I keep a multi-tool in my bag, as a number of folks responding (I read all 17 pages!) to the OP have reported, and a packet of twist ties which don't seem to be as favored as dental floss for tying back or otherwise securing stuff. I don't get around too well anymore so there's little to no risk at all when out & about to either me or the camera because I'm always in familiar territory. Tennessee is a "constitutional carry" state, and I have ample experience with firearms, being both retired Army and ex-law enforcement, but I took the classes and tests, paid the fee and qualified for a standard CCW permit. My own philosophy regarding carrying a gun? If I'm going to a location where firearms are prohibited, or even might go, the gun stays locked up at home. Otherwise, it's on my person and stays concealed. Ideally, it stays that way; ready for use but never needing to be used.....

I saw one in a short clip on YouTube that did a perfect yapping small dog; he was in a group of 3 or4 little guys, including at least one Chihuahua, all running around in front of a closed gate with another dog outside of it, all barking like crazy, including the Cockatoo. He was really into it, too; that little topknot of feathers was standing straight up and you couldn't tell his barking from the dogs'.

I'll add my 2¢ in support of Thousand Oaks products. Just took delivery on an 8x8'sheet of their black polymer, to be used for DIY-type filters (as in '17's TSE) for my Linux FZ-1000, and a good pair of 15x70 Celestron astronomical binoculars I recently bought specifically for this event (good price on Amazon). I've read a lot on both sides of the argument for & against using Welders Mask glass, but it seems the cons are more than the pros. I can certify that the use of black polymer as a solar filter back in '17 resulted in some nice pictures and video with zero problems and no damage to my Retinas or camera sensors. I'll be re-using the filter I'd made special for my good old Fuji Finepix S1 with its (35mm equivalent) 1200mm telephoto reach; that one's hard to keep the image in the LCD screen when you don't have an azimuth tracking setup on your tripod (like I don't!) but you can luck onto some pretty good photos.

Duplicated by mistake.

Born in '49, living on Long Island (Sayville, NY, in Suffolk County). One clear memory in particular from that time, from about mid-1956 to Autumn of '60 when my Dad was transferred and we moved to the Midwest, was how us little grade-school-age kids played casually on the LIRR tracks, which were in continual use at the time by both freight and passenger rolling stock (though I can only recall the small 2-car silver-sided "B.U.D.D." cars I think they were called or something like that, that came along that track with passenger traffic, like an Interurban car would). My point being that we kids felt perfectly at home on the tracks, and all of us had the sense to get 'way off to the side of them when we saw a train was coming, though we just had to put pennies and ballast gravel on the tracks first for the train to run over). No one ever got hurt, though looking back on it from so many years on, we must have surely given the Engineer fits when he saw us running around like monkeys on his track. As a bonus, Concord grapes grew wild along the right-of-way which we feasted on and carried home if my beloved Nana was visiting (as she did twice a year back then) to make jelly. There was also a creek where we played & waded/swam, all day long with no supervision at all, but no trouble at all, either. As everyone else here has said: All that's long gone and won't be back...

We had a Wi-Fi connection from the router in the office to the Roku device in the living room, with occasional buffering. When we laid new carpeting, I took the opportunity to first put down 30 feet of LAN cable underneath, then hooked one end to the LAN outlet on the router and the other to the same outlet on the Roku box. With a now-wired connection, there's always a clear, steady stream with no buffering.

As a young (22 years old) police officer in 1971, I responded to a call from an elderly widow reporting that a car had struck her front porch. When I pulled into her driveway she met me outside, saying "The poor old gentleman is dead". Turns out he'd had either a stroke or heart attack on the main drag at the height of rush hour, killing him instantly, yet miraculously he crossed 4 lanes of heavy traffic, bumped over the curb and on up the lady's front lawn into the porch unimpeded. Not a scratch on anyone or anything else.

I don't remember the author, but this is what I believe was the entire text of the short-short story he wrote: "The last man on Earth sat alone in a room; there was a knock at the door."

I seem to recall that line as part of the "Gloom, despair and agony on me..." Skit as done by Grandpa Jones, Archie Campbell and a couple of others on the old Hee Haw tv show.

Starting in 1931, Warner Oland made 16 films as Chan. Mr. Toler took on the role after Oland's death in 1938 and made 22 Chan movies until his death in 1947, whereupon 6 more films were made with Roland Winters in the title role. A long string of good movies.

In 2017 I used a homemade solar filter for the camera I was using at the time, a Fuji Finepix S-1; filters for this particular make & model had a special-made bayonet sort of mount that was inserted and then clicked into place on the lens barrel; the filter was of course screwed into the mount. I just bought a mount and a clear glass 72mm filter, cut a bit of the aforementioned Black Polymer sheeting from Thousand Oaks Optical, and then sandwiched the cut piece between the clear glass and the Fuji mount. I was able to shoot still photos periodically during the eclipse, and at the moment of totality I was able to quickly twist off the solar filter and make exposures of the Sun's corona, twist-snapping it back into place when the Bailey's Bead came into view. For video, I used my little GoPro Hero 5 Black with a 5-stop (ND32) neutral density filter but no solar filter as such; the camera has such a wide angle that the Sun's light, intense as it was, was reduced enough that the GoPro's sensor functioned normally with no problems for the entire almost-three-hours it was on the tripod shooting what added up to slightly more than 1,800 individual photos, subsequently edited into a 43-seconds-long timelapse video. It wasn't real exciting to watch compared to most of the work made by other folks (especially on this forum), but it's my own work and shows a once-in-a-lifetime event from a unique personal perspective.

Aptly put...

The video on this subject that I watched not long ago originated within the UK (Scotland, I think) and the man demonstrated the recycled jar-inside-the-larger-one just like Jerry described. The man also mentioned that vacuum sealing via the various machines on the market didn't take the place of actual canning, i.e. whatever was sealed inside (if it was perishable) still had to be refrigerated or frozen like with the vacuum bags. We have a 10-year-old Foodsaver with the little accessory cap that allows us to long-term store rice, beans, pasta, etc. In wide-mouth Mason jars. The hose for it plugs right into a dedicated port on the machine, the various jars are neatly lined up on the pantry shelf and the contents stay fresh and ready-to-use for a longer time.

T'aint funny, McGee...