from the moderated comments
WRONG, i’m female and anime FREAK.
from the comments
Erica, kale will grow very nicely in a container. It likes the cold, as you know. I don’t have personal experience with deer (rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, birds and lately a raccoon!). But I have heard of some things that can help if you don’t have a tall fence.
Fragrant bars of soap hung from branches or a bamboo stick, etc., about 30 inches from the ground. Think Irish Spring. Or human hair (ask a barber for trimmings) in mesh bags three feet off the ground. Plant spray made of three raw eggs in a gallon of water. Supposedly deer hate that. Also, row covers can help for a while, anyway.
I’ve also had success with mirror mobiles. I had one that was just a long fishing-wire string with small round mirrors attached. I laced it from a piece of wire protruding from a fence and nothing bothered my garden for ages. It would swing around in the sun and wind and it must have freaked out the varmints. Then the Iowan managed to knock it off onto the brick walk and broke a lot of it.
So I bought some very thin fishing wire and a bunch of little mirrors from a craft store. One mirror, glue, attached to the back of an identical mirror. Either one string or attach multiple strings to, say, a wire hanger, which is not pretty but will do the job. Speaking of, you also might string fishing wire between posts in the garden because supposedly that confuses deer.
Good luck!
Y’all are eating what you walk on
from the comments
It’s not possible to duplicate hush puppies that had been deep fried in an iron kettle perched on a wood fire outdoors. With the hand-cranked ice cream under a tree, still in freezers covered by newspapers. The freezers had to be repacked in fresh ice and salt and covered with newspapers and towels, left alone for a while. This “ripened” the ice cream, or hardened it. Absolute ambrosia.
Light Across the Plain
Mary lived in a garage apartment behind a two story house with a porch swing. She had a mattress on the floor in the corner of the room, and two windows on each wall looked onto the yard — where children’s bikes were thrown — and back to a field that sloped down to a stream where trees grew up along it so, at night, they looked like a wall, stretching as far as could be seen, and high and blocking the sun as it rose in the morning.
There was a pool table in the room at the top of the stairs that had been the family room for the people in the house, but since they rented to Mary, no one, the children or their friends, were allowed up there.
“Charles,” she said. “Get out of here.”
But I leaned against the doorjamb and smiled at her.
tweet of the day
I honestly cannot get enough of the comments on this vid: youtu.be/WMno23_otgE
— Megan Amram (@meganamram) February 6, 2012
from the comments
Miss Nell would start her cooking shows with, “Now as everyone knows I hate to cook so let’s get started and get out of this kitchen.”
El Wingador
Errol Morris interviewed competitive eater El Wingador:
El Wingador is a man truly committed to a certain kind of excellence — or at least, a certain kind of excess. Sure, I could have picked a different eating champion, but I guess I have an affinity for chicken. It is evident that chicken is his favorite competition food — particularly chicken wings. I asked him, “Why not hot dogs?” The simple and compelling answer: “Hey, my name is ‘El Wingador,’ not ‘El Hotdogador.’”
Night Stand
tweet of the day
I don’t need to read articles or books on atheism.My dog’s farts assure me we are all alone.
— Brian Posehn (@thebrianposehn) February 3, 2012
from the comments
When I was a little kid and we lived in South Haven, Michigan for a while, the house my family rented had one of those old electric ranges with the built-in deep fat fryer. Please remember this was back before unhealthy fried food was invented.
My mom would buy pre-made doughnut dough, the kind in a tube (like biscuits or crescent rolls). She’d pop ‘em open and separate the flat die-cut doughnut parts and fry them. The doughnut holes, fresh out and almost too hot to eat, were golden heaven. We’d sprinkle powdered sugar on them sometimes. Is there anything better than fresh, homemade doughnuts? No.
I don’t remember what we did with the doughnut parts outside the cut circles. Maybe we cooked and ate those too, never speaking about it or looking at each other.
Logistics
There’s a hole in the side of the hill birds fly out of. I like to go out there, into the field, and stand where the land rises into the hill, and watch as the birds fly back and forth.
I saw his mother getting out of her car. She kept fretting with her clothes. The baby was strapped to its seat, tightly. He kind of laughed then burped as I slid my hands beneath him. He laughed once, then lay quietly. I held him tightly against me.
