Odds & Ends

Several red oaks in the back yard, covered with flower tassels and releasing LOTS of golden pollen, now have tiny reddish-beige leaves, all furry and pleated tightly.   The youngest bur oak (not up to my waist yet) has popped some buds.  The cedar elms (Ulmus crassifolia) in the Near Meadow (and elsewhere) are in a variety of stages.  Some are bright lettuce-green-ruffled with young leaves–which up close look shiny, as if shellacked.  Others are at what I call the dotted Swiss stage, with tiny green leaves scattered out, like the colored dots in dotted Swiss fabric.   Still others have just started to unfold their buds, which are pale, pale green and look like itsy-bitsy lights on the end of every twig.  And some are just plain late to the party, not dressed at all.  Elbow bushes are also a confusion of leafed out, partly leafed out, still gray with occasional touches of green.

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Last night (Wed. night, in case I don’t get this finished this evening)  I was inspired to make up something for supper.  Our favorite grocery store chain carries frozen boiled shrimp in several sizes…and I usually thaw them in running water (as advised) and then cut them into pieces and mix them with cottage cheese, diced celery, and a BIG dollop of picante sauce.  But last night was cool, and I wanted something warm.  So…I ran the frozen shrimp under cold water to make them wet, and stirred them around in some flour, Peruvian Chile Lime spice mix, and black pepper.  Heated up a largeish lump of butter in the frying pan/skillet thingie and when the butter was bubbling put in the shrimps and shoved them around, which creates a roux…and as it began to thicken, and the shrimps were warming up, I took the bottle of Pace picante sauce and dumped some of that into the pan, where it blended into the sauce perfectly (perfect for me, that is) and then I dumped my share on toast.  This would also work with half or more shrimp and half or less cooked chicken chunks.

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The rusty blackhaw viburnum bushes in the front yard have gone wild this year, the south one wilder than the north.   White iris are blooming under the blooming pear tree by the snake fence made of old cedar posts.  Redbud’s blooming.  Bees are loud and busy on all the things blooming.   These white iris (and some yellows I used to have) are the kind you sometimes see around here outlining what used to be a homestead, or growing on the border of a private cemetery.

I may add more to this later, but today’s ride on Rags is in a separate post.

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The Will Smith/Chris Rock/Oscars incident.   I don’t know either man personally–I know them only through their public personas.  I didn’t watch the Oscars.  From their previous public personas, I came to this controversy with a dislike of Chris Rock as a verbally abusive “comedian” who wasn’t funny (I didn’t find him amusing and avoided watching him online–one of the reasons I avoided the Oscars)  as I do his sort of “comedian.”  I have an intense dislike of people who joke about other peoples’ disabilities or medical conditions.   If I hear that sort of thing, and especially if it’s followed by any hint of gaslighting-by-claims of humor (“I was only joking”  “Can’t your take a joke?” “You need to get a sense of humor”) then my instinct is to clobber the abuser.   As a culture, we have learned to accept verbal abuse in the guise of humor–to join in the laughter, and ignore the abusive context.  Donald Trump’s mocking of the disabled, families of dead soldiers, and women he thought weren’t beautiful enough should have made clear why this tolerance had gone too far…but it didn’t, and Chris Rock continued to profit by a similar approach.

So yes, I was already primed to be angry with Chris Rock for his mocking of Will Smith’s wife’s alopecia.  Not a joke, not “just a tasteless joke”, but a verbal assault on her in public, in front of millions of viewers of the Oscars.  An assault targeting an element of women’s attractiveness critically important to an actress, and very important to most women.  A deliberate choice he made to humiliate her, as he has humiliated others in the past, with the assumption that the gaslighting defense of “just a joke” would cover his butt with everyone, even Will Smith.   Well, he found out it didn’t, with Smith’s slap.  And unfortunately, it appears that slapping an abuser is worse than the abuser’s verbal assault on someone’s wife…our culture has learned that the “just a joke” defense covers all verbal abuse after all.   No, husbands cannot object to the verbal abuse of their wives…nor can the abused woman…because verbal assaults aren’t treated as assaults, only touching is.  Headlines insist that Will Smith’s reputation as a decent person is ruined forever because of one slap…while Chris Rock’s reputation as a comedian is not even smudged because being slapped wipes out all wrongdoing…where others are concerned.  It does not change my position.

