Stanford University identifies one causal chain for Sudden Onset Cardiac death after getting the Clot Shot

The Mainstream Media told us that sudden heart attacks after the clot-shot were all in our imagination.

Stanford is a first-tier University. So far, I have not seen this reported in the Mainstream Media.

Link 

Stanford Medicine investigators have unearthed the biological process by which mRNA-based vaccines for COVID-19 can cause heart damage in some young men and adolescents.

...the researchers identified a two-step sequence in which these vaccines activate a certain type of immune cell, in turn riling up another type of immune cell. The resulting inflammatory activity directly injures heart muscle cells, while triggering further inflammatory damage.

One rare but real risk of the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines is myocarditis, or inflammation of heart tissue. Symptoms — chest pain, shortness of breath, fever and palpitations — appear in the absence of any viral infection. And they happen quickly: within one to three days after a shot.

(Not all who have these symptoms die) 

Vaccine-associated myocarditis occurs in about one in every 140,000 vaccinees after a first dose and rises to one in 32,000 after a second dose. For reasons that aren’t clear, incidence peaks among male vaccinees age 30 or below, at one in 16,750 vaccinees.

Translated, approximately 1/3 of the men have a 6/100k chance of developing cardiac disease after taking the shot. I used cases-per-100k because that is the standard unit for reporting mortality data. 

Pruning notes, mice and a Christmas toy idea

 

A pear tree after pruning on the left. An unpruned apple tree on the right.

I grafted four branches last spring into the pear tree and this year I pruned out nearly all of the growth that was NOT from those grafts.

The down-sized bucket-o-mice.

It is in a pole-barn that is cat-proof but not mouse proof. I wanted to prove that the smaller size could still work and that the mice could not hop out.

The peanut butter bait flaked off in the cold weather. I will spread the peanut butter on a strip of gauze and wrap that around spinner-bottle.

A new toy for Quicksilver

Quicksilver really likes Grandma's "Bissell".

She will be getting her very own this Christmas.

That is a lot of money for a 3 year-old's toy but I am willing to spend extra for tools that get used.
 

Priorities, priorities, priorities.

 

Kudos to University of Michigan for doing "the right thing" even when it is painful and inconvenient.

The University of Michigan fired their head football coach after an internal investigation revealed that he was having "an inappropriate relationship" with a staff member. It comes at an inconvenient time as the team prepares for a highly anticipated bowl game. 

Having a sexual relationship with somebody underneath you in the organization chart is considered de facto sexual discrimination for two reasons.

Due to the imbalance of power, the partner who is lower on the org-chart is under some level of coercion to accept sexual advances.

The other reason is that all of the other people...the one's not in the relationship...are now at a disadvantage for any kind of promotion or when giving advice.

Football and basketball bring a lot of money into major universities and create a lot of awareness among potential students. Unfortunately, too many schools turned a blind-eye to behaviors by team members and coaching staff that would not be tolerated in others.

Assuming that the investigation was thorough and even-handed, good job U-of-Michigan! 

Side story

I worked in an auto factory where one of the other supervisors was a young man who was a "Hi-Po" or High Potential employee. His folder had been tagged. He was given choice "developmental" assignments. Even though he was only 25(ish) years old, management had already decided that he was going places.

He had a temporary employee who was making about half of what the regular employees were making. The Hi-Po supervisor over-rode her pay-code in the computer to give her the highest pay-rate he was authorized for. He bumped her pay up to Team Leader pay, a dollar-an-hour more than what most of the regular employees were paid.

HR investigated. It quickly came to light that they were having sex.

The Hi-Po supervisor was directed to break off the relationship and a letter was put in his file (typically to be purged after one year).

The next pay-cycle the Hi-Po supervisor over-rode her pay code again.

He was released, with-cause, the next business day.

Yes, he was that stupid and so sure of the protection being a Hi-Po. 

Don't assume that this was the U-of-M coach's first transgression. 

Just for fun

This is a short video of about 2-1/2 minutes. I did not expect the voices that came out of these singers, nor did I expect the joy in their facial expressions.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed it. Turn up the speakers and watch their facial expressions.

Who is your customer?

