The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Joy Freeman:

Lila@290: That was my thought when I found the patent info online. Perhaps an uncharitable one, though. Perhaps the author of that article wanted to keep people from paying the sometimes outrageous prices that some people pay on eBay for hedgeapples, which probably aren't as effective as other, cheaper "green" solutions closer to home. But if that's the case, he might have said that; his wording seems a little too strong.

Lee@292: They shrivel up. They only last 2-3 months (depending on where you are) but usually by that time, it's winter and the insect problem isn't so...problematic. I was told to put the fruits on something (such as plastic wrap) so they won't harm the wood or whatever they're placed on. One great-aunt said she cut them in half to use outdoors (at the base of trees for some particular sort of insect pest? don't remember details) but indoors they're used whole.

Frankly, I doubt they're all that effective--certainly not compared to the concentrated chemicals (naturally derived and otherwise) available today. But historically even a slight efficacy would have made it a no-brainer. These thorny trees were widely planted in pasturelands to make thick, impenetrable hedgerows (before barbed wire) and so there was always a great deal of fruit just lying around on the ground (and inedible to humans). As a family put up their crops for the winter, placing hedgeapples in the barn, attic, cellar, etc. would have been a smart use of a plentiful resource.

I don't have the scientific chops for this, so I thought I'd ask the assembled wisdom of the fluorosphere.

As tends to happen every year, yesterday somebody on a local (Arkansas) email discussion list asked where she could find hedge apples (aka Osage oranges or horse apples or bodark balls). She'd heard these bumpy green fruits have traditionally been used as an insect repellent, and she wanted to try it out.

So somebody else posted a link to a pdf Facts and Myths Associated with "Hedge Apples" published in 1997 by the Department of Horticulture at Iowa State University. The article says:

The use of hedge apples as a pest solution is communicated as a folk tale complete with testimonials about apparent success. However, there is an absence of scientific research and therefore no valid evidence to confirm the claims of effectiveness. Although insect deterrent compounds have been extracted from hedge apples in laboratory studies, these do not provide a logical explanation about why hedge apples would work as claimed. At this time, there is nothing to recommend the use of hedge apples for pest controll.

I was curious if there had been further study since then, so I did some Googling. Turns out this article is linked to from the Wikipedia article on the Osage orange and I see it used on various sites as an authoritative refutation when people tout the insect repellent properties of these fruits. But further search led me to read of several articles (full text not available online--to me, anyway) by other people at the same university studying the use of Osage oranges and their extracts in repelling various insects. They had even filed for at least one patent concerning the extracts from this fruit.

So I started to write the original article's author to point out that there has since been new research that does "recommend the use of hedge apples for pest control" but then I reread the above-quoted paragraph and realized he was almost certainly aware of them--he refers to extract studies---but doesn't think they "provide a logical explanation about why hedge apples would work as claimed."

His logic seems flawed to me: (1) Generations of people report insect repellent properties of these fruits; (2) scientists note these anecdotes and study extracts from the fruits, finding significant insect deterrent effects; (3) this author concludes the extracts do have deterrent effects but there's no good reason to think the fruits themselves would be useful for insect control.

Am I missing something?

Abi,

I didn't *quite* get your point on the first read-through, but I read it within the context of Making Light and understood approximately what you were getting at. Your clarification is a good thing (and very graciously offered), but you certainly shouldn't be criticized for making others feel uncomfortable, when that was obviously not your intent, much less for attributing to them only a few emotions without nuance.

Please don't stop feeling comfortable posting on the fly. I'm sure Mia never intended that, just as you never intended to impugn her for lack of an avatar.

Oh, goody, I was hoping for an open thread! I'm not a wine drinker, really, but after hearing somebody mention a Bonny Doon wine named "Bouteille Call," I checked out the Bonny Doon Vineyard website. Fun website overall, with a great theme, art, and copy, but I especially liked the video Vive le Screwcap (under "Dooniverse: Learn Our Ways").

Juli, I Googled the phrase and found it referred to as Czech on most sites that came up. However, I did find one site that claimed the phrase is the same in both languages.

I also learned it's referring to one sticking one's own finger down one's own throat, when I had previously been visualizing a self-defense move rather than a gagging gesture. Heh.