I could feel him breathing. He yawned, then closed his eyes, as I set him, stomach down, onto the couch. His back was warm against my hand. I settled into the chair and watched him, and the sun rose and shone through the window.
He slept on the couch and I watched him wake up. I thought of a name for him, though I never called him by it, and I held him on the porch in the evening, before I set him down to sleep, and repeated it.
On afternoons, when he could walk, I took his hand and walked with him into the field toward the hill. We watched the birds. We listened as they flew into the sky or followed as they entered with their wings pressed tightly against them.
I heated water on the stove and watched steam rise as I poured cooler water into it. Then I lifted him and set him, feet first, into the tub. I passed a cloth across his back. I held his head in one hand, and poured water over his hair with the other. The beads caught on his lashes, and he blinked, and they rolled down his cheeks as he laughed.
One morning, he reached up and pulled at my shirt. When I looked down, he folded his hands beneath his arms, then pressed them against his body. They called and sang their songs for us. They dove and fell into the shadow of the hill. He jumped once, then stood quietly.
When I woke, the couch was empty. The door was open, and a wind came through the room, pushing against my hair. I could see the hill in the distance. As I got closer, the birds were singing, and I saw him standing there, arms outstretched, and what I had imagined as the birds calling to each other, was him singing and the birds answering, and coming to him from the hill.
I called out to him, but my voice was lost in it, and he didn’t hear me.
from the spam
Latin Proverb: “If the wind will not serve, take to the oars.”
I Believe I Can Fly (Flight of the Frenchies)
A trailer for a documentary about some crazy Frenchmen who combine ‘climbing, slackline and tightrope walking.’ As well as base-jumping and whatever that thing is called where you fly down the side of a mountain with those batwing suits.
(thanks, Joel)
T-Rex Trying…
Hugh Murphy’s tumblr documenting The Unfortunate Trials of The Tyrant Lizard King.
(thanks, Amy)
from the comments
Michael: As with many academic pursuits, we must restrict our purview to that tiny segment of the field which contains the subject of our discussion, ignoring and sometimes completely forgetting about practical applications of our study within the field and in the world at large.
headline of the day
dueling banjos
I need more people to do my things for me.
— Tim Carmody (@tcarmody) January 30, 2012
my ability to successfully adjust time & microwave power for partially defrosted frozen meals makes me feel like my generation’s julia child
— Sarah Pavis (@spavis) January 30, 2012
It looks remarkably like Africa, but it’s not — this is Texas
60 Minutes did a segment on African animals, some on the verge of extinction in their natural habitats, thriving on Texas ranches that offer the opportunity to hunt some of the animals in exchange, I guess, for the economic incentive to protect the rest. Embedding was disabled, but you can watch the video on YouTube.
(via marginal revolution)
quotes out of context
At the Shmoocon security conference Friday in Washington D.C., O’Connor plans to present the F-BOMB, or Falling or Ballistically-launched Object that Makes Backdoors.
The night was cool and the tree frogs chirped. Rosy cheeked children the world over dreamed of birthday cake and going to the pool. Angora bunnies piled on top of each other and were the coziest things ever. A man with a hat sat in his window somewhere and played a tune on his saxophone, and I, snug in my pajamas, quietly poured over book after book looking for the word “nipple”.
“Whatever you say about the euro, it’s a great insulator.”
When it becomes feasible for a consumer to print a complex structure like a grandfather clock or an iPhone, the stakes of preventing the dissemination of ideas are raised considerably.
Celebrity Letterhead
Web Urbanist selected the letterhead of seventeen celebrities from a larger catalog at Letterheady. This is Leonard Cohen’s. Make sure you compare it to Richard Simmons’.
(via @gary_hustwit)
from the comments
I’m also picturing one of those pet-toys where the big, battery-driven head rolls erratically over the floor with the little, empty skin of a body flipping and flapping around, following along behind it.
from the comments
I thought this was really sad at first, but in thinking it through, it also makes sense. In a country that no longer makes things, I suppose one of our last commodities that can be bought and sold is our attention.
dueling banjos
P is close enough to NP for government work. The difference is pedantic.
— ★ＯＫ★ (@horsedreamer) January 30, 2012
Vatican officials padlocked the bathrooms in response to the depredations of Pope Pius VI (1637-1701).
— Mike Topp (@MikeTopp) January 30, 2012
my current desktop
