OK, so ALL ants want that. But the little, red fire ants in the area have determined that EVERYWHERE is their territory. And for whatever reason, when people step on their territory, they have favorites, those whom they look the other way for. I am not one of those people.

Last year, I had bites that looked like these all over my digits and ankles. They itch, burn, swell, weep, and generally don’t heal for weeks. My wounds are healed now, but I did my part to research what I need to do differently next time:

• don’t wear open toed shoes (bummer in the heat, but doable)
• don’t step on their mounds (I LOOK, but they must be everywhere!)
• fire ants do not like cinnamon. A perimeter of cinnamon around areas you are sleeping can help. (aha!)

So this is progress. And I plan to bring enough cinnamon next time to dose my feet and all around my tent to keep out the territorial insects. That is, until last night’s dream:

I dreamed last night that I put down the cinnamon, and was having a grand time with friends nearby when I looked over at my carefully poured powder perimeter. The ants were frolicking in the cinnamon, and to my astonishment, laughed at me: “Fool!” they said in their tiny ant voices, “You chose the cheap, false cinnamon, cassia bark! We love the stuff! It is true cinnamon, the Ceylon cinnamon that is abhorrent to us. HAHAHAHAHA!” 

I guess I better bring both kinds, just in case. And stop listening to Sam’s “true cinnamon” rant.

We had a depressing debate, actually, about whether the rest of the country cares enough to save Michigan from what seems like a state-wide economic failure. I worry that every other state won’t want precious funds going to a state that seems too far gone, but my friends who live there optimistically believe the opposite. For the sake of their jobs and safety, I hope there can be a turnaround, even if the new jobs coming in aren’t part of the Detroit automobile industry.

All the same, it was great to spend time with some friends I rarely get to see and see their new digs, their new plans, and help them feel more comfortable in the long Michigan winter. People there are quite friendly, and I love asking them to point out where they live on their anatomical [right palm] state map. And even in a city that appears to be dying, there was a fascinating trick to Detroit buildings: from the outside, most of them look dark and small, but once inside, they are spacious, brightly lit, and often full of people. Hopefully the city too can turn a similar trick.

The bad news is a little more serious. Our 100 square foot plot sits next to two 30-feet tall blue spruces. That might be OK, except they sit immediately to the south. The. plot. is. shady. all. day.

If you’re not a gardener, you may at this point be saying, “So what? Clearly plants grow in shade, I see them all the time. Grow up!” In part, you’re right: I should grow up, but this is the second time in recent months I’ve had this problem: when we moved into our northwest-bottom-corner apartment and found I couldn’t raise much in pots on the windowsills. The garden was supposed to correct that problem, but as Sam considers, perhaps we are being “hazed” as new members of this exclusive locale. The pure shadiness of the plot means that more than half of the things I planned to grow must be crossed off. So, tomatoes, gladiolas, all peppers, basil, daisies and zinnias are out. LOTS of lettuce, spinach, broccoli, peas, collards, and did I mention lettuce? are in. We’ll show them we know how to garden.

The tragedy that keeps me from accepting this and moving on is that I haven’t grown tomatoes for over a year now, and was desperately looking forward to raising the crop that has the most payoff: a freshly grown and plucked tomato, something I could rest assured would grow in Colorado with much the same requirements as in Missouri. While I could quietly slip my brother $50 cash (he’s a certified sawyer) and the trees would suddenly no longer block the sun, I have a feeling I’d be hunted down by an angry mob if I did, since no one else would stand to gain from the trees mysteriously being chopped down.

So, we’ve taken the first steps – meeting a few other gardeners, and amending the soil with high-quality compost and sheep manure while picking out the blue spruce pinecones. This week I’ll probably put down peas and a few kinds of lettuce and spinach. If things work out, we’ll get a lucrative trading system down, offering the rare mid-summer spinach and lettuce when everyone else is drowning in tomatoes and basil. Oh, and next year we’ll request a move to a sunny plot.

However, bananas are not an evolutionarily favored plant, for all their benefits. They are clones – which explains the lack of any seeds, and the remarkable uniformity of the ones you see at the grocery store. But in the past, and now again, it means bananas fall easily to any fungus, disease, mite or bacteria that successfully attack a single plant of a banana cultivar. In the 1950s, Big Mike bananas started disappearing due to a fungus traveling easily between plantations. Big Mike bananas are not extinct, but they don’t work in big plantations anymore. How frustrating, then, that our bananas today aren’t as good as back in your grandma’s day. I’m tempted to ask someone of the era what exactly these dream bananas were like…but to be realistic, if someone asked you forty years from your last one what was so great about Pink Lady apples, could you really pin it down?

