So I recently bought a new house, and said new house has a back yard that is a mess. It's a small back yard, about 40' x 60' with a concrete pad over a quarter or so. My goal is to not mow said yard, to have it be as low maintenance as possible, while still growing useful things. This probably means an herb garden and possibly a veggie garden. That still leaves the question of appropriate ground cover.

does the flurosphere have any suggestions? My first thought was Mother of Thyme, but I'm open to any suggestions of hardy zone 5/6 ground cover that doesn't need much trimming and can hold up to minor amounts of trampling.

Also, suggestions of your favorite seed catalogs/websites are also appreciated.

The rereading was prompted by recent drives through northern California and the west coast of Oregon, when I realized how deeply McPhee had influenced my "reading" of landscapes and what shapes them. He's one of the best expository writers of the last half-century.

Of course I live in Britain, and we have a different climate, so what do I know? A very different climate - in US terms most of Britain, including the North of Scotland, is in hardiness zone 9 - that's the same as New Orleans or Houston. The advantage of an oceanic climate.

Over here the hardiest thing is ivy. Rreal ivy - Hedera helix - not any of the many things some people call "ivy". And that will cover ground. Or anything else!

Do you grow runner beans? (if you do you probably call them something else) That's a great way to get a garden started.

My other cognitive dissonance is the idea that 40x60 feet is a SMALL yard. I'd think of it as a medium-sized or even large one. It's larger than that of any of the six or so houses I've lived in with gardens and larger than the ones behind my brother's house, my sister's house, or my Mum's.

And then I woke up.
What a dream!

If I wrote about software testing, the title would have to be "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished".

One of my joys in Iraq was a finding a six month old Atlantic, with a piece by him about long haul trucking in it.

On a different note, the seatbelts thread is behaving oddly. I'll click on the newest entry, and when the page is done loading I am still at the top, and that entry isn't on the page. I have to reload from there, at which point all is apparent,

Quality assurance in software seems to me to require a peanut butter cup mentality. First, you have to have the analytical approach to testing, but then you must followup with the wild, blue sky, emotional understanding of where software gets messed up. I've loved doing it for many many years!

to fall upon their heads, so they consume
their scraps of knowledge and launch thereby
symbolic violence in lecture-room.

The hard coiled words give off a heady fume
while the old teacher is arcane and wry,
but no one listening expects true doom

since every year the purple flowers bloom
although unhappy scholars may let fly
symbolic violence in lecture-room

no youthful head believes there can be gloom
although they're told about the cloudy sky
but no one listening expects true doom.

Each palace has been built upon a tomb,
we struggle to defeat the ancient lie:
symbolic violence in lecture-room,
but no one listening expects true doom.

<yorkshire accent>Small yyarrd! Small? That be a palace! Graaandeeeuurrr. Aye loooke faard tu be back in mayne oon sooone, strretching oot tu 8' x 25' [~2.5m x ~8m]. That be'ynt a fayne brooad yard fer owt part o' town. And with a frrront gaarrrden (8' x 8') — there's loooxoory.</yorkshire accent>* (Hello ken #6)

* for values of 'yorkshire' which extend to extraplanetary locations

How about White Dutch Clover? Mine grows to about 4 inches and then falls over. It tolerates drought and low cutting. It's great for the soil. It encourages honey bees to visit and pollinate (unless that is a problem for you).

This is a cached version of the Cornell page http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:_8w-vD5ZeOEJ:counties.cce.cornell.edu/rensselaer/HORT/Fact%2520sheets/fs07522x%2520white%2520clover.htm+%22white+dutch+clover%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us

(Still grumpy about "Manila, Indonesia" error made on Belgian evening news)

Seed Saver's Exchange--dedicated to preserving endangered heirloom varieties. They also have the most beautiful catalog in the business.
Pinetree Garden Seeds--they have a basil mix, a pepper mix and a lettuce mix. Great fun.
Le Jardin Du Gourmet--offers 35-cent "sample" packets of herb seed, which is a much more reasonable amount of seed than you usually get.

Add me to the John McPhee lovers. For gardening books, I strongly recommend Ruth Stout's How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back, Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening, and Frieda Arkin's The Essential Kitchen Gardener.

If you're sweltering (or worse) in Australia, or just curious about Arizona as it looks between Phoenix and the Grand Canyon, you might want to check them out.

I speak from the position of a person with a quarter acre (and counting) of self seeding oreganos where once bearded iris grew.

By a strange open thread synergy, one of the seed catalogs mentioned in #19 was also my mom's favorite; namely, Seed Saver's Exchange.

Some times I think a warning list for new gardeners should be compiled. All the plants you DON'T want. Start with comfrey.

Sisuile - it'd help to have some idea of which end of zone 5/6 you're in, and whether you've got sun, shade, part-shade, dry or wet land.

Also, there's a variety of plants that are both non-native and aggressively invasive (periwinkle in California, ivy, bamboos in many places, for example) that are often sold as ground covers, and should be run away from, screaming.

To be honest, it sounds like you're almost going about this bass-ackward, by deciding on a ground cover before sorting out how you want your garden laid out -- I've actually ended up with almost nothing by way of ground cover, but a fair number of beds, mulch, and a few paths between them.

Also, suggestions of your favorite seed catalogs/websites are also appreciated.

Veseys and Richters are two decent sites -- I've had good plants from Raintree Nursery in the past.

I recently read Swan Song by Edmund Crispin, one of his Gervase Fen mysteries. At one point a journalist asks Fen for an interview. She's doing a series on famous detectives: "I'm hoping to do H.M., and Mrs. Bradley, and Albert Campion, and all sorts of famous people."

I didn't immediately recognize the first two names, but Albert Campion is Margery Allingham's series detective, who in 1947, when Swan Song was published, was still appearing in new books. Google revealed that "H.M." was John Dickson Carr's Sir Henry Merrivale (which I should have known), and Mrs. Bradley starred in a nearly forgotten (but intriguing-sounding) series by a third author.

This was interesting. I've seen writers make use of public-domain characters, and I've seen covert in-joke references to their colleagues' work. (For example, as I recall at least one of Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy stories had characters obviously based on Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.) I haven't often seen a writer explicitly and unilaterally connect his own fictional universe with one created by another contemporary writer. In fact, I can think of hardly any. Two things come to mind: a Star Trek tie-in (Ishmael, by Barbara Hambly) that apparently crossed over with an old TV show I've never seen, and a recent post on The Valve about a 19th century hack who tried to latch onto Charles Dickens's coattail by taking a melodramatic trunk novel, slipping in a couple of cameos by Dickens's Paul Dombey, and calling it Dombey and Daughter. (This kind of thing must have happened more often in the days of loosely-observed copyrights; it's possible I've heard of, and forgotten, similar incidents from the period.)

Does anyone know of any other examples?

On the subject of Worldcon: this is a bit far in advance, but if any Flourospherians are going to be in at Anticipation and wishing to hold a party, but a uncertain as to what to do about party food in Montreal, I know an excellent caterer in the city. She makes great food, has a very scalable, customizable menu, and she is a wonderful small-business woman.

I'm not going to spam her contact info, but if anyone is interested, let me know and I'll get you in touch.

Nearly two weeks ago we had 8 - 10 inches in London (England). Paralysed the place because we're just not set up for it. Looked lovely, but the trains were not running (so my husband had to work from home the first day) and I spent a fair amount of my week off helping other people get their cars off the kerb onto the road - the small sideroad we live on was not gritted. Our car stayed home. My neighbour said she'd not seen that much snow in London since 1963. Schools were closed for a few days.

See: e.g. http://jalopnik.com/5144625/london-snow-gallery-blizzard-causes-1000-miles-of-traffic-jams if you're interested (sorry, I don't know how to make the link active).

I am in possession of a reasonable complete set of Analog from about July 1960 to present, in varying condition. And I have a few Asimov's as well.

You wouldn't happen to have ROF #1, would you?

I tend to think of in-jokes as disguised references--one way to put it might be "references with plausible deniability." The reference in the Crispin novel openly established other contemporary writers' characters as real people in his own fictional universe, which I haven't often seen; to use a modern SF analogy, it was as if Miles Vorkosigan went to a party and heard some gossip about what Jernau Morat Gurgeh was up to over in Culture territory.

Regards
Jo

It would be fun to make a list for Larson if one doesn't exist. A cheat sheet would come in handy sometimes. The "cow tools" one need not appear on it.

Those who don't know Sidney Harris may want to check out his science cartoons too.

There is Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which comprises Allan Quartermain, Mina Harker, Mister Hyde and others, but which turns out to be but the most recent incarnation of a group founded by Lemuel Gulliver. Or was it by Father Syn?

According to this fun list, it's the smallest number n where either n or n+1 is divisible by the numbers from 1 to 8.

Serge @48, I thought of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen too, but isn't Wesley looking for the literary equivalent of Ursula Buffay?
I can't think of anything specific, but have a vague recollection that members of an informal literary group - Bloomsbury? Algonquin Round Table? - would refer to elements of each other's works in their writing.

Takuan @ 4 OOH! a new toy!!

Ken @ 6 I will never plant English Ivy in my garden, even though it's a wonderful dyestuff. I've seen too many homes destroyed by it and gardens lost to it. It ranks up there with Kudzu in my book.

TexAnne @ 10 I am not a fan of my local Agrigiant and what they're doing to farmers around the world with their business practices and the genetically altered seeds. None of the companies are very good, though. Asgrow, Pinoeer, and co. pretty much hold the strings for your average midwestern farmer, simply by availability in the area through their local dealers. You buy what you can get, what works well in your cropland, and with your needs. Dwarf Soybeans are a prime example of this.

Lila @ 20 Thankfully, I live about half a mile from Shaw's Gardens, an invaluable resource. Everything I plan is getting run past them first so I don't get any nasty invasives that will push out

xerger @ 28 I'm avoiding the obvious nasty invasive non-natives (ivy, mint [including the native varieties. They're still madly invasive], periwinkle, etc.), but I have some areas where it's just not feasible to put beds. Entertaining has a tendency to flow outward and down from the back deck, so I want the areas near the paths/around the deck/around the patio to be something sittable that I don't have to mow. I do have both an herb garden and a veggie garden planned more out of the shadow of the house. Unfortunately, mulch is not an option for me. I have a pathological hatred for both termites and carpenter ants and an allergy to pine. The suggestion for a dwarf clover might work too.

I'm really just brainstorming what I might want to do in a couple months as we approach frost-free.

The only thing of his I can recall for certain reading was The Rising Curve of Binding Energy, but I was quite impressed with it.

Briefly, it was a biography of Ted Taylor, one of the physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project. It obviously covered his work at that time, but also how he came to physics in the first place (he credits playing pool in Tijuana for developing his intuition for particle reactions), and his later work on nuclear reactor design, atomic rockets (along with Freeman Dyson), nuclear weapons proliferation, and ice.

The latter was interesting to me; living in a place which snows frequently, I've regarded snow as 'negative solar energy'; it has always seemed that there should be some way to put it to productive use (beyond sliding down piles of it with waxed slats strapped to your feet). A couple of projects were described: a water purification system for a town in Northern Quebec that used a freezing pond run through the winter months to purify and store water for the town's yearly needs, and an insurance company in Buffalo that stored snow under an inflatable tennis court and used it for summer cooling.

The curve of binding energy was an interesting concept too. Iron was the bottom of it. Anything lighter than iron can create energy by fusion. Anything heavier than iron can create energy by fission, and will eventually decay into iron. IIRC, in something like 10 ^67 years, all the matter in the universe is expected to have decayed into iron.

Although, now that you mention it, The Black Dossier might be a good example--Moore almost doesn't even bother to disguise still-copyrighted characters like James Bond and Emma Peel. (And is Harry Lime in the public domain, or not? The film The Third Man is in the public domain, but I think Graham Greene's novella, written solely for the purpose of the film adaptation and not published until 1950, is still copyrighted.)

Or skip the hard sciences entirely, and go to Giving Good Weight which is a series of essays, including one on the people who run the New York farmers markets.

I will never plant English Ivy in my garden, even though it's a wonderful dyestuff. I've seen too many homes destroyed by it and gardens lost to it. It ranks up there with Kudzu in my book.

Thank you for not destroying your biome. There are still idiots here in the Pacific NW who plant english ivy, despite that it's busily trashing our forests. When I bought this house 4 years ago, every tree on the property was under attack by ivy; the largest of the Doug Firs, which is right next to the house, was completely covered for the first 40 or 50 feet. That ivy had vines 2 inches thick; it took more than a month for it all to die off after I cut and pulled out the roots. Yes, it's as bad as kudzu.

That link takes you to a site dedicated to blogging about Darwin for his 200th birthday. Posts on the subject are still being written; the window of opportunity is 2/12 to 2/15. There are links to literally hundreds of blog posts by bloggers known and unknown. It gave me a bit of fanboy squee to find that the link to my own humble effort was right next to a link to a post by Eric Drexler, author of "Engines of Creation" and father of nanotechnology.

One literary pastiche I'd pay very heavy money to read would have a scene where Lord Peter Wimsey is foolish enough to try his silly ass routine on Nero Wolfe. Archie would love it because of his feelings about royalty, and I as a reader would love it because my favorite parts of the Wolfe books are when Wolfe gets annoyed enough to break out his verbal flensing knives--and Wimsey in silly ass mode would be just the thing to start Wolfe's mare to dance.

re McPhee: With the exception of, "Coming into the country", which I've been readig desultorially, I've devoured everything of his I've been able to find. "Annals of the Former World" does have a new section, on the "craton" of the North American continent. As I recall I made a specific trip to the Great Gorge on the Arkansas River, crossed the bridge (which seemed to me as though I were walking The Pattern... once started it was sheer willpower to keep moving but to stop would be fatal), so I could touch the oldest exposed rock in the United States.

My book selling has hauled in $381, and emptied two book cases. (Which I left out on the landing with TAKE ME notices. Took about an hour for them to disappear.) All of the Heinlein juveniles went, as did the Vance novels. (Including two book club editions, which are usually dogs.)

I have one first edition of The Old Man and the Sea which used book department told me to bring back in a month or so.

I need to resist the urge to use the money on more books.

When I hit the latest post in the seatbelt thread, it opens as if I had clicked it from the front page (i.e. at the top).

The last post on the page is the last post I clicked, when the page was open.

If I want to see the more recent posts, I have to refresh the page.

ObIvy: We hates it, Precious. Hates it. Nasty, evil, tricksy ivy.

Fragano, great poetry!

Which Powell's store did you take them to? I need to get some McPhee; it's been 35 years since I read anything of his. Also, it's almost time to recharge on SF; I've got a good stack of nonfiction by the bed, with plenty more in the basement office, but not enough fiction.

Personally, I recommend ordinary white sweet clover gathered from one of those microplots of grass that are used to divide some parking lots or separate the sidewalk from the street. It's very tough, hardy, doesn't mind being trodden on, grows just tall enough to feel nice under bare feet, and spreads quickly. Also, most parts are edible. However, you will be visited regularly by bees if you plant it.

Speaking of search engines, BTW, can anybody recommend one that still does Boolean searches? I used to go to Altavista Advanced Search if I needed more precision than Google Advanced Search can provide, but they dropped their Boolean function. I need ("search engine" AND Boolean) AND NOT ("specific field of research" OR "specific area of interest"). I know that nothing turns up as many hits as Google, but I need a better filter on my results.

