Guerrilla Tree Planting

Someone once asked Martin Luther, “What should I do on the last day of earth?” Luther replied, “Plant a tree.”

It’s a wonderful, spiritual thing to plant a tree. Each tree is a living thing that can share the rest of your life. It will grow and give you shade, elegant beauty, food to eat, clean air to breathe, and branches for birds to nest in and children to climb in and for you to hang your hammock on and take a well-deserved nap.

Carla Emery loves trees so much that she came up with the most wonderful idea: guerrilla tree planting.

The idea here is that wherever you are—in an urban or rural area—don’t miss an opportunity to plant new life wherever you see fit. Pick a neglected space on private land or an open one on public land. Then you sneak up and plant your tree there. Plant trees on your holidays. Don’t leave town without some seeds or seedlings in your back seat! Don’t go picnicking or backpacking without a few gifts to the earth in the form of seeds or seedlings: evergreens, or fruit or nut trees. Keep a private tally of how many trees you’ve planted so far and take pride in it. Go back and visit some of them years later and say, “Hi, I’m your parent. My, but you’re looking good!” Expect some losses; it’s okay. Thankfully, Carla Emery has a few tips to make your next guerrilla tree planting venture a success:

Consider your climate

Is your climate subtropical or tropical, or temperate? The amount of sunshine falling on leaves directly affects the plant’s rate of food production in its leaves. The more sunshine there is, the greater the fruit production per acre. The farther north you live, the higher in altitude you are, the shorter your frost-free season.

What is your pollinating situation?

Some nut and fruit trees, and vines (such as kiwi), can’t make fruit alone; they can be either male or female, and they need another tree to be a pollinizer for them in order to bear fruit. Other trees are “self-fruitful” or “self-fertile” or “self- pollinating.” There are trees that are kind of in-between; they’ll produce some harvest, but only a small crop unless they get cross-pollinated by a different plant. Trees that are to be wind-pollinated should be planted within 100 feet of each other.

How much space do you have?

One of the main questions you have to ask when shopping for a tree is, “How big will it get?” Little seedlings can grow into awesome 100-foot giants. When guerrilla planting, make sure you are planting trees that will only grow to a manageable size and won’t require pruning or major upkeep.

No matter what, plant one or more trees every year. And plant as many — or more — as what you take out. If you’re planting various kinds of trees your harvesting will be staggered because they grow at different rates and you may be harvesting different sorts of products from them. You can sell Christmas trees, nuts, maple syrup, firewood, fence posts, sawlogs, and fruit. If you have livestock fodder trees, you can get rich selling pork, because pigs can more easily get a total diet from tree crops than any other animal. So plant some nut, fruit, sugar, stock forage, timber, or woodlot trees every year on your land. And if you don’t have land, or have no more room, then plant them on someone else’s land, doing your share to guarantee our mutual future.

It takes a long time for a tree to grow, and some of them may not make it. And, sooner or later, grown trees, like people, die of old age. But then they can be fuel or building material, or a home for wild things until they finally decay and become food for other trees in the fullest completion of their life cycle. In the space where they once lived, plant new trees, continuing their spirit of hope. Plant a tree for your housewarming, and one for each anniversary, one for farewell — any excuse will do, the more often the better!

BLOG LINK IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

It's not often the New York Times arts section quotes from this blog and links to it, but it has now. I wonder if this will yield any increase in comments. The link back to the NYT article is here.

THE LOST NOTEBOOKS OF HANK WILLIAMS

Bob Dylan's project The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams sees release as an album on October 4th. The most detailed and interesting account I've found about all this comes from the New York Times here.

Did you know there's a Facebook group called Stop the Desecration of Hank Williams Unfinished Songs?!

THAT BOB DYLAN ASIA SERIES AGAIN

Thanks to Wiebke Dittmer again. Here's a 1950 photograph by Dmitri Kessel:

 

and here's another Bob Dylan painting from the Asia Series:

The most striking thing is that Dylan has not merely used a photograph to inspire a painting: he has taken the photographer's shot composition and copied it exactly. He hasn't painted the group from any kind of different angle, or changed what he puts along the top edge, or either side edge, or the bottom edge of the picture. He's replicated everything as closely as possible. That may be a (very self-enriching) game he's playing with his followers, but it's not a very imaginative approach to painting. It may not be plagiarism but it's surely copying rather a lot.

