Good morning. The sun is out. I feel pretty good for a change. Yesterday I slogged through a small problem dispersed in a large quantity of mud that has occupied me for over a week. I made progress, in understanding its components and visualizing the desired product, and that eased my mind.
I came across this article this morning. It is by Zadie Smith. The knowledge, experience, thoughtfulness and precision she brings to the subject and the page....well, it is oddly comforting, given the intentional corruption and deformation of language we are witnessing.
"We aren’t required to be like one another or even to like one another to be in relation. We just need to be willing to create and enter spaces in which solidarity is one of the possibilities."
I thought it was the key point. If you're willing to get into conversation with people, no matter who the people are, you're going to find points of commonality. As Ms. Smith observed, one of the most basic commonalities is mortality. We're all going to die.
I'd like a frozen anything about now. There were some tree branches interfering with Juan's installing the floodlight by the driveway, so I cut them off and chopped them up to be bagged when we find the yard waste bags.
I was last at Wingspan, sigh. Sheldon was first. It might have been the first time he played since the Covid gaming blitz. He is a clever bro and is doing well at his community college classes.
Katie and I went to Buffalo Wild Wings to watch the end of The Ohio State University game with the UW Huskies. Buckeyes won 24-6.
I asked about her day. She was please I slipped a love note into her sewing stuff. She decided to join the Greenville (OH) Quilters guild. $15 a year, but the savings on fabric (Long story on how they get discounts) more than pays for itself. The quilt show she went to was held by the guild. They don't use professional judges, but rely on volunteers, so they encourage new members to submit quilts to shows. She may show my office quilt, the "Stained Glass Window". I had a visitor two weeks ago who knows quilts, and thought it was professionally done.
At project Linus, she showed up with 13 blankets to donate. Impressive! A day at the quilt retreat gave her a floral print fabric for a blanket, but Katie was stumped how to make it good for a child. The leader said they also donate to hospice, an elderly would love it, so Katie finished it today.
The Buckeyes had a slow start, with the first score a Huskies field goal, but they came back strong with a convincing win to maintain their #1 ranking.
My youngest is thinking about going to The OSU for dental school. He's a junior at UD, so still almost two years away. But as a show of confidence in him I bought an OSU golf shirt from Goodwill.
A jelly roll and hot tuna all on the morning menu at the same time? What the heck kind of joint did I stumble into here while looking for a cup of Joe? And do you at least have burgers or hot dogs for lunch, or do I need to start complaining Where's the beef?!
Armstrong Hot Five and Hot Ten, Heebie Jeebies, Muskrat Ramble..etc are delightful!!
Galena... a town in Virginia and a town in Missouri. Galena is a term ish for lead bearing deposits. Did you know that 99.99% of all Pb used is from recycled batteries? Mostly respected near Troy, Alabama.
Galax, VA is a town I went thru from Roanoke on our way to our (no longer) farm in Greenbrier County..between Lewisburg and Beckley. alas, getting to Health care down some snow and icy bound mountain roads didn't look promising for older age. And we moved west from MA to MI to CA to AZ..so we sold it. Had the best Spring flowers and trees...
Ans Willie..Ms Pinki went to a concert here maybe 7 ish years ago. Always been a huge fan.
Finally in the weather department, we had first overnight lows in the 60s. Windows opened for a while now at night
Yes, Reinhardt. Also in a big way: Bob Wills, the Western swing guy. They copy his style down to the whooping and hollering by the band leader. Asleep at the Wheel is almost primarily a Bob Wills tribute act, Ray Benson loves him so. It’s definitely a version of swing music that I like an awful lot, too.
I always loved Django's music. I discovered him in my youth, reading a Peter Frampton liner note, who credits him as an inspiration. I love Frampton's guitar work....
In college, whenever a musician passed away, I'd share that that last album was titled "X comes alive", and attracted over 11,000 converts before the record companies pulled the release back....
