Flamethrower, Part Whatever[U]

This morning, as you can see in the image below, the hornets have gotten pretty close to covering half of the lens of this dish. I wonder when the reception is going to start to fail.

hornets nest on satellite dish

So how much of the lens needs to be covered (and is lens the right word?) for the satelite dish’s reception to fail? Any experts?

I mentioned in my post yesterday that this thing is about five feet from the sidewalk. I was being generous. It’s more like 2-3 feet. I hope this image gives the idea of how close it is:

It’s not like I took a tape measure to this, but it seems to be to be a good deal closer to the street than I remembered.

Can’t immediately recall whether I mentioned it in a previous post, but how I noticed the nest was because I heard it. Was listening to my new morning-walk soundtrack, Rufus Wainwright’s Out of the Game, and I just happened to go by during a break between songs. I noticed because I heard it, or them, buzzing.

[Update] I checked on Wikipedia and guess who selected this location? The queen. See 3 Life cycle there. I guess there is no king, but if there were, he would probably have recommended against this particular spot.

This entry was posted in Big Garbage Can of Weirdness by Steve, i.e., him. Bookmark the permalink.

About Steve, i.e., him

Stephen Stark is an award-winning novelist and bestselling ghostwriter. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, Poets & Writers and in many other journals. He has been a fellow and taught at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and won an NEA Literature Fellowship in fiction. His novel, Second Son, was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 1992, and a New and Noteworthy Paperback of 1994.

2 thoughts on “Flamethrower, Part Whatever[U]

  1. Hey Stephen, it’s Peter DeMarco from Berkley Books. Not sure if you remember me. I came across something in my files I wanted to share with you. E-mail me!

  2. Just to add some context, Pete DeMarco and I, and a lot of others—Jon Rosen (Where are you?) used to work together at Berkely Publishing back before it became part of Penguin Publishing Group, or Penguin Group. Lot of others I would love to hear from – – talking about you, too, Chris Pepe.

Tell me what you think. Seriously.