One Man And His Clog

This Is A Bit Unusual
But bear with me, if you will.  Last night Your Humble Scribe was, as is his wont, cruising Youtube and looking for r/AskReddit and the delicious dishes of schadenfreude that infest it.  I know, I know, it makes me a terrible person, but we already knew that, didn't we?
     Well, what did I come across but a video posted by someone with the handle "Post 10", whom is a South Canadian, and Post 10's mission in life is to unblock drains, sewers, ponds, car parks (okay, "parking lots" and he's done lots of lots) and other water features.  I don't think he gets paid for it, it's just his bag; his and his faithful rake.  He opened his epic with an illustration of how horribly slowly a large pond was draining.  Art?

As you can see, the water is barely moving

     Then he shifted back up the slope, so he could illustrate the whole pond, showing that water had flooded over the edge and into the trees.  Ol' Pos also pointed out that this is autumn, and all the trees had shed their leaves, and that there had been a storm the previous night.  Art?

Watery and wet

     Okay, so let's see where the large pond/small lake should drain from, into a culvert that leads downhill and out of the exit shown above.  Art?

Noticeably not draining

     In case you were wondering, that big metal pole is some kind of emergency valve, allowing water to drain away if the level gets excessively high, by which point Ol' Pos explains the nearby highway would have been flooded, too.  So if it comes into operation, that's still too little too late.
     Ol' Pos gets to work with his mighty rake and extracts copious amounts of rotting leaves, twigs and branches from the drain.  As he further points out, an oak leaf sitting on that drain will take two years to decompose, which means the water being backed up for all that time and even more oak leaves joining in -

     Here you can see just some of the rotting vegetation that he's pulled out of the water.  There was a lot more to come.  Art?

     He's removed enough guff that water is beginning to drain.  At this point I was getting a bit nervous, as you cannot tell precisely what's under the water, and I had images of him being swept into the drain and being sucked to oblivion underwater.  But no!  Art?

     Compare this to the first picture; the water level has risen way up and the H2O is really belting down that culvert.

The drain emerges!

     By now Ol' Pos had left the drain, since the water was really coming in at speed and he risked getting knocked off his feet.  You can see how far the water level has fallen by how low it stands against the valve.

Taken out to port, going in to starboard

     You can't help but feel that Post 10 gets a positively Zen sense of satisfaction when he stands back and sees the fruits of his labours.  And lucky us can watch all of this without getting cold or wet or having to deal with the stench of rotting debris.
     Let's hear it for Post 10!
     Motley, shall we go find a stinking septic sump and clear it by hand?

Let me just append this here -

Intricate gearing!

Back To Normality
Well, as close as we ever do here.  For Lo!  It's back to that Rolling Stone list of the top 50 television sci-fi shows, and at number 44 we have - 
Max Headroom!

You had to be there

     Max was an artificial intelligence that fronted a television channel of the future, where people exploded if they didn't watch the correct channel which contained "blipverts", and he was the product of a journalist in a coma who had seen a sign declaring "MAX HEADROOM 2 Yards 6 inches" -
     I think.  It's been a while since I saw the film that spawned Max, and the subsequent programs where he fronted for music videos.  And for all that he was supposed to be the face of the future, it was all done with make up and that digital art in the background?  All hand-drawn.

This will all make sense once it's on Facebook -

A branchful of batrachians

Your Daily Dose Of Danger!
Oh, yes, about those date-expired croutons from 2014, I had them in a bowl of miso soup last night and hey, what do you know, they were pretty filling once they'd soaked up a load of miso.  Also I am still alive, so yah booh sucks to food safety once again.
     Anyway, today we are going to be looking at the organochlorine compound Aldrin.

Even at 90, do not pick a fight with this guy

     Okay, okay, you knew that was coming.  No, seriously, Aldrin is one of a class of pesticides that were banned once it was realised that they accumulated in any organism that came into contact with a sub-lethal dose - DDT is another in the same class.
    It is not stuff to muck about with.  Let's see what the hazard classifications tell us about it: Fatal if swallowed. So, do not eat it.  Fatal if it comes into contact with the skin.  So, do not have a dust bath in Aldrin.  Possibly carcinogenic, so it may kill you even if you don't bathe in or eat it.  Extremely toxic to marine organisms.  Do not chuck it in the nearby pond.

Wood, okay.  What about every other living thing?

Finally -
Whilst talking of clogs and wood preservative, one wonders whether the Dutch ever used Aldrin to treat the soles of their national footwear?  Back in the Forties, of course, before people knew how horribly toxic it was.  Art?

Also, that's lead-based paint

     Hey, imagine life in the Dutch colony of Surinam, where they might have the Manchineel Tree a-growing, and some locals with a death wish make clogs out of one, and then used Aldrin to preserve the wood, and then wondered why anyone who wore them dropped dead within hours*?


*  Conrad, you have a morbid imagination; yours, Conrad