Many years ago, I linked to Jürgen Henn’s 11foot8.com. That’s an entire site dedicated to a noticeably low bridge in Durham, North Carolina, one which oblivious truck drivers frequently fail to clear. A couple years after writing about the bridge, I found myself in Durham, and captured some photographs of the ill-fated area. Despite the fact that this picture looks like I was Photoshopped in, I promise, I was really there:

Alas, I didn’t get to witness any vehicular carnage while I was on-site.

Apparently, in 2019, the bridge was finally raised by eight inches. Raising the bridge has likely reduced the frequency of incidents, but it hasn’t solved the problem fully. Just three weeks later, the first collision with the new bridge happened.

A few weeks ago, 11foot8.com posted a new video featuring a “perfect peel”, where the roof of a box truck was stripped off as if the whole thing was built to do just that. It’s terribly satisfying to watch, and I encourage you to do so. Here’s a screengrab:

Here in Boston, we have a crosstown parkway called Storrow Drive. It features several low bridges which cause similar problems, often for students moving around the city in rental trucks. Years ago, I managed to capture a stuck truck mere moments after it had gotten wedged:

[Photo courtesy of P. Kafasis]

While Boston lacks its own site devoted entirely to this phenomenon, local news blog Universal Hub does track the incidents, which we refer to as “Storrowings”. Each occurrence is a bad day for one hapless driver, but there are many, many signs and warnings aimed at preventing this problem. As such, it’s hard to muster up too much sympathy. The innocent folks who find themselves snarled in the resulting traffic are more deserving of pity.

Of course, the fact that these bridges keep taking down trucks tells us that the signs just aren’t enough to prevent the problem. I’d love it if more innovative solutions were tested, such as the SoftStop system from Australia. When needed, it showers down a curtain of water so a ”sign” can be projected right in front of drivers.

For now, though, I expect to see these bridges continuing to feast.

In January of 2020, I moved to a new address. In the year and a half since that move, I’ve received a bizarre stream of envelopes in the mail. I’ve been documenting them since shortly after they began, and now I’m going to share the mystery of Terrys (sic) Tropical Paradise. Perhaps someone out there can crack this case.

I believe this all began back in February of 2020. It was around that time that I received the first envelope addressed to “Terrys Tropical Paradise” (no apostrophe!). I found this very strange, but I simply tossed it in the recycling bin. It was only upon receiving the second letter that I started documenting things. That second item was received March 31st, 2020, and can be seen below:

I’ve removed my street address, but this is otherwise unmodified. That’s all there was. It’s a single sheet, with an address (visible through the envelope and used to get the item here), and a tiny bit of text. That envelope contains no return address or other identifying information.

After those two pieces of mail, things went quiet in the Terrys department for many months. Perhaps the global pandemic threw a wrench in things. However, in November, I suddenly received two envelopes in one day:

The very next month, I received another two. I also had better lighting for my scans:

These particular letters came on my mother’s birthday. Is that a clue? No, of course it’s not. That would be ridiculous.

Things then stalled for another three months, before picking back up in force. Since March, I’ve received at least one mailing each month. Each envelope contains just one sheet of paper, and the only thing that changes are the numbers and letters in the upper left. I’ve reproduced those below:

March 2021 (Received 2021-03-12):
A9807550    B02753ER.DAT

April 2021 (Received 2021-04-19):
A9807550    B02753ER.DAT
A9807550    B02753ER.DAT
A9807550    B02753ER.DAT

May 2021 (Received 2021-05-17):
A9807550    N02809FA.DAT

June 2021 (Received 2021-06-10):
A9807550    I02102BU.DAT

July 2021 (Received 2021-07-06):
A9807550    B00219ER.DAT

This is surely all automated, judging both by the contents of these envelopes, and that missing apostrophe in the name. The unchanging A9807550 is probably an identifier, like an account number, while the .DAT extension on the second half suggests different data files. But why isn’t there any actual content? Even if there were a “Terry’s Tropical Paradise” located here, what purpose would these mailings serve? I’m at a loss.

Searching the web reveals nothing that seems relevant. I’ve found a “Terry’s Tropical Paradise” in Jacksonville, Arkansas, which I suppose is more tropical than Boston, but is still not a place I would call tropical. I can’t figure out what that business is, however, and the phone number listed rings once and then tells me it’s been “disconnected or is no longer in service”.

So that’s where things stand. Every so often, I check the mail, and get another envelope for TTP, and another laugh. Much like life, I don’t know if I’ll ever understand what’s happening here, but I sure would like to.

A few weeks back, I noted Jeff Bezos’s plan to go to space with his brother. In contrast to his appalling yacht purchase(s), I gave this plan a somewhat flip nod of approval, stating “[i]f we’re going to have billionaires, that’s how you do it.” Space exploration is cool, and certainly a better use of purchase than yet another yacht, with all its attendant problems.

But a far better model for how billionaires should use their money is available in the form of Bezos’s former wife, Mackenzie Scott¹. Following the couple’s divorce, Scott took sole possession of tens of billions of dollars in Amazon stock. She quickly began giving that wealth away. In just two years since signing the Giving Pledge, Scott has donated more than $8.5 billion to hundreds of worthy non-profit organizations.

These donations are going to have incalculable positive effects, and from the post about her most recent donations, it’s clear Scott is far from done. That post also notes that Scott wants to keep the focus on the organizations themselves, like the Girls First Fund, Muslim Advocates, and Results for America. However, if society isn’t going to prevent the creation of billionaires, we should at least applaud those who really are using their ludicrous power to benefit others so dramatically.