I heard this story in (Juran) Quality Training in 1985. It was presented as a true story that happened in the 1948-1950 timeframe.

The setting was post-war Japan in a textile mill that spun yarn and thread and knit them into consumer products. The United States paid for automated equipment to lift Japan's economy out of the basement. The equipment was not placed in a purpose-built building but was shoe-horned into a multistory factory.

The problem was that every so often, a skein or spool would come into a station that fed into one of the automated looms and loom would lock-up into a giant rat's nest that took an hour to disassemble and clear out.

The problem was traced back to an operator on a lower floor who removed skeins from a winder and placed them on spindles on a roller-rack. When the rack was full she had a minute to stretch her back before the next rack replaced it.

She was not using the knot that she had been trained to use because she had found a quicker, "better" way to knot them. When the loom operator tied the tag-end of one of her skeins onto the tag of the skein that was almost used up, it did not untie the knot but, instead, resulted in the entire hank being gobbled up by the machine in one big chunk.

Rather than summarily firing the operator, the Quality Manager waited for the next train-wreck and then he directed the repairmen to not touch the machine until he returned.

He plucked the prideful worker out of her downstairs job and escorted her up to the behemoth (compared to the stature of a typical Japanese woman of the time) loom and then directed the repairmen to begin.

She knew that they knew that she was the cause of the problem. The entire factory ground to a halt as material backed up behind the loom. An hour later, they were able to restart the loom at low speed and it took another hour before the loom's timing was dialed in enough that they could run at full speed.

The woman burst into tears "I had no idea!" she gasped, sure that she was about to be fired.

The Quality Manager shook his head "No".

"Go back to your department and tell them that the roller-rack is not your customer. Everybody down-line of your station is. The rack, the shunter (who moved the racks from one floor to the next), the loom operator, the repairmen, the store that buys our sweaters and even the customer who ultimately purchases our products." 

"Tell them to follow their written instructions exactly they way they are trained...even if it seems stupid or like it is make-work."

"Gleece"

I was watching Townsend's Youtube channel and he was talking about "Hasty Puddings".

That brought back a memory that I thought was worth recording.

Background

My father's father's people were from just north of the Balkans and his mother's people were from just east of the Baltic. In spite of his origins, he tanned very, very quickly and was short and stocky.

His mother never heard a word of English until she went to school at the age of five in Allegan County, Michigan.

His mother was widowed when he was nine or ten and she was 33. That was in 1936. Times were tough. 

When Dad was 18, he went to Detroit to register for the draft. It was during WWII and gas and tires were scarce. He hitchhiked since nobody in the family had a car.

A young man stopped and gave him a ride. That man was also going to register for the draft. They were both deferred (my dad because he was the sole support of a widow and Adam because he was born in Canada).

They became friends. Adam had a business and hired Dad. In time, Adam offered Dad the chance to purchase some swampland in Michigan that had a 12'-by-20' shack on it.

Fast-forward 25 years...

The shack was expanded as finances allowed. Cabinets and indoor plumbing was installed. It graduated from a "shack" to a "cottage".

Early one spring, I (and a spare brother or two) assisted Dad in opening up the "cottage" for the season. Time got away from us and there was nothing to eat. Dad solved the problem by dredging up memories of when he was a kid and the cupboard was bare. He made us something he called "Gleece".

An image from the internet.

He mixed flour and eggs and maybe some water together to the consistency of pancake batter. Then he loaded up a large spoon with the batter and holding the bowl of the spoon just above the boiling water, he dribbled-and-drooled a stream of it into a pan of boiling water.

Half-hearted attempts to find a recipe met a stone-wall. I assumed it was just something he made up on-the-spot or it was something that only his family did.

God Bless the Internet

Guess what, "Gleece" is real. 

Gleece/Glace

Ingredients for One Generous Serving

1 egg beaten
1/2 cup all purpose flour (not self rising)
1/4 cup (scant) water

Start with boiling salted water in a pot. Beat together ingredients and drop by small spoonfuls into the boiling salted water. Gleece are done when they rise to the top of the water. They do expand in size. Let them boil for an additional minute or two and then drain off the water.