I have Uncommon Carriers on my TBR pile. I seemed to have missed the Irons in the Fire collection. But other than those two I think I've read all of his books, starting many years ago with the marvelous The Pine Barrens.

The Curve of Binding Energy, The Survival of the Bark Canoe, and The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed are early McPhees that delighted me.

If all goes well, on Tuesday he graduates from using the wheelchair to using the hemi-cane in his room, and, presumably, while going out! WooHOO!

We were out yesterday, and he demonstrated that he can use a four-footed walker, but he prefers the hemi-cane. We still need a wheelchair for distances and such, but this means we can go places with stairs on our own.

It's takuan's birthday, too, though it's not clear what that means to a mollusc. Happy Hatching Day, Tentacled One!

Velma - That's great news! Yayyy!

Takuan, also known as Takuwan, is a popular traditional Japanese pickle. It is made from daikon radish. In addition to being served alongside other types of tsukemono in traditional Japanese cuisine, takuan is also enjoyed at the end of meals as it is thought to aid digestion.

Plant what gives you joy; plant what interests you. Don't get hung up on "easy maintenance" because if you don't get emotionally and physically involved with it, it's going to be a mess. The only tidy parts of what was once an acre of maintained garden at my house are the perennial bed between the laundry room door and the clothesline and the bed between the SW corner of the house and the upper patio (which is, on the house side, behind a thirty-inch maintaining wall). I spot-weed the one in five minute intervals all year, and can access the other without bending. The entry yard is a mess because I often go from weekend to weekend without going out that door- the steps are too steep for me these days.

Put your vegetable garden in raised beds; if you can't afford the good stuff (the best stuff is recycled plastic lumber, since it doesn't release chemicals into the soil nor does it provide root-room to weed seeds) use whatever you can get; broken driveway concrete is nice, although one of the best raised gardens I know was edged with stacks of newspaper in grocery sacks. Whatever you use, make it so that it can be taken apart easily, because there is nothing on earth less fun than having to use a shovel to get to a subterrainean yellowjacket nest.

Plant what you like to eat, with this disclaimer: corn doesn't do in anything under about 100 sq ft plots, and is most productive in 1000sq ft and above (and even then draws racoons, crows, possums and rats out of nowhere). Tomatoes, peppers, basil (oh, Ceres Pomona, basil) cucumbers, chives... and pole beans, Blue Lake for the purist, all do well in short space, bear heavily enough to make a difference in your diet, and are not cheap at the store even in summer. Zucchini and other summer squashes are the contrary- space hogging, overly productive, and cheap in the organic section. We mostly grow squash because we can feed the oversized ones to the cattle. If you want pumpkins, there are articles everywhere about trellising them, and it's a good kid project.

Plant what makes you rejoice. If you want roses, please don't decide one day at the grocery store to buy 1 1/2 grade whatever because they're three for ten dollars, unless you are utterly OK with treating them as annuals. Walk around your neighborhood and see what grows well for the neighbors, and on a sunny early spring day when there are weed-piles growing on the sidewalks, stop and talk to people with interesting yards about what of their stuff pleases you. I have yet to meet a gardener who doesn't like to talk about plants. Taking to the people who are closest to you in soil and climate is the source of the best ideas and often handsfull of gift plants.

However:Do Not Plant Anything You've Been Given Unless You Identify It and Are Sure You Want It. There is nothing more destructive of an easy-to-maintain garden than the wrong plant innocently introduced. Anyone who offers you Claridge Druce geranium, Alstromeria aureas, Campanula rampunculoides, Greek Oregano, or Southernwood should be considered a manifestation of the trickster god, garden division.

Get a good garden reference book and use it.

Spend more money on compost than granular fertilizer. Spend time laying down soaker hose for any perennial plantings. Be as generous as possible with water, but mulch the heck out of everything and keep the soil cool with healthy well grown plants, which are their own water conservation mechanism.

Give yourself dry places to stand in the winter and spring- gravel walks are nice, but problematic next to mown areas; recycled concrete, again, is dandy stuff, as are the cheap ugly concrete pavers from Home Depot. If you want to get into yard art, there are mutiple places online giving instructions in making your own pavers; google is your friend.

There will be wasps. There will be weeds. If you are lucky, there will be lizards, toads, snakes and bumble bees. If we are all lucky, there will be honeybees. If any of those freak you out, gardening may take some mental adjustment.

Also, Burpee sucks. Territorial Seed is good, as is Nicholls Garden Seed and Seed Saver's Exchange. Raintree Nursery, Burnt Ridge Nursery, Joy Creek, Heirloom Roses al have given me good plants, but again, talk to your neighbors about plant and seed sources. Call Master Gardeners and ask, too, but remember the name is misleading; that organization is a self-selected sample of people who garden, and are not actually "masters."

(Hitting post in the certain knowledge that, even after four previews and a half hour, there will appear grammatical, spelling, or compositional enormities which I will see before this actually posts. This is why God made editors).

Obligatory SF reference: In The Dark Dimension, A. Bertram Chandler's Commodore Grimes has an adventure that bumps him up against Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry.

I seem to recall that this was done with full permission.

Hear that, takuan? I can break you just as easily. :-)

Hey, I just found out that takuan and abi also share a birthday with Harold Arlen (composer of The Wizard of Oz).

Stefan Jones @ #73: The Powell's book compression algorithm: Sell books back, get credit, buy fewer more expensive books. ;^) You can also spin some of the credit off onto separate cards to give as gifts.

re gardening. Some things are tolerant of pots. Some things require pots. What will thrive where you live sometimes affects this. I have greek oregeno, in pots. If it gets away, it requires a little maintenance to make it to adulthood. Los Angeles doesn't get enough water for many seedlings to survive the germination.

To me, geraniums are a pest. Rosemary is a valuable weed. Peppers are hardy, tomatoes overwinter and allysum is evil.

If you have the space, there are sqaushes which are worth growing. Having lots of compost makes for a good sqaush planter. A trickle of water (see again, about climate) and the butternut and delicata went wild. I was able to harvest them for months. So many butternut we left them in the yard, and fed them to guinea pigs.

You say you have a clay soil. Add sand. If you can get access to horse manure (or lots of compost) put that in raised beds (pegs to hold 2x4/2x6 boards are good; so you can pull the pegs to get at the boards when/if you want to rearrange things). Add the sand, set the pegs, drop in the boards, fill with compost.

In a year, or two, pull the boards, turn it all under, re-peg, re-fill and repeat. The yard, as a whole, will improve.

Those who like McPhee might want to look into Harold Petroski. Really good writing on engineering. The Pencil and, The Evolution of Useful Things are great, as is, To Engineer is Human.. heck, read 'em all.

Flexible.
How nicely put.

...Susan B Anthony, Ian Ballantine, Claire Bloom, Cesar Romero, Matt Groening and Galileo Galilei.

They celebrate birthdays in The Netherlands?

(/Surprise)

Well then. Happy Birthday, abi!

Although I've got hundreds of feet of retaining walls, there are almost no photos of them; the one at the corner of the house is "backstage" for that planting and the space it faces is less than six feet wide. All of the ex-iris now-oregano garden is terraced behind 18inch retaining walls, as it was originally built to restore a system of swales my father built to keep the wells from flooding. Certain male relatives who I neither married nor gave birth to destroyed the swales with a bulldozer to "tidy up" the area after putting in a new pump. That act, followed by five inches of rain in twenty-four hours, led to the formulation of Smith's first and second laws of civil engineering:

1. Water flows downhill.

2. Never create with a bulldozer a problem you will be forced to solve with shovels.

We have a big limestone planter taking up a pretty sizeable chunk of yard. There's a maple tree just to the west of it. The planter doesn't get enough sun for anything, but we're not willing to take down the tree because oh, shade, lovely shade for reading books in. We've gotten things to grow just about everywhere else we've tried, including full shade, but the planter defies us.

My garden, because I'm in an apartment and don't trust the soil (I park on it): nine 13-qt plastic pots, each of which will get some worm compost once I harvest it and at least one bell pepper plant. Reading about gardens has reminded me to put in my seed order and/or count the pepper seeds left from last year. At least this year I'll know to put the space heater on them to make them sprout.

When I started carving out what originally was a slope, my wife said that everything could be taken out except for the bushes that you see in the picture. I basically made things as I went, but I was quite glad for the flexibility of those bricks.

—Agree with the John McPhee love. Good stuff, including some stuff I didn't know. (For context, my mother was raised in Laramie, fell in love with geology, and studied paleontology at the University of Wyoming under Dr. Samuel Knight.* She actually knows one of the people in the Wyoming section of the books. So when we were kids, we'd go on vacations and look at rocks.)

—I was not happy with the idea of ethanol (wasteful to raise corn just to convert it) until somebody pointed out that they're working on developing ethanol from "trash" biologicals... kudzu, ivy, other invasive species. Can you imagine kudzu ethanol? Now that's a renewable resource!

*Dr. Knight is the person who, among other things, created the copper statue of T. Rex that sits on the campus. He hand-hammered the copper for the skin and gave Mom a piece.

She now has three pieces. It's a wonder my brother survived.

Happy birthday, takuan-san, on this best of days to be born!

Many good gifts, including some from the 'Sphere (thank yous to be despatched privately). My daughter gave me a bracelet, my son a box in which he had placed a kiss and a cuddle to act as infinitely reproducing "seeds", so that I have a perpetual supply, whenever I need them.

I threw a party, of sorts. I got all shy and waited too long to invite people over, so there were only a few who could come. But people seemed to have fun, and gave me some thoughtful gifts to remind me of the day.

I'm now baking a cake to bring to the office tomorrow, but it turns out we have no eggs in the house. So I've turned a 2-egg cake into a no-egg cake, adding 1/4 c extra oil and 1 tsp vinegar. It seems to have risen well, but the sponge is weak and soft; it's clearly a fallback adaptation rather than a good recipe. But hey, it's chocolate, so people will choke it down.

All in all, a good day.

Using English Ivy as a dyestuff

Now I just need plumbing and bookshelves before I can move in. Minor things. ;)

I can never assemble a complete list of what they read to us; every time I do, I miss something forehead-slappingly obvious. But here is a partiallist, not in chronological order:

Basin and Range
Rising from the Plains
The Hobbit & LOTR (twice)
The Chronicles of Narnia
The Once and Future King
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Murder on the Orient Express
Genesis and Exodus
The Odyssey
The Last Unicorn
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Watership Down
The Wind in the Willows
The Hound of the Baskervilles
The Left Hand of Darkness

(Interestingly enough, my parents do not identify as fans.)

... and things that must not be confused ;)

Poem delivered* to Our Hostess Teresa upon meeting her, for the first time in person, at Boskone:

This is just to say
I'm one of the commenters
On your blog

Which, really,
Probably covers half
The people here.

Forgive me
I thought you might
Appreciate having a face
To go with a name

Since
The Internet can be
So shiny
Yet so cold

* Partially, because I got lost halfway through, but it served to break the ice as was intended. :-)

Also from the con, unexpected problems of modern technology department, I had to restrain myself from using my shiny new smartphone to Google or search Amazon for the names of everyone I talked to who seemed vaguely familiar -- while I was talking to them, no less -- so I could be sure to know if I was talking to an author or other notable-type person whose name I should recognize. I want my iris-implanted heads-up display, dammit. ;-)

I'm a big McPhee fan too. One of the interesting things I recall from reading his geology books, if you read them chronologically, is to see how much progress the discipline has made over the course of his writing career. The earliest book or two contain some geological information - I can't recall what exactly - that was the orthodoxy back then, but is just plain wrong, and nutty wrong by today's standards. (Plate tectonics was crazy marginal stuff when I was a kid; just a few years later it was solidly proven and part of the new orthodoxy.)

janetl, the thing about perlite is that it increases tha albedo of the soil, which for most of the year in the PNW is a very bad thing. Last year it would have been bad for the whole summer, too, when the weather left soil temperatures low. Of course I'm on the functional opposite end of the glacial sediments chain from clay: sorted outwash sediments, which in my case means Nisqually Silty Sandy Loam. Spanaway series soils are even less in need of perlite, since they're mostly gravel.

Which reminds me, sisuile, mulch doesn't necessarily mean organic material; I use fist-size and bigger rocks as mulch on slopes (sand and three feet of slope in ten feet of run is a tricky kind of gardening environment). Anything river-rock size (2 3/8 inch screen) or larger also keeps the squirrels from digging up bulbs. The nice thing about rock mulching is thatyou can pick up the rocks and stuff like quack grass and sheep sorell roots are laying on the surface of the soil, much easier to get rid of than otherwise. Of course having to go out and scrounge rocks after learning my gardening on Spanaway series soils is pretty ironic.

Now I have to disagree with the person who said that ivy is as bad as kudzu. Nothing else that will grow in the USA is as bad as kudzu. There are a couple of south-facing banks along the reservoirs that were planted in kudzu back in the '30s-'40s, and the only thing that keeps them in check is that the winter weather here is cold enough to kill them back to the ground every year, which helps make up for the multiple inches (if not a foot) a day they grow in season. Ivy isn't nearly as bad; mainly you have to keep it away from trees or anything else where it can get high enough to go arborescent. (I understand in that in the Pac. NW it is a different story.) V. minor isn't really that bad in most places either; just don't plant it in the woods. Vinca wants part or full shade, though, so it's not likely to be what's wanted here anyway.

Anyway, we seem to be having a slight divergence of purpose here which does make a difference: some of us are thinking "ground cover", and some of us are thinking "lawn". It makes a great deal of difference which. White clover makes an adequate lawn if you don't mind the bees, but it's not really a good ground cover.

As far as seed companies are concerned: one of the things I've seen is that the price of seed packets from many of the name companies has gotten high, and the selection has dropped (particularly badly at Park's). Pinetree has held the line, which is one of the reasons I buy from them. I also like Botanical Interests, which has a good retail presence as well. Both of them have a wider range of vegetable seeds than some.

I may be misundertanding you but I thought you could do all that with Google.

It still accepts "OR" as operator, you can put "exact phrases in quotes", otherwise it just looks for pages that have all of the individual words. You can also exclude pages that have certain words by using the minus sign, e.g. "-apple" to exclude sites with 'apple'.

Examples:
grape banana apple -> 270, 000 hits

grape OR banana OR apple -> 524, 000, 000 hits

"grape banana apple" -> 191 hits

grape banana -> 1, 720, 000 hits

grape banana -apple -> 626, 000 hits

#84: Almost certainly, except I don't have a beard. A don't-shave-on-the-weekend O'clock shadow at best.

I was in a hurry that morning, and managed to drop a bag twice. Only had 75 cents to feed the meter. Made it back with 7 minutes to spare, which I used for a pee break in the Powell's Technical bookstore (closest parking spot I could find). It was quite a temptation to buy something there with the wad of cash in my pocket.

I offered my parents a cut of the book money; my father bought the mainstream ones after all. (The Elmer Gantry first edition cost him a dime at a garage sale!) They said no.

For that matter, happy anniversary to my parents. (And an aunt and uncle . . . dual wedding.)

It gives lots of surface area for cilial roots. Oddly it increases both drainage and water retention (the things one learns doing bonsai.