Footnotes:

1. The story of Scott’s wealth seems to be too often summarized as simply being the result of her divorce from one of the richest men in the world. More than just a jilted ex-wife who got rich when her husband cheated on her, Scott was with Amazon from the beginning, and her money seems as well earned as Bezos’s. ↩︎

Yesterday, I saw the following news summary:

DOJ recovers most of Colonial Pipeline ransom
The Justice Department announced Monday that it had recovered about $2.3 million of the $4.4 million in bitcoin

Now, my first thought when I read this was “That is not most!”. However, by the barest margin of the dictionary definition of “most”, it is.

$2.3 million is indeed a razor-thin majority of $4.4 million. Of course, that’s not really what we think of when we hear “most”. If I borrow $100 from you and then pay you back just $51, you would not tell people “Oh, it’s fine, Paul paid me back most of my money”. “Never loan Paul money”, that is what you’d say.

Upon reading more about this story, I realized that headline was actually correct, though the sub-head was quite misleading. By way of explanation, here’s a brief timeline:

May 7, 2021: The DarkSide ransomware gang attacked Colonial Pipeline, taking pipeline management systems down.

May 8, 2021: Colonial Pipeline paid DarkSide a ransom of 75 bitcoins to undo the attack. Amusingly, while DarkSide did provide Colonial with a tool to restore their network, it was so slow that Colonial ultimately restored operations using their own backups.

Around this time, that ransom was widely reported as nearly “$5 million”. This shorthand made sense, as the average reader is not likely to be familiar with the current price of bitcoin.

June 7, 2021: The Department of Justice announced they’ve recovered “$2.3 million” in cryptocurrency paid to DarkSide. The how of that is interesting from a technical perspective, but most reports focused on that “$2.3 million”, a number which is very misleading.

In point of fact, of the 75 bitcoins Colonial paid, 63.7 were recovered. That’s about 85%, a much more satisfying definition of “most”. The problem comes when reporters again convert that into US currency, because Bitcoin’s value has tanked in the month since the ransom was paid.

[Chart via CoinDesk]

On May 7, 1 bitcoin cost around $58,000, and 75 bitcoins cost around $4.4 million. On June 7, the value had fallen to around $35,000, making 63.7 bitcoins worth about $2.3 million. As a result, though Colonial Pipeline got back most of the actual asset they gave away, they’re currently still out a whole lot of money. They likely paid somewhere between $4 and $5 million back in May, and have now recovered an asset currently worth a bit over $2 million.

Given this wild price drop, Colonial may wish to keep that Bitcoin for now, in the hopes that its value will shoot back up in the future. In other words? HODL.

Back in 1998, advice columnist Abigail Van Buren took a letter from a woman who was deeply upset about her husband urinating in their front yard. Her response was, frankly, not terribly helpful.

This is not a subject that’s often discussed, but I suspect the practice is not unusual. Dogs and cats urinate to mark their territory. Your husband may be doing it for the same reason. For pets, the problem can be resolved by neutering; however, I wouldn’t recommend that for your husband.

That’s some advice, Abby. “Don’t have your husband neutered”. Got it. That really was about all she offered, except that according to the Los Angeles Police Department¹, it’s “not illegal as long as it is not in public view.”

A few weeks later, the column printed a response from Charlton Heston. More than two decades later, I still think about it.

DEAR ABBY: Though a frequent reader (after my wife), I’ve only now found reason to write to you, in response to the lady who feared her husband’s habit of urinating on their lawn was inappropriate.

So it may be, but the fact remains that all men pee outdoors.

My best to you and continued good luck with your column.
— CHARLTON HESTON, BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF.

Once I get past the obvious joke about prying Heston’s outdoor-micturating penis from his cold, dead hands, I really just have to wonder what compelled him to write this letter. How could a world-famous actor feel so strongly about peeing outside that he’d take the time to mail a letter in support of the practice? Did no one suggest he might be better off passing up the opportunity to assert his allegiance to this particular cause?

Unfortunately for me, from Heston to his wife to (the original) Dear Abby, all the major players in this drama are now dead. As such, I don’t think I’ll ever get answers to my questions. At least now we can enjoy this bizarre occurrence together.

Footnotes:

1. I haven’t a clue why she chose the LAPD to answer this question. I don’t believe she lived in LA, nor does it appear the letter writer did, and her column was nationally syndicated. ↩︎

Recently, I came across the following sign:

I actually saw several versions of this sign, all within a few blocks of one another, and each one was similarly modified. Though I don’t have any information about this missing pet, I still kind of want to dial these people up.

• Yes, I’m calling about your lost dog sign…no, no, I’m afraid I haven’t seen the dog. I just want to know why on earth you edited your sign…Hello? HELLO?!

After discussing this with multiple people, there are two theories, both of which I quite like. The first theory is that these people have multiple small dogs, and they are very bad at keeping track of them. In this scenario, they previously lost a small dog of a different color. When it was found (or they just gave up on ever seeing it again), they collected the signs¹ and stored them. Now that a second dog is lost, they are again using these signs, slightly modified.

The second theory is that one member of the family made the signs on their own. When a second member of the family saw them, an argument began about the color of their shared dog.

“What do you mean “tan”? The dog is white.”

“White?! She’s TAN!”

“IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, SHE IS WHITE!”

It seems like these signs could be greatly improved, and the possible argument avoided, by simply including a picture of the dog. But maybe they lost this dog so quickly that they didn’t even have a photograph yet.

Footnotes:

1. As one should always do when seeking a lost pet, holding a garage sale, or anything of a similar nature. ↩︎

Update (May 22, 2021): An anonymous reader purports to have texted the number on the sign, and received this reply:

So apparently, the answer is actually that this sign was placed by a volunteer who isn’t directly associated with the dog, and who re-uses signs. Maybe we can design some sort of sign that features swappable adjectives, like SMALL/MEDIUM/BIG and WHITE/TAN/YELLOW/BROWN/BLACK. Perhaps something with a rotating wheel design…