I built another fire in the firepit last night, burning 4 rubbermaid totes of twigs and sticks. I also burnt a 15-20 year old log. I still have hot ashes this morning, so I swept some twigs off the patio into it. Still smoking. My record for keeping coals burning is 6 days.
I haven't commented at the mothership in awhile. Ever since Charlie Kirk's death I haven't felt funny. I started to post a comment similar to one I had here about Colbert not doing a joke on a Trump meme, but then I set it aside. I'm didn't vote for Trump, but I don't hate him either, nor do I think he's a threat to democracy, a Nazi, a Hitler, etc. He's a narcissist entertainer who beat two bad candidates. I don't agree with many of his policies, but it's more meh for me. It makes it fun to poke gentle fun at him. I also think January 6th was a protest that got out of hand, not an insurrection.
Hopefully my spirits will lift and I can return to some funny lines. But it's tough swimming in turbulent waters....
RE: burning 4 rubbermaid totes of twigs and sticks
I hope you dumped the twigs and sticks out of the totes first. Burning Rubbermaids probably don't smell all that great.
I think I have your 'live coal' record beat. About 3 decades ago I purchased a 2 3/4 acre parcel of land adjacent to my existing property, a great compliment to the similar sized parcel on the opposite side of my place I'd bought and combined with my original land & home purchase a few years earlier.
It was a piece of long dormant, overgrown farmland, as was much of the property homes are situated on in these parts. I very selectively 'cleared it' of loads of scrub brush, unwanted small saplings and a few dead trees, burning it all in a shallow pit in a cleared area well away from my home or adjacent tree lines for safety. After the 1st day of combustion, I didn't have to strike a match for the rest of the time it took me to do the clearing with me working at it 3 or 4 hours a day after work, which was about 2 1/2 weeks.
Just stir the ashes, add an armful of freshly cleared combustibles and voila! A fire fit to roast a side of beef or toast a marshmallow the size of your head and then some. And a couple of times I 'took a day off' from the work, and the coals were still good to go when I needed them.
There are many “famous” BBQ places in Lockhart TX area. I remember years ago one of them moved to a new building and wanted to maintain the mojo of the original pit fire, so they shoveled the coals into a wheelbarrow and rolled it down the street to the new pit. This made for a cool photo.
I remove them from the Rubbermaid totes so I can reuse the totes! It's just a tote is a good amount to carry without straining. If I don't add any more wood they should be cool enough to put in the trash Tuesday morning.
I've kept on visiting and commenting on the mothership.
One thing I've noticed lately is that there are newbie commenters showing up--even some with a comment count in single digits--who have something insightful to say. I try to give them a like, and maybe even a reply if one is in order.
Asuncion de Maria's husband, Juan, who is a lighting installer by trade, came over this morning and installed some light fixtures for us to replace ones the construction crews broke. I had told my husband that the people who broke them should replace them, but he didn't feel like waiting forever, which I guess is fine.
Meanwhile, I sterilized and stowed away the Envirothon team's dissection tools, although I suppose we'll need them again when the middle school group dissects crayfish.
My comprehension and my accent are great. When it comes to putting a sentence together in everyday life, it's hit or miss. To be fair, Juan didn't have a Spanish word for "floodlight," either.
Back in the day, I worked with a group of mojados in the oil exploration biz in the Golden State. They weren't about to learn English, so if I wanted to hear their stories or joke around with them, I was gonna have to learn their lingo. Eventually I did, but it was the worse kind of Spanish, a regional country dialect (Sinoloa) full of slang and curse words. I got a little more refined (both personally and with the lingo) as time passed.
ha - when my kids learned Spanish in middle school, their instructor was from Spain. Then, in high school, she was from Mexico. All 3 speak pretty fluently, but I don't know about various 'lingos' they understand, nor cursing - but they pick up languages fairly easily...