REM'S HOME TOWN: ATHENS, GA

News that REM have split up, after 31 years' existence, makes it seem a good moment to reproduce an article of mine about their hometown, Athens GA, written in 1999 (plus a fraction from 2001) while I was in Georgia researching the life of Blind Willie McTell. Here it is: 

When Shelley wrote “Another Athens shall arise”, he didn’t envisage it as the grunge capital of the South, a sort of Sun Belt Seattle.

This venerable town in rural East Georgia has been enjoying a renaissance based on sheer student numbers and white guitar-based rock bands. This began, or stopped being a local secret, because Athens was hometown to two renowned groups, R.E.M. and the B52s.

I headed there from Atlanta by bus, on Highway 78, a small road through deep woodland with brick bungalows, wooden houses, swathes of grassy farmland, glistening horses, the Full Gospel Holiness Church and ramshackle flea-markets.

I was almost the only person to alight at Athens, where the bus-station waiting-room, two blocks from downtown, is miraculously timeless. I told the manager, who had brought in my suitcase, how good it was to see the pre-war curvaceous wooden bench seating still there. He said yes, it’s been there since 1939 and not even a broken arm-rest. “Can you imagine what all that oak would cost today?”

He’d never heard of my expensive B&B, the, er, Athenaeum… but he found it in Yellow Pages and called me a cab. A mile from the centre, it’s in a leafy street of turn-of-the-century houses, some now frat houses for the university of 30,000 students. Wooden steps led up to a back porch. A pony-tailed young man showed me to an enormous ground-floor room. The room was chinoiserie bourgeoiserie.

It was an autumn afternoon, the air warm and foreign. I sat out on the back porch, near a huge grey cat and two huge ashtrays full of fag-ends - just to confirm that B&B is not like hotel life, I suppose.

I read through the Flagpole Guide to Athens, trying to find clues about real quality in the remorselessly positive write-ups of the restaurants and bars. Their quantity was not in doubt. Athens, population 95,000 - less than Telford - has 48 “American” eateries, plus another 30 doing “Downhome & BBQ”; 14 Asian restaurants; 19 Italians (discounting Pizza Hut, as you should); 10 Mexican; three vegetarian; 14 coffee-houses; and a further 25 miscellaneous food places from Latino to Cajun to German to Middle Eastern to a New Orleans oyster bar.

I had Rebeccas Wells’ deep south novel “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” on the table beside me. People started arriving for a meeting of a preservation society. A crumbling, rheumy-eyed woman in her fifties tottered up the steps in a mauve trouser-suit, spotted the book and asked what I thought of it.

“I have mixed feelings,” I answered. “I -”

“ - Well it’s a women’s book.”

Oh, right: so much for my critical skills.

I took a university bus into town. These are free and run every five minutes during the day. You can’t mistake them: they say THE BUS along their sides. I jumped off by the war memorial (the Civil War, of course: the only one that counts down here), where downtown meets the campus entrance. A notice says this was the earliest state university, and that when “the War for Southern Independence” began, most students joined up and the university closed for two years.

The campus was like the green pastures of Harvard with more luxuriant foliage, including black elephant-ear plants. People walked, cycled and roller-bladed past, often smiling hello. People are polite. It’s creditable that you can walk in unhindered off the street. At the vast main library, scented with old hardbacks, no-one searched my bag.

The autumn weather was hot: 84º [29º celsius] at 4.30pm. Students flowed across the zebra crossing between the campus and downtown, snacking on junk food. Occasionally one had purple hair or self-mutilation jewellery; most just looked pudgy and dead-eyed dull: overgrown American children, already weary from a lifetime’s ease and mass culture. (One girl was writing notes on the film “Pretty Woman” by from Cliff Notes.)

As I transcribed the war memorial’s phantasmagoric prose (“True to the Soil that gave them Birth… to their Ancestors of High Renown… These Heroes - Ours in the Unity of Blood… Reached the Consummation of Earthly Glory… Holiest Office of Human Fidelity Possible to Brave Men… They won their Title to an Immortality of Love and Reverence”) the traffic flowed past, and, living out race clichés, most cars driven by black Athenians pounded out medically dangerous levels of bass and numbing rap lyrics - lyrics exactly as opaque and overblown as the memorial inscription.

