There is no defense...

...against a summer squash attack.

WORTH A LOOK. Here's USA Today about waiting for the Affordable Care Act in WV. Notice working people wanting coverage versus political posturing by others.

WEIRD STORY ABOUT RAT CONSCIOUSNESS AFTER DEATH here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Herps R Us

While doing a little weekend gardening, we came across several guests of the reptile/amphibian variety. It's not every day you see a baby turtle.

These guys are a bit more common.

And I seem to remember a story about one of these in another garden...

Those are the ones we saw. I wonder what we missed.

SNAKES IN SUITS? Here's an interesting discussion of capitalism, morality  and the whole "the rich are different" debate.

THE WHOLE "OBAMA'S-WAR-ON-COAL THING" discussed here.

IN CASE YOU EVER WONDERED how manta rays spend their time, click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Garlic!

I don't have a green thumb but I do my time in the garden. This year, ours is not terribly ambitious but it has been a pretty decent year so far. First came lettuce, arugula, radishes and spinach, then peas and the occasional hot pepper. Tomatoes are coming in now, along with an eggplant or two.

One crop I take a particular interest in is garlic, something I consider to be a welcome addition to almost any recipe, with the possible exceptions of breakfast cereal and deserts. We usually plant ours after the first frost but before the ground gets too hard. This time we did it on Christmas Day (the power was out so that provided our entertainment), putting the clove sections about finger deep and covering them with mulch from the goat barn.

Garlic is pretty low maintenance. In early summer, the plants develop bulbs or scapes that we cut off (they are edible). Then just wait until the leaves start turning brown and dig them up, being careful not to damage the bulbs.

This weekend I dug up our crop, which turned out pretty good. I'm hoping it will get us through most of the coming year. As for the rest of the crops, how's that rain coming?

STALLED. Two million jobless Americans have lost unemployment benefits due to congressional inaction.

ELIMINATE THE MIDDLE MAN. Here's a novel approach to global poverty.

WALTHER REUTHER. Any op-ed that favorably mentions a great West Virginian and labor leader has a place here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The world in a grain of sand

El Cabrero sometimes teaches a night class in sociology somewhere comfortably off the campus of Marshall University. The most recent semester, now in finals week, I taught Deviance and Social Control.

Mostly I do it to get to use the library, wherein I can find all kinds of quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore with which to regale the Gentle Reader.

I often find myself bringing works of literature and poetry to class because these can often get to the heart of the matter more quickly and clearly than reams of statistics. In the last few weeks of this class, I've brought in or referred to works by William Blake, Shakespeare, Herman Hesse, Herman Melville, and others.

William Blake's poem London, for example, speaks volumes about his time (and ours) in four short stanzas.

Aristotle noted the power of poetry for this kind of thing 2,400 years ago. In the Poetics, he discusses the difference between poetry and history. In modern terms, what he called poetry would include novels, plays and other works of literature, whereas history would include most kinds of nonfiction. He puts it this way

The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. [emphasis added]

SINKING LIKE A ROCK. Stagnant or falling wages can make the recession worse, according to Paul Krugman.

WHICH GOSPEL IS THIS IN? A Pew survey found that regular churchgoers were more likely to support torture than those who were less observant.

THE FIRST GARDEN continues to attract attention.

SPEAKING OF FOOD, the ancestor of the current swine flu now sweeping parts of the world has been traced to US factory farms.

ANIMAL UPDATES. Fish may feel pain in ways similar to us, according to a recent experiment. And while we're at it, animals that are capable of voice mimicry also seem to be capable of keeping a beat.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A little British snark

D.H. Lawrence was not a big Franklin fan. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero has been amusing himself, and, he devoutly hopes, the Gentle Reader, lately by thumbing through the pages of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. This week I've been looking at his quest for moral perfection.

It's hard not to like Franklin, even when he's taking the whole Protestant Ethic/Spirit of capitalism thing too far. But there are those who manage to dislike him. One such person was the British writer D.H. Lawrence.

