What You Don’t Know About Chicken Soup

 “People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains… This overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.”

  - Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999, Vol. 77, No. 6. ] 121-1134, Copyright 1999 by the American Psychological Association, Inc., 0022-3514/99/S3.00 Cornell University)

Yeah, so? Look, I’ve been busy, ok?  We finally moved into our newly remodeled bedroom and love it.  This move emptied out our former bedroom thus making way for a sewing room. No more sewing on the dinning room table and trying to keep track of thread, fabrics et. al. by tucking them between wine glasses in the china cabinet. This means I’ve been sewing and it’s like my sewing machine is as happy as I that it has a new permanent home. On it’s own table. On top of a plastic measuring/cutting grid that fits the table exactly. It’s like I know what I’m doing. My kitty (who will definitely NOT kill me) also approves of the move. That's her head peeking out of a fold in the quilt.

But the big news is I made some killer chicken stock. My journey began at the farmers market, when I asked the chicken lady for chicken feet. She’d tipped me off some time back that the feet add the gel that makes the stock nice and syrupy, and she’s right. So last week when I went to get some chicken feet, she asked if I’d also like some heads. She explained how her grown son – the only family member who apparently has no gag reflex – takes all the unwanted chicken heads and feet and cooks them down in a huge vat. She explained that what you do is, you first blanch the heads and feet, then you skin them, or at least slit the skin so, presumably, the insides can leak through into the broth.

I don’t do well with yucky stuff like chicken autopsies. It’s all I can generally manage to blanch and then cook the feet. When they’re done, they’ve plumped up nicely and look like they’re alive. Chicken feet have these creepy nails that look like they just had a professional manicure. So just cook them, she insisted. You won’t regret it. So I did. I got two bags of feet and one bag of heads for $4. I tossed the parts in a pot of boiling water for a few minutes to clean them off, then rinsed them and discarded the dirty water. Then, I put the parts into nice clean water that will become stock. I’ve found that white wine is a truly good accompaniment for chicken, particularly when cooking chicken skulls. In all fairness, I determined later that when the white wine is gone, red goes just as well.

I’m going to label the dozen 8 oz. jars Chicken Skull Stock.  At some point during the day while refilling my wine glass and stirring the chicken parts, I counted four heads, and we formed a special bond. I named them John Doe, Manny, Moe, and Jack Doe. The problem was that I didn’t know if I was cooking their feet or some other Does' feet. I decided to forgo attempts to name the feet because, you know, without a specific provenance or way of recognizing which feet roll to the top of the pot at any given moment it would be crazy to name the feet. And I’m not crazy; although it did occur to me late in the process that I might get some DNA and try to match them up. Fun fact, some of the feet have a dark brown pad in the middle that feels like the paw of a cat. While I didn’t make an exact count, I’d say maybe 2 sets out of 6. I theorize that these belonged to the drone hens that had to walk guard duty at night to protect their sleeping coop-mates. Or maybe they’re roosters?

Now, even if you take it on faith that chicken skulls make good broth, nobody wants to open a jar of chicken stick and find a head, or even a foot.  When I had the stock at a consistency I liked, I poured it into a clean pot and let the parts drain in a sieve lined with cheesecloth. It was at that point, I realized I had not four, but five heads. Being remorseful by then that I’d named the other four as guys, I named the last one Carmen. Her blind white eyes gazed at me reproachfully as she and the boys and their feet drained. You’re supposed to pour it back into the pot, let it cool, skim the fat, re-boil and then can it, but I didn’t do any of that prior to canning. The stock came out clean and gloopy and without foam or much fat to skim.

In order to can the broth - because it’s technically meat – you’ve got to use a pressure canner, not a simple water bath. The Blue Book says give them 20 minutes at 25 lbs psi. The big pressure canner has a pressure gauge that reads out in increments of 5 from 5 to 20 and above that there’s just a red line that says “caution”. A bit daunting: neither the chicken skull quintet nor I were confident of our ability to master this advanced level of technology this late in the day. I had my huge pressure canner all set to go, but fate intervened. It was at that point that I found I’d lost the damn weight thingie that sits on the top and jiggles to let out steam. I had to use my regular pressure cooker and it took me three batches to do all the jars.

I also made pickles. We harvested the first major batch of pickle cucumbers from the Veggie Garden this week. I took 22 of them and made pickles to share with the veggie gardeners.  I got a dozen 8 oz. jars of what I’m calling Garlic Dill Lemongrass Pickles. I adapted a recipe from Preserving Summer’s Bounty (Rodale) for Kosher Dills. I substituted a blade of lemongrass for horseradish root because, well, because I have some semblance of good taste.  The ingredients included a bit of sweet Maui onion also harvested yesterday. In addition, I used my own home grown dill weed and seeds, and used mostly black mustard seeds instead of boring white. The garlic cloves are from a lovely “rose” garlic we also grew.

