I have decided that not only am I not a green-thumb gardener, I am not even a black-thumb gardener. If there is such a thing, I may be the antichrist of gardening. Nearly all of my larger tomatoes this year are tortured-looking things like the faces of the souls in hell that you see on engravings in the pages of Dante’s Inferno.
They are also not edible, it’s like trying to eat a mutant reddened sponge ball.
I have also given up on basil. Each time I tried, a plant would flourish and then one fine morning the leaves began to turn black from their tips inward. It was like watching a forest fire from an airplane, as the flames converged on the center of the plant leaving only burned vegetation behind.
This happened repeatedly in spite of my following all the good advice that I‘ve been given. Eventually I took pity on the world of basil and withdrew, leaving it for others to colonize.
Things have reached the point where my neighbors have taken out protection orders against me and I am not allowed within 50 yards of their domiciles. In an attempt to encourage me to move elsewhere, those same people are directing episodes of nighttime drive-by doggie defecation at our home. A blacked-out car with hooded driver will pull slowly to the curb, a door opens, and a masked dog rushes from the automobile to my lawn where it immediately relieves itself. It then jumps back into the car and the vehicle vanishes into the night.
One has to admire the time and effort it must have taken to train such animals.
Ah well, you’ll have to excuse me, one of those cars is driving up right now. I’ve saved the last ten canine deposits and built a small version of a catapult which is loaded with them and trained on the spot where the car is stopping.
Wouldn’t want to miss their surprised looks for the world. I call it setting boundaries.
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From The New Yorker
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We all have times that there are no words for, I suspect. Both of joy and of sorrow. Depths and heights … when we really need them we find that everyday life has already used up the special words. It’s like you come running to the end of the pier and there is nothing to do but jump and let the wind wipe away your tears as you tumble into space.
For me, tears have become the replacement for those missing words, as when I was a child and would cry when I was extremely frustrated for one reason or another. Tears can be symbols, the placeholders for words yet to be coined.
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Grandson Aiden settled into his dorm room at the University of Texas this week. Some pictures of the event drifted back to us and one of them contained something that looked terribly familiar, a tower at the main building. My personal search engine began to rifle through the mess in my cranium, and from somewhere in those old rusted filing cabinets it came up with the answer. It is the (in)famous Texas Tower, a landmark dating from August 1, 1966, when a sniper opened fire from its observation deck.
Charles Whitman killed seventeen individuals and wounded at least thirty-one others over the course of thirteen hours before he was killed on the observation deck of the UT Tower on August 1, 1966. All but two of those killed and all injured sustained their wounds after Whitman reached the 28th floor of the main building less than two hours before his own death.
Wikipedia: The Texas Tower Shooting.
Funny, but not really. Back then, shootings like this were not the commonplace event that they have become. It was quite a sensation. There was even a movie made about the whole sorry business, starring Kurt Russell.
We’ve made precious little progress since then in curbing this particularly disturbing sort of violence. Too many of the people who buy these t-shirts out there.
If they would only just shoot at each other, and leave the rest of us alone, the problem would eventually solve itself.
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From The New Yorker
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How many times have you seen a line like this as clickbait on CNN online?
You won’t believe what a daring dress she wore to the Oscar ceremonies.
A hundred? A thousand? And what is it that is so daring … why, the draping of fabric in such a way, perhaps defying gravity, to conceal all but the tiniest peek at … a nipple. That’s it! That’s the whole huge and unbelievable deal! A few square millimeters of pigmented tissue.
Don’t you just despair, sometimes? We can be such a silly species. Well, I’m not one of those sheep, those gutless wonders. I do not fear a little bit of skin. Here is a photograph of a full-fledged nipple from a full-fledged person for you to start your day with. Think of it as a blow for freedom and sanity.
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Little Home In The Valley 