Douglas Alpenstock

From a historical perspective, I recall seeing a hand-powered rotary slicer for mangels on the Victorian Farm BBC series. They were chopping up mangelwurzels as fodder for their cows. It worked remarkably well. This was a big beast, maybe 4 ft. tall. Sorry, I don't remember which episode.

Sometimes I like a little pineapple on my pizza. To the haters who say 'fruit doesn't belong on pizza," what about your tomato sauce? Tomatoes are a fruit.

Andrew Vlcek wrote:Would a filter even be necessary if I did something as simple as a fountain or some sort of aeration?

I don't know about the starting chemistry of your water, but personally I think a pump system that aggressively aerates the water is a good place to start.

What are the inputs to your pond/pool? Rainwater? Municipal tap water? What does it look like right now? Curious minds want to know.

The city is Venice! This is a remarkable BBC piece that I think is worth your time. Cheers.

Most modern structures are built to last 50 years or so, but ingenious ancient engineering has kept this watery city afloat for more than 1,600 years – using only wood.

As any local knows, Venice is an upside-down forest. The city, which turned 1604 years old on March 25, is built on the foundations of millions of short wooden piles, pounded in the ground with their tip facing downwards. These trees – larch, oak, alder, pine, spruce and elm of a length ranging between 3.5m (11.5ft) to less than 1m (3ft)  – have been holding up stone palazzos and tall belltowers for centuries, in a true marvel of engineering leveraging the forces of physics and nature.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250324-the-ancient-forest-that-supports-venice

Ah, but be careful. It might be sharp sand -- fracking sand. Now under tariff. You can't be too careful.

That bicycle, of unknown provenance, is just a ruse to throw the feds off the track.

It's a common issue. There are left-handed drill bits and extractors designed for exactly this problem. They work. Any supply house catering to tradesmen will have them.

A lo-tek method is to carve a simple slot in the body of the bolt with drill and Dremel. And then tease it out with a stout mechanic's slot screwdriver that can take gentle taps with a hammer while torque is applied. Careful heating with a small propane torch may help loosen the body of the bolt.

Edit 3: Take note of the thread direction. A RH drill may do it.

Well if we are talking about Wild Rose hips, a pie would be a helluva lot of work. The flesh is perfectly edible, but the internal seeds are nasty and spiky with sharp single-direction hooks. As in, you don't want to run these through your digestive tract. So when ripe and frozen, we Canucks nibble off the outside and carry on. Lots of Vitamin C.

Carla Burke wrote:You could take a cue from "It's a Wonderful Life" - "Bread, that this house may never know hunger. Salt, that life may always have flavor. And wine, that joy and prosperity may reign forever."

Lovely! I would add a lump of coal. (Wait, what? That's a diss! It means you've been nasty and naughty!) Not necessarily. My Dear Wife's grandmother was a very English war bride, and told me that a lump of coal in your Christmas stocking was a wish that you would always be warm in the year ahead.

Pre-spring is when a bunch of early Canada geese are standing on frozen ponds with a disgusted look and loudly cussing their annoyance.

It's officially spring when I cut my first crop of pussy willows and bring them into the house. These are literally the first flowers that bloom here.

It does seem that large language model AI's have yet to master the three most intelligent words in the English language: "I don't know." All wisdom and thoughtful inquiry flows from this starting point.

The AI's to watch for are not the LLM's which cause much consternation and entertainment in their hallucinations. It's purpose-built AI's for specific applications and tasks that will bring substantial change. Nobody talks about those.