Source: Economist John Kenneth Galbraith (2001). “The Essential Galbraith”, p.186, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
To me, this quote sums up what’s happening with the November 2024 elections, and the takeover of American politics by the frankly pro-dictatorship anti-democratic MAGA forces. Continue reading Post #1984: “All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.”
Post #1894: Commentary on the NY Times/Siena College poll results.
From my November 2023 post, shown above, regarding a Siena University poll:
Here’s my take on the main message: Biden’s too old. And other stuff, sure. Weirdly, the main writeups seem to skirt this issue. But to my eye, this is something that everybody agreed on. Separately, smears work, disinformation wins. ... But if my only alternative to Biden is Trump, then “too old” doesn’t exist. If Biden’s breathing, I’m voting for him.
Nine months since that Siena U. poll, and I’d say that pretty much nothing has changed.
Luckily, this Presidential race is very much a case of needing to outrun the bear. You don’t have to be fast, to outrun that bear. You just have to be faster than the person you’re running against.
And so, thankfully, Biden doesn’t have to be a great candidate for President. He just has to be a better alternative than Trump.
And I’d say he has that knocked. For me, if forced to choose between an old guy who struggles to keep his head on straight, but hires the best and brightest, and understands America’s place as leader of the free world, versus a dictator-smooching adulterous shameless liar who hires his relatives for key jobs and seems dead-set on destroying the American system of free and fair elections … I’ll take the old(er) guy any day.
Not much of a defense of the Democratic candidate, but given his opponent, it’s all that’s necessary.
Today is one of those sultry summer days where Nature just can’t quite seem to make up its mind to rain. Or not. It’s overcast, humid, hot, and windless.
Not that a little bit of rain is going to make much difference at this point. My garden water barrels have been empty for most of June.
June 2024 is going to be the second-driest June on record in this area. The records, in this case, go back to circa 1960, for Dulles Airport. Even if it does finally manage to rain, it’s not going to rain enough to change that.
According to NOAA, Dulles Airport (one of the weather stations of record for my area) has received a total of just 0.69 inches of rain, so far, this June:
Source: Weather Underground, historical weather for Vienna VA
National weather service monthly precipitation data (Google link for Dulles) show the following:
For Washington, DC, the NOAA precipitation record goes back to the 1930s. There, 2024 is shaping up to be the third-driest June, edged out by 1988 (as above) and by 1940.
Dry, no matter how you squeeze it.
If if have learned nothing else from back-yard vegetable gardening, it’s that I would surely starve if I had to grow my own food.
So far this year, I’ve had poor yields of peas, potatoes, and garlic. My 100-square-foot potato bed yielded just under 50 pounds of potatoes, most of which were small (but still edible) potatoes. (Thus giving me the potato yield assumed in the movie The Martian, see Post G23-016. If I eat 2000 calories per day, my 100-square-foot potato bed generated enough food for nine days.) For my garlic, I suspect I’ll be lucky to end up with a half- ounce of usable garlic per square foot, from a roughly 64-square-foot bed.
And now, my little patch of garden is surviving courtesy of my municipal water supply. Absent that, pretty much everything in the garden would be dead, given the drought.
On the plus side, my investment in surface-laid irrigation is paying off (e.g., Post G22-027). Right now, I’m using a mix of 1/2″ dripline, 1/2″ drip tape, and some “bubblers”. To water my garden, I dial in an hour on my hose timer, and walk away. Beats the heck out of toting watering cans in the heat.
Most plants can’t make use of anywhere near the full intensity of summer sunlight. Perhaps you knew that, but I didn’t. Depending on the plant and the conditions, photosynthesis maxes out at as little as one-seventh or -eighth of the intensity of noon-day sunlight (at my latitude). Anything beyond that is wasted. Continue reading Post G24-019: Photosynthetic efficiency, or finally understanding the back-yard garden trellis.
Edit 7/16/2024: The cucumber beetles finally showed up this morning. And, we had a few Japanese beetles. Still no sign of the squash vine borer, though, despite having several varieties of cucurbits in my garden.
I guess I shouldn’t complain, but certain of my garden insect pests are missing. And — see below — that’s likely due to drought in this area.
It’s now way past time for Japanese beetles (left), cucumber beetles (center), and squash vine borers (right) to show up. These should all appear when we’ve reached ~1000 growing-degree-days of accumulated warmth for the year. That occurred in this area almost two weeks ago. We’ve now accumulated somewhere in excess of 1300 growing-degree-days of warmth. So these pests are way overdue, no matter how I figure it.
Source: Cornell University.
And yet, so far, I’ve seen a total of three Japanese beetles. Cucumber beetles — normally found in my squash blossoms every morning — are nowhere to be seen. Ditto for the squash vine borer, which should be fairly easy to spot due to its bright orange coloring.
Does that mean they aren’t going to show up this year? Or are they merely delayed for some reason?
Nothing heralds summer like the hum of Japanese beetles ravenously descending on a flower garden. Cool weather this spring has slowed emergence of adults from the soil. Heavy spring rains early followed by relatively drier weather in late June, may have trapped adult Japanese beetles under a crusty layer of hardened soil. Due to their large numbers in many parts of Indiana last year, they are very likely just waiting for a good rain to soften the surface, so they can dig themselves into the light of day and on to your flowers. So, if we get a little more rain by the time this article comes out, we are likely to be awash in adult beetles.
Source: Purdue University landscaper report, emphasis mine.
The paragraph above was for 2022, for Indiana.
But it describes 2024 in Virginia well. This spring was characterized by plenty of rain, followed by drought that kicked in just as we were approaching 1000 degree-days of warmth.
For Japanese beetles, at least, the bottom line is that they have probably been delayed by the drought. For the other two, by analogy, it’s plausible that they, too, have been delayed by crusty topsoil resulting from weeks of no rain.
The bottom line is that I can’t count on having dodged these pests for the year. Likely they are just waiting for enough rain to soften the topsoil, so they can dig themselves up into the light of day.
We had a welcome half-inch of rain last night. Perhaps I’ll be seeing these old friends soon.
It has reached the point where half of my incoming emails are spam from the Biden campaign.
These emails are all solicitations for donations. Given that this is all coming from the same source, you’d think they could figure out a way to limit it to one-a-day, or some such. With this volume, they have crossed the line between persistent reminders and simply being annoying.
In any case, today it finally dawned on me that I could unsubscribe. This is an odd thing to do, given that I never subscribed to anything in the first place. But, semantics aside, as long as it gets them to stop, that’ll do.
The point of this is that I am baffled by Federal campaign finance limits. Every time I hear about the latest multi-million-dollar fund raiser by either candidate, I keep coming back to what I thought the law said, regarding contribution limits: $3,300 per person, per candidate, per election. Like so:
Source: FEC.
Normally, I’d just chalk that up to the norm for modern America, which is that there are no binding rules for the rich, only for the little people. So, of course candidates can hold $100K/plate fund-raising dinners, for their campaigns. At the same time that hoi polloi are limited, by law, to $3,300, if donated to to a candidate’s campaign.
I would do that, except that among my emails from the Biden campaign is a request to donate $5K. Like so, from my in-box:
How on earth can the Biden campaign solicit a donation for $5K, from a mere commoner like myself, when the legal limit on donations to a political campaign, for an election, is $3,300?
I realize there are no binding limits on what the wealthy can spend to try to influence politics. But if there are no real limits to what the average Joe or Jane can spend, I sure wish they’d revise the law to make that clear. The current situation — a $3,300 limit which just about everyone seems to be able to avoid, one way or the other — turns Federal campaign spending limits into more of a joke than they already are.
The Japanese beetle and the squash vine borer both show up somewhere around 1000 growing-degree-days into the year.
Source: Cornell University.
This year being pretty close to average, temperature-wise, the Japanese beetles are right on time. I saw my first one this afternoon. Last year’s version of this post occurred on June 20. The year before that, June 18.
It’s not so much that the Japanese beetles do a lot of damage in my garden. It’s that, around here, they are easy to spot, and their appearance means that many other pestiferous bugs will soon be arriving. Relatively pest-free gardening is over for the year.
While Japanese beetles arrive like clockwork, not so the tomatoes. Every year, I plant some short-season/cold-tolerant tomatoes, including Burpee’s aptly-named Fourth of July. And, owing to the warm weather, and maybe an early start indoors, for the first time ever, I have my first red tomato on the same day as my first Japanese beetle. I believe this year’s winning variety is Glacier.
x
This early ripening is kind of a good-news, bad-news joke. Good news is, it’s been so warm that the early-season tomatoes are extra early. (E.g., a neighbor of mine has had ripe cherry tomatoes for about two weeks now.) The bad news is that it’s been so hot, we’re already having nigh-time lows in the 70’s F, which is too warm for tomatoes to begin the ripening process. So I’m guessing that I may get a few ripe tomatoes soon, but the bulk of what’s growing is going to remain green until temperatures cool off a bit.
It is not from being too cheap to buy a new belt. In most cases.
In reality, a guy with a beer gut has no choice. Belts seek the geodesic, that is, the path of least distance. In this case, the path is around your midsection at the belt line. If you have big gut, and buckle your belt at your navel, it’ll sag. Maybe not immediately, but soon.
Left to its own devices, your belt ends up below your gut, at your personal geodesic. Continue reading Post #1981: Have you ever wondered why fat guys hang their gut over their belt?
Offered for your consideration is the artifact below, found amidst the remains of my wife’s disused (now rehabbed) bicycle: Continue reading Post #1980: What’s the opposite of nostalgia?
Sky Meadows is one of our under-appreciated Virginia State Parks. The main hike at Sky Meadows (above) is a seemingly-easy half-mile walk up a hillside meadow with nice views. It’s only a half-mile to the top, but that’s at a constant 18% grade.
We (pant) took many (pant) pauses to (pant) admire the view. On a clear day (e.g., without forest fire smoke), you can see the tall buildings at Reston, VA, roughly 50 miles away.
My little patch of berries is doing well. Black raspberries have peaked. Blackberries (above) are doing OK. Currants and gooseberries are about done. Wineberries are still to come.
My boysenberries are now ripening. Three years ago I put in a few boysenberry plants. I did this for the novelty, as I can’t recall ever having seen boysenberries for sale in this area (Virginia). Now, having grown some, I understand why. Technically, they are cane fruits. In some climates, they may in fact produce stout canes. But in my yard, they are low, creeping, sprawling plants. They are hard to grow, in that it’s all-but-impossible to weed around them. They’re a pain to pick, as the berries are borne just a few inches off the ground.
A ripe boysenberry looks like a purple blackberry, as shown above. When less than totally and fully ripe, boysenberries and blackberries taste about the same to me. But fully ripe, each berry yields a few seconds of its own distinct flavor. Boysenberries are different from blackberries, but I would not say that a fully-ripe boysenberry is better than a fully-ripe blackberry. And blackberries are vastly easier to grow, in my climate.
In both cases, once the fruit is fully ripe, it’s very soft and won’t travel. Near as I can tell, the only way to taste a fully-ripe blackberry is to grow it. And around here, the only way to taste a fresh boysenberry, at all, is to grow it.
I must have made the right choices in rehabbing my wife’s BikeE recumbent bike (Post #1978 and earlier). This, because she was gadding about town, on that bike, for a couple of hours today. There’s the bike, on the W&OD trail this morning.
My sole useful advice was to mind her coccyx, in the sense that a long bike ride on a recumbent can leave you with a sore butt, particularly if you haven’t done any riding in a while.
This bike rehab project remains unfinished. I managed to get the bike into ride-able condition, but I have been unable to get the three-speed rear hub and other bearings serviced. My local bike shop took on the task, then declined to work on the bike due to a damaged shock mount. (Apparently my 15-year-old repair of that mount left them unimpressed.)
