So yesterday I did my thousandth Wordle, and I paused to look at my stats:
| Guesses | Quantity |
| 1 | 1 |
| 2 | 45 |
| 3 | 375 |
| 4 | 416 |
| 5 | 134 |
| 6 | 19 |
| Fail (the “seventh guess”) | 10 |
My final average was 3.73 guesses per Wordle.
I’m not sure if this the end of the line for my Wordling, or just a milestone — I’m guessing the latter, because I did another one this morning.
I have no idea how this happens (or, if it’s nefarious, what is supposed to be accomplished by doing this), but I discovered, about a week ago, that some other domain was aimed at my IP address — as in, you type in their website name, and it goes to my site.
I found this out when I was doing a little security check-up, and noticed the other website name (which was, basically, almost-random-string-of-letters-dot-com) among the logs. I Googled it and the results showed snippets from my site. Hacked!!
Well not quite: some further Googling explained what was going on (but not why). I also found that when I tried to actually go to the other site my browser refused to load it, because the SSL credentials (for my site) did not match the bogus website’s hostname. Thank you SSL!
According to my Googling there was nothing I could do to prevent someone from aiming their site at my address, short of contacting the bogus site and asking them to stop (fat chance), but I could configure my site to throw a “Forbidden!” error at anyone coming to my site from any other hostname but mine. So now my site won’t load from that host, even if someone decides to ignore their browser’s security warnings.
What did the trick was a little snippet added to my site’s root htaccess file:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^donkelly.net$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [F]
</IfModule>We (us, and Ben & Jennie) started the weekend before last by driving down to Philly on Friday morning for Russ & Mimi’s wedding. We met Joe & Laura at the Italian Market, got lunch and did some exploring, then checked in at our hotel. Dinner was at Khyber Pass, and we all hung out (with yet more family members) at Penn’s Landing later.
Saturday we started with the “No Kings” protest, then got lunch and then went to the wedding celebration, which involved a bus trip to Fort Mifflin, a revolutionary-era fort right next to the airport and basically in the middle of nowhere despite being in the city. What a weird and interesting place! We ended up dancing to a DJ in an underground bunker.
This weekend was a trip with the family to Rehoboth beach. Ben and Jennie again, plus Emmi, Kyle and Iris. Fun and sun, some time at the beach and some time with Iris at the timeshare’s pool, and lots of hanging out and cooking in our weekend condo. We got home yesterday afternoon.
(We stopped for lunch, both on the way there and the way back, in the town of New Castle. Very cool and charming place.)
I am currently just hanging inside, hiding from the heat and doing post-vacation laundry/chores.
It’s a rainy day today, and the start of a week of rainy weather, but until today the weather has been beautiful, sunny and warm. We’ve been getting in a lot of cycling, including rides to the library (and ice cream store) with Iris in our new bike, and a few towpath rides to Easton. The trees have been enjoying the weather too, they’re in full bloom and the pollen is off the charts, but overall I’ll take it.
We managed to see a lot of wildlife on our towpath rides this week, tons of turtles as well as deer, a great blue heron and a bald eagle. The biggest excitement though was just outside our door yesterday, and we missed it…
That’s the current excitement — a young bear was in our neighborhood yesterday, captured on various Ring cameras and making the local news (in the video you can see our friend’s house, right up the block from us). It’s kind of weird, the bear seemed to be hanging near the local playground, where we’d also seen some ducks hanging out recently — maybe that little park is looking extra hospitable these days?
With today’s rain we opted to take Iris swimming, and we’ve been playing indoors all day. Tonight is ukulele night at our place.
It was a beautiful morning yesterday, but the forecast was for afternoon thunderstorms. I did a load of laundry and hung it out to dry, then took off for my usual towpath ride — I figured I could get back before the rain started, though by then the sky was starting to look ominous.
Well I basically did a hot lap, got home in plenty of time to beat the storm, got my dry laundry in and… it didn’t rain until the middle of the night.