There really is something good for the soul to spend a day in the kitchen amid yummy smells and among chicken head friends. I expect the wine didn’t hurt either, but then again, that might just be a failure of my metacognitive abilities to realize how yucky chicken skull soup actually is.

You Think You've Got Problems

"There’s no suffering,
 no shame, no ruin—not one dishonour—
 which I have not seen in all the trouble  you and I go through."

Sophocles, Antigone

The lovely illustration here is Walters manuscript leaf W.692, is from a Mughal manuscript copy of Anvar-i Suhayli (The lights of Canopus), a collection of fables by Husayn ibn 'Ali Va'iz Kashifi (died 910 AH/AD 1504-1505). It dates to the late 10th century AH/AD 16th or early 11th century AH/AD 17th. It depicts "the fate of a man who, escaping from a wild camel, jumps into a well. There his predicament grows even more precarious when he lands on the heads of 4 snakes, grasps in desperation at a bush gnawed by two rats, and looks down to see dragon waiting to devour him should he fall".

He's having a bad day. To which I say, big deal. Except for the rats, I’ve suffered worse.

My complaint du jour is about jam recipes. This is the season for fresh fruit that begs to be drowned in sugar and cooked down to sticky mush and put into jars to savor during the cold dark winters we experience for fifteen minutes each year here in San Diego. Having sampled a number of jam recipe books, I’ve found I especially like the recipes in Rachel Saunders Blue Chair Jam Cookbook, particularly for her combinations of fruit and spices.

Possessing the whiney entitlement of any aging American on Social Security; plus an inborn sense of outrage I modestly claim to be superlative; and compounded by a temperament best described as being a bitch, I have found much to complain about nonetheless.

I recently attempted my holy grail of jam: a sour cherry conserve that includes alcohol. A conserve is a jam that includes a mix of fresh and dried fruit, as Rachel explains, “often with the addition of liquor, spices and nuts.” What’s not to love? But before I begin my complaining: a disclaimer. I’ve never met a recipe I followed religiously: the fun is to use the same general proportions and customize.

I used Rachel’s recipe called “Italian Prune & Cardamom Conserve”. I started with farmer’s market plums that made no pretense about being Italian. I have no idea what their provenance was except that they were grown in California. But I didn’t have enough, so I had to cut the recipe in half, and then still add enough fresh cherries to get to the right measure of fresh fruit. Then I substituted dried sour cherries for the boring white currents which are, IMHO nothing more than albino raisins. Then, instead of using slivovitz “or other dry plum brandy” all I had was blackberry brandy. The added benefit here was that it turns out I had enough surplus brandy to sip while cooking.

Here’s my beef with this woman. She eschews precision. Example:

“To test the conserve for doneness, carefully transfer a small representative half-spoonful of conserve to one of your frozen spoons. Replace the spoon in the freezer for 3 to 4 minutes, then remove and carefully feel the underside of the spoon. It should be neither warm nor cold; if still warm, return it to the freezer for a moment. Nudge the conserve gently with your finger; if it seems thickened and gloppy when you nudge it, it is either done or nearly done. Tilt the spoon vertically to see how quickly the conserve runs; if it runs very slowly, and if it has thickened to a gloppy consistency, it is done. If it runs very quickly or appears watery, cook it for another few minutes, stirring, and test again as needed.”

I’ve always had a lot of trouble dealing with clarity and specific detail. I’m all like, can you maybe vague this shit up a bit for me? The scientific terms like “thickened and gloppy” and “for a moment” are bad enough, but “done or nearly done” kills me. It’s done or it’s not done. One would assume that the person who wrote the recipe would be able to provide more than general clues wrt/doneness. But, my favorite (not) part of the above is when she gets all existential and tells you what the jam should not be like: “it should be neither warm nor cold”.  This kind of specificity would be slightly more helpful if one was searching for an albino cat in a blizzard. (I have no idea why I seem to be fixated on albinos in this post.)