Gleece can be used in chicken broth or green bean soup. They can also be fried with sliced potatoes (or boil your potatoes ahead of time and fry the boiled potato slices with the gleece). Season to your taste. They can be added to mashed potatoes and a little butter or put sour cream, butter and onion slivers on the boiled gleece.

Dad's versions were more icicle/round-noodle shaped than than dumpling-like. But the name is identical and the provenance matches.

Cheap. Quick. Simple. Easy. Very filling. Cheap.

Presented without comment

 

Link

Fine Art Tuesday

 

Hasui Kawase

Today you get a grab-bag of artists. All suggested by the indefatigable Lucas Machias. "Trees" are the theme.

 

Antonio Fabrés

Berndt Lindholm

Oscar Törnå

Hippolyte Boulenger

Ivan Shiskin

Follow-up on Hungry Times post

Based on the volume of comments, the post on "The Hungry Times" struck a nerve.

From the comments:

Anon 7:55 PM wrote "...it appears having a large pond or small river nearby will be able to provide some extra food or attractant options for foragers."

Anon 11:10 PM responded "A 30’ gill or trammel net suitable for suckers, carp catfish etc might be a lifesaver."

...then...

Anon 10:16 PM independently stated "I wonder how the Indians did so well. Granted, they ...had fewer people per acre." 

How did the Native Americans survive the winters?

Population density was a big part of it. Population estimates for pre-Columbus continental United States and Canada vary by a a factor of ten but anumber of four-million is commonly used.

The current population of that same area is almost one-hundred times greater.

As can be expected over such six-million square-miles, strategies differed.

The Native-American Mound Culture cities were almost all near rivers. The largest NAMC city is called Cahokia and it is very close to East Saint Louis, Illinois. 

Link to maps

Along the Eastern seaboard, tribes were often migratory and followed the resources. Estuaries...that is bays that are flushed by the tides, are enormously productive since multiple ecosystems converge and the flushing of the tides creates a mixing effect that combines oxygen and nutrients.

In both locations...rivers and estuaries...clams/mussels/oysters were easy pickings.

The West-coast tribes had a cultural innovation called "Potlatch" which functioned as a form of welfare.

Individual clans gained status by throwing parties and giving gifts of preserved foods (nearly always dried salmon). Due to the vagary of the salmon runs on the hundreds of streams that drain into the Pacific any one family could be randomly left without enough food to make it until the next salmon run. 

Potlatch allowed that family to survive at a cost of loss of status. However, that status could be repurchased by hosting several, very generous Potlatch parties in the future.

Native-Americans in California's Central Valley were blessed by thousands of square miles of oak-orchards. Acorns (and pine nuts) which could be harvested with brooms were easily dried and cached in simple structures and stayed edible for years.

White settlers had a very dim view of those Native-Americans because they assumed that they had not even progressed to the level of simple agriculture. That assessment may have been a bit harsh. Those Native-Americans did not engage in any kind of agriculture that the plow-field-annual-grains based Europeans recognized.

Random factoids

The mesh size is critical for gill-nets and varies by the target fish. The issue is muddied-up because some people specify by "stretched-mesh" size and others specify by distance between knots "square-mesh" size.

Depending on the primary species of sucker that you are targeting, a square-mesh size in the 1-1/2" to 2" range is probably about right.

Common carp are highly variable in size. The younger ones that are more desirable for food according to my Polish neighbor are best caught with a 4" square-mesh while the most mass is caught with a 5" square-mesh. As a side-note, if you are going for mass, then a trammel net is the best choice because a heavy load of fish can trash a simple gill-net.

Bonus Link1 Academic paper discussing net selection that targets common carp

Bonus Link2 Youtube video of a trammel net set catching carp. Long video.

Unemployed new college graduates

What happened to "academic advisors"?

Back-in-the-day they were the link between "the market" for graduates and the classes students took and the academic tracks they followed.

There is a huge amount of angst as new college graduates cannot find jobs. Not only that but recent graduates are among the first to lose their jobs as A.I. starts doing the least complex tasks; tasks that are typically assigned to less experienced employees.

Even in the 1980s it was understood that the "degree" you graduated with was not a guarantee nor was there any promise that "your" profession would exist unchanged for any meaningful amount of time. 