Refined cursing is an art form in any language. I worked for a boss in a GM shop decades ago who did the English language proud with his inventiveness, tone and inflection when using curse words to punctuate his displeasure about something or someone or something someone did, and I often envied his talent for making the profane sound almost classy.
come on, y'all... in COLO growing up, the crawdads shared the same swimming hole we did as kids. Now, in Louisianna, where one son lives, they (& we when we visit) chow down on huge platters of boiled crawfish w/ sides of corn on the cob, sausage... Once you learn how to eat 'em, it's quick & yummy!! We have a Catfish Parlor near us, & once a year the Rod & Gun Club rents the place for an all you can eat - crawfish, corn, peel & eat boiled shrimp, sausage, beer, wine...
like little lobsters... but boiled spicy - you can order 'em at different degrees of 'heat'...
You think of them as bait and have eaten them a couple of times? I guess you were lucky that whoever offered them to you was practicing catch and release, eh?
Katie poked her head in my office last night to tell me the daughter of a HS classmate (co-valedictorian with Katie) is on "The Voice"; whereupon all four stars turned around to claim her. Her group is called DEK of Hearts (the DEK are the first initials of the three). They sang a Reba song, and Reba praised it.
So if any of you watch The Voice (I never have), and want to vote for DEK of Hearts, you should do so.
I had to laugh: we were at a reunion many years ago. So Katie began by asking me: Do you remember talking to Carl at my reunion? Ummmm, I remember going, but not much more than that.
Wonderful! I first heard this song during a Hot Tuna concert and was hooked on the blues forever afterward. I hadn't heard Morton's original version 'til now, though. Very enjoyable listening to all these versions. I hope you'll feature stuff like this in the future. Thanks!
Back to yesterday and the nut weasel, I read this year we are having a mast event. I’ve never heard that term. Apparently every few years trees produce an over abundance of nuts (seeds.) The acorns are insane this year.
I haven't noticed more nuts this year (tbf, this isn't an election year), but they came down later than normal. My hickory normally begins dropping nuts in early to mid August: This year it really wasn't until a few days before Labor day (I swept the driveway for a family gathering). Leaves have been falling for weeks, but normally they don't fall until, well, fall. But the ones up there are beginning to turn and all is well.
My favorite part of fall is driving past bean fields, as they ripen into purple and gold colors.
I wonder if I'll find a lot of acorns here. I remember some past years when I'd be sitting at the playground and getting acorns falling in my purse and bonking off my head.
The natural selection reason for the cyclical mast production is that making seeds takes a lot of energy from the trees, so they can't afford to produce that many nuts every year. Instead, they have a baseline amount, and nut-eater populations get in equilibrium with the baseline amount. Then, every few years, the trees massively overproduce, and the nut-eater population isn't big enough to eat the nuts, so more of them germinate and potentially produce new trees.
Good morning. 56 degrees, the start of a day in the 70s and sunny. Good football weather last night.
The mothership has an article documenting how the FCC has used its regulator power for political purposes for decades, going all the way back to the early days of radio in the 1920s. This did not start with Jimmy Kimmel.
The FP has an article on a movement encouraging women to give birth without medical assistance, the “Free Birth Society”.
"the FCC has used its regulator power for political purposes for decades"
The Commentary Magazine podcast brought that up, too.
There's always a "movement" promoting the idea that, because giving birth is natural, there's no reason for medical involvement. Not my thing, personally, but one really can't argue with True Believers on this subject. "That's nice. More pie?"
Due to Pam's cancer, they couldn't give her pain meds (some interaction that went wrong), other than some localized stuff down there.
Pam's was brutal: 2 blood transfusions, they brought ER folks into the room, she ended with 38 stitches. The OB Gyn told me in the bad old days she'd have died from childbirth.