C. Wingate: re kudzu. Lots of things are as bad (blackberries in the PNW. Mustard, in some regards, in the California Coast). Aggressive ground cover which outcompetes its competition is horrid. Me, I hate, with a bone-deep loathing, "iceplant" which chokes out natives, is murder on the soil, ugly (though the flowers are decent), and almost impossible to deal with. Absent gloves, machetes, mattocks, shovels and lots of hands, you can't get rid of it.

Morning glory and bouganvilla are about as bad. In California both are weeds. The latter will overgrow just about anything, and rip your foundations apart. The former is aggressive enough to kill off bouganvilla. I have seen it devour houses.

Terry Karney @ #138: Yup, one area's tender wonder is another's invasive nightmare. I don't recall seeing bindweed in the east or midwest, but it's a nightmare in Portland. I grow annual Morning Glory 'Heavenly Blue' ipomoea tricolor because it is the most perfectly celestial color there is. It's slow to bloom here — soil's not warm until July sometime — but I think it's worth the wait. The locals tend to react with horror when they see my plants, thinking that I'm deliberately coddling perennial bindweed. I assure then that it's a tender annual that just happens to look similar, but they doubt me.

My brother-in-law loves blackberries, and wondered why we didn't plant some, until he saw that they can cover barns in this part of the world. That's the Himalayan variety that was introduced, of course.

Terry Karney @ #138: On the subject of bonsai, have you ever visited the Weyerhaeuser Pacific Rim Bonsai Collection‎? A tad bit ironic, obviously, but it's amazing. It's located near I-5, just south of Seattle.

Wasn't iceplant planted as a firebreak in much of So. Cal.?

The other side of the coin, though, is that anything that is a worthwhile ground cover has some tendency to spread and crowd things out. And for that matter, ornamental garden plants (other than trees, which as long as they aren't beset by pests grow where they are planted, and certain tender annuals whose seeds won't survive the winter) have some tendency towards being "invasive" just because people are going to grow things that need constant life support to survive.

McPhee seems to respect and enjoy being with all these intelligent and engaged men, and his neutral reporter's voice is perfect for the inevitable disagreements.

janetl: I didn't manage to make it when I was stationed at Ft. Lewis. On the occasions I had the time it was closed.

takuan: Depends on the perlite (since some is made from vermiculite). I don't know that janetl's use of horticultural makes much difference. I suspect that just means the vermiculite was well washed. There was a mine, in Colorado, which sold asbestos contaminated vermiculite to places making it into perlite (I looked into this when we were deciding on incubational media for snake eggs), and the real problem was that, once into the production stream, it was almost impossible to trace more completely than, "sold to this company".

What we did was try to make sure the places we bought from hadn't ever gotten supplies from them. Since the mine was closed a decade ago the odds of that mine's contaminated output still being in the queue is slim.

Kayjayoh @34,
Making Lumière II: the Mirth of Con will be on Friday or Saturday. Right now it is in its protoplanning stage.

In a semi-geological vein, did any enjoy Tim Flannery's The Eternal Frontier (An Ecological History of North America and its Peoples)?

Google can't do this:

((Kodiak NEAR bear) AND tourism) AND NOT (trophy OR attack OR garbage).

Google Advanced Search doesn't accept all of the Boolean search terms.

<clears throat>

This is your birthday song,
It isn't very long.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @149

Well, if at any point in the planning process you find that you would like Chantilly's contact info (that's my caterer friend) then let me know. If you find you neither want nor need such a thing, no offense shall be taken. :)

I do recall when it was breaking into the public conciousness, and the oddities of how it was receieved.

The fake morning glory was the bane of my existence in my last house after the previous occupants left a root in the compost pile. And I wasn't going to use chemicals. Thankfully, there's none of that at this house.

And a loud W00T! to Scraps and Velma. There's just no stopping that man!

I just love having things to celebrate. Please, all of you, keep them coming.

Terry @ 140
Second the Petroski recommendation. It's just amazing to find someone who can describe so well what engineering is about to people who have no experience of it.

And speaking of celebrations ... we went to a friend's 60th birthday party yesterday. She's a teacher at the local community college, and her husband is probably the last Marxist economics professor not in captivity. There was a houseful of their friends, and I was reminded again of how nice it is to be among smart, funny, and politically-aware people. There aren't too manhy places where someone could remark on how progressive someone's political views are, and I could truthfully say, "Well, but aren't we all?"

Like I said, I love having things to celebrate.

Police avoid arrests due to time-consuming QPRIME computer system
“It's difficult to navigate because it's not a matter of following steps in a logical manner. You go from A to G then back to A, then C, then H,” he said. “It's a nightmare. … There was an occasion where two people were arrested on multiple charges. It took six detectives more than six hours to enter the details”

Looks like the only Boolean Operators Google accepts are AND, OR and NOT. AND is on by default. It also looks like nesting works. The exclude (-) can be used for as many terms as required. NEAR also appears to be a Google default.

With your example (and working within Google's limitations), have you tried:

Kodiak bear tourism -trophy -attack -garbage

Personally - I add parsnips, green lentils, chickpeas, and coconut milk to your list. I eat a smaller selection of beans & meats than you do, though I do keep half a dozen kinds of bean in the cupboard - must dig them out. I'm cooking for one, and I have a kickass cooker (six gas hobs and an electric oven large enough to feed 20 from - and I have) but almost no freezer space, so I tend towards roasts and three-day stews.

Speaking of roasts, the best combination of £/kg, tastiness, and relatively low food miles I've found is a shoulder of lamb. (I shop at Tesco for such things, so should be generally available.) I do constrain myself to not eating battery anything, and as local as is possible without actual effort, so that skews the cost curve a bit.

I tend to go heavy on spices, because they're dirt cheap for the effect they have. Mind you, here in East London I've got (to a close approximation) 37,682 ethnic food shops within half an hour's travel, so that's easier for me. Note also that soy sauce, lemon juice, red wine vinegar, sushi vinegar, and Thai fish sauce all count as spices. Mustard oil is also good - incidentally, I've noticed that they've stopped labelling it as "not for food use" now.

I know some people recommend natural yoghurt. There are likely other solutions.

So was Major Bloodnok's situation misleading?

I hate squirrels.

takuan @ 147

No, no bees or chickies. Not even a 'real' garden. By the time I get to summer, the 'day' job often does 10-12 hr days and is 6-7 days a week. I don't want everything to die from neglect or have foods that are going to rot on the vine because I don't get outside for a few days (the exception being fresh tomatoes). Squashes and root vegetables are what I'm concentrating on, I think. Probably edamame. One (1) red raspberry cane and one (1) gold raspberry cane, in pots. Raspberries and blackberries will go nuts here if not strictly controlled.

I am exceedingly lucky that my back windows look out on the site of one of the local summer farmers' markets. They close in Sept, though. I need more carrots, parsnips, leeks, beets, and hard squashes than they provide.

The world is a busy, interesting, somewhat sleep-deprived place just now. (Background noise: two little boys chattering at each other over something, while the baby cries and the dog tries to beg/steal food from one of the boys.)

People who like his work may also enjoy Tracy Kidder's work. Soul of a New Machine captures an aspect of high-pressure, you-bet-your-company high-tech projects better than anything else I've ever read, and this is something I've experienced enough to know what I'm talking about. (Pretty much everything about the technology used is now far, far out-of-date, and the company involved is (I think) long since either shut down or gobbled up by some other company. But the insights into what the world looks like inside that kind of project are accurate w.r.t. modern projects, in the same way that you can still learn a great deal about (say) the stresses of being in combat from good reporting from WW2.) I found Hometown to also be really fascinating and interesting, and also Among Schoolchildren. My sense is that Kidder is a bit more inclined to spread his attention out among more people in his books, but there's a lot in common between the two.

You just haven't found the right recipe yet.

"We don't have titles down here. We're all Democrats."

I recently watched a youtube slot from an MSNBC interview of Taleb Nassim and Nouriel Roubinni, which was amazing in its embarassing unintentional humor. (One of the commenters on Felix Salmon's blog said it was like watching the cheerleading team interview Henry Kissinger on foreign policy, and that seems about right.) A link to this interview can be found from Krugman's blog, here.

This made me think of the amazingly funny last Hillary/Obama debate, where the "journalists"[1] asked a bunch of questions that I swear could have come right out of an Onion or SNL piece. The NYT has the script for that skit transcript from that debate here.

The thing that's hard is, the talking-head TV news shows are pretty much always like this. Sometimes, the talking heads are chattering with someone who's both smart and informed enough that the talking heads will, simply by their own stunning ignorance, end up looking really stupid. Most of the time, though, either the smart/informed interviewees will be playing the game with the talking heads (pretending their inane questions aren't really quite as inane as they are, answering their did-you-stop-beating-your-wife questions in a nice, measured way that makes it sound like there was a real question asked), or there won't actually be anyone in the discussion who's bright enough to see how dumb the talking heads' comments/questions/assumptions are. Sometimes, the smart-but-not-verbally-quick interviewees will even come off looking dumb or evil to people who don't know anything about the topic of the interview.

Now, at the other end of the universe from that is something like what McPhee does, or even what Charlie Rose does.

It's interesting to ask why most of that talking-head style journalism is so mind-hurtingly stupid, and why so little is sensible. I guess one part is that most viewers aren't all that bright or interested, so Larry King interviewing some pro wrestler gets better ratings than Charlie Rose interviewing Nouriel Roubinni. I suspect, but can't prove (and don't really know) that another cause of this is that serious discussion of issues is much more likely to offend someone important: advertisers, corporate parents, administration officials who retaliate against unfavorable stories by denying access or leaking to friendlier journalists, interest groups capable of bringing in large numbers of complaint letters/calls, etc.

[1] In most cases, this ought not to be taken as an insult, but in this context, the term is somewhat less favorable than "drunken beligerent bum screaming at the little voices to be quiet."

Unfortunately, I tend to eat quite a bit more home-baked bread than store bought. I consider enjoyment of good bread to be worth the increased cost. And potential weight gain.

Actually, our home made bread cost is quite a bit less than 40% of store bought, thanks to bulk yeast and a 25 pound bag of bread flour for $8 from the local warehouse club. Can you get a similar price at your friendly local Evil Empire Tesco?

For Christmas I got Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day and we absolutely love it! Mix up a big batch of dough -- no kneading -- store it in the fridge, and pull off grapefruit-sized hunks to bake. If you store the new dough into the same container you just emptied, a nice sourdough effect happens. Two people easily go though that smallish loaf in a day. The grapefruit-sized hunk makes a loaf about the same size as the small loaves in the front.

I wonder how much of this reflects more people eating at home rather than eating out, and the resulting shift in demand.

Pre-mix breadflour for baking machines saves a little money over store-baked bread I prefer the Lidl product, which is good for non-ordinary breads.

The recipes provided with the machine work well.

Tesco in Brigg isn't so good for fresh vegetables. I have a feeling that surpluses in the supply chain are getting squeezed, so stores tend to run out of stock at the end of the day.

People will still be stuck with my sensitive fannish face, but I don't have to look at that.

...while, in Copenhagen, it's not so good for little mermaids.

Bread is so important...

The larger supermarkets in UK do loss-leader cheap lines. So if you have the presence of mind to go in and ONLY buy what is cheap that week you could eat for very little money. It varies from week to week. Tins of processed peas and own-brand baked beans are often very cheap - almost never more than 15p each and sometimes only 8 or 9p.

For some reason carrots are very cheap at the moment. The week before last I bought 1.5kg for 88p (about one dollar of your earth money) Thats more carrots than I and my daughter are likely to eat before they go off. On the same day I bought 2.5 kilos of decent white potatoes for about 1.30 - I could have got 5 kilos for only about 12p more but that was more than I wanted to carry home in my bag.

As you said beans are cheap. Peanut butter is still pretty cheap round here I think - though our food is usually more expensive than it is in America, so 60p or 70p for a small jar might seem a low price to me but a high price over there.

"Rice is much cheaper than dry pasta..." Yes, and if you can buy larger bags - say five kilos or ten kilos - you can get real basmati rice for much the same price as the cheaper stuff in a supermarket. Cheap luxury! As is tea of course. Everyone ought to drink a variety of teas. Made with real tea leaves not teabags. Its much cheaper than coffee, or juice, or booze, a little cheaper than fizzy pop, or tea made with teabags. So you get the gourmet experience at less than the cost of the mass-market stuff.

"fish is out of range except for locally canned salmon" Not my experience at all here. The fish counters of the large supermarkets sometimes sell fresh sardines and mackerel astonishingly cheap. The cheapest canned fish is sardines, if you look around you can get a small tin for less than 30p (Tesco's and ASDA are advertising sardines online at 18p a tin). Mackerel and herring are slightly more expensive than that as is tuna (though sometimes tuna gets sold cheap on some promotion or other) Even the cheap cans of pink salmon cost more than tuna or mackerel, and the more expensive red salmon much more, maybe three times as much.

I don't buy or cook much meat other than fish - much les than once a week, sometimes not even once a month - so I'm not up on prices, and when I do buy it I tend not to buy the cheapest. I think the lowest prices in supermarkets these days are for imported chicken. And in the street markets for ex-battery hens. I've seen them on display at 99p for two birds in Deptford and Lewisham. I've never bought one of those but I expect that you would be making soup or stew, not roasting or frying them. If you are willing to cook it slowly gammon/ham/bacon joints can be quite inexpensive I think.

Making your own bread is cheaper than buying it as you said, though in practice I almost never get round to it. The price of flour is very variable. Posh organic wholemeal stonegound strong flour is usually well over a pound a kilo, but own-brand is often more like 50p-80p & sometimes less. I think plain flour is usually about 50p a kilo these days but I've seen it for 30p recently. Self-raising can be cheaper than plain, which is weird. Once upon a time not so long ago I saw flour for 9p a kilo, which is weirder. When the supermarkets were selling crusty bread at 60p a loaf and white sliced at less than 30p there wasn't that much price incentive to bake your own but now the white sliced has gone up to 70-80p and decent crusty bread seems to have almost disappeared except in ethnic shops or very expensive organic places. And I still have qualms about spending three quid for a small loaf, however nice it is.

For vegetables, the street markets are on average cheaper than the supermarkets, but they aren't really open at times I go shopping :-( If I was really broke, or if I was unemployed, or if I worked nearer where I live, I would use the street markets more. And the ethnic corner shops are often cheaper than mainstream supermarkets for larger packs of dry beans or rice or spices - there is a Turkish supermarket that sells better bread than Tesco's does for less money. Living in South-East London I can get most stuff from corner shops though they usually have either lower quality or higher prices than supermarkets. (Our local corner shops are almost all run by Tamils & so have a South/South-East Asian flavour - I can get ginger or curry leaves or lemon grass (or even betel nut not that I ever use that) from closer to my front door than sisuile is to the end of her or his garden)

As for ivy in gardens - I think I didn't realise it wasn't a North American native. I thought it was circumpolar. Oh well. Please don't think I want to recommend planting invasive aliens.

Being a Brit - even one who has studied botany - I have no real idea what kudzu is. From the way Americans talk about it it sounds almost as evil as Japanese knotweed. Almost but not quite. Nothing could be quite that bad. I think Japanese knotweed must have been what Tom Disch had in mind when he wrote The Genocides

Two guys deep in a gloomy coal mine, the only lighting their helmet lamps. One looking at something down the length of the tunnel; grinning, comments to his co-worker — "It's Eleanor Roosevelt!"