Ergo, the better academic counselors told their students that they should not just be preparing themselves for a single profession but should be thinking in terms of having a tool-box filled with transferable skill-sets.

It is my perception that students are locking-onto a single goal. They decide as freshmen that they are going to be "an actress" or something similar and then never consider any other possibilities. They refuse to consider any other job that would make substantial use of their learned skill-sets and their innate talents. They would rather be an "actress" working at Starbucks than a salesperson making $99k a year. 

They are INSULTED if you "kill their dream" by suggesting that the odds of actually making a living as an actress is a very long shot. After all, magical thinking is entirely dependent on "Believing it intensely enough" and casting any doubt on that belief poisons the magic.

Discipline

I suspect that the reason that many academic advisors are missing-in-action is that they have an improper view of discipline. They think that offering honest guidance to a student is disrespectful even though it is what they are paid to do.

Consider these words from Hebrews Chapter 12:

For the sake of the joy that lay before him he endured the cross, despising its shame, and has taken his seat at the right of the throne of God.  Consider how he (Jesus) endured such opposition from sinners, in order that you may not grow weary and lose heart. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood.  

You have also forgotten the exhortation addressed to you as sons:

“My son, do not disdain the discipline of the Lord or lose heart when reproved by him; for whom the Lord loves, he disciplines; he scourges every son he acknowledges.”

Endure your trials as “discipline”; God treats you as sons. For what “son” is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are without discipline, in which all have shared, you are not sons but bastards.

Sharing harsh truths in a loving way is a form of discipline. Failing to do so is to program your student to fail in life.

 

That time when I was mistaken for one of the homeless

I got a call from a friend who needed a ride to Sparrow Hospital in Lansing to have some tests done. The only sticky point is that his tests were scheduled for 1:00 in the morning.

Friends do what friends do. I gave him a ride and waited for him in the waiting area just outside of the Emergency Room and on the "hot" side of the metal detectors.

The sandwiches had been pitched into the trash at the stroke of midnight, 12/08/25. He gave them to me at 1:15 a.m. on 12/08/25

As I was sitting there a man approached me and gave me a bag of food. Then he noticed the hole in the toe of my shoe and started asking staff as they passed "Do you need them shoes" as he pointed at their Hokas.

Frankly, I was filled with gratitude.

He was either a homeless dude or somebody who was doing outreach for The City Mission...being as it was 10F actual in Downtown Lansing and -3 in outlying areas. 

It could go either way. He was dressed in a newish, puffy coat that went below mid-thigh which is a good setup for a cold night. He was about 45 and skinny. On the flip-side, he talked to himself pretty much the whole time he was near me and he asked if I had a pack of smokes twice.

Maybe he was both. I think you need to be a little touched in the head to do mission work in an inner city. 

View from the office

150 yards west and 40 yards north of yesterday

Ten minutes of legal light left...

...and...no deer were injured in the production of this blog post.

I did get another three trees pruned. That counts for something.

The "Hungry Times"

Suppose...

Suppose something were to happen and rural folks were "encouraged" to move into dense-pack housing in urban areas. Suppose your refused.

Suppose that the incentive for moving was that the supply chain, maybe, could keep you fed but if you refuse then you might have to shift for yourself.

While this seldom happens in isolation, for the purpose of this blog-post let's pretend it does. There are no jack-booted thugs storming across the sandy-plains of Michigan or Georgia or Eastern Germany. Just you and your family trying to figure out where your meal will come from.

January

Foraging: 40 deer per square mile is considered a heavy population. That works out to one every 16 acres. Or, at 100 people per square mile (fairly typical for southern Michigan rural areas) one deer for every 2.5 people. Let's assume you manage to snare a deer and call it 15 pounds of lean-meat per person.

Garden: You still have some carrots you mulched that you can dig up. You have some turnip greens.

Remainder: Food from storage.

February

Foraging: You set out snares and catch two rabbits a week. You have to race the coyotes, foxes and possum to get your catch. That is 4 pounds of very lean meat per week. You are starting to crave fat.

You go ice fishing. You split the galls on goldenrod to collect some grubs to sweeten up the hook of the teardrop jig. You get four bluegills and you save the guts for bait.

