History, Politics And Current Affairs

I buy a lot of discounted stuff from Amazon and AliEx.

Latter can be *hilarious* due clunky translation and peroptomistic claims, plus absurdly excessive postal fees hidden rather slyly...

The fad for 'multi-terabyte' memory sticks, a scant-few gigabytes with hacked addressing, seem to have 'fallen off the map', but there's a new monster a-foot.

My browsing kept presenting me with rubber 'caps' to fit on my alloy tent poles' top spike.

As a rain-storm excluder, and a way to prevent wind getting in through grommet and 'flogging' fabric, okay.

But their blurb claims the rubber 'cap' provides protection from lightning !!

No, no, no, no, no.
Absolutely, lethally no.
Worse, would provide false sense of safety...
( A cousin spent decade doing lightning rod stuff: His *repeatable* anecdotes were, to put it mildly, shocking...)

So, I used the AliEx provision for reporting product as dangerous.

I also pointed out that victims were unlikely to survive to complain...

Let's see what happens !!

Please convince your cousin to share the stories.

Sadly, he's now more reticent about that era's weird, wonderful 'WTFs', too many now thought 'NSFW'.

But, if you ever hear of a unicyclist near-missed by a 'Blue Sky' bolt...
IIRC, rider realised selfie-stick was drawing 'St Elmo's Fire', hastily retracted the 'invitation'.
Survived unscathed beyond laundry bill...

One time my beloved wife was in hospital, a 'Super Strike' on pitched roof of near-by wing knocked out power to half the sprawling site. The 'Red Plug' supply stayed up, but every car alarm for a quarter-mile sounded off.

Happens, that wing had several dozen sea-birds resting from refuse foraging. The 'Shock and Awe' stunned them such they all slid down, fell off roof onto 'ornamental' lawn / air-gap several floors below. The first few to recover began pecking the others: 'Waste not, Want not' ? Or, perhaps, CPR ? Certainly, by the time site power was re-booted, 'vulture mode' was suspended and all those birds were hopping around again...

Good ones.

And for a 'WTF ??' to make your nape-hair stand...
Literally, you could not make it up !!

The mystery eruption of Tor Zawar
https://www.volcanocafe.org/the-mystery ... tor-zawar/

AliEx summarily closed case as 'unsupported'.

Ha ! Short of putting such 'spike covers' onto horn-tips of 'Hairy Coo' 'Sacrificial Goat' and pegging such beastie out when lightning radar warns a 'cell' is in-bound, then boxing-up remains for despatch...
Snark:
Hey, if AliEx will not act against 'Thumb-drive' capacity scams, is it not but a mild progression to mass murder of campers & gazebo shelters ??
/

In other news: Yet again, 'Fresno' stuck mid-chapter. Until I draft rest of #119, #116 held in FIFO buffer...

They have a point.

See, lightning is electricity causing excitation of electrons and energy going from one place to another place. What we call static electricity is just lightning on a model scale. The caps provide protection against static discharge, therefore they protect against lightning.

It's not their fault that no one reads the actual data sheet for the breakdown voltage.