BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3

Subject: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: keberoxu
Date: 16 Jul 23 - 09:39 AM

THere exist two other Rain Rain Go Away threads, so I'm starting a third.

Maybe it isn't raining where you are --
some of us have other problems --
but it's raining where I am, and there's a tornado watch,
and the mosquitoes positively rule right now.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 16 Jul 23 - 11:00 AM

It's raining here in North Texas today, setting us up for a miserable afternoon of extremely high humidity on a hot day. Mosquito dunks are everywhere to try to keep the mosquitoes at bay. I read recently that we're seeing fewer dragonflies near our homes because of the mosquito treatments; their food source is diminished, but sobeit. I'll miss seeing as many, but I don't miss the mosquito swarm at dusk.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: keberoxu
Date: 16 Jul 23 - 11:29 AM

Dragonflies! How interesting!
There have been many dragonflies about this summer.
I didn't know that they consume mosquitoes.
I shall view dragonflies with new admiration and respect.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 16 Jul 23 - 04:29 PM

Many invertebrates, as well as birds and bats, consume mozzies. Small fish and insect larvae in bodies of fresh water also consume their larvae ("wrigglers" this end). If you kill them all you are seriously disrupting ecosystems and unintended consequences will occur. In May, a beech tree next to our washing line became infested with beech woolly aphids, big time. Honeydew all over the nice clean sheets. I had to relocate the washing line. I could have sprayed the tree with insecticide, of course, which would have killed far more than just the woolly aphids. Instead, ladybird and other beetle larvae have done the job for me, all for free. I shall be putting the washing line back in the next couple of days. That the way it should be. Rub DEET on your bare bits and you won't get bitten.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 16 Jul 23 - 06:15 PM

The perfume of my childhood, on camping and fishing trips, was 6^.12 Insect Repellent in a stick. I still have one here as a souvenir that used to be in my fishing tackle box. Smells fabulous, but probably didn't do our internal organs a lot of good. Ethyl Hexanediol is the active ingredient, banned for this use in 1991. I've looked it up, the information I find isn't harsh like DDT, it seems to have a mixed set of mild results. DEET is complicated; I don't use it because it's another one of those products with "generally accepted as safe" chemicals that seems to have been given a free pass.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0045653520311553

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 16 Jul 23 - 06:43 PM

Well DEET has been around for a very long time, has proved its worth as a super-effective repellent and has never been shown to cause harm, even to children. It will attack things like plastic shopping bags and watch straps and will stain your skin in consequence, but you allow that once and avoid it from then on. Research has shown (yes, weasel words red alert...) that roll-ons and wrist bands are completely useless. Any repellent must cover every inch of bare flesh.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 16 Jul 23 - 06:44 PM

Oh, and citronella is useless.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 16 Jul 23 - 07:46 PM

If you can explain the relevance of that Science Direct piece about DEET to what we're talking about here, you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din... As you know, I'm a very simple man.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 16 Jul 23 - 08:57 PM

It's there as a jumble of keywords and links to other articles. It looks like DEET goes through people and into waste water, where it can't be easily removed. It was selected for a study about chemicals that are difficult to remove because there is enough of it to detect and it is so durable:

Due to the resistance to UV photolysis and chloramination, DEET was selected as the target pollutant to investigate the contributions of HO· and RCS on its degradation by the UV/NH2Cl process (Antonopoulou et al., 2013). In this study, the objectives were to: (1) investigate the degradation of DEET in the UV/NH2Cl process under various conditions and evaluate the relative contributions of reactive species; (2) investigate the effects of several water quality parameters including initial pH, water temperature, coexistence anions and natural organic matter (NOM); (3) examine the plausible degradation pathways based on LC-MS analysis and density functional theory (DFT) calculation; (4) evaluate toxic effects of DEET and its transformation products (TPs) through acute toxicity tests and quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) analysis; (5) analyse the energy efficiency of UV/NH2Cl process in terms of electrical energy-per-order (EE/O). The results obtained in this study will provide the guidance for the application of UV/NH2Cl process in drinking water and wastewater treatment.

Do you really want that on your skin?

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 17 Jul 23 - 04:06 AM

Well it wouldn't be going through people, but admittedly it can wash off into drains or in the sea if you go swimming. Some sunscreen ingredients are just as bad, and they're used in much bigger quantities. There's no such thing as a free lunch. But, as for its effects on skin, I've been using it for decades and my 72-year-old skin is as smooth as a baby's bottom. ;-). No science there, of course...