Katie was two weeks late, and our son had a big head...He still does, she blames me....
yep, first husband said that when I was getting ready to give birth to my 11 lb 1 oz first baby who was breech 'cause he was so big he never turned... Dr. just looked at him & said "You'd then have a dead wife & son" & dr walked away to get me ready for c-section...
yep. The folks in the nursery nicknamed him the Incredible Hulk. He never wore newborn clothes. 2nd born was a scheduled c-section (in those days I had a vertical incision - tmi? - so reg birth wasn't recommended), so he was only 8 lb 3, at at least 2 wks early. 3rd was to be scheduled but arrived on his own at 10 lb 2. In case anyone's wondering, which is often the case, no, I'm not diabetic, did not have it during pregnancy...
Fang was 9-1/2 lbs. and over two weeks before his due date. I was afraid the next one would be even bigger, but Vlad was actually the smallest at birth. He grew fast, though, unlike Sheldon, who was never an eager eater.
For mammals, death of mothers and/or young during birth is natural. So are ghastly intestinal parasites. I like having the option to avoid much of what is natural!
My sister, who had five kids, used nurse midwives and delivered at hone. But these ladies avoid any medical involvement whatsoever, including visits to an OB/GYN doctor and ultrasounds. And they seem not to get emergency assistance for difficult births.
My wife was a nurse who cared for premature infants. Had we been able to have children, no way would she have declined medical assistance.
The male singer singing alongside Martha Spencer is Luke Bell, who passed away three years ago. According to Rolling Stone, Bell "[played] classic honky-tonk with a wink and a yodel that summons the sleeping ghosts of country better than any voodoo spell ever could". (nice writing)
There was a tribute to him at AmericanaFest last month.
Good Sunday morning. It was 58 degrees first thing this morning, 71 now and headed to the 80s and sunny.
The mothership's faith article reports on Jewish pilgrimages on Rosh Hashanah to the grave of an 18th century Hasidic rabbi -- in war-torn Ukraine.
That sounds like a very interesting topic. I'm familiar with Rabbi Nachmann.
Good morning. The sun is out. I feel pretty good for a change. Yesterday I slogged through a small problem dispersed in a large quantity of mud that has occupied me for over a week. I made progress, in understanding its components and visualizing the desired product, and that eased my mind.
I came across this article this morning. It is by Zadie Smith. The knowledge, experience, thoughtfulness and precision she brings to the subject and the page....well, it is oddly comforting, given the intentional corruption and deformation of language we are witnessing.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/29/the-art-of-the-impersonal-essay
"We aren’t required to be like one another or even to like one another to be in relation. We just need to be willing to create and enter spaces in which solidarity is one of the possibilities."
That's it, in a nutshell.
I thought it was the key point. If you're willing to get into conversation with people, no matter who the people are, you're going to find points of commonality. As Ms. Smith observed, one of the most basic commonalities is mortality. We're all going to die.
And abrupt encounters with that realization can startle us into seeing other commonalities. If we are lucky and let go of being stubborn.
Placido Domingo, everyone. I defrosted the garage freezer yesterday. Now I need to clean the water out, so I can turn it back on.
Happy Sunday.
Boy, I wish I had a frozen garage!
I'd like a frozen anything about now. There were some tree branches interfering with Juan's installing the floodlight by the driveway, so I cut them off and chopped them up to be bagged when we find the yard waste bags.
Now, I need a shower. It's really humid here.
I was last at Wingspan, sigh. Sheldon was first. It might have been the first time he played since the Covid gaming blitz. He is a clever bro and is doing well at his community college classes.
Katie and I went to Buffalo Wild Wings to watch the end of The Ohio State University game with the UW Huskies. Buckeyes won 24-6.
I asked about her day. She was please I slipped a love note into her sewing stuff. She decided to join the Greenville (OH) Quilters guild. $15 a year, but the savings on fabric (Long story on how they get discounts) more than pays for itself. The quilt show she went to was held by the guild. They don't use professional judges, but rely on volunteers, so they encourage new members to submit quilts to shows. She may show my office quilt, the "Stained Glass Window". I had a visitor two weeks ago who knows quilts, and thought it was professionally done.
