Month: July 2023

The devil now polls 58 percent in America


But which one is the devil?

“The Devil presenting St Augustin with the Book of Vices,” Michael Pacher, 1435-1498

There probably is a way to do the math, but my back-of-a-napkin estimate is that, at the current rate, the Enlightenment will have arrived in America in about 942 more years.

The Washington Post has an article today with this headline: “As organized religion falters, the devil falls on hard times.” It seems that the devil’s numbers have dropped. According to the article, a Gallup poll found that 58 percent of Americans now believe in the devil, down from 68 percent in 2001. The devil polls 20 points higher among Republicans at 78 percent, which is the percentage of the vote that Donald Trump got in my county in 2020.

Things like this make me realize what a naïf I am for thinking that people ought to know better than to spray glyphosate in their gardens, or to drink bleach, or to believe what they hear on television.

I think I need to go pour myself some Scotch and listen to some Beatles.

Outsourcing is now an option


I grew the tomatoes on the upper shelf. The tomatoes on the lower shelf were part of my weekly vegetable pickup.

Technically, where I live is a food desert. The nearest grocery stores are about twelve miles away. A shocking number of rural people get most of their food these days from dollar stores such as Dollar General. Dollar General stores are everywhere. This makes it easier for me to believe the terrifying statistic that 70 percent of the American diet these days comes from ultra-processed foods.

It’s shocking how few rural people have vegetable gardens. And why should they? They don’t eat that stuff anymore. With transplants it’s a different story.

I’ve always had a garden, for better or for worse, in the fifteen years I’ve lived here. However, I do not enjoy — at all — summer gardening. It’s the heat, the humidity, the bugs, the ticks, the weeds, the briars, the gnats in the eyes. No matter how energetic my start in the spring, by summer the garden is always a wreck.

This summer I have an entirely new option. A young couple who live about two miles away (transplants from the Chicago area) have taught themselves to be superb gardeners. When they first moved here, they had day jobs. But this year they’ve quit their jobs and are making a living with their garden. Mostly they sell on Saturdays at an upscale farmer’s market in Greensboro. But, for a few local people like me, they started a weekly pickup of an assortment of vegetables — community supported agriculture. I was able to downsize my own garden this summer to a very manageable one row of nothing but tomatoes and basil, both of which are easy to grow and neither of which I’d be able to live without in summer.

These two young people taught themselves to garden, mostly by watching a lot of videos. In retrospect, I can see what a good idea that is. Old hands like me tend to garden the way we saw it done as children, and though we may experiment with newer methods, we never reach the state of the art. Whereas the garden I’m buying from this summer is a sight to behold. I’ve never seen anything like it other than at Monticello, or an abbey garden on Iona in Scotland. Almost half the garden is in flowers. They don’t till. Everything is perfectly mulched and well watered. The climbing system for such things as beans and cucumbers is ingenious, not to mention tall. They make their own compost, partly from the compostables they collect from their customers in Greensboro as part of the business. They even make enough wine for their own consumption, from native varieties of grapes.

There may well be some local young people — that is, young people who were born here and grew up here — who are interested in doing this kind of thing. But I don’t know of any. The reason for this, as I see it, has everything to do with the cultural decline of the rural deplorables. In a county that voted 78 percent for Trump in 2020, it’s safe to assume that 78 percent of the calories are coming from Dollar General and fast food from the nearest towns — Walnut Cove and Madison. These people — the people who are making America great again — eat their burgers and chicken sandwiches in the car and throw the bags, wrappers, and empty cups out the window onto the road.

Show me someone who lives otherwise, and the odds will be greater than 78 percent that that person is a liberal.


The nearby gardeners, at their booth at a Greensboro farmer’s market

Feasting your inner pet


Lentil-barley burger with fixin’s

Just in the last ten to twenty years, we’ve gotten a whole new insight into how to use food to keep ourselves healthy. That new insight has to do with our microbiome. For much longer than that, we’ve known that antibiotics will do serious harm to our digestive systems. Even so, we didn’t appreciate just how important the microbiome is and how to take care of it. We also know now why, beyond the stomach, we have a two-stage digestive system. Cows have four stages, but we humans don’t eat grass. Still, we humans are omnivores (except for grass), and now we know much more about why we require a two-stage digestive system. The first stage in humans is about the enzymes, and all that, which break down our food and feed us. The second stage is all about feeding the microbiome. And feeding the microbiome is all about fermentation.

