Reading and loving this collection of short stories. “Money as a weapons system” is about midway through the book; early in the story comes this line:

“It wasn’t my idea,” said Bob, “We remade the Ministry of Agriculture on free market principles, but the invisible hand of the market started planting IEDs.”

Catch-22 laugh-out-loud funny for the rest of the story. World class critique of institutions and how they move forward with no understanding of context or impact.

Phil Klay, Redeployment, (New York: Penguin Press,2014).

Not just squirrels anymore. I’ve got leaf miners who are destroying the spinach and ensuring that my swiss chard will not grow.

Proud of L_Do

Three kinds of Kale, Three kinds of Chard, Collards, and a few radishes. Everything is 12″ apart but I’m going to harvest the small ones with the goal of 21 strong plants.

The bad news — it poured all weekend and I could not get a single plant or seed into the ground.
The good news — it poured all weekend and there isn’t a single puddle on my raised beds.

The awesome folks at Treephilly have organized a yard tree giveaway and I’ve started clearing the perfect space for it in my backyard garden. There’s a huge space that’s currently occupied by an Azalea bush. It’s pretty but it’s too big and I’m tired of it sending large branches through the chain-link fence.

Because of the orientation of our yard, a tree in this spot won’t diminish the sun available to the various raised beds. I’m trying, too, to have everything growing to be edible.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who huger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

Dwight Eisenhower, 1953

1. Deborah Ellis, Children of War: Voices of Iraqi Refugees (Toronto: Groundwood Books, 2008).

A recent study has shown that if American parents read one more long-form think piece about parenting they will go fucking ape shit.

Here.

I pick up these sorts of books so that I can get re-energized around a topic. Again, Michael Pollan delivers.

Two quotes before I pass the book to the other side of the bed:

“To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest — on behalf of the senses and the microbes — against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe. It is also a declaration of independence from an economy that would much prefer we remain passive consumers of standardized commodities, rather than creators of idiosyncratic products expressive of ourselves and of the places where we live, because your pale ale or sourdough bread or kimchi is going to taste nothing like mine or anyone else’s.” (pp.414-5)

“As a form of cooking (baking) seemed way too demanding — of exactitude and patience, neither a personal strong suit. Baking was the carpentry of cooking and I’ve always gravitated towards pursuits that leave considerably more room for error. Gardening, cooking, writing, all are roomy in their way, amenable to revision and mid-course correction.” (p.210)

1. Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (New York: The Penguin Press, 2013).