April 28

 Here we are nearly at the end of April. We had a couple of very warm days last weekend with temperatures in the 70s and low 80s. Very above normal for this time of the year. I took advantage of the conditions to clean up and transplant my clumps of chives which survived for two winters outside without any real protection. I put them in individual pots and put the pots on the fence hangers. Neither of my mums survived though they looked promising before the freeze we had a couple of weeks ago. My valerian, bee balm, and chamomile are coming back strong despite the freeze. I think one of my rosemary plants is putting out new growth. I should probably cut back the growth to force the plant to put its efforts into lower growth for a more compact bush. I saw a carpet of seedlings just popping up in the container where Japanese indigo sprouted last year. I wondered then if the plants had seeded themselves from the year before and let those seedlings alone to see if the plants came up from the roots or from new seeds from the plants. The question is settled--they self-seeded. I plan to plant some seeds in the containers on the fence which get the most light and warm up the quickest. We'll see what comes up.

Tom Nichols has a nice rant on his Peacefields newsletter in the Atlantic: Pharmaceutical Ads Give Me Hives. I can agree totally. Here we have long complained about TV ads, including the ones from the drug companies. How often do the contraindications of those drugs (up to and including "death") sound worse than the symptoms described by the ad? But my hatred of the ads goes far beyond the drug pushers. I remember when an hour show was a full 50 minutes of program with only 10 minutes of commercials. Then we noticed that the show had shrunk to maybe 40-45 minutes. Now, I swear that we get 30 minutes of program in every hour, if we are lucky, while the rest of time we suffer through time companies have bought to try to sell us on products we don't want or need, or guilt us into giving to their favorite charity. (Don't misunderstand me--these charities are worthy causes but we have only a limited bit of money and give what we can to those we choose. I am annoyed by the constant demands for money.)

I have had an interesting thought over the last several months. There has been a strong strain of nostalgia in political affairs for while now. We saw it in the Brexit movement which was fundamentally wanted to go back to a time when Britain has full sovereignty over its affairs, especially immigration and economics. Number 45's pledge to "Make America Great Again" also was a nostalgic desire for an unspecified "Eden" from which we have fallen. Both Russia's Putin and China's Xi are also looking backwards to "better" days when they were prosperous and respected internationally. Reports say Putin admires Stalin and the "Great" Czars so presumably those are the eras to which he aspires to return Russia. Xi might be looking back to the time before the "Century of Humiliation" when China was the center of the world--in their minds if not in reality. Problem is that the pasts they are dreaming of were ever as "great" as they think.

Gizmodo had this item from a couple of days ago. I heard about India's heat wave earlier today on BBC. Expecting temperatures in the 40's C. Not good so early in the year that has already seen the warmest March in the 122 years they have been keeping records. The BBC reporter said that they haven't had rain for about two months during a period when they usually get heavy rains off the Arabian Sea and the heat may reduce the wheat harvest.