Lives in a Shoe

Or a French Economist With Fudged Data

Vanderleun

The Science Is Settled

 Grilling Over Charcoal Is Objectively, Scientifically Better Than Grilling Over Gas. I anticipate a lack of consensus. Though the bacon argument is pretty potent.

But see, Grilling Over Gas Is Objectively, Scientifically Better Than Grilling Over Charcoal.

-- Glenn Harlan Reynolds.

Maher Making Some Sense

Unnerving to hear the halfhearted titters from his audience.  Thought police okay with them, evidently.  Do you think many of them don't get it that dumb people, mean people, racists, homophobes -- people who disagree with you -- get to express their opinions?  Listen to that audience and see if you don't think they are looking from side to side waiting to be clued in on how they should react.

Maher was connecting it to the Fourth Amendment but I don't see that.  I just see a sort of self-censorship we are dancing into by trying to outdo each other with the Approved Goodness of Our Thoughts and Intentions. 

Last week, when President Obama was asked about the Sterling episode, he said, “when ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, just let them talk.” But Sterling didn’t advertise. He was bugged…Even at home, we have to talk like a White House press spokesman? … I would listen to a hundred horrific Cliven Bundy rants if that was the price of living in the world where I could also hear interesting and funny people talk without a filter…So let me get this straight: We should concede that there’s no such thing anymore as a private conversation, so therefore remember to ‘lawyer’ everything you say before you say it, and hey, speaking your mind is overrated anyway, so you won’t miss it. Well, I’ll miss it. I’ll miss it a lot … Does anyone really want there to be no place where we can let our hair down and not worry if the bad angel in our head occasionally grabs the mic? … Who wants to live in a world where the only privacy you have is inside your head? That’s what life in East Germany was like. That’s why we fought the Cold War, remember? So we’d never have to live in some awful limbo where you never knew who — even among your friends — was an informer. And now we’re doing it to ourselves. Well, don’t … If I want to sit in the privacy of my living room and say, ‘I think the Little Mermaid is hot and I want to bang her, or I don’t like watching two men kiss, or I think tattoos look terrible on black people, I should be able to. Even if you think that makes me an a–hole. Now, do I really believe those things? I’m not telling you, ’cause you’re not in my living room.”

 

And the Truth is Plain to See

Some attention finally being paid, but...

Many across the internet have asked why the British progressive rock band would do such a thing and wondered how the hippie groovers had become "terrorists".

One Twitter user said: "It's shocking that Procol Harum's records are still being played on the radio after what they did in Nigeria."

Another wrote: "Wow! What happened to Procol Harum? Whiter Shade of Pale was a great song, but it doesn't excuse terrorism."

Procol Harum, who came to fame with their 1967 single A White Shader of Pale, have been blamed for the horrific kidnapping after people confused them with radical militant group Boko Haram.

 

 

 

 

Heirloom

Yesterday I discovered little blossoms on my tomato plants. Look carefully -- yellow blossoms right in the center there.

These plants are an heirloom variety called "Mortgage Lifter" and the seeds were in my shoebox in an envelope with handwriting on it -- no idea where they came from but know they've been there for a long time. 

Not expecting much, I started these seeds in January over bottom heat, after sprouting continued them in the unheated greenhouse for some weeks now.  Healthy plants, transferred into those large containers two days ago.  I'm thinking this year to grow half my tomatoes in the greenhouse, the remainder outside. Have I had tomato blossoms this early before?  Don't think so.

Curious, I looked up the variety and learned about Radiator Charlie and the story of his Mortgage Lifter tomatoes.

Sometime in the early 40s, Radiator Charlie Byles wanted to build a better tomato. You remember this is a story about a tomato, right? Well, this is how he did it.

BYLES: What I did I took ten plants and put them in a circle and put one in the center.

YOUNG: McCormack has studied this part of the tape carefully and says Byles invented an unorthodox but elegant system.

McCORMACK: Well, he started with four varieties of tomatoes and he placed a tomato called German Johnson in the center of a ring of 10 tomatoes. All these tomatoes were the largest seeds he could find in the country at the time. So, he would go around to the other tomatoes, collect pollen in the baby’s ear syringe, then squirt it on the flowers of the German Johnson. Then he would save seed. After seven years, he felt he had a stable tomato with all qualities he was looking for, and once he was satisfied with that he never worked with any other tomato plants, did any other plant breeding. But he really ran with it after he developed it.

YOUNG: Ran all the way to the bank. Turns out Radiator Charlie Byles had quite a knack for marketing, and sold tomato seedlings for a buck apiece—a lot of money for a little plant in those days. He sold enough of them to pay off the mortgage on his house.

BYLES: I didn’t pay but six thousand dollars for my home, and paid most of it off with tomato plants.

Wikipedia has an article disputing the Byles story, crediting the cultivar to William Estler in 1922.  Facts are hazy.