If you haven’t started your veggie garden yet I think you’re crazy but there IS still time! This is my front yard, because my back yard is too shady for a serious garden. Those bushes behind the seedlings are purple and pink flowering heather.
Anyway, I’m not doing another post just to show off my garden. I just found out that . . . .
Monsanto is siccing their lawyers on every web page that has shown this movie. YouTube has already yanked it under threat of lawsuit. This link may be one of the last places you can see this movie before it is banned, so go! Go! Go see!
Seeds were once for ever. After harvest, a few from the crop would be planted for the following year, and so it went on. Now, biochemical industry giants are making seeds themselves infertile. You sow them this year, and that’s it. For next year’s crop, you need brand new seeds — you would have to buy them, of course. Twenty-five years ago, there were at least 7,000 seed growers worldwide, and none of them controlled more than one percent of the global market. Today, after a takeover spree, 10 major biochemical multinationals, including Monsanto, DuPont-Pioneer, Syngenta, Bayer Cropsciencie, BASF, and Dow Agrosciences, control more than 50 percent of the seeds market.
All my seedlings are hybrids this year because I didn’t buy heirloom seeds in time for my heirloom garden. Next year, next year! This year I have rhubarb, watermelon, three different pepper plants, several varieties of tomato, cucumber, zucchini, several varieties of lettuce, broccoli, and cauliflower. Next on the to do list: Beanstalks, but I need to set something up for them to climb first . . .
Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops, an authoritative new study shows, undermining repeated claims that a switch to the controversial technology is needed to solve the growing world food crisis.The study - carried out over the past three years at the University of Kansas in the US grain belt - has found that GM soya produces about 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent, contradicting assertions by advocates of the technology that it increases yields.
He felt safer as an idea
Green Man, Smiling Pan
An abstract thought in times of freeze and thaw
But now He faces me
Adonis ablaze
United in love-death
Blood spilling, torn to pieces
Setting fire to my world.
- HPS 1998
Lovely Livvy at English Courtesan tagged me for another meme a few weeks ago: The Six Word Memoir. It took me a day or two to think things through: What short phrase could distill my life’s meaning into a tidy little package? What a daunting task! I decided to take a long weekend to think about it. My whole life. Six Words. Okay.
Intent is like an onion: Just keep peeling away at the dry layers and eventually you’ll find a seemingly endless supply of soft, slippery translucent films of sweet and sour meaning. My relationships mirror my spiritual understandings, and fluctuating relationships (especially with men) follow the seasons: Springtime for blossoming and/or rekindling (Ace of Wands), Summer for ecstasy (The Lovers), Autumn for the Apocalypse or Awakening (The Tower), Winter for yearning, grief and/or hibernation/stasis (Five of Cups or the Hermit). My entire adult life is about ricocheting painfully between the excesses of intimacy and estrangement.
Finally, while on the road to visit Jen in Massachusetts the phrase just “popped:” Awaiting the Return of the King. This was my six word memoir, the story of my life on SO many levels. My spiritual, sexual, romantic and social lives are deeply consistent: Passive, steadfast and patient, I still lie in wait (adorably of course), yearning for the return of that which I once had whether it be a person, a feeling or a level of understanding. It sounds pretty lame; I mean, what a way to romanticize what is probably nothing more than Seasonal Affective Disorder! Why don’t I take a more aggressive stance and grab - ahem - life - by the balls?
Well, here’s the interesting part: I’m never disappointed with the results. They always return, whether I want them by then or not. I actually call a few of my old lovers “Boomerang Men.” Perhaps the answer is not to medicate my way through my personal winters, but to just roll with them and wait for Springtime.
Which reminds me of a story. I went to New Orleans with a group of witches in 1998 and we did the typically witchy New Orleans things: The graveyards, the voodoo museums, the midnight ghost tours. The highlight of that long weekend was a visit with Voodoo queen Mambo Miriam. So much wisdom wrapped up in that tiny turban.
We chatted about Mistress Erzulie, the Goddess of Love, Passion and Jealousy, Motherhood and Beauty. Erzulie can be thought of as a mashup of the Goddess Venus/Aphrodite and Virgin/Mother Mary. Erzulie was Mambo Miriam’s favorite among the Lwa, and she told us the story of her late third husband, a sorcerer, medicine man and legendary wanderer. “The Goddess Erzulie is constant, but the Gods who worship her are not. Meh: They come and go, but Erzulie is patient.” There was a metaphysical rubber band between her and her third and last husband: He wandered off sometimes, but he always came back. “When I was young it bothered me. I was so jealous! But . . .” she shrugged, “I got used to it, and then I came to know Mistress Erzulie. She is very wise.”
She stopped, cocked her head and took another tack. “Or, you could think of men like planets, and women like the sun. It feels like they go away . . . but they’re just . . . they just go round and around. Sometimes you look to the sky and it looks like they’re even going backwards.” She chuckled a little. “Once he went away for a year and I didn’t even care. I knew he’d be back.” For some reason she decided to look directly at me. “That’s how you tell when a man loves you: He keeps coming around. That’s how you know.” She leaned over toward me and whispered, “Don’t worry; you can have more than one.” Then she winked, and everybody laughed.