I find Smith’s slap both appropriate and forgivable, the same as my punching the third grade bully in the solar plexus when I was a first-grader was appropriate.  No adult  or older kid came to my aid when that bully ambushed me on the way home from school every day.   But being punched hard enough to knock the breath out of him stopped the bullying.  The boys who’d watched him threaten me, mock me, pull my hair, pull up my skirt, etc, etc. did nothing to stop him…until he was slugged by a mere girl two years younger.  Then they laughed at him, shrugged, and started playing ball.    I wasn’t the only younger kid he’d bullied.  I was the only kid who hit back.  One hit.   Within a few days he’d quit bullying the others and started playing ball with the boys he’d ignored before.  So yes, I think *limited* controlled violence works in such cases…but it does require a society that recognizes the bullying behavior in the first place and doesn’t automatically gaslight its victims and punish them for reacting.  Verbal assault is assault.  For an established bully, a physical result is more effective than a tongue-lashing.   A slap is appropriate–not really physically damaging, but psychologically shocking–because a punch from an adult can do real damage (a punch from a 6 yo, however strong, not damaging.)  The immediate dumping on Smith, and excusing of Rock, is another example of what I consider a skewed moral/ethical scale, whereby bullies get away with bullying while their victims are attacked if they respond in kind.   From the results so far, I’m convinced that if Smith had just yelled an insult at Rock, he would still be attacked for it.  I have observed, over my lifetime, an increasing tolerance for verbal and physical bullying, and an increasing intolerance for the bullying victim to react either verbally or physically.   And of course, tolerance for bullying leads to more bullying, and confusing bullying with *reacting to a bully* is exactly how we got to this mess in the first place.

Chris Rock is the asshole and should’ve apologized to Will Smith and his wife.  That’s my hill and I’ll die on it if I have to.

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Friday morning.  This morning the local fire station has the red flag out for extreme fire danger and a burn ban.  At the moment there’s dew on the grass and no wind and it’s cool…and R- was going out to mow until conditions changed.  After a lively conversation in which I finally said “How much trouble do you want to be in?” and reminded him that last year’s fire was *also* on a day of no wind (though hotter) he agreed to drive past the fire station and see if they had the red flag out.  They did.  Apparently he slowed down to be sure it was *that* red flag (SIGH!)  and one of the fire-folk came out and said “We have a burn ban and extreme fire danger…”   He didn’t ask the person if he could mow for just an hour or two.  If you show your face and then have to call in a fire later…that’s…um…embarrassing.  R- came home and said he was going to check the recovery of the scorched trees instead.

We had hoped the old mower would get fixed faster, but it didn’t, so by the time R- agreed we needed to go on and buy a replacement for the one that burned up, so that there’d always be one available (one in the shop, one in use)  it was getting into the regular fire season again and all the winter mowing hadn’t been finished.    The new mower managed to joggle a critical spring that tensions the belt driving the mower blades (the spring sprang out and landed *on top* of the fire ant mound) , so some hours went into fixing *that*.  R has dealt with getting that part back together before, but the new mower has added another safeguard to the belt protection & tensioning system and basically you need to be a really tall person who can reach under the mower and over the mower deck (not much clearance) with your arms spread out like a scorpion’s, with a 3/8 inch ratchet wrench in one hand and a tool I forget in the other, one on “this” point and one on “that” (about 4 feet apart), and rachet the belt tension up to the “right” amount.  R- is a genius at stuff like this, but he says it’s harder now that he’s older (and he doesn’t *have* a 3/8 inch ratchet wrench, so makes do with what he has in his collection of wrenches.)

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Another incident in the land-work category.  R- had been out digging up baby to youthful cacti that–prior to mowing–had been lurking in the tall grass, waiting to grow into BIG cacti.  The tiny ones are low enough not to be mowed; if they’re big enough to be mowed, you have to collect *every single piece* the mower broke off, or it will sprout.  (This is why, although you can drag a big heavy chain over land and kill off many woody shrubs, that does not work with prickly pear…you will create a solid mass of cactus within 12 months.  NEVER CHAIN PRICKLY PEAR.  One cactus can make a thousand.)   He was putting the pieces (and the whole ones he dug up) into the little wagon behind the mower.  The mower *will* control baby Ashe juniper, sorta control baby cedar elm and bumelia (with one annual mowing.)   So, spotting a youngish bumelia where we didn’t want bumelia, he drove over it…and it was bigger than expected, and very springy (as bumelia is…) and it overturned the wagon…with all the cactus flung out.   We decided that the bumelia and the prickly pear had made a deal, a confederacy of thorny things (bumelia is a thorny scrub-tree kind of woody plant).