In the 1950s, the banana companies were forced to realize that they needed a banana replacement for the Big Mike, and they scornfully switched to the “inferior” Cavendish banana you see now. It is more fickle in travel, smaller, less creamy, and generally considered a weak replacement (though consumers, apparently, didn’t mind or didn’t notice the difference slicing it into their cereal). But the Cavendish, as I write, is being attacked by a stronger strain of the same fungus that destroyed most of the Big Mike bananas. And we’re no better at solving the problem. Clones just don’t have the genetic strength of other breeding methods. The best hope currently for keeping our Banana Foster recipes for the next couple generations is to employ transgenic methods to produce a third commercial banana. Wild bananas generally aren’t very appealing, even if hardy, and most bananas eaten by the non-Western World are starchier, closer to a plantain (how many of us would switch happily to a plantain on your peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich?). And regular cross-breeding is next to impossible with seedless fruit. It’ll take a lot of trial plants to find something that we picky consumers barely notice is not a Cavendish, but doesn’t die from fungus or the other diseases currently decimating the crops.

Anyway, it was a really good book. If you don’t feel like reading it, you might want to instead check out the NPR Fresh Air interview the author did, complete with singing a banana jingle and a thoughtful explanation why transgenic bananas aren’t worrisome. The author had many opportunities to try bananas you’ll never see in the US, and confidently picks a favorite: the Lacatan. He claims it is sweet and extra creamy, and is beloved by the locals who have access to it. Again, no fair. I am being told that one of my favorite fruits isn’t even the best of it’s kind, with the two better varieties either gone from the market or only sold in and near the Phillipines. I’ll need to find someone to smuggle a Lacatan to me at some point, so I can tell kids years from now how amazing yet another banana they’ll probably never eat was.

Sam’s family has and loves two beagles. The older of the two, Baxter, is now blind and has decreased smelling abilities, so he causes relatively little trouble, if you can find it in your heart to overlook his copious but unconscious drooling. The younger beagle, Maddy, however, has a nose sharper than a top-ranked sommelier, and no qualms about eating ANYTHING within barest reach that might qualify as food. Families with beagles (like Sam’s) tend to be aware of this instinct, and hide all food well away from countertop edges, in containers with rocks on them, or take other extreme measures to ensure they don’t come home to a swollen-stomached dog and tipped over food containers.

Sam and I don’t live with a beagle. This was made evident when we thought our precautions with the two bars of 85% rich, dark chocolate we received for Christmas were sufficient. They were tucked in a paper bag full of other presents in a room with the door closed for our time at his family’s house, but on the day after Christmas, one of us must have left the door open. About an hour later, Maddy appeared very guilty, licking her chops, and retracing her steps revealed two carefully opened dark chocolate wrappers dragged outside, with no remaining chocolate. Sigh.

We all know chocolate is bad for dogs, and that this particular dog had done a ruthless, very bad thing, but we didn’t notice any problems right away, and left it at massive scolding and a sharper sweep of the house for other edibles she might be able to reach. A few hours later, Maddy had the appearance of an espresso junkie with a fresh dose of caffeine, unable to sit still, whining and drinking lots of water, but otherwise as goofy as usual. Perhaps a stomachache, we thought. Nothing serious. Everyone went to bed, while I stayed up to do some writing. Her demeanor changed sometime after 11pm. She started trembling all over and her eyes became very bloodshot. She didn’t respond to her name quickly, and would lean against me with her whole body shaking. Concerned, I checked a few sources online. This one in particular gave me the scary facts – she had eaten 7 ounces of very dark chocolate, double the toxic dose for her body weight; and was showing more than half of the symptoms. I counted myself lucky she was not yet experiencing seizures or coma, and woke up Sam. We tried the family vet first, where the answering service promised to leave a message for the vet on call, who’d get back to us in 30 minutes. 35 minutes passed with no call, so we called back the answering service, who basically shrugged and said they’d tried. Luckily, FC is known for its top tier vet school and accompanying small and large animal hospital, complete with emergency services. A call to them and some quick math on their end meant that we should bring the shaking dog right away. Bundling up for the cold, we headed out, disturbed that even the sight of the harness and leash didn’t raise Maddy’s spirits. This was bad.

The drive to the vet hospital was unpleasant, to say the least. Maddy apparently hates cars, and was very vocal about it. We got there and found the hospital empty of patients, where a young, kind vet quickly scooped her up and took her back. From that point, things got better – from the info we could share about how much she had eaten and when, they decided to make her vomit (the vet’s words were, “She puked up a LOT of chocolate. It smelled nice at first…like hot chocolate. But also like dog vomit”), coat her stomach with activated charcoal, and keep her overnight with IV fluids to dilute the damage. He assured us we had done the right thing by bringing her in, and that he gets a LOT of calls this time of year with the same problem. Their knowledge means they can do some calculations on the phone, like they had with us, and give a good estimation of whether the dog should come in or not. In this case, Maddy had eaten an awful lot of quite dark chocolate containing large amounts of theobromide and caffeine, and the puking helped her from getting worse. The vet was friendly, gave us regular updates through the night, and after taking a down payment sent us home around 2am, saying we could pick up the very naughty and now empty-stomached Maddy in the morning.

