricks seem too mysterious for an ordinary mortal to figure out, but that’s exactly what makes them so appealing. Bob Schmitz, Belleview, sent me an e-mail a few days ago mentioning a Website that offers on-line card tricks. You can find it at www.ecardtricks.com along with a few entertaining examples suitable for the Web. The few I went through seemed pretty simple to figure out, but without the manipulating hand of the card trickster, I suppose there’s a limit to what you can do just on a computer screen, while trying to make it seem interactive. I knew some people in the Army decades ago, who were pretty adept at such trickery. Only problem was they didn&am ...

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Man of many talents knew how to juggle Life and its many facets
	By Emory Schley on 9/24/2007 4:54 AM

William Claude Dukenfield died on Christmas Day 1946. He was perhaps, at least at the time, the world’s best known juggler. His career ranged all the way from the old vaudeville days to radio to motion pictures. At one time, he may have had the most recognizable face in the entire nation. His asking price for making a movie was $100,000 and many times, he got it. This was when a new home might cost $2,500 and a new car around $900 or so. That’s not bad money, even today, but back then it was a true fortune. Dukenfield was a man of many talents, and today, he’s remembered more for his comedy routines and movies than for his juggling prowess, bu ...

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The mind is an easy thing to fool
	By Emory Schley on 9/21/2007 4:54 AM

Close-up magic is, I think, a fairly new phenomenon in our society. I suppose the original close-up magic tricks were the hundreds, perhaps thousands of card tricks that have been invented by clever, but devious minds. When you look into the inner workings of some card tricks and learn their secrets, it seems almost impossible that some of them can be thought of as anything mysterious when seen by an observer, but the mind can be awed by the simplest of ruses, at times. Here is a trick that long baffled me, even though I knew exactly how it worked. It sounds so simple, and it truly is, but your mind keeps searching for some highly complicated sequence to help make sense of it all, when it’s just simplicity itself at work here: Sort a deck of cards into its various suits, then arrange each suit in numerical order, then stack the suits ...

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Changing patterns among readers, TV watchers
	By Emory Schley on 9/19/2007 5:05 AM

I’ve been reading in some sources lately that people aren’t reading books, magazines and newspapers as much as they once did. TV-watching is reportedly down, too, so it makes me wonder just what is taking up so much of people’s time lately – what it is they’re using to fill the void in their schedules. I’d guess that it’s probably the Internet, that multi-fascinating be-all and do-all to many of the world’s residents. The Internet is so remarkable that I marvel when I hear of the occasional soul who has no familiarity with it at all. My wife belongs to that category. She does not know how to access the Internet, and if she clambered over that obstacle, she probably wouldn’t know where to go once she logged on. She has started ...

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Separating the facts from the fiction
	By Emory Schley on 9/17/2007 5:13 AM

Do you get as tired as I do of receiving all those urban legend e-mails that seem to be perpetually circulating around the Internet? You know, the ones about Target being owned by the French, the millions due you from some saint in Nigeria, and how Lee Marvin said Bob Keeshan (Capt. Kangaroo) was the “bravest man he’d ever met”? It seems like every week, there’s some new, at least to me, story going around as outrageous as one might hear in a liars’ round-robin contest. I’ve gotten into the habit of checking out many of these stories that clog our e-mail facilities. One I frequently use is www.snopes.com which seems to have the low-down on just about anything that pops up into my e-mail box. Checking stories I receive through snopes.com has saved me the embarrassment of forw ...

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Lessons every new resident of Florida should learn right away
	By Emory Schley on 9/14/2007 4:51 AM

There are some lessons most new residents of Florida generally need to learn right away: Don’t mess with the alligators, avoid the rattlesnakes, don’t bother telling the rest of us how it’s done up North, and buy a good, reliable air-conditioner. That’ll at least get you off to a good start. But another point that should always be on everyone’s list, but isn’t, is this: Keep a keen eye on the weather! There’s an imaginary corridor roughly 100 miles wide that runs from Tampa to Jacksonville, and that encompasses all of Beautiful Marion County. Inside this corridor, more lightning strikes are recorded than anywhere else in the nation. It is truly the lighting capital of the United States, and is – if my memory serves ...

