Skip to main content

Houndini

 OK, you've gotta see this. It's the continuing story of Hannah vs. The Basement.

She evaded all my previous efforts and for about the last month I've been trying to figure out how. I borrowed an idea from barbed wire security fences and put a 10 inch board at a 45 degree angle along the top of all the pegboards on the theory that her legs don't bend properly to get around that. Didn't work.
So then I got some blue chalk dust from Home Depot, the stuff that is used to refill chalk line markers, and dusted it everywhere on the theory that wherever she went over she would knock some off. It is all still in place.
The camera has been giving me some problems. Events recorded to the cloud are only available about half the time. The rest of the time, they throw an access error. The ones I could see, there was a curious camera artifact, a sort of white blob that files at high speed around the frame.
So my working theory was that my basement is haunted by ghosts and that they are helping Hannah over.
That would have been more believable than what she actually was doing.
I got an SD card to record video locally. It's a total pain because they've designed it to record 12 seconds at a time. So if you have an hour of video, that is stored in 300 individual files. I think they want to force you to pay for the cloud. So I have spent most of tonight assembling the files and then trimming it so you can see this little hairy acrobat at work.
Now think about what she's doing here. It is in a part of the basement where the lights are out and I haven't fixed them yet so it is really dark. That's why the camera is in night mode. It is a top shelf of three, with about ten inches between the shelf and the ceiling. I had screwed in a board to block the hole anyway, but it can only be attached on one side.
Somehow she had to figure out there was a hole up there despite it being blocked up, and figure out how to ascend the shelves, pull the block off, slide through the opening, run to the foundation vent and have an escape.
The fact that she discovered this exit and the amount of thought that went into that and also into figuring out how to make it work is just amazing. First she investigates it. Then she goes away to think about it. The action starts around 1:25 when she begins moving things out of her way.
I think she might be a space alien.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tis for Today in 1925

Today is the birthday of the author and illustrator Edward Gorey, born in Chicago, 1925. His stepmother was the woman playing the guitar during the Marseillaise scene in Casablanca. The New York Times credits bookstore owner Andreas Brown and his store, the Gotham Book Mart, with launching Gorey's career: "it became the central clearing house for Mr. Gorey, presenting exhibitions of his work in the store's gallery and eventually turning him into an international celebrity." Gorey's illustrated (and sometimes wordless) books, with their vaguely ominous air and ostensibly Victorian and Edwardian settings, have long had a cult following.[7] He made a notable impact on the world of theater with his designs for the 1977 Broadway revival of Dracula, for which he won the Tony Award for Best Costume Design and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Scenic Design. In 1980, Gorey became particularly well known for his animated introduction to the PBS series Mystery! ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bend and Stretch. Reach for the Stars. There Goes Jupiter, There Goes Mars...

On this day in 1976, during an interview on BBC Radio 2, British astronomer Patrick Moore announced that a very rare planetary event was about to take place—that Jupiter and Pluto would soon align in relation to Earth, and their combined gravitational pull would momentarily override Earth's own gravity and make people weigh less. He called it the Jovian-Plutonian Gravitational Effect, and said that if people jumped into the air at exactly 9:47 a.m., they would experience a floating sensation. Moore signaled, "Jump now!" over the airwaves, and within minutes the BBC switchboard was flooded with calls from people who claimed it had worked. In 1957, the BBC TV show "Panorama" ran a segment about the Swiss spaghetti harvest enjoying a "bumper year" thanks to mild weather and the elimination of the spaghetti weevil. Many credulous Britons were taken in. In 1998, Mark Boslough fabricated a press release claiming that the Alabama legislature had legally...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Simpsooooooons.

On this day in 1987, the longest running prime time sitcom in TV history debuted. The Simpsons began as a video short on The Tracy Ullman Show. Two years later it was spun off on its own and has now aired more than 650 episodes. It has received numerous awards. The Simpson family has their own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Matt Groening has said that his goal in creating The Simpsons was to offer audiences an alternative to the "mainstream trash" they were watching. And while the show often tackles heavy-hitting topics like religion, climate change, poverty, gun control, and nuclear power, its silly jokes and occasionally coarse humor have put some people off. In the early '90s, President George H.W. Bush encouraged Americans to be more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons. First Lady Barbara Bush called The Simpsons "the dumbest thing she had ever seen." But to be like Simpsons may not be so bad after all. The characters embrace and reflect...
Post a Comment
Read more