Thursday--

A minor bit of clean up today and rearranging. I moved the small planter tower upstairs under the lights (after getting the area cleaned up a bit), mixed up another batch of slightly acidified water for the blueberry and watered everything. The sky keeps threatening us with rain and then the clouds clear off. Don't know if we will get anything at all.

Didn't see anything I wanted to comment on. Maybe tomorrow.

Friday--

Thunderstorms rolled through last night along with heavy rain. They say that one sure way to make it rain is to wash your car. Well, watering a garden does just as well. With full light everything looks good outside. No damaged plants.

This is a fascinating and disturbing (though not totally unexpected) development. It certainly gives the lie to the notion of "free speech." Oh, I guess that is only for corporate people these days.

I can relate to this article. We have become transients and few of us really know our neighbors. We have lived in our apartment for more than a decade. During that time we have had at least five neighbors in the unit on the east side of us, nearly as many on the west side and only two in the unit one door down in our four unite building. We never knew much about most of them. Our neighborhood consists of about twenty similar buildings and a line of similar (though slightly larger duplex houses) across the street. People move in; people move out--frequently. What is a good metaphor for something that interacts less often than "ships in the night?"

David Kaiser has some good comments on the coming election.

Tuesday--

I always look forward to two bloggers' posts each week. One is John Michael Greer's Archdruid Report which appears on Thursdays and the other is James Kunstler's Clusterfuck Nation which should have appeared today. When I didn't find it in my e-mail I went to the site to find out what had happened. It seems his site has been under DoS attack for the last two weeks with particularly sustained attack for the last two days. However, Patreon has it crossposted on their site. It is classic Kunstler which skewers everything about the leading presidential contenders and their failure to address the most urgent problems this country faces. Is that why his site is under attack?

Wednesday--

We went to the farm market yesterday. It was only the second day and the first weekday so we are trying to get a feel for which venders are there on what days. I got the strawberries to finish out one of the tower pots and a couple more lisianthus to keep the first one company. We also found our locally produced honey, maple syrup, asparagus and spinach and some nice tomatoes from a woman who brings early produce in from the south. We are so glad when ever the market opens for the season. This last winter has been a particularly bad one for veggies of any kind from the supermarket. The quality has been markedly poor whether it was fresh or frozen. We don't buy much in the canned veggies any more but those had disgusted us some time ago.

It will be cool today but sunny for the early part of the day. Should be able to do a few things in the gardens.

When I read the title of this my first reaction was "Bhopal." It seems to be one of those gifts that keep on giving.

Business Insider had this item today which has me shaking my head. High tech is so damned sexy--especially high tech genetic engineering. There are several problems with the proposal. First, it is a long term proposal that might (probably) won't ever yield truly useful results. For comparison take a look at all the promises of a "cure" for cancer. There are so many possible, and some proven, causes that a cure is impossible. Scientists have discovered several genes that predispose people to cancer and each acts differently and responds to treatments differently. The scientist presenting the proposal to identify the genes in mice that prevent some individuals from transmitting Lyme disease to ticks (and hence its ultimate transmission to people) describes a similarly complex situation. Furthermore, no one knows how many different functions each of those genes actually perform within the cell. Any one of those genes might accomplish the purpose of preventing transmission of the Lyme bacterium but have another action we might like even less. Maybe the money could be better spent on other less high tech projects.

The comment on the link at Naked Capitalism sums up the story quite well: "third world stuff." We wondered why it took so long for the news media to call the California primary. This explains it. And, yes, it is definitely third world stuff.

Monday--

Ah, nice and sunny so far. I have a bunch of chores I want to get done in the gardens and in the grow light section upstairs today. I planted a dahlia, a French thyme, and a lisianthus I picked up at the opening of the farm market last Saturday. I was glad to see that the numbers of vendors have increased. The weekday market is usually even better.

I found this amusing piece almost first off and everyone should have a good laugh to start the morning. Being well over 30 myself it resonates with me. I usually wear scarves, caps or bandanas and I have had three people ask me over the last couple of years if I had cancer or some such and had lost my hair. I wonder how many people assume that and don't ask. My hair isn't my crowning glory and I hate bad hair days. I remember some years ago when the phrase (from a poem I once looked up) "when I am an old woman I will wear purple." I think it also said something about a red hat. I said screw waiting till I am old. I will wear what I damn well please now.

Tom Englehardt has another of his yearly "commencement addresses," the kind that should be given but which won't be.

Saturday--

I wasn't going to post at all this weekend but I simply couldn't pass up this item. The title (Superbugs Have Reached the U.S. for the First Time--Again) alone was enough to make me laugh and click on the link. When we combine a 24/7 news media looking for sensational stories to hype and a complex and potentially serious phenomenon we get a situation tailor made for hysteria.

