The plantation 01

Agribusiness ramps (get it?) up locally. Archer-Daniels-Midland "concerned"

Arugula Up the Wazoo

The Back Forty

Hobbes and Black-Style Herb Pyramid

The menu: 01

Catching up on a year's worth of food pictures.

Antipasti

Duck risotto with golden trumpet mushrooms and asparagus.

Vegetable saute', all local, some extremely local.

Huevos rancheros, Joseph Street Style

The table

It's a good day ...

... for headlines, tweets, and so on that trigger the old imagination.

For example, @irarchaeology tells us: "In 1007 AD the Book of Kells was stolen. Two months later it was found beneath a sod ..." Whether or not the sod was charged with anything, we don't know.

An Ancient Rude Monument

@VoxHiberionacum says: "On the Recent Desecration of an Ancient Rude Monument at Tara ..."


And Vladimir Putin (who is either drunk most of the time or is being very badly translated) said, of Hillary Clinton, "When people push boundaries too far, it’s not because they are strong but because they are weak. But maybe weakness is not the worst quality for a woman." Now, let's see, the last world leader who was pushing boundaries was ... oh, hell, who was that now? It'll come to me.

You'll never believe this!

Incredibly, against all odds, the Pakistan Taliban splits into factions. "This is unprecedented," said an expert in religio-political terror groups. "Never, in all the last twenty minutes, have I heard of anything like this happening!" He spoke on condition of anonymity, for reasons so obvious that they don't bear repeating.

"Wow," said US Vice President Joseph Biden, "I didn't see that coming."  His comment, which was intended to be off the record, was picked up by thirty-six live microphones, most of them positioned near his mouth.

Situational Awareness Quiz

In which of the following African countries does the US have a military presence?

• Burkina Faso
• Congo
• Central African Republic
• Chad
• Djibouti
• Ethiopia
• Kenya
• Mali
• Niger
• Nigeria
• Somalia
• South Sudan
• Uganda

The answer is: all of them.  The number ranges from a couple of dozen in Somalia to around 4000 at a base in Djibouti. The Washington Post article was vague on numbers, but that's sort of beside the point.  Looked at one way, you could say that the US has a military presence in virtually all countries if you count embassy security, but most if not all of the above goes beyond that.  And the list and map provided may or may not limit themselves to Sub-Saharan Africa.

Your morning idiocy round up

Good morning. And now the idiocy round up for Wednesday, May 21st.

The Guardian reports that the French government has a wee bit of a problem with an incompatibility between new high-speed trains it has on order and some of its older stations. A size problem. With somewhere between 340 and 1800 of the new trains. And 1300 stations.

It's as if you have bought a Ferrari that you want to park in your garage, and you realize that your garage isn't exactly the right size to fit a Ferrari because you didn't have a Ferrari before. We discovered the problem a little late …

By "trains", we assume they mean "engines and cars", by the way. The upshot is that they'll be fixing the stations, not the new trains. And of course, the existing administration is blaming the previous administration. For some reason, they (the previous administration) decided to split the administration of the national railroads in two, with one organization responsible for the rail network and another one moving trains around on it.  One group gave the other one measurements for its stations, but only the more recently built ones. The other group -- the one buying the new rolling stock -- took that information at face value, and ... voila! Une véritable grappe (Grappe appears to be how Google Translate renders "cluster".)

Moving to the world of politics, it is reported that Russian Premier Vladimir Putin's "Palace" on the Black Sea was paid for with money from a vast healthcare fraud  "... in which medical suppliers were making millions by gouging hospitals as part of a health-care improvement program set up by Putin."  Putin says he didn't do anything wrong. I swear, Officer, those aren't my rubles!

In an apparently unrelated incident, Britain's Prince Charles, during a private conversation with a Jewish person whose family fled from Poland to Canada in 1939, is claimed to have said that now Putin is doing "the same thing".  Whether he meant forcing people to flee to escape horrific persecution or whether he believes that the Russian leader himself is preparing to flee to Canada was not clear. However, everyone and his serf are objecting strongly to the gaffe. Even neo-Nazis are upset, insisting that the comparison is an insult to Hitler.

And finally, Italy's former Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, told an interviewer that as far as he's concerned, Germany's Angela Merkel isn't a lard-arse.  (He actually tacked an adjective onto the phrase, but the Wood-Charles policy on naughty words prevents us from repeating it; however, if you run it through Google Translate, it would probably give you "infoutrable".) 

To be clear, Berlusconi was adamantly denying that he ever said such a thing. Instead, he did admit "... jump[ing] out at her from behind a pillar in 2008 and yell[ing] “cuckoo”".  Berlusconi claimed that she found the prank funny, and said he got the idea from Vladimir Putin. (Note: we did not make that up. He is reported as saying that.)

This has been the idiocy round up.  We will not be bringing you the World Violence and General Mayhem Round Up today because no one here could stand to think about it, let alone attempt to mock it.

American slang for British Readers

Recently, in an article I can no longer find, there was yet another amusing piece in which an American was given a set of British slang terms and asked to guess what they meant. Although anyone who has seen any television since the 1970s would understand them, the author pretended not to and wrote crude and hipsterishly ironic mis-translations. This sort of off-hand journalism tends to obscure the very real differences between English and whatever it is we speak over here.  Consequently, here are some American words and phrases that may be useful for those traveling here from the mother country.