Garden: Running out of carrots. Now scavenging garlic greens for flavor.

Remainder: Food from storage.

March

Foraging: In addition to the snares for rabbits, you are putting out snares for starlings and other birds. You are STRONGLY considering catching mice...to feed the dog, of course.

You discover that squirrels are fat and they become your newest favorite-animal. 

The snow is mostly melted. You could collect maple sap by you have to boil 30 gallons of sap to get one gallon of syrup.

You watch the picked farm fields like a hawk hoping to harvest some early geese.

Garden: Tapped out.

Remainder: Food from storage.

April

Foraging: Suckers are running sporadically near the end of the month but you don't live on a stream. You make a gill net anyway. You have a friend with a flooded drainage ditch that connects to the Spicer Creek.

You walk the south side of ridges looking for early dandelions and other greens. Yellow Rocket is eagerly sought and your urine turns fluorescent yellow.

Garden: Still tapped out. Maybe you can get a few stalks of rhubarb near the end of the month.

Planting peas, potatoes and field corn. 

Remainder: Food from storage.

May:

Common carp begin spawning in the shallows when the water temperature stays above 65 degrees for several days in a row.

 

Foraging: Migratory birds, primarily ducks. Carp are spawning in the shallows. Bluegills are on their beds late in the month.

Young rabbits and woodchucks show up in the later half of the month. 

Morel mushrooms early in the month. Oyster mushrooms later in the month.

Greens and maybe some Jerusalem Artichokes.

Garden: Tapped out. Burning lots of calories planting the garden and getting almost none out of it.

Cabbage and broccoli transplants are planted in early May. Tomatoes and peppers are planted at the end of May. 

Remainder:  Food from storage.

June:

Foraging: Lots of young rabbits. Robbing eggs from bird nests. The bluegills that are spawning near shore are rapidly fished-out.

Greens, mostly nettles and poke because they produce so much. You learn to dislike greens. It seems stupid to boil them multiple times to make the edible.

This time-table is highly dependent on the weather, especially early in the growing season. This early-June corn plant is stressed by cold and too much rain.

Garden: Strawberries through the middle of the month. Raspberries and cherries toward the end.

Lettuce, peas, onions are harvested.

Beans are planted the first week of June and vining crops are planted the second week of June. 

Large volumes of food but not lots of calories. You have been losing two-pounds a week for several months and are running out of pounds to lose.

Remainder: Food from storage

July:

Foraging: Lots of young rabbits. You sit in the garden and shoot starlings with your pellet gun because you are counting on every bit of food.

Greens shift to Lamb's Quarters, amaranth and purslane (which are weeds in your garden)

Garden:

Lettuce, peas and onions in the first two weeks.

Everything changes in the third and fourth weeks. Earliest sweet corn and potatoes are ready for harvesting. Wheat is ripe. Green beans and cucumbers start coming in. It is like a switch flipped on July 20.

Remainder: Food from storage for the first two weeks. Replenishment starts the third week as the first wheat comes off of the farm fields. 

Discussion

In spite of what Porgy and Bess told you, living is NOT easy in the summer, at least not until the second half of July (in Michigan).

In all likelihood, the majority of the calories that you put into your mouth are coming out of storage until at least July 20 unless....

Domestic animals

Suppose your neighbor has a cow or even several cows. They can even be "beef breeds".

Suppose you work out a deal. Maybe you trade a bang-stick and ammo and your labor to buy-into a 1/3 share of a cow-in-milk. If the cow drops her calf in April and the calf is not fed his mother's milk, then a 1/3 share might be seven gallons of milk a week*. At 4% fat and 3.5% protein and 3% lactose that works out to 17000 Calories a week and all of it from old grass that is not edible for humans AND it is showing up during the most calorie-starved time of the year.

If there are just you and your wife, then 17,000 Calories are about half of the calories you need per week. If there are four of you, then 17,000 Calories is about one-quarter of the calories you need.

Of course you can get milk from sheep and goats and camels and horses and yaks if that is what you have. 

*I used 1/3 of the average, commercial Holstein milk cow's production level in these calculations. 

What do pull-tabs, cigarette package wrappers and WOKE ideology have in common?

