Post  #2544.   Daphne.      Reading the Sunday paper, Home & Gardens section. I know. I was drawn to this one shrubbery that I have just the place for, as soon as the dandelions are gone. The lady across the street says her mother-in-law has a foolproof concoction that works every time and doesn't kill anything else. Hmmm heard that before. Anyway, speaking of killing, the shrubbery,



called Daphne x transatlantica, or "Summer Ice," is large and long-blooming and does something most of the year. Just what I need. Only .. "despite these virtues, daphnes are heartbreakers. No other plant up and dies so unexpectedly and often." Perfect. Mine would die on the way home in the car. I'll keep looking. And this time, whatever I get will not end up in the corner of .. that room (you know the one I mean - it's on the way out back, has a concrete floor, a dirty sink, shelves, rubber boots, boxes of garden tools and fertilizer) where I never go.

Another place I never go is my back yard. It is completely wild, and my neighbors are not too happy about that. I don't mean "wild" like your typical overgrown suburban lot that could be completely cleaned up by a couple of stoner teenagers over a weekend. I mean this is wild and impassible. This morning, I looked up from washing dishes and a raccoon was watching me from about twenty-five feet away. Don't remember ever seeing one in the daytime before. They move so slowly and casually as if they've not a concern in the world, something pretty dumb to believe here in Dog City. I had been leaving a slice of bread out occasionally for the blue jays, and it's likely this raccoon heard about it. They do love bread.

My Virginia relative, second cousins and up, love to shoot raccoons. Yeah, they're country all right. Good ol' boys. My second cousin "Dot" was real close to being Deliverance, at least the way he talked, and would he ever go on and on about the coons. It didn't take too long before I could understand what he was saying. He took brother and me out in the forest last time we were back in Virginia. Eighty-some years old and you should have seen him scamper up them trails. (You get to pickin' it up real quick back thar.) Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day.

posted by Rick at 10:42 PM

Post  #2543.   Today in time travel.     It wasn't so much the invention of time travel that wrecked the Universe, it was making the application available to anyone who wanted to take a ride. And that's what happens when you have an idea but no time to pry it out. It goes into drafts until one day you return, have no idea where you were going with that and write something else, like 30 Rock. was this a brilliant piece of comedy writing or what?

I told her to stay/I didn't want her to leave/This is my fault ... leave

And finally, from the the irony file: US nuclear aircraft carrier evacuates from Japanese radioactive threat. Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day.

posted by Rick at 12:40 PM

Post  #2542.   I took a week off.     I found a discussion forum to post in and got involved, until I realized that it makes no sense to debate with anonymous persons who are deranged and have no lives.

Think about this: somewhere in this country is the worst brain surgeon in the entire United States, operating away.

Last week, during the 60 Minutes' interview with President Obama, they cut the sound very briefly while he was speaking. It intrigued me because they never do that. Once you say it on 60 Minutes, they've got you. Curious, I ran it back several times, but I could not read his lips to understand what words were deleted. So I went to the CBS site where a transcript was posted and saw that the words were; "wealthy, you know," referring to a hypothetical Dubai prince as the sort of person who might have actually been in the compound instead of Bin Laden had the intelligence been wrong. The only thing I can figure is that the President is trying to remove words like "you know" from his discourse, and CBS decided to cut him a break. Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day.
posted by Rick at 2:05 PM

Post  #2541.   Today's cartoon.     The first panel shows a scholarly type fellow at a desk, "scratch, scratch," diligently working figures. In the next panel, we see him at a lectern, addressing a group of scientists, reporters, interested persons, "If we act soon," he says, there is still time to reverse the effects that humanity has had upon the climate."

The next two panels show the same thing, only "reverse" is replaced by "halt."

Next two: "if we act soon" is replaced by "if we act Now."

Finally, he reports in the last panel, "I'm afraid there is no more time. Nothing we do now will have any effect upon the looming climate disaster. Accordingly, I'd like to announce that I am leaving my position as Professor of Climatology and will be looking for a job doing something else." I don't get it. This will never happen.Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day.
posted by Rick at 1:52 PM

Post  #2540.   Amazingly convenient.      Right about the time I started to fall apart and a lot of walking, bending, lifting, pushing, seeing, searching and checking-out became more difficult, home grocery delivery arrived. Costs the same, pretty much, and the shopping ladies do a far better job of selecting that I ever could. They even send my 7 oranges a week in a range from firm to soft n' ripe. Can you believe it? Oh, that's not all. No sooner did I swear off housework forever and render my home un-guestable, friend-media started. Now I have "friends" I can "see" (or not) whenever I want. I have classmate friends from my high school who graduated 15-30 years after I did! It doesn't even matter because we'll never meet. Got a great post from one just tonight. She is so cool it's as if we've always known one another. Our high school itself is in Japan, and neither of us has been back there. Probably wrecked from the earthquake anyway; it's up there in that part of the country. Another girl who I actually knew in school, 3rd grade in a Quonset hut, has been corresponding for almost ten years. We will never see one another again (I hope anyway,) so it's great keeping in touch by typing. My doctor contacts me by email. Pretty much everyone does for that matter. My phone rarely rings. I turn it off at nap and bedtime. Since those periods of the day/night occupy about a third of the day, most people who know me have just given up. I have no problem with that at all. The sister-in-law is a notable exception to that. She will call anytime and will always say, "Oh, you're up," to remind me how annoying it is for her to call and get no answer. Like it would matter.

All this medical crap has crimped my existence however. Before, getting a driver's license renewed or having the car serviced were the only two circumstances where I had to leave the house. Now these doctors have me driving all over. Not only that, I have to be on time. Something has to give. I worked too hard to get here.

Speaking of medical crap, I was re-reading some reports tonight. Lawyers have really changed medicine. Doctors are ridiculously careful about what they put down in writing, to the point where they really aren't saying anything useful. "No apparent sign of," "does not seem to," "very little evidence of." When there is something of note, you would want it to be flashing red and jumping off the page, maybe, but they'll just use a colon: Stage: 4. Holy shit. That's what I said anyway.

I see you managed to turn this into another how sick you are blog entry. I know. Strange, I wasn't headed there at all. Guess it was that or the weather: rained 24 days in April. My kind of April.

Ever since I quit watching national newscasts, I get my (other than newspaper) input from the squibs that Yahoo puts up when you log out of mail. Sometimes there will be as many as 5,000 comments listed after a story, most of them dumb. Do the people who have completely missed the point and then go on and type something full of grammar and spelling errors - do they know they're dumb? These are "Letters to the Editor" that never got printed, 5,000 of them. So, at least people are participating in the opinion-sharing of a thriving democracy, only no one reads the letters. That says something, only I'm not quite sure what.Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day.

posted by Rick at 11:45 PM

Post  #2539.   RE: Pakistani competence.      Has there been enough written yet about the removal of Bin Laden? Of course not. I just wanted to add a note about the role of our ally, Pakistan. A great deal has been said already, and much of it has been unkind. Did they know? Could they have helped us? We will probably never know the answers. But as far as the issue of competence, well, that has been plain not fair. Why, just take a look ..



at the fence they have already constructed to protect our crashed helicopter wreckage. And we were so sure they would turn it over to the Chinese. Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day.

posted by Rick at 10:09 PM

Post  #2538.   Osama is still dead.      I have to type something, anything. Just too much being said out there to ignore. Earlier, I saw this headline in our local paper and,

Bin Laden's death a relief for Seattle area woman who saw 911 attacks

simply by dumb instinct I read the article. Seattle is very provincial even though we like to point at all our world-classness stuff to assert otherwise. Inevitably, we'll quote somebody for the local perspective on a major story; better yet, we celebrity-watch shamelessly. JFK Jr seen at Farmer's Market! He really was one time, and they really wrote that.

All this celebrating bothers me a little, but I seem to be very much in the minority. Yay, somebody is dead and we did it! USA-USA-USA! is for winning a hockey match, not for killing a man after ten years of trying. Don't get me wrong - I'm very much pro-death for the right people, and this was the right person. But the only guy on the planet who is completely unaffected by the event, who is utterly calm and at peace and has zero opinion about it one way or the other is ... come one, it's not a hard question. One more clue: he isn't jumping for joy OR plotting revenge either, though some of his friends may be. So, celebrating doesn't put an exclamation point on it.

Geraldo was the worst, but then you would expect that. And this one is all over Facebook tonight:



I noticed far majority of people out in the streets were quite young, say early twenties. Thinking back, if my entire living memory was of the search for an evil man who changed a world that I will never know, and now finally my country had shot him in the face and dumped the body in the ocean, appropriately, then yeah, I'd probably be out doing a USA-USA-USA! as well.

Stay tuned. This isn't over.Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day. Osama is still dead.

posted by Rick at 10:16 PM