Here comes the ocean and the waves down by the shore

We haven't put the fish back in the pond yet, partly because we want to build a cover for it, to keep nocturnal visitors like the raccoon away from our goldfish. We figure to build a couple PVC frames with netting strung inside them. And we'd been resolving to measure the pond's actual dimensions --- we guessed it was an oval about 10 feet across at the widest --- all winter. Finally it was warm enough and I found we didn't have a tape measure wide enough for that. But in a brainstorm I'm way too proud of having, I realized we could use the extensible ladder, with its rungs twelve inches apart, to measure the pond.

Thus it is we now know the pond is strikingly close to circular, about 12 feet from water's edge to water's edge and about 14 feet rock's edge to rock's edge. Also some experimentation with a yardstick and a leaf grabber revealed the depth is about nineteen inches, meaning among other things the pond is about 300 gallons bigger than we had supposed. Nice to know, anyway.

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Been reading my humor blog? If you haven't, here's some of the things you missed the past week:

• When The Car Wash Changed Management, based on a sign I saw driving back from having my car worked on the other day.
• Some Stuff About Stan Freberg including a link to his old-time radio show that's generally quite good.
• This Week’s Baffling Compu-Toon Comic Strip (plus a link to my mathematics blog), which it turns out is a rerun strip that had baffled me before.
• Warbling, after I saw a Cape May warbler outside.
• Robert Benchley Society 2014 Award Winners Named wherein I point out how I'm not among them.
• Statistics Saturday: Nations of North America Organized By Length, a list sure to be of use to you, surely.
• Betty Boop: Sally Swing, an attempt to give bobbysoxers their own generation's Betty Boop, which strangely didn't take.
• A Dream Game Show, which baffled me when I dreamed it up, and continues to baffle me.

Trivia: The National Road, when completed from Cumberland in Maryland through to Ohio, had cost about $13,000 per mile. It was projected to be about $6,000 per mile. This does not count the cost of bridge construction. Source: Engineering in History, Richard Shelton Kirby, Sidney Withington, Arthur Burr Darling, Frederick Gridley Kilgour.

Currently Reading: Little Zoo By The Red Cedar: The Story Of Potter Park Zoo, Kevin Hile. It's all cheery, chipper, local, amateur-written history and then you run across a sentence like ``the baby elephant only had to be kept in chains an average of five hours a day''.

PS: Doesn't The Other Team Count? How Much?, another piece of my thread on information theory as understood through college basketball. Fifth, wow, such article since my last roundup of these.