The Boy Electrician

WE KILLED A BEAR

My mother grew up in New Boston (Linn County), Missouri. My mother's side of the family has called Missouri home for several generations. That said, I grew up frequently hearing the expression... "We killed a bear."

I argued with AI for several minutes... as it proceeded to tell me that this expression does not exist and that perhaps I had it mixed up with another expression... one recorded in available resources. Wow, AI, a bit of an arrogant a-hole, aren't you?

Anyway, after I explained to AI what it meant when it was said to me, and where I am from... AI came around and agreed that it is an expression that made perfect sense to someone with historic roots to Missouri.

"We killed a bear."

When a person is bragging about something minor they did... inflating an accomplishment into something heroic, "We killed a bear" is a way of saying "that bar is already set, and you're not even close ---stop. You can't out-brag a bear kill."

Killing a bear is the ultimate hunting trophy. Historically, Missouri had a deep bear-hunting culture. Black bears were once abundant here, second only to deer in what pioneers harvested, and a successful bear kill was a genuinely significant accomplishment to someone from Missouri. The Missouri Department of Conversation notes that "second only to deer, bears were the most common animal harvested by pioneers and travelers," and that many early county histories contain reports of remarkable bear numbers.

Bears were hunted to near-extinction by the early 1900s, and Missouri didn't have a regulated bear season again until 2021. So the phrase likely dates from a time when the accomplishment was still a living memory in the culture, and it stuck as a family/regional expression long after bear hunting faded from everyday life. I can still hear my mother's voice... measuring out each word slowly. "Well... we... killed... a ... bear." (Never "I", only "we".)

I'd love to hear about any expressions that seem to be isolated in your regional vocabularies, too. 

Oh, and I have never killed a bear. 

Hempcrete

Hempcrete is made of the inner woody core of the hemp plant (hemp shives), a lime-based binder, and water.

Hempcrete is easier to work with than traditional lime mixes and acts as an insulator and moisture regulator. It lacks the brittleness of concrete and consequently does not need expansion joints.

Typically, hempcrete has good thermal and acoustic insulation capabilities, but low mechanical performance, specifically compressive strength. When used in prefabricated blocks, hempcrete acts as a carbon sink throughout its lifetime. The result is a lightweight, fireproof, insulating material, finishing plaster, or a non-load bearing wall, ideal for most climates, since it combines insulation and thermal mass while providing a positive impact on the environment.

Reported...

 This is the first time I even considered reporting someone on GoComics. I had no idea what the process looked like, entailed... none of it. I have heard all manner of garbage from trolls, but this wasn't just about me... it was targeting a 7 year-old-girl and turning her abuse into a raunchy schoolboy comment. I didn't take it as a comment directed at me, in particular, but at ANY 7 year-old-girl living through such a thing. (It's always easier to talk about when I step outside myself and pretend that I'm talking about someone else.)

This is, I assume, the form provided by viafoura, the AI moderation team hired by GoComics to sort out the good, the bad, and the ugly. 

Click the image to enlarge

The first reason is defaulted in.  What if the wording for the reason I am reporting isn't among those listed? Why can't I use my own words? I don't recall if I am allowed more than one reason.

I pieced together only those comments that led to me filing a report. There were other comments by others in between, but I just kept it to the reasons why I reported this scumbag (who is a persistent troll who keeps returning with new identities.)

The cartoon that triggered my comment.

I fault Clay for nothing. He was merely

expressing his point of view via his cartoon.

Word Balloons (Then and Now...)

 This drawing/"cartoon" (something about a woman giving birth to lots of rabbits) gave me my first glimpse of a sausage/eel/?? coming out of the speaker's mouth. I decided to try it, too. Perhaps I will eventually graduate from a hole to a person.

Bad Bots are my #1 Frog Blog readers

Not true, but not that far off!

Well, isn't this another feel-good ego boost?! Only 59% of my Frog Blog visitors are human. The rest of my traffic is bots... and all of them bad ones. Bots and cowardly trolls are one of my biggest reasons for not permitting comments on Frog Blog. Readers are free to respond to the FA page that day or email me privately, if they wish. 
 

I asked AI about the difference:

Good bots are automated software programs designed to perform helpful, beneficial tasks for users or website owners, such as indexing content for search engines or providing customer support.  They typically operate transparently, identify themselves clearly, and respect website rules like the robots.txt file. 

Bad bots, in contrast, are automated programs created with malicious intent to exploit systems, steal data, or disrupt online services. 

They often disguise their identity, ignore website rules, and engage in harmful activities like spamming, credential stuffing, or launching DDoS attacks.

The key distinctions between the two include:

Intent: Good bots aim to enhance user experience or efficiency, 

while bad bots seek to manipulate, deceive, or cause harm.

Behavior: Good bots follow ethical guidelines and rate limits, 

whereas bad bots often scrape data, flood servers, or impersonate users.

Impact: Good bots improve discoverability and automate routine processes, while bad bots distort analytics, drain resources, and compromise security.

How do good bots interact with robots.txt?

Good bots follow the Robots Exclusion Protocol 

(standardized as RFC 9309) and interact with 

robots.txt in a few consistent ways:

Fetch first, crawl second. A well-behaved bot requests 

the robots.txt file at the site's root before crawling 

any other page. If the file doesn't exist or contains no 

matching directives, the bot proceeds to crawl freely. 

Match their user-agent. The bot looks for a User-agent 

block that matches its own identifier (e.g., Googlebot, 

GPTBot, ClaudeBot). If multiple blocks match, it 

follows the most specific one.

Obey Allow and Disallow directives. If a matching 

block contains Disallow: /private/, the bot will not 

request any URL under that path. If it contains 

Allow: /, the bot is free to crawl.

Voluntary compliance. The protocol is purely 

advisory — there's no technical enforcement.  Good 

bots comply as a matter of policy and reputation. 

Major examples include Googlebot, Bingbot, GPTBot, 

ClaudeBot, and CCBot. 

Honest identification. Good bots use their real, 

published user-agent strings rather than spoofing 

browser identifiers, making them easy to verify 

and target in robots.txt rules.

A practical caveat: even among "good" bots, behavior 

isn't 100% uniform. A 2026 test of 12 AI assistants 

found only 3 (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity) reliably 

honored Disallow rules for real-time fetching, 

while the rest ignored them. So robots.txt is best 

understood as a polite request to well-behaved 

crawlers, not an access-control mechanism.

Trending... why?!

It's nice, of course, to see that "Frog Applause" is trending, but it's also confusing. Check out the comment counts from among the others around me... 281, 157, 218, and 191.  42 comments?!! What in Gandhi's swimfins am I doing --- not only among these very popular strips --- but smack-dab in the middle. Some of my more hateful FA trolls might even suggest that I'm a hacker... or that I managed to bribe someone who is a hacker... to add me to this trending mix. (I've actually seen FA appear as "Trending" multiple times lately and I still can't figure out the GC algorithm that would allow this embarrassing irregularity.) Dum spiro, spero!