A Mess

I’m falling apart: not only recovering from tennis elbow (week 3) and chronic stiffness in my right leg, I got hit with a cold/flu/something last Friday and was sick all weekend.
Today, it’s raining and while the immune system seems to be catching up with the virus, the muscles feel like we’ve been in a rowing competition.
So, I’m staying put and working at home.

Intent on Suicide

Given their apparent choice of nominees, it’s not just the Democratic and Republican parties who seem intent on self-destruction, but the Libertarians as well.
I mean, really: Bob Barr?
For one thing, the creepy, mustachioed Barr looks like a cross between a race track tout and the standard issue villain in a Victorian melodrama.
Worse, the anti-Choice Barr has about as non-Libertarian a political past as one could conjure, having been a co-sponsor of the Defense of Marriage Act, opposed to medical marijuana, and a supporter of the Patriot Act.
Gun control is about the only other major issue on which he could have been more offensive to Libertarians and conservative Republicans, and the fact that he was one of the mad dogs who championed the trumped-up impeachment of Bill Clinton should be enough to turn off any moderate Democrats who might have otherwise been interested in the LP.
It’s looking more and more like the only viable choice for some of us is to write in Ron Paul this November.

Mother of the Week

Brenda Sullivan, adoptive “mother”, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the aggravated abuse of her 17 year old adopted son.
When the boy was rescued by child welfare workers in 2005, he weighed 49 pounds. Both he and two other adopted boys, twins, were kept in cages.
Sullivan’s husband was also arrested but died in January 2007 while awaiting trial.
Sullivan evidently left Ohio to live in Florida. Good for the people of Jacksonville to see through her ridiculous excuse that Ohio authorities told her to keep the boy in a “crib”.

Gardener’s Diary

This past weekend was a big one for garden sales, and I managed to get to the Master Gardeners’ at the Fairgrounds.
Due to a scheduling conflict, I arrived at almost the very end, which turned out to be a bonus: they were selling everything for half price. I got five pots of healthy plants for only $14.
So, I did some planting this weekend: an astilbe from Mahoney’s and five pots from the Master Gardeners, including lily of the valley, a coreopsis, yellow day lilies and another, possibly a campion. I put three of these in the last empty spot in the garden at Edgewater, and if they take, it will be filled in with perennials.
I was eager to get everything in because rain is predicted for the rest of the week.
In about ten minutes, I’m off to Hyannis to drop off the lawn mower for repair.

Granfalloon

If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon.
A granfalloon, in the fictional religion of Bokononism (created by Kurt Vonnegut in his 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle), is defined as a “false karass” (imagined community). That is, it is a group of people who outwardly choose or claim to have a shared identity or purpose, but whose mutual association is actually meaningless.Wikipedia
For an elegant, witty stabbing of the granfalloon that is the Obama campaign, consider this, from Gerard Baker, the US Editor of The Times:
Every decade or so the people who control the way we see the world anoint some American politician the Redeemer of a Troubled Planet.
…it’s fairly clear now that, with the near-certain nomination by the Democrats of Barack Obama everything is in place for the media to indulge in one of the greatest, orgiastic media fiestas of hero-worship since Elvis Presley.
You will not see a finer example of the genre than the cover story of this week’s Newsweek, which was entitled