I keep a cookbook/notebook in which I meticulously write down the actual ingredients and proportions of what I'm cooking, so in the unlikely event that I ever stumble on jam recipe perfection I will be able to reproduce my success. After listing my ingredients and specific amounts, I decided to attempt to out-obfuscate Rachel’s instructions:

When the conserve has cooked down for anywhere from 20 minutes to three days, test it for doneness by balancing a smallish smidgen on the head of a pin. The angels on the tip of the jam-encrusted pin should neither stick too tightly together to perform a musical dance number to Michael Jackson’s Killer better than inmates in a Korean prison, nor should the angels slide off in large-ish clumps into the aether while screaming “Noooo!” in tiny angel chorus as they drop to the sticky floor. Did I mention you should make sure your floor is sticky by this point? Do so now. If at least 17 - but not more than 7,856  - angels can do the polka decently in the jam (and by decently, I mean the quality of their polka-ing, not the decency of the gangsta hand signs they make while dancing) then the jam is done. Maybe. Or, perhaps the jam would be better used as spackle to repair nail holes in plaster walls; or to dye an albino gerbil pink; or alternatively, to sweeten and flavor a vanilla Vicoden martini. You decide.

The final product was, by the way, the best jam ever. 

GMO: To Do or Not To Do

"The protestors, thinking they’re attacking some Monsanto-like evil corporation, are so consumed with their hatred of GMO that they are spreading misinformation, refusing to allow scientists to even engage in the research into GMO, and rather than engaging the scientists in dialogue are threatening to just destroy their experiment. This is the worst kind of bullying, extremist, anti-science garbage out there. At least the creationists don’t show up in our labs and start spitting in our test tubes. The climate denialists might make a lot of noise but they aren’t threatening to blow up James Hansen’s computer."

Mark, Denialism blog

I recently posted here about food, and included the link below to an article promoting laws that mandate that all GMO foods should be labeled. I still maintain that GMO foods should be labeled. People are entitled to know what they are eating, and to decide whether or not they will ingest GMO fruits and vegetables. It seems to me even ideological oppononents -  say, Newt Gingrich and Nancy Peolsi for example - would agree about this.

Then, there’s agreeing to disagree. I spent most of my professional career in administrative positions which supported basic and applied university research. I respect science, and like most Americans have directly benefitted from improved health care practices developed through medical research. I subscribe to the wisdom of distinguishing between  facts (which I loosely define here as empirically observable and repeatable results) and opinions (which, for purposes of this argument I define as conclusions based on often conflicting judgements and theories regarding the application facts). As the cliche says, you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.

Which leads me to this. I distinguish between the right to know what’s in your food based on the label, and the right to choose what food you consume. To eat or not to eat GMO: that is the question.

There is still plenty of scientific wiggle room on the question of whether it is potentially harmful to humans to routinely ingest food that has been grown from genetically modified sources. My opinion is that I risk substantially more potential harm by gardening without a tetanus shot. But maybe that’s just me. Further research on GMO food is something both sides should support in order to arrive at any discoverable facts about long term effects on humans.

I subscribe to the whole local, organic credo and routinely shop at farmer’s markets. I can taste the difference between real food and processed foodstuffs. My heart wants to side with the farmers, the cooks, the people who still want their food to be fresh, delicious, nutritious and slow. But my head says that anti-science is more dangerous than good science. And facts should weigh more than opinions, no matter how appealingly old fashioned and “natural” those opinions. 

This article, with its appeal to science and reason, persuaded me to think twice about GMO food; and I recommend it: Environmentalism and anti-science, how GMOs prove any ideological extremity leads to anti-science.

Angry Birds

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."

---Revelation 18:2

I had to fix the tsukubai this morning because some nighttime visitor had knocked over the return pipe so the water poured into the ground instead of back into the sone basin that sits above an uderground reservoir with a pump. 

The entire time I was repairing the problem, the hummingbirds, those small annoying hyper nasty “yappy dogs” of the bird kingdom, nagged me to get out of their day spa. It took me longer to fix because I was yelling at them to get out of my yard. I sounded like that archetypical angry old man yelling at a cloud. Hummingbirds aren’t hateful, they’re just noisy neighbors.

In other news, I’ve had this recent e-mail conversation with my doc about drug side effects. In the course of this conversation, he asked how often do I take Vicoden? Here’s my draft reply: 

Subject: Vicoden Vs. Warfarin

Dear Doc,

How often I take a Vicoden depends entirely on my decision about how often I’d like to sleep through the night without waking in pain. Hypothetically, I prefer to sleep enough hours nightly to avoid having to suffer daily from sleep deprivation hallucinations. Notwithstanding the foregoing however, I also don’t want to take Vicoden more often than 3 nights a week because the more I take, the less it works. And I need it to work.

And now that we’re on the subject of how much you care about potential drug side effects, it may interest you to know that the warfarin I take to thin my blood (Fun fact: warfarin is rat poison. I shit you not.) is problematic wrt/ side effects.