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If only scales could lie. . .
	By Emory Schley on 9/12/2007 4:53 AM

--—---------------------—----- The older I get, the more I seem to pack on the pounds. Seems to me like I don’t eat nearly as much as I once did, so I find the increased weight somewhat mysterious. However, I do freely acknowledge that I eat foods I probably should leave alone. I’ve often wondered why all the really great tasting bad-for-you food is so loaded with calories, while the good-for-you food with low calories seems so tasteless and bland. It would be nice if the situation were reversed. Then we could celebrate special events with broccoli and peas and lettuce, and feel good about it as we pigged away on all those great-tasting vegetables, leaving all the mundane stuff, like pizza, cake, ice cream and pie for more sedate events.

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Keeping an eye on you!
	By Emory Schley on 9/10/2007 5:04 AM

Have you stopped to consider how many cameras there are in the world today – and just how many of those cameras may be pointed at you, without your knowledge? Back in the ’60s, pretty much the state of the art in miniature camera design had to be the Minox, although a number of Asian competitors were giving the good folk at Minox, if not nightmares, then at least mini-nightmares with their new models as the miniature camera wars raged. The Minox pretty much stayed ahead of the competition, though, because it was pretty difficult to put quality optics, a film chamber, film exposure apparatus, a viewfinder and a focusing capability into a small metal box about the size of a package of chewing gum. One had to buy special little cassettes of film – I believe it was 16 mm film – ...

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Got a few hours to invest?
	By Emory Schley on 9/7/2007 4:55 AM

There’s a pretty neat Web site you might like to check out. It’s called www.instructables.com and it contains instructions and photos showing how to build a lot of very neat equipment, and how to solve various problems that may have been vexing you from time-to-time. It even shows you how to perform various tricks. There are literally hundreds of projects on this site that you can spend an enjoyable couple of hours browsing. You’ll find everything from cheap computer hacks to building a CNC milling machine, real cheap! You can learn how to save money on button cell batteries, how to cook up delicacies, how to send music over a LASER beam, and lots of truly neat stuff suitable for science projects in schools for your tween or teen, and stuff for adults, too. How to build a heat exchanger to c ...

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Only time will tell...
	By Emory Schley on 9/5/2007 4:47 AM

Life, I have read, is kind of like a roll of toilet tissue. The closer you come to the end, the faster it goes. There seems to be a world of wisdom in that statement. I can remember as a small child that it seemed an eternity existed between birthdays. A year seemed so long it was almost inconceivable. All that seemed to change once I got into high school. The days suddenly started picking up steam and went by at a noticeably brisker pace. As I got even older, time seemed to have broken into a trot. This process has continued throughout my life, and I now find myself in awe to discover an event, or a death I remember as having occurred during the past year or two actually occurred a decade or more ago. There at one point, my concept of time and how quickly it was passing, seemed so screwed up that I began doubting my sanity. Fortunately, that phase of my life quickly passed, too. So, I guess there is at ...

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Juggling always looks pretty good on a résumé, doesn't it?
	By Emory Schley on 9/3/2007 7:09 AM

Well, happy Labor Day to you! I have addressed the subject of juggling several times here. Previous installments have explained how to learn to juggle beanbags, both in the cascade style (March 13) and later (May 7), the shower style for the more adventurous folk out there. An old Army tale is that in Airborne School, where soldiers are trained to be paratroopers, the drill instructor addresses a new group of “victims” with something like “Awright, you guys, this is the U.S. Army Airborne School. This course lasts for three weeks. During that period, we accomplish three goals: The first week, we’re going to separate the men ...

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There's a lot more to the subject of color than just hues and chroma
	By Emory Schley on 8/31/2007 5:02 AM

I’ve long been fascinated by colors. When I was a high school student, we were taught about the three primary colors: red, yellow and blue – and how mixing them together in various combinations would recreate virtually any color in the visible spectrum. The process wasn’t perfect of course. One had to mix all three together to get an approximation of black which at best turned out to be rather drab, lifeless and only a poor imitation of black. No lustrous depth of color there. But, black, we were told, wasn’t really a color at all, but an absence of color. White on the other hand, was the presence of all colors. Then, why, I asked, if white is the presence of all colors, do we get this muddy amalgam of almost black when we mix red, yellow and bl ...

