Go green with Google's new PowerMeter Times Online Take a look at an interesting article we found.
Tips on working smart in the yard San Francisco Chronicle Take a look at an interesting article we found.
Summer Reading: Gardening Books The New York Times Take a look at an interesting article we found.
Sixty-five years ago, two teens from the same North Carolina community waited off the coast of France for the start of an invasion that turned the tide of World War II.
June 07, 2009
I've gone to my farm in Kentucky for the weekend. It's a great place to relax, do a little hard physical labor, and forget about the rest of the world. If you don't have such a place, I highly suggest you get one.
In the meantime, here's a little something that I found for you that might bear fruit.
See you on Monday.
J. Peterman
From: The Sentinel
Planting In June garden-helper.com/ Take a look at an interesting article we found.
The Incredible, Edible Front Lawn time.com Take a look at an interesting article we found.
The Victory Garden victoryseeds.com Take a look at an interesting article we found.
still thinking about today...
i think first i'll plant a victory garden in my soul. planting, hope early, joy to be picked daily from the beauty of this planet we call earth. the fruit of my labor to be peace and happiness. somewhere in the middle, perhaps, a twinkie or two to be harvested.
Check out the Obama White House Vegetable Garden: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/ariel-schwartz/sustainability/recreate-obama-vegetable-garden-online-plangarden Not called a Victory Garden but there is a long history of one being at the White House http://www.vimeo.com/1767242
I come from a family of gardeners. Everyone in the family gardened for as long as I can remember. When I was little, I used to help both sets of grandparents maintain their gardens. Mum's parents grew vegetables & squashes, Dad's parents grew fruit. My parents grew vegetables and wanted to raise chickens in their old VW Bus. When I growing up, I lived in an Italian Neighborhood; all the other children I played with had families with herbs & vegetable gardens behind their houses. The grandparents gardens are gone now, but the old neighborhood and my parents still garden, although they still haven't started raising chickens and the VW Bus is long gone. Right now, this grow-your-own mentality seems incredibly in vogue, but I fear it is merely a passing faze, much like Pilates, Tai Bo, Atkins, etc. When I read the article, I was surprised to see no mention of the back-to-the-earth movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. These people gardened as well, and it's a little more recent history, with the wonderful ability to actually ask the majority of those who were there, rather than asking the few remaining children (now grown up) of the owners of the victory gardens.
Peppers, basil, mint for drinks and one heirloom tomato this year in containers for my shady garden. Call it minimalist.
What cuukoo said.
Cuukoo, you rock!
oh i like rocks and roll too! lot's of that planted in my garden.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFaBKg5iEwU
Daniel Zev,
Enjoyed your comments except for a small point of disagreement: You are correct in observing that few actual Victory Gardeners remain, but a lot of their children are still above ground.
I know this because we often bump into each other of a Wednesday or Saturday at the downtown produce market where persons fit and flexible enough to rise from a stoop, without seeing stars, offer a wonderful selection of home-grown fruits and vegetables with just enough soil clinging to them to remind us of our youth.
Cuukoo1,
What Swami, who still owes the Eye some explanation from yesterday, said.
All the grand thoughts so eloquently expressed by my neighbors require no further embeishments. The first post set the bar high, has struck me dumb... speechless..... well almost. I just want to say I love the already expressed sentiment of a victory garden of the soul, it all starts there.. Peace out
Saw Swami in the dining car of Thesepia train. He was eating cherry pie served by an insouciant yet hard working divorced waitress with a lot on her mind. He still wasn't talking...
it's a full moon ! a little van morrison in the club car after dinner tonight?
Penn,
Oh my God! It sound as though our boy has has wandered into the web of that infamous black widow, Roxy, whose garden path is paved with the broken hearts of men up and down the line and whose succulent melons are watered with their tears.
It is probably too late now.
make sure you have a little dirt on ya, so you don't float away.
ill timed post, by me (the last one, u'da had to've been thinking about stoneys comment to daniel, i guess i'm old, technically.).....being outside is my explanation, pondering in the soil, nippin, tuckin and plucking, here and there. spectacular courtship and territorial displays of the hummingbirds. i have no excuse.
cuukoo1,
Strangely enough, I got it. It's a marvelous night for a moonwalk.
wonderful remark wild night cleaning windows
heyhol101 ~ Doing a container garden myself this years ~ I have already killed the Basil hopefully am reviving the Thyme & praying that the Sweet Basil still may make it. Al lthi week after only 1 week. This should be an interesting summer project.
reading up on how to pasteruise the bounty from the victory gardens, think i stumbled on why the hummingbirds are so active. i make my own. hmmmm. boot leg hummingbird food.