This is an interesting N.Y. Times article on how the military is refocusing its training. As I read the piece with its reminder of the "conditions" on many of our bases in Afghanistan (and Iraq) I realized that the number of contractors the army depended on was not the only reaction to political necessity. The contractors allowed both the Bush and Obama administrations to keep the numbers of "troops" at a level acceptable to the public but also kept the soldiers relatively comfortable so they would put up with being deployed (and redeployed and redeployed, ad infinitum) to the "front lines" of the War on Terror.

I don't know what part of this I like more: that a Chinese company has made toilet paper with Donald Trump's and Hillary Clinton's faces on it or that The Donald's rolls are selling more than the Hillary rolls by 6-1. Beats the Halloween masks all to hell especially in a year where our choice will probably be between turds. How do you make that choice--which smells the least or which was easier to pass?

The Organic Prepper starts off her post today with the information that the General Mills flour recall, which encompasses 10 million pounds of flour, may be much worse that the original news made out and may grow. The flour was also shipped to restaurants and food processors so it might include pie crust dough, bread dough and cookie dough. I wouldn't doubt that cake and muffin mixes might be next. Her prescription is one we went to some time ago: buy local and cook from scratch.

Friday--

Starting out to be a very nice day with the sun out and no rain threatening. I have a few minor chores but nothing major planned.

Who'd have thunk it--zombie wildfires. And they have had 16 of them so far this year including one that has been smoldering for two years. I hope that isn't a foreshadowing of the coming year.

I wasn't going comment on this but the more I thought about it the more it rankled me. I mentioned the patronizing tone of the medical article yesterday and this one is more of the same only worse. Somehow the "Trump voter" (of which I am not one) is to blame for the dismal job numbers. They are the 400+k who "dropped out of the labor force" last month either because the "didn't want to work" or because they "didn't think there were any jobs" out there. So they are either lazy or delusional. As someone who not too many years ago spent two-and-a-half years unemployed without unemployment insurance and who sent out dozens of resumes each week all of which netted one sort of interview that last about 5 minutes before the interviewer decided I was "overqualified" before I was able to qualify for social security, my sympathies are with the "Trump voters." And far from being "uneducated" I have four university degrees. I do resent patronizing assholes.

I love Yves Smith's Naked Capitalism and her Political article is right on target. We have discussed the likely candidates for the presidency. If Bernie Sanders by some strike of lightening luck becomes the Democratic nominee we will vote for him. If the contest is, as is looking very likely, gives us a choice between Clinton and Trump, I am considering voting Libertarian. I consider it my equivalent of chewing my leg off to get out of the trap of having to support two parties whose policies have consistently betrayed their core voters.

Thursday--

Supposed to be warm and sunny today. I saw some plants that need tending--mostly tomatoes I should prune and tie up. I found one that has sunscald, I think. I will take a closer look. We had a good rain yesterday so I don't think I have to water anything.

Now for the mystery of the day which may have finally been solved: what happened to tens of thousands of racing pigeons which disappeared during a cross channel race between France and England in 1997.

This story doesn't surprise me although the tone does. The author's tone is more than a bit patronizing. The fuzzy oldsters simply don't understand the difference between a 50% chance that a 50 year old woman will have a hip fracture over her remaining life time versus the between 10 and 40 out of 100k patients taking an osteoporosis drug breaking a thigh bone versus the fewer than  in 100k suffering a rotting jawbone. I am not fuzzy, though at 67 I am somewhat of an oldster, and I have two science degrees (BA and MS in Biology and Zoology) and frankly I don't know what to make of the stats except to question them. What does a 50% chance of a hip fracture over a "remaining life time" really mean? And group statistics don't really mean that much applied to individual people. A couple of years ago Mom (86 this year) and I both had a bone scan which indicated that her bones were thin while mine were still robust. What does that 50% really mean for us individually? Mom's doctor insisted that she go on one of the popular drugs which she did for several years until the reports came out about the atypical fractures. Key point here isn't her concerns about those reports but the fact that during all the time she took that drug her bone density did not improve at all. If her bone density did not improve then how could the drug improve her chances of escaping a hip fracture? I think a large dose of skepticism is in order here. We don't need patronizing dismissal. We need answers.

Welcome to June

I just had to clear my in-box of more than 70 advertising e-mails. I am totally irritated. I have to wonder how often I have to designate some of that trash as spam before my filters catch up. Let's see if I can get a pleasant mood back.

One nice thing to contemplate: we saw our first hummingbird yesterday. I had a suspicion that they were back because the level of the food in their feeders was lower by a bit but we hadn't seen them yet. The one we spied also checked out the calibrachocha. Those also attract bees and butterflies. I have put that plant on my seed order list for next season.

Damn!!! Lost another of my favorite bloggers. Gene Logsdon, the Contrary Farmer, died yesterday. He had a quirky sense of humor and covered a number of odd topics on farming and the relationship of farming to our society. I thoroughly enjoyed his account of his battle with cancer (Gene Everlasting). I am sorry to read that he ultimately lost that fight.