Goats seem to be pretty good at controlling it.

Japan invades. Far Eastern vines
Run from the clay banks they are

Supposed to keep from eroding.
Up telephone poles,
Which rear, half out of leafage
As though they would shriek,
Like things smothered by their own
Green, mindless, unkillable ghosts.
In Georgia, the legend says
That you must close your windows

At night to keep it out of the house.
The glass is tinged with green, even so,

As the tendrils crawl over the fields.
The night the kudzu has
Your pasture, you sleep like the dead.
Silence has grown Oriental
And you cannot step upon ground:
Your leg plunges somewhere
It should not, it never should be,
Disappears, and waits to be struck

Anywhere between sole and kneecap:
For when the kudzu comes,

The snakes do, and weave themselves
Among its lengthening vines,
Their spade heads resting on leaves,
Growing also, in earthly power
And the huge circumstance of concealment.
One by one the cows stumble in,
Drooling a hot green froth,
And die, seeing the wood of their stalls

Strain to break into leaf.
In your closed house, with the vine

Tapping your window like lightning,
You remember what tactics to use.
In the wrong yellow fog-light of dawn
You herd them in, the hogs,
Head down in their hairy fat,
The meaty troops, to the pasture.
The leaves of the kudzu quake
With the serpents' fear, inside

The meadow ringed with men
Holding sticks, on the country roads.

The hogs disappear in the leaves.
The sound is intense, subhuman,
Nearly human with purposive rage.
There is no terror
Sound from the snakes.
No one can see the desperate, futile
Striking under the leaf heads.
Now and then, the flash of a long

Living vine, a cold belly,
Leaps up, torn apart, then falls

Under the tussling surface.
You have won, and wait for frost,
When, at the merest touch
Of cold, the kudzu turns
Black, withers inward and dies,
Leaving a mass of brown strings
Like the wires of a gigantic switchboard.
You open your windows,

With the lightning restored to the sky
And no leaves rising to bury

You alive inside your frail house,
And you think, in the opened cold,
Of the surface of things and its terrors,
And of the mistaken, mortal
Arrogance of the snakes
As the vines, growing insanely, sent
Great powers into their bodies
And the freedom to strike without warning:

From them, though they killed
Your cattle, such energy also flowed

To you from the knee-high meadow
(It was as though you had
A green sword twined among
The veins of your growing right arm--
Such strength as you would not believe
If you stood alone in a proper
Shaved field among your safe cows--):
Came in through your closed

Leafy windows and almighty sleep
And prospered, till rooted out.

James Dickey

There are two mechanisms involved with the difficulty of eradication of most plants: seed load and subterranian structure. Both apply to blackberries: to exterpate an old infestation, you have to dig up each and every burl, some of which can be as deep as six feet down in loose soils. And then you have to pull, mow, spray, burn et'c every sprouting seed until they stop sprouting or you're back where you started before you know it.

Anyone who thinks keeping Himalyas under control is a snap is welcome to take on the ones growing at my place, in sand, on an artificially steep and thence eroding slope. Above the well, so we are all averse to using chemicals.

Scotch broom depends entirely on seed-load, but specializes in producing hard, decay-resistant, inedible seeds.

sisuile @170; use the river rock (specified because this works best with nice skipping-stone sized and shaped; I need to get a yard of 2 2/3 screen drainfield rock, which can be the same stuff but needs inspected to be sure: crushed rock doesn't work) at least two layers deep on top of the soil; it is slithery and hard for squirrels to dig in.

I am with you in the pure white-hot hatred of the rampant Eastern Grey Squirrel, destroyer of orchards, consumer of everything. Humans, starlings, brown rats, and eastern grey squirrels would be even more destructive if feral cats and coyotes weren't around to keep them honest.

I was awakened today by starlings and redwinged blackbirds in chorus in the oak trees, and opened the curtains fully expecting both seed feeders to be entirely empty; the flocking birds sit in the oaks and wait their turn at the feeders, and can empty two pounds of black sunflower seed out those twelve, half inch, holes in a half-hour or less. The seeders were full, and the flocking birds gone, while the resident gold-crowned sparrows, juncos, song sparrows, rufus sided towhees, white crowned sparrows, purple finches, goldfinches and English sparrows were making short trips from the the shrubbery into the feeder and then back to the shrubbery to feed. By which behavior I deduce that the merlin is around; nothing like a falcon of any size to make the travelling birds decide that the pickings are easier elsewhere and the residents decide to have breakfast quietly at home. If it were one of the accipterines, sharp-shinned or Cooper's hawk or goshawk, all the birds would be flocking close-round to harass it and fill the air with the ratchetting hawk warning.

(There is nothing so dignified as the way tiny birds ignore eagles).

I also like this one from The Day The Earth Stood Still:

"Why doesn't the government do something, that's what I'd like to know."
"What can they do, they're only people just like us."
"People my foot, they're Democrats."

Three jump to mind very quickly:

1. Larry Niven putting the Kzin in Star Trek.

2. Roger Zelazny borrowing John Gaunt a.k.a. GrimJack for his Amber novels. (See also the dozens of appearances of Munden's Bar, and comic book multiverses in general.)

3. Tommy Westphal - A universe explored which links over 280 TV shows into one continuous tapestry. Prepare to spend some time, even though it's only supposed to be a three hour tour. A three hour tour.

You got caught because one of the birds you cite (g0shawk) contains the name of an obnoxious spammer from a week or two back.

I'll check whether it's stopped and may remove the string from the filters if so.

albatross 175: My boys are singing to the baby to calm her down, and she's stopped crying.

May I point out that this bodes well for future intersibling relations?

ON the other hand, having seen Anna's hummingbirds eye-to-eye with hawks (probably swearing at them, but I wasn't close enough to hear), dignity doesn't always enter into it.

Last June, as I was going up the street to vote in the state primary, a Cooper's dropped on the flock of Brewer's blackbirds on the school field. (We were all startled by each other.) When last seen that evening, the hawk was carrying off the bird it caught, followed by several members of the flock.

Ooo, ooo, I know which song!

My brother has a book of feminist poetry that includes a haunting little lyric of dual soliloquies as Odysseus sails away from the nymph's island; he is looking over his raft in amazement, cataloging all the things she did for him, while she is on shore lamenting the selfish stupidity of men. It ends (IIRC):

"Her own hands twined the cords, she wove this wool--"

"For Man is a brute and a fool."

Mobbing accipterines, though, must have some adaptive use (although it may just be that it instills a sense of solidarity). One of my fondest memories from my son's first month was sitting and nursing him at dawn and seeing every adult swallow in the big old hay barn next door stream out in pursuit of a sharp shin carrying one of their number.

I suspect mobbing has a similar dynamic.

I live five minutes walk from a Tesco. Save money by going over there at about the time they put stuff on "Final Reduction" (usually 20 or 25% of original, occasionally 10%). Hasn't been as much recently - I think they're getting tighter in the stocktaking and running out of things instead.

What I want to know is why is wholemeal flour, which takes LESS processing, more expensive than white flour? We make our own bread (bread machine is my friend!) so we can have nice bread without paying too much for it - but for people really strapped for cash, I'm not surprised they end up eating the "plastic" (but cheap) stuff.

They've a big bag of Basmati rice on cheap at the moment - may get one, but not sure where to store it. Also, rice may be cheaper than pasta, but it's got a less-good protein to calorie ratio - so when I'm trying to watch the calorie intake (not at present, having lost weight while overworking) while still keeping my protein intake up (and I'm a vegetarian, so I do count protein grams, aiming for 35 - 40 grams per day), it's less good.

Mung daal has an excellent protein to calorie ratio, and is relatively inexpensive.

The dogs and cats are useless. Birds and moles and field mice they'll bring me, but never a perfect dead squirrel.

So, any ideas out there in the Fluorosphere for stopping the **%^&#($) things?

Maybe I'm reading too many doomsayers, but both the Hub and I are suddenly fearful of the future. Some of it we can tackle by improving our disaster preparedness, but some of it just lurks, incurably.

I find myself planning the purchase of that hand-operated sewing machine I saw in that second hand shop, and stocking up on thread. (People will need clothes more than books.) Maybe get another couple of hot water bottles, in case we can't heat the house in the future. That sort of thing.

I want somebody to tell me it's going to be all right.

It -is- going to be alright. You have talents and friends and family, and an ability to communicate with and to others that's only going to become more valuable over time.

dcb @ 206 -- I can buy "no name" whole wheat flour at the local supermarkets for the same price as their "no name" white flour, but the quality is poor; the bran is very coarsely ground, though the rest of the flour is fine. The whole-wheat flour that I prefer to buy, which has the brain finely ground, seems to have quite recently become unavailable except in much smaller (and proportionally more expensive) bags. There may be some extra processing involved in grinding the bran properly; I'm not sure.

Janet Croft @ #210: Over the years, my dog has proudly dropped 2 dead squirrels on the back porch. I don't know if she actually brought down a healthy critter, or just picked off the dead and dying. I didn't enjoy getting rid of the corpses, but did feel a certain pride for her on behalf of dogs everywhere.

Hummingbirds: During the Snowcopalypse (or was it Snowmaggendon?), with temperatures in the 20s, I'd swap out a thawed hummingbird feeder for a frozen one, and get yelled at. I don't think we'd find hummingbirds so cute if they were any bigger!

Jenny Islander @ #201: On the subject of feminist viewpoints on Odysseus, I highly recommend Margaret Atwood's "The Penelopiad".

But, certainly for bread-making, the protein content of the flour does matter, and the bran has relatively little protein.

So wholemeal flour has to be produced from grain with a higher protein content, which is more expensive.

I don't think I would be comfortable eating anything that had "mung" as part of its name. heh.

But can you get cheap wholemeal strong bread flour?

Lady Helen Todd, aviator

Where does the trunk fall on the edibility scale? Is it good because there are no bones? Bad because you have to skin it inside and out?

abi @ 211 - locally, the real estate market is coming back. I'm waiting with baited breath for NAR's January numbers to see if the tally jives with our experience. December's numbers did.

Multiple offers, homes going to "highest and best," prices starting to go back up...we're through the bottom here, at least. God willing. Where we lead, others follow, up or down. I think we just might be in that final darkness before the dawn.

Where are you?(just generally is ok.) We have recently managed to sell our house, but multiple offers were *not* involved. I'm not sure whether it's all getting better, worse, or both around here; DH and I are in agreement that it's going to be an interesting year.

It never hurts to have a few days of food set aside. Learning to live thriftily is a good thing.

But there's a mental state where the process of preparedness become obsessive and counterproductive.

At its worst, you get normally sane people holing up in the woods and waiting for the hordes of _____ to come after their bunker full of nitrogen-preserved porridge mix. These folks know a lot about guns and knives but little about the most important survival tool, a community.

Not quite as bad, but becoming thoroughly tiresome: Gurus who see [Ebola / Y2K / avian flu / peak oil / credit crunch / 2012] as a way of pushing their cranky social agenda. Oh, and to sell their books. And sell tickets to speeches. And, yeah, to revel in the glow of reverent attention from scared people.

The followers get a self-righteous buzz of their own. They know what the sheeple do not; they enjoy rattling people with authoritative sounding pronouncements. (How many times was the U.S. about to bomb Iran because the latter was going to start their own Oil Bourse based on the Euro?)

Apocaphilia, James Cascio calls it.

Don't give these emotional tapeworms a victory. Stop being afraid.

Unless Mighty C'thulhu returns. Then we're fucked.

If I can offer a suggestion about mammoth cookery based on utter ignorance?

Since elephant trunks (which is as close as I could find to mammoth trunkology in a five minute search) are made of approximately 40,000 muscles, grouped around the nose tubes, once the outside is skinned, and the inside tubes scraped (presumably) of whatever Proboscideans might have in there, wouldn't you end up with approximately 40,000 red meat tenders?

Except they might be more stringy than tender, due to the amount of work the trunk does, and there might be a lot of connective tissue . . .

So, perhaps several gallons worth of mammoth trunk soup? Like Gramma Og used to make?

I don't know as mammoth trunk would be worth the trouble to me personally, even if it was cleaned and portioned and offered on foam trays at the megamart, but I expect your average mammoth-hunter wouldn't have been too choosy about his protein . . .

B. Durbin, #125: I'm with you in theory on the notion of kudzu ethanol. In practice, though, I don't think it would do much to solve the invasiveness problem, because (for example) harvesting the kudzu that's overrunning Interstate highway roadsides all over the Southeast wouldn't be economically practical. OTOH, perhaps that could be made into a WPA project for people left unemployed by the current depression...

Earl Cooley III @ 216
But the lentils (dahl) are nice, and nutritious, and don't need to be soaked before cooking.

Make things. Fix things. Do the work that falls under one's hands. This is the real answer, I guess.

Or sleep. Which is next on the agenda.

Phillip Jose Farmer's Wold Newton books.

Farmer's A Feast Unknown is related to the Wold Newton concept, but it's really not crossover so much as professionally published slash. I got my copy from a dirty book store around the corner from the Andrews Hotel, I think it was, at some early Minicon. The clerk near the door tried to keep me (an innocent young lass) from going in. "Excuse me, miss," he asked nervously. "Do you know what kind of bookstore this is?" "Yes," I replied with a perky smile. "It's that kind of book." He still didn't want me to come in, so he agreed to go look for it. He was soooo embarassed to sell it to me.

For some reason I picture a bunch of little kids standing around in "Indian" headbands, as in grade school circa 1966, and saying things like "Ugh! De gustibus non disputandum est!"

Not in the least :)

abi @ 230 ...
I'm sluggishly trying to put things into more permanent locations, or back in their permanent locations, or simply set them into bags for appropriate disposal, and thereby make more space for doing.

I'm rather amused to find that wine glass racks (the chromed wire sort that IKEA appears to have stopped carrying) make quite reasonable file-and-hammer-and-screwdriver storage.

For lunch today I hacked off two goodly slabs of that white bread, slathered it with mayo and sandwiched it around a very nice tomato. A little salt and pepper ... mmmmm I can't wait till tomatoes grow in my back yard again.

I don't know; I don't buy different kinds of flour for bread and for other purposes. I find that "ordinary" flour (usually half white / half whole-wheat) works well enough for bread, muffins, whatever, and nobody seems to object to the desserts that I make with the regular white flour either. I've sometimes wondered why I have so much trouble getting a half-white-wheat/half-rye flour bread loaf to rise; perhaps I should try a higher-protein white flour for that.

The shears[0] are definitely in need of a bit of adjustment, and based on the photos in this similar ebay listing I reasonably expect that this is both possible and plausible.

Unfortunately I can't seem to find the correct combination of tools/angle/something that'll allow the slightest bit of movement.

I've applied substantial amounts of penetrating oil, to address the plausible rust/gunk, as well as tapping with a wood mallet -- have tried various combinations and permutations of hex keys/levers/right angle pliers -- but no joy (or movement). I've tried for a gentle bit of wiggle in either direction, just in case it's not the standard sort of screw the ebay images suggest -- again, to no avail.

I'm wondering if there's a specific tool required, or if it's one of these "everybody knows that the shears have to be [open|closed|upside down]" sorts of things, and hoping somebody here knows...

