Friday.  Hope you all have a nice Memorial Day planned.  Ours will be the usual--quiet and at home.  I did get the shed cleaned out.  Oh, my!!  We can actually step inside and reach anything we have stored there.  I am always amazed at how much we accumulate.  I kept about ten of the plastic milk or vinegar jars I cut to use as cloches and tossed the others.  I hate to throw away anything that might be useful but we simply don't have the space to keep them.  We get white vinegar by the gallon because we use it in cleaning up almost anything and as a fabric softener.  And combining that with the gallon of milk we consume each week I get a lot of those gallon jugs.  I have also put plants in them but I also kept the "temporary" pots from the garden centers so I don't need as many of the gallon jugs for that purpose any more.

On tap for today--going through the pots I have stored on the lower shelves of the mini-greenhouse.  I want to separate the small starter pots and put them upstairs for seed starting.  The bigger pots will stay n the greenhouse till needed outside.

I have been listening to the morning TV news and am totally irritated by the coverage of the Mark Cuban remarks.  Anybody else notice how the focus has been entirely on the "black kid in a hoodie" part of the remarks?  Entirely lost in the coverage is the second part of that remark about the skin head with the full-body tattoos.  Cuban would have avoided both and I don't blame him one bit.  Everyone has totally passed over his point in the whole conversation:  we all have our prejudices and act on our stereotypes.  Worse we almost never carefully think about them.  I may not trust either the black kid in the hoodie or the skin head but that doesn't mean I trust the guy in the business suit or the cop in uniform either.  As I watched the original sound bite of Cuban's remarks which included both parts of the comment, I thought of the scene toward the end of the first Harry Potter movie where Harry confronts Professor Quirrell expecting to find Professor Snape.  Quirrell smirks "Snape?  Yes, he does seem to be the type."  We interact with people first on the basis of what we expect of their type, of our stereotypical perception of them.  We may be right but we may also be very wrong.  To use another movie analogy--I agree with the union soldier in Gettysburg:  "Anyone who judges the individual by the group is a pea wit.  You take men one at a time."  But every one of us are pea wits frequently in our lives.

I would agree that cataclysmic is an apt description of the GM recalls this year.  Key stat: GM has recalled, so far this year, more cars than it sold between 2009 and 2013.

Isn't globalization wonderful?  An Israeli drug maker recalls lots of three different drugs intended for the U.S. market but made for it by an Indian company.

I (still) wonder who will buy the goods manufacturers make when all their workers are robots.  It is nice that robots don't need time off, don't need health care, don't need food, don't have families to interfere with the work.  But they don't need the cars, don't order merchandise, don't eat the food being processed either--and since they don't get pay checks couldn't buy them any way.