• Mother country: way, way out in the boondocks, as in "Man, we're in one mother of a country now".
• Boondocks: New Jersey.
• Truck: (noun) a lorry; a large self-propelled wheeled vehicle used in the US to break up pavement. (verb) a silly walk.
• Pickup truck:  a unit of measure equal to four sedans or nine buggers. Also a kind of motor vehicle owned by 99% of the US population.
• Pickup basketball: a game played with an inflated ball, a parking lot, and pickup trucks.
• Professional basketball: the last refuge of the scoundrel.
• Bugger: a two-wheeled cart, intended to be drawn behind a bicycle.
• Bugger off: a warning to a bicycle rider that his bugger has come loose.
• Bugger you: An invitation to a ride in a bugger.
• Sod off: As above, a warning to a landscape artisan that he has lost a quantity of grass and topsoil off the back of his truck.
• Canada (US spelling: Canadia): A large North American country, characterized by snow and low self-esteem.
• Ballocks: (noun) a) a neutered bull; b) an American actress. (verb) you don't want to know.
• Bite me (US spelling: byte): a request for additional digital storage.
• English: (noun) An Indo-European-derived language spoken in several underdeveloped nations. (adj) What the Queen is, as in "Don't you know the Queen's English?" "So's the King!"(1)
• Castors up: broken, out of service; a reference to large devices such as tape drives, mainframes, and hybrid automobiles; such devices frequently have small, steerable wheels on the bottom. "My Prius went castors up."
• Ford: (verb) to cross a stream or river by wading; (noun) a crack-smoking Mayor of a large city.
• Minton: a common name for a pet; "Bad Minton! No biscuit!"

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(1) The author is aware that there have been periods of British history during which there was a Queen but no King; further, he is aware of times in which the Queen was English and the King wasn't, viz., William of Orange, the Hanoverians, Lars the Norwegian, Joe the plumber, etc.  Byte me.

Those who cannot remember quagmires, etc.

News from the Pac Rim is discomforting lately.  It was interesting enough when only Japan and China were snapping at each other. Now China is annoying the Philipines as well. But even more concerning to those of us who remember the sixties and early seventies is the increasing tension between China and ... wait for it ... Vietnam.

This tiny People's Republic is once again threatened by the specter of foreign intervention.  A vast and intimidating economic powerhouse is menacing the free and democratic exercise of self-determination, carrying out secret plans to subvert, ah, something subvertable. A large faction within the Chinese government has decided that Vietnam represents a prime example of the so-called "Mahjong theory", a largely mythical historical process in which if one small Asian country is allowed to slip into capitalism, soon others will also fall victim, and before you know it, them damn round-eyes will be buildin' Pizza Huts in the forbidden city. 

Unnamed sources within the People's Liberation Army Navy (Yes, I know it sounds silly. That's what it's called) claim that US cruise ships in the Gulf of Tonkin have treacherously mocked their pre-owned Russian aircraft carrier without a declaration of mockage.  Chinese interests in the region are claimed to be in jeopardy. "Some of them have even been ON Jeopardy!" said a Government spokesman.  Most of Beijing was shut down this morning in order to allow a series of city-wide fire drills.(1)

The US State Department issued a rebuttal, denying Chinese claims that a new Ho Chi Min tunnel, reaching from Hanoi to Wasilla, was being used to smuggle arms, food supplies, and smart phones to the Vietnamese Army. (A resident of Wasilla told reporters that she couldn't even see Vietnam from her porch, particularly because there was a moose standing in the way.) Nevertheless, China went ahead with formation of a multinational force ("The Coalition of the Intimidated or Confused") to maintain peace in the region. It will include troops from China, North Korea, and China, and will be tasked with preventing insurgency and hooliganism in Vietnamese cities, including Hue, Kyoto, Manilla, and Sydney.

---

(1) All right, all right. That was insensitive. And not very new, either.  I'll put a letter of reprimand in my personnel file.

The secret, not-holy war

An article in New Scientist (you may not be able to see it if you're not a subscriber, in which case, you'll just have to trust me) describes the decline in religious belief across the world, but it also exposes for the first time the violent world of Atheist factionalism, a thing that makes sectarianism in actual religions seem like gym class.

The author, Graham Lawton, goes on for several pages about the thought and non-thought surrounding belief and dis-belief, but most importantly, in a side bar, there appears the following typology:

"Four kinds of atheism
Mind-blind -- can't comprehend religion
Apathetic -- can't be bothered
InCREDulous (sic) -- isolated from extreme acts of faith
Analytic -- explicitly reject religion"

This remarkably dim-witted abstruse set of categories seemed harmless until Wood-Charles consulted a not-well-known non-member of the local not-clergy, and discovered that this is actually an accurate discription of the fracture of disbelief into competing, mutually hostile not-sects.  Our contact (who spoke on condition of anonymity since he is not dis-un-authorized to speak to the press) showed us the following letter to New Scientist sent by a high-ranking official of one of the factions of the intolerant unconvinced:

"Graham Lawton's summary of atheism and religion was an interesting and useful piece, but many of us would have preferred that he continue to conceal the 4 kinds of atheism for a while. As a member of the one true sect of the non-faith, I can say that we need more time before we are able to initiate un-holy war against the heretical, schismatic, non-non-believers in the other three kinds. So until the True Un-elect of Atheism are prepared to rise up in dis-righteous anger and smite the schismatic horde of the not-damned -- or at least until we insert enough of our faithful non fidelibus into various governing bodies -- the wrath of nobody will have to wait, and it would be better if we all just pretended to get along."

 Whether this portends execution by the social virtual machine of the instruction if (NOT longBelief AND boolCranky) {mahem();} remains to be seen. However, we did note a sharp increase in companies that produce spandex atheism shorts.

Free at last, free at last ...

It is now permissible for Ann Arbor residents to -- try to restrain your excitement -- scrape food off your plate straight into your composting cart!

A spokesperson for the NAAPL (National Association for the Advancement of Procyon lotor) expressed optimism.

"There's a tremendous opportunity there to reduce the amount of materials we're putting in the landfill ..." he told reporters.