[0] Newly mine, hence the rather abused look...

dcb, #206: We've found that rice is best stored in sealed plastic containers for long-term usefulness. One of our kitchen cupboards is full of repurposed peanut-butter/trail-mix jars filled with different varieties of rice. For a big bag (how big?) you might need a couple of 5-gallon plastic buckets with lids.

joann, #224: Houston is generally not as bad off as a lot of the rest of the country, partly because we had a big housing crash, back in the 80s during the oil crisis, and the housing economy never completely recovered from that. Still, new-housing starts nationwide have taken a precipitous drop -- and that's a trailing indicator, signifying that we're already in a depression. It's going to be a long, bumpy ride back out, and the Republicans in Congress are NOT helping. They'd rather see Obama fail even if it means taking the country down with him.

xeger, #233: We are "making lemonade" here -- which is to say, having finally gotten all the roof and ceiling repair from the Ike damage done, we're triaging the stuff we had to move out of the back rooms as we move it back in. Amazing amounts of things-we-don't-need are being sent to Goodwill, freecycled, or just thrown away. The goal is to get to the week before this year's Chocolate Decadence party NOT in a state of frantic cleaning-up-sorting-out-and-throwing-things-into-the-back-rooms for once.

Part of it is spring - when it gets warmer, people want to go out and look at houses. That was the last couple of weeks here and we're seeing the corresponding annual uptick. "Spring Market" starts somewhere Feb 15-Mar 1 here, Mar 15-April 1 in Mlps. It's a different time everywhere, corresponding to when it usually gets warm. This is esp true right now, because most of the people and movement we're seeing in the market are first time homebuyers, who set their leases to end when it gets warmer. No one really wants to move in the cold.

This is aided this year by epically low interest rates. I've seen under 5% interest for a 30yr fixed rate loan advertised, no PMI. There are people who didn't want to buy when prices were high and now feel like they can get a good deal. Many times they've saved a decent down payment.

Last month, the National Association of Realtor numbers were really good. Prices were down from the last year but up from Nov., home sales were up, inventory was down, and time-to-clear the inventory was down. Next week, we should know about January's numbers.

Tracie @ 234 They had the basic recipe in the Splendid Table segment. I'll go grab that and try it while waiting for the book to show up at my library.

We discovered a small Bosnian bakery a couple weeks ago, and now I stop in whenever I'm in that part of town (it's 2 blks from Big Lots). Today, I picked up a small knot as a snack, bit into it, and was in heaven. Salt bread.

I never noticed kudzu smelling of anything in particular, but I mostly saw it along the highway as we were driving by.

Why do I never see the errors until I've already hit 'post'?

In re "wholemeal has less processing": this may not be the case in practice. I believe that modern milling processes aren't set up to grind without separating. This may relate to the too-large bran question -- a canny producer might mill plain flour, then add (less-milled) bran and (some portion of the) germ back in.

And why did I find that blog? Because I live in California, and was extremely frustrated at seeing all these people at my job level affording houses when I couldn't. It was an immense relief to me to find out that they couldn't; it was all funny money.

—I'm not in favor of the stimulus plan for several reasons, but two stand out:

1. Every recession since the 1940s (which is as far back as you want to go, since the monetary policy was completely different prior to FDR) started at a certain date and ended at a certain date, as understood in retrospect. Every single stimulus plan brought about by the government took effect after the end of the recession.

2. The stated goals of this plan are exactly what didn't work for Japan in the 1990s, and in fact seemed to prolong the recession to a fifteen-year doozy. They finally tried something different— what this plan is trying to prevent— and have started to climb out of the hole.

There are squirrel traps available online. They talk about trapping and "relocating" the buggers, I personally would relocate them to another plane of existence rather than make them someone else's problem.

*Had* started to - but this time they won't have a US boom to carry them along and out of it. Exports are down by really shocking numbers.

Could get ugly.

Of course, reading about complaints about ivy makes me realise that almost anything can be invasive if it's in the wrong continent. Conversely, in the right place it's wonderful: Ivy is a major foodplant for Comma and Holly Blue butterflies here in the UK, and a major source of nector in autumn for all butterflies.

I momentarily read that as 'devour horses', and the image was startling.

A plant in the wrong place.

Enlightenment! Thank you. Much becomes clear.

takuan, we have a custom here of giving some hint what links are about. I know this is not your habit on Boing Boing.

These horribly invasive plants can probably be exploited as feedstock not only for cellulosic alcohol but for pharmaceuticals as well. Kudzu is a source of genistein, and Japanese knotweed is a source of resveratrol.

You'd want to keep a sharp eye on the shears, to be sure whatever you're doing isn't actually damaging them. Especially if, once you have the vice grips gripping on the nut, you wale away on them with a hand sledge. Should you choose that route, do fix in your mind the difference between 'clockwise' and 'the other way' as they relate to the nut. I get that stuff mixed up all the time, is why I mention it.

Failing all attempts to crank that nut off, and provided you have a replacement nut/bolt, you might consider drilling the thing out.

re squirrels: I hate them too. My solution is less pacific than rocks (as I am trying to stop them eating the fruits on the trees). Sadly I don't trust them for eating, so I just bury them. Brillat-Savarin said they were wonderful when braised in madiera. Sadly madiera is to expensive for me to use it in so profligate a manner.

albatross: When the media deigns to notice price migration it's either to bemoan the cost of fuel, or to blame the consumer for not spending money better, and so keeping the price down.

Ken Brown: How small is that jar? Because the "cheap" peanut butter is something like $2US, here in Los Angeles (he says, as he replies from Ottawa).

P J: Hummingbirds (on the wing) fear nothing. Thank God they are so small. There are Anna's, and Allan's and Rufous in the area, and they are nasty. If it flies, and looks to be in the area they've claimed... kitty bar the door.

But that makes them easier to photograph.

When it come to feeding them... the food coloring in the commercial mixes kills them. Their livers have to process it, and it gives them chirrosis; the thing to do is just mix up clear sugar water. They don't care what color the nectar is, the blossom is what they look for.

Re mobbing: I can't say for non-corvids, but in them (and crows especially), it seems to be a showing off behavior. Serves several functions. They drive off the raptor. They show how brave/smart they are to the local females (because in crows it's a male behavior), and it keeps the raptor busy if any of the others want to leave. Every so often the hawk/eagle gets pissed off enough to catch one, but that's part of the game, apparently.

But corvids are really smart, so they don't get bagged often, and probably weigh the odds (for smart, there is a group in Japan (as I recall) which has learned to use cars to crack nuts. When the cars pull up to the stop sign, the birds hop up and place a nut in front of the wheel. They know the next car will have to stop, so they will have time to retrieve the nutmeats).

dcb: Whole wheat flour costs more because it goes off faster (the oils in the germ go rancid) so it has a higher loss rate (in manufacture, as well as sales; because unless flour is aged (by bleaching, or time), it doesn't behave properly). The oils also make blending the streams (to balance the protein level) tricker, and more labor intensive. That, and most wholemeal/whole wheat flour is made by reblending the brand and germ back in (again, more labor intensive).

janetl: When we were killing off elms we found the trick was to have a barbeque. We built a pit (cinderblocks) around the stump and kept the coals going for about three days. No more regrowth.

Earl Cooley: No bean sprouts for you (made from mung beans)?

Diatryma: I'd think it tough, but tasty (lots of work for the muscles, and the fibers are long), but the thing to do is to research the pygmies, and see what they think of elephant trunk.

The invasive plant I hate around here is "golden sumac". It's a tree. It sends runners. The damn thing is... the runners can radiate from the parent for about 100 meters. I used to think the hundreds of seedlings in the yard were from the mimosa. Nope... golden sumac, two yards and three walls away.

Joel: The reason your loaves don't rise so well is that rye has very little gluten. I notice from the breads I'm buying here the protien is 9-10 percent, which is, "soft" to start with; which isn't helping you. If you want the loaves to rise (and this works for the softer wheat flours as well), buy some pure gluten (sometimes sold as "essential wheat gluten", or just plain, "gluten flour").

About a tablespoon in the dough will stiffen it up, and help the crumb hold more air.

xeger: It looks as though the shears are held with a peened pin. Which means the won't come apart without 1: a file (to remove the peened portion) and 2: a replacement, and the means to peen it. Best to take them to person who knows how to sharpen them. It might be there is a special tool which will hold the pivot in place, but I don't think so. I think the nut was set, and then the pivot "upset" into it, so the pin won't drift out.

I'm sorry I didn't have the time to write a shorter letter

Won't that stop people from resting?

"The whole-wheat flour that I prefer to buy, which has the brain finely ground..."

Someone always finds a way to bring zombies into the thread.

Hidecote lavendar and Munstead lavendar--they are surviving in my yard and have been there a few years, spreading very very slowly over time.

Various types of thyme, spreading at different rates. The woody thyme, very little remains of--the central woody stem died out, and a couple small outside ones that had grown up from roots or woody area sending down roots, may have survived. The other types aren't woody. There's one type that's in about a 3 foot diameter circle now, after years....

Oregano -spreads-, oh wow does it spread, however, bees and butterflies love it... and it's quite amusing to watch them bouncing off one another (except, the bees have been getting clobbered by whatever is killing off the honeybees....)

What else--blueberries, there are two growth habits, "high bush" and "low bush" generally which are the type that are "wild blueberries." They like shade and acid soil. Also, there's wintergreen, which the leaves and flowers look a lot like blueberries, though the berries are quite different looking. The leaves of wintergreen can be used for flavoring, along with the berries.

Santolina is inedible, but is useful for dissuading insects.

Any sorrel that pops up, is susceptible to having me pick it and eat it, and the same is true of dandelions.

Sand plums grown slowly and are shrubby.

I have a number of volunteer trees, including a number of flowering crabapple trees, one of which has yellow crabapples rather than red, and there's one with purply leaves(except, it's under a butternut tree--the butternut tree was growing slowly, then one year decided "I think I'm ready to be a grownup!", doubled its height, and started bearing... and from then on, it's gotten a LOT larger... the leaves of the crabapple tree aren't much purply in the shade of the butternut tree).

Do not not NOT put in rosa rugosa rose if in New England, not not NOT NOT!
(Massachusetts has a pest plant list... google on Massachusetts pest plant and it should be present in the Googling results.)

If having shade, there's mayapple (which I forget one of the other names of)--even though mine have never fruited (the fruit is edible). It spreads somewhat, but there is spacing between the shoots, and each shoot really only has one (large) leaf. There's also Canadian ginger, asarum canadesis or something like that--Europe ginger isn;t hardy around here--but it also wants to be in a moist area, and survival otherwise tends to be dubious.

What else... hollyhocks, gayfeather/liastris (not herbs....)

I fail to understand why people will pay $4.00 for 6 ounces of raspberries but will relentlessly eradicate any raspberry canes appearing in their yards....

Strawberries.
Daylilies (which are also edible in both flower and tuber, though the raw flowers tend to be -strong-.... they get used in hot and sour soup, before they open)
Yucca--and if it flowers and somehow gets pollinated, the fruit is edible I've read. Yucca is TOUGH, it grows on mountainsides in the Rockies....
Clary sage--I have a plant growing under a rhododendron. It wasn't originally under the rhododendron, the latter grew and sprawled, to where the clary sage is under the rhody. While clary sage is SUPPOSED to be a biennial, the plant might be a decade or more old... it likes being under the rhody!
Regular sage--I've had a few sage plants, which haven't survived more than three or so years though. Unlike the kept in the shade (and particular under a rhody is shady!) clary sage, the regular sage was in full sun. Hmmm...

I have had (may still have) lady's mantle... it';s a barely surviving plant, but then I don;t have it in much shade, either.

Scented roses don't really thrive in my yard... one sort that I planted that isn't a scented variety, has stuck around.

Oh, garden pinks--they're relatives of carnations. Big showy carnations don't tend to be hardy in zone 5/6. I did find some hardy carnations once, which lasted two or three years. Some types of pinks will last longer than others, also.... the flowers are edible, and some of them are scented.

"Jerusalem artichokes" are a member of the sunflower family with small edible tubers. I may have some in the yard, clumped from tubers I stuck in--I didn;t dig any up in the fall to check....

Mint does not go invasive in my yard, bee balm/mondarda doesn't either (edible for teas and such), lemon balm tends to die off and so mostly does perennially chamomile, some onions will survive and grow new bulbs, chives survive and spread. Asters may survive--the wild volunteers are hardy, the domesticated strains, however, are much less resilient.

Hazelnut trees eventually establish and even bear. The single surviving Chinese chestnut gets pollinated by insects from one or more native American chestnut trees (judging by the volunteer offspring that have sprung up) in the area.

The mind reels! I'm going to have to go lie down with a cool compress on my forehead....

Because when you buy raspberries, you get just the amount you want at the time you want it, they don't take over your yard, and there are no damn THORNS to deal with!

I used to have some thornless (commercial) blackberry canes at my old condo. They didn't seem to be terribly invasive, and sometime shortly before I left, the management cut them all down. But wild blackberries and raspberries are a completely different story.

Wild strawberries are nice, although the fruit isn't especially edible. But the leaves are pretty, and they smell like strawberries.

Tracie, #180, I'm now #10 in the hold queue for that book (the three copies are out) at the library.

Dave Bell, #184, more good news!

Ken Brown and others, Jenny lives in Alaska. While it's not entirely frozen waste, a lot of food has to be shipped there.

Julia Jones, #225, when the feeder is empty, the squirrels will come stand with their paws on the window and look in, insisting that I come put more seed in. (I like squirrels, although I don't eat them anymore.)

Stefan, #226, when we were kids, my brother and I had to memorize books of the bible because the bad non-believers were going to take away the bibles and chase us into the wilds.

Linkmeister, #244, but what would I do with the coffee? Actually, I have a lot of tupperware. I gave some away before I had to have stuff packed to put the laminate down, but I kept more than enough to manage.

DC is ripping out Marion Barry, too!

What?

Oh well.

That'd be a bit of a technical detail -- the company that made those shears hasn't existed since 1875... [0]

Terry Karney @ 274 ...
xeger: It looks as though the shears are held with a peened pin. Which means the won't come apart without 1: a file (to remove the peened portion) and 2: a replacement, and the means to peen it. Best to take them to person who knows how to sharpen them. It might be there is a special tool which will hold the pivot in place, but I don't think so. I think the nut was set, and then the pivot "upset" into it, so the pin won't drift out.

1: Hmm... I hope not - and it'd be a hell of a peen to produce this[1].
2. ... and I'm waiting for a call back[2] from the recommended person who knows how to sharpen such things, but being both impatient and eager to edjumacate myself in the interim.

[0] I've also just realized that I probably failed to include anything useful by way of scale; those shears are around 15" long -- the pivot itself is a bit over 1.25" wide[3]. This is a picture of somebody elses hand with them, for scale.
[1] Possibly more usefully, but rather large, all the pics bundled together
[2] Have been for a bit, and will try leaving a message again...
[3] ... at least it's 7/8" between the centers of the two holes, plus a rough guesstimate at the margins, instead of going downstairs to measure.

But wild blackberries and raspberries are a completely different story.

