That ain’t a bowl full of larvae, it’s crosne!

...n, justifiably, gives me a hard time for growing strange things around the homestead. This week I just completed the world’s smallest harvest of a root vegetable popularly known as crosne (Stachys affinis). Crosne, also known as Chinese artichoke, chorogi, knotroot and artichoke betony is a member of the mint family that produces a tiny edible tuber. While looking like any other mint plant, the leaves have no smell. The tubers look all too much li...

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Acedia Part II: An Internet of Narcissism

...h Coulam toy with his employees and go on dates at the Olive Garden with a series of 20 something women that he meets online on a site called SugarDaddy.com. Coulam’s shameless and humiliating treatment of these young women reminds me of this passage in The Culture of Narcissism, Sade imagined a sexual utopia in which everyone has the right to everyone else, where human beings, reduced to their sexual organs, become absolutely anonymous and interc...

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In Praise of Beaters

..., I discovered the secret car companies don’t want you to know. 2020 BMW 8 series? No better than a 2002 Pontiac Aztek. 2020 Land Rover? No different than any Kia. They’re all just a hunk of plastic and metal with an inside full of rubber tubes, greasy metal parts and other thingies that I don’t know what they do. Zero to 60 in 6.8 seconds? Who cares. There’s so many other idiots driving around in hunks of metal and plastic that you can’t go fast...

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RIP Susan Rudnicki

...the emails she sent me over the past few years and I think I need to do a series of posts on them such as one that I missed which links the editor of a major bee magazine to pesticide manufacturers. I can hear her bold, uncompromising spirit in those emails. Rob McFarland of HoneyLove says in Facebook, I lost a good friend today who I loved dearly, and the world lost one of the finest beekeepers to ever wear the veil. Susan was the smartest, fier...

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Using the Google Search App for Plant Identification

...Google confuses data accumulation with wisdom. See Adam Curtis’ three part series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (Part I, PartII, Part III) to see where the nightmarish world Google’s belief in cybernetics will take us. Enough ranting. You will all have to help still my urge to take a sledgehammer to the whole interwebs. To that end if any of you know a plant search alternative that works as well as Google please leave a comment. Or...

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