A few years ago, I installed a couple of ultrasonic buzzers in our attics to keep out animals.  The first year, it was quieter than usual — fewer bumps in the middle of the night by our furry friends.  Then, this year, I discovered a family of raccoons had taken up residence in the attic.

Call it affirmation of survival of the fittest except, in this case, it is a family of deaf raccoons that discovered a place to live peaceably under the roof of our house.

I found out that fact last night by opening the attic door and shouting at the raccons to be quiet.  The baby raccoons kept chasing each other until one of them must have smelled me and turned, catching the attention of the other two who turned and froze, too.

Waving my arms and making aggressive charging motions scared them off into the unreachable corners.

Well, at least there’ll be no more screaming at the top of my lungs and confirming to my neighbours that the crazy man next door is trying to commune with the dead again.

In robot news, more from the analysis of Heidegger’s Being and Time by Hubert L. Dreyfus…

“2. Comportment is adaptable and copes with the situation in a variety of ways. Carpenters do not hammer like robots.  Even in typing, which seems most reflex-like and automatic, the expert does not return to the home keys but strikes the next key from wherever the hand and fingers are at the time.  In such coping one responds on the basis of a vast past experience of what has happened in previous situations, or, more exactly, one’s comportment manifests dispositions that have been shaped by a vast amount of previous dealings, so that in most cases when we exercise these dispositions everything works the way it should.”

“4. If something goes wrong, people and higher animals are startled. Mechanisms and insects are never startled. People are startled because their activity is directed into the future even when they are not pursuing conscious goals.  Dasein is always ahead of itself.”

In other words, our actions/thoughts are based purely on the past while focused on the future.  No wonder we have no idea what we’re doing in the present moment.

In business news, UPS made a hostile bid for the company Space Exploration Technologies Corp, commonly known as SpaceX, now that SpaceX has demonstrated its near-Earth-orbit package delivery service is reliable.

Experts expect FedEx to make a competitive bid to prevent UPS from expanding its reaches to “infinity and beyond,” with FedEx merely wanting to “be there before there are customers to be there,” mainly the Earth-to-Moon route that international transportation corporations are watering at the mouth to sink their teeth into.

The UPS CEO denied that Felix Baumgartner would be vice president of dropoff service for the new SpaceX division, if their bid is accepted.

The bicycle messenger union has opened negotiations for a stratospheric drop and parachute deployment training center that could provide pinpoint hand-delivery of packages to customers in remote locations via sky-high balloon or dirigible.

Pickup of the delivery person is a major sticking point in the negotiations at this time.