Category: Not-politics

Well, either a productive or unproductive day…

…depending on how you look at it; I mean, I thought that it was productive, but then one of my metrics for success is how badly-spelled the hate mail is. Although, truth be told many days I don’t even get hate mail. Alas. Alack.

Moving along: light posting – seriously; the weekend is being spent at a lakefront camp that may have electricity but won’t have Wi-Fi, so don’t expect much. Maybe a couple of posts preloaded. In the meantime, hit the tip jar.


Why?

Because if you don’t, the sun will implode.

Nah, really it’s so that I can get a hotel room for the RS Gathering. My readers’ generous contributions have already paid for the plane ticket, bless them.

“Summer Solstice.”

I was trying to find this Lisa Theriot song in embeddable form, but this will do: Summer Solstice.

The song is available here; the album is A Turning Of Seasons.  What?  Oh, just because it was a pretty nice day today; not too hot, but quite bright and sunny out.  And now it’s cooling ,and possibly promising some interesting thunderstorms tonight.  A good day for a languid song, particularly with the promise of a holiday weekend.

And it amuses me to try to reproduce the mood for my readers.

Bamboo. :Trembling hands: Effing. Bam. Boo.

There are two types of people in the world: people who have never had to deal with bamboo on their property, and lucky people. You can tell the first because their reaction to this (via Instapundit):

Can American Farms Make Bamboo the Next Big Cash Crop?

Could the Mississippi Delta become America’s bamboo belt, the breadbasket of a new class of homegrown structural building components? Earlier this June in Greenville, Miss., a group of engineers, manufacturers, bureaucrats and farmers gathered to discuss how land formerly cultivated for cotton might be converted to produce bamboo on a massive scale. Teragren, the world’s largest bamboo building products manufacturer, has engineered new structural joists made of imported Moso, a bamboo species with the tensile strength of steel. Teragren VP Tom Goodham says a domestic Moso source is the key to renewable structural timber becoming mainstream and affordable: “The whole bamboo building-products category is just on the cusp of critical mass.”

…was probably the same as mine: a slow-motion scream of “NNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOO” and an instinctive look around for a flamethrower. Trust me. Don’t plant bamboo.

Don’t plant bamboo.

We once had to clean out an old infestation of the stuff, which survived weed killers, herbicides, other chemicals*, machetes, power saws, and plowing up the ground and sowing it with salt. Yes, we actually salted the earth. It didn’t work. We eventually got it under control by hacking away everything above ground level, laying down a tarp, covering it with half a ton of rocks – and then spent the next couple of years hunting down and cutting away every shoot that penetrated the covering. I warned the guy who bought the place from us about the bamboo; I don’t think that he was listening. I don’t know for sure, because I wasn’t about to go back.

Don’t plant bamboo.

Moe Lane

*Which did not include Agent Orange, but only because I didn’t have any.

Also, this movie is a total lie. They get really intense about people having pandas without the right forms.

[UPDATE]: Vladimir in comments reminds me that this is not the first time that I have fulminated about the Demon Bamboo.

They apparently mainstreamed SF conventions a little since I’ve attended them.

Either that, or Australian SF conventions are a bit different than American ones.

Why not? Everything else is.

Moe Lane

PS: Nah, she’s right: basic ethnic similarities aside, she doesn’t look all that much like Boomer. Then again, there are people still grumbling that Boomer didn’t look like Boomer, either.