March 17 is St. Patrick’s Day, when people of all national origins raise a glass and declare, “Today we’re all a bit Irish!” This may be truer than we know. The Irish were driven to America by debt, and they are leading the Western world in household debt today. The London Daily Telegraph reported on March 13, 2008 that household debt in Ireland has reached 190 percent of disposable income, the highest in the developed world; and that the Irish banking system is suffering such acute strains from the downturn in the housing market that it may have to nationalize its banks.1 The same may soon be happening in the United States, and for much the same reasons.
Debt Drives the Irish to America
A short review of the history of the Irish in North America reveals that few were here before 1845, when a disease struck the potato crops of Ireland, wiping out the chief or only source of food for many poor farmers. Famine continued for the next five years, killing over 2.5 million people. “God put the blight on the potatoes,” complained the Irish farmers, “but England put the hunger upon Ireland.” Farmers who were heavily in debt were shipped to England to pay the rent owed to their landlords. Impoverished Irish immigrants saved what little money they could to send family members across the Atlantic, traveling on overcrowded ships on which many died of disease or hunger on the way. When they arrived, the Irish men had to fight – often physically – to get labor jobs involving long hours and low pay; while the women worked mainly as servants (called “Brigets”) to upper-class families. Despite their very low wages, they managed to send a bit of money back to their families, until other family members had enough to buy the ship tickets to America. In the American South (mainly New Orleans), the Irish lived in swamp land infested with disease. Here, Irish men were looked upon as actually lower than slaves. As one historian put it, if a plantation owner lost a slave, he lost an investment; if he lost a laborer, he could always get another. Because the Irish workers were plentiful and expendable, they were often sent in to do dangerous jobs for which the slave-owners were reluctant to send their valuable slaves.2
“Debt Slavery” Replaces Physical Slavery
This form of “debt slavery” or “debt peonage” was not just an accidental development of history. It was a deliberately-planned alternative to the slave arrangement in which owners were responsible for the feeding and care of a dependent population, and it is still with us today. Although European financiers were in favor of an American Civil War that would return the United States to its colonial status, they admitted privately that they were not necessarily interested in preserving slavery. They preferred “the European plan”: capital could exploit labor by controlling the money supply, while letting the laborers feed themselves. In July 1862, this ploy was revealed in a notorious document called the Hazard Circular, which was circulated by British banking interests among their American banking counterparts. It said:
Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power and chattel slavery destroyed. This, I and my European friends are glad of, for slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the European plan, led by England, is that capital shall control labor by controlling wages. This can be done by controlling the money. The great debt that capitalists will see to it is made out of the war, must be used as a means to control the volume of money. To accomplish this, the bonds [government debt to the bankers] must be used as a banking basis. . . . It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called, to circulate as money any length of time, as we cannot control that.3
A system of “debt peonage” is inextricably linked to a banking system in which money is issued privately by bankers and lent to the government rather than being issued as “greenbacks” by the government itself Today the “European plan” has evolved into the private central banking system, and it has come to dominate the economies of the world. A private central bank creates money simply by printing it or entering it as an accounting entry, then lends it to the federal government in exchange for government bonds or debt. Private commercial banks create many more dollars in the same way, advancing money created as accounting-entry loans without even incurring the cost of a printing press. Except for coins, the entire U.S. money supply is now created as a debt to private bankers.4 Banks create the principal but not the interest necessary to pay back their loans, so more money is always owed back than was put into the money supply in the first place. More loans must therefore continually be taken out to cover the interest, spiraling the economy into increasing levels of debt and inflation, in a futile attempt to repay principal and interest on a debt that is actually impossible to repay. The result is “debt peonage,” and it has systematically reduced the people to working for the company store, bound to their corporate masters for the food, shelter and health care formerly provided by slave owners under the old physical-slave system.
While observant Jewish women run around town like maniacs, working their butts off preparing home, hearth and temple for yet ANOTHER labor intensive religious holiday, their men attend to Priority Number One: Their dicks. Business as usual, in other words.
Viagra ruled kosher for Passover
A way has been found to prevent Viagra from coming into contact with the body
A leading Israeli rabbi has ruled that the anti-impotency pill Viagra can be taken by Jews on Passover, reversing a previous ban. Viagra had been deemed not kosher since 1998 under strict dietary laws over the week-long Jewish spring holiday.
Rabbi Mordechai Eliahu said the pill can be swallowed if it is encased in a special soluble kosher capsule first.
Viagra’s Israeli manufacturers said they sought an answer after receiving queries from worried religious men.
Imbolc or Imbolg, also known as Candlemas and Groundhog’s Day, takes place during the early part of February. It marks the midpoint of Winter and the beginning of the lambing season, when the momma sheep start to make their milk. This is where the Celtic name Imbolc/g came from: Oimelc = Sheep’s milk.
