Month: April 2021

Frost, on Earth Day


Wild persimmon

Most of the country had unusually cold weather on April 21 and 22. Ironically, April 22 was Earth Day. Here in the South, spring was far enough along that there was considerable damage. Native species are hardy and came through pretty well, with the odd exception of wild persimmon. Most of my persimmon trees are fine, but one tree in particular was badly bitten. The frost was devastating to my two deciduous magnolia trees. The figs were heavily damaged but will recover because they were in an early stage of leafing. The other fruit trees in the orchard — all old Southern varieties — don’t show any damage.

A Facebook friend with commercial vineyards posted sad photos of his damaged vines. He wrote this:

“I want to thank all my dear friends for your concern about our vineyard. First, let me say that it’s not just our vineyard. All the North Carolina vineyards in our area suffered the Earth Day Freeze. Different varietals have varying degrees of damage with the Chardonnay and Cabernet Franc suffering the most. It looks like most of shoots that were budded out were damaged. What will happen is that we will end up a very reduced crop with a mix of latent primary and secondary fruit with irregular ripening. The positive is that this event did not split and kill the vines like we have experienced in the Easter Freeze of 2007. This is being a grape farmer in North Carolina. It’s difficult and this is why wine is so expensive.”

Late frosts have always been a risk, of course. But it seems to me that, at least in this part of the country, late frosts are happening more and more often. I blame global warming, which causes early budding, complicated by increased arctic turbulence also caused by global warming. That turbulence messes with the jetstream, and cold air spills south into places where nature has already committed to spring.


Fig


Deciduous magnolia

Update: It happened in France, too: Washington Post: French vineyards devastated by April frost that followed unusually warm March.

Greenland

Preppers love disaster films. And, after Covid-19, aren’t we all preppers now? “Greenland” is a pretty good disaster film.

Except that “Greenland” is really more of a family film — a vulnerable seven-year-old boy with diabetes, and a mom and dad (who aren’t getting along very well) fighting to save the family.

The film was supposed to be a summer blockbuster last year, in theaters. The Covid-19 lockdown forced a change of strategy. I first noticed “Greenland” in iTunes, where Apple was renting it — renting it! — for $19.99. That was an interesting test of the desperation of the bored lockdown market. I have no idea how many people rented it at that price. I waited for the rental price to come down to $5.99, as it did a month or two ago.

What’s scary about “Greenland,” and also of particular interest to preppers, is that the people are far more scary than the comet fragments bombarding the earth. The film reminded me of “War of the Worlds” (2005), when I kept yelling at Tom Cruise on the TV, “No! Get off the roads! Stay away from people!” It’s the same with “Greenland,” which is largely a movie about a terrifying road trip north from Atlanta.

Screenwriters usually do a pretty good job of representing mass psychology during a disaster. Some people will try to help others. But others would shoot you over a bottle of pills. In a disaster, cities are a terrible place to be. But the highways would be worse.

It was after 9/11 that I became a left-wing prepper. I continued to live in San Francisco for eight more years. It was obvious how trapped I was. In a disaster, the possibility of evacuating San Francisco over the two bridges — the Golden Gate Bridge north to Marin County, and the Bay Bridge east to Oakland — would be non-existent. The only way out of the city would be by boat (if you had one), or by a dangerous road trip south toward San Jose. I bought a Jeep for that purpose. My plan was to drive the Jeep out to the coast, offroad through Golden Gate Park, and then to try to find a way south, off the pavement and around stalled traffic as much as possible. Fortunately I never needed the Jeep for an evacuation, but I still have it. It also was during those San Francisco years that I got an amateur radio license and learned how to use radios. Another detail that the “Greenland” screenwriters got right is that, when the inferno caused by the comet subsided after nine months, the scattered survivors located each other by radio. A detail the screenwriters got wrong, however, was in showing abandoned houses still with electricity, and cell phones still working after cities are on fire, and cars with enough fuel for a long road trip. Every bug-out plan must consider communications and a rendez-vous plan worked out in advance. Anything you need but didn’t stash in advance will not be available.

