Does anyone have plums this year? Aha, Maribeth does. So where are mine? Our two big trees, which gave us an excess of Italian prunes beyond giving away last year, have nothing this year. No obvious pests, they flowered all right -- I have no idea what's up. My parents, who live fairly near us in Seattle but not within likely bee-travel distance, also have very few plums this year. What could be the problem?
Day lilies are easier to buy if you see the really exotic-looking ones and think they'll still be easy to grow, I think. And I'm fearfully fascinated by the flier I just got from Breck's offering dinner-plate-sized ones.
My recent architectural salvage has been bits of glass that seem to have come in the gravel to a construction site next to where I'm temping. Lots of stained glass, in lovely blues and greens and swirled yellows, and, more mysteriously, chunks of what was evidently very thick glass, at least an inch. Having just read Mongo at the time, I picked glass out of gravel unfazed, even when the folks working on the site stood near me a little pointedly. I'm thinking I might make a mosaic of some kind, though part of me says, "What, I have to make something?"
Tina, you didn't tell us what kind of animal fat! And how do you make llama sausages anyway?
Meredith, "creative reinterpretations of canon" are one of the main reasons I read fanfic. Reading the very occasional story that is completely bizarre but in some way works is such an amazing (-ed) feeling.
I'm with the others who want to see all the headers and read the mail as plain text. That's the easiest way -- well, no, the easiest way is to know whether the person receiving the mail has that sort of account at all, but it's very easy.
Eight of ten isn't too bad, though, and I only missed through being over-cautious. I do have an awful lot of family members who need to try this. Thanks.
The phrases I noticed recently as confusing to non-native English speakers were at the time, referring to a past condition, and at the moment, referring to the immediate present. "Time" and "moment" used alone mean very nearly the same thing, so I can only imagine how much people stumble over the distinction.
Mary Kay,
It's always been Nordstrom for narrow shoes here. My feet will fit medium-width shoes now, but when I was a kid my family had to bring me to Seattle (from Poulsbo, a ferry trip plus half an hour) every time I needed shoes. This would have been fine had we been able to afford it.
Have you tried Yazdi for dressy clothes in Seattle? The unfortunately named Yazdi Too, in Wallingford Center, is the plus-size specialty store of the chain, and usually has most of the same selection the main stores have. Yazdi's heyday, in my opinion, was when they had the soft, ankle-length knit circle skirts with pockets, but they had a lot of bright, interesting stuff last time I was in.
The orchestration is creepy, but I actually like the way different colors are available in different years. I generally have enough clothes, so finding a t-shirt in the new hip color that actually looks good is just a bonus. It'll probably look fine with black, and maybe even with some members of the medium-dark green family that's the other mainstay of my wardrobe.
If I want something in a particular color, there's always some kind of undyed cotton available as a base, and Procion dyes come in the same colors all the time.
I'm astounded and grateful that someone else posted about Cub's "New York City" being the original. Thank you, Tim Walters.
The "Cricket, Cricket, I'm on Fire" name is from a particular game we played here in Seattle, in which that wound up being one of the end (or maybe just intermediate) phrases. The original was, of course, "Liar, liar, pants on fire". Poor drawing skills are half the fun: lyre -> cricket. The other half is watching the way people's minds work, what they focus on, what is added or subtracted from a drawing as it goes, and what's a stable meme.
One refinement: If the paper's originator doesn't happen to recognize it, we keep going because it'll just get funnier.
Kathy Li wrote:
I was equally drop-jawed and appalled watching Morimoto pouring Coca-Cola to make a dessert out of the secret ingredient in the Iron Chef Natto episode.
Natto with Coke?!
Good gods.
Even my leg hair stood up, reading that. I don't think that's ever happened before.
Yes! on the sweet potatoes. Sheesh, I do not like them, and marshmallows are not going to help. I never liked onions, either, and saying "but these onions are sweet!" was not convincing. Sure, they're sweet, and they taste like onion.