The favorite food of the microbiome is soluble fiber. That’s what ferments best, that’s what is most nutritious to the microbiome, and that’s what creates the nutrients that we need but that we can’t acquire directly from our food. One of the key signs of a healthy microbiome is a low level of inflammation everywhere in the body. That’s because of the nutrients that only the microbiome can produce. Unsurprisingly and conversely, one of the key signs of a poorly fed microbiome is inflammation everywhere in the body. We probably notice it first in our joints. We don’t notice it in our arteries — a very dangerous place indeed for inflammation.

I’ve started thinking of the microbiome as a kind of inner pet, a pet that we should take care of as carefully as we take care of our cat. One of the things we’ve learned is that the makeup of our microbiome can change very quickly, based on what we eat. There’s also an inertia in the microbiome, because our inner pet adjusts to what we eat, and, once adjusted, wants to go on eating the same thing. If you’re living on pizza, doughnuts, and TV dinners, then that’s very bad news, because that’s what your microbiome will crave. But if you have a well-fed microbiome, then what you crave will be healthy food. There are many references in the literature to a brain-gut connection, but I’m not sure we know yet how that really works. Presumably the microbiome creates substances that are carried by the bloodstream to the brain and tell us what to crave.

Two of the foods highest in soluble fiber are lentils and barley. The two of them together, with seasonings, make mighty fine burgers for feasting for both stages of your digestive system.

I use organic green lentils, which I buy in bulk from Whole Foods. I make barley flour by grinding organic hulled barley, using an old Champion juicer with a milling attachment. Organic hulled barley is hard to find locally, but you can get it from Amazon. I believe that every well-equipped kitchen should have a grinder for flour. I buy unbleached wheat flour already ground. But I use my grinder for whole wheat flour and barley flour.

Just as your cat nags you when it wants to be fed, your microbiome will nag you, too. It will nag you for more of whatever you’ve been eating lately. If you feed your microbiome lots of soluble fiber, I can testify that that’s what it will nag you for. I eat fiber because it’s good for us. But I also eat it — no kidding — because that’s one of the main things that my microbiome nags me for.

But I still like a nice slice of pizza a few times a year.

Vigil

After watching all nine seasons of “Masterpiece Endeavour,” I found myself in a serious state of Endeavour withdrawal and was desperate for something just as good to watch next. I considered the 1980s series “Inspector Morse,” but it seemed a little too dated (though I love the red Jaguar). I checked Shaun Evans’ filmography and found that his most recent role was in “Vigil,” which was broadcast on BBC One in 2021. As far as I could tell, the only way to watch “Vigil” in the U.S. is to subscribe to NBC’s Peacock streaming service. So that’s what I did, at $4.99 a month.

A bonus in “Vigil” is that the lead character is played by Suranne Jones, of “Gentleman Jack.” Another bonus in “Vigil” is that it’s set in Scotland, though it mostly takes place inside a Royal Navy submarine, the HMS Vigil.

I’ve only watched one episode so far (of six in the first season). There will be a second season, which probably will be broadcast in the U.K. next year.

It was amusing reading some of the snarky reviews of “Vigil,” including this one in the Telegraph: “A TV drama so bad it could be Russian propaganda.”

I’m easy, I guess. With Shaun Evans, Suranne Jones, and all those beautiful Scottish accents, how could I not like it?

Speaking of accents: In “Endeavour,” Shaun Evans uses an accent appropriate to his background as a former Oxford student. Evans is from Liverpool, though, and his native accent is a Liverpool accent. There are television interviews in which you can hear his native accent. I have read that he was reluctant for his fans to hear his Liverpool accent, for fear that it would break the spell. And speaking of Liverpool, the northwest of England is one of the not-too-many parts of England I haven’t visited. It sounds like a fascinating city, and I think I just might go there on my next visit.

Why so much chatter about UFOs of late?


Source: Syracuse NewTimes, 2015

There has been so much media buzz about UFOs lately that even conservative pundits such as the New York Times’ Ross Douthat have written columns such as “Does the U.S. Government Want You to Believe in U.F.O.’s?” Ezra Klein, also at the New York Times, recently had a podcast with the title “What the Heck Is Going On With These U.F.O. Stories?” A big part of the recent buzz has been because of a whistle-blower who has claimed that the U.S. government possesses crashed UFOs, or at least pieces of them.

Back in 2019, I wrote a post here about the UFO that I saw in the early 1970s in eastern North Carolina. I included the sketch below to try to help describe what I saw, especially to make the point that it was no mere “light in the sky.” Lights in the sky don’t impress me (or any UFO watchers). Images from military radar don’t impress me either. My reasoning is this: If little old me has seen what I’ve seen, then the U.S. military has seen much, much, much more.