If you live in a populated place, do you have a bug-out plan? From wildfires or earthquakes in California, to tornados anywhere from the plains to Maine, to hurricanes and flooding along the rivers and coasts, millions of Americans need a bug-out plan and don’t have one. “Greenland” should encourage us to think ahead.

Literary novels and other trash

I know that, when something really gets under your skin, it’s a psychological red flag and that one should ask oneself what’s really going on. Whatever. But when I ask myself what’s really going on with my aggressive hatred of literary novels (or literary anything), I think it’s this: Literary novels are not merely bad, they’re also a fraud. They’re a fraud because they suck up so much oxygen, suffocating and marginalizing and demeaning far better work. Literary novels get all the attention. Everything else is carefully ignored by critics (though not by the millions of people who actually read for pleasure).

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant is trash, not worth having been written and not worth reading. But just look at all the fawning reviews it got in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Atlantic. I believe Gore Vidal called them “university novels,” though I’m not sure Vidal is entirely guiltless, literarily speaking. Orson Scott Card, a good writer in spite of his rotten politics, call it “pre-criticized fiction,” written to appeal to critics and for those who imagine themselves to be a literary elite.

So why did I read The Buried Giant? A friend was reading it, and I was looking forward to discussing it with him. Normally I would have flung such a book within thirty pages. But I kept reading even after I discovered it was a university novel, for the sorriest of motives: to have more credibility to rip it to shreds.

As is required in a literary opus, the title is meaningless. Clarity is forbidden, and vagueness and randomness substitute for plot. Most of the novel doesn’t make sense, because it’s not supposed to. It’s supposed to be more like a Rorschach test, and the reader is expected to project great profundity into the vagueness that one can’t quite put one’s finger on and that — since the critics loved it — must surely have gone over one’s head. The reader is constantly taxed with an excess of words. But, worst of all, the ending is frustrating to the reader and cruel to the characters. To my mind, it’s a writer’s ethical duty both to readers and to the writer’s characters that a novel’s characters might be made to suffer, but that they will be compensated in the end by winning their heart’s desire. It is both a literary crime and a breach of ethics to leave one’s characters in hell because that’s “like life” or something. If I ever met an author like Kazuo Ishiguro I would berate him within an inch of his life for being a fraud, for possessing a mediocre mind in which a deliberate vagueness masks the mediocrity, for his pessimism and literary cruelty, and for being a mediocre and wordy writer to boot.

A friend from L.A. with a large eating-out budget once criticized me for liking cuisines that are “easy to like,” such as Thai. To his mind, stuff that is hard to like — raw eels in cold gummy rice and reeking seaweed, for example — is the real test of a connoiseur. My crime was refusing to go with him to a sushi restaurant.

I refuse to be shamed. There must be a thousand bodice rippers, ten thousand science fiction and fantasy novels, and a hundred thousand historical novels, crime novels, spy novels and mysteries that are better, better written, wiser, and deeper than the phony likes of The Buried Giant.

Barley dumplings


Barley dumplings in tomato sauce

I’m on a constant quest to test the versatility of barley. The latest experiment was barley dumplings. I think I can get the grade up next time, but my first effort would get only a C+.

The ingredients were barley flour, egg, and seasonings. I ground the barley flour myself (from organic hulled barley) in the milling attachment for my Champion juicer. I steamed the dumplings, thinking that they’d be less likely to fall apart than if I boiled them in stock. That was a mistake, because the dumplings were dry, and there was no risk of their falling apart. They needed to be in water long enough for the barley flour to take up more water. Also, I think that flat dumplings would have fully hydrated better than round dumplings.

Barley is magical, and healthy. After all, Scotch and ale are made from barley. There’s nothing like barley for thickening soups. But there have just got to be other uses for barley that are equally good.

A classic diner returns (I hope)


From the 1950s

If you’re like me, as things reopen after a year of staying in, you’ve been thinking about how much you’ve missed eating out. I’ve even been thinking about where to go for an eating-out celebration. Until yesterday, my plan was to go to Bernadin’s in Winston-Salem. But I learned yesterday that a classic diner on the Blue Ridge Parkway, long closed, will reopen on May 27.