The rabbits ate my carrots; the kids climbed all over the peach tree and killed that; I'm down to begging home-grown tomatoes from our children. Pathetic, but it works :)
rings90--take heart, I killed the rosemary after only three days. I allowed for sun but not for rain--I have to grow my own basil or I will be held in disgrace by my social class, so I too am praying that it will make it this year.
heyhol ~ I have bought a new plant maybe this one will be a little stronger... I will welcome any recipes you have that calls for fresh Basil ~ this is my first time growing it & I am unsure exactly what I plan to use it in.. I couldn't find rosemary but just as well it may have gone the same way as the basil did.
Gardens.... I remember my mom starting me at age four with snap beans, marigolds and zinnias.... cute little loops coming out of the earth fascinated me!------- My grandfather bought the empty lot next to his Victorian home in the 1920s (so no one could build right next door ;-). And during the Depression, though he too was unemployed (no one needed lawyers!), his seven kids and that land provided food for the family. And sometimes he's send his sons out with baskets full of extra produce with strict warnings to leave them on specific folks's front doorsteps and to get away unobserved..... ----- And my first big garden, in back of the house in Halesworth, England, with the cold, damp wind blowing in from the North Sea a few miles away, clouds scudding by, and a fine drizzle coming down. It was perfect weather for brassicas, especially brusssels sprouts.... Memories!
Stoney, If anyone has an antidote to the poison of a black widow... Swami would. I bet he got delayed, and is dancing in the club car to M.r Morrison's full Moon.
When Ronald Reagan was president, there came a day when he underwent colonoscopy. The removal of a single polyp from the Presidential colon got more TV and print media attention worldwide than did the fact that on the same day, the Australian prime minister went swimming in coastal waters and was eaten alive by a shark!
Since that time public officials, or want-to-be public officials, have been chintzier about making their medical issues public. Bill Clinton's medical records were never released, and a former Arkansas state trooper who refused to be named stated this this was because Clinton had required treatment for one or another varieties of the clap.
The full extent of W's addiction proclivities was never made public. If they had been presented, along with data about the incredibly high rate of recidivism among cocaine abusers, who he have been elected? He had a classic group of enablers-as-handlers in the WH. Maybe my mind is too jaded, but "clearing out brush at the ranch in Crawford" started to sound very like a euphemism for drying out.
McCain divulged his treatment history regarding melanoma, but this raised more questions than it answered. Given the left temporal lesion's lack of depth, and absence of sentinel nodes, why were 23 nodes dissected anyway? Why was a head CT never made public? Because, I suspect, it shows extensive white-matter disease in the brain. To my eye, McCain had features of vascular dementia on the campaign trail, including a species of thought paucity and monotony of sentence contruction as well as disinhibition (e.g., when he referred to B.O. as "that one.") Insiders in his campaign made description of his daily regimen, and it sounded very like, to me, a routine designed to hide sundowning. He ate supper at 4 p.m., and wanted/needed to be in bed shortly thereafter. Use of "psychic energizers" (such as modafinil) for nighttime debates or events was extensively rumored.
Comes now before us a person being vetted by Congress for a highly highly visible and important job, one that could have her functionally writing opinions in wet concrete that will forever alter life in the U.S.
Does Sonia Sotomayor's medical history warrant consideration in her bid to become a SCOTUS justice? It does.
And should what is known and what is easily inferred about her medical history keep the post from becoming hers? It should indeed. In my opinion.
Judge Sotomayor is 54 years old, and has had type I diabetes since age 8. While many justices of the same age could be appointed to SCOTUS and earnestly have their best judiciary years in front of them, the same absolutely cannot be said of Judge Sotomayor, for whom the overwhelming majority of her tenure years in this life are gone.
Based on anthropometric conisderations, her hypertension and her dyslipidemia, I assert three very critical things:
(1) that she has type II diabetes as well as type I. She requires insulin, but is metabolically refractory to its action.
(2) that she has non-alcohol steatohepatitis to an advanced degree now, and that if appointed to the SCOTUS, would have a 30-35% likelihood of developing features of liver failure during her term.
(3) that she has obstructive sleep apnea. People with OSA rarely get into REM sleep; the result is horrible chronic daytime somnolence. This can be managed by a nighttime breathing device called CPAP, but we don't know whether she uses CPAP, or requires daytime stimulants to promote wakefulness.
With her longstanding diabetes:
(1) a major cerebral or cardiac vascular event could occur at ANY time now, and she is a very very high risk for these.
(2) why in the world is she not being treated by insulin pump? Je ne comprende.
(3) Bindness and kidney failure could come about at any time in her term.