So what might be going on?

One theory, as Douthat suggests, is that the government is using some sort of procedure to gradually disclose UFOs to us, to condition us to the existence of UFOs so that some Big Announcement won’t freak us out too much. That’s an interesting and maybe even plausible idea, but those of us who have been interested in UFOs for a long time recall that, back in the 1980s, the same idea was prevalent because of films such as Close Encounters, E.T., Enemy Mine, and even the Star Wars films. But nothing ever came of it. The government is just as secretive as ever, really. As I see it, the purpose of the release of military radar video is to deceive us into thinking that the government is still mystified about what’s going on. I cannot believe that.

Recently I sent a copy of my UFO sketch to a friend who lives in France. She replied with a link to the sketch above, which looks very much like the sketch I made in 2019. The sketch above comes from a story in the Syracuse NewTimes from January 2015, “15 Years of Cylinder UFOs Over New York State”. Never before had I seen a UFO sketch that looked so much like what I saw.

I’ve made this standard disclaimer countless times, as many times as I’ve told my UFO story. That’s that my anecdote is just another anecdote among many thousands of anecdotes. The epistemological value of an anecdote is pretty much zero. So there is no reason why anyone should take seriously what I say, and no reason why anyone should take any UFO anecdote seriously. But the epistemological calculus for me personally is very different. I know what I saw, I saw it clearly, I remember it clearly, and I have no more reason to doubt what I saw than I have reason to doubt that I saw Donald Trump’s Boeing 757 parked and mothballed at La Guardia airport when I was last there in 2019. Thus my question is not “Do UFO’s exist?” but “What is the full story of what is going on?” I can only speculate, though some possibilities are more probable than others.

For one, I have zero doubt (or doubt that is as close to zero as is ever possible in a human mind) that, because I’ve seen these things, the U.S. military has seen them too — no doubt lots and lots of them. The idea that the U.S. military has collected the remains of crashed UFOs seems entirely plausible.

It would be a wonderful thing if humanity gets the Big Announcement soon. I can’t express how much I’d like to see that in my lifetime.

But people sort roughly into two categories — people such as religious people whose worlds and minds would completely fall apart because they can’t handle it; and people like me who are eager to get on with a huge expansion of human knowledge and heavy revisions in human philosophy. I’ll admit here that there is a whiff of vindictiveness in my point of view. Primitive minds — closed minds, religious minds, ugly minds — have held all of us back for far too long. If such minds were unable to deal with the Big Announcement, their defeat would be total, and there’d be nothing in the world (or in the galaxy!) that they could do about it other than go home, load their guns, and lock their doors. Then the rest of us could participate in a renaissance like nothing humanity has ever seen before.

Primitive minds will ask, “What if they’re here to eat us or to enslave us?” In fact, the primitive mind of Ronald Reagan thought that a war with aliens would be just the thing to unite humanity. Such nonsense. If E.T. visitors were here to enslave us or eat us, and if they have the power to do that, they’d already have done it.

Though I’d have a thousand questions for them, three questions stand out. First: How does their propulsion work? Second: Are they capable of faster-than-light interstellar travel, or did they get here much more slowly and do they therefore have some sort of outpost near earth? And, third: Is there a galactic federation with laws, a capital, and libraries? I’d imagine that if such a place exists, it must be a lot like the Star Wars planet Coruscant.

Maybe I’ll never find out. But future generations of earthlings surely will, and I envy them.


My sketch of the UFO I saw in the early 1970s

Must we rethink alcohol?


From “Masterpiece Endeavour,” Season 2: Morse in a pub

Only a few years ago, the “experts” told us that a certain amount of alcohol actually was good for us — say, two glasses of wine a day. In the last year or so, that has reversed, and now we encounter article after article saying that alcohol has no health benefits and that the ideal amount of alcohol is — none.

The experts can go hang.

In my lifetime, the record of the experts has been abysmal. Meat is good for you. Then it’s not. Eggs are good for you. Then they’re not. Margarine is healthier than butter. Then no amount of margarine is healthy. Vegetable shortening is better than lard. Then no amount of vegetable shortening is healthy. The ideal diet is starvingly low in fat. That’s disproven, and carbs become the culprit. It would seem that the best course is to always be skeptical of what the experts tell us and to use our own good sense.

