Thinking Driving Hollywood style

For years I would cringe every time I saw a driving scene in a movie.

The driver would look away from the road for ages at a time to talk to their passenger.

I always thought it was just poor realism, in much the same way as people in movies get pushed off their feet when they get shot, but now Im not so sure.

Perhaps the reason people cut me off sometimes is because they actually drive like that. Perhaps the reason some people just drive into intersections when their light has been red for a few minutes, is because they are trying to get their partner to understand something really important. The kind of important that only fifteen seconds of sincere eye contact can truly establish.

Or perhaps they watched some movies where people looked  away from the road for ages, and instead of being a little disappointed at the lack of realism, they just took it on board as the obvious way to drive.

Either way, I want it to stop. In the movies, and anywhere Im likely to be.




120 Things in 20 years is sounding like a grumpy old dude when thinking about driving Hollywood style.

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Water cooler style auto top up

Heres a couple of short videos showing my water cooler-style auto top up


Bottle Empty


Inserting Full Bottle

I didnt think to pull out the base to show you, but it is just one of the bottles I used to use for my window farm. I cut off the top of a standard 5-gallon water bottle (I drilled a 1-inch hole near the top, then used tin snips, finishing the edge with some 1/4-inch tubing sliced so it could fit over the raw edge of the plastic). Since I need water to flow in and out of the base, I drilled additional 1-inch holes near the bottom. If you drill too fast, the plastic can rip (why would I know this...).

Heres a picture showing what the 5-gallon bottle looks like with the lid snipped off (I originally did this to create a fish tank for my aquaponics window farm system):

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Aquaponics Artificial pollination

Ive been artificially pollinating my cucumber plants for a while now.

I do the hand pollination thing with a small artist paintbrush, because my original - whatever you call cotton on a stick in your part of the world (cotton buds, cotton swabs, etc)- fell to bits, and was really only a stick by the end.

But Ive been wondering if picking a handful of male flowers, and dropping into a blender of water, might just give me a pollen shake to spray into the female flowers. Obviously it would depend on the survivability of pollen in a blender. Its just an idea, and although a quick search didnt find it, it may well have been tried.

It might be a really quick and easy method to pollinate things that dont do the thing with the bees for whatever reason.

I suspect the reason my cucumbers are not getting pollinated, is because there dont seem to be any bees. I seem to remember something about bees mysteriously dying out or something.

I have no idea if it will work, but given none of my cucumbers set fruit without my intervention, it should be easy enough to test. I think all Ill need to do is separate two of my four cucumber plants, and spray one with the pollen shake, and leave the other untouched. The two remaining plants Ill keep pollinating by hand because I need the cucumbers.

This experiment will have to wait for a while, because Ive hand pollinated all the flowers this week. Ill separate the two test plants, and wait until they stop producing fruit before I start the test. Ill use the delay to see if anyone else is doing it, or if it wont work for some reason.



120 Things in 20 years - Its 6am and I havent slept yet.

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Aquaponics Cucumber and baby rockmelon

The title gives it away a bit, but today I thought I found a new wacky variety of cucumber.

It looks like this.

In the background is a regular cucumber. In the foreground  is what I thought was a cucumber.

I picked it and ate a bit. It tasted like the opposite of a cucumber.

Anti-cucumber.

I didnt even realise anti-cucumber was a flavour until today.


But it is.

After I picked it and ate a bit, I figured I should look up my new variety of cucumber, and discovered its commonly called rock melon. Or perhaps "cantaloupe", dependant upon which oceans your country currently floats.

I probably got the "pick it, and then google it"  bits back to front. Next time I might look it up first.

So, on the downside, I wasted what looks like may have turned into an excellent fruit.

On the upside, I picked my first rock melon today!

I didnt even know I had them growing.

I remember planting them, but I dont remember seeing them grow.





120 Things in 20 years - Sometimes rocks taste better than rock melon, but cucumber always tastes pretty much like cucumber.
 

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