conuly

An article on a self-teaching computer, haven't read it yet

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Spaghetti tacos, a more interesting article than it sounds

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At Brooklyn High School Named for Murrow, the Television Studios Are Dark

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Footprint Fossils Offer Earliest Evidence of Dinosaurs’ Ancestors

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A Seed Library for Heirloom Plants Thrives in the Hudson Valley

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Done!

This'll take up multiple entries, I'm sure.

Cricket helps the police forge ties in immigrant communities

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Rain collection is now legal in Colorado

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Children: Self-Control Presages Math Gains in Young

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Fragile Tanzanian Orphans Get Help After Mothers Die

( This one is fascinating )

Political Shifts on Gay Rights Lag Behind Culture

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Our comfrey was thriving on Monday - about as tall as Evangeline, almost as tall as Ana. Tuesday it was about as tall as Jenn - and while Jenn is short, she's just not that short. Today it's tall enough to fall over and collapse on the ground and block the path - and that's just one of our comfrey plants.

I don't care what my mother says, we have yet to have the disaster that requires the use of the comfrey that ate New York. (Besides, if we do it'll probably because we're cut up from fending off the rosebush that ate New York. There's something about our soil, I swear.)

So I'm going to trim it this weekend. Now, I know comfrey is good for the compost, so some of it will go in there, but I'd like to save some for human use as well. You know, in case of zombie apocalypse and all the drugstores are closed. What's the best way to go about this?

Similarly, we only need one rosemary, not three. I like rosemary as much as the next girl, but seriously, I've never used more than half an acre in my pasta. And the chamomile - who thought we needed that much chamomile??? It's approaching the height of our crape myrtle, and that's just not cool. Perhaps the pending zombie apocalypse will bring about epidemic levels of insomnia, but in that case I don't think we'll exactly want to fall asleep.

So I want to save these herbs, and I want to see if I can transplant some of them someplace less in my garden... maybe I can move some into Lenore's yard next door, she won't mind, or I can donate some to the school...? (If they take, of course.) Then I want to encourage that chickweed to grow. It's doing a fine job of preventing erosion and more annoying weeds in the places we haven't tended yet. I like our chickweed!

And finally, remind me this weekend to stop by the Farmer's Market and pick up some nettle. If I should happen to plant that in the tulips and by our fence, and if garden thieves and trespassers should happen to get stung, that's hardly my fault, is it? Pretty funny if they do, though. My mother nixed this plan two years running, of course. Better warn the neighborhood kids, though - despite having some four different kinds of mint in our yard (pepper, apple, spear, lemon) you'll note I haven't said a word about mint overtaking our garden. Thanks to the kids on the block we're actually in the novel position of having to plant more this year, and I don't want one of them going for nettles by accident - ouch!

1. Jenn - they're praying mantis egg cases!

An article on being the adoptive black parents of a white child, which is not the usual way of multi-racial adoption in the US. (I forgot who gave me this)

A reminder - Geocities is closing this year. Thanks, pne.

Two links from thornleaf, one on posting to Twitter using nothing but your BRAIN and another on a woman who left the house for the first time in 18 years thanks to the internet.

Another parody for that NOM ad, thank you griffen. And look - Giant Gay Repellent Umbrella is a real site! (I've only seen parodies of this ad, not the ad proper. Do I want to change that?)

And this, the most gratuitous mention of same-sex marriage I've seen in the news so far.

The article is about states, due to the economic climate, cutting down on the hours of their workforce, which is interesting enough on its own and very relevant. But the first paragraph, out of nowhere, starts out: "Licenses for same-sex marriages were supposed be issued in Iowa starting this Friday. But because of a crimped state budget, court employees will be on mandatory furlough that day and the courts will be closed. Gay couples cannot start filing for their licenses until Monday." Which, you know, affects people in opposite-sex marriages too. NOBODY is getting married in Iowa until Monday. It just seems tacked on, you know?

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Do raspberries grow well from cuttings?

How about seeds? How many berries would I need to pick, and when would I plant the seeds?

One on guerilla gardening, haven't read the whole article yet

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And one on the use of excessive force against wildlife - go check out the comments after the article.

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One of the comments following that article is asking me to crosspost it here:

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Saw Deniz the other day, and she told me that it's "always illegal to kill animals". Well, no, so I reminded her of hamburgers. "Well, it's always illegal to kill wild animals!" No, I mentioned that people hunt. "Well, that's only legal if you're doing it for food, not for fun."