Norm (not his real name) is a simple-minded fellow who goes to the same church that I attend.

One of his quirks is that he hounds men to donate their beverage pull-tabs for recycling. He demands that we detach them from our beverage can and place them in a separate container.

When asked "Why?" he goes off on a long ramble about how the pull tabs are made of a special, ultra-pure alloy that is recycled for heart-valves and cardiac stents. At church dinners he places his chair by the barrel for recycling beverage cans (which have a ten-cent deposit on them in Michigan) and sternly lectures diners who do not separate the tabs from their cans.

Anybody who knows anything about metals and alloys know that this is pure B.S. Aluminum is not used in any in-body medical devices and even if it was, it would be far cheaper and simpler to use virgin material rather than recycling tramp materials into a pure enough form to use in-body.

Most of us humor him in the same way we would humor an intellectually-challenged child showing us a scribble that they inform us was "a horse". I deal with him by choosing to drink water.

Norm's quirk reminds me of the smokers in the 1970s who collected the plastic sleeves that went on the outside of their packages of cigarettes. According to them, the sleeves were made of a special, rare, exotic material that was used in dialysis machine membranes. People were dying because the companies that made dialysis machines could not get enough of that material. They also demanded that other smokers save their wrappers.

Why is that interesting?

This phenomena interests me because people outside of the "thrall" easily see that it is pure bull-shit. Irrational behaviors interest me, so dissecting the "thrall" or the "glamor" captured my interest.

I believe that the basis for the delusional behavior is that it allows Norm to feel morally superior to people who do not drink 24 cans of Keystone Light beer* every night because they are not saving the lives of people who need heart valves.

Likewise, the belief in saving the cellophane wrappers of cigarette packages allowed the believer to entertain the fantasy that they are righteous and pure and morally superior to people who do not pluck cigarette packages out of the gutter and strip them of their cellophane.

Norm's hectoring of people who do not share his delusions reminds me of the WOKE people who dog normal people like you and me. "XY"s cannot be women is a simple, biological fact and yet social justice warriors made trans-ideology (along with a host of other absurdities) a core belief. Not just that, but they are enraged if we do not validate their fantasies.

 

* Artistic license exercised. I don't know if "Norm" drinks. 

Deer hunting A-a-R (and notes on pruning)

Well, I know you are all biting your nails wondering if I connected with a deer.

Nope. Not tonight.

I got a late start. For some reason my muscles were sore and stiff. Never-the-less, I had my deer hunting property in sight by 2:30 p.m.

As I drove up to it I noticed a dead deer in the middle of the field west of the Upper Orchard. That was an oddity that merited investigation.

If it is deer season and you hope to harvest venison, it is worth your while to carry a suitable firearm while tramping about. Not carrying one is the equivalent of expecting to win the lottery but not bothering to buy a ticket.

I checked out the dead deer. And yes, Virginia, I was carrying a bang-stick. It had been dead long enough for the varmints to find it and there was snow on its eyeballs.

Michigan game laws are very clear. It is illegal to tag a deer that you did not shoot.* How-some-ever, if you happen to "find" a dead deer that is unclaimed. And if there is clear evidence that the deer died of ballistic trauma. And if you stick a finger into the mouth of that deer and you determine that the temperature is below 90F and more than 10F above ambient...then it is clear that whoever shot that deer is not going to claim it. If they were, they would have found it by now.

In which case you need to decide if you are going to comply with man-made laws and let the coyotes eat the dead deer or if you are going to comply with higher moral laws and make sure that the meat ends up in somebody's freezer.

Clearly, the deer had died long enough in the past that I was not confronted with such a moral dilemma.

While walking back toward the Upper Orchard, I took a slight detour. On two separate occasions I have seen bucks bedded down in a depression north of the field. I eased into the woods that separated the depression and the field. Lo and behold, there was a deer in the depression.

Alas, it was not a buck. A single deer, all by its lonesome is usually a buck .or. an orphaned fawn. Even though I had a permit for an antlerless deer I let it walk.

My Plan

My plan was to prune trees in the orchard until 4:30 and then sit until 5:36 p.m. which was the end of "legal light".

One of my readers commented about the ambiguity of the term.

