Welcome to Sasha's garden

Her majesty's daily heliotherapy.

Also known as my balcony.

I've always loved gardening, even before the time in the 1970s when Jack Prager and I tried to grow hybrid vegetables by planting a bunch of different seeds together in one hole, hoping they'd meld into one big cool hybrid plant.

They didn't.

But I still love gardening. Probably get it from my mom, who got it from her dad. Just love it. The planting of flowers and fun plants, I mean. As for mowing the lawn or planting big trees or bushes, gag me. I like the kind of gardening where the holes you dig are no bigger than 4 or 5 inches across. Anyway, it was a near prerequisite for my first purchase of a home (well, a condo at least) that it include at least a balcony, and my current place does. I was a bit worried that is has a northwest exposure, but who knew that balconies with NW exposures get sunlight starting around noon, and then lasting through the entire day. So my garden grows.

It's still not quite as lush as I'd like (Chris wins on that category), but it's coming along. Here's a quick tour of some, but not all, of my plants:

This is my Japanese Maple tree.  I got it two and a half years ago - end of the season sale at Home Depot, cheap as dirt and looking a little Charlie Brown Christmasy.   It's done quite well in its pot, only suffering in August when the leaves do get a bit scorched - too much sun really, but there's nowhere to give it less sun on my balcony.

This is my bignonia.  Meant to hide my balcony from the prying eyes of neighbors.  I bought this last year and it's done quite well - still has a way to go, but it flowers on old growth, so I'm looking forward to some great flowers any day now.

These are my irises.  The yellow one, on the left, has gone crazy (it's about to bloom) - I actually need to divide it this year.  The red or purple one on the right has never bloomed, and pretty much stalled for two years.  It's finally doing better this year, so I'm hoping it finally blooms this year.  The leaves never died back on either plant over the winter.  They didn't the winter before either.  Mom was a bit surprised.  Back in Chicago, hers lose their leaves completely in winter.

Sky pencils are expensive, unless you buy them at the end of the season, like I did. I like these plants a lot, but they're hard to grow here, I think. I've had 3 plants nearly die - just lose all their leaves, and then slowly come back over the following summer, but with a lot of dead branches. I suspect they may have dried out, in part (or in whole) due to the winds from the west.  They are pretty though when they survive.

Clematis.  Great in theory.  Less great in practice.  Maybe it's because I'm growing it in a pot. But it just doesn't grow like wildfire like my mom's back home.  It does bloom all summer long, on and off, which I like. I'd just hoped it would grow into a bigger plant.  I finally decided to cut it back this year, so we'll see if that helps.

Double Knockout Roses. Great plant. Pretty bug and disease proof. Not as pretty as a regular rose, but far easier. And they grow like wildfire in one season. Prettier from afar.

I don't recall the name of this little plant, but it's pretty much indestructible. When you're planting it, it will always lose some bits and pieces of the plant. Just put em in the dirt and they grow. It looked like this all winter too.

My friend Matt suggested I grow some bamboo as another screen for the neighbors. These are cuttings from his plants from about a year and a half ago. Last summer they grew about 4 feet tall. This summer am hoping for 6-8 feet. As they're in containers, it's not guaranteed. Bamboo is not cheap. And it does take a few seasons to grow taller and taller. Still, if you can get some cuttings - meaning, a chunk of plant with roots from a rhizome - it's far cheaper :)

This is an ornamental grass that grew far smaller than I wanted last year, so I transferred it to a smaller pot and am on the lookout for something larger and showier. I got this guy on super sale, with no growth, last spring, so perhaps that's why it didn't grow much. Anyway, it's doing well this year, so we'll see. Read the rest of this post...

Global warming leads to early spaghetti harvest in Switzerland

Amazingly, many people fell for the BBC's April Fools joke back in 1957. As Wikipedia notes, spaghetti was not widely eaten in Britain at the time, so a lot of people had no idea how it was made. BBC:

[S]ome viewers failed to see the funny side of the broadcast and criticised the BBC for airing the item on what is supposed to be a serious factual programme.

Others, however, were so intrigued they wanted to find out where they could purchase their very own spaghetti bush.

Read the rest of this post...

Bloggers lose legal battle against Huffington Post

The suit was over whether people who blogged over at Huffington Post, for free, were entitled to any of the profits from the deal in which AOL bought the Huffington Post for a cool $315 million.  The bloggers claimed they were owed a third of the money.