So we had a talk about how it's legal to do any number of things that maybe aren't ethical. (And no, I'm not a fan of the hunting-for-fun concept, nor the "killing snakes because they creep me out" idea.)

Not the plantains that are like bananas, the plantains that are plantago and native to Eurasia.

Well, we've got right now some huge giant plantains - big enough that I didn't believe they were plantains before, I kept going "They look familiar, and I think they're edible..."!

Think they must be Greater Plantain. And if google is serving me well, they're not only edible, but extremely medicinal as well. Well, I dug most of 'em up (my god they have deep roots!) and I left one in to grow, because I knew before I googled, from reading, that the little plantains are valuable (much though people pull them up as weeds!), so I thought the big ones might be as well.

HUGE plants. Remember I told you about the giant milkweed of doom? Well, this is the giant plantain of doom. Those roots alone were as long as my arm from wrist to elbow, and they're only about half the height of the plant at the middle - and most of the leaves don't stand up, but flop over, and *they're* all about half to entirely as long as the root.

This is a weird year. We have a lot of birds, more than I think we've had. We've got a chickadee, and I know what it sounds like! Don't have any dragonflies. When we were in Brooklyn, we always had dragonflies in our yard, all the time, and lots of slugs. When we moved to Staten Island we ditched most of the slugs, but we don't seem to have any dragonflies! They have them in Battery Park City, even, and they have them over in Snug Harbor I think, but we don't have any near us where I live.

Used to have a lot of trees up and down our block, too. Lots on the sidewalk, and lots in our yard. We had our big maple, and the one in the corner that fell the year we moved in, and one in the OTHER corner that I think was a cherry, and in the middle of our yard we had our dwarf peach, and our crepe myrtle, and by the edge we had a... something, I think mimosa, though that doesn't make any sense this far north, does it? But when the big maple fell it took out everything, everything, EVERYTHING but the crepe myrtle (which plays dead every year until May), and for the past seven years or so we've been losing all the trees on the block. All the little ones anyway, the big ones, the maples there and the london planes? They're still standing.

So anyway, last month the city made a big push to get people to commit to having trees in front of their houses, which my mother refuses to do because it's the worst deal - you're liable for if the tree pushes up the sidewalk or drops branches on a car, but you can't trim without permission from the city! - and all around our block, in our neighborhood, every street has lots and lots of these little trees. And we lost three, four trees in the past year alone, and we didn't get any :) I think, after the tornado, people saw the sense in not having more excess foliage.

Unwanted childbearing is a greater demographic force than the desire for large families, and may have been for centuries.

Well, duh!

The Mystery of Parental Psychiatric Diagnoses
And a related post by ABFH

Another article on urban farming
And another one indeed

One on being a closeted gay, and, incidentally, on homophobia

One introducing the word kyriarchy, which is a bad choice for a word for a bad thing because it just sounds so dang pretty!
And a related post here.

Say, listen. I might start cataloging the nieceling's books one of these days. Would anybody be interested in my posting quick-ass reviews of them here? There's a lot of books to go through, so I won't do it unless at least one person says yes.

And, also, does anybody know where I can get one of those stands that they have in bookstores and libraries that have small shelves on all four sides and spin, so they're a very economical way of storing paperbacks?

Repetitive exposure to an opinion can influence as much as exposure to opinions from several people

I have a friend, Rachel. Rachel is a wonderful person, and very "crunchy", as they say. Now, a few months ago she was raving about how she was going to join a CSA, and get farming experience, and this, and that... actually, I'm pretty sure she never did that. Now, at the time, my thought was "Rachel, you're Ms. UberCrunchy, there's food at the store".

But when I read about it a second time... I got to thinking. And now it's the third time, and I'm convinced! Give me the money and sign me up, right? I'm not sure I have the money for the one I want, but maybe I can start with a half share and work my way up?

Next weekend, I'm cleaning out the backyard. I think I'll see if I can talk my mom at least into getting purple carrots. What else should I plant? Our soil is pretty rocky, so I'm not even sure the carrots are a great idea... can I grow them in massive pots?

Edit: This might be best, you don't have to pay all at once. I just now called and recommended it to a friend of mine who uses food stamps, because that's an option too. Maybe I can call the others, see if they too can be paid in installments if you need to, that'd be good. I just wish there were some way to compare and contrast them without having to join them all individually!