10-22-17 Bats
12Bats. A Halloween staple.
Meow.
How to build Lego bats:
https://frugalfun4boys.com/2017/09/16/lego-bats-building-instructions/
Fun4boys? Pfft. Who doesn’t like Lego?
.jpg.838x0_q80.jpg)
Way back when I was 11 or so, I volunteered at The Museum Of Discovery And Science. There’s not a whole lot you can do as a volunteer at that age, but I enjoyed my time there. One day I got to be stationed close to the bat exhibit for a few hours. I didn’t know much about bats, so I was no help with that. I basically was there to guide people to the restrooms or whatever. So for a couple of hours I got to watch bat tv. Fascinating creatures.
Tonight’s musical selection:
Stabbing Westward
I got to see them in concert when I was 15 or 16. I went by myself. It was in a club that sometimes was a fetish club, but not during concerts of course. It looked mostly barren. It was super hot in there and at the time, I usually wore my hair down. I remember during a song, some lady in her 30s or 40s lifted my hair and started blowing on my neck to cool me down. I was terrified. I didn’t say anything because she had my hair in her hand and that basically meant she could easily hurt me. I just stood there paralyzed until she let go of my hair. I quickly left to the other side of the club. It was one of the oddest memories I remember of a concert besides the one festival where I had heat stroke. I was rushing to go vomit in the trash can and some random dude grabbed my ass. I think I was 15 then also. Just wtf.
Anyway, on to the music!
Haunting Me
Save Yourself
What Do I Have To Do?
Shame
Sometimes It Hurts
Nothing
Waking Up Beside You
- 11 comments, 24 replies
- Comment
Bats are fascinating. They’re also simultaneously cute and creepy as fuck. We have some in our neighborhood and I like to root for them to eat mosquitoes at dusk. But I have zero desire to be within touching distance of them.
@djslack I actually thought about adding a bat house so they could eat all the mosquitos… But more research is needed.
I think the fruit bats are the cutest kind.
@RiotDemon I’ve been wanting to add a bat house. I was told by someone who knows about them to take a wooden birdhouse and make the hole wide enough to pass your fist. Then put some fruit in it (which will attract bugs as it spoils) and securely mount it up high on a post or in a tree.
https://shirt.woot.com/offers/bats?ref=meh_com
A small percentage of bats carries the rabies virus. Of all weak and sick bats captured and tested for the disease, only about 6 percent have the virus. But 90 percent of human rabies cases in the United States (about one or two per year) originate from contact with bats.
They eat mosquitos & bugs, but I’ll enjoy them from a distance. I found one in my woodshed & left it alone. It was gone a week later…
I did a volunteer thing one day building bat houses. Would put one up at home, but I have nothing tall that I want covered in guano.
@walarney welp, I definitely need more research now, haha
@walarney I may look into those bat houses. There’s a pond just beyond my back property. As it would be at least 500’ from the house on one of the huge fir trees, I wouldn’t mind bats there.
@daveinwarsh the ones we built were this style, but painted black.
@walarney Looks like a winter project for me!
I’m thinking that wasps & yellowjackets may nest in them or if they need yearly cleaning.
@daveinwarsh the bats would eat the insects, no?
@RiotDemon I dunno. Suppose I could Google it.
@daveinwarsh Tried the mason bee thing one year. Disappointed to find the trays half full of wasps. They get into everything. (Yeah, I know they can be beneficial. But the aggressive European wasps give them all a bad name.)
@walarney I do have 4 mason bee hives (nests?) that I made.
2 have the fancy straws, 2 have just holes I drilled into chunks of wood. The wood ones did OK for a while, then I hardly saw any masons around. Put up the straw ones & now I saw a few this year.
Guess I’m supposed to take straws out that have bees & stick it in the refrigerator or a cool building over winter.
We mostly depend on bumble bees to pollinate trees & garden here.
@walarney So what’s the difference between guano and feces? Just asking for a friend…
@tohar1
Interesting band. The only song I’d heard before was Save Yourself, but I think the rest of the music is pleasantly eerie, and fitting for the season.
Here’s a band from the land of K-Pop. They changed their name and their musical direction, then all I could find is this one song and they’re gone. A shame.
A-Fati – Another Chance
@2many2no your comment made me go research what happened to Stabbing Westward… It felt like they fell off the face of the earth at the time. Turns out they ended up forming a new band called The Dreaming and have put out a few songs in the last couple of years. It was like reuniting with an old friend.
Fruit bats/flying foxes are some of the cutest things on Earth.
Nom
@PooltoyWolf I think it’s because they look like tiny flying doggos.
@RiotDemon That’s precisely why :3
@RiotDemon When we visited Carlsbad Caverns 15-20 yrs ago, we stayed to watch the bats flying out in the evening. It was very interesting how they circle out, thousands at a time, & it just kept going for a long time. Not mentioned is how it must bring out the air from the cave also, and how it just stinks.
The main cave was also amazing (no bats or stink there…)
@daveinwarsh according to the video, many, many feet of poop… So I’m not surprised it smells a little.
Last month there was a critter laying in front of our shop and I pushed it with my finger. A dead bat.
Called the county “I found a dead bat”.
“Did you touch it?”
thinks “Uh, no” I lied.
I have no idea why I lied. Anyway, hubby scooped it into an old I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter container and wrote “BAT” on the top in red Sharpie.
I had to talk to two more people and they came and got it and I ended up telling the truth, that I touched it. (Poor guy, I bet he gets that a lot “you’re not in trouble if you touched it, we just have to know so we can get the testing expedited”.)
Not rabid.
Husband says “I didn’t know we had any bats around here.” Eye roll from the female half.
“You’ve never noticed them in the evening? Come sit with me on the swing and I’ll point them out in the sky as the sun goes down.”
Yeah, he stayed on the sofa watching MSNBC. I watched the bats, sad that they’d lost a family member.
@lisaviolet did you have to pay for the testing? I didn’t know it was that easy to get rabies… Thought they had to bite you or something.
@RiotDemon It didn’t cost anything. And all I did was push it with my finger, I didn’t pick it up or anything, couldn’t tell if it was some sort of rodent.
He did ask me if the cats had messed with it and I said “if they did, it wouldn’t look like it does”. You know, in one piece.
But just touching it was cause for concern, I guess. Maybe to see if rabies could be a problem in the neighborhood?
@lisaviolet Have you experienced any strange symptoms during say…full moons?
@therealjrn Not since I got married in '85.
Omg a classic
@meh427 the bats, the band, or something else in the thread?
@RiotDemon
The bugs bunny cartoon
@meh427 ah ok. Wasn’t 100% sure since you didn’t reply to the cartoon post.