Good day to you all on this cloudy first Friday of May.  I did get the mints transplanted yesterday but I don't really have much gardening planned.  The temperatures aren't supposed to get much above 60 with scattered rain.  All I will do is check all my seedlings for water.  A couple of the gardeners we see most mornings say they have already planted their gardens.  Hope it works out for them.

I didn't see much to mention yesterday.  Let's see if that changes today.

Every time I think a given situation can't get any worse--it does.  Recalled 'beef' contaminated with pork and horse in Europe and now, in China,  'mutton' that turns out to be rat, fox, and mink.  I love the last  quote from an unnamed interviewee: Everything we eat is poison.  In our news last night, the reporters focused on an article in Consumer Reports which linked the common practice of 'blade tenderizing' large cuts of meat which can inject contaminants deep into the meat.  Customers can't tell just by looking that the meat has been so treated.  I wonder if that is the same Consumer Reports article which found that nearly all of the meat they checked from supermarket shelves were contaminated by fecal matter, salmonella, or e. coli.  Worse a large portion of the bacteria were resistant to at least one and often more important antibiotics.  A key finding indicated that those animals not raised on antibiotic-laced feed had far less resistant bacterial contamination.

This is a topic that hasn't received any attention in our press--not even our economic press.  I have heard a few related stories but only because I get my news from a lot of different sources.  Workers have long known that globalization has provided less benefit than promised and cost them dearly in other areas--like wages.  But the concerns of those at the lower end of the economic scale didn't stem the tide of globalization.  However, now that the political powers-that-be are concerned about what it is costing the nations they lead, that may change.

Arianna Huffington posted an interesting piece on "America's Real Deficit Crisis."  Not debt but time.  As one who spent most of her adult life frazzled to one extent or another, I agree.  I haven't worn a watch since I retired and don't want to start again.  I might suddenly find myself wondering where the time has gone but I am not obsessing over it.  And at the end of the day (or month or year) I look back and am amazed at how much I actually did get done.