• For instance, I bruise so easily that if someone speaks sharply to me they leave a bruise.
• For instance, large bruises - say =>3” in diameter - are painful. Who knew?
• For instance, increasingly, my bruised fingers and hands swell up and turn purple in a tight and painful generalized bruise that lasts two weeks, and that keeps me up nights looking at the dark side of the moon while my hands look like two balloons.
• For instance, if I get the least little scratch, I bleed so much that if CSI used one of those backlights in my house they’d think it was a Manson Family time-share.
• For instance, if I had invested in Band-Aid stock when I started on warfarin, I’d be rich enough to have a doctor who first did no harm.

Let’s call it a working draft reply and leave it at that.

Sheep Vs. Roses

"For millions of years flowers have been producing thorns. For millions of years sheep have been eating them all the same. And it's not serious, trying to understand why flowers go to such trouble produce thorns that are good for nothing? It's not important, the war between the sheep and the flowers?... Suppose I happen to know a unique flower, one that exists nowhere in the world except on my planet, one that a little sheep can wipe out in a single bite one morning, just like that, even without realizing what he's doing - that isn't important? If someone loves a flower of which just one example exists among all the millions and millions of stars, that's enough to make him happy when he looks at the stars. He tells himself, 'My flower's up there somewhere...' But if the sheep eats the flower, then for him it's as if, suddenly, all the stars went out. And that isn't important?'"

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

The war between the sheep and the flowers has been going on a while, and there is no clear winner so far. So far, nobody has eaten the last rose. Meanwhile, I’m slow roasting a rack of lamb today, but it’s not the last lamb.

Today, there is a rose in the backyard, and the house smells like rosemary. So for today, the roses are winning, and the stars are still shining. Life is good.

Remembering and Forgetting

“One of the saddest things in life, is the things one remembers.”

― Agatha Christie

"Learn to forget, learn to forget

Learn to forget, learn to forget"

― The Doors, Soul Kitchen

Ever wonder if you have a tapeworm in your brain? Me neither. But we should, apparently. At some point in every life, one has to start cleaning out the top hard-to-reach shelves of the old memory bank. Otherwise, all we’re likely to remember is the danger of tapeworms, the needless mnemonic for how to spell Arithmetic, and simple gardening information, like say, distinguishing a rose from a daisy. I probably won't remember the hard gardening stuff like whether it’s aloe or agave that dies after it blooms. Look it up, you’re more likely to remember it that way.

Apart from potential worms in my brain, I worry that if I don’t clean cobwebs from my memory store (like the names of the brothers on Bonanza, and don’t say Little Joe because everybody remembers him. And Hoss. It’s that other guy, what's his name...) that I won’t have room to store new knowledge like the names of the current Idol finalists (not!) or the difference between a daisy and a rose. 

When a loved one dies, I grieve about the one-of-a-kind memories they took with them. Sometime it may be merely delightful and within living memory: like a particular game of hide and seek on a childhood summer evening like this. Sometimes it is generations old: like that the tiny enamel pin in my jewelry box that says “AHS ’03” that is my maternal grandmother’s pin from her 1903 Ayersville (Ohio) High School graduation class that Mom gave me. Sometimes it’s more than recent or fond; it’s ancient and essential. To give you an idea, think about what would happen if the last guy that knows how to brew good beer dies. Ok, then think of something that actually might happen.

I’d like to remember happy things, and not sad ones. I know life includes both, but see no reason why this should require that the shelves in my personal memory must be stacked that way. But, not withstanding Jim Morrison, learning to forget is the easy part. The hard part is learning what to forget, because it turns out that the mere act of revisiting a particular memory tends to strengthen it. It’s, like, counterintuitive. And it's hard: like counting to ten without thinking of elephants. (Which reminds me of my all-time favorite riddle: why do elephants drink?)

So, here’s my trick for learning to forget. The first step is to identify the memory you want to forget - say tape worms, or that if you are a gardener who likes to eat what you grow you may be a murderer. 

Then spend twice as much time thinking of something good to remember.  And if you can’t tap into happy memories to wipe out bad memories like bleach on bloodstains, then you should create some. Happy memories, not bloodstains. Like today’s NASA Astronomy Picture of The Day. Today, it’s the Annular Solar Eclipse I will see tomorrow night from here in SoCal, even though I won’t be in the path for the full eclipse pictured, but will see a small bite out of one side (i.e. a partial annular solar eclipse.

Don't forget that last step for heaven’s sake. Learn how to remember it. The happy memory, not the brain worms.

An Apple A Day?

