Around here we get a lot of confusion between the non-venomous king snake, and the venomous coral snake. Understandable since they do have similar color patterns. Just remember the ditty, red touches yellow, kills a fellow. Red touches black, friend of Jack.
And, we get a lot a folks thinking just about any snake they see is a dreaded water moccasin (a rather fat snake), even skinny black racers.
Moccasins are big, nasty critters. One struck at and almost bit my schnoodle (the dog ) on the nose a few years back.
Yep. They keep seeing Bobcats in their backyards. dammit, I have not.
Here in SoCal we get people screaming about Brown Recluse spiders. There are none here (except maybe the one that came along in one of those cardboard boxes you packed when you moved).
I’d totally be up for taking on a python. They are lean meat, so probably a stew rather than a grill, so I’d probably do a white wine / tomato based sauce. Not too much herbs, because I imagine they have a delicate flavour, but a little sage and thyme.
I’d prefer to do cutlets, but I have butchered a rabbit, and I know how hard it is to remove small bones.
I don’t do Nextdoor, though it is a thing here, the gossip channels are mostly via Whatsapp. I avoid them for the racism, but if I offered my neighbours some python I would probably be the the star of the Whatsapp group (not in a good way) for a couple of days.
That’s the kind of nonsense that drives me up the wall. I mean, I don’t work for my city’s water department, but I’m about as adjacent as someone can realistically get (I work in IT, assigned specifically to handle water related stuff), and I knew the inside scoop on the water bill raises. They were totally related to the cost of doing business- just about everything had gone up in price after the pandemic. There wasn’t anything shady in there at all.
But despite that, and despite the absolute fact that all city and state worker salaries and bonuses are available online, there were knuckleheads who claimed it was somehow illegitimate for one of two idiotic reasons:
The bills went up, but they weren’t getting anything additional in return. How dumb is this? Nothing is static- when chlorine goes up in price, your water treatment costs more, and your bill may get larger as a result. Nothing to do with additional services, etc…
They claimed that somehow water people were siphoning this off and lining their pockets. Again, all this is extremely transparent- I’m sure if they chose to go look, they could see exactly what caused the prices to rise. On top of that, our water department is funded by the money they bring in through bills. So if they don’t want to end up like Flint or Jackson, periodic bill increases are how they actually achieve that.
But you say that (without the commentary about idiocy or stupidity), and they’ll downvote you and literally tell you you’re wrong because… I guess it makes too much sense?
Because it doesn’t mesh with their preconception that all government is riddled with “waste, fraud and abuse.” Also that all government workers are lazy parasites who do little or no work while gorging at the public trough.
(In my 40+ years in IT I worked in both the private and public sectors, and in general I found the private sector more prone to inefficiency and general laziness. Just MHO.)
Not to hijack, but I’ve found that the motivations are fundamentally different. The private sector seems to be mostly motivated by fear of losing their job and/or avarice through getting raises and bonuses.
The public sector doesn’t really have either of those in the same forms as the private sector, so people are doing it more out of a sense of duty and desire to do a good job, because there’s no fear and not really a lot of avarice either. Which sometimes translates into a less-than-customer friendly attitude on the part of customer-facing folks, but it also means that nobody’s cutting corners on account of making their own numbers for a bonus, etc… And it does definitely translate into a less relentless(?) pace of work- there isn’t any bonus for anyone if 10% more work gets done this quarter vs. last, for example, and nor is there a threat of termination if they get 10% less done either.
Truly my biggest peeve is that people cannot understand that their original posts appear in my email with chopped off titles that are worse than useless, for example:
Hi neighbor! I was wondering
Has anyone else seen this?
Hello! It’s been a long time since I posted but
If I want to find out what the post concerns, I have to click on the link, wait for Nextdoor to load (it is slow) and 95% of the time discover I have no interest in it.
Several times I have tried to show how easy it is to write a title that is useful, like Lost Black Cat, ISO Plumber, Hawley Road Is Out … and get a lot of agreement. But nothing changes.
A Nextdoor classic from today’s e-mail urges people to “look out for 5-8 kids and two cars, one black and one white following each other through neighborhoods” to break into and steal vehicles and/or commit unspecified antisocial acts and mayhem.
Another poster however had this to say: “I am so upset right now ! After looking at other peoples post on here, I’m so upset that I have nothing to complain about ! I haven’t seen any lost cats or dogs, no teenagers doing bad things or seen a car get stolen ! I didn’t get yelled at on the phone and I had it on silent, so I missed all the automated , telemarketing calls . Why Me ?!”
If you (general “you”) ever find yourself in Pittsburgh in mid-September, go to ALCOSAN’s (Allegheny County Sanitary Authority) open house. It’s all free and very interesting. Be sure to take the actual plant tour, where you’ll see the whole process, from where the water comes into the HUGE wet well to where the clean water goes into the river. There are many educational activities and you even get a free lunch!
My electric utility even has a map on their website/app that shows any known outages, how many customers are affected, and and estimated time until it will be restored. Granted, they generally don’t give the reason for the outage, but apart from general curiosity I don’t see why anyone really needs that information.
The very similar one that comes up all the time around here is “I saw a couple of police cars at such and such location. Does anyone know what’s going on?” No, your neighbors almost certainly don’t know why the police are at a particular place. If you really want to know the police department publishes a police blotter on their web site.
In my town (less than 2000 people) neighbors often do know. Or you can go down to the cafe and ask Mrs.B what she’s heard. Hardly need Nextdoor for that stuff.
Every time I think, “Maybe I should check out Nextdoor,” a thread like this pops up. I think I’m good.
Though I do wanna say, I live in kind of a sleepy neighborhood, in a nice town, and some crazy fucking shit has happened here. One event, which I slept through, occurred when my neighbor across the street held his girlfriend hostage at gunpoint. They sent in SWAT, but he ended up killing himself. The cops did in fact come to my door, and bang LOUDLY on it at about 2am, trying to evacuate the neighborhood, but I didn’t get that it was the police. I was scared shitless and stayed in bed.
Not long after that, somebody escaped a nearby mental facility, stole an ambulance and crashed it into the tree near the sidewalk in front of our subdivision.
Last but not least, my Aunt’s sleepy neighborhood was interrupted by a hail of gunfire earlier this year, when a jealous ex-boyfriend shot up a bunch of cars, hitting a lot of the neighboring homes.
I just know my neighbors have stockpiles of weapons because of the flags they wave on their lawns. The fear of gunshots is maybe not always irrational.
On the whole, I see many more informative posts than dumb ones. It’s just that the dumb ones are the ones that stand out. It’s a good place to get recommendations for area plumbers, roofers, restaurants, etc.
For me, it’s stuff I have to give away + I would like to make friends with someone who lives in this neighborhood. I don’t really know anyone here. I know there are at least a few nerds because they have wireless networks referencing Doctor Who, etc. There is at least one person here with a trans flag (people are really into flags in my neighborhood.) Just have to find them.
I posted a Dallas Morning News article about why gas bills are so high lately, and what to do about it (the whole topic of a massive thread on there), and the first response was “Can you copy and paste it into Nextdoor?”
) on the nose a few years back.
