My Messy Media Center and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom

My media center, also known as my computer room, was a terrible mess. 3 big boxes of books, the excess spilling over, were up against 1 wall, blocking a closet door. The other side of the room had all kinds of crap piled all over the place–an accumulation of over a decade’s worth of junk. I finally got tired of looking at it and decided to straighten it up. The real impetus was a book I recently read but couldn’t find. I was also looking for some tax forms. I spent hours cleaning the room and discovered a plumbing disaster. The carpet underneath the junk was wet, and I determined it was from a leaky sink drainage pipe on the other side of the wall, leading to a $1000 repair. After the repair the carpet dried and I purchased a $60 bookshelf from Amazon to get the boxes off the floor and suffered through more aggravation. It was a cheap piece of shit made in Vietnam, and I could not put it together. The top part of the bookshelf was supposed to connect with the bottom part using small plastic pegs that wouldn’t line up. Moreover, the shelves were supposed to rest on ridiculously tiny pegs, and the whole thing fell apart every time I barely touched it. I devised an alternative construction using wooden blocks and a shitload of wood glue. My concept worked, but I became really angry with my own stupidity. After installing the first shelf I went looking for the other 2 and realized I’d forgotten that I’d put them on the bottom of the case to get them out of the way. I’d glued the blocks underneath the first shelf on top of the other 2. I felt like the 3 Stooges wrapped in 1 person. I fixed the snafu by sawing extra wood from the frame of the original bookcase I didn’t use, and those served as the additional shelves. Below are before and after photos of my media center.

Boxes of overflowing books blocked my closet door.

I discovered a plumbing disaster under this mess. If I hired a maid, she would probably take one look at it, quit and cry.

Now, I can at least get into my closet without dragging hundred-pound boxes of books out of the way.

I built this bookshelf using the leftover frame of another bookcase that I could not put together with wooden blocks and a shitload of wood glue.

I did find the book I was looking for, but I never found the tax forms. I also found a box of film noir and Wild Kingdom DVDs. I’d completely forgotten about the latter and probably hadn’t watched them in over 20 years. Wild Kingdom was my favorite show when I was a little kid. I remember crying in 1968 when our family had just 1 television, and my father chose to watch The Ed Sullivan Show instead of Wild Kingdom. This long running nature series was the successor to Zoo Parade, a series that ran from 1952-1957, and it was also hosted by Marlin Perkins. He convinced the Mutual of Omaha insurance company to sponsor the next version of the show in 1962, and new episodes have been produced off and on ever since. The original Wild Kingdom aired on NBC and syndication from 1963-1988 with Marlin Perkins hosting it until shortly before his death from skin cancer in 1986. The show was revived in 2002 and again in 2011. It was a YouTube series from 2013-2018, and since 2022 it has been part of NBC’s Saturday morning line up of shows for kids.

Marlin Perkins wrestling a giant anaconda. He said, “a bite from an anaconda could be very painful.” His statements of the obvious were often fodder for late night comedians.

Wild Kingdom is 1 of the greatest nature shows of all time and was especially educational for children. Each episode often features many different species of animals interacting with each other. For example in an episode about the Okefenokee Swamp they showed alligators, alligator snapping turtles, common snapping turtles, water moccasins, egrets, mallard ducks, barred owls, red-shouldered hawks, black bears, raccoons, bobcats, gray foxes, striped skunks, and fox squirrels. A bobcat hunting the ducks and squirrels became prey for an alligator. Some episodes feature conservation projects that show game managers or scientists capturing wild animals to study them or to relocate problem individuals. (They’ve been accused of unnecessarily handling animals for the camera. I think that is true in some cases.) Other episodes follow individual animals and are narrated in story form. Below is a link to Wild Kingdom’s YouTube channel where hundreds of episodes are available.

https://www.youtube.com/@wildkingdom

Adobe Houses vs F5 Tornadoes

Google searching for answers and research is much easier now. Google AI answers the questions, and there is no need to scroll through pages of websites to find a satisfactory answer. I suspect Google AI is responsible for reducing the average daily views to my site by 50% over the past 6 months, but it doesn’t matter because I don’t make any money doing this. It’s just a hobby for me, and I don’t feel bad for the owners of WordPress.

I’ve always been fascinated with adobe houses. They are built using primitive technology yet are comfortable and especially able to keep indoors cool in the American Southwest where they are most prevalent. American Indians built adobe houses, and some were built embedded on mountainsides where they were accessible by ladders which could be withdrawn, keeping the people in them safe from other hostile tribes. My fascination led me to read Woody Guthrie’s only published novel House of the Earth. Guthrie wrote “This Land is Your Land” and was a great folk song writer, though he was a stupid communist. His novel, written in 1947 but not published until recently, is a good example of really bad writing. The corny dialogue is tedious and pointless, and Guthrie sometimes uses a dozen similes to describe 1 thing, a style of gross overwriting that I found hard to endure. Moreover, in the novel, the characters never get to building their adobe dream house–the part I was most looking forward to reading. How unfulfilling.

I asked Google AI whether an adobe house could withstand a F5 tornado. Tornadoes are rated according to the Fujita Scale, and an F5 is the most devastating with winds that exceed 200 mph. Google AI emphatically said no. I then asked Google AI for an example of an adobe home destroyed by any scale of tornado, and it was unable to give any, though it still insisted a tornado would destroy an adobe home.

An F5 tornado will obliterate almost anything in its path.

Map showing area where adobe homes are common in the U.S. The eroded sedimentary rock found in this region is good for making adobe brick.

Many tribes of Southwestern Indians used adobe brick.

This is a really attractive adobe home.

Another nice adobe home. Authentic adobe homes usually have flat roofs, but this one has a modern roof.

Reinforced concrete with embedded steel can survive a direct hit from a tornado.

Dome-shaped homes can also survive tornados because of aerodynamics. The shape deflects high winds and distributes pressure evenly, and there is no weak point that attaches the roof to the walls. An adobe home shaped like a dome could also survive a tornado, so I propose Google AI is wrong about this.

Adobe homes are made from sun dried bricks as opposed to regular bricks which are dried using heat. Straw is mixed with the local soil and dried in piles. The walls of an adobe home can be made several feet thick and can keep inside temperatures constant, like a cave. The roofs are made with poles, lattices, and branches held together with adobe. The roofs are often flat. Adobe houses can be built in Georgia, where I live, but they need large overhangs to prevent precipitation from eroding the walls. Usually, an extra coat of cement plaster or stucco attached to iron mesh is used to give the adobe home a better look.

Tornadoes destroy homes by causing internal pressure on the home that makes it implode. The wind tears the roof off, and windblown debris also can cause severe damage to homes not directly in its path. Tornado proof safe rooms can be built using concrete reinforced with embedded steel. There is more than 1 case of a dome-shaped structure withstanding tornadoes due to the aerodynamic nature. The shape deflects the wind and distributes the internal pressure evenly. Google AI might be wrong. An adobe house built in a dome shape could possibly still stand after a hit from an F5 tornado.

References:

Groben, W.

“Adobe Architecture: Its Design and Construction”

U.S. Department of Agriculture 1941

Click to access adobe_arch.pdf

Pan, K., D. Montpellier, M. Zadeh

“Engineering Observations of 3 May 1999 Oklahoma Tornado Damage”

Weather and Forecasting 17(3) 2002