"And then I thought, 'Wouldn't breakfast be healthier if my waffle were made of salad?'"
-Scott, on morning meal alternatives 

This article, “Gross Intredients in Processed Foods” in today’s Huffpo breathlessly breaks the “news” that some of the stuff in processed foods would gross us all out, if only we knew. So they tell us,  and the answers are "gross", which is a precise scientific term of art meaning Eight on a 1-10 scale from cringeworthy, to vomit inducing scrotum punch. Ok, I made that last part up. But in fairness to the author, she's an idiot.

Here’s what’s in an international orange bottle of Cheeze Whiz Squeeze: Whey, milk, milkfat, dried corn syrup, water, sodium phosphate, contains less than 2 percent of: Food starch-modified, salt, maltodextrin, lactic acid, mustard flour, Worcestershire sauce (vinegar, molasses, corn syrup, water, salt, caramel color, garlic powder, sugar, spices, tamarind, natural flavor), sorbic acid as a preservative, oleoresin paprika (color), cheese culture, annatto (color), enzymes. Yikes, right?

But not only is the science in this story rather squishy, they bury the lead. Turns out foodie bloggers are right: not only does real slow food taste better than fast food; it’s better for you! This scientific fact was cleverly deduced by Dr. David Katz, who knows what's best. “An overhaul of food labeling is most likely still a while off. In the meantime, consumers' increased curiosity into food production could result in a return to cleaner eating. 'What I know best is that the foods best for health are generally not prone to any such adulterations,' writes Katz, who suggests eating foods made from ingredients you have heard of, recognize as either a plant or animal and can pronounce.”

Seriously? Whether I can pronounce ingredients? Then again... Digest pantothenic acid, pyridoxine, phytosterols, alanine. Consider the lowly monosaccharide and it’s greasy cousin oligosaccharide. To me, these sound like pretty gross and unpronounceable ingredients. Hence, I conclude they are clearly not better for my health.  I mean, Dr. Katz might point out that monosaccharides totally sounds like a social disease; or it might if I could pronounce it. In case your curiosity has been aroused, these are the ingredients in apples. Moreover, even if consumers’ curiosity into apple production remains unaroused, these are still the ingredients in apples. 

The Huffpo article is to science as Cheese Whiz Squeeze (“Now with more Trademarks!”) is to cheese. But thanks, Sara Klein, Associate Editor, Healthy Living, for this amazing factoid stuffed taste of the science of healthy living.

In the event that you’re interested in an important issue to all who prefer their apples from trees and not GMO test tubes, check this out: GM Food: Don't Ask, Don't Tell? in the Utne Reader. There will be an initiative on labeling GMO foods on the upcoming CA ballot and this article gives a good, if biased*, background on the topic, along with a number of references. 

* Of course the GMO article and all of it's references have a bias. That is, if you want to consider facts capable of being biased. To paraphrase Respectful Insolence, facts can neither be biased, nor insolent. OBTW, evolution is true.

Fools and Liars

“As blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.”

Jonathan Swift

If modesty makes a fool seem like a man of sense, does immodesty make a fool seem even more foolish? Or does he merely remain a shameless whore who also seems a fool?

I'lll take a lot of credit for giving Swift the inspiration for the above quote. I spun him over in his grave a few times by playing Mitt Romney’s recent radio interview taking credit for the bailout that insured General Motors’ survival.

Responsible Vegetable Gardening - Brussels Sprouts

"You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of."

Jim Rohn

Vegetable gardeners who cultivate year-round vegetable gardens - as we can here in Zone 9 - must learn to embrace the mysteries; and by that I don’t mean mysteries like why someone would want to grow Brussels sprouts in the first place. I don’t judge. For the purpose of classifying the vegetables we cultivate at any given moment, I refer to the mysteries of seasonal transitions: when can I stop growing cool season veggies like cole crops (cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts); and when can I put the tender tomato starts in? Especially, when do I get to give up on the languishing Brussels sprouts and sew the watermelon seed?

Mother Nature doesn’t simply flip a switch at the spring equinox and declare that those languishing cabbages won’t ever get around to making heads, or that the world is now safe to grow eggplants. Around here, she tends to tease the gardener with a week or two of lovely warm weather and then circle back around and ambush us with a whack of winter weather. (And, what the hell do those anorexic, inappropriately dressed weather “gals” mean when they say well, we’re in for some unseasonable weather? Before weather can become unseasonable, you have to have discernable seasonal transitions, or at least discernable seasons, i.e. seasonable seasons. We don’t.)

Which gets me to my real subject here: those deadbeat losers of the vegetable kingdom - Brussels sprouts. We have only left the malingering Brussels sprouts in our vegetable garden for the upcoming Spring Garden Festival. It’s not just that we don’t want a patch of bare ground, or that we’re reluctant to expose tender vegetable to “unseasonable” weather. It’s certainly not that we expect to actually see a respectable ROI on our Brussels sprouts venture.

