Good wet Wednesday to you all.  We didn't hear the rain last night because the thunder boomed, and boomed, and rolled, and rolled.  The weather people described it as "house shaking."  We can testify to the accuracy of that.  We are supposed to get more waves of rain with possible thunderstorms.  The wind is up and rocking the trees now.  Needless to say--I haven't done much in the gardens.  I did stop by Home Depot to look at the plants but didn't buy anything.  I just don't know what I want to fill in and nothing spoke to me.  Saturday is supposed to be cool, sunny and dry.  I will try again then.

I agree, Kay.  Mom and I find ourselves going back in time with respect to diet and that the 'food Nazis' wouldn't like at all.  Some items, like ice cream, are treats and we treat them that way.  They are infrequent indulgences not something to eat three times a day every day.  As such we thoroughly disregard the so-called nutritional statistics.  Just this morning the news had a snippet about a new study which finds that there is an increased risk of obesity and diabetes if one drinks five or more cups of coffee a day.  I have known a lot of heavy coffee drinkers and been one myself for quite a number of years.  Guess what--no diabetes.  And the obesity can be traceable to other things in our modern diet like processed foods and a sedentary lifestyle.  The notion that the researchers claim they have isolated a chemical that may play a part cuts no ice with me.  Another example of what Michael Pollan calls "nutritionism" (In Defense Of Food)--the belief that one can identify specific compounds which have specific and individual and reproducible effects.  He shreds this quasi-religious belief system.  By the way--we just finished off a blueberry upside cake (made from scratch) and a blueberry pie is in the oven for the next week.  Again we don't much care about the calorie count.  We don't go for huge portions--an 8x8 cake lasts us four days.  Think about that.  The individual portions are only 2inX4in.  Our approach to any food is moderation not prohibition which seems to be alien to most Americans these days.

I haven't read the Thomas Friedman article The Contrary Farmer cites but I find it both interesting and believable.  A chapter in Jared Diamond's Collapse dealt with the 'genocide' in Rwanda which our media presented in terms of ethnic tensions.  Diamond made a good case for overpopulation and the resulting economic tensions being the prime mover.  The conflicts in Sudan with Biafra and what has become South Sudan were similarly resource driven (water and oil).  The ethnic aspects came in to define the 'us' who deserved the resources and the 'them' who had them and didn't deserve them.

As I read this article I flashed back to the scene in Jurassic Park where the scientist assures everyone the dinosaurs couldn't breed because they were all females--"we engineered them that way."  So what could possibly go wrong?

I can hope that the dear (expletive) will simply crawl back under her rock.  Unfortunately, her unsavory aroma will hang around in our media like a recently gone skunk.

The logic behind this article is mind-blowing.  They take scraps from the U.S. wood products industry, transport those scraps to the U.K. where it is burned in power plants instead of coal.  And the U.K. gets credits for going "green."  I guess the greenhouse emissions involved somehow aren't charged against the U.K.