Really?

You have to remember that at the Huffington Post, you were permitted to "blog" but that did not mean that you worked for Arianna.  While the site was by invitation only, it was a pretty large invite lists to the point where the arrangement was not unlike DailyKos', where any diarist could take up show and write a blog, but still not really work for Markos.

In any case, people agreed to blog for free in exchange for their posts being published on a high profile site and seen by the masses.   It's the same reason I started blogging - not for the money, but for the exposure (and the hope that the exposure would push the political agenda I care about).  There was no expectation of money, so the court says none is deserved.

It is an interesting question.  But when you think about it, HuffPost staffers have been paid for years, long before AOL acquired them.  The blogger never were.  Why didn't they complain about not being a part of that monetary scheme?

A blog - any Web site - is a tricky thing.  Are you doing the site a favor by writing on it, or is the site doing you a favor by letting your content be seen on a site that reaches a large and influential audience (making you a virtual star)?  Probably both.  And the bargain wasn't to write on the site in the hopes that it would be bought and make a lot of money for everyone.  The bargain was to write on the site, and not make a dime, and not PAY a dime, regardless of whether the site went bust or bountiful. Read the rest of this post...

Schrödinger's Romney is both a conservative and a liberal - meow

The New York Times started putting their content behind a pay wall a year ago.  They've now cut the number of free articles you can access each month (without a subscription) from 20 to 10 (boo!).  This article by David Javerbaum is probably one of the best ways you can use your allotment of the Grey Lady this month.

A bit of context. Before Mitt Romney, those seeking the presidency operated under the laws of so-called classical politics, laws still followed by traditional campaigners like Newt Gingrich. Under these Newtonian principles, a candidate’s position on an issue tends to stay at rest until an outside force — the Tea Party, say, or a six-figure credit line at Tiffany — compels him to alter his stance, at a speed commensurate with the size of the force (usually large) and in inverse proportion to the depth of his beliefs (invariably negligible). This alteration, framed as a positive by the candidate, then provokes an equal but opposite reaction among his rivals.

But don't miss one of the best bits hidden in the caption to one of the figures:

The famous “Schrödinger’s candidate” scenario. For as long as Mitt Romney remains in this box, he is both a moderate and a conservative.

This is a pun on the famous "Schrödinger's Cat" thought experiment in which quantum mechanics says that a cat in a box containing some poison is both dead and alive at the same time. In Romney's case, he's both a moderate and a conservative, depending on the day, or the weather (and in Romney's case, the box with the cat would be on the roof of his car traveling 75mph).  Remember when Romney flip-flopped on Super PACS?  Or criticized Solyndra but then took money from its lobbyist? Or flip-flopped on the effects of carbon pollution, on gays, stem cells, and abortion, and even on whether he liked catfish?

Then again, back in 2000, Schrödinger's Bush was able to lose the election but still become President.

 You don't need a degree in nuclear physics to understand the piece but if you do it is even funnier. Javerbaum hits every mark with perfect snark.



NOTE FROM JOHN: Oddly, I've not found a good explanation online of the Schrödinger's Cat riddle. The video I posted above tries to explain it, but still doesn't do it well in my opinion. Here's another video explaining it, and I don't think it passes muster. What the explanations fail to explain, and what I don't remember well enough from college physics to explain here, is why in quantum mechanics do both states exist simultaneous - meaning, in real life it's 50-50, either or. In quantum mechanics, both states co-exist simultaneous, in a sense, so the cat IS both dead AND alive at the same time - that's the point of whole thought experiment.  I don't think the explanations get that point across well enough.  Can someone explain this better in the comments?

This is probably my biggest beef about the Internet. There's a lot of information about everything, but often not the exact information I'm looking for, about something obvious, like this.

REPLY FROM MYRDDIN: Schrödinger's Cat is probably best thought of as a koan rather than a paradox. It is a useful way to think about and discuss philosophical interpretations of quantum equations. In particular is observation a necessary or merely a sufficient condition to collapse the wave function? The equations work just as well either way. If you consider the idea that the cat is both dead and alive to be unacceptable then you need to take the view that any particle interaction that could be used to make an observation will cause the collapse. But the opposite interpretation is equally consistent with the theory.