When he was able to tear himself away from writing about sex, Lawrence put together an amusing but venomous look at American literature in which he singles "sturdy, snuff-coloured Doctor Franklin" out for singular abuse.

In his discussion of Franklin's list of virtues and his practice of them, Lawrence accused him of attempting to fence in the human soul:

Who knows what will come out of the soul of man? The soul of man is a dark vast forest, with wild life in it. Think of Benjamin fencing it off!

Oh, but Benjamin fenced a little tract that he called the soul of man and proceeded to get it into cultivation. Providence, forsooth! And they think that bit of barbed wire is going to keep us in pound forever? More fools them...

And now I, at least, know why I can't stand Benjamin. He tries to take away my wholeness and my dark forest, my freedom. For how can any man be free, without an illimitable back-ground? And Benjamin tries to shove me into a barbed-wire paddock and make me grow potatoes or Chicagoes.

Chicagoes?

Rave on, D.H. For all his quirks, old Ben lived a full and generally useful life. I'm not sure it would have been better spent writing highbrow erotica.

VOLUNTEERING AGAIN. Here's an interesting news story about the growing number of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan volunteering to help civilians displaced and harmed by the war.

TAKING IT PERSONALLY. Here's an interesting article about how AIG executives who received post-bailout bonuses are feeling the scorn and ire of many people.

EAT IT. Are big changes coming to America's industrial food system? When an organic garden is about to be planted at the White House, anything is possible.

URGENT WHALE GENEALOGY UPDATE. Hippos may be their closest living relative. I was thinking maybe wolverines...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

TAKING THE LONG WAY HOME

Odysseus, courtesy of wikipedia.

"Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.
But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove--
the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sungod blotted out the day of their return.
Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
start from where you will--sing for our time too."

It's been a long time since El Cabrero went on an extended ancient Greek jag, but I can't resist any longer. Lately I have been revisiting Homer's epic poem The Odyssey and have been struck again by its power.

For nearly 3000 years, the saga of "long tried, noble Odysseus" and his ordeals has been a favorite for people of all ages. It has given us several words, including odyssey itself, mentor (a character who befriended Odysseus' son Telemachus while his father was away), siren, cyclops, calypso, and probably more.

It has inspired many other literary works and films, including Virgil's Aeneid, James Joyce's Ulysses, the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Charles Frazier's powerful Civil War novel Cold Mountain, and more. Odysseus has shown up in places like Dante's Divine Comedy and the poetry of Tennyson. The Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957) even wrote an epic sequel. I'm sure I'm leaving out plenty of other examples of its enduring influence.

There are lots of reasons for its popularity. For one thing, it really is a great story as Odysseus suffers ordeal after ordeal on his way home from Troy. Although most of us haven't spent 10 years besieging a sacred city and finally sacking it, we can probably all identify with the desire to go home, i.e. to reach a place of peace, security, and safety. We probably don't run across too many cyclopes or cannibalistic giants or make pilgrimages to the Underworld, but everyone has problems and challenges that have to be overcome with courage and strategy.

Finally, the real subject matter of the Odyssey is an urgent issue today in America: how is it possible for veterans who have endured incredible hardships and survived the ravages of war make or miss their homecoming? As the Odyssey shows and the experience of generations of combat veterans shows, the challenges and dangers don't stop when the war ends.

Way more to come.

WAL-MART--EVERYDAY LOW ACTIONS. A certain retail giant is warning its employees that the world will come to an end if giant corporations don't continue to completely dominate everything, especially elections and labor law. Where's the thunderbolt of Zeus when you need it?

HOW LOW WILL IT GO? Here's the Economic Policy Institutes's latest take on the state of the recession.

UNSPORTSMANLIKE CONDUCT. Some US hospitals have taken to deporting sick or injured immigrants.

LET US CULTIVATE OUR GARDEN. Words of wisdom from Gazette columnist Perry Mann.

TALKING SENSE ON HEALTH CARE. Click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED