Your brassica seedlings come with free bugs. I’ve never seen a six-pack of broccoli starts at a nursery that don’t have a few holes in the leaves from caterpillars, or a collards plant without an aphid or ten. This is not a big deal. Nonetheless, before you plant it’s good to scan the leaves for […] The post Cleaning brassica seedlings before planting appeared first on Greg Alder's Yard Posts: Southern California food gardening.

The big oak tree in my garden is bullying me. Every time I rake up the leaves, I turn around to put them in the compost, and boom! New heap. To add insult to injury, it sometimes dumps leaves on my head while I clear away the old ones. And every time I can hear it laugh like a maniac. It keeps coming up with new leaves to throw at me too! Does it steal them from other trees? Create them from the ether? How else do you explain the five truckloads of leaves I've removed already? I guess you could…

Wailin' and Scalin' (dl)Hey! Cobella (dl) both songs published by Gordon & Lefleur Music, Inc. (BMI)ALJA 10021957Record listed at RCS (location unknown)*Real name : Peter J. Veneziano, He was born Sept. 8, 1932, in Clarksburg, W.Va. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1951-1955. A recording artist, disc jockey and radio and television personality known all over Ohio, he sang and appeared on TV on American Bandstand and won a TV Emmy award and appeared in several motion pictures filmed in Ohio…

Last week, FFXIV patch 7.56 brought the newest limited job, Beastmaster. This has been something I’ve been looking forward to with cautious optimism for a while. I’ve now spent many hours with the job, have leveled it from 1 to 50, finished some floors of the Crucible, and befriended all beasts.

Fed up with leaders who use promises and threats of future outcomes to secure votes and support, but take no accountability for delivering and/or preventing those outcomes, future candidates are constitutionally required to enter into enforceable contracts before taking office. If by action or inaction they do not deliver what they promised, it constitutes fraud against the voting public. The office holder and their donors—not taxpayers—become financially and criminally liable. Any voter has…

I am going to see Bonobo in November.

Signboard 2.0 will be a line-in-the-sand release. There will be Pro features that are only available to Pro subscribers. The 1.7.x release will always be all free. I’ll likely do a release there that removes the commercial license and keeps the tip jar. Stay tuned! Side note: It is really, really nice.

Instead of just four seasons, I'm proposing we have five. Here goes: The tail end of summer should be a season all on its own, at least here in the Pacific Northwest. The days are sunny and mild, and can even get warm, but by evening the temperatures cool to what we refer to as "good sleeping weather," requiring replacing summer's light blanket on the bed with a cozy comforter. Here in the Willamette Valley this season can last well into October some years, extending the harvest before winter…

Overwhelmed. Well less overwhelmed now because I’ve accepted that I am/was overwhelmed. Laying on my couch with my feet up. Feels good. Started sabotaging myself Sunday. Stayed up late watching movies and YouTube. Monday good sleep. Tuesday up all night, movies, YouTube shorts, porn. Wednesday same thing. Thursday… same thing. Didn’t make it to any “kung fu” classes this week. Well, no I did make Monday’s. But I was barely there. There in body only for the most part. Most of this week I was…

Brian Leno popped in a pic a couple of days ago. “Just wanted to show you my new purchase,” Brian said. “I think it’s cool as hell and it’s the right Kong — not the later bullshit. Judging by his nostrils I’d hate to be around when he blows his nose.” Using the spines of the Og novels as a clew, it looks as if Kong is enthroned atop this cabinet in the Leno Library. Not to say he may not have it travel around some, looking for Fay Wray. Behind Kong on the left are a couple of the slipcase years…

All images from the film “If I Had a Million,” 1932 Super sleuth Davrie Caro sent me a link to the 1932 film “If I Had a Million,” a collective work by different writers and directors. It tells the story of a very rich man, apparently on death’s door, who realizes that he doesn’t want to give away his money to his family or his employees. Instead, he picks random people out of the phone book and gives them each a million dollars (worth about twenty-four million today.) A series of vignettes…

I am going to Not a BBQ tonight!

