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Flickr user Lady Oracle calls this “The most rockin’ fence in E-Town.” That’s Edmonton, Canada, I think. And this house is roomier than the house with the ukulele fence.
Link -via Offbeat Home
Eric Johnson’s urban garden is so small that it lacks a single blade of grass. So he has to get creative to make the most of it. One change that he made was to embed glass marbles into his privacy fence. It’s really simple: just drill holes into the wood and push the marbles in! Think of the creative patterns that one could make, like constellations or rainbows.
Link -via Offbeat Home
How much do you know about barbed wire? The very idea of barbed wire fences has a fascinating history. Railroads and farmers put up fences, and ranchers, who were used to open spaces to drive their cattle, tore them down. Manufacturers were making lots of money selling barbed wire, and each had a different barb design.
While cattle ranchers sparred with farmers, the legal system was tangled by lawsuits over barbed-wire patents. Almost from the moment Jacob Haish and Joseph Glidden filed their first patents for barbed wire in 1874, the two men were squaring off in court. That same year, a hardware-store owner named Isaac Ellwood bought a 50-percent share in Glidden’s patent for $265. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Glidden’s favor in 1892 (his “Winner” design is used on most fences today), hundreds of patents for as many designs of barbed wire had been filed, and many more unpatented variations were on the market.
Now those rare early designs are highly sought by collectors. Yes, there are barbed wire collectors, as well as barbed wire clubs, museums, and conventions, as you’ll see in this article at Collectors Weekly. Link -Thanks, Lisa and Ben!
(Image credit: railman)
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The United States built a fence along the Mexican border, but the mud along the Rio Grande is too soft to support a fence. In Brownsville, Texas, that means it was built a couple of miles north the river, which cuts off an American neighborhood from the rest of the U.S. The residents are not happy.
“I’ll say right off the bat that I’m a conservative – I believe in hard work and I believe our border needs to be secure,” says Debbie Loop, whose 15-acre citrus farm is on both sides of the fence. “But when they signed this fence into law, nobody stopped to think Texas isn’t Arizona or California. Our border does not run dirt to dirt. Any idiot could have told them that. My grandchildren now live on the wrong side. Who is going to protect them? Who protects me when I’m in my orchards after dusk? I just want to work hard and earn a living. But they’ve changed this place forever.”
Link -via Metafilter
Fifteen ninja monkeys on trees
Evil scientists, beware! Cages, plodding henchmen …er, "graduate students" and even seventeen-feet tall electrified fence are match for … the ninja monkeys:
A group of 15 monkeys at Kyoto University’s primate research institute in Aichi Prefecture, which are the focus of a string of high-profile scientific studies, escaped from their forest home which is encased by a 17ft high electric fence.
The monkeys made their bid for freedom by using tree branches to fling themselves one by one over the high voltage electric fence located nearly three metres away.
The ninja monkeys are invincible … well … except for one teeny tiny weakness:
However, despite the intelligence shown in their great escape, the primates appeared unsure as to what to do with their newfound freedom: the monkeys remained by the gates of the research centre and were lured back into captivity by scientists armed with peanuts.
Plattsburg, Missouri police officer Nick Shepherd responded to a call for help involving a dog stuck in a fence. The wire was twisted, and Shepherd cut the fencing to free the dog. He then tried to capture the dog. What happened next makes it worth sitting through the jumpy footage from Shepherd’s automatic camera. Link -via Buzzfeed
Betcha didn’t know that "ha-ha" is an actual word meaning a trench, basically a sunken fence to keep livestocks from coming into your backyard while preserving the uncluttered look of the landscape:
… the name is derived from the response of ordinary folk on encountering them and that they were, "…then deemed so astonishing, that the common people called them Ha! Ha’s! to express their surprise at finding a sudden and unperceived check to their walk."
More on Ha-ha at Wikipedia – via Fancy Notion’s Word of the Day