With snow on the ground and with a full moon, there is enough light to clearly identify deer all night long. Since the DNR cannot predict snow-cover any better than the professional weather-guessers, and since they cannot predict if the moonlight will be intercepted by cloudy skies...they TELL hunters when it will be "legal" based on when the sun will set.

If one were inclined, it would be pretty easy to weasel on when you dropped the hammer if you were using a bow. But you would be pretty stupid to "violate" with a firearm by more than a minute or two, maybe. It just isn't worth it.

So, at precisely 5:36 p.m. I removed the magazine and cycled the bolt to eject the round that was in the chamber.

I saw three deer while walking from the blind to my truck.

Pruning report

I pruned one mulberry tree and three pear trees in the 90 minutes I was working.

If you are a long-time reader then you know that I did a major pruning of the orchards last winter. By major, I mean that I removed about 2/3 of the crowns of many of the trees. Others I culled.

Most of the ones I left responded by producing a dense forest of 24" to 48" long whips from the scaffold-branches that I left.  "Hairs on a dog's back" is an apt description of how some of these trees look.

Those trees will overbear and produce runted, flavorless fruit if I do not reduce the bearing potential. Not only that, but they will go into alternate bearing. One year will give a gross overload of mediocre fruit. The next year will produce nothing.

So, I am thinning out the whips. If most of them are 24" long, I am removing all of the whips within 24" of the ones I decided to leave. If the whips are 48" long, then I leave 48" of space around the few I select to leave. That way the sunlight and drying breezes can penetrate the crown and every fruit will have multiple leaves collecting sun and feeding them.

It would be excruciatingly slow work except that most of those whips can be yanked out by their roots. I grab each one and give it an authoritative JERK and most of the time I can rip it right off of its mother-branch.

It took a long time...but I finally found a job where my innate ability to be a big jerk works to my advantage. I highly recommend this job for people who are like me. 

*Some hunters bypass this law by putting a bullet through the dead deer they stumble upon. "There. It is mine now that I shot it." 

View from the office

 

I am still here

I have a couple of side projects going.

Water Locust

Water Locust (Gleditsia aquatica) is similar to wild-type Honey Locust in that the tree throws big balls (size of a football) of 2" long thorns that sprout directly from the trunk. It (supposedly) can fix nitrogen and the wood is very similar to Honey Locust...or Red Oak. The seeds are carried in pods that hold a single, 11mm diameter "button" shaped seed rather than a "bean" that can hold up to fifteen seeds.

As you can see, it grows as far north as St Louis or Terra Haut, Indiana.

Among this species's few virtues is that it can stand in water for extended periods and doesn't seem to be bothered by it. That might make it a useful niche-player. In my neck of the woods, 90% of the trees in "swamps" are Silver Maple. The ash have mostly died off. There are a few Swamp White Oak and a few Black Willow. Where it is just a freckle drier, American Elm and American Larch starts to show up but there are not a lot of choices for trees that will grow in swamps.

At the start of the soak. If you look closely, you can see two of them that were damaged and are significantly larger than the others.

 

Same container and zoom after soaking for 20 hours. I do believe that they absorbed some water! Four of them were still puny, so I am soaking them for another 8 hours.

The Water Locust seeds have an impermeable seed-coat that must be breached before the seed can absorb water. I used sand-paper to wear through the edge of the seed until I saw a lighter color. Then I soaked them in warm water...changing it as I remembered. After soaking for 20 hours, most had expanded from 11mm diameter to 15mm diameter. 

I will probably be cursed by future generations. Those thorns are the devil to rubber tires. 

The other "project"

The other project is hitting the gym to maintain my muscle-mass. 

After a warm-up at 135 and 185 pounds, I was able to complete four sets of 6 reps dead-lifting my body-weight. I expect to be sore tomorrow. 

"Diversity" means a representative cross-section of the population, right?

I don't THINK this site is satire or a parody. These are images of interns from the Headquarters of a Mainstream Media outlet.

Three of these pictures are not the same. Can you spot them? 

Note: Images were cropped to make their faces approximately the same size.

OK...this is not a picture of an NPR Intern, but it is weird that the one image of a Middle-eastern Intern is holding a microphone boom the way she is. That seems...insensitive.