Silflay Hraka

It looks like Osama is not the only person in the Middle East with a passion for chocolatey breakfast cereal.
Unholy Lands

If you ask me, and I know you didn’t, Palestinians are not only nuts, they’re butt-ass stupid. You don’t win concessions from a democracy by attacking their citizenry, at least not in the long run. The only successful way to get anything from a democracy, be it Israel, Britain, or America, is through non-violent resistance. Most people don’t have any idea who Griselio Torresola is, but you can be damn sure they’ve heard of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Nelson Mandela. If Rosa Parks had blown up the bus, she have set her movement back years. I certainly doubt the shade of Griselio is real happy with how his vision of a free Puerto Rico turned out. Put bluntly, if you make the denizens of a democracy feel guilty, you’re home free. If you piss them off, or make them fear for themselves or their children your cause is finished, and you are like as not a dead man. That’s the reason Pakistan will never control Kashmir, and why we don’t have to ask permission before we bomb the crap out of Vieques.

If the Palestinians really wanted a state of their own, they’d do the smart thing and surrender. Declare the intifada lost, over, a horrible failure. A few years down the road, you produce a television commercial starring the Palestinian version of Iron Eyes Cody, and you’re golden. Of course, this means admitting that a bunch of Jews kicked your ass, but not admitting that certainly hasn’t stopped them from doing it, now has it?

Update: Edward Boyd touched on this subject a while back.
Update: Joe Katzman at Winds of Change talks about Islamic non-violent movements in Islam’s Other Voices

I Probably Should Be In Therapy or Blame it on Dad.

Ahhh…the Worm Farm.

That takes me back a ways. I can remember the golden Summers of our youth spent trying to breed worms in that busted freezer. How many children do you supposed carried the goal of a worm farm through their youthful years, through young adulthood, into comfortable married suburbaninity? Hell, how many children spend any part of their life attempting to convince worms to be fruitful and multiply? I can’t guess that there are many. I don’t even remember why WE did it. I guess ostensibly the worms were for fishing.

You know, the more I think about the things we did as children, the more I am convinced that we are wholly abnormal. I blame it on dad. The gardening instincts certainly come from dad.

They say that man is made in the image of God. I think that if this is true, then it is most evident in the desire of man to create and grow and govern his own world. What better way to do that than through gardening? What better place than your own back yard? I am sure that Dad, being a man of the cloth, reflected God’s image in this way. Dad is a man who, every April or May, plows under his entire back yard in obeisance to some primal call that’s been passed down through the ages ever since Adam hitched up his plow-mule, laid aside his hunter-gatherer ways, and moved into the Garden. I remember those Spring days of my childhood vividly. He would plant tomatos. He would plant peppers. He would plant squash, and sunflowers, and pumpkins, and watermelons, and marijuana, and this stuff that I never could identify, but which dripped milk-white sap that made you itch like you had the crabs if it came in contact with your skin.

At first, it would be this beautiful, organized, well-planned garden. The tomatos were neatly tied to their stakes. The sunflowers tracked the sun in neat rows. The pumpkins nestled gently in the freshly turned soil. Dad would water the garden daily. He would weed with vigor. He would crap his own weight in fertilizer daily, adding roughly 11 times the potash to the potash starved soil of our lawn. And then the cyclical rebirth that is the Spring would give way to the soul-sucking heat of Summer.

Satan tempted Eve, Eve tempted Adam, Adam ate the apple, God gave ‘em both the boot and the Garden of Eden grew thick with weeds.

By mid-June, the back yard was for all intents and purposes, impassable. Thanks to all the fertilizer Dad crapped into the garden, the weeds grew as high as an elephant’s eye. The tomatos were overrun and dropped yellow from the vine. The smell of rotting tomatos lingers like the stench of death over my childhood memories. The sunflowers, overshadowed by a thick canopy, tracked in all different directions, individually guessing at the approximate location of the sun. The pumpkins grew voluminous, only to develop, in their gluttony and sloth, festering bedsores on their pale, fetid underbellies. Several neighborhood children wandered into the jungle that was our backyard and were never heard from again.

Anyway, I forget what my point might have been. I guess if I were your wife and knew the family history of gardening, I’d probably be annoyed if you bought a worm farm too.

Books to torture your child with

The real story of the Samaritan

God Save the Queen
Link via Andy

Pride and Prejudice meets Dick and Jane.
More Austen mutants

The Worm Farm

For years, we lived in a townhouse. All of the yardwork was taken care of by the neighborhood association, other than the few flowers along the patio that the wife planted each year. My gardening philosphy vis-a-vis the flower beds was simple. “Throw down birdseed, and whatever grows there is the garden.” This led to curious looks from the neighbors, but I considered it a great success, in that after I threw down the birdseed, I was done gardening for the season. Unsurprisingly enough, this annoyed the wife, who much preferred impatiens to millet

Then we bought a house, with a yard. A massive yard, one that must be measured not in acres or hectares, but in Rhode Islands. This is of course a lie, but in comparison to the postage stamp of grass that we used to own, this is Pemberley.

We moved in, spent the night, and woke up the next day as the Jones’s. Or I did, at least as far as the lawn was concerned. I had to have grass that grew faster, thicker and was of a more pleasing shade than that of my neighbors. My roses must be rosier, my azealas more zealous and my hydrangeas more…hydrangic. Come summer my tomatoes must be bigger, redder and above all earlier than those grown by the poor weak fools who live beside me. What is best in life? To outgrow your neighbors, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women. The only thing left to complete my transformation is to re-register as a Republican.

It’s not just enough to fertilize, reseed and water constantly, or so I suppose. We’ve only been here 9 months, and turf wars are long haul affairs. You need a secret weapon, and one day, while ostensibly at work, I found one…..

Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm. Properly fed and cared for, 1000 worms make another 1000 worms every couple of months, and each worm craps out his weight in fertilizer every day. Worm crap contains five times the nitrogen, seven times the phosphate, and eleven times the potash of the same amount of your regular topsoil. ELEVEN TIMES THE POTASH!!! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Look on my rye grass, ye mighty, and despair! Thanks to the glory of the Internet, I can order the worm farm kit in a matter of seconds.

At dinner that evening, I paint a glowing picture of our yard in the not too distant future, a verdant eden, lush with flowers and the fruits of the vine, where our toddler could amble through turf thick as molasses and soft as down.

“You spent 65 dollars buying worms off the internet?” Warm.

I admitted that yes, I had indeed spent 65 dollars buying worms off the internet, but that the consequent money saved in fertilizer would more than adequately…

“You spent 65 dollars buying worms off the internet!!” Getting warmer!

“Yes dear, but I’ll have THREE TIMES the number of worms that I ordered by September. And the lawn will be the envy of the neighborhood!”

“Don’t worms come to the surface when it rains?” Getting colder!

“Yes, that’s a plus you see, because their burrows allow water to penetrate deeper into the ground, which promotes a much stronger root system than one would normally..”

“So, after it rains, our lawn will be covered in literally thousands of worms.” Monotone. “That WILL be the envy of the neighborhood.”