At project Linus, she showed up with 13 blankets to donate. Impressive! A day at the quilt retreat gave her a floral print fabric for a blanket, but Katie was stumped how to make it good for a child. The leader said they also donate to hospice, an elderly would love it, so Katie finished it today.
The Buckeyes had a slow start, with the first score a Huskies field goal, but they came back strong with a convincing win to maintain their #1 ranking.
My youngest is thinking about going to The OSU for dental school. He's a junior at UD, so still almost two years away. But as a show of confidence in him I bought an OSU golf shirt from Goodwill.
A jelly roll and hot tuna all on the morning menu at the same time? What the heck kind of joint did I stumble into here while looking for a cup of Joe? And do you at least have burgers or hot dogs for lunch, or do I need to start complaining Where's the beef?!
I had fish for lunch.
So, I guess there's no need to yell Where's the cold-blooded aquatic animal with gills, scales and fins?!
I love this music genre. Martha Singer has overtones and some looks similar to June Carter Cash, imho.
This brings my musical love back to recommend to you, the paradigm shifting Louis Armstrong. https://youtu.be/dbkCdPUOydU?si=Kl-nzSguhI8gH5E4
Armstrong Hot Five and Hot Ten, Heebie Jeebies, Muskrat Ramble..etc are delightful!!
Galena... a town in Virginia and a town in Missouri. Galena is a term ish for lead bearing deposits. Did you know that 99.99% of all Pb used is from recycled batteries? Mostly respected near Troy, Alabama.
Galax, VA is a town I went thru from Roanoke on our way to our (no longer) farm in Greenbrier County..between Lewisburg and Beckley. alas, getting to Health care down some snow and icy bound mountain roads didn't look promising for older age. And we moved west from MA to MI to CA to AZ..so we sold it. Had the best Spring flowers and trees...
Ans Willie..Ms Pinki went to a concert here maybe 7 ish years ago. Always been a huge fan.
Finally in the weather department, we had first overnight lows in the 60s. Windows opened for a while now at night
I think I decided that Martha Singer’s voice reminded me a bit of Iris DeMent, in some subtle ways.
Because I can't get this out of my head this morning be cause of all the good music and, well, it's raining.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGUJLny4gH8&si=b2jZo4vCH46oBQMJ
ETA: a lot.
It was raining here earlier, but it stopped.
The music, especially Willie’s version, has a lot of Django Reinhardt influence to me. All of Texas swing does really.
Yes, Reinhardt. Also in a big way: Bob Wills, the Western swing guy. They copy his style down to the whooping and hollering by the band leader. Asleep at the Wheel is almost primarily a Bob Wills tribute act, Ray Benson loves him so. It’s definitely a version of swing music that I like an awful lot, too.
I always loved Django's music. I discovered him in my youth, reading a Peter Frampton liner note, who credits him as an inspiration. I love Frampton's guitar work....
It comes alive...
My parents had that record.
In college, whenever a musician passed away, I'd share that that last album was titled "X comes alive", and attracted over 11,000 converts before the record companies pulled the release back....
I built another fire in the firepit last night, burning 4 rubbermaid totes of twigs and sticks. I also burnt a 15-20 year old log. I still have hot ashes this morning, so I swept some twigs off the patio into it. Still smoking. My record for keeping coals burning is 6 days.
I haven't commented at the mothership in awhile. Ever since Charlie Kirk's death I haven't felt funny. I started to post a comment similar to one I had here about Colbert not doing a joke on a Trump meme, but then I set it aside. I'm didn't vote for Trump, but I don't hate him either, nor do I think he's a threat to democracy, a Nazi, a Hitler, etc. He's a narcissist entertainer who beat two bad candidates. I don't agree with many of his policies, but it's more meh for me. It makes it fun to poke gentle fun at him. I also think January 6th was a protest that got out of hand, not an insurrection.