I like cilantro well enough in small doses, but it can certainly be overdone. The weird, seemingly genetic flavor turnoffs I have are mangoes (yes, I have had them fresh in Hawaii, and they still taste bad) and a couple of the solanaceous fruits. Most peppers are fine, tomatoes and tomatillos are lovely, but bell peppers and ground cherries have a particular nauseating flavor that bothers me so much I can't eat pizza that once had any bell pepper on it.
Teresa, so glad you're feeling better. Mine don't usually get really painful, but every once in a while they're that bad. I hate to hear about anyone being that miserable.
Graydon, thank you so much for posting about olfactory hallucinations! I've had those, and never managed to figure out what could be causing them. My doctor hadn't given me a migraine diagnosis at that point, so who knew it could have to do with the sparks I kept seeing?
Many comments ago, Xopher wrote:
Granted, a known fictional source IS "evidence against."
I disagree, actually. As Lenora Rose said, it might be just confusion avoidance, but I find that looking at deity through filters helps me feel closer to it, and overtly fictional characters work just as well for me as, say, the fictionalized Greek gods I've read about. In my opinion, some face of God is Charlie, if somebody thinks so.
Thank you for the post, Teresa, particularly the Burgess Shale and the creed that's a little different from the one I know.
Stephan wrote:
When push comes to shove, there are *lots* of Americans with all the raw brainpower of canned pineapple.
I've started to think that people aren't really as dumb as all that. Example: I grew up in rural Washington state, am reasonably intelligent, and had one militantly Democratic and one apathetic parent. Despite my parents, I grew up thinking that taxes were a mean thing the government did to us for no reason. That way of thinking just crept in. The idea is probably more prevalent where I was than in many places, but there are a lot of places like that, and a lot of people never happen to examine their knee-jerk reactions, or don't have enough counterexamples.
A lot of people start out indoctrinated like that. Then they don't learn to value information, so they don't seek it out, so they're more vulnerable to the manipulation that's being pulled on them. And it is manipulation. If immunity to being fooled is the standard for intelligence, I know I don't make it either. There's a problem, but it's not that they have no brain power, it's that they don't care about being informed.
(Sorry for the poor composition today. It's hard to type with a big bandage on the cat-mauled finger.)
I laughed out loud at a lot of them, but the Iron Chef one (on this page) is my favorite.
What bothered you the most about this letter?
The second sentence, because it inferred that an offer was available
If this is an example of the usage in the manuscript, I can see why it might be rejected.
I'm not any kind of writer, but this whole post makes me feel like finishing up a story or two and sending them out. Heck, I compulsively proofread everything down to cereal boxes. I can write a paragraph that's all about the same thing. Even if my plotting were terrible, I'd at least make it to number 7.
I'm just starting to really get into knitting, so I'll be back to comment in about a couple of years when I've played with all those links. Thanks!
(Have I posted here before? Hi.)
I'm heading toward a BS in "plant biology", since the University of Washington no longer has a botany department, but I didn't have any botany courses this quarter, so thanks for the question. My answer is "Give them time." The Rosaceae are a fairly recent evolutionary development, and, as people have been saying, right now they mostly like to live in temperate regions. Unlike the Asteraceae, which are also a young family but often have windborne seeds, most Rosaceae seeds are distributed by animals due to some really nifty fruit types. So, while the Rosaceae are very successful, you don't tend to find them jumping quite as far. Birds migrate, but they certainly don't keep their gut contents with them the whole time.
And if you're just talking about the genus Rosa, that's 2x10^2 species instead of 2x10^3 species, and the chances of one of them adapting all the way through tropicality and back to temperate life are that much less. Guns, Germs, and Steel is a pretty good reference for that sort of thing, as Yahmdallah said, though it doesn't go into much detail.
The book I used for species counts and to confirm my recollection of trends in the family was Wendy B. Zomlefer's Guide to Flowering Plant Families, which is a wonderful taxonomy resource. I think it cost me about $75, but it's a wonderful resource.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 3 |
| 2004 | 15 |
| 2003 | 1 |
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