Books + spooky: Unearthed: New Horror of Ancient Ruins

I've been greatly enjoying reading, "The Hab," from Bad Idea. The fourth issue came out this week and I had the chance to swing by the shop yesterday and grab a copy. Today I sat down to read it, and I noticed a blurb on the front cover; it seemed familiar. Then I realized it was a quote from a review by The Newest Rant. Hey, wait a minute, that's me!I've been around long enough that sometimes my (positive) reviews are used to promote something, and I always get a little kick seeing, "The…

In the 1960s, Qantas wanted to improve their flight reservation system. At the time, reservation clerks would get tickertapes from travel agents and enter flights manually; every single sales office needed to be contacted whenever a flight was full. Cancelling involved, again, manually calling every office. To make the company run smoother, they obtained three IBM S/360s (each with 64K of memory) and spent 18 months with IBM creating a new system. IBM S/360 being unloaded from a plane in 1966,…

Want: Cable Bagle

went to the first class for my intro to drawing at the Toronto School of Art. this is the mug.

Look: Weeds Project

Read: A day is short, a life is long

Lowry Bridge This and more Northern Folk on the Lowry Bridge in 2016https://northernfolkarchive.pagecord.com/salford-quays-26-october-2016

A memoir of Googol; my pet and dear friend.

It sort of feels like summer is over although we are enjoying a warm stretch here in mid-September that has brought sun and warm temperatures and calm winds to the island. This is more typical of the summers I remember from half my life ago, before we experienced extreme heat and drought. There was always a dry patch between the middle of July and the middle of October with a bit of rain usually in August and more at the beginning of September. But in the past 20 years that pattern has changed.…

[Just a quick remembrance of Reggie Lewis, the rising Celtic star who left us way too soon from a fatal heart ailment while shooting baskets. The tragic moment happened in July 1993. Lewis was just 27 years young. Here, Lewis still is very much on the NBA rise, and the great Fran Blinebury tells us how. Blinebury’s story appeared in the 1993 Street & Smith’s Pro Basketball Annual. If you want to read more about Lewis, find Craig Windham’s Quiet Grace, published in 1995.] **** Reggie Lewis was…

Sites I like + music: Finn Streuper

I wonder if Ed Sheeran will be the halftime show this year.

Ben Nadel thinks about cycling through a sequence of values in ColdFusion using both static values and closure-based predicate operators....

Dear Constant Reader, Happy Friday all! If you happen to be in the Fitchburg area tonight, you can see me at Nocturna! Here’s your tip! Avoid looking directly at the stage lights. They can be very bright and can make you temporarily disoriented, which is not a great place to be on stage. These writings and other creative projects are supported by my 17 Patrons. I appreciate you all so much!

Another week with more movies! The big opening is a reboot of Resident Evil from Barbarian & Weapons director Zach Creggar, apparently hewing closer to the games that the Milla Jovovich series did. It's at Fresh Pond, Jordan's Furniture (Imax Friday-Sunday), Boston Common (including Imax Laser & Dolby Cinema & Spanish subtitles), Causeway Street (including XL), Kendall Square, the Seaport,

I often could not remember little things about my tags, like is it "#book" or "#books", SO I made a plugin. Your available tags are listed under the "Attributes" dropdown on your new/edit post page. So as you type a tag, the plugin pulls from that list and compares what you typed to what's in the afformentioned list. By default, as long as the typed-word is IN the tag, the tag will be suggested. Like "blog" will match #blog, #blogger, and #bearblog (and will be sorted in that order). There are…

Amidst all the policy proposals, claims, and counterclaims about energy use and carbon emissions, it’s useful to touch base from time to time with basic current facts. One of my starting points is the Statistical Review of World Energy, published annually (free registration needed to download the report). The report is full of figures and tables, with some text sprinkled in. Here, I’ll just pass along a couple of big-picture fact patterns. This figure shows sources of energy for regions around…