Hopefully my spirits will lift and I can return to some funny lines. But it's tough swimming in turbulent waters....
RE: burning 4 rubbermaid totes of twigs and sticks
I hope you dumped the twigs and sticks out of the totes first. Burning Rubbermaids probably don't smell all that great.
I think I have your 'live coal' record beat. About 3 decades ago I purchased a 2 3/4 acre parcel of land adjacent to my existing property, a great compliment to the similar sized parcel on the opposite side of my place I'd bought and combined with my original land & home purchase a few years earlier.
It was a piece of long dormant, overgrown farmland, as was much of the property homes are situated on in these parts. I very selectively 'cleared it' of loads of scrub brush, unwanted small saplings and a few dead trees, burning it all in a shallow pit in a cleared area well away from my home or adjacent tree lines for safety. After the 1st day of combustion, I didn't have to strike a match for the rest of the time it took me to do the clearing with me working at it 3 or 4 hours a day after work, which was about 2 1/2 weeks.
Just stir the ashes, add an armful of freshly cleared combustibles and voila! A fire fit to roast a side of beef or toast a marshmallow the size of your head and then some. And a couple of times I 'took a day off' from the work, and the coals were still good to go when I needed them.
There are many “famous” BBQ places in Lockhart TX area. I remember years ago one of them moved to a new building and wanted to maintain the mojo of the original pit fire, so they shoveled the coals into a wheelbarrow and rolled it down the street to the new pit. This made for a cool photo.
!
That’s dedication.
I remove them from the Rubbermaid totes so I can reuse the totes! It's just a tote is a good amount to carry without straining. If I don't add any more wood they should be cool enough to put in the trash Tuesday morning.
Outrage is exhausting, even if it's outrage one shares. Badinage is restorative.
I've kept on visiting and commenting on the mothership.
One thing I've noticed lately is that there are newbie commenters showing up--even some with a comment count in single digits--who have something insightful to say. I try to give them a like, and maybe even a reply if one is in order.
ah, the song 'The New Kid in Town' popped into my head
Socializing newcomers is important.
Asuncion de Maria's husband, Juan, who is a lighting installer by trade, came over this morning and installed some light fixtures for us to replace ones the construction crews broke. I had told my husband that the people who broke them should replace them, but he didn't feel like waiting forever, which I guess is fine.
Meanwhile, I sterilized and stowed away the Envirothon team's dissection tools, although I suppose we'll need them again when the middle school group dissects crayfish.
Asunción de Maria is a lovely name.
Yes, it is. The bride in a wedding our band did a couple of weeks ago was named Maria de los Angeles; she called herself "Angeles" rather than Maria.
How interesting. How's your Spanish?
My comprehension and my accent are great. When it comes to putting a sentence together in everyday life, it's hit or miss. To be fair, Juan didn't have a Spanish word for "floodlight," either.
Back in the day, I worked with a group of mojados in the oil exploration biz in the Golden State. They weren't about to learn English, so if I wanted to hear their stories or joke around with them, I was gonna have to learn their lingo. Eventually I did, but it was the worse kind of Spanish, a regional country dialect (Sinoloa) full of slang and curse words. I got a little more refined (both personally and with the lingo) as time passed.
ha - when my kids learned Spanish in middle school, their instructor was from Spain. Then, in high school, she was from Mexico. All 3 speak pretty fluently, but I don't know about various 'lingos' they understand, nor cursing - but they pick up languages fairly easily...
Refined cursing is an art form in any language. I worked for a boss in a GM shop decades ago who did the English language proud with his inventiveness, tone and inflection when using curse words to punctuate his displeasure about something or someone or something someone did, and I often envied his talent for making the profane sound almost classy.
I have a friend from the oil industry with a similar story of learning to speak "bar-floor Spanish".