Speaking only for myself and not my fellow veggie gardeners, my reason for permitting the Brussels sprouts to remain in the garden is that they are a harsh lesson in responsible vegetable cultivation. If not damning evidence of their worthlessness, their unproductively is surely the harbinger of doom for our Brussels sprouts. These pretentious celebrities of the vegetable kingdom that spell their first name with a capital letter are as worthless as any Hollywood celebrity. 

When we were kids, we used to call them Mighty Mouse Cabbage, but that didn’t mean we liked eating them. I have met exactly one adult in my entire life that claims to like eating Brussels sprouts. Cooking the fruit of the Brussels sprouts makes your house smell like the unventilated hallway of a cheap boarding house at dinnertime, even down to the finishing notes of unwashed sweat socks lingering in the kitchen the next morning.

I conclude my case against Brussels sprouts by somewhat redundantly concluding that any annual vegetable that takes more than 90 days to ripen (or not to even bother to ripen) isn’t going to work in the microclimate of our garden. I should admit here that I have seen a vegetable garden about 5 miles away grow these plants taller than I, and so thickly productive that their stalks look like cylindrical cobblestone roads. In fairness to me, a professional master gardener who lavishly feeds them her homemade compost tends that garden. That said, I maintain that it is not a responsible use our sparse water and precious compost, not to mention my meager unpaid amateur gardening talents, for some stupid vegetable that ends up being an open invitation to several generations of short-lived white flies to enjoy themselves at leisure.

But wait until next week, after the Festival. Then, look out.

Imagine mama whitefly, who today gathers her fledgling babies around their whitefly hearth and tells them about the rich feeding grounds in plot #10. There, my darlings, you will find yummy, leggy Brussels sprouts, with lush leaves and anemic fruit that have nurtured generations of our ancestor flies, making us the mightiest whitefly kingdom on the block. Now imagine how, come next week, the kids will find a figurative scorched bare ground. Hah! It will be like global warming for our whitefly population; or 100-year drought, right? This leads me to admit that another reason to leave the sprouts in is to lull the whiteflies into complacency and indulge my vengeful fantasy. Surely, one of the perks of being a vegetable gardener is the totally godlike power to change the environment of pests. Apocalypse next Tuesday! Citizens of entire whitefly nations will rise up and turn upon their failed leaders as their world descends into the chaos, and as whitefly civilization breaks down, and as entire whitefly cultures are lost in nightmares of starvation and deprivation. (Disclaimer: I could be less than accurate about whitefly biology and ethnography here, but I’m probably not. I’m not a botanist or a fortuneteller. Based on this post, one might even say that I’m not much of a gardener either.) 

It is a challenge to garden responsibly, particularly as our seasonal circumstances are so mercurial. One of the changes we can control is what we plant and don’t plant. As god is my witness, I’ll never plant Brussels sprouts again.

Not Such a Long Way After All, Baby

 “The courage of a man lies in commanding, a woman’s lies in obeying.”

-       Aristotle

“Women are capable of education, but they are not made for activities which demand a universal faculty such as the more advanced sciences, philosophy and certain forms of artistic production. ... Women regulate their actions not by the demands of universality, but by arbitrary inclinations and opinions.” 

-       Hegel

Women are being threatened. Again. At first I was surprised that we seemed to be moving backwards in this seemingly endless American election season. Then I was outraged. Now I’ve come to accept that men have always felt this way about women.  This journey from denial to acceptance is neither more remarkable than the taste of bitter ashes; nor more puzzling than the long history of man’s inhumanity to women. But there’s still the question of why women continue to passively accept or even actively collude in their domination by men.

I think I’ve found a big answer to part of this question - by recently learning about the plight of a typical Afghan woman who passively accepts her lot in life. This girl was married off at age 11 to a husband who expects his wife to wait on him hand and foot until she dies young, probably in childbirth. Why doesn’t she strangle the man in bed or poison his dinner?

Despite the risk of having my head explode from the cognitive dissonance of attempting to equate the horrific fate of an 11-year old Afghan bride to that of a “working mom” like Ann Romney (after all, neither of them have every been “gainfully" employed) I have developed a theory about why. Women everywhere accept our various fates because we have no expectation of any alternative choice.