A horror story. I am in perpetual war with the damn things because the part of my south side neighbor's lot next to mine is a designated native plant wetland reserve, which is chock full of blackberries we're not allowed to eradicate. Best I can do is kill off what I find in my yard every year, and hope they're not tunneling. It's getting a lot harder these days, though; I don't have the strength left in my bad leg to do more than an hour or 2 gardening in a day, 1 or 2 days a week at most, and that's not enough to stay ahead of both the blackberries and the ivy. I'm starting to think about goats. And I'm inside a large city.

A friendly amendment to Terry Karney in #114 - it's Henry Petroski, not Harold.

Seconding the Tracy Kidder, and also suggesting Witold Rybczynski for engaging and educational non-fiction, mostly around architecture, urban planning, and design.

I'd never heard of John McPhee and am now really looking forward to checking him out.

"Darby, sir, but Janus they call me," the seaman said, "on account of a surgeon we shipped in the Sophie, a learned bloke, saying I saw both ways like some Roman cut-up by that name;"

"Wild strawberries are nice, although the fruit isn't especially edible"

Wild strawberries are beautifully edible. Very small, compared to the commercial varieties, but full of flavour - more flavour in one of those tiny wild berries than in a whole punnet of the commercial types. I keep meaning to get some going in our garden. I do get to pick the odd one from the planters outside the British Library, in season.

Why does this bother me so much, when I have other stuff that's gone into the interwild without making me feel twitchy?

Facebook responded to the furor. I am somewhat mollified, and logical me knows that the same fate awaits most of my online work (=obscurity) regardless of location. Nonetheless, my initial Noooooooo! reaction surprised me. If I had a blog, I could probably get a good 2000 words out of said initial reaction.

Something similar was reported in the news just today (okay, it wasn't the news, it was the funny pages).

re 284: Here in the east, if you have birds, you have blackberries. Another really nasty prickly thing is Rosa multiflora, which has huge masses of powerfully scented little flowers, but which will turn into this impenetrable mass of briar. R. gallica is also a bit of a garden pest: as roses go, it's especially spiny, and it spreads. And, then, of course, there's poison ivy. I found out in my 20s that I'd become desperately sensitive. And again, if you have birds, you'll have it.

This in no way reduces the win of caffeinated jelly beans.

Marilee @ 281 Golden raspberries taste like raspberry honey. They're light and delicate and I love them. They also tend to be not quite as thorny.

The next project is to find a online, free, landscape design program. This garden needs to be aesthetically pleasing from above as well as straight on the side and ground level. It's 4 ft above street level on the corner, and 6 ft below my back door. And my office and bedroom look out over it. *sigh* This is the part where I get to unrealistic and demanding, because there is no way I can get into the dirt for another month. And the space is small enough that I really need to make a cohesive whole.

Perhaps Fragaria chiloensis? In sun, it's flatter and denser than the other strawberries, and covers the ground better. The flowers look like strawberry, the (occasional) fruit are small, seedy, and pretty tasteless.

Or it could be a Potentilla, some of which have strawberry-like fruits. Their flowers are yellow, rather than pink or white.

Oh, and I adore golden raspberries! Fortunately, one of the regulars at the downtown farmers market offers them.

You could, while waiting for the callback from the sharpening expert, soak the whole unit in a dish of [penetrating oil of your choice]. Three days to a week of that just might do the trick.

Perhaps a giant pitcher plant would help with your squirrel problem? Alternatively, you could always try squirrel fishing.

Terry Karney @ 274:

I saw a video on YouTube a while back of a crow cracking a nut using traffic in Japan. It waited for the light to change before hopping out to get it. They really are smart birds.

I don't know that the license is required for the transmission. If it were I think I'd see something like in for Lj, or Flickr.

I recall ranting about it, last July, and deciding then I wasn't ever likely to use facebook, for precisely that reason.

The problem isn't the archiving. It's Facebook saying they have the right to use, in any way they see fit, anything you use their service to transmit.

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

That's more than just a tool to transmit information. That's a rights grab.

Mulch does not equal "pine."

Gravel or pebbles CAN be used as a mulch, and often is to lovely effect in a knot garden.

Straw is a mulch, and there is one on the market made from cocoa bean husks.

There is also a mulch available that looks like wood chips but is really shredded tires. It's supposed to last forever!

Here's the fed list, with links to state lists (many of them broken).

It would help if we knew what state we're talking about, as zone 6 in NE is way different from zone 6 in the plains.

BTW, Paula, the Canadians have developed lines of extrahardy roses, many of which are scented. Most of the better-scented old roses are also pretty hardy.

Will the limestone planter hold water? Does it get any sun?

If it gets 4-6 hours of sun a day, you could turn it into a water garden. If it gets less than that, it would be wonderful for impatiens or ferns.

Yesterday I was faced, again, with the fact that taking pictures of birds here is a very poor abstract of the experience. Video recordings with a dB meter display might be useful, although still limited. Yesterday the flocking birds- redwinged and Brewer's blackbirds, damned dirty introduced starlings, and robins- were hanging out in the oak trees (and here I'm talking thirty or more, hundred foot tall, Oregon White Oak, in a climate with no ice storms so that the canopies stretch 1.5X the tree's height) and singing in chorus. Yesterday the first Crocus tommasinianus were blooming and spring seemed possible, even though there are still piles of snow where my son shoveled the tricky bits of the driveway.

Also, Raspberries: I grow mine in a raised bed; one side is pasture, the other mown lawn, and there's always someone to give the excess canes to. When Mom was alive, there were four hundred-foot rows over at her house, but five years ago they all succumbed to laminar root-rot. My mother's siblings wore berries and beans on their backs every first day of school, and grew up to plant Sumner series raspberries, which are smooth. I never thought of raspberries as prickly until I planted the varieties I have now (Coho, Autumn Bliss, and two others I forget the names of). Autumn Bliss is an amazing fruit, but I'm going to get surgical gloves to pick the damned things because they're covered with hair-sized prickles and my fingers are at odds with my tongue.

I haven't read the TOS of other social networking sites but am fairly certain that similar clauses can be found there too. Three hours after reading the article, I've more or less reached the conclusion that my anger is in direct proportion to Facebook's usefulness, without which I wouldn't be uploading stuff, and stems from the prospect of losing that usefulness.

Re: gardening, I do not have kudzu or blackberries, but grass seems to be a worthy substitute. There's enough room in the backyard for a vegetable patch, but the grass is immortal! How can I get rid of, say, a 6' x 10' patch safely and neatly? Weed killer is out - we have three in-and-outdoor cats.

There are wild strawberries growing in the backyard, and I am looking forward to tasting their fruit.

Lori @ #300, the cocoa mulch is both attractive and toxic to dogs. It's also expensive, which is why I've never had that particular problem.

Even if you do live in a desert, something will probably grow there naturally. What grows "naturally", however, is often likely to be a noxious weed. (Puncture vine was very happy to grow in our yard in Tucson, for instance.)

Better to find something that's actually native to the area, and plant that, rather than just accepting whatever seeds happen to drift in from your neighbor's yard.

At home I have a copy of Mother Earth News that has a great guide to creating a vegetable garden over a patch of lawn, without having to kill off or plow up the grass first. When I get home I'll either summarize, or see if I can find a link to it online (my search-fu is failing at present, and since I can't recall the month of the article I really can't find it). It largely depends on thick layers of mulch, IIRC.

However, when you try this, it helps a lot to be a termite or a bark beetle.

http://www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=9508

Prediction: If any of this jerk's fans do shoot anybody, they'll claim it was a setup to justify oppressing them.

Is this what you were talking about? Google search terms were mother earth news garden, first hit.

The clause they seem to get by with for the transmission aspect which Facebook claims is legal necessity is LiveJournal reserves the right, without limitation except by law, to serve any user Content on the web, through the downloadable clients and otherwise.

They have a clause about reserving the right to resell that content back to the user. I think this is to make sure no one gets sniffy about having to pay to see their own content, should Lj become some sort of closed set, as Facebook is.

Myspace says: MySpace.com does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you post to the MySpace Services. After posting your Content to the MySpace Services, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content, and you continue to have the right to use your Content in any way you choose. By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the MySpace Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com a limited license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on and through the MySpace Services.

They go on to explain that such license is needed to do things like compress files, allow them to be played etc.

Yahoo claims the right to use such materials as you post to promote the services to which you have posted them (Flickr, YahooGroups, etc.). If you withdraw the posted material, Yahoo ceases to have the right to use them. The exception is for text you submit to the publically viewable areas of Yahoo.

Which is to say the things which actually have the likelihood of real commercial value, they aren't claiming to have bought by letting you pay them to host.

So, again, it looks as though FaceBook is making a rights grab. That they are not alone in this (because Microsoft [which seems to have introduced this sort of clause when it launched Microsoft Passport], and Google, place a similar clause in their ToS), doesn't mean they are legally required to do so, nor that it's right.

Flame Warriors

I aspire to be a Godfather. :)

Earl, even if that's not what Caroline had in mind, nice article! I may finally have that vegetable patch I've been dreaming of.

Underneath the pine tree out front is nice, though; same shade, but there are several levels of containers, ranging from the ground to tables and a little chair to things hanging from sawn-off branches. We are big believers in hanging baskets.

Can you tell it's February?

Just in case anyone wants to know: it's raining buckets out here in San Pablo, CA. According to the weather report people, we can expect rain through Wednesday. I am very happy about that.

On the other hand, our governor is about to lay off 20,000 state employees. As we used to say -- bummer.

I went off and sewed the headbands on my Latin grammar, which has been sitting half-bound for over a year now.

Hey, I have one of those! Clendon and Vince, Oxford, 1931, reprinted 1954. Part one only, sadly. But hey, it's been from England to Australia to Canada in its short life.

In theory it's waiting for me to buy some matching tissue for section guards. Because more paper is always the answer.

I'm not trimming it, nor trying to clean the ink stains, marks of lavender pressed between the pages, nor removing the pencilled annotations in the calendar section. It's a working book that's been with me for my entire adult life so far, and which now needs a better binding so it can outlast me.

My fervent hope is that sometime in 2089 some Latin student will run across it in a used bookstore, marked down to practically nothing, and use it in defiance of all of her classmates' code plugins that annotate the declensions in the texts they read through their iris-implant viewers.

At the very least, I need it so I don't make declension mistakes like I did on Whatever today.

That'll go well with my flying to the Bay Area next week for my yearly reaming... I mean... my yearly review.

Bamboo is a legacy plant, a grove planted today could greatly benefit your grandchildren. Species carefully chosen of course.

I have to believe there is a place for cats in the afterlife; they give us so much love here. I'm sure Sophie is there.

Here in Japan it can easily (well, over a few years) wipe out whole orchards if neglected, which it almost inevitably will be.

IOW, if you put one of those handy little "Share On Facebook!" widgets on your personal or commercial website, Facebook is now staking claim to anything on YOUR site as well, whether you post it to Facebook or not. Not that I'd have been likely to link my (still-under-construction) jewelry website to Facebook anyhow, but they've just guaranteed that I won't.

Pendrift, #305: If you live in a neighborhood where people put huge collections of those ugly plastic street-spam signs up on the street corners, you can collect them* and put an overlapping layer of them on the grass you're trying to kill. You might have to leave them there for a full growing season, but it will work -- we cleared a largish patch of our back yard that way. And not only are they free, but you're beautifying the neighborhood by getting rid of them!

Lila, #307: At risk of sounding callous, that would seem to make it a good solution for places plagued with feral dog packs -- especially if said places also have leash laws.

joann, #332: My condolences. Kidney failure was what finally got my late beloved Mina.

* In most places, it's perfectly legal for you to remove a sign that's been placed on the right-of-way. Check your local ordinances if you want to be sure.

takuan: Men strike.... blaze of stunning light. A brief hesitation in all forward movement. Done wrong, it just hurts.

ukemi (aikido)... unless done wrong it's just the logical outcome of the event. Generally it's painless; though at time shocking.

I have taken ukemi from some who are being less than gentle, those can be abrupt, but so long as I am flowing, they are just that, abrupt, not painful (well, excepting yonkyu which has pain built into it. Doran Sensei is of the opinion this makes it the least of the teachings, because not everyone can be controlled by pain, but simple physics is irresistable.

ukemi in judo (which was the first art I studied, lo those many moons ago) is a bit more breathtaking, because a lot of them are falls from which the bottom has been taken out of the uke and all one has to keep it from stunning one to immobility is the proper application of the arms. Sometimes one is slow, or soft.

There's one aid to front roll practice that makes the front roll perfectly inevitable... if you trust your partner. If not, at least if you're me, the moment of inevitability ends in a splat*.

Many techniques end in, "Oh! I am made of levers!" Many others end in, "Why don't I have a third leg?" The first are perfectly elegant, with an edge of marvel that my body does that. The second are sometimes frustrating for both of us because if I don't know where I'm supposed to lose my balance, I sometimes don't.

*this is my own term for not doing a front roll due to headspace failure. I really, really do not like bending, losing control, or not being upright.

Then it's all chaos, and noise and confusion and pulling one's mind back into one's body.

Being just outside an explosion is different again... that's like being bounced off the grill of a mack truck; into a wall.

Further away than that... it's a lot like being near lighting.

It's probably my ukemi is as good as it is (and I've been praised for it, more than once, even when all else was elbows and angles) is because I started with Judo. We did about 100 meters of forward rolls, left and right, before we started to practice falls.

That sense of being able, once released, to just let muscle memory take over is liberating in the extreme.

So my advice (worth at least what you paid for it) is, when next you take up the art, go to class early, and practice rolls, forward, backward, atemi, side falla and any other way you might want to be able to part ways with your nage.

No, the quality I'm trying to capture is the instantaneous shock that fills the world silently, bright without light, a zen-katsu moment when before thought has time, you realize you are slain. - you know, the moment you think, "shit!he got me!" and then you foul him with a low and dirty tsuki thrust in the soft meat of the upper arm. Kidding! Just kidding! (maybe)

Those were booms. I used to think they were explosions.

Howizters, cannon, and things like machine guns and rifles;I don't know how to explain the difference, but they are nothing like explosions. They are directional is the best I can cime up with.

There isn't any awareness of the impending explosion No awareness that you left an opening and it's being exploited (well... one may be aware, for incoming; but it doesn't signify, there isn't any sense of impending to it, mere inevetibilty, and fatalism), the world is divided into now, and after. Before was just regular time.

The explosion was special time, and the after is rushed and hectic time, until regular time comes back again.

It's nothing like anything else, really.

Stefan, #315, I suppose some of us Social Security folks could fight back. I can't handle a gun anymore, but I could make a b...oh...hmm.

joann, #332, I'm so sorry about Sophie. I hope you find comfort.

Why yes, I did leave karate with some baggage.

Most of my problems with aikido come from my head, and the rest are an unwillingness to bend or fear of my head going somewhere my feet haven't. I know exactly what to do to help fix them, I just don't do any of it. I know all the words and can say them back to you, but I can't or haven't tried to do the steps.

If you go back to the mat, and want to talk, you know where to find me. :)

As for the head/feet thing, there are aspects of ukemi which take faith, in you, your nage, and gravity. Sometimes I choke, my body can't go "there", at which point it doesn't and I end up in a graceless pile.

Anything else I might add is probably just rubbing a sore spot, so please forgive me the preaching I just did.

