Open Threads

Rented National Treasure 2 and Taken, and between those two and The Deadliest Catch marathon on Discovery, it should be a wild one here tonight. Got the garden tilled, picked up all my plants, and I’m going to go plant everything tomorrow morning when the soil is cool:

I have the following going in:

zucchini
squash
cucumbers
cantaloupe
multiple colors of bell peppers
a wide variety of hot peppers I am too lazy to list
a wider variety of tomatoes, including heirlooms, big boy, beefsteak, better boys and on an on.
broccoli

As far as herbs I am putting in some mint, cilantro, basil and some other spices I can not remember. The herb garden already has several things growing in it, so I will just chuck those in there. I can already taste fresh tomatoes. Also, I don’t know how the overall economy is doing the past week or so, but the Lowe’s around here was JAMPACKED with people. I was waiting in line to check out for near 15 minutes, it was so crowded. That, for a change, is a good thing.

Missed most of the lacrosse today, but Syracuse destroyed Duke and Cornell smashed UVA. I watched the first half of Cornell/UVA and UVA never looked like they were even in he game.

Anything going on your way tonight?

Saturday Night Open ThreadPost + Comments (96)

When I suggested earlier that the National Review soup kitchen putsch sounded like something communists would do, several of you pointed out that I must only mean Maoists and Soviets, since many of today’s commies eat well (the Slow Food movement and Gambero Rosso were both started by Italian commnists), and that under the Soviets, obtaining edible food was was sufficiently difficult that it left little energy for worrying about what kind of mustard your comrades were using. In other words, in United States, you make fun of soup kitchen, in Soviet Union, soup kitchen make fun of you.

But this got me to thinking that there really are some remarkable similarities between today’s conservatives and communism in the style of the Mao or the Soviets. I went to a talk a few years ago about Chinese math under Mao; Chinese mathematicians were allowed to study nonstandard analysis (but not many other kinds of math) because it dealt with a formal notion of infinitesimals, and Marx once said he liked the Leibniz infinitesimal approach to calculus. Similarly, Stalin favored Lamarck over Darwin (and forced it on Soviet scientists), because his theory seemed more in keeping with the tenets of Marx-Leninism.

Is this not exactly like intelligent design, the desire to find Burkean solutions to social problems, and so on? And to take this a step further, isn’t the idea of conservative songs and movies very much like the notion of good Soviet art? And of course, conservatives now engage in regular ritualized party purges.

Am I taking this all too far?

More posts about wingnuts and foodPost + Comments (66)

This is where I would play Parliament of Funk Flashlight from youtube, but I can find a recording worth a damn.

Shake your bones.

Open ThreadPost + Comments (190)