This is the problem with riding what is, in effect, an antique. I need to find another bike shop in my area that can rebuild a Sachs 3×7 rear hub. That’s a bit of a trick, given that every part for those has been out of production for a couple of decades.
This year marks my fourth attempt at growing garlic in my back yard garden. This year I bought seed garlic (i.e., big heads with big cloves) from a local grower, made sure the soil had adequate nutrients including sulfur, and generally I Did What They Told Me To Do. Including planting after our nominal first frost date in the fall.
Once again, my dreams of growing garlic heads the size of my fist are unrealized. In fact, this is shaping up to be my fourth failure at growing garlic. As with my prior attempts, my heads of garlic are tiny. About half of my garlic is still in the ground, but it’s clear that most or all of my garlic heads will be on order of 1.5″ diameter or so. Almost but not quite unusable.
At this point, I’ve tried using different garlic varieties, planting times, backyard locations, and soil amendments and fertilizers. But I always get the same result.
I suspect that I just don’t have enough sunlight to grow full-sized garlic. My garlic bed gets about 5 hours of direct sunlight a day. Growing guides variously recommend “at least six hours”, and in some cases, eight-to-ten hours of direct sunlight per day. Garlic doesn’t have a whole lot of leaf area, and as a consequence, I’m guessing it really needs more direct sunlight than is available in my back yard.
Seven weeks ago, I started to propagate some schip (skip) laurels by two methods: Air-layering, and snip-and-dip (Post #1967).
The snip-and-dip plants are thriving, as shown above. Seven weeks ago, these were green branch tips that I snipped off, dipped in rooting hormone, stuck in wet potting soil, then kept moist and out of direct sunlight. These cuttings are obviously thriving.
Air layering skip laurels, by contrast, has been a total dud (above). The internet told me I’d have a big ball of roots at the end of that cutting after just four weeks. After four weeks, I had nothing. After seven weeks, there are some little bumps on the bark that might, eventually, become roots. My guess is that for a schip (skip) laurel, I’d have to tend to that air-layered branch all summer to have any hope of having a root ball form. Snip-and-dip is a lot easier and in this case a lot more effective.
The scene on the left is a particularly sketchy bit of sidewalk in my neighborhood, as of March 2024 (Post #1950). The scene on the right is the same stretch of sidewalk, now. Presumably, in the interim, the Town of Vienna Department of Public Works has been at work.
That was good to see, given that the Town, in Its infinite wisdom, has decided to tear up my street next year. This, due to free money from Covid.
The plan is to bury the roadside swales that have been there for half a century, widen the street, and almost manage to convert it into just another cookie-cutter suburban street. The point of which is to provide “a sidewalk” on my street. In this case, for reasons only apparent to DPW, the sidewalk will cross the street mid-block. Thus, when they are done, anyone wishing to walk down my block, on the sidewalk, will be required to cross the street in front of my house.
My bet is that nobody is going to use the sidewalk beyond that ridiculous crossing. Other than the geezers in the 100+ bed assisted living facility that the town permitted at the end of the block.
Which, although nobody will admit it, is why this one-block-long sidewalk has to cross the street mid-block. Because it’s not for residents on the block to use, it’s for benefit of the commercial establishment at the end of the block. (The sidewalk crosses the street in order to attach to the sidewalk directly adjacent to the assisted living facility).
But hey, if somebody else is paying for it, and you are in a use-it-or-lose-it situation, the more money it wastes, the better.
Anyway, kudos to the Town for putting the this particularly run-down bit of local sidewalk back into good repair.
I am not looking forward to next year’s makeover of my street. But the Town owns the right-of-way, and they can do pretty much whatever they damn well please with it. Which, apparently, is pretty much the Town’s view of the issue, as well.
To the casual observer, that looks like a bunch of un-ripe cherry tomatoes. Those are actually potato fruit, what you get if you allow your potatoes to flower. These are quite toxic due to their high solanine content.