Several of the mailing lists that I'm on (public and private) have at least one member (although not the -same- member in all cases, fortunately!) who seems to feel that every email that appears in their inbox must be replied to (not infrequently including their own replies!) -- and seem to be immune to standard gentle (and not so genteel) hints.

In one case, I suspect cultural difference -- it's clear by name and content that the poster isn't a native english speaker, and also isn't culturally 'western' -- in another, that's quite clearly not the case.

I'd like to say "stop trying so hard, and just listen a bit", but that seems to be much easier to understand in the context of face-to-face interaction[0].

[0] Doubtless because it's fairly hard not to notice volume, or social cues like the audience vanishing.

Clear Creek Distillery, in Oregon, makes an interesting eau de vie with the new spring growth of Douglas fir. Unfortunately it's even more expensive than their wonderful pear brandy.

That sounds like an eau de vie made by the Distillerie de Biercée in Belgium. They're most famous here for their citrus-based Eau de Villée but they make a range of lovely liqueurs and eaux de vie. I wonder if their products are available in the US.

Terry and Lee: Facebook has now reverted to the previous TOS after the backlash, and is asking for input before putting up new terms of service. It's a step in the right direction and gives users an opportunity to fix even older ownership issues.

Open thready, free-association note to no one in particular: The more I comment, the less intimidated I am, but oh my! I can feel how underused my spontaneous writing skills are. Making Light forces me to hold myself to higher standards and it takes me ages to finalize a comment*.
As a translator I work with words all day, but it's enlightening to discover** that rendering an existing thought in another language is far easier for me than shaping my own thoughts into new content.
----------
*It took me a good 20 minutes to write and rework all of this, and I'm still not happy with it.
**Joining the Fluorosphere: another butterfly moment!

It's a 10 kg (22 pound) bag of rice. The "Best Before" date is two years from now - we should manage to eat it by then (we went and bought it) - not that I believe in "Best Before" dates.

I do recycle plastic icecream containers as stackable containers for rice, pasta, lentils, chick peas, sugar etc.). Problem is we're a household of two and I don't have any large plastic containers - oh wait! Lateral thinking has done it (thanks to your prompting): plastic boxes which 1 kg assorted biscuits-for-cheese came in (bought when on half-price offer, of course). I have two of those empty, with "resealable for freshness" lids. And they will fit on top of the kitchen cupboards (which is about the only space available - our kitchen is a bit small).

Re sorting things-we-don't-need, I have that on my list of "to do" - now I've finished the big project I've been working on for several months and can reclaim things called "evenings" and "weekends". Problem is working out what's "keep in case needed (like empty plastic biscuit containers) and what's "you're never going to use it"...

We kept ours in an airtight plastic box that holds about 5 kilos (so bought the 5 kilo bags more than the 10 kilo) But the box is lost. Where can it be? My daughter insists that she has no idea. But it wasn't me!. And cats don't take large plastic boxes from the tops of fridges

I bet someone took it to a party with party food in it. But who? And where?

Still on food prices, I looked at the price of meat and was surprised how cheap chicken is. You could buy a single largish one (not frozen) for four quid - that's about 1.50 a kilo, the same price as most of the dry pasta or porridge oats. What the heck do they feed the hens on?

Its the same kind of price per kilo as the cheapest sardines or mackerel (which are cheaper fresh than tinned)

Lamb and pork were a bit more expensive than I thought. Or maybe the price has just gone up since I last bought any, which us months ago.

Beef is too expensive to consider as a staple food, but I don't buy it anyway. (Though I have occasionally bought a greasy steak-and-kidney pie when less than sober and in great desire of stodgy food)

But the cheapest meat of all is liver. You could get pigs liver for about 40p a kilo if you tried hard, and certainly less than a pound a kilo for pig or sheep or chicken. That's pretty much the price of cheap potatoes or onions or cabbage. I'm tempted, just to see if I can cook myself an outrageously large meal with meat in for less than 50p. Though as you can't buy small quantities at those prices actually it would be four outrageously large meat meals for two quid and who would eat the others?

Talking of livers and torture and eagles and mobbing... I once sat on a hillside in Ardnamurchan (far west of Scotland) and watched two hoodie crows push an eagle off a ledge. They landed beside it and sidled up to it and squawked a little, making it clear they didn't want any eagles on *their* ledge. It moved a little to the side. The moved closer. The eagle moved a little more. the crows followed. Like impolite commuters on a crowded train.

After some minutes it got to the end and there was nowhere further to go so it jumped off and glided away down the hillside. It was raining gently and the poor bird looked very grumpy. Quite young I think - can't remember exactly (it was years ago) but perhaps in its second year.

I've had the same experience, here and on my own intermittent blog. Sometimes it alarms me to realize how long I've taken to come up with a couple of paragraphs.

Sympathies. It's always horrible losing a furry friend.

Easy chicken liver and gizzard adobo recipe
1 lb each of chicken livers and gizzards
1 head garlic, peeled and crushed
1 onion, chopped (optional)
1 tsp peppercorns
2 bay leaves
1/4 cup vinegar (palm vinegar if available, apple cider vinegar is a good substitute, as is sherry vinegar)
1/4 cup light soy sauce (Marca Piña from the Philippines if you can find it, or Pearl River Bridge. Kikkoman will do in a pinch but I don't recommend it)

Wash the giblets well. Cover gizzards in water and bring to the boil, then simmer for 30 minutes. Chuck out the water, then add all other ingredients except liver plus about 2 cups water and stew for an hour or so until the gizzards are tender. Do not stir before the sharp smell of vinegar is gone. In fact, avoid stirring if you can help it. About 10 minutes before the gizzards are done, add the livers. Serve with rice.

Small pork and chicken cuts can be prepared the same way. It's even easier, because you can just dump all ingredients in a pot and forget about them for an hour. Tweak proportions at will. Done right, this tastes even better the next day.

And let's not forget spruce beer, aka bière d'épinette up in Québec.

I recently downloaded to my laptop David Gerrold's episode "Blood and Fire" of Star Trek's New Voyages. It consists of five mp4 files, one for the teaser, and one for each act. I wonder if there is something with which I could integrate all 5 files, and where the menu would give me the choice to watch the whole thing in one continuous viewing, or to skip to the next act if I so chose. I'd then burn the whole thing into my own DVD.

If you know, or if you don't know but you know someone who knows, do let me know.

I've used Pinnacle Studio Version 11 for making some vids, and I think most video editing/moviemaking packages could do it. I'm not sure if Windows MovieMaker can do it.

I found this forum entry addressing your problem.

http://www.kirupa.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1983077

Lee @ #347, that's pretty callous, especially in the same breath as sympathy for someone's cat's kidney failure. I acknowledge the necessity for the killing of feral dogs in some circumstances, but I draw the line at doing it by slow poisoning.

Terry @ #366, re "graceless pile", I like my TKD teacher's expression: "Try not to fall like a bag of antlers."

xeger @ #367, aikido is supposed to be good for teaching a person that not everything that impinges on your awareness has to be responded to...

Talk of artisan beers and such leads me to express my sorrow at the passing of Ben and Jerry's limited batch Ginger Snap ice cream, which is, bar none, the best ice cream I have ever tasted. And now I shall never taste it again. *retreats to the corner, sobbing quietly*

If you can find Lotus-brand Speculoos* over there, crumble some and sprinkle over vanilla ice cream. It will assuage your pain.

*They appear to be sold under the Biskoff brand in the US and the prices are outrageous.

joann @ 332: My sympathies.

Diatryma @ 350: Echoing what you said and Terry said at 354, it's both a matter of trusting yourself and your partner. And gravity. Gravity can be frightening. I'm still learning to trust my body when I dance, but it can be hard. No real advice, other than to say that it comes eventually.

xeger @ 367: Sorry, no help for the must reply to everything syndrome if gentle advice and reminders hasn't worked. On a related note, I've been having fantasies of taking piano wire to a few colleagues who don't understand the difference between reply and reply to all.

Pendrift @ 369: Don't worry, I'm still bad about having to rework some of my posts too. And rework. And rework. And then look at them, decide it's still not right, and close the window. You're doing fine.

Serge @ 379: Because if you drink enough you'll have to be carried out?

Serge @ 380: It depends on what you want. Do you want a normal DVD that you can bung into a DVD player and watch on TV? If so, I think pretty much any DVD authoring software would work for you. Give it all your mp4s, then tell it to make a title with the chapter breaks you want. If you're looking for making a single media file to play on your computer that you'll then burn to a data DVD, I've heard good things about the mkv container format for holding video with breaks like that. Sorry, I don't have any particular software recommendations.

Sophie was a very happy beast, not only because we treated her well, but because she had an amazing capacity just to seize the moment and enjoy it. The only things that ever worried her were vets and doorbells. And a fear, from sometime in the years before we got her, that the food would run out. With us, it never did.

On a lighter note, I just have to say that Kriek Lambic (which is not cherry earthworms, Serge) tastes wonderful.

Re: the martial-arts discussion: It makes me want to take a martial art again. I took TKD when I was 17, from a fellow who taught in a much more traditional Korean way. I have since gathered that most American TKD schools are largely focused on street fighting. My school was largely focused on meditation, form, and control.

Diatryma, I have pretty much never been good at physical things either -- I was always the slowest, weakest kid. I can't say I was much good at TKD but I certainly accomplished some personal bests. It really helped me to limit my focus to my individual achievements, rather than comparing to others.

(Currently I've taken up weight training, which is all about individual progress. This may be why I like it so much.)

The heather ale tastes, well, heathery. There's some tasting notes here that do a far better job than I can.

Tesco is selling the 10 kg bags of basmati rice for half price - so under £12 for the sack, which is about 50% of the cost of buying it 1 kg at a time, which is why I decided to get it.

I'm vegetarian, and trying to rely less on (a) cheese; (b) prepared Quorn-based etc. foods. I'm trying to get into the habit of cooking at least four portions at a time - eat one, eat a second in the next couple of days, freeze the others as home-made "ready meals". I'm also trying to remember to get those ready-meals out in the evening and defrost in the refrigerator for the following day's lunch, thus reducing energy use a little bit.

I continue to be bemused by the tendency of boozemakers to market non-food flavors and flavorings as if they were a feature. :-)

What do they feed the chickens on? Well if it's a modern eating bird it's bred to gain weight fast, and they are buying feed in bulk, so the cost is a lot lower. If it's a battery hen they made money from the eggs. It won't be all that tough, because she didn't move much.

Earl Cooley: Heather ale doesn't taste like Drambuie. It's yummy, but it's not sweet, and none of the other spicing is in there. A bit grassy, with hints of spice, but a very different taste/feel on the palate. I like it, but at $6US, it's a treat, not a steady, in the bar.

KiethS: I think the problem is I have an almost unshakeable faith in gravity. The sheer ability of good ukemi to limit the effects of gravity is what makes it so amazing.

It's not that it can't be effective, it's that so much of it is big, and therefore slow, moves; in a very linear style.

I've looked in at lots of TKD dojos (because it's pretty), and never seen one which, even when punching was being done, didn't focus on kicks, and big kicks at that (the sort which, should they land, will put you down/out; real "night, night bunny rabbit" stuff).

And really, all one has to do to dodge most of that stuff is step to the side a little. To attack it isn't much harder.

There was a very good karate dojo which had open sparring. Every so often a guy who took TKD would show up (usually trying to prove something) and get clobbered. There was a group which came in one week. Karate belts who were ranked below them won the bouts, handily.

The next week some of the black belts showed up to show the karate people how it was done; same story.

This may be too many years of too many integrated disciplines (and I sure wouldn't want to make a mistake in fighting someone who was skilled, but that's true of any art), but TKD feels very limited to me; in a fighting context.

Which is why I don't understand the aggressive/combative aspect of so many US dojos, as it's not taught in a way which suits it to that.

/rant

I must have been telling her how to find your cat all those years: she'd purr, and I'd put my head down next to hers (the better to catch the full rumble) and say "buzz, buzz, buzz ..."

Good: Yesterday, Soren received the hemi-cane, and we will be taking it with us when we go out. This will allow us to go to restaurants that are up or down a few steps, and to get into rest rooms that are not really accessible with a chair.

Patience required: He's not allowed to use it in the halls of the floor he's residing on, only in his room and during physical therapy. I suspect that this is because he's not yet adept at dodging people, and there are some wicked wheelchair drivers at Atlantis. (I have bruises on my calves to vouch for that.)

Weird: Shortly after Patrick and Elise left yesterday, Soren went into the bathroom, and the toilet tank broke. From my side, there was a loud cracking sound, then the sound of running water. I knocked, and dashed in, to discover a very puzzled and disconcerted Soren, standing in a large pool of water. I got him out, and into his chair, then spent some time trying to get the nurses to understand that THERE WAS A FLOOD IN HIS BATHROOM. YES, A FLOOD. THE TANK BROKE AND WATER IS POURING OUT AND INTO HIS ROOM AND THE ROOM NEXT TO HIS. HELP, PLEASE.

And, of course, it happened while much of the staff on the floow was on dinner break, and just as maintenance was about to go on break. Fortunately, people did come quickly to turn off the water and mop the floors.

(No, we have no idea how it happened. I hope to find out tonight when I see him. At least the nursing supervisor thought it was amusing.)

I hope that today will be dry and boring.

It pains me to say so, but windows movie maker (comes with xp) is actually really good for that sort of thing.

I also use VirtualDub, which is free/open source and runs under windows. That's much handier for converting avi files to divx files.* You can just point it at a folder full of video and tell it "make them smaller, de-interlace them, compress them using this codec with these settings and sound a chime/shutdown/make a cheese sandwich when done."

Let me know if this is helpful - too much info, too little, etc.

*codec download required. Terminology is not technically correct. Avi is a container format, divx is a compression format.

VirtualDub was originally created for the purpose of compressing anime videos of Sailor Moon.

Ah, well, I don't use Drambuie in the normal way anyway: I usually pop open the bottle and smell at it for a while, or sometimes use it to sweeten iced tea. My apologies if anyone thinks of this as insufficiently respectful to the elixir.

They're cutting beautifully, and now I'm really not wanting to work -- I'd rather drag the table out and do some cutting.

I've just finished a looong project (electronic encyclopaedia volume on "Rabbits and their Relatives: Health and Management", since you might actually be interested to know) and I'm going to celebrate with a bottle of Kasteel Rouge - which is a rather nice kriek.

The Fraoch ales is very good as well.

It is, in that regard, nothing like Drambuie.

Supe: Bring back nudity to B2B 4:00 AM

'Wife Swap' makes S.F. man's life a mess 4:00 AM

Fake agent in clown suit arrested 10:22 AM

"Rabbits and their relatives" does sound interesting. What do you propose for coccidiosis?

I am now adding Fraoch and Kasteel Rouge to our shopping list, and thank you for the tip!

*As in, we finished that large bottle in one night. Granted, it was a weekend night, neither of us had anywhere to go, and I wasn't on call. Still. That's a lot of malt beverage for us.

Which is why I don't understand the aggressive/combative aspect of so many US dojos, as it's not taught in a way which suits it to that.

I think you answered your own question much earlier in your post when you said "because it's pretty". There's a lot to be said for just looking cool even if it's not entirely practical. Hollywood fighting is notorious for this. The fencing in The Adventures of Robin Hood looks amazing, even if Errol Flynn would be neatly spitted in a real fight. The same goes for Jedi swinging weightless lightsabers in ponderous arcs and intentionally hitting each other's blades. Very flashy, very pretty, very fun, but not tactically sound in the slightest. The fighting in the Matrix films looks cool, and is, of course, entirely impractical. All of this looks wonderful on screen, though.