The restaurant is The Bluffs. It first opened in 1949. It was in operation for 61 years until it closed in 2010. The National Park Service could not find anyone to operate it. A great many people remember the place fondly, and the Park Service was under pressure to reopen it. Lots of people donated money to a campaign organized by the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation. The Appalachian Regional Commission contributed, as did the stingy state of North Carolina. You can read about this at the restaurant’s web site, here.

Those outside the eastern United States may not know that the Blue Ridge Parkway is a national park. The Bluffs is at Doughton Park. That’s at Laurel Springs, at Milepost 241. Part of what’s exciting about this reopening is that it’s a public-private project worth supporting.

I’ll have a report soon after The Bluffs reopens. I’m just hoping that they get it right. Judging from the photos, authenticity was priority 1 for the renovation. I hope the same is true of the cuisine, though I suppose that heavy porcelain dinnerware, and glasses and cups that aren’t supersized, would be too much to hope for.


The renovation

Stars


Source: Hubble telescope, NASA, Jesœs Maz Apellÿniz, and Davide De Martin via Wikimedia Commons

An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics. Bradley W. Carroll and Dale A. Ostlie. Cambridge University Press, 2017. 1,342 pages.

Quick now: How old is the universe? Answer: About 13.8 billion years.

If you were to walk out under the night sky this evening, photons of light would reach you that are billions of years old. You wouldn’t be able to detect those photons with your unaided eyes, but the photons came from the far edges of the observable universe. That light is very, very old and was generated by a star that was among the first to form after the Big Bang. When you look out into the far reaches of the universe, you are looking into the distant past. Even the light from our sun, of course, is about eight minutes old. What’s happening at the edges of the universe right now? We can’t possibly know for billions of years, when the light reaches us.

It is almost criminal that light pollution and modern living have robbed us of a relationship with the stars. Our ancestors must have felt that relationship very keenly, given some of the artefacts they left — the clay tablets of the Babylonian astrologers and astronomers, for example, or the prehistoric henges.

One of my favorite bedside books is an astronomy textbook last revised in 1964. There’s very little in that textbook that is actually wrong; astronomers then knew what they didn’t know and what needed to be figured out. But in the 55 years or so between the two textbooks, our knowledge of astrophysics has exploded. There are very few equations in the 1964 textbook, but the 2017 textbook is full of them. We now have mathematical models for (and therefore substantial understanding of) all sorts of phenomena, including what happens in the interior of stars, how elements heavier than hydrogen are formed inside of stars, how gravity works its magic in the gas and dust of the interstellar medium to form galaxies, etc. Astrophysicists love their equations.

I cannot follow the math of all those equations. However, not being able to follow the math should not stand in the way of reading books like this. I frequently read books that I can’t completely understand. There is still much that can be learned. The processes that are modeled by equations can also be described in text, and this book is lucid in its descriptions of astrophysical phenomena.

But, as is often the case with nerds, it’s not just about the science. The wonders of the universe also are food for the imagination. I can almost imagine that stars have personalities. Though stars can be classified according to type, size, age, temperature, and many other factors, each star is different. There are even not-exactly-fringy theories that stars are conscious. Stars, like life, have the almost magical ability to create order in a chaotic universe. Stars can do amazing things, such as make oxygen or iron or gold out of hydrogen. Stars furnish the chemicals out of which life is made and the energy that sustains life. Like stars, each galaxy also is different. Both stars and galaxies cluster, almost as though they have social needs. Stars (and galaxies) are very frequently found in pairs like friends or lovers, orbiting each other around their mutual center of gravity. Like us, stars are born. Some live longer lives than others, but eventually all stars die. The earth, of course, is made from the bodies of long-deceased stars, which is why scientists like to point out that we are all stardust.

The table of contents of this book is an excellent outline of what we know so far about the universe.


Cambridge University Press. Click on images for high-resolution version.

Leaves for Lily and me

This is Lily’s first catnip bouquet of the 2021 season. I already have huge quantities of catnip. I also have quite a lot of mint coming along.

I’ve mentioned that one of my resolutions for this year is to eat more leaves, including, and especially, raw leaves as pesto. Apparently mint pesto is a thing, so I will soon try that. Catnip pesto is not unheard of. But I think I would like to read and think a little more before trying that.