As I understand it, the experts’ mistake concerning alcohol was a classic error of causation. It seems that people who drink one or two glasses of wine a day are in fact healthier. But the alcohol probably isn’t the cause of that. Maybe it’s because healthy people don’t have to give up alcohol for health reasons, or because people who can afford wine can afford an all-around better diet, or because people who drink wine tend to be better educated, and education correlates with health. So it seems to be — at least in the new thinking — that people who drink wine sparingly are indeed healthier, but the wine is not the cause of that.

For those of us who are healthy and like to drink, then what does it all mean? I think we all have to decide for ourselves. But my own thinking is that, partly because of my age, I need to drink less than I drank two or three decades ago when I was younger, quite healthy, living in San Francisco, and used alcohol as self-medication for work-related stress. Back then, I head a stress headache several times a week. Now I don’t think I’ve had a headache in the 15 years I’ve been retired. Obviously my stress is lower. I’m still healthy, but I’m also older. I also realized that it’s not healthy, or even pleasant, to have alcohol in my system at bedtime. That means drinking earlier in the day (which feels decadent at first) and never drinking (or, for that matter, eating) after 5 p.m.

In the past few weeks, I’ve watched the first eight seasons of “Masterpiece Endeavour.” Starting tonight, I’ll watch the last season, season 9. “Endeavour” is set in the late 1960s up until, I think, 1971. It is shocking — and in a way funny — to watch them drink. They keep Scotch and glasses in their offices at work. They drink at their desks, though clearly it’s considered proper not to start too early. In pubs, they may have a glass of Scotch along with a mug of ale. They serve Scotch in big tumblers, and four or five ounces seems to be the standard single serving. A pint of ale with lunch is perfectly normal. Did people — or at least the English — really drink that much then? Though everyone in “Endeavour” drinks heavily as far as I can tell, Morse gradually becomes an alcoholic. For those who may not have watched this series and who might want to watch it, I won’t say how that fits into the ongoing plot because it would be a spoiler.

A recent article in The Atlantic by Emily Oster has this headline: “Is a Glass of Wine Harmless? Wrong Question. The latest alcohol advice ignores the value of pleasure.” I’m with Emily. People have been drinking alcohol for thousands of years. Wine, Scotch, and ale are amazing products — agricultural products, really. Since too much alcohol is pretty obviously harmful, then the trick is to be sure that one’s relationship with alcohol is not causing any harm.

I will continue to do my share to support Scotland’s Scotch industry and California’s wine industry.

Into the woods, and more each year


Click here for high resolution version

Fifteen years ago, after I cleared an acre of elderly pine trees for the house, the landscape looked like a huge red gash in the earth. I moved as fast as I could to restore ground cover and to start planting. Growth takes time, but nature moves fast. Though there is a band of grass on all sides of the house, this is woodland, and if I didn’t like woodland then I wouldn’t be here.

I planted a great many arbor vitae trees, as well as ornamentals such as deciduous magnolias, camellia, rose of Sharon, abelia, and rhododendron. But mostly I’ve let nature take its course, as all sorts of native trees volunteered and I left them alone to grow — poplars, persimmon, beech, maple, and oak. There was even a magnolia grandiflora already here. It was a spindly, shapeless thing that never got any light. But, once the pines were gone, the magnolia has grown into a very grand tree, as tall as the house and with a perfect magnolia shape.

You would think that the people in these parts would welcome a natural woodland landscape, but they fight it. They prefer huge, square, easy-to-mow lawns, with nothing to stop the eye. I have done everything possible to stop the eye, with a yard that is more like little ponds of grass that meander around the trees. Such a yard is a pain in the neck to mow. But now that I have a zero-turn mower, I can get the mowing done in less than two hours. That’s still a lot of grass, none of which is visible in this photo because so many things stop the eye.

There is another very welcome advantage to welcoming the woods into your yard. The cool air from the woods flows into the yard as the new trees gradually link up with the woodland canopy. Even a slight breeze is surprisingly cooling. The day will come when there will be shade on much of the roof even at midday, but we’re not there yet. And because the trees are deciduous, there’s plenty of sun in winter.