There might also be something cultural going on. Aggression, channeled correctly, is seen as a virtuous trait. It's more heroic to give the bad guy a good kicking than it is to wait for him to come at you so that you can use your judo skills.

Would you say that the duel between Robin and the Sherriff looks more realistic in Robin and Marian? Those swords look heavy.

One of the things I liked in Clive Owen's King Arthur is when Keira Knightley, instead of taking on the big Saxon guy in a swordfight, jump him along with a bunch of other women.

Sure seems that way -- but since I didn't want to annoy him by watching, I couldn't say for sure :)

Maid Marian: Let's take a look at you.
Robin Hood: [opens his shirt] Just a few bumps and bruises.
Maid Marian: [Reacting to his scars] Oh!
[She touches them gently]
Maid Marian: So many... You had the sweetest body when you left. Hard, and not a mark. And you were mine. When you left I thought I'd die. I even tried. I walked into the woods and laid down by a stream and cut myself. Some damn fool forrester came by, took me to the abbey. So they say. No more scars, Robin. It's too much to lose you twice.

25 My Little Pony Modifications

I like the "My Little Cthulu" and the Batman & Robin pair.

I would quite like to take up either karate or judo or both. Although I imagine it would take me some time to mentally cope with falling and rolling -- I never even learned to do a cartwheel when I was a kid and it took me a long time to be okay with flip turns in swimming, where you can't fall and hurt yourself while upside down. But I think it would be good for me.

Serge, #406: Your statement is not incompatible with Jacque's, given that Iguanacon was in 1978...

I have never met a street fighter in any of those venues (I have met at least one cop and at least two bouncers). YMMV, and obviously many people's does.

The feeling of being a bit over your head is perfectly natural and totally familiar to me: video formats are a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Except when they are different. Mark Pilgrim wrote up a nice, human readable description of what's actually going on with all that here. It's even funny in places.

We should indeed, but it seldom is what we are shown, because we usually want the fantasy. There are only so many times realism can be used before it becomes a cliché. Meanwhile, having Errol and Basil cross swords and banter is great fun. (They certainly were better at both things than Bananakin Skywalker and Ben Kenobi.)

re 411: If you really want beer selection you should go to one of the stores in Laurel, especially Corridor (which I realize is as far from you in Laurel as it is possible to get).

I've been feeling the same way lately, so I'm the wrong person to offer reassurance just now. But I agree that thinking about what you can do now to prepare for the possibility of the economy going south in various ways, and then finding concrete actions, is much more healthy than churning over what you can't fix.

Looking cool can make up for a lot.

And thus, Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle

I have a nearly thornless black raspberry plant, by the way.

And no, the spearmint or peppermint in my yard has spread a bit over the years, but has not taken over the yard, or come anywhere near to in. The other true mint mints have mostly died off--orange mint, chocolate mint, Kentucky colonel mint, catmint and catnip (done in by the neighbor's cats...)... the mountain mint which isn;t really a mint has done a bit of spreading.

The oregano, again, has massively played spreading weed, but given its attraction to butterflies....

I meant to mention another mint relative, which might spread in other people's yard but is quite tasty, but I can't remember the name of it... it marginally survives a year or two in my yard, alas.... ah, anise hyssop--it is not hyssop (which I had but it got completely crowded out and extirpated by the oregano/marjoram).

The stuff that really likes the soil in part of my yard, but is definitely not hardy, is pelargonium generaniums, included the scented herb use ones. Fast-drying acid sand, which even blueberries aren't that thrilled with, the geraniums thrive in.

Oh, regarding pine trees -- retsina, and pine nuts--but the pines around here don't tend to bear pignolias.

Red cedars have edible juniper berries, though. And for the daring, the red berries of yew can be sweet--but DO NOT!!! eat the seed inside, unless you really want to poison yourself.

There's even a hardy citrus, poncirus trifolata or something like that, aka "sour orange" which can survive outside in zone 5/6, and if you have neighbors you want to keep out, it is extremely spiny and prickly. Some of the nastiest native spiny things I've seen going, though, belonged to a native Massachusetts opuntia (prickly pear cactus) at my aunt's on Cape Cod. A particularly vicious salt-laden windy stormy winter killed it off, but the spines were slender and at least five or six inches long on the particular plant.

Warning, those things spread, too. I've got a less offensive specimen of the species in my yard, busily spreading up. It has the other variety of nasty opuntia spines--the little tiny filament thin hard to see equivalent of nearly invisible metal short needle varieties.

Of course, being an prickly pear cactus, everything above ground on it except the spines, is edible--flowers, fruit, and the pads. But one has to deal with the spines, and embedded in hands and lips etc. is not pleasant!

Texanne @434, Zone 6 and what kind of wind exposure? Snowcover or no? Do you like fragrant roses or are you more enamoured of shapely ones? If you're going to Antique Rose Emporium, can I go with you?

Easiest and most smelly reblooming roses: Rose de Rescht and Stanwell Perpetual.

Earl Cooley @403, I believe Queen Victoria often took Drambuie in her hot tea; it's a rare treat for me, but when I do it I find Earl Grey and Drambuie is a wonderfully tasty thing.

Terry Karney, about booms and explosions: having grown up on Yelm Prairie four miles from Muck Creek impact zone, and then moved to a place where my father took agin' stumps, I concur with the difference between booms and explosions. Booms are compact and concise, even the ones from the WW1 vintage big guns, while explosions are raggedy and bigger and digressive.

Marilee, the problem I have with hummingbird feeders is the same as the one I have with growing things from seeds: they need consistent and focussed attention, and from February to the end of June my life is not my own.

Thomas @368, douglas fir tips are nicely perfumed, but I wish there was a way to contain and imbibe the smell released when one splits a chunk of green doug fir wood.

Busy day, here, having lost yesterday to a stupid toothcleaning. I've now learned how long my camera battery holds a charge: long enough for me to take a dozen photos up by the house and then balance and totter down to the lower garden and no longer have the juice to take photos of the Chimonanthus. Bother. Two months, minus sufficient time to do what I'd wanted to do all day.

My best breakfall was one I had to take on concrete, on a San Francisco sidewalk, when my dog came around the corner at a dead run and took my legs right out from under me. I went down as I was taught, and arose without a scratch or bruise, laughing. Of course, that was about 30 years ago.

Alpha is a ten-day writing workshop for young writers of SFFH. This year's been a little disorganized, but it's always a fun time. Pro writers, near-constant* conversations about stories and writing, hanging out with people who read the same books you did, and lots of writing. If you are a young writer, if you know a young writer, send in a story.

Alphans are going to rule the world someday.

*there is a short time between 'last one goes to bed' and 'I have consumed enough waffle to crit something'.

I like fragrant roses; hips are a bonus. Shrubs would be better than climbers. If I ever do any non-internet shopping, I'd love to have your company. (Alas. When I lived in Waco, I didn't know I wanted to grow roses, and even if I had, I couldn't have brought them with me.)

They're aptly named -- they will paralyze you.

Rose de Rescht can also take a little shade, but it blooms best in full sun- it's a bigger shrub than Stanwell Perpetual and needs heading back so that it blooms in clusters rather than singly. It's deep rose-red and damask scented.

I should really put all the rose photos in my LJ in memories, shouldn't I? I think you could grow both Old Pink China, the ultimate Texas pioneer rose, and Ghislaine de Feligonde, an apricot noisette "rambler" which really behaves like a small shrub, in zone 6. If you go back to June of 2008 in my journal, there's also a photo of my favorite yellow rose, the single Golden Wings. If you've got the room and can put a couple of days a year into maintenance, there is nothing on earth like the big damask called Ispahan; also, if you want a cabbage rose of the oldest fashioned sort, get Rosa Centifolia and whack it back to the ground after it blooms, because otherwise it gets blackspot in the natural course of things, and it blooms on new wood anyway.

There's a pretty species rose worth growing for foliage, canes and hips- Rosa glauca. It has star-like little bright pink single flowers and blue, blue foliage and canes, with vermillion hips in the fall. If you want hips to eat, look at Rosa rugosa varieties but be aware it is a seaside rose and doesn't like damp feet or alkaline soil.

To be getting on with.

Would swashbuckling fencing look out of place here? Most definitely. That said, this would look just as out of place in an Errol Flynn film.

I'm definitely going to rent this now.

It's too bad we're going skiing this weekend, or I'd be making a road trip in the opposite direction.

Switching into copyeditorial/pedantic mode, you probably mean 'misprision', as in "Misprision of felony" … Mmmm. Does roll off the tongue when linked to Certain Persons.

(One of the enjoyable parts of Making Light is that I can use otherwise dormant parts of my vocabulary. (Another is expanding it, and also knowledge.))

Timber bamboo: D'you think it'd grow OK in a planter/tub in my tiny, not all that sunny Sydney, yard or deck? (See #15, supra)

Oh, Diatryma, you are strumming my strings. We know what to do. We know what the steps are. And yet, and yet ... we do not. I've been considering why.

Weather? Astrology? Zeitgeist? Feels like the entire world is holding its breath just now. Maybe I'm afraid of upsetting the balance.

I've been saying this for years: "If I ever get organized, I'm going to be dangerous." And I am more organized now (and in better physical condition) than at any previous point in my life. Maybe I'm afraid that the next step is going to be the one that starts the avalanche.

And I'm not confident in my ability to bodysurf with boulders. Do I need more confidence? Or is it a reasonable caution?

Pendrift @ 369 Making Light forces me to hold myself to higher standards and it takes me ages to finalize a comment

Boy howdy. In the time it took me to compose this, the comment count went from 369 to 452.

I'm trying not to be frog soup.

I am probably not the first person to wonder if I'd be better at aikido slightly drunk. It's not only possible but kind of likely-- I think too much-- right up until things got very very ugly.

If at first you don't succeed ... redefine success? I used to write poetry, and I put everything into it, and one day, it just stopped. I kept writing for months, but the poetry wasn't happening for me any more. So I had to let it go.

The love of my life came down with cancer, and I cared for her at home for the last year of her life. When I reached the bottom of my reserves, I just started digging. It was years before I was back up to empty.

Did I fail? No. I did the best I could with what I had, and when I had to let go, I did.

Damned if I've been able to fling myself into anything since with that utter abandon, though. I don't think I'm afraid. It just isn't the right thing to do right this minute.

Maybe the problem is in thinking it's a problem. Maybe it's just a fact. The great thing about facts, in this material world, is that eventually the odds are good that they'll be different.

After Cara died, for years my mantra was "I will not always feel this way." It worked because it was true.

takuan: That depends on what you count as either typical, or a duel. The motives were different. Judicial duels were something else altogether (and there's a wonderful account of the last one fought in France). No matter the outcome in the lists, one of the two was going to die, on the field or the gallows.

Tended to concentrate the mind.

Caroline: From both a preference, and from attitudes (generally) I'd reccomend aikido. There are some aggressive dojos out there, but most are more contemplative. My present affiliation is with Aikido Ai, in Whittier Calif. They are, for an aikido dojo, fairly martial, and the only way to know is probably by comparing them to other dojos.

It's a defensive art, at core (though one can induce an attack, and then get very unpleasant to the person who decides to accept the invitation), and ukemi (the art of self-protective falling) is paramount. Excercises are shared, there is no, "aggressor" (though many see nage in that role; it's not quite the relationship). Esp. if one has doubts about falling, it's a very good place to begin.

Lizzy L: Ukemi is what keeps me coming back. The sense of, I don't know... smooth inevitabilty to the rising mat, and the slowness with which it can come... as well as suddening wondering where the smooth support of it under one's flat body came from. That's a rush. Being nage is different, and while performing a technique well is a fun thing (esp. when doing rondori or [moreso] jiu-waza) it's not got the same ease of entering selfless time.

The best roll I ever did was having a skateboard come to a dead stop... I (of course) continued to proceed. That was best because all I got was a skinned elbow. That too was about 30 years ago.

The most amusing was when Leus dropped me from his shoulder. Smooth forward roll, and to my feet; one motion.

Steve C. Ah... like a French 75 (equal parts champagne and brandy). Like being hit with a shell from one.

takuan: Don Fitch (commenter here) taught me (he having spent a lifetime as a professional gardener at aboreta) explained to me that when planting the size of the hole will (for some years) be the same as a pot. So dig it wide and deep.

I would watch it back to back with Ladyhawke, one of a handful of medieval movies in which (a) the non-period score works (in all its '80s syntho-riffic glory) and (b) the climactic battle features people actually getting tired (even if the swords look an awful lot like stainless steel wall hangers). Plus, even if the story wasn't taken from a period source, it's got the right moves for a ballad: stalwart knights unjustly slain, star-crossed lovers, clever outlaws, corrupt prelates, drunken monks, riding a good steed on a mission of doom, little homely touches, and the occasional psycho.

* Just saw another version of Cyrano, and that damn feather's stuck in my mind.
** And he wouldda been a contender for the first half too, but for John Houston, in particular The Treasure of Sierra Madre.

And while I'm here, I have to agree about Ladyhawke as well. It's been one of my guilty pleasures (because so many people foam at the mouth when they hear it mentioned) for many years; I own a copy, and play it once in a while when I'm feeling particularly in need of being reminded that there is nobility in the universe.

Nonsense, Rusty Nails aren't paralyzing, and even Irish Mistakes -- Irish Mist and vodka -- aren't!

Boy is my face red. That's a factoid I was told some years ago and have been happily repeating ever since without ever checking. My apologies for the thoughtless dissemination of duff data.

re 450: Corridor is in AA County, being at the far eastern end of Maryland City.

On a totally unrelated note, last night's PBS show about the career of Jerome Robbins had a wonderful line from an ex-collaborator about Robbins' perfectionism: "He wouldn't take yes for an answer."

Does anyone remember "Robin of Sherwood"? You bet I do. I loved that series and my heart fluttered over Robin (Michael Praed in Dynasty did not have the same effect).

The Patrick Bergin film was MUCH better than the Cosner - pity it was overshadowed.

And yes, I really like "Robin and Marion" as well.

Why yes, Robin Hood was my favourite legendary character when I was a child. He's why I took up archery when I had the opportunity at university.

I'm sorry if I didn't make myself clear enough or inadvertently misinterpreted you. Still, I think that the answer to your question is because it's showy. It looks like what's on TV and the movies, and it looks flashy and dangerous. That it's not practical is rather lower down on the list than the fact that it kind of looks like it is.

Jenny Islander @ 461 and Bruce Cohen @ 462:

I guess it's time to bump Ladyhawke up from where it's been languishing at the bottom of my Netflix queue, then. I loved his Three Musketeers and Four Musketeers, although I haven't seen them in a while.

I did see the very beginning of the Kostner film (it was on TV). Dover to Nottingham in a day? I don't think so.

Archery always wound up conflicting with other classes that I needed more, unfortunately. Maybe once I'm better at dancing I'll take up archery and fencing.

Serge @ 478 You mean the one with the incredibly accurate portrayal of Eleanor d'Aquitaine's personality? I have it on DVD. It's one of my favorite sets.

Your comment reminds me of one of my