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Is there something odd going on with the number 20?
	By Emory Schley on 8/29/2007 4:54 AM

I have from time-to-time wondered if there is any mystical significance to the number 20. Why 20, and not some other number, you might ask? Well, 20 just seems to pop up with some regularity, at least often enough for me to have noticed. My first mysterious encounter with that “mystical” number was in a dental assistant course I took in my youth. When the curriculum got around to the subject of taking X-rays, we were taught that as voltage rose into the neighborhood of 20 kilovolts, X-rays began to be generated which were capable of penetrating soft tissue. For some reason that particular number stuck with me. Years later in studying radio phenomena, I read that radio wave ...

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Air-conditioning's effect cools off neighborly interactions
	By Emory Schley on 8/27/2007 4:41 AM

The Dog Days of August are well-named. They bring to mind another old saying: Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noon-day sun. I guess there must not be any English blood in me at all because I have four air-conditioners – one in the house, one in my ham shack, and one each in the two cars – and ALL of them have had a herculean workout this month. In fact, it appears their labors have no end in sight for at least another month, perhaps six weeks or so. We’ve had some hot summers before but this one seems to be more punishing than most. Ahah! “Global warming” is what some of you are thinking. & ...

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The Internet has a role in Man's evolving political structure
	By Emory Schley on 8/24/2007 4:53 AM

Letting off a bit of steam every now and then, and complaining about things in general and life in particular seems to be a popular pastime these days. I participate in this nonsense, too, and am as guilty – perhaps even more so – as anyone else. But, from time to time, it just might be profitable for all of us to stop for a moment and make mental note of the fact that complaining, loudly and indignantly and to as many as will hear us, is really the unfettered expression of an opinion, and as such, probably has at least several Constitutional mandates guaranteeing us the right to scream loud and long. At least within the borders of the United States of America. &a ...

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The constant need to remain ahead of the pack
	By Emory Schley on 8/22/2007 5:01 AM

Have you ever had someone pass you while you were driving, then pull over in front of you, and just kind of hang there? It’s happened to me any number of times. It’s like some people just cannot tolerate driving behind someone else. I understand the feeling because I’m subject to it, too. When I was younger, I used to pass up motorists ahead of me, then they would pass me, then I’d reciprocate. After awhile it got to be a somewhat tiresome game, and I began to see the futility of such shenanigans, so I try to avoid doing that now. If I do pass someone, I usually keep the gas pedal down long enough to put some real distance between us. No one likes being stuck behind an 18-wheeler and I have laboriously passed many of them on the highway, only to have them pass me by in turn ...

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Don't wait to prepare for a hurricane: Do it now!
	By Emory Schley on 8/20/2007 4:58 AM

There’s generally a two-month window during our annual hurricane season when the tropical regions belch up their greatest threats to us – hurricane-wise, that is. That window runs approximately from Aug. 15 through Oct. 15. Having just stepped into the increased activity weeks, it would behoove each of us to get serious about hurricane preparedness. Yes, hurricanes rarely hit us. Lightning seldom hits anyone either, but that doesn’t mean you should tempt the Fates. The very moment it looks like a hurricane may be churning down on us – take my word for it – most of those items in the stores you should be stocking up on now, like flashlight batteries, portable radios, canned goods, bottled water, etc. almost instantly ...

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The day the only King in America died
	By Emory Schley on 8/17/2007 4:54 AM

Yesterday marked the 30th Anniversary of the death of The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Elvis Presley. I remember that day well. I had gotten off work about 4 p.m., and had stopped in the Kash ‘n’ Karry grocery store on State Road 44 in Inverness to pick up some bread and eggs on the way home. I was standing in the checkout line when I heard two young women in front of me discussing someone who had died. “They found him dead in his bathroom,” one said. The other replied, “I know, it’s so tragic. Whoever would have believed he would die so young?” – or words to that effect. I wondered momenta ...

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Standing at the threshold of 'A Brave New World'
	By Emory Schley on 8/15/2007 4:47 AM

I was reading a story on the newswire recently here at work about how some scientists think an artificial lifeform will be created in a laboratory sometime between three and 10 years from now. They have reduced the problem to a three-step process, and the first of the steps is expected to become reality in the very near future. Such a scientific advance is likely to have far-reaching consequences for mankind, affecting everything from medicine to religion. It’s expected that custom-engineered lifeforms will be able to chomp away at oil spills out at sea, and then perhaps to tackle other forms of environmental pollution here on land. Bacteria-sized struc ...

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