Xopher, yes the second is Welsh, as I said (amidst too many parenthetical phrases--a weakness of mine) in my comment. Here's the original site where I found both phrases.

PiscusFiche & Ellen, Aureola is a great word! And I love the vowels-in-order game. I don't think I've ever seen or heard Suoidea, but Googling it led me to a bunch of fun word sites. The word I was thinking of was evacuee.

One of the sites I found had the following two sentences, which looked, at least at first glance, to be disemvowelled.

"Strch prst skrz krk" and "Bydd y cyllyll yn y cwpwrdd wrth y bwrdd."

Of course, they turned out to be Czech (in which r is a vowel; translation: "Put your finger through your throat") and Welsh (translation: "The knives will be in the cupboard by the table"). Anyone else see a trend? I think Teresa's hitting on disemvowelling verbally violent commenters was truly inspired.

Good point, PiscusFiche, and I do see the problem, but I can visualize something that would fill in the more obvious words and give, say, drop-down menus for the words that have multiple possibilities. And those could be ordered by frequency or, if the program was pretty sophisticated, by potential relevance.

But really, I suppose an automatic process would spoil half the fun of trying to puzzle it out.

Speaking of puzzlers: what word has seven letters and four syllables but only two consonants?

I suppose there have to be multiple answers to this, but I heard a particular word on the radio recently and it occurred to me that that's a lot of syllables for just two consonants.

Now if somebody would just come up with an autoreemvoweller. Or am I the only one who likes to try to read the disemvowelled ones? Some of them are pretty slow going.

Consultant's Creed

Then, obviously, what Patrick meant to say earlier was:

From another o' th' many books ne'er cracked at Yale by that horn swogglin' landed-lubber who ortin' t' be keel hauled:

When resources be exhausted, then levies be made under pressure. When power an' resources be exhausted, then th' homeland be drained. Th' common swabbies be deprived o' seventy percent o' the'r budget, while th' government’s expenses fer equipment amount t' sixty percent o' th' budget. Ya lily livered scurvy cur!

— Black Sam Rackham
aka Pirate Butch the Hatless
aka Mighty Ripper
Th' Art o' War

Yammer on!

I'd fallen behind on this thread and finally got the time to catch up tonight. I see why so many people are so irritated with (okay, a mild term) Greg London, but I also see his point regarding skepticism. In fact, I just spent half and hour arguing Greg's side (on a couple of points, anyway) with my husband. His "skeptical epistemology" is appealing--even kind of fun as you get to play prosecutor, defender, judge, and jury as you figure out which side of the argument has the burden of proof and all those other courtoomy concepts--but I think he needs to reconsider what he'll accept as evidence.

Soon after my (now) husband and I started dating, I mentioned to him that I'd noticed as a young child that my looking toward bright sunlight or bright white artificial lights often caused a sneeze reflex. And so sometimes, when I feel the need to sneeze, I quickly turn toward the sun or a light and that helps me sneeze. He insisted that it was just coincidence. I told him I *knew* it was more. He said he'd *never* had that experience. After a couple more rounds of disagreement, he made a noncommittal this-isn't-going-anywhere noise and I grumped off, feeling as if he had called me either a liar or gullible.

No, I certainly couldn't prove a causal relationship. But *I knew* there was one, and I was as certain as I could be that it wasn't, as he once suggested, a learned response. It really rankled; didn't he think enough of my ability to observe and reason to trust me when I said I was certain about something I'd experienced and he hadn't?

Turns out that somewhere between 15 and 25% of people have this "photic sneeze reflex"--including our 2 yo daughter. My husband doesn't (no surprise, the unfeeling cad isn't ticklish either ). But you know what? Even before I had corroborating evidence that the phenomenon was a real one, I was *right* and I knew it *in my bones.*

Anyway, all that to say that just because your experiences haven't proven to your satisfaction that racism is a pervading force in our culture doesn't mean it isn't. Maybe you should allow yourself some "expert witnesses" in your courtroom of the mind. Will you consider me as one, if I tell you that racism is a pervasive condition and a founding principle of the society that I live in?

