10:21 – It was 35.8F (2C) when I took Colin out this morning, but with not much wind. I’ve never trusted our electronic rain gauge. We use it during cold months because we’ve had several standard rain gauges, plastic and glass, fracture when water froze in them. Our electronic gauge typically reads low. If the manual gauge is showing, for example, 2 inches, the electronic gauge may show 1.2 or 1.6 inches or whatever.
But I trust the electronic one even less now. When I asked Barbara this morning what the outside temperature was, she looked over at the electronic gauge and told me it read 37F. Then she added that we’ve had quite a bit of rain since the first of the year, 397 inches. I suggested she must mean 3.97 inches, so she showed me the gauge. It read 397.14 inches YTD, which is 33.1 feet, 1,008.7 cm, or about 10.1 meters. So unless our gauge has malfunctioned, we had more rain in the last month than we normally get in seven years.
I talked to Barbara yesterday about dropping Amazon Prime. She said she’d prefer to keep it, if only for the streaming video. It’s only $99/year, so price isn’t a factor. I told her that if I dropped Prime I was thinking about replacing it with Hulu for $12/month. She said she wouldn’t mind having all three streaming services. Once we’ve cut down on our backlog of streaming stuff we want to watch on Netflix or Prime, I’ll probably sign up for Hulu’s one-week free trial, just to see what kind of stuff they have.
Given that Hollywood in general is Trump’s enemy, I’d like to see him take steps to eliminate copyright protection for new video and audio recordings, and to eliminate it retroactively for existing recordings. There’s no Constitutional basis for copyrights on anything but books and essays–“securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;”–but absolutely no mention of video or audio recordings. While he’s doing that, he needs to change “limited Times” to reflect the original intent. Tom Jefferson didn’t want to allow patents and copyrights at all, but he compromised on “limited Times”, intending that to mean perhaps a year at most. A 17-year term for patents and life-of-the-author-plus-50-years for copyrights is simply outrageous.
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