In the morning, Sam’s dad (everyone had been briefed by this point) offered to pick her up. She came back overjoyed to be both out of the hospital and the car, but having learned nothing. It is remarkable that such an unpleasant experience had no effect on her. How many humans can’t remember the last time they puked their guts out and why?!? Thank your ancestors…it’s an evolutionary advantage not shared by most other mammals, and probably responsible for our survival through thousands of ecosystems. I suppose the silver lining is that she has no memory to blame me or Sam for taking her to the puking-place, but it was shocking how little time it took before she was performing acrobatics to (unsuccessfully) slide another chocolate bar from its high perch on a bookcase. Beagles!

Since then, there seems to be a residual sense of danger averted – she has carefully singled out each family member for licking and insistent whining, as if to reassure herself that no love was lost from her actions. It’s lucky she lived through it all. Having gone through this and being thankfully human, I learned that you should get a clear idea of how much and what kind of chocolate a dog eats, and see a vet if they have any symptoms as seen in the links above. Also, vets are totally underpaid for inducing and cleaning up dog vomit. That part of the bill was less than $30.

“OH Goodness! The seasons are changing again! Who would have expected it?!? How could we have predicted that the seasons might change! How can a motor vehicle hope to operate if there are two inches of snow on the roads! We’ll be helpless!”

I’ve recently switched to sarcasm, noting that I’ll be leaving work early to pick up extra ammunition on the way home, in case I have to defend my home during the weeks of isolation caused by a moderate snowfall.

I hope it snows a bit, that would be nice. I’ll still have to go to work, however.

bq. “To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.” — Aleister Crowley

Sometimes it feels like news is generated more out of a desire to fill time, than an actual need for people to know about certain things. It is important to keep up with the world around you, but at the same time, it is rare that an article in the paper will give you a complete picture. All you get is a ‘factoid’ that remains isolated from everything else you know about the world. You may know that yesterday 4 people died in a fire in central China that may or may not have been caused by arson, but since there is no relevancy to your life, your knowledge of it will make no difference in how you live your life, or the choices you will make.

I like to call it pseudo-knowledge. My head is full, but the links between each factoid don’t exist. It is not a collection of factoids that makes up knowledge, but rather the connections between them, tying our thoughts together, that constitute knowledge. Most news articles supply me with much in the way of factoids, and very little in the way of connections and relevancy. The knowledge that I find changes my life, and influences my decisions, stems from more complete sources which take the time to give a complete picture, rather than just selected tidbits. This ‘real’ knowledge is combined in a thick web within my mind that gives me the power to make more informed decisions. I find that news articles rarely integrate with this web, instead seeming to float about as disconnected noise.

Another term I’m going to toss out is “infonography”, which, like pornography, is often enjoyed with excess, filling, and then overfilling, a basic human desire. Many people (myself included) often find themselves with the purient desire to read more news, simply because they can. The internet has made this almost endemic. I sometimes find myself reading every little article I can, trolling through “Google News”:http://news.google.com or the “BBC”:http://www.bbc.co.uk reading articles. Why? The desire to read them is totally purient. It isn’t rooted in a desire to become a better person through knowledge, but rather a desire to be entertained, without feeling guilty. Sitting around watching soap operas is seen as a waste of time, but sitting around watching the news is not. However, for many people, the two activities fulfill the same desire, entertainment. The fact that one is ‘real’, and the other isn’t, is irrelevant.

This is why my desire to read news waxes and wanes. I believe that a certain amount of news-following is helpful, to keep one informed about things that do affect your life, and to better understand how changes in one part of the world affect other parts, perhaps your own part. However, I try to keep it in perspective. Just because it is easy to move thousands of news articles back and forth across the globe instantaneously through the magic of the Internet, doesn’t mean we should. Just because I can sit down and do nothing except read news articles the moment they are released, doesn’t mean that is a healthy activity. I say this mostly for my own benefit, but many will find the same tendencies within themselves or others around them.

This topic is discussed in great detail, and with much rigor in the book “Amusing Ourselves to Death”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140094385/cowboysofjust-20 by Neil Postman. I recommend visiting your local library and reading it. Postman is a very cynical man, but he brings forth some very good points. Also of note is the fact that the book was written in 1986, about 17 years ago. News then was a bit different from news now, but Postman makes several grim predictions for the future of news, based on negative trends he saw in 1986. Many of these predictions have come eerily true in the years since the book’s publication, and are worth noting when you read it.

