He claimed he was a Doukhobor/But they never heard of that in Baltimore

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This morning I was crossing 2nd Ave N at 5th Street, where construction is going on to extend the LRT to the new ~~boondoggle~~ Twins stadium and the Northstar commuter line.

A bird came flapping out from behind a traffic cone. I thought it was a pigeon, and then I saw it was a peregrine falcon, carrying a pigeon. The big bird flapped a few yards away, sat down on his kill and glared at me until I went away smiling to work.

Soon there will be a tiny cell-phone camera picture.

"Pain is all around": Reuters
Oh, the pain of having bought a huge gas-guzzling suburban assault vehicle, and now being unable to sell or trade it without losing thousands of dollars.

Oh, the greater pain of having committed to an industrial strategy of producing those vehicles, based on a kind of magical thinking in which the oil supply would never run out.

A battered little piece of history on sale
It's a bit ugly, though. Look at that hail damage!

From Wikipedia: "The Citicar was produced between 1974 and 1983 by a U.S. company called Sebring Vanguard, based in Florida. It is the most produced electric car in American automobile history."

Only 2500 were made, which still makes it the most widely available 100% electric car ever made in the U.S. It has a 40-mile range and a top speed variously described as 38 to 40 miles per hour.

This car was a direct result of the 1970s oil crisis, and there are still a few being driven around today. I wonder what improved modern batteries would do to its range?

Cool
"Red is an uncommon color among prairie plants because many pollinating insects (e.g., bees) are insensitive to this range of the light spectrum. However, some butterflies perceive red, and for this reason are attracted to such flowers. The flowers of Royal Catchfly have a design that favors butterflies as pollinating agents: They have a proboscis that is sufficiently long to reach the nectar at the bottom of the long narrow tube that is formed by the calyx, while the flared petals provide a colorful landing platform for their legs."

source

If you can read this, you are probably rich.
Find out how rich you are, compared to the world's population.

You probably don't feel that way a lot of the time, but it's good to keep these things in perspective!

The biofuel drain
Runaway food prices could throw millions of people into poverty

Since I'm not running for political office in Minnesota, where no one can criticize the ethanol industry and survive, I can get away with saying this: our current obsession with using food crops as biofuels is simply insane.

What we're doing is burning food, people.

I predict that one day in the not-too-distant future, children will say to us, "You guys had all that good food, all that good soil to grow it on, and you just burned it up? So that you could drive all your cars everywhere? And then all those people starved to death, because they couldn't buy food anymore?"

We'd better start thinking about how we're going to answer that.

Thank you
Thanks so much for everyone's kind thoughts about Jack.

It's strange to walk past his big empty cage, still expecting him to be there. I wonder if I should take it apart and put it in the basement for a while.

But then there'd be a big empty space instead.

Can't get around this. Just have to go through it.

Captain Jack

Captain Jack died suddenly sometime today. I didn't have any hint that anything was wrong.

ngakmafaery, could you do p'howa for him? I will do what practice I can.

We will probably cremate his body tomorrow night.

Sorry I couldn't do more for you, Jack. I could feel you warming up, but we just didn't have enough time in this life.

The sun is here to stay a while
I've been setting my young plants outside to take in the sun, while doing research on shrubs and experimenting with my rice cooker (they cook much more than just rice, you know).

I saw the first robins nearly a week ago. Today I found my first dandelion leaves - growing in about an inch of space between the sidewalk and the south side of our house.

I picked the leaves to feed to Erin the turtle, and I went and found my trellis to see if it will fit in that inch of dirt. It does, with room to spare. I think I will plant morning glories there, in the warm afternoon sun, so they will climb up the trellis and up the drainpipe to the roof.

Re-Use-A-Goth
Today I went with D and S to the ReUse Center store in South Minneapolis. It's a wonderful place full of odds and ends, and a great place to save money while saving nice things from the landfill.

We were looking for pavers, stones for a retaining wall for the edge of our yard (the plan is to put them slightly in front of the front fence, just behind the little trough we're going to dig for a rain garden), and some shelves for the garage. We found two out of three; their paving stones had all been snatched up by other bargain hunters.

Their website often features strange and wonderful things available for on-site sale at "deconstruction" sites. One of their main tasks these days is to send crews to reclaim materials from buildings about to be remodeled or demolished. They find that they get a higher percentage of reusable materials if they get involved in the process this way, since it takes some skill to remove many parts of a building without damaging them too much.

I was struck by the beauty of a funeral home about to be demolished, which they're apparently still working on. From the stained glass windows to the embalming tables, it's all up for grabs. I can't say we have any need for most (or any) of that stuff, but the Internet is for sharing: maybe you do! Even if you don't, there is something quite poignant about the photos, especially pages three and four.

One less lawn
Seems pretty much like common sense to me: The Case Against Lawns

This is not an April Fool's Day entry

(The original version of that song is here ...)

Merlin's apple tree?
One of our ideas for the front yard has been to plant an apple tree (Don suggested a Honeycrisp apple). But one of the interesting things about apple trees is that you need more than one of them. They need to cross-pollinate, so you need at least two of them, from different varieties that bloom in the same month. If anyone else on our block had an apple tree, or even a crabapple, that would be good enough, but I don't think anyone does.

So we need to think about two trees. If one is going to be a Honeycrisp, what about the other one? I may have just found it, the apple of my dreams.

I have never been to Ynys Enlli, but I spent two nights in a tent on Bryn Myrddin, just outside Carmarthen, in a mix of snow and freezing rain. The winds were very high, and I never did hear him cry out from beneath the hill where he's supposed to lie in chains.

Seed sharing, part two
I have many, many heirloom morning glory seeds, from the beautiful old cultivar called Grandpa Ott's. A few plants volunteered themselves in my plot last year in the Eleanor Graham Community Garden, and I brought many seed heads with me when we moved here, still wrapped around my trellis.

I have roughly enough of these to cover most of South Minneapolis with morning glories, and I briefly considered doing just that, but I'd rather send them where they're wanted.

If you have any interesting seeds you might like to share with me, please do, but that's optional.

heaven
Mmm, miso soup with tofu, watercress and jalapeno.

fellow gardeners
Anyone want some holy basil seeds?

They are from a couple of plants I kept inside last winter. The plant grew profusely in my living room window and bloomed in the spring.

The seeds are extremely viable; I've already planted some indoors and they're growing very happily under fluorescent light.

Here I am with some holy basil plants:

Smile!
Your mom probably told you never to get this kind of tattoo if you wanted to get a job, but this guy is a college instructor.

Edit: Whoops, I guess Cityrag doesn't like hotlinking to their images.

"Include me out." - Samuel Goldwyn
Tomorrow (or today, I think, if you're close to Greenwich Mean Time) is the day of the great Livejournal Content Strike! That's right, everyone who thinks ye olde LJ is going to the dogs is going to send a powerful message to those fiendish Russian corporadoes by taking the day off from posting anything at all to their blogs and communities! That'll show 'em!

No, wait: so everyone who has been pissing and moaning over the past year or more about how LJ totally sucks now is going to... just shut up for a day?

Can't they shoot for a month?

Fortunately, today and tomorrow are my days off so I can use the time to catch up on my journaling. In the meantime, my advice is to keep smiling and don't take anything too seriously. That includes both me and you.

Edit: Of course, I mean no insult to H.E. the Tai Situpa by appending his transcendent advice to my bigoted, subjective snarkiness. I just thought it was something we could all use right now.

...good heavens, the chamomile started to sprout in 5 days.