Few people see my house, because I’m near the end of a unpaved private road. But, of the people who have seen it, the abbey landscape is starting to inspire some envy, and a few country folk — country folk, who ought to know! — have asked me how I did it. That’s actually pretty easy. The first thing is make sure that there’s something growing everywhere, that no sun and no water are wasted. Even the ditch along the road in front of the house is a beautiful thing — tall grasses, some wildflowers, blackberries (which get out of hand and must be restrained) and persimmon trees. Not only do ditches channel and preserve runoff, the water makes them lush. They’re a path for wildlife, especially the rabbits, of which there are a great many. Except for the difficulty of mowing a yard in which nothing is flat and in which you can’t walk more than ten yards in any direction without bumping into something, a natural landscape is an easy landscape, suitable for lazy people. A minimum amount of time is spent fighting nature. Another thing I emphasize to the country folk — and the birds agree — is that you can’t have too many arbor vitae trees. Arbor vitae trees are hotels for birds, as are the dense thickets of honeysuckle and jasmine that grow along the top of the orchard fence.

My biggest disappointment is that the deer will eat almost anything. For example, azaleas can’t live through the night. I’d like to have more blooming things, but the deer won’t allow it. Defending my beloved daily lilies has been almost impossible, though I haven’t yet given up. Fortunately there are a great many green things that don’t taste good to the deer.

Every year, the house will be a little more hidden in the woods. I’m like a deer, or a rabbit, or even a cat. There have to be places to hide.

Much to think about

End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. Peter Turchin, Penguin, June 2023. 352 pages.

It seems to me that most publications, and most of our useless and accursèd pundit class, are doing their best to ignore this book. I think I can see why. The political punditry don’t like to bother with scholars and ideas. That wouldn’t get many clicks, and it would interfere too much with the punditry’s pursuit of shallowness — politics as a horse race; who’s up and who’s down; working every day to keep us scared and to keep ratings (and clicks) up; profiting from polarization and wallowing in everything that promotes it.

Even those who have written about this book mostly miss the point. What’s important about this book is not whether the author, Peter Turchin, has a theory that can make predictions, which is all the pundits seem to want to write about. What’s important, and what nobody has written about, as far as I can tell from Googling, are the political factors that Turchin uses to measure the stability of political arrangements, and the course that states take when things become unstable.

By far, the most important factor is the “wealth pump.” It’s the wealth pump that transfers the wealth produced by the working classes to the governing elite — the ruling class — who hold the wealth and power. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. When that happens, as it did in the U.S. when the Reagan administration started the reversal of the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal, something will break sooner or later, for two reasons. The first reason is the “immiseration” of working people. The second reason is that too much wealth at the top creates a surplus of rich people competing for power and a bigger share of the spoils. This competition tends to get uglier and uglier as frustrated elites increasingly break the rules (and destroy institutions in the process) to try to get ahead.

Turchin, in brief but very telling examples from history, traces the rise and fall of states that rose, and then fell. His account of the fall of the Soviet Union is particularly helpful, as is his account of what went wrong in Russia during the 1990s as elites fought over, and divided up, everything that belonged to the Russian people. He also sheds a great deal of light on why the political systems of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus went in different directions after Putin came to power in Russia.

Probably the biggest reason that publications and the punditry are trying to ignore this book is that there is no way to spin it into a centrist morality tale. Someone is bound to slam the book as confirmation bias for liberals, if someone hasn’t already. Turchin does use the word “moderates” in one chapter, but by that he does not mean centrists. “Moderates” is the term he uses for people who initially participated in the violence and mayhem of rebellions but who become sick of violence and start working instead for a restoration of peace. People usually die — both peasants and elites — when the wealth pump pushes things all the way to disintegration and revolution.

I will not try to describe here what Turchin has to say about how far along the United States is on the path to disintegration, and what the possible outcomes are. But I will say this, and I don’t think that, as a liberal, I’m falling into the trap of confirmation bias. If we Americans are to save ourselves, the only solution is a new New Deal in which our ruling elites come to their senses and realize that, unless they use their political power to turn off the wealth pump, the 90 percent of the population at the bottom will use some means or other, including possibly violence, to turn it off for them. This, according to Turchin, in what happened during the New Deal. It wasn’t just Franklin Roosevelt. The ruling class of that time had looked over their shoulders and seen what was happening in Russia and Eastern Europe. And so the ruling class consented to new arrangements in which the 90 percent, the government, and the ruling class all worked together for an equitable sharing of wealth. (There was a serious flaw in that settlement, though, and we’re still paying for it. White people got a fair deal. Black people got Jim Crow.)

