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Joined: Aug 2001
Posts: 2,605
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2001
Posts: 2,605 |
Do you say sih-CAY-dah or sih-CAH-dah?
Music, maestro!
You like potato and I like po-tah-to,
You like tomato and I like to-mah-to;
Potato, po-tah-to, sih-CAY-dah, sih-CAH-dah -
Let's call the whole thing off !
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
When I was in the Philippines, we all kept a couple praying mantises inside our sleeping net to catch any mosquitoes that might get in during the day.
The seventeen year locusts (cicadas) in New England never were any problem except that the female buried her eggs about a foot from tip of branches, which would die and droop, a minor cosmetic blemish. I rembember them very well because my tinnitus causes illusion quite reminscent of them.
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Joined: Jun 2001
Posts: 2,636
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jun 2001
Posts: 2,636 |
Wow [every meaning intended], have you ever tried to catch a gajillion teeny tiny praying mantis without killing or maiming them? Luckily, we lived in an old adobe house with plenty of cracks and such for them to make good their escapes. No praying mantis were intentionally killed or injured during this learning experience. 
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Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 477
addict
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addict
Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 477 |
we lived in an old adobe house
Connie, what's an adobe house? (Do you do acrobatics in there? I imagine you were, chasing all of those teeny tiny locusts...)
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Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 4,757
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 4,757 |
I think it's a Merkinism fer mud hut, hev! 
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Joined: Jun 2001
Posts: 2,636
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jun 2001
Posts: 2,636 |
adobe
1. A sun-dried, unburned brick of clay and straw.
a. The clay or soil from which this brick is made.
2, A structure built with this type of brick.
[Spanish, from Arabic aṭ-ṭūba, the brick : al-, the + ṭūba, a brick, singulative of ṭūb, bricks (from Coptic tōbe, tōōbefrom Egyptian dbt, brick).]
These bricks are very thick, a foot or more is common. The completed structure is usually given a mud or thin cement stucco coating and then painted with a [lime]whitewash. They are very good insulators, making this a wonderful building material for the desert.
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Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
Merkinism fer mud hut
The mud is of a rather special sort as I remember and it's dried with parbly some straw or suchlike in it. The walls tend to be very thick and it generally stays nicely cool in the heat, but you don't want to build one where it rains a lot. It's quite popular in the American Southwest. I lived in one for a summer in Santa Fe, New Mexico and it was just fine.
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Joined: Aug 2001
Posts: 2,605
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2001
Posts: 2,605 |
They are very good insulators, making this a wonderful building material for the desert.
As I recall, they are even better than that: they are a heat sink, that will will warm with and thus "store up" the heat of the day. Thus a good portion of the heat of the desert will go into heating the bricks -- rather than heating the interior of the home -- and a part of stored heat, the warmth of the adobe brick, will then go to radiating and warming the home during the cool desert night.
Much the same effect is felt in a well-built fireplace in an older home. Even after the fire is out, the heat of the brick or stone lining the firebed will radiate out and greatly warm the room for over an hour.
I wonder if the typical thickness of an adobe brick is not random, but rather is the thickness such that it takes 12 hours for heat, at the exterior side, to pass through and warm the interior side.
Perhaps stales, or jazzo, might have some information on this?
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Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
what's an adobe house?You could google "adobe house". I got this (inter alia) site with a nice interior shot of one of these mud huts. http://www.adobebuilder.com/Click on the Cont. arrow in the bottom right hand corner of the page.
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Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 1,094
old hand
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old hand
Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 1,094 |
Perhaps stales, or jazzo, might have some information on this?
I don't know too much about adobe construction as it's not used much around here in sporadically rainy Ohio. The buildings traditionally associated with them were pueblos, named after the Pueblo "Indians" of the Southwest US. I've always liked that maze-like construction of interconnected houses. It's similar to the building type used in ancient cultures elsewhere in the world, like Catal Huyuk, in present-day Turkey. The only entrances to the rooms were near the ceilings and accessed with ladders. Having the doors up there helped with ventilation, but it was mainly because stacking the buildings among each other made the whole more structurally sound and had some defensive advantages. A town could easily corner an invader, but the residents of the invaded room were pretty much stuck as well.
One interesting word related thing I remember was a Final Jeopardy question a few years ago, a name for a dwelling that is an anagram of a material that it might be made of: abode, adobe.
My most frequent encounter with adobe, though, is the company by that name, which Hev alluded to. They produce such illustrious software as Photoshop, Illustrator, In Design and Acrobat.
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