Better

Today at Rancho Deluxe

An illustrated story.

There were mushrooms.

There was monkey grass, AKA Liriope:

My flowering cherry tree has produced inedible fruit:

Crabapples - there are tons of crabapples:

My catalpa tree has somewhat recovered from its partial denuding by Sphinx moth caterpillars:

There were flars:

My grape crop is coming in nicely:

My walnut trees are producing walnuts:

And since I planted the walnuts that those trees grew from these are, in some regard, my grand walnuts. 

Then the sun set:

The end.

Ah! Mes Amis - La Fille du Régiment

It is summer

It has been very hot and dry lately. Last time I mowed the lawn it was like a dust storm out there:

Today I decided to prune some shrubberies and cut down some poke weeds. The latter were close to 8 feet tall and amazingly well built for a weed. They were overgrown with wild grape plants and vines covered with stickers. While dragging the prunings back to the burn pile I noticed that the spiders in my boxwood shrubs are back:

I don't much care for boxwoods but I am glad they provide a nice home for millions of spiders.

But that's not what I am here to talk about. Nope, what I am here to discuss today is Heracleum Mantegazzinum, which although it sounds Italian, is actually an extremely dangerous member of the carrot family. Looks benign enough:

Link to more information.

Contact with the sap can lead to months of pain or blindness. It causes phytophotodermatitis and while that rolls trippingly off the tongue, I really don't want to experience it. Poison ivy is bad. Poison oak, bad. Poison sumac, worse. Heck, after a lifetime of working with freshly cut black walnut I have now gotten sensitized to the point that I get contact dermatitis when the sap gets on my skin. So when I read that this noxious plant is now invading my space I became concerned. Now I hope I have enough sense to avoid it should I encounter it in the wild.

Where is a flame thrower when you need one?

Did someone say "Italian"?

Shelley

Percy Bysshe "Please" Shelley wrote a poem. I have heard the poem and liked it but never paid attention to the author thereof.

You may be familiar with Mark Twain's critical takedown of James Fennimore Cooper's work, it is well worth reading, although on the point of "using the wrong word" the same can be said about Twain. The English language changes rapidly enough that what Cooper thought was the correct word sounded odd to Twain, and now a hundred years on, the same can be said about Twain. But other than that his criticism is well aimed.

I recently read Twain's takedown of Shelley's biographer Edward Dowdin entitled In Defence of Harriet Shelley. Twain, being a plain spoken midwesterner cuts right to the chase and calls out Dowdin's denial of the facts of Harriet Shelley's life and Dowdin's inability to point out just what a bad person Shelley was. He was a walking, talking horrorshow of a human being. Nothing he did in life was defensible. That he died young, either on purpose or in an accident is actually a saving grace - he was no longer able to abuse others with his charm and wit.

While Twain's account of Shelley's life is not linear enough for me to follow I did read the Wikipedia page about Shelley. That cleared up some of the timeline for me and helped me with the names of the players involved. What a slagheap of humanity. Blighters, one and all.

Here is the poem - for all of his moral failings the boy did have a way with words. I turned on the CC so I could understand it - Bryan "Comrade" Cranston does not enunciate well:

Link.

I think that poem applies to Shelley's life, to Obama, and countless others. But that's just my opinion.

Hey, the big dummy died in Italy, so why not?

Did someone say baseball?

Live, from the Met

I read that today's broadcast will be "Il Trovatore", which immediately made me think of this:

Some days you just want to draw your sword and start fighting government officials, just sayin'.