Which is the old simile about quickness? Is is “like grain through a goose” or “like grass through a goose?”
I know it alliterated but the memory is not specific.
Squirrels? One day here in S. GA, there were a half-dozen of them feasting on my pecans out in the front yard. However, one was as big as a small cat. It was a Sherman’s fox squirrel. It hung around for a couple days, but one day when I headed for my mailbox, it ran out into the highway and got hit. I haven’t seen another since.
Anything named Sherman in Georgia is already living on borrowed time.
Gray squirrels are all I’ve seen for many years. Growing up in Maryland black, red squirrels were fairly common, and not far from our house an albino squirrel was well known enough to get his picture in the local paper.
I saw the largest squirrels I had ever seen in the courtyard of a hotel in Ontario. I’m sure the hotel workers were much less impressed than I was.
Since this thread has devolved into a squirrel discussion, let me recommend last week’s episode of the -ologies podcast: sciuridology
Been watching watching Northern Exposure a lot. The opening credits has a moose walk through town.
Meh.
We get that all the time I get them in my yard too. To the point where I always check before I let the dogs out. It’s nice though, they mow our “grass”. They also lick the salt off our cars. Makes a real mess. First time I saw one, I didn’t have my glasses on “Honey, there’s a horse in our yard” They are big.
A tourist in town got ticketed for trying to pet one. NOT a good idea. The moose in our yard have been very docile, but that just indicates that they ain’t afraid of nothing.
We had some visitors from out west, AZ and CA desert areas. I took the guys golfing to a course near where I was living at the time, Scottsboro, AL They were shocked at the huge numbers of geese all over the course, just amazing. They really should have expected it with the course name - Goose Pond Colony. And yes, big greenish-black blobs all over.
This reminds me of the time my family was on a road trip. Mom was taking a video of something and my voice can be heard in the background crying out with delight, “I see a cow!” I had seen cows before, but we were playing some I Spy type of game, and that bovine was worth some points. It didn’t matter though, I was branded a cow-lover from that day onward.
Maybe somewhere in the world, but not necessarily at a particular latitude. Where I live, we have about 7.5-8 hours of daylight in December. So any moon phase that’s between 8 hours and 16 hours behind the sun won’t show its face during daylight.
Having said that, I don’t know what the latitude of Middle Earth is, or the axial tilt of Arda (do we even know if it is round?) so I would say all bets are off.
How do you know they are not the same squirrels? They could have moved too.
Yeah, maybe they’re flying squirrels.
Grease.
Except that a Moon that’s close to opposite of the Sun will also have opposite timing: When the Sun is only up 8 hours of the day, the full Moon will be up 16 hours. I think that the only way you can avoid having some time during the day when both are up is extreme latitudes (at least 61º, if I’ve done my math right) where one or the other might not come up at all.
And Tolkien made it clear that the physical planetary parameters of Arda are the same as those of our world, because long ago though his tales might seem from a human perspective, they are but a short time for the planet (he was specifically referring there to the number of days in a year, but it can be reasonably inferred that it would also apply to things like axial tilt and curvature).
Unsurprisingly, you are right and I am wrong. I checked the moonrise and moonset times for Dublin for December 2023, and the moon will be visible during daylight on every day of the month, including the date of the full moon (27th), on which date the moon will set at 9:48 (1 hour after sunrise).
Moonrise, Moonset, and Moon Phase in Dublin, December 2023 (timeanddate.com)
Ignorance fought!
I don’t recall alliterative versions of this. I usually hear “crap through a goose”, or a similar word in the place of ‘crap’.
The one I remember most comes from the opening speech in the movie Patton:
This was a change to one of Patton’s actual speeches which refers to something else entirely:
Wild Horses. People stop on the side of the highway to gawk and take pictures. Me? I have to chase them out of my yard with a stick now and then. Hate them! Acres of weeds to eat, but choose to destroy my trees and expensive/valuable landscaping.
Bastards! Nothing but destructive nuisances.
I live in a quasi-rural area, so it’s not that unusual to see a cow moseying down the street, but it’s not every day either.
The last job I had caused me to pass by an auto repair shop that had a full-sized racecar on the roof of the building, slightly hanging over the front.
There was a comedy club SE of Indianapolis that had a half a plane sticking out of its roof, as if it had crashed there.
The non-profit where I worked at my first full time job after college had a few women who were bird nerds, and they put some feeders up in a tree-lined area behind the building where they could do some birdwatching from their offices. One day one of the women in the office - not a bird enthusiast - comes running in to tell one of the bird ladies about this beautiful blue bird she had just seen. The bird lady grabs one of her reference books and starts showing her pictures. “Was it this one? No? This one?” Gradually moving to rarer and more unusual birds. “Nope. Nope.” Getting a little exasperated, the bird lady finally says “OK… I’m going to show you a picture of a blue jay…”
“YES! That’s it!”
One day while out walking with my son, I saw a group of about 20 crows crowded around a single tree.
Me: “Look, a murder of crows! That is the first time I have ever got to use that phrase in a sentence”
Son: “No Dad, you used the same joke at least 2 other times already”
Once in a while, usually on a weekend, someone will post on Facebook that a black helicopter just flew over their house, and are usually pretty freaked out about it. We always reply that the helicopter is probably from the National Guard base north of town, and they’re doing training exercises.
Hah. So funny. We had about 5 flyovers this morning.
I’m beginning to get paranoid.
Or afraid.