A SCOTUS justice is basically being appointed for his or her brain (I think back to some old Star Trek episode where a planet's ruling council is just a collection of a few brains kept properly liqueifed, and with electrodes attached, all under a big glass dome.) And I see several things that could affect that brain's ability to function at ANY time:
(1) hypoglycemia
(2) day time somnolence
(3) uremia from renal insufficiency
(4) stroke, or worse, multiple small strokes.
(5) portsosystemic encephalopathy from liver failure; this often malingers in many people for years as a state of prodromal minimal encephalopathy, where minor deficits appear, but the patient can overall appear to have good global function.
If what I have said has offended anyone, that is not my intent. Some people may be accusing me in their minds of medical discrimination. But for some jobs, medical discrimination is highly necessary and widely practiced: airline pilots, for example; doctors; in some cases, attorneys; in all cases, for the US military. I am not saying that people with these conditions, which almost certainly includes some PE readers, are bad people or undesirable people or people to be doubted and never trusted. And I am certainly not saying such people have no value. They have great value as parents, community leaders, teachers, people who can inspire others to take good care of their bodies.
But we are referring to a potential supreme court judge. I can state with good authority that during the next 5 years she has a greater than 50% likelihood of experiencing a medical adversity that will affect her ability to function cognitively as a judge for the nation's highest court.
For these reasons, her nomination fills me with a sense of alarm, and I absolutely cannot support it.
If I have offended anybody, please know that there was no such intention. And I don't have any narcissistic nuts and bolts that have me pinned and wriggling on this POV. Debate or disagreement is welcome, as the issue at hand is serious.
Penn,
Thanks for the subtle reminder that i neglected to provide attribution for Van Morrison's most famous line. Evidently, he is not always drunk or it doesn't always matter.
Swami,
As Olivia has recently asked, could you be a little more precise?
So, Swami? Are you for, or against life tenure? And what about the mind of 89 year olds? Maybe I should just ask you to dance....
I am not really in favor of automatic life tenure. It should be considered case by case. Many justices have resigned with great grace.
The great thing about life is that no generalization can be applied to 89-year-old minds. The fact is that after the age range of 40-50, we all take extremely divergent paths as to how we age. It's partly genetic, partly post-genomic, partly based on telomere length, muchly based on lifestyle, and probably monumentally based on habits of mind, how mind processes stress, how curious the mind is. My father has been a lifelong professional photographer, and and at age 73, is still innovating, improving, and reveling in what he can do with a camera. He has incredible passion about photography, and so many times has strongly hinted he'd love to go overseas with me just for a good shooting trip. I have honestly thought about setting up a co-trip with him to, say, Mongolia,Vietnam, Ethiopia. He can't afford the airfare, but I can. My mother is the same age, and acted as if broken by life in her thirties til now, and could almost pass for my father's mother.
Stoney--I am definitely not trying to be a chest-pounding terror, and psychometric testing of me shows strongly that I am a non-judging sort of person. Sotomayor's liabilities in no way make me think less of her as a person, and in all other ways she's unusually well-qualified. I am in no way drawing any sort of strength from her medical misfortune. What I am asserting medically about her is unique to her, and not universally applicable to people with diabetes.
I just think the truth about things is something we should always be mightily and exhaustively trying to find.
It is an honor to be part of this neighborhood. Dream sweet.
Swami,
I merely jest with you, old friend. Actually, it is a time to be judgemental at least for the judiciary committee. Nine persons, each of whom, effect all of our lives for good or ill and for a long, long time. No amount of caution is too much.
Oddly, it is easy for me to agree with her that with her life experiences, she probably would be better than a lot of well-to-do white guys
Swami ~ I hear you & totally understnad you ~ The reports that Justice Ginsberg has Pancreatic Cancer & is still on the Court also raises a red flag to me. Last year I spent taking care of G-ma who was suffering from Pancreatic Cancer & the Meds she was on put her WAY OUT of the loop many of times...
I'm not big on the appointment as I do not agree with some of her already written opinions... Yet the issues you bring up are very valid no matter in which political direction you happen to follow.
"When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands."
"Sustainable," the new buss word of the 21st century,Sustainable Agriculture is important to our well being.....the loss of bee colonies caues increase prices on fruits, vegetables, & honey and further adds to the problem with hunger in every state in America.
BUY FRESH FARM/GARDEN FOOD!!!
Dedicate, Strongly Advocate, and provide healthy
and sustainable environments in which we can thrive...
Many thanks, Swami, many thanks. And too, what Penn said: It is indeed an honor to be a member of this group.
rings90-the best fresh basil recipe I have found exists in Fields of Greens by Annie Somerville for Penne with marinated tomatoes, basil and garlic bread crumbs. Note that the tomatoes must be perfect to carry this recipe but the basil--or lack of--can be assisted with a judicious amount of tapenade or plain old pesto.