NOTE FROM GP: Gotta weigh in, perhaps ignorantly. Light is both a wave and a particle in quantum physics. Why? Because what it appears to be, is a function of how you examine it, not when examine it. Metaphorically, look at it from the left, it's a waveform (i.e., has no mass); look at it from the right, it's a particle (oops, has mass) — all at the same time. That doesn't explain the cat story, but it does explain the simultaneous aspect John raised above. (I don't have cats, but my plants are always dead, so I'm no help there.) Read the rest of this post...

Myanmar voting today

It's been a long time coming and the process has not been clean, but it's a start. NY Times:

For the first time in two decades, voters in 45 districts across Myanmar had the chance to vote for the party of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, a milestone after years of military rule and brutality.

From a strictly numerical standpoint, the election itself will not affect the balance of power in Myanmar, as less than 10 percent of seats in Parliament were in play.

But voters described it as a joyous day, another step toward democracy as the country undergoes radical changes under President Thein Sein, the former general who has led the country for the last year and is encouraging reconciliation with Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi.

Early reports are positive for Suu Kyi, who appears to have one a seat in parliament. Read the rest of this post...

Zimmerman will walk in the Trayvon shooting case—"Sanford is the new Selma"

Via Ron Beasley at Newshoggers, we find this great interview — lawyer and former prosecutor Mike Papantonio on the Stephanie Miller Show.

His point is clear: Because the Sanford police did not do their job, any competent defense attorney can get George Zimmerman found innocent of wrongdoing.

Watch:



Be sure to listen through — at 2:35 Papantonio discusses the racial history of that department.

This isn't the first time with this police department down there. They're disfunctional, and part of the problem is the "race card" runs through that department. Sanford is the new Selma.

And (4:52):

People are missing the fact [that] this is an area that didn't even have an organized neighborhood watch [!]. ... When I used to prosecute I would see these characters that would hang out at police departments, they'd hang around the state attorney's office, they had this Batman mentality.... In reality they are Walter Mitty ... with a gun.

Did you catch that? No neighborhood watch, says Florida-based Mike Papantonio. Is the media misunder-characterizing our local neighborhood shooter?

Which reminds me of this excellent piece by Digby, on Sanford Florida's other dark days:

We were talking about the Trayvon Martin tragedy the other day and a friend pointed out that Sanford was only about 130 miles from the town of Rosewood, the site of the notorious Rosewood massacre:

Rosewood was a quiet, primarily black, self-sufficient whistle stop on the Seaboard Air Line Railway. Spurred by unsupported accusations that a white woman in nearby Sumner had been beaten and possibly raped by a black drifter, white men from nearby towns lynched a Rosewood resident. When black citizens defended themselves against further attack, several hundred whites combed the countryside hunting for black people, and burned almost every structure in Rosewood. Survivors hid for several days in nearby swamps and were evacuated by train and car to larger towns. Although state and local authorities were aware of the violence, they made no arrests for the activities in Rosewood. The town was abandoned by black residents during the attacks. None ever returned.

It turns out that Sanford Florida, where Trayvon was killed, has a history of its own:

[W]hen it comes to a history of fear, racism and violence, Sanford, Florida, has a particularly fraught past, one that traces right up to the night a month ago when an unarmed black kid was shot dead on one of its streets, and his killer went free. ...

I'll let you read the rest; it's an especially fine bit of research.

The new Selma. I keep thinking about those White Pride marches the crazy right keeps thinking is the ever-innocent equivalent of Black Pride or Gay Pride events.

Equivalent only on the surface. What's missing? Any recognition of the extreme imbalance in power.

How about this? Oppressor Pride Day. Or a Nazi Pride march through Warsaw, 1940. Maybe a Male Pride rally around the local YWCA. Or a Roman Army Pride march straight down the streets of Jerusalem in 42 AD — 'cause, you know, the Legion has rights too, and pride to burn.

All the equivalence in the world, except ... not.

UPDATES: (1) This comment and its replies are worth noting. (2) Also this re Neighborhood Watch.

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
  Read the rest of this post...

The Beatles - Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey

I'm only back for a week and already I've managed to pick up the bug that's going around. I probably should have stayed under the covers and rested yesterday but couldn't help myself and did an easy 30 mile ride yesterday. Let's just say that the ride didn't help. Oh well, Sunday is supposed to be a rest day, right? Read the rest of this post...