Songbirds beware the feral cat

If you’re a pet lover, what do you do about ‘fixing’ your pets?

Spaying or neutering your pets is a large decision to make. We feel that spaying or neutering your pets is the best decision for you, your pets, and animal shelters. Spaying or neutering pets allows you to have a healthier pet. Fixed pets have lower rates of cancer, as well as for female pets, the elimination of becoming pregnant.

Speaking of becoming pregnant, animal shelters are already overcrowded. There are thousands, if not millions, of pets euthanized each year because a shelter cannot afford to keep them. Even with shelters, there are more than 60 million feral cats in the United States. These feral cats have reduced an already weak songbird population even more.

If you get a new pet and it hasn’t been spayed or neutered, go do it.

The "W" in Willkommen is pronounced like a "V."

Spelling is a strange topic. For one, it’s rarely constant. Over time, spellings tend to drift or change outright. Two, it’s not phonetic at all. For example, the city of Worcester, Massachusetts is pronounced “Wooster” or “Woostah”.

A standardized spelling only came into effect after the first dictionaries were published. However, even with dictionaries, spelling changed with time. Most of the changes came from simple shearing of extra letters. Catalogue became catalog, colour became color, and so on. As time went on, people began to realize that spelling in English didn’t make any sense. And thus the English Spelling Reform movements were born.

As of today, there are not very many spelling reform movements. However, during the 1800’s, there were countless proposals. By 1906, an American council had decided to seek the approval of the government for officially changing English spelling. It was largely unsuccessful because of several factors. Some of the more glaring problems, ones that still exist, are teaching people to switch to a brand new system from a well-established one, the cost of reprinting old books and signs, and the difficulty of forcing people to accept it.

However, spelling reform does make a bit of sense. After all, English words often have strange spellings and often don’t match up with their modern pronunciations. This is largely because there isn’t a single standard for English, nor is there a committee for the preservation of English, unlike French or Spanish. Without that committee, there’s no real way to unify English spellings.

Is the lack of spelling reform a bad thing? Not necessarily, but it does make learning English very complicated. Take a look at this sentence: Though a rough cough and hiccoughs ploughed through him, he houghed the horse with thorough thoughtfulness. As a native English speaker, that’s a challenging sentence, but as a second language, that’s nearly impossible. On the other hand, by not changing the spelling of words, it remains possible to suss out the meaning of obscure words, thanks to Latin and Greek roots.

Spelling is a strange thing, and Atlas Signs and Plaques will work with you, but (and there is always a but”) with that said, you have the final choice of what you want on your sign. Because of all the variables in spelling, Atlas insists on written copy from the client. If you want to make your sign Phonetic,or spelled in Old English, or would like to include Non English words, we can do that! Just let us know and we’ll do the rest.

Nasa Photo

Hiding in the shadows, a sinister plot builds and grows…

There’s nothing quite like a good conspiracy, is there? The lovely interplay of thousands of parts, all spinning together, toward a sinister end. It’s actually somewhat comforting to think that there is a pattern is all the randomness of the world. After all, humans see patterns instinctively. In fact, seeing patterns was probably a survival trait on the African savannah and in prehistory. If someone could see the shape of a tiger or lion lurking in the tall grass, they would have a better chance of surviving into adulthood and reproduction.

However, conspiracies are persistent. For example, there is a small but dedicated group that insists on doubting that the Moon landings ever happened. They believe that they were faked on a Hollywood backlot or a studio or a desert out West. While on the surface some of these claims seem plausible, there’s one rather large problem. How has NASA and the US Government managed to suppress all of the information and pictures that would show that the landings were faked? Basically, my counterargument to this conspiracy is that it presupposes a level of competency that doesn’t quite match up properly. In addition, more than 400,000 people worked on the Apollo Project and none of them has come out to support this theory.

This is my main issue with the conspiracy of a Global Order that secretly runs everything. If they are powerful enough to run the entire world, why not just step out and rule directly? And two, how has no one in the organization stepped out? Occam’s Razor is a nifty little tool that cuts right to the heart of conspiracies: the simplest solution is usually the best.

Admittedly, there have been some conspiracies that were true. The 1953 Iranian coup d’etat was run by the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom and the United States. There really was a US government program dedicated to studying drugs, called MKUltra.  But those generally much more limited in scale and are incredibly rare. In general, apply Occam’s Razor and a splash of logic and you’ll do alright.

A Bridge Too Far?

The Bridge from China at the development stage

In 1989, an earthquake hit California and the Bay Area of San Francisco. Part of the Eastern span was damaged and plans began immediately to fix the bridge. More than twenty years later, parts of the span were still being installed. However, this bridge was a huge change from the past. This bridge had a Made In China tag.

When the bids were opened, the planning commission for the Bay Bridge realized that costs would be astronomical and began looking for ways to save money. They quickly found that if they relied on Chinese steel and labor, they could build the bridge for less. However, what were the other costs? All of that money that could have gone toward revitalizing our own construction industry just went to China.

Buying local has huge benefits. For one, you save on shipping because your goods don’t have to travel as far. Two, the money that you spend locally stays local. With more business, the local company can expand and hire more workers. Small businesses create jobs and have a personal stake in making sure that they hold on customers.

We here at Atlas Signs and Plaques are committed to bringing you the absolute best signs we can. We’re also proud to keep jobs and commerce within the United States. We have pledged to use American Materials and Labor in all of our signs. We have also partnered with Metalcraft Industries to bring you American made brackets to hang your signs.

Let’s keep local businesses alive and support American companies. In the short term, it may cost more, but in the long run, we’ll be better off.