Today is a rainy day. Anne is out doing some bike event (in the rain, she’s tougher than me) while I went over to the Easton Market, to brunch with Emmi and Iris.
I just got back from an overnight trip to Alexandria, Virginia to pick up a new bike. It’s a huge cargo bike that Jenny found online, like eight feet long and maybe 85 pounds, with a cargo box up front (the brand is Bakfiet, for those following along). Anne arranged to borrow Sarah’s pickup, and I drove down yesterday with John R to get it.
It was not quite a buddy movie, no adventures or anything — we just drove down, dealt with Baltimore and DC traffic (nothing major), and met the owner at a parking lot near Mount Vernon. Owner Vince seemed to be a pretty nice guy, and told me about how he used to use the bike to transport his daughters around, before they got too big and started riding their own bikes. I assured him it was going to a good home, and would soon be transporting another little girl…
A little bit of wresting (we also removed the bucket for transport) and we had the bike secured in the truck bed. We drove over to our hotel and checked in, and then took an Uber to a local brewpub called the Aslin Beer Company for dinner.
Neither of us had ever heard of them, but apparently Aslin is a local powerhouse, with multiple brewpubs in the area and even one as far away as Pittsburgh. The place we went to was packed — it was Trivia Night — but we found the last two seats at the bar, and had a great meal washed down with some really good west coast IPA’s. (My meal was a pepperoni and hot honey pizza, which I was prepared to have my doubts about but it was amazing.) We had a good time, but we were tired and didn’t really last long, we just did what we had to and left.
Back at the hotel, I discovered that my room was just close enough to the lobby that I could hear the horde of teenagers (some group on a bus tour) coming and going from the elevator to the pool. That died down by about 11:00, thankfully, and probably when the pool closed, and I slept fine from there out.
Today was an easy return: I met John (along with a horde of hungry teenagers) in the breakfast area, and after breakfast we had an uneventful drive home. We arrived just after 1:00, just about 25 hours, with a round trip total of maybe 450 miles.
And now we have this beauty!
So that John Denver song about Jacques Cousteau in my last post, it got me thinking about the latest Richard Powers novel, which I’d read a few weeks ago but now I couldn’t remember its name. So, I Googled it (it was Playground) and happened to read a few random reviews, and I won’t post any spoilers but I found I completely misunderstood the entire book! Like, the entire point of the story went right over my head… I guess I’ll just have to give it a re-read.
I got interested in a recent presidential ruling, a two-year exemption for some coal-fired power plants from the new, stricter EPA regulations on mercury emissions. I took a look at the list of plants in the proclamation and mapped the ones in Pennsylvania; you can check out my new page with (one version of) the map here. Enjoy! If that’s the right word.
But that map is not what I came here to talk about, I came here to talk about yodeling.
There is a song I really like called “I Am The Mercury,” by Jimmy Spheeris. The title caught my attention at first because it reminded me of an image from a science fiction novel involving alchemy, where a student sees a plate in one of the secret texts: it was described as a wild man’s face, maybe caught halfway into a scream. The picture (inside the book, in the novel) was titled “Lead Man,” but I remembered it as something-something Mercury — possibly because of the connection between mercury and insanity?
Anyway, there is no connection between the book and that song, but the song is incredible:
What I really like is that chorus, “let it rain on the mountain,” and then that wild yodeling shout — I don’t know if that even is yodeling, it seems very Americana, a folksong-ey barbaric mountain yawp. I know I’ve heard it somewhere before…
I knew it had to be in some John Denver song, so I Googled “John Denver yodeling” and found the one I was looking for pretty quickly: “Calypso,” a song about Jacques Cousteau and his research ship. And so, just because I can:
And that brings us back to thinking about the environment. And, now that I think of it, that definitely is yodeling.
PS This is what I wrote twenty years ago.
Well, well, it looks like Thomas Pynchon has a new novel coming out this fall!
Maybe everything that dies someday comes back… I see that some company has brought the dire wolf (or some reasonable facsimile) back from 10,000 years of extinction. Not sure how I feel about that yet…