Bumelia is a good thicket-plant and where we want occasional thickets for wildlife food and shelter, we don’t mind a bit if it’s one of the constituents.  But like most thicketing “brushy” plants, it will spread out into areas where it’s not wanted.  Cattle and deer both browse on its leaves if grass is insufficient (they don’t eat Ashe juniper…so when we bought this land and most of the grass was gone, there were junipers up to waist high all over the place.  There are still baby ones coming up every year.)   From our perspective, given the size of the place and the changes both so far and predicted in rainfall & temperature, the ideal thicket is 10 to 30 feet in diameter and contains at least 6 woody species, all producing food for some species and shelter for others, along with shelter for grasses that need less grazing pressure.   These thickets tend to harbor 2-3 kinds of vine (not the same in each size) and forbs, along with various grasses.  the small ones may have only one bird’s nest, and a small “hollow” of grass where an animal has rested in bad weather (too hot, too cold, too wet) and some burrows.  The larger ones will have several resting hollows large enough for grown deer, several birds’ nests, and  a fan of game paths leading in and out.

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Music again.  The first tweet I saw on Twitter this morning was a question from someone with a family-musical background, and near as I can remember was “How many instruments did you give up after childhood?”  And my question back was “Do you mean “giving up lessons on” or “quitting and never playing it again?”   I had about a year and a half of piano lessons…never had more, we couldn’t afford it…but did not quit playing until I started having arthritis problems in my right hand as a result of all the typing inherent in pounding out all those books and stories.  I felt I had to save my hands for work.  I taught myself to play an accordion, a chord organ, a somewhat more complicated home-style electric organ, and could make music of a sort on all of them.

I can sortakinda read music (certainly a melody line with a keyboard in front of me) but I learned most of the music I played by ear.   I can’t sight-read for both hands except very, very, VERY slowly, and it helps a lot of if I can also hear it played.  There seemed to be a good connection from ear to hands, as from ear to voice.  I started singing early.  At the time I was a preschooler, there were simple recording studios in many towns, where parents could have their child “make a record” on a thin little disk that would play on any record player (stereos weren’t there yet.)  My grandfather, who loved to hear me sing, had one made of me, and when I was a little older, mother would sometimes put it on the record player so I could hear my younger voice sing “Sweet Betsy from Pike” one of my grandfather’s favorites.  It had multiple verses but I remember only the first one now:

Oh do you remember sweet Betsy from Pike/who crossed the wide mountains with her lover Ike,

with two yoke of oxen,  and a big yaller dog,

a tall Shanghai rooster, and one spotted hog??

Foodle-dang-fol-de-eye-o, foodle-dang-fal-dee-ay

Sweet Betsy and her Ike had a whole string of misadventures on the trip…the wagon broke down, the oxen all died, the last strip of bacon that morning was fried…but I don’t remember any more than that, and the sheer fun of singing “Foodle-dang-fol-de-eye-o…”   (The tragedy of “the last strip of bacon” was clear to me, the bacon-lover, from the start.)

As I child I thought everyone learned music by ear, and could transpose any tune to any handy key, and it was years before I realized that someone playing a B-flat instrument couldln’t “just start on this note” the way I could, singing or playing a keyboard.  I thought having trouble reading music meant I was bad at music itself.  Certainly the school choir director thought it meant that.

Foodle dang-fol-de-eye-oh, Mrs. So and so.    My church choir directors, however much they wished I was a better reader, wanted me in their choirs.

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Russians.  Apparently the Russians are not given to self-examination, and thus do not realize how foolish and silly they’re looking when they get all huffy and say that the Ukrainians blowing up a refueling station in Russia could upset peace talks.   As if invading a sovereign nation,  attacking civilian targets, blowing up a maternity hospital, bombing cities and schools and clearly after civilian targets wouldn’t have any effect on peace talks on the Ukrainian side.

This is not to say that Americans are all great at self-examination, that the US has never done anything as monumentally stupid as invading a sovereign nation on specious grounds and even (like the Russians in this instance) expecting a short victorious war, and then gotten its nose bloodied (and worse) but…yeah.

Russians, you fools, you screwed up big time.