Also called: Candlemas, Oimelc, Brigid’s Day dates: February 2, early February colors: white, red energy: conception, initiation, inspiration goddesses: Brigid, Maiden
customs: lighting candles, seeking omens of Spring, cleaning house, welcoming Brigid, Celtic goddess of fire, forge and hearth, poetry, healing, childbirth and unity.
I’m off again for our yearly Sisterhood is Powerful Holiday Conclave in New England. It’s a small group, only two of us, but oh! The things we do! Such as read and drink coffee and nap.
What, no Christmas carols? No big family reunion? No fancy feast? No church? You’re kidding, right?
Don’t worry about us; we have our own special Christmas traditions, like getting drunk and cow-tipping at the neighboring farms.
What? You’ve never heard of cow tipping? It’s where you sneak up on a dozing cow and tip him over. You have to be really, really drunk, as it’s the only way to approach a huge bull minding his own business in the middle of a field. The bull needs to be nodding off, almost asleep or it won’t work.
Oh. You know cow tipping is an urban myth? There are articles all over the web explaining how cow tipping breaks the laws of physics?
Damn internet. It used to be so funny, watching those drunk city boys being chased by the neighbor’s enraged bull. Priceless.
But my dad and his buddies did put the neighbor’s bull on a roof once. Really; that story is true. When Grandpa told him and his friends never to do it again they put the car on the roof instead.
Don’t believe it?It’s done with scaffolding and ramps. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a REAL cow being hoisted to a high roof with a crane. That’s just mean.
According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, while both maleand female reindeer grow antlers in the summer each year, malereindeer drop their antlers at the beginning of winter, usually late November to mid-December. Female reindeer retain their antlersuntil after they give birth in the spring.
Therefore, according to EVERY historical rendition depicting Santa’s reindeer, EVERY single one of them, from Rudolph to Blitzen, had to be a girl.
We should’ve known… ONLY women would be able to drag a fat man in a red velvet suit all around the world in one night , while pregnant and not get lost.
(Autum is a second spring when every leaf is a flower? Um, howbout, NO?)
Albert Camus was a famous writer and a Nobel laureate; however, apparently he knew next to nothing about the Wheel of the Year. A short primer in honor for the man who fought nihilism, my gift to people who think Autumn is like Just Like Spring:
Spring = Rebirth, resurrection, new life, turning outward
What did y’all have for thanksgiving? I grilled a grass-fed buffalo steak rather than bake a whole turkey breast for myself. I also made garlic mashed potatoes and pumpkin pudding, and topped off with a pumpkin Martini! Wearing a full slip of course!
The weather was sunny and balmy, then turned cloudy and damp later on in the day. Meanwhile, Bunny is with her father, the folks are in Minnesota, and my sister has pneumonia. But the football game is on!
I suppose it’s a blessing in disguise that we didn’t get home from the emergency room until after the trick-or-treaters had left. What would Bunny and I have eaten if we had given all the Halloween candy away? Neither of us can cook anything: Bunny has only one working hand and feels clumsy, and I can’t balance on one leg long enough to give up my crutches, and am not able to carry anything anyway, so phhbblt whatever. Scorpio’s yummy spit-roasted chicken didn’t last very long between the two of us, so it’s been Twizzlers, Milk Duds and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups keeping us alive! Oh, and leftover chips from last week’s party. Don’t ask me how I just lost two pounds.
One would never guess this, but my (reproduction) silk and feather-stuffed Victorian sofa is very comfortable. The Percocet pills make me dopey and inattentive and bring me in and out of consciousness, but least they make time go by without my noticing. Which reminds me: It’s time for another one.
The only consolation I get from forgetting to mark the full moon is that afterwards I am usually able to find a film clip of it somewhere. This was filmed on Monday, October 26, 2007. .
We chatted about 
Imbolc or Imbolg, also known as Candlemas and Groundhog’s Day, takes place during the early part of February. It marks the midpoint of Winter and the beginning of the lambing season, when the momma sheep start to make their milk. This is where the Celtic name Imbolc/g came from: Oimelc = Sheep’s milk.
Don’t worry about us; we have our own special Christmas traditions, like getting drunk and cow-tipping at the neighboring farms.
What did y’all have for thanksgiving? I grilled a 
I suppose it’s a blessing in disguise that we didn’t get home from the emergency room until after the trick-or-treaters had left. What would Bunny and I have eaten if we had given all the Halloween candy away? Neither of us can cook anything: Bunny has only one working hand and feels clumsy, and I can’t balance on one leg long enough to give up my crutches, and am not able to carry anything anyway, so phhbblt whatever. Scorpio’s yummy spit-roasted chicken didn’t last very long between the two of us, so it’s been Twizzlers, Milk Duds and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups keeping us alive! Oh, and leftover chips from last week’s party. Don’t ask me how I just lost two pounds.
One would never guess this, but my (reproduction) silk and feather-stuffed Victorian sofa is very comfortable. The Percocet pills make me dopey and inattentive and bring me in and out of consciousness, but least they make time go by without my noticing. Which reminds me: It’s time for another one.