The young Afghan woman who flees from an abusive husband is guilty of committing a “moral crime” for which she can be indefinitely imprisoned. Her “choice” is to return to her father’s house where she will be murdered for bringing dishonor; to live as a beggar and never see her children again; or to return to the abusive husband. For very similar reasons, American women will watch as American men move us in pretty much the same direction as the customs prevailing in Afghanistan. Apart from the feeble power of our vote in an electoral system increasingly corrupted by corporations and politicians, what choice do we have?

I was not only a working mom, I was a single mom with a full time job who attended law school at night. I was fortunate. I had the choice to leave a bad marriage, to find an underpaying job, to attend school to improve my income potential. But I didn’t have a choice about making 77% of a man’s salary; of paying for birth control if I chose to engage in intercourse; of leaving my young child in the care of someone else while I worked and attended school; of paying 20% of my salary for such day care; or of being exhausted every day and every night for years.

Generally speaking, the sexes are different. Men are generally larger and have stronger muscles. Women are generally smaller and possess less physical strength (although my own experience is that women have more endurance).  When survival depended on physical prowess, men had a clear advantage and could even be considered superior – again, generally speaking.  Thus evolved a rule that made perfect sense: because women generally aren’t able to kick the shit out of men, men got to kick the shit out of women. A perfectly reasonable rule. To. A. Caveman. To cavemen like Aristotle and Hegel, or many American politicians. The kicking can be literal, as it is to the young mother in Afghanistan; or metaphorical as it was in the workplace and marketplace to me.

But that was then. I might have belonged to the first generation of feminists who had access to reliable birth control, but I was also part of a generation of women who still wanted to become mothers, even though many of us couldn’t be stay-at-home moms. But today, many daughters of my generation of moms are choosing to postpone motherhood for a professional career; and even to forgo motherhood entirely.

So, my theory about why women often permit men to kick the shit out of them is that they allow it for the sake of their children. I suspect some men realize this dirty little secret and hence the “war on woman’s health” which is actually more of a war on a woman’s choice about whether or not to bear children.  While many mothers of my generation probably consider the greatest accomplishment in their lives to be their children, I now understand why more and more of our daughters do not see motherhood as their greatest potential achievement.  In this regard, our daughters are smarter than we were. They exercised a very fundamental choice. They have found a way to break the cycle of passive acceptance of generations of unfair and cruel treatment at the hands of their male relatives.

These days, survival no longer depends on relative brute strength, at least in America. Women have brains every bit as capable of men; many would argue more capable. Once no longer hampered by the imposed long term "weaknesses" of childbearing, women may no longer passively permit men to kick the shit out of them. I hope I live to see the day men figure this out. Maybe I already have.

Flowers Resembling Wisteria

"Among all plants, vines are the most vivid examples of nature's playful spontaneity. When they decide to grow, they grow without knowing where to grow to. They never miss an opportunity to engage themselves in a playful act with whomever they meet.The movement of the vine dutifully records the memory of its adventures."

 - Living Arts Originals

Although my wisteria is stunningly lovely this year, I have posted enough about wisteria. So, instead, I thought I’d use this post not so much as an excuse to show off my white wisteria, but to write about flowers that look like wisteria. Clever how I did that, eh?

Have you ever thought you saw a large white wisteria tree? I have. We were both wrong. What we saw was a black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia). The flowers bear a remarkable resemblance to white wisteria, especially from a distance. Upon closer inspection, they are clearly not wisteria.

The picture on left below is wisteria. The picture on the right is a black locust. Close resemblance, but clearly not the same.

An intriguing fact is that all three plants - the black locust, the mescal and the wisteria - are not only drought tolerant, they all have similar foliage: pinnately compounded leaves. My personal theory about these similarities is that this is simply further evidence of  a conspiracy by Mother Nature to keep me from ever learning any serious botany.


A more intriging flower, for me, is found on a tidy bush, intriguingly called Mescal bean (Sophora secundiflora, or Calia secundiflora), also known as the Texas Mountain Laurel. All three pictures on the left are of the mescal flower, bush and seed pods. The seeds inside are bright orange-red.

It surprised me to learn here that mescal beans “are also not related to the highly intoxicating beverage called ‘mescal’ or ‘mezcal’, made from the fermented and distilled juices of several North American species of Agave, including A. americana and A. atrovirens. Incidentally, the fermented juice is called pulque, and the highly-alcoholic distilled products include Mezcal and Tequila.” Good to know.

It also surprised me to read that that the mescal bean is not related to the peyote cactus (Lophophora williamsii), although  “The poisonous seeds contain the alkaloid cytisine, and were once used in the intoxicating, vision-seeking ‘red bean dance’ prior to the widespread use of the "less-life-threatening" peyote cactus.” So, peyote is less deadly than mescal. Also good to know.