Can't you just boil the tools in the same pot as the crawdaddies? Or is that poor science? 🤔
Um ... ick?
C'mon, Crawdads don't taste that bad...do they?
come on, y'all... in COLO growing up, the crawdads shared the same swimming hole we did as kids. Now, in Louisianna, where one son lives, they (& we when we visit) chow down on huge platters of boiled crawfish w/ sides of corn on the cob, sausage... Once you learn how to eat 'em, it's quick & yummy!! We have a Catfish Parlor near us, & once a year the Rod & Gun Club rents the place for an all you can eat - crawfish, corn, peel & eat boiled shrimp, sausage, beer, wine...
like little lobsters... but boiled spicy - you can order 'em at different degrees of 'heat'...
They taste like chicken... if chickens had 8 legs, two claws and lived under rocks in creeks.
I've only eaten them a couple of times. I think of them as fish bait. The elementary students dissected worms, which are also bait.
You think of them as bait and have eaten them a couple of times? I guess you were lucky that whoever offered them to you was practicing catch and release, eh?
Well played.
They taste great. It's the tweezing and squooshing around in all the body parts for something resembling an actual piece of meat that is the problem.
Related to music.
Katie poked her head in my office last night to tell me the daughter of a HS classmate (co-valedictorian with Katie) is on "The Voice"; whereupon all four stars turned around to claim her. Her group is called DEK of Hearts (the DEK are the first initials of the three). They sang a Reba song, and Reba praised it.
So if any of you watch The Voice (I never have), and want to vote for DEK of Hearts, you should do so.
I had to laugh: we were at a reunion many years ago. So Katie began by asking me: Do you remember talking to Carl at my reunion? Ummmm, I remember going, but not much more than that.
Well done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBeWokdScRo&list=RDjBeWokdScRo&start_radio=1
Jo Dee Messina had the big hit with that song, which was written by Mark Daniel Sanders and Tim J. Nichols.
This is my favorite Jo Dee song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o40fwZgSFPI&list=RDo40fwZgSFPI&start_radio=1
I know who Jo Dee Messina is! About 20 years ago she did a song called "Biker Chick"....I didn't know she was a Clark Gable win (GWTW)....
I didn't remember that song, but it's not bad.
Wonderful! I first heard this song during a Hot Tuna concert and was hooked on the blues forever afterward. I hadn't heard Morton's original version 'til now, though. Very enjoyable listening to all these versions. I hope you'll feature stuff like this in the future. Thanks!
Back to yesterday and the nut weasel, I read this year we are having a mast event. I’ve never heard that term. Apparently every few years trees produce an over abundance of nuts (seeds.) The acorns are insane this year.
I haven't noticed more nuts this year (tbf, this isn't an election year), but they came down later than normal. My hickory normally begins dropping nuts in early to mid August: This year it really wasn't until a few days before Labor day (I swept the driveway for a family gathering). Leaves have been falling for weeks, but normally they don't fall until, well, fall. But the ones up there are beginning to turn and all is well.
My favorite part of fall is driving past bean fields, as they ripen into purple and gold colors.
Perhaps it’s location dependent?
Seems like everything has gone nuts these days.
Abundant here, too. It’s like walking across a lawn strewn with marbles.
Wait. Did the nuts lose their marbles, or what? I'm confused.
Seems kind of squirrely to me.
I wonder if I'll find a lot of acorns here. I remember some past years when I'd be sitting at the playground and getting acorns falling in my purse and bonking off my head.
The natural selection reason for the cyclical mast production is that making seeds takes a lot of energy from the trees, so they can't afford to produce that many nuts every year. Instead, they have a baseline amount, and nut-eater populations get in equilibrium with the baseline amount. Then, every few years, the trees massively overproduce, and the nut-eater population isn't big enough to eat the nuts, so more of them germinate and potentially produce new trees.
I've often wondered why some trees crank out more seeds one year than another.