The idea of “Chemtrails” is a theory I’ve been alerted to by “Dustin”:http://www.radioactiveantimatter.com/blog/archives/000137.html. The basic premise is that the government is spraying us with some sort of odd chemical(s) which can be seen in the form of contrails that persist far longer than they should. These chemicals are a part of everything from population control experiments to causing asthma and allergies.

Now, based on what I’ve read, I’m inclined to believe that Chemtrails are a myth. Like many conspiracy theories, they rely on highly improbable conditions to create effects that are easily explained by existing information.

For instance, its a well known fact that allergies and asthma is an increasing problem in America. But instead of looking straight for a conspiracy, why not look to the ever-increasing quantities of fossil fuel consumed and industrial pollutants released into the air. There is no unexplained problem that warrants looking for an explanation in a conspiracy.

For some good information, check out the following two links:

* “Atmospheric Disturbances, Chemtrails, Chembusters”:http://www.orgonelab.org/chemtrails.htm – This link, particularly the “Open Letter Critical of ‘Chemtrails’ claims” at the top of the page, is very enlightening.
* “Chemtrail Controversy”:http://www.weatherwise.org/qr/qry.chemtrail.html – This website contains an explanation of why the idea of chemtrails has no basis, written by NOAA meteorologist Thomas Schlatter.

To see the other side, here are a few links from groups that are concerned that Chemtrails are a reality:

* “Chemtrails 911″:http://www.skyhighway.com/~chemtrails/index.html – This site has information and many photos of supposed chemtrails. One thing to remember when viewing trails that appear to be very close, is that they may be at drastically different altitudes, only appearing close because of your perspective. The atmospheric conditions at 45,000 feet and 15,000 feet may be drastically different, causing trails to spread and dissipate at vastly different rates.
* “Aerosol Operation Crimes and Cover-Up”:http://www.carnicom.com/contrails.htm – This rather hectic site contains much of the same info as above. Photographs of trails, as well as various conspiracy theories. It also contains a message board. One user noted that they took their home air filter outside on a ‘chemtrail day’ and saw that the air outside was much cleaner than the air inside! Another user used this as further proof that chemtrails exist, though I don’t understand how it proves anything, seeing as how household pollution is caused by everything from candles and incense to carpets, ovens, and your air conditioner. If there is more pollution inside than outside, wouldn’t that suggest that it isn’t coming from the sky?

One key point is to note that in many cases, problems caused by contrails are brought up, which are sometimes problems that are blamed on ‘chemtrails’. However, the problems supposedly caused by ‘chemtrail’ conspiracies are easily explained by existing knowledge of pollution and atmospheric disturbances. To ignore the existing explanation and hunt for a ‘secret’ explanation is not a logical course of action.

Sometimes I think that there is a belief many people hold that they are the only ones who cares about the world, and that everyone else is either ignorant, or has sinister intentions toward the world. In order for a secret chemical spraying program to exist, there would have to be thousands of people who are both willing and able to hide a program’s existance, and be willing to spray chemicals on their own families and countrymen. Conspirators would be needed in the government, the military, the airplane maintainence industry, the petroleum industry, flight controllers, ground crews, etc. Thats a lot of places, and a lot of people. It is highly improbable that all of these people could maintain perfect secrecy about a project. Of course, the complete lack of evidence is always one of the hallmarks for a conspiracy theory.

I’ll leave you to make your own decisions about chemtrails, but something I think you all should read is this essay on the “Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic”:http://www.washington.historylink.org/output.cfm?file_id=5136. In 1954 people in Washington began noticing odd pits in their windshield. Within days, reports from all over Washington, concentrated in Seattle, began pouring into police stations and government agencies about mysterious pits forming in people’s windshields. Vandals were blamed, until the reports began numbering in the thousands. Everything from cosmic rays to secret government nuclear tests to sand flea eggs were blamed. Eventually, researchers from around the country looked into the situation, and found that the pits had always been there, and were on all cars across the country. The cause? Gravel from the road due to normal driving wear and tear. People had just started to actually look AT the windshield, instead of THROUGH it. The power of suggestion from a few news articles was enough to convince them that they were part of this big problem. Its described today as a typical case of mass hysteria, people’s fears cascading and feeding off of each other, resulting in a vast misunderstanding.

Try to keep this in mind when viewing information about Chemtrails. Are we looking so closely at them that we are seeing something we think is new? Is the power of a little suggestion enough to make us look at contrails with fear? I pride myself on an open mind, but I’m also keenly aware of the human tendency to behave quite irrationally, especially when it stems from a belief that we are ‘helping’ people by alerting them of a hidden danger.