What are my credentials? After all, I'm not black. I've never had to wonder if I was pulled over by the cops for driving while black. I've never, to my knowledge, had folks cross the street to avoid me, even in my yard-hippy college days. But I have lived in a small town in Arkansas most of my life. My high school graduating class of 144 included not even one black student. My parents were careful to try to teach me that people of different races are no different from whites, but my very lack of exposure to anyone who looked different meant I was awkward around the first non-white friends I had in college. I'd like to think there's been progress throughout my adult lifetime, but even today, when I pass a cop who's stopped a car with a black or latino driver, though I *hope* it wasn't a racially motivated stop, I know there's a good chance it was. (My husband is far more likely to make that assumption; I tend to want to give the police the benefit of the doubt; he's probably right more often than I am.) I've had black friends get what seemed like heavy punishments for far lesser offenses than those my white friends only got slaps on the wrists for. I've heard cops and teachers and respected business leaders make public racist remarks with what seemed to be no fear of reprisals. I've seen a basic fear and distrust within my society of anyone who's "different," particularly those who are "taking our jobs!" It's pervasive, Greg.

Don't believe me? So am I imagining it? Am I lying? Am I just gullible? Or could I be right? Could Lydy and Lucy, and Lenora be? (No sexism intended; just a lovely alliteration.) Is there really no room in your belief system for personal testimony?

And are you so quick to tell us all that we should avoid using the word "racism" for fear of turning off our audience, but so blind that you're alienating us with your unwillingness to believe us when we talk of our own experiences and knowledge?

I have no doubt this post has holes a mile wide in it. It's late. I shouldn't post it. But here's hoping you'll actually read it before you leave for jury duty...

j h woodyatt wrote: "If I have to live down Lyndie England for the rest of my life— even though it's hard to see what else I could have done to try to prevent her and her playmates from having any chance of doing something so awful as what she did— then "the good people of Gretna" are just going to have to suck it up and take another one for the team on this horrible atrocity too."

But that's just it. When we vilify the entire citizenry, there IS a risk of creating a sense of "team" among them. Better to drive a wedge, and as Xopher said (I think), by addressing your message to the "good people" you have the opportunity to both humiliate the folks who back the cops and to appeal to the better natures of those who don't or aren't sure. And while it may seem patronizing to anyone who has any level of political sophistication, it may be simply educational to those who are truly unaware of how to object in a meaningful way.

The throw-them-all-to-the-wolves approach strikes me as a similar type of thought process as that the Gretna police chief must have undergone when he decided not only to block the bridge but also to not continue to send buses across to ferry the evacuees to a safer area.

Might it be better to disabuse than abuse those who might be unsure how to react?

Xopher,

I like it, for the most part. I think the bulldozing paragraph is a bit strong (there's probably a better use for those houses than bulldozing them, at least?), but even just as it is, it's good.

I don't know that it would get printed, as a letter to the editor. I'd contribute toward placing it as an ad in either whatever local paper might exist (my husband looked online but couldn't find one) and/or the Times-Picayune (my preference; they could use the revenue), if they'd print it. Or towards a mass mailing.

I also wondered if an online website (say: benotforgetful.org or something similar) could be set up for residents of Gretna and the other offending suburbs to sign a petition telling their city council, mayor, and police that they don't support their actions. But I don't know if that could be made to work in any useful way.

Joy

pericat wrote: "People in the South, though, struck me with their "we have always lived here" rootedness. Not "always in this region", or even state or town, but "always in this house". "

Are you speaking metaphorically? Because most of my sharecropper forebears didn't own a house, but tended to move quite a lot. My mother's parents originally came to Arkansas from Mississippi to find work, picking cotton. IIRC, they moved to California briefly during WWII, to find work in the shipyards, I think, since Grandpa was too old to fight. After the war they settled back here in Hot Springs and at some point were able to buy some land and build a house.

My dad's family came from South Carolina and Georgia and also tended to move a lot--to wherever there was work, which usually meant crops. His parents did buy 10 acres out in the sticks during the war, and they built a log house there. They built a slightly better house upslope from that one in the mid-60s, and that log house was torn down a few years ago, but my grandparents lived on the property until they died. On the other hand, their siblings were spread all over the state and region.

pericat also wrote, earlier: "I kinda doubt there's anyone in Greta who, if you said "social contract" in their hearing, would have more than the vaguest idea of your meaning."