Good morning. 56 degrees, the start of a day in the 70s and sunny. Good football weather last night.
The mothership has an article documenting how the FCC has used its regulator power for political purposes for decades, going all the way back to the early days of radio in the 1920s. This did not start with Jimmy Kimmel.
The FP has an article on a movement encouraging women to give birth without medical assistance, the “Free Birth Society”.
What! But we were reliably informed Carr is the first person EVER to weigh in on such matters.
Childbirth was pretty real to me with medical assistance. To each his own.
Late response, but thank God for Cesarean Sections, or I'd be minus my wife and my 3 kids!
"the FCC has used its regulator power for political purposes for decades"
The Commentary Magazine podcast brought that up, too.
There's always a "movement" promoting the idea that, because giving birth is natural, there's no reason for medical involvement. Not my thing, personally, but one really can't argue with True Believers on this subject. "That's nice. More pie?"
One really can't argue with True Believers on any subject. And believe me, that's the truth.
Due to Pam's cancer, they couldn't give her pain meds (some interaction that went wrong), other than some localized stuff down there.
Pam's was brutal: 2 blood transfusions, they brought ER folks into the room, she ended with 38 stitches. The OB Gyn told me in the bad old days she'd have died from childbirth.
Katie was two weeks late, and our son had a big head...He still does, she blames me....
yep, first husband said that when I was getting ready to give birth to my 11 lb 1 oz first baby who was breech 'cause he was so big he never turned... Dr. just looked at him & said "You'd then have a dead wife & son" & dr walked away to get me ready for c-section...
Gulp, 11 lbs? 🥹
yep. The folks in the nursery nicknamed him the Incredible Hulk. He never wore newborn clothes. 2nd born was a scheduled c-section (in those days I had a vertical incision - tmi? - so reg birth wasn't recommended), so he was only 8 lb 3, at at least 2 wks early. 3rd was to be scheduled but arrived on his own at 10 lb 2. In case anyone's wondering, which is often the case, no, I'm not diabetic, did not have it during pregnancy...
My MIL is probably 5’1 and weighs 115 lbs. she gave birth to 2 tiny piglets, my husband was 9.12 and his sister 10.14.
I had a 9 pounder. He looked like a 2 week old.
Fang was 9-1/2 lbs. and over two weeks before his due date. I was afraid the next one would be even bigger, but Vlad was actually the smallest at birth. He grew fast, though, unlike Sheldon, who was never an eager eater.
For mammals, death of mothers and/or young during birth is natural. So are ghastly intestinal parasites. I like having the option to avoid much of what is natural!
Avoiding much in the natural world is a natural selection for thinking folks to make.
True. Our brains are behind our success as a species.
True... whenever our brains aren't in our behinds. 🙄
My sister, who had five kids, used nurse midwives and delivered at hone. But these ladies avoid any medical involvement whatsoever, including visits to an OB/GYN doctor and ultrasounds. And they seem not to get emergency assistance for difficult births.
My wife was a nurse who cared for premature infants. Had we been able to have children, no way would she have declined medical assistance.
Even weirder than the "birth is natural" people are the ones who are opposed to diapers.
(snicker)
no, baby ruth
Seriously, they exist as an ideological group with a certain view of anthropology and child development.
This is different, of course, from conditions of poverty or displacement that might result in the unavailability of materials to use for diapering.
In Ukrainian orphanages, they potty train children at 6 months, to save money.
They change them at the 7s (7am, 7pm). If a kid has an accident in the interim, they have to sit in it until 7 rolls around.
Oh, I'm aware of the anti-diaper contingent. They're good for a laugh. Or a snicker.
The male singer singing alongside Martha Spencer is Luke Bell, who passed away three years ago. According to Rolling Stone, Bell "[played] classic honky-tonk with a wink and a yodel that summons the sleeping ghosts of country better than any voodoo spell ever could". (nice writing)
There was a tribute to him at AmericanaFest last month.