It’s better than bad, it’s good!
Bought this at a smallholding fair. It’s a grow-your-own ‘shroom kit.
Dude sells wooden furniture pegs — you know, like the ones you bang together Ikea furniture with — covered in different varieties of mushroom spores. Sells ’em in little burlap bags, along with instructions and a correctly-sized drill bit.
What you do is, you take a freshly-cut hardwood log (needs to be fresh because the mushrooms live on the moisture and sugars), about four inches by two and a half feet, and drill a series of holes in a diamond pattern. The holes are a little deeper than the pegs. Bang the pegs in, plant the log in a cool, damp spot and…wait a year, eighteen months.
I bought hericium Erinaceus, which is supposed to taste like delicious lobsters.
But where in the Sam Hill do you get freshly cut hardwood logs? Anyone who sells wood will swear on his granny’s silver noggin that everything he’s got is two years old or more and seasoned all to hell.
We had begun eyeballing out neighbor’s orchard and planning a midnight raid when we remembered a local smallholder who sells apples. He had a perfect pile of wood…only it was six months old. Two months or less is optimum.
Oh, well. It’ll have to do.
Then the drill bit snapped off in the log before I got all the holes drilled.
Well, hell. This shit grows wild. In the woods. How hard can it be?
September 22, 2010 — 10:34 pm
Comments: 31
YESSS!!!!
Do delicious, wholesome snacks come out of your best friend’s bottom in the morning? No? Too bad, so sad.
First egg: Friday the 10th. We’ve had six more since. They were supposed to start laying between 20 and 24 weeks old, and it was within a few days of week 22 exactly.
Here’s the thing, though: we think it’s just one of them at it.
I was told chickens change personality when they start laying — they weren’t kidding. Lucia (formerly the shy, dependant one) has become a whole ‘nother chicken. She’s restless and goes off on her own, without her little friend. She follows me around the garden like a puppy. Her comb and wattles have gone bright red and poofy. When you reach toward her, instead of beGAKking and flapping away, she hunkers down, throws her elbows out and waits — presumably a sexual readiness posture (ummm…ewww, Lucia).
The other one is still the same flighty peckerhead she’s always been.
The eggs are so small and perfect…they’re like the Barbie Dream House version. I feel like I should cook them in a tiny frying pan with a tiny spatula. They reckon it’s two bantam eggs to a large fowl egg, but the bantam ones have a higher proportion of yolk to white.
Mmmmm…yolk!
So far, I have eaten two. Fried. On a tiny piece of toast.
September 21, 2010 — 7:50 pm
Comments: 53
MWAH!!
Some time in the last couple of weeks, this blog finally hit half a million visitors. I was going to make a big deal when that happened, but somehow I missed it. I was probably high.
Some blogs break half a million before breakfast, but they by-god don’t do it peddling a steady fare of chicken blogging, spotted dick and hastily constructed obscene political Photoshops.
It’s hard work flogging this crap.
SRSLY? If there’s a reason to follow this blog, it’s you guys. I have the smartest, funniest and most interesting commenters on the internet. Y’all blow me away sometimes. (Where the hell did you come from? I know I poached some readers from Ace, but you didn’t have to hang around and entertain me).
A favor? I know the blogosphere is a restless place, but when you guys wander off, would you occasionally check back in? There are a few names I haven’t seen in a while, and I worry.
You know how it is.
p.s. Wait until midnight. Go outside. Look up. It will be over a decade before Jupiter is this close to earth again.
September 20, 2010 — 9:18 pm
Comments: 86
The Panties of Liberty
I am so not into identity politics. No, scratch that — I really hate identity politics. I have consistently refused to participate in women’s art shows (I can compete in the regular kind just fine, thank you). A lifetime of observing the increasing role of women in politics and the workplace has convinced me the female influence in those places has been mostly bad. Really bad.
A mother is someone who has stuck her finger down the back of somebody’s else’s pants to see if he’s shat himself. That sort of person no longer recognizes boundaries like the rest of us. “None of your business” just doesn’t compute any more.
So it isn’t some reflexively feminist impulse that the number of women candidates on our ticket this year makes me think of this lady. Liberty, up there. That particular seated Liberty was all over our money in the 19th Century (by law, Liberty has to appear somewhere on US coins).
I love this one, because it looks like she’s waving her panties around on a stick. Which totally says “Liberty” to me.
Like, “Woohoo! LIBERTYYYYYYYYYYY!!”
(Okay, it’s a Phrygian cap on a liberty pole, but it’ll always be panties on a stick to me).
Good weekend, all!
September 17, 2010 — 9:17 pm
Comments: 29
Let the mockery begin!
Or “How the Democratic Party Lost its Cool.”
On Tuesday, this enchanting whiff of bullshit was released into the ‘sphere:
Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine plans to make what’s being billed as a major announcement Wednesday about the future of the party, according to a Democratic source with knowledge of the speech.
The source tells CNN that Kaine will announce something that will excite Democrats across the country. Kaine’s event comes as Democrats face the difficult task of holding onto their majorities in the House and Senate this November.
And finally it was Wednesday, and lo the big, exciting surprise was…a D with a circle around it!