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: keberoxu
Date: 21 Jul 23 - 09:35 AM

We had two sunny days in a row,
and now the rain comes back.
No escape from the mosquitoes.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 21 Jul 23 - 02:40 PM

Rain, rain go away from Old Trafford. England are so much on top in the fourth Test that they could conceivably wipe out the Aussies in half a day. That would set up a thriller of a final Test at the Oval. But the forecast for the remaining two days is terrible. Bring back Michael Fish to get it all wrong, say I.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 23 Jul 23 - 05:33 PM

And Australia were saved by the rain... Shame, like you and I'm sure many others, I'd wanted the ashes to be decided by the final test.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 23 Jul 23 - 05:45 PM

A really imaginative and sporting thing to have done would have been for the Aussie captain to declare before the umpires called the match off. Hand the match to England, who, after all, were slaughtering the Aussies, and set up a real blockbuster at the Oval. Ho hum.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: keberoxu
Date: 25 Jul 23 - 10:20 PM

For the time being, the weather here
has settled into a monsoon pattern.
We have brilliant morning sunshine,
intense noon-time heat,
and afternoon downpours with lightning and thunder.

And the mosquitoes are so numerous you can't avoid them,
even indoors . . . (swat)

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: keberoxu
Date: 26 Jul 23 - 06:31 PM

The good news is that the rain is going away.
The bad news is that we have the same high heat as the rest of the country.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: keberoxu
Date: 27 Jul 23 - 03:28 PM

The rain is back,
and the storms are so volatile that the forecast warns of
"an isolated tornado", God forbid.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: Charmion
Date: 27 Jul 23 - 06:42 PM

Southwestern Ontario is also having a monsoon summer. I don’t think it’s quite the wettest I can remember, but it could well be the noisiest, with the almost daily donner und blitzen.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 27 Jul 23 - 07:11 PM

We had sparkling weather from mid-May until the end of June. July has been the most miserable bloody summer month I can ever remember. The world is in a climate emergency but we've got a huge downward loop of the jet stream that won't budge.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: MaJoC the Filk
Date: 28 Jul 23 - 04:08 AM

Here, Steve .... [passes something in cupped hands] Here's a ray of sunshine I caught in the garden yesterday, and rescued from the cat.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: keberoxu
Date: 28 Jul 23 - 06:37 PM

Rescued from the cat -- I love it --

THe next rain is forecast to bring in some cool air for a change,
I'll believe it when I see it.
Mostly we get heat which triggers thunderstorms.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: keberoxu
Date: 30 Jul 23 - 06:05 PM

The rain went away.
I said I would believe it when I saw it,
and today I see it.
It's even less humid today.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: keberoxu
Date: 30 Aug 23 - 07:48 AM

We are in the midst of a thunderstorm, with the rain pelting down.
Nothing to compare, of course, with the Gulf of Mexico
and Hurricane Idalia making landfall.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: Joe_F
Date: 01 Sep 23 - 05:55 PM

If you want allies against the mosquitoes, the best are bats. I well remember being camped by a pond at sunset. There was a cloud of mosquitoes, but the bats came out of the trees and scarfed them up. If there had been a hymn in praise of bats, I would have sung it with gusto. (I gather than polar bears also eat them in large numbers, but they would be inconvenient to keep around.)

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: keberoxu
Date: 07 Oct 23 - 09:35 AM

I'm close to Boston, where we anticipate
that Maine, not far from us,
will get a visit from
what remains of tropical storm Philippe.
That's to the northeast.
To the west,
a cold front is pushing heavy rainstorms towards us.
There is no escape from the rain.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: Mrrzy
Date: 11 Oct 23 - 08:10 PM

Ah, the Frenchman in sandals... Philippe Filoppe.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: Mrrzy
Date: 11 Oct 23 - 08:10 PM

Ah, the Frenchman in sandals... Philippe Filoppe.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: Joe_F
Date: 01 Sep 23 - 05:55 PM

If you want allies against the mosquitoes, the best are bats. I well remember being camped by a pond at sunset. There was a cloud of mosquitoes, but the bats came out of the trees and scarfed them up. If there had been a hymn in praise of bats, I would have sung it with gusto. (I gather than polar bears also eat them in large numbers, but they would be inconvenient to keep around.)

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: keberoxu
Date: 30 Aug 23 - 07:48 AM

We are in the midst of a thunderstorm, with the rain pelting down.
Nothing to compare, of course, with the Gulf of Mexico
and Hurricane Idalia making landfall.

Subject: RE: BS: Rain, rain, go away, pt. 3
From: keberoxu
Date: 07 Oct 23 - 09:35 AM

I'm close to Boston, where we anticipate
that Maine, not far from us,
will get a visit from
what remains of tropical storm Philippe.
That's to the northeast.
To the west,
a cold front is pushing heavy rainstorms towards us.
There is no escape from the rain.