Good Evening – July 26, 2021

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Good evening! The Watkins Glen Pool closes now at six o’clock on weekdays. 🕕

I am really not digging that. 🏊🏻‍♂️ Because closing at six means I need to get out of the pool by 5:30 so I have time to shower and get changed. 🚿 And it’s still warm on a hot day at this point. Although sitting by Aunt Sarah’s Falls is quite nice and cool. 😎

Spent the bulk of my day at the swimming pool, really kind of lazy vacation day 🏖 during the dog days 🐶 of summer. Hiking and birding in the Catharine Creek Marsh and decided to take the trail to the falls. Once I get back to my truck it’s off to Tops and ice cream 🍧, followed by maybe Clute Park or maybe camp. Still haven’t had dinner yet, so I might not want to get back too late and I kind of want to watch for shooting stars 🌠 later on into the midnight hour of I have enough energy.

Still kind of hot evening. 🌇 Partly clear and 82 degrees at the Aunt Sarah’s Falls. There is a west-northwest breeze at 6 mph. 🍃. The dew point is 62 degrees.

Gentle Drop Into A Golden Pool

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There are two pools like this at Goldmine Stream Falls, at the bottom of gentle falls. The pools aren't very deep -- maybe three feet or four in high water -- but provide refreshment on a hot day in a beautiful glen with great looking water.

Taken on Saturday July 25, 2020 at Piseco-Powley Road.

Gypsy Moths 🦋

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This year, the gypsy moths are so bad in parts of the Finger Lakes National Forest. Earlier this summer they hatched out of their egg sacks that can be found on many of the trees, leaving the forest partially deforested and denuded. Fortunately, trees have a lot of energy stored in their sap and an ability to regrow leaves, which many have done but still look small and immature for mid to late summer.

Most healthy trees can survive a years gypsy moth attack and will go on quite fine a bit with stunted growth for the year. But they will heal. It’s much more of a menace to farmers and those raising trees as a crop, as year of stunted growth is a year of loss, land not producing what it should. And I’m not happy about the loss of shade for camping but ultimately what I can I do about it?

NPR

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From Politically Correct To Cancel Culture, How Accountability Became Political : NPR

That term, "canceling," has become central to the present-day debate over the consequences of speech and who gets to exact them. It has ascended from minor skirmishes on Twitter to the highest office in the country, and it actually mirrors a cultural conversation that started three decades ago.

"This is a power struggle of different groups or forces in society, I think, at its most basic," says Nicole Holliday, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. "And this is the same case with political correctness that used to get boiled down to, well, 'Do you have a right to be offended if it means I don't have the right to say something?' "

The idea of being "politically correct," having the most morally upstanding opinion on complicated subjects and the least offensive language with which to articulate it, gained popularity in the 1990s before people on the outside weaponized it against the community it came from — just like the idea of "canceling" someone today

NPR

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Key Takeaways From The Climate Meeting Kicking Off Today : NPR

More than 200 of the world's leading climate scientists will begin meeting today to finalize a landmark report summarizing how Earth's climate has already changed, and what humans can expect for the rest of the century.

The report is the sixth edition of an assessment of the latest climate science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body that coordinates research about global warming. The last edition of this report came out in 2013 — an eternity in the world of climate science, where the pace of both warming and research are steadily accelerating.