Some may think: it’s just a logo—it’s just a brand. Well I don’t believe the Democratic Party is a logo or a brand—we are much more than that. We are Democrats. We create change that matters. Ours is a party of ideas and ideals, of policies and people, history and purpose.
Really. A new logo. That would be chock full of all kinds of FAIL right there, if it had turned out to be a GOOD new logo. But it’s not. It’s awful.
Let’s make fun of it.
September 16, 2010 — 7:40 pm
Comments: 64
Course correction
Some of y’all may remember how I was traumatized in 2006 when I was bullied into voting for Lincoln Fucking Chafee for Senate — after the party utterly shat upon and just squeaked a win over his conservative rival in the primaries. I HAD to vote for him because it was the most important election ever and the Northeast simply won’t support a conservative and what are you, some kinda whiny baby?
Oh, and puuuuuuurity tessssssst!
You know what happened: Chafee lost to a genuine Democrat, quit the party in a cloud of sulfur, and all the fingers on my voting hand turned black, shriveled up and fell off.
I swore my remaining hand would never pull the lever for a politician I hate and no amount of, “be reasonable, Wingnut” would change my mind. (John McCain doesn’t count — I voted for Sarah Palin and he happened to be on the ticket).
Others may come to other conclusions, and I understand their reasoning. I sure as shit don’t want any part of the red-on-red smashmouth slap-fest rolling around the right-o-sphere today.
But for me, I’ve decided that every election can’t be the most important win ever and moving the party to the right is more important than winning. More important even than a majority, with all the controls and committee chairmanships and other legislative goodies that go with.
But I still felt pretty uneasy about that conclusion until I read this excellent piece by Ben Domenech:
Conservatives should not tolerate the likes of Mike Castle because of the simple fact that a 51 member Senate with Mike Castle is a Senate where Mike Castle is the most important vote in the room. As Specter and others before him, that Senator will set the terms of policy debates, determining in advance what can succeed and fail. Those who advance the argument that a majority with Castle is better than being in the minority tend to place priorities on Senate committee chairmanships and staff ratios and lobbyist cash… a list which pales in comparison to the power they would wield as the broker for both sides.
Do read the whole thing.
September 15, 2010 — 6:05 pm
Comments: 44
Cock fighting, Ken Burns edition
Just a little silliness on an unproductive Tuesday.
September 14, 2010 — 9:55 pm
Comments: 16
Never trust an artard
I’ve designed publications for a living, too — magazines and brochures and stuff. I can tell you, when pictures are chosen, they are always the ones that best support the narrative.
I mean, duh, right? You run a story about Obama’s falling poll numbers, you’re going to run it under a picture of Obama looking all cross and grumpy. If you ran it with with a picture of him all sunny and happy, it would look stupid. Even if he was actually in a terrific mood when today’s pictures were taken, you have to comb through and find one where he’s blinking or looking down or something.
I know this isn’t a profound revelation. But it’s worth bearing in mind, because we react to images way down at the lizard level. Even when they aren’t actually meaningful.
Drudge ran the headline, “Thousands Riot in Afghanistan” or something with the picture above left. I count three guys, two of them are grinning like raccoons. The dude with the knife and the stupid red beard (no really — it was an awful henna job with gray roots) grabs our eyeballs and won’t let go, so we don’t see the smilies on either side.
When you look for it, it’s amazing how many people in these angry mobs look happy to be there. Most wire services ran the picture at right. Uncropped, I count ten men, about half of whom are smiling (a bit hard to see at this size, sorry). Yeah, you know why — that big white hand against that big black cloud. Pure sex to a photo editor.
I’m not suggesting angry third-world mobs are happy funtime carnivals. Or that thousands didn’t pour out in protest this weekend. Apparently they did, with some fatal results. But nobody seems to have gotten any good pictures of it, so they had to run with small bands of yoohoos (mugging directly into the camera!) and crop it to look like legions.
News photos like this aren’t wrong, but they’re often the most contrived, least informative part of the information we get.
September 13, 2010 — 9:44 pm
Comments: 20
There. Done. Everybody shut up and go home now.
So fifty knuckleheads in Florida vow to do something small, dumb and pointless, and the next thing you got the pope and the president and the prime minister and the general in charge of the war and everybody all up in there screaming and flapping and turning a small moment of private stupid into a HUGE INTERNATIONAL INCIDENT.
If a Koran burns in the forest and AP doesn’t report it, do thousands rally in Afghanistan?
Oh, retaliation? Really? You mean they haven’t really hated the West all that much, but NOW they’re serious? Instead of being mad at us, now they’re extra super mad?
What comes after that? Double extra super times-infinity-plus-one mad?
Seriously. Everybody shut up. Go home. Stop embarrassing me.
September 10, 2010 — 1:30 pm
Comments: 32
My mother smelled of what, now?
Eh. Sorry, about the lameness, peeps…I got all jammed up today and if I don’t go take a bath RIGHT NOW, Uncle B is going to leave me for the slop bucket.
I harvested the elderberries today and started a gallon of wine. Fiddly little bastards, aren’t they? And it won’t be drinkable for a year.
Oh, also, I made mushroom, leek and cucumber soup (because that’s what I had to get rid of). I’m thinking of calling it “cream of beige.”
September 9, 2010 — 11:14 pm
Comments: 22