Can we turn the United States into Denmark? And how fast could we do it? That’s pretty much what it comes down to. You can imagine how hard that will be, given that the Republican Party’s system of disinformation and propaganda has convinced working people that turning the United States into Denmark is the worst thing that could ever happen to them. The truth is, turning the U.S. into Denmark would be the best thing that could ever happen to the deplorables. Strangely enough — and this book has given me a whole new level of respect for President Biden — that’s what Biden is trying to do, as quietly as possible and in as bipartisan a way as possible. Even we Democrats know far too little about Bidenomics. The media don’t write about it, because the media feed on conflict and failure rather than progress and success. For example, when inflation is rising, the media go on and on about it. When inflation is coming down, they change the subject back to conflict and failure. In the Republican propaganda bubble, no one even hears that inflation is coming down. Clearly Biden has a plan to force the media to write about economic success, by making Bidenomics a thing during the 2024 elections.

If you’re a liberal, this book will renew your confidence that we liberals are on the right track. It also occurred to me while reading this book that political and moral philosophy will get you to the very same place that Turchin treats as a science and which he calls “cliodynamics.” We liberals want to apply John Rawls’ theory of “justice as fairness” simply because it’s the right thing to do. The difference, from Turchin’s perspective, is that if you fail to pursue justice as fairness simply because it’s the right thing to do, then you’re on the road, inevitably, to violence and collapse.

In Roosevelt’s time, Americans did the right thing. For almost three decades after World War II, America was like Denmark. Can we do it again?

The upside of summer


Dandelion pesto, made with Gorgonzola cheese

Summer pesto:

One of the best ideas I know for making the best of summer is: Eat more pesto. Already this season I’ve had pestos made of basil, kale, dandelions, and mixtures including parsley, dill, cilantro, and thyme. I was afraid that the dandelion pesto would be bitter, but it wasn’t. I did my best to counteract the strong taste of dandelions with other strong tastes — a little malt vinegar, and Gorgonzola cheese. I’ve realized that parmesan doesn’t have to be the default cheese for pesto.

Summer reading:

I always like to have some good fiction and some good nonfiction going at the same time. I had high hopes this summer for Tad Williams’ The Dragonbone Chair, which was published in 1988. I stuck with it for 125 excruciating pages and finally flung it. Why did this book get so many fans and so many good reviews? It’s embarrassingly overwritten, lame in its attempts to be ever-so-clever in every last sentence. Nothing ever happens. There is scene after scene in which new characters are introduced, and dozens of other characters are named but never seen. There is scene after scene in new settings in an old castle, and dozens of other places are named but never seen. A database would be required to track it all. But there’s no motive to track it because it’s so boring. Who could possibly compare something this bad with the work of J.R.R. Tolkien? I’m not even going to waste shelf space on this book. On my next trip to the used book store, I’ll sell it. Until I can scare up some new fiction, I’ll stick with Peter Turchin’s new book, which I mentioned in a recent post.

Traveling persimmons:

For years, Ken and I have grieved over the abbey’s orchard. The peach crop always fails, early on. The squirrels steal all the apples exactly one day before they’re ripe. We do get some figs. But the trees that never let us down are the persimmon trees. They’re natives, so they’re not finicky and never sickly. For some reason, none of the wildlife raid the trees while the persimmons are still on the tree. They wait for it to drop. There are more persimmons in the yard each year than a single household can use. I do believe that Ken does his best to time his American college tours to persimmon season, which is late October. Last year, when he returned to Scotland, he took some persimmon seeds, which we had saved while making persimmon pudding. He planted the seeds in his Scottish greenhouse. He got lots of promising seedlings, some of which he took to Germany as a gift to his wife’s sister. In a few years, we’ll know how the trees are coming along. Our guess is that the German trees will like their climate better than the Scottish trees.

Summer watchables:

Because I don’t really watch broadcast (or cable) television, I had missed the long-running PBS series “Masterpiece Endeavour.” Just last month, the series had its ninth, and last, season on PBS. Having missed the earlier seasons, I decided to keep watching all of it, in order. I’m now on season 6. It is some of the best television I’ve ever seen. It’s intelligent, and made for adults. It’s not here-and-now. It’s set in Oxford in the late 1960s. The characters really grow on you. Each episode is complete in itself, but there are longer-running plot elements. I made a brief visit to Oxford in 2019. At the time, I didn’t know that the pub that I wanted to visit is the Lamb & Flag, which according to Wikipedia has been operating since 1566. Now I know. I’ll need another visit to Oxford to correct my mistake.


⬆︎ My coneflowers have perennialized. Lucky me!


⬆︎ Dill, bolted


⬆︎ Rose of Sharon


⬆︎ Baby persimmons, which won’t be ready until fall