The politically incorrect plant sign on the mescal bean in the LA Arboratum where I took these photos this month explains, “The wood yields a yellow dye. The bright orange-red seeds were sacred to Indians and placed in burials. Now they are made into jewelry.” A depressingly succinct summary of how native culture has been misunderstood and corrupted by descendants of European settlers.

We may no longer do the red bean dance, but at least we can now buy our intoxicants in clearly labeled bottles at the Booze Barn; and we don’t have to keep all the details straight about what might kill us. More importantly, we can simply enjoy these beautiful flowers for their appearance and not their chemical make up.

Ask a Terrible Gardener

"We've left our future largely in the hands of people whose single greatest characteristic is that they are bewildered by the present." Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It
 

If I find a buried treasure in the backyard when I’m digging a hole to plant a tree, do I have to share it with my deadbeat grown children?

Only if you don’t kill them immediately after you tell them about the treasure.

Is time travel possible?

I answered that question tomorrow. 

Why must I be a teenager in love?

You should really be asking a lawyer about this; preferably, one who specializes in estate planning.

Is the war in Afghanistan futile?

Some say so: “I say futile as (we) have 100,000 men in theater to engage in a fantastically unrealistic nation-building effort amidst a Pashtun population who largely detest our presence, simply to ferret out perhaps 50-100 residual al-Qaeda operatives, and with their leader already felled long ago in Abbottabad.” Gregory Djerejian

 

Can the Supreme Court force me to grow broccoli?

That remains to be seen. But if they do, you can always smother it with melted cheese.

Was Hunter S. Thompson an admirer of Spiro Agnew?

Probably not: “Hunter S. Thompson once characterized Agnew as a ‘flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed.' But he was Nixon’s vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.’  This was absolutely untrue.  As any undergraduate zoology major knows, weasels on speed behave very differently." Brainstorm 

Does anybody here speak jive?

Beaver’s mom, but she’s dead.

Twenty-four Hours in Four Words

Moved piano. Slept well.

Experience vs. Dreams

“Everything in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head.” Geoff Dyer, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It.

“People always think something's all true.”
J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

The other day, I arranged more than one terrarium on the table outside by my mural. The small terraria are real; the view from the painted window is not real. But the overall effect is pleasing.

The other day, a person I know described a vivid experience involving a train passing outside her bedroom window. In passing, the noisy train had woken her from a nice nap. She recounted that there was a neighboring lady who was going to buy the train, which was clearly frivolous and impractical.

The person recounting this experience is a dementia patient confined to a wheelchair and living in the midst of suburban houses where the nearest passing train is more than ten miles away. Her days are so routine as to be mind-numbingly boring, and I figure her dream-life is compensating by giving her something interesting to experience.

I am not the first person to speculate that if something does happen but only inside one’s own head such events are as real as experience as far as our brains are concerned. But what about the flip side of the question: can my brain insist that something I saw while awake was merely a dream, to be kicked to the curb of memory lane? There are more things these days that I’d rather forget than remember. At least, things that I can recall at the moment. For example, I’d rather remember the lovely blooming white iris, and forget the small crocodile lurking in the background.

It is sobering for me to consider that the foundation of my cognitive functions in the future rests on the shaky structure being constructed of my present experiences. Perhaps it’s time for me to research the whole lucid dreaming thing, so I can attempt to establish a less bewildering muddle of experiences to remember.

Then again, perhaps not. I do like trains.

Seize the Vicodin

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun
Shine on you crazy diamond
Now there’s a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky
Shine on you crazy diamond
- - Gilmour, Water, Wright, Shine on You Crazy Diamond

It’s poppy season in Afghanistan: beautiful but deadly, and not just for those who grow and consume the harvest.

Meanwhile, back in America, it’s April Fool’s Day. The news stories about New York school officials censoring words from performance tests to avoid upsetting children are, regrettably, not a joke. After all, it’s not just New York where, for example, censoring words that might make kids feel bad like “poverty” and “divorce” are not the only example of such attempts to cocoon children from the really, really bad old world. It’s also no joke that California apparently bans the word “weed” from tests. Of course, as a gardener, I too, am upset by weeds…

In honor of poppy season/April Fools Day, I am hereby instituting a dress code for my blog. Please don’t read or post here if you’re not tastefully and modestly clothed. A bit of cleavage or a glimpse of a bulging codpiece is upsetting enough to your friends and family. Please spare the rest of us.

On a related note, there’s another line from the Pink Floyd song quoted above that has always mystified me: “… you wore out your welcome with random precision…” Does anybody know what that means?

Once again, I have achieved a world record in labels that will never be seen together again.