Come on, now. Do you really believe that? (And what culture is next on our social studies syllabus?) Again, I get that hyperbole is way fun and has its uses, but how does overstating your case to this point help?

Not everybody in Gretna shares a belief system. Not everybody there is uneducated. Not everybody there is right-wing. Not everybody there is white. Not everybody who lives there is even back HOME yet. Not everybody who lives there supports the police chief's action, no matter what the city council thinks or reporters report. But many of the people who are horrified at the cops' behavior have been taught (like good Southern women...and men) not to make waves and won't have an inkling of how to change things. How can we give those people a voice rather than just trashing them as a group? Come up with a way--and put it and the necessary contact info on that postcard, along with a sincere (rather than sarcastic) message "to the good people of Gretna," and you've got a good idea...

Mary Kay, Thanks for not taking my post badly; I worried you might. You wrote: "What I see displayed by people is the lack of any significant understanding of their own and their society's attitudes and why it might be necessary to change those attitudes." Yeah, but as I've learned since I married, changing somebody else's way of thinking or doing things has to go beyond a dopeslap and saying "can't you see how stupid that is?!" And it should include trying to see things from their POV(s) so you know how to communicate with them effectively.

As those attitudes do start to change in subsequent generations (that would be my sister and I and some but certainly not all my cousins), it's nice for the converts to not constantly be told how evil our parents and grandparents were. If I want to hear hellfire and damnation preached, I'll start going to church again. I'd far rather learn to speak about the issues intelligently and in ways that have a chance to reach people (which is why I asked my husband to help me find a good clearinghouse for info on the Katrina response that *wasn't* a liberal blog like Making Light so I could send it to family members and they might actually read more than a few sentences).

Mary Kay,

You said "In the south, the social contract doesn't apply to nggrs."

Tell that to all of those in the South who *have* opened their homes and communities to evacuees.

Maybe you didn't suggest the South has a lock on racism, but it can certainly be read that you suggested everybody in the South believes "the social contract doesn't apply to nggrs." That thousand-mile-wide brush painting all Sthrnrs as having identical beliefs is what many object to. It smacks of yet another form of "those people."

I won't say there's not room for hyperbole, and I actually agree with your point, but I would have agreed more wholeheartedly if you'd been more precise in your application of it.

Like after the election (during the redstate/bluestate discussions), I keep thinking: in their current heartsick condition, should Southern liberals, who already often feel ostracized by geographic neighbors because of politics, also have to feel ostracized by political allies because of geography? Or is it time for more of that "why haven't they evacuated" business?

Anyway, this isn't meant to be a bash of any sort, just explanation. And by the way, I lived in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, as a child (am now in Arkansas, and spent some time in Atlanta), and I agree that Eastern Oklahoma is a very Southernlike region.

from: http://www.gretnapolice.com/

Mission Statement

The City of Gretna Police Department's mission is to prevent crime and maintain order while affording dignity and respect to all individuals; to protect lives and property while safe guarding constitutional guarantees, committed to the delivery of police services in the most efficient, fairest, responsive and ethical manner possible to impartially enforce all laws and ordinances, while enhancing the quality of life for all citizens through new and innovative approaches to problem solving and crime prevention; with a sensitivity to the priorities and needs of the people; and to promote professionalism and pride among employees of the City of Gretna Police Department.

The quote in that article that got me was "And to find people still there is just heart-wrenching to me because, you know, the mayor did everything he could to get them out of there." Yeah, right.

In other words, "Now is not the time to be blaming" the authorities. The people, on the other hand, are fair game.

So, I've been wondering, is it out of respect for the privacy of the husband, that only one of the various blogs discussing this matter (that I've seen, anyway) has mentioned his last name (not Olen) and occupation and body of work? Is it just because it's at least possible that he's a perfectly innocent party in all this and so shouldn't be subjected to the spotlight shining on his wife and ex-nanny? Is it just not interesting? Or is it some sort of code that I don't know about and am somehow breaking by even mentioning it?

Having just read partway through the Bitch, Ph.D. comments about the nanny blog, I vote for putting commenters' names above their words, too.

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