Downtown is not one main street, as in Georgia’s smaller towns, but a criss-cross of tree-lined streets, jumbling nineteenth-century to 1960s buildings. As darkness fell they looked like leafy provincial English high streets - except that all the shops that weren’t clothes stores seemed to be bar-cafés, open until 2 or 3am. The mix of students, profs, business types and young townies within was almost all white. In a doorway a black busker played weird runs on an electric guitar you could hear way down the street.

You hear guitars everywhere. There are 300 local groups. Every time a listing is published, half have already disbanded and 150 new bands or new permutations of old ones have replaced them. Most are white guitar-rock. There’s the all-black Common People’s Band but it plays early Tamla-Motown to indifferent frat audiences; most black musicians are DJs or in mixed bands, or play blues or hip-hop outside the middle-class white loop that is The Scene. “De facto segregation influences the music scene as much as any other segment of Athens,” says local journalist Aisha Leuwenhoek.

She says The Scene is allegedly split between frats-and-hippies and townies (“post-punk, gay, pierced, tattooed, commie, country and western, subversive…”) but that the facts don’t fit this theory - thus Vic Chesnutt, charismatic townie genius songwriter now getting a little international recognition, has recorded with local hippy heroes Widespread Panic. Meanwhile, though your waiter may be a muzo who was once big in Belgium, locals who say the Athens renaissance is over are probably just being snobbish.

The crucial thing about Athenian guitar bands is that they’re fiercely anti-Atlanta. Everyone in Athens hates or affects to hate Atlanta: its size, its commuting, its swarms of “beggars and weirdos”, its feverish struggle to Make It. Athens musicians are all duck-tape, grunge and avant garde. Atlanta bands are all cordless mikes and mainstream ambition.

The pressing question is felt to be, though: how long before Athens is absorbed into Atlanta’s commuter-belt? Under ten years, most people fear. The two cities are 70 miles apart.

On apparent borrowed time, then, youthful downtown Athens remains unique: a youthful mix of scuzzy dives with pool tables and black-painted floorboards; fast-food caffs with polystyrene plates and waxed paper drink buckets littering their outside tables and the streets; and polished dark-wood watering holes for obnoxious businessmen and politicians in immaculate clothes pressed for them by the maids and southern-belle women they despise.

In Hollister's, which was dark, empty and congenial, I was alone apart from the short young man playing one of the games machines, who turned out to be the barman. He bore an unfortunate facial resemblance to George W. Bush but was very pleasant, gave me my second Bud Lite free and was helpful with general information about the area. He kept playing Lynyrd Skynyrd on the sound system and was keen on the music of the 1960s and 70s, including the Allman Brothers, and on electric blues. Yet he had never heard of Blind Willie McTell and had no sense that any such important figure from the past came from or belonged to this region.

In the oyster bar at lunchtime next day, surrounded by the politicians and businessmen, I listened perforce to these Tennessee Williams bullies and their ringing phones. (“They just weren’t Athenian type people…”; “He was doin’ the American Dream thing: he got a brand new wife…”) The place exuded pampered plenty but the waitress was comically inept. Maybe she’s a great guitarist.

_______

© Michael Gray 2011

 

Celebrate Fall with a "Pop!"

As the leaves start to change color here in Seattle, the wind starts up and the temperature drops, I can’t help but think that fall is in the air. Just breathing in the cool air conjures up images of steaming hot cider, reading by the fireplace, and taking chilly walks through piles of collected leaves. Of course, one of my favorite aspects of this season is the food—pumpkin and acorn squash and cranberries and anything spiced with cinnamon!

Carla Emery shares my appreciation for fall’s bounty with the delightful crop of maize. It’s a bread, it’s a vegetable, it’s a decoration. The husks can be made into paper, rope, or stuffing. The cobs provide fuel to burn. The stalks and leaves are as good as hay for winter-feeding. The vegetable you might know as corn has a rich history of its own and provides one of my favorite fall snacks—popcorn!

An A-maize-ing History Lesson

The Latin name for corn is Zea mays. The word “Zea” is ancient Greek for “cereal” and comes from the verb “to live.” Similarly, the Native American word for corn was “maize,” which means, “that which sustains.” To Europeans, the word “corn” translates to the hard kernels of any common grain: wheat, oats, barley . . . or maize. That’s why the pioneers called maize “corn” — and why Europeans are still confused when we say “corn.”

Corn was first created by the genius of Native Americans thousands of years ago from an annual grass that had an extraordinarily high natural mutation rate. There’s nothing comparable to it among all the wild grasses; corn was created by farmers’ careful seed selections over the millennia (and is still being thus “created”). All the original corns, of course, were Native American. It was they who originally developed the flour, hominy, pod, popcorn, flint, and dent varieties, and all the colors and color combinations of corn.

POPCORN

Popcorn (Zea mays var. praecox or everta) is the only kind of corn that pops and turns inside out. It is considered by archaeologists to be the most ancient of the corns, popped and served for thousands of years. Popcorn is tougher than other corns (it has an extra hard outer covering called endosperm) and is difficult to work with unless you pop or grind it. When it has some moisture content (about 12 percent) and is heated, pressure builds up inside the tough outer covering that is preventing that water vapor from escaping until the whole thing explodes with a pop!

Popcorn takes longer to mature than most sweet corns. Harvest it as you would other field corns, first drying it in the field. Then hang it in the house like seed corn and dry another 3–4 weeks. The kernels of popcorn need to be hard on the outside in order to get the proper explosion of the remaining moisture at the center of the kernel when it’s heated. Popcorn is also the hardest of all corns to shell. To keep from hurting your hand, shell by rubbing one ear of corn against another or cover your hand with an old sock before you rub kernels away from the cob. Store popcorn in tightly lidded glass jars (so kernels don’t become too dry to pop).

Popping

Dutch ovens are good popcorn poppers. So is an iron frying pan with a lid or a commercial popper. Allow ½ cup dry corn for every 1 gallon popped corn that you want. Melt about 1 T. cooking oil in your Dutch oven or some other heavy pan with a tight-fitting lid. When the oil is hot enough to get broken lines across it and is just starting to smoke, it’s ready for the popcorn. Add the popcorn, cover, and cook over medium heat. Shake the pan on top of the heat constantly until you don’t hear much more popping; then immediately take it off the heat to prevent burning. To butter the popcorn, melt some butter in another small pan, pour it over the popcorn, and stir to mix. Sprinkle with salt if you like.

Classic popcorn is wonderful with just a little butter and salt, but Carla Emery has recipes for some great seasonal gourmet versions as well!

Cinnamon-Raisin Popcorn Mix -- Mix together 2 T. melted butter, 3 T. brown sugar, 1⁄2 t. ground cinnamon, 1⁄4 c. raisins, and about 1⁄4 c. apple chunks. Toss together with 8–10 c. freshly popped popcorn.

Cheese-Coated Popcorn -- Grate cheese to make 1⁄2 cup. Sprinkle cheese onto still-warm popped corn. Mix well. If you bake this for 15 minutes, it will dry out and be a bit crisper.

Honey-Nut Gourmet Popcorn -- Mix together 2 qt. freshly popped corn, 1 c. chopped peanuts, 1 c. raisins, and 1 c. sunflower seeds. Heat 1⁄2 c. honey and 1⁄2 c. water together in a pan, stirring, until you get to hard-ball stage. Add 1⁄2 c. butter and stir to melt. Pour the sweet mix over the dry mixture, stirring until the kernels are all coated. Spread it out on 2 greased cookie sheets. Bake 15 minutes at 350 degrees F.

OCCASIONAL PHOTOS NO. 178b

Another game of ping-pong (photographer unknown):

 

Difficult shoes to play in

MORE ON BOB DYLAN'S OPIUM PAINTING

Ah well, so he's at it again  -  copying or referencing, depending how you see it. Wiebke Dittmer has written to report that Dylan's 'Opium' painting from the Asia Series can't but have been based on a photograph taken in 1910. She writes, very interestingly:

"Bob obviously painted this new work from an old photograph. See link below... To me, it's a fascinating find. I've suspected before that Bob might paint from photographs sometimes, though the main idea / image always was that he makes drawings of things that interest him and paints from those. That's certainly true for the Drawn Blank Series and part of the Brazil Series, but some of the Brazil Series looks very much like good photo opportunities (the Favela pictures come to mind), and one as yet unpublished painting from the Asia Series called "LeBelle Cascade" has been described in the press as "a riff on Manet's 'Le Déjeuner sur L'Herbe' but is, in fact, a scenographic tourist photo opportunity in a Tokyo amusement arcade." We'll have to see about the rest of this new series, but it looks like there will be much to discover, and isn't it just like Bob to find such a vintage photo to paint from? He's doing what he does with old songs in a different medium."

Thanks to Amy Crehore, the photo and the painting were linked, and are juxtaposed, here.

25 YEARS ON: BOB GETTING SNIPPY ABOUT BRUCE

I realise with the usual twitch of hapless surprise that the US and Far East tour with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers was 25 years ago already! Here's one of the shorter entries from The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, about Bob's little rap during the last night's concert in Japan:

Jesus v. Springsteen

On the 1986 tours with TOM PETTY & THE HEARTBREAKERS, beginning in Australia and Japan in February and March, Dylan would nightly regale his audiences with garrulous, slightly mad raps before a number of songs. Disappointingly, these were always roughly the same (i.e. descending to showbiz routine, rather than the spontaneous one-off communications of earlier eras  -  or at least of those when he spoke at all).

            The most effective was the rap that introduced ‘In The Garden’, from the Saved album: a song about Christ. The rap always begins with a short list other people’s heroes, and those on the list varied nightly  -  except that they always seemed to include BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN. The list was particularly nifty in Tokyo on March 10, at his last concert in the Far East. Dylan says:

            ‘This song here’s about my hero. Everybody’s got a hero. Where I come from heroes are . . . John Wayne, Boris Karloff, Henry Winkler, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon. Anyway, I don’t care nothing about any of those people. I have my own hero.’

How to Mind Your Own Beeswax

Lately, I’ve been facing a difficult dilemma. I’ve recently come to the age where I need to start thinking about what I eat. As a kid (and even through high school and college, I have to admit) I pretty much ate whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and rarely experienced any consequences to make me consider changing my behavior. But as I begin to acknowledge my own adulthood, I’m realizing that processed foods—while often tasty and satisfying—might be doing more harm than good in my diet. Refined sugars, for example, are ever-present in packaged food and many dessert recipes, but serve no nutritional purpose. So here is the dilemma: how can I live without the unhealthy sweets for which I yearn on a daily basis?

Luckily, Carla Emery has the answer: honey.

Honey has been around longer than refined sugar and is easier for your body to digest. Honey is composed of simple sugars, mainly fructose and glucose. Best of all, you can substitute honey in nearly any recipe that calls for refined sugar and trade guilt for flavor!

Carla Emery has all kinds of advice for personal beekeeping to pollinate your crops and collect honey, but if you feel a bit squirmy about spending a lot of time with these buzzing pollinators (like I do), you can also buy wholesale honey direct from another beekeeper. If you are purchasing honey from a beekeeper, she suggests buying in 5-gallon quantities to supply an average family for a year.

Storing Honey

Honey keeps easily — better than just about anything else. Unlike most food storage, storing honey at a warm temperature, in a closed bottle, does not result in any loss of flavor. It doesn’t need to be frozen, canned, or even refrigerated. In fact, storing honey in a cool place can actually speed up the granulation process. (Your honey may crystallize into a stiff whitish texture—this is normal and doesn’t harm your honey, but each time you re-melt it your honey may lose some of its flavor and nutrition.) It keeps just fine in glass, plastic, pottery, or metal, inside or outside. But store where it won’t get warmer than 75 degrees Fahrenheit since above that temperature it may lose flavor and color (the higher above 75 degrees F, the faster the change). Ideally, pack your honey in wide-mouthed 1-gallon jars in comfortable room temperature (chilly, stiff honey won’t mix with other ingredients very easily).

Cooking and Baking with Honey

The sweet taste of honey tends to be more concentrated than that of sugar, so you can substitute less honey than the sugar called for and end up with your dish equally sweet tasting. You can substitute honey for sugar in any recipe, but because honey is a liquid you should then also decrease the liquid in the recipe. Carla Emery has a helpful cheat sheet for substituting honey for sugar when cooking:

· 2/3—3/4 cup honey = 1 cup sugar

· ¾ cup honey = add 2-3 T. liquid

· 1 cup honey = add ¼ cup liquid

· Baked goods with honey will brown faster than with sugar, so bake at a temperature 25 degrees lower than called for.

· Honey is acidic. If there is as much as 1 cup of honey in the recipe, you can add ½ t. baking soda (per 1 cup honey) and get a leavening action as well as neutralize the acidic quality.

· Honey is easiest to measure if your measuring container has first held the oil or other fat for the recipe, or if you first coat the spoon or cup with oil (or with nonstick pan-coating spray). Then the honey won’t stick in the measuring container and you’ll be able to get it all back out easily.

· Combine honey with other liquids in the recipe.

· If liquid isn’t called for in your recipe (like for cookies) add 4 T. additional flour for each ¾ cup honey.

· Cakes, cookies, and breads will be moist and stay fresh longer because of honey’s moistness.

And here are a couple of Carla Emery’s mouth-watering recipes to try without losing an ounce of sweetness!

Honey-applesauce cookies:

Cream together 1 ½ cup honey and 1 cup shortening. Add 2 beaten eggs and beat mixture until smooth. Add 2 t. soda to 2 cups applesauce. Sift in 2 t. cinnamon, 1 t. nutmeg, 1 t. salt, and 3 ½ cups flour. Stir in 2 cups quick-cooking oats (or rolled wheat), 2 cups raisins, and 1 cup walnuts. Drop on cookie sheet with a spoon. Bake at 325 degrees F for 10 minutes.

Honey-Fudge Brownies:

In a saucepan over low heat, melt together ½ cup butter, 2 squares unsweetened chocolate, ½ t. salt, and 1 t. vanilla. Mix well. Remove from heat. Blend in 1 cup honey, ½ cup unsifted flour, and 1 t. baking powder. Add 2 well-beaten eggs. Beat the mixture well. Pour into a thoroughly greased 9-inch-square pan. Bake at 325 degrees F for 35 minutes (or until done in center). Cool on wire rack 15 minutes before marking in 16 squares.

Straight Talk: Everything You Need in a Phone with good quality and low cost

This post brought to you by Straight Talk. All opinions are 100% mine.

Fed up with huge phone bills, only half of the amount used and contracted telecom services? Here is everything you need in cell phone without a contract, No surprised bills but much saved cell phone facility with Straight Talk. The Straight Talk is the fortune for the people to have the right plan. For example the Talk $30 plan gives you 1000 minutes talk and 1000 text along with 30MB of data(Ask for “All You Need Plan”). It offers 411 calls at any extra charge for the users so check out this Hook, line and sinker.

<iframe width="560" height="345" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/khiWqJG24d4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

There is a testimonial from the user “I love the idea that I feel richer with Straight Talk because I cut my cell phone bill in half. You have to be crazy to be on a contract these days when you can get everything you need without one.” This is not just the words by mouth but by heart and the appreciation for the real services from Straight Talk. You can trust it with no doubt because Straight Talk uses only trusted phones like Nokia, Motorola, LG, Samsung, Kyocera and etc. Most important to mention here is that there is no activation/reactivation or termination fees.

 

Much spent roaming charges are no more, Loss of connectivity is no more, bad reception quality is no more because of the best quality low cost services from Straight Talk available only at Wallmart. Many people are wasted so much like $70 to $100 per month but not much used but the plan of $45 for 30 days from Straight talks makes people rich with unlimited calls, text and data services with Hook, line and sinker.  Just imagine the amount that are saved by using straight Talk per year.. I hope one can save at least $600 in a year by just using the Straight talk $499.00 Year plan with Everything you need.

 

People can select the reconditioned phones which are available from $10 with camera, mp3 player and web access, blue-tooth and all other latest technology phones like this Todo lo que necesitas. There are also latest smart phones and touch screen phones with all the app capabilities. So, what are you thinking still? Just Call a friend and enjoy your telecom journey with Straight Talk

Straight Talk: Everything You Need in a Phone with good quality and low cost

This post brought to you by Straight Talk.  All opinions are 100% mine.


    Fed up with huge phone bills, only half of the amount used and contracted telecom services? Here is everything you need in cell phone without a contract, No surprised bills but much saved cell phone facility with Straight Talk. The Straight Talk is the fortune for the people to have the right plan. For example the Talk $30 plan gives you 1000 minutes talk and 1000 text along with 30MB of data(Ask for “All You Need Plan”). It offers 411 calls at any extra charge for the users so check out this Hook, line and sinker.

 

    There is a testimonial from the user “I love the idea that I feel richer with Straight Talk because I cut my cell phone bill in half. You have to be crazy to be on a contract these days when you can get everything you need without one.” This is not just the words by mouth but by heart and the appreciation for the real services from Straight Talk. You can trust it with no doubt because Straight Talk uses only trusted phones like Nokia, Motorola, LG, Samsung, Kyocera and etc. Most important to mention here is that there is no activation/reactivation or termination fees.


   


    Much spent roaming charges are no more, Loss of connectivity is no more, bad reception quality is no more because of the best quality low cost services from Straight Talk available only at Wallmart. Many people are wasted so much like $70 to $100 per month but not much used but the plan of $45 for 30 days from Straight talks makes people rich with unlimited calls, text and data services with Hook, line and sinker.  Just imagine the amount that are saved by using straight Talk per year.. I hope one can save at least $600 in a year by just using the Straight talk $499.00 Year plan with Everything you need.


   


    People can select the reconditioned phones which are available from $10 with camera, mp3 player and web access, blue-tooth and all other latest technology phones like this Todo lo que necesitas. There are also latest smart phones and touch screen phones with all the app capabilities. So, what are you thinking still? Just Call a friend and enjoy your telecom journey with Straight Talk

OCCASIONAL PHOTOS NO. 194

George reading D.A.Pennebaker's book of the film Dont Look Back:

 

photographer unknown

Cow Psychology 101

I once had the opportunity to milk a cow on a small farm in Northern California. Sitting on a low stool, leaning towards the underside of the cow, I was awed by the sheer size massive mammal allowing me to glean nourishment from her body. Though I was nervous, the owner coached me through the milking and assured me that I was not hurting her in any way. It was a fascinating process and helped me to appreciate the origins of some of the food I regularly consume. Up until then, I had always just grabbed a carton of 2% milk from the refrigerator in the supermarket and thought no more of it. Considering our dependency on cattle for enriching our diets, Carla Emery encourages us to learn a bit more about cows and they way they think and behave, instead of taking them for granted.

Worldwide there are literally hundreds of beef, dairy, and dual-purpose cattle breeds and at least 35 common ones—including both dairy and beef—in the United States. Among the many breeds, cows vary wildly in gentleness from a sweet pet of a Jersey family milk cow to a huge, mean, wild range bull. All cows are powerful, however, and have the potential to do serious damage if the handler doesn’t fully understand the way they think and behave. Here is a little Cow Psychology 101 to help with safe cow handling.

Cow psychology is very much influenced by the design of a cow’s body—her senses work differently from ours, which is important to understand when handling cows.

• A cow’s strongest sense is her smell. She can smell her calf 3 or 4 miles away. A bull can smell a cow in heat that is miles away.

• Cattle have good hearing, too, and respond well to auditory cues and calls. They dislike high-pitched sounds like the crack of a whip.

• A cow has 360° panoramic vision. She can actually see beside and behind herself without turning her head. This means that she can put her hind foot into the bucket or kick it over on you and it’s not a lucky accident for her. However, cows cannot see color. Everything is black and white to them, so it doesn’t matter what you wear. They are very sensitive to stark black and white contrasts, though, and have poor depth perception. White lines painted across a road can look like a cattle guard to them. It’s hard for a cow to tell the difference between a shadow and a hole in the ground so a dark shadow can scare her into going around it.

• Your cow’s closest relative on the farm is the sheep. They’re both herd-oriented, humble animals. (For least stress and best production keep 2 or more calves or cattle.) Like sheep, cowherds form social hierarchies with a ‘boss cow’ the others follow. Large cattle herds will form smaller subherds with an order of dominance in each group.

Carla Emery’s Golden Rule for Safe Cattle Handling: Move your cattle patiently, quietly.

Cows are frightened of new places and are made nervous by changes in their daily routine. They don’t take easily to learning anything new and they actually resent being forced to do anything.

1. Avoid exciting or hurrying them because a running cow does its own unpredictable thing whereas a slowly walking one is likely to go where you want. The safest and smoothest approach is true patience and a plan to outsmart rather than outfight them.
2. Cows follow the leader. If you can coax the first 1 or 2 through a gate, etc., the rest are likely to follow naturally.
3. To turn a cow you can make some noise and make yourself look large by waving your arms widely, but do this from an angle, not right in front of the animal because you may lose. Standing straight ahead in the cow’s way invites you getting knocked down and hurt.
4. Teach your cattle to come to a certain familiar call to get a treat of grain or a bale of hay. When you feed them frequently and handle them gently they learn to trust and depend on you. Then you can call and lead them where you want. Always follow the call with the food reward or they’ll lose faith. (This, of course, works best if they’re hungry!)

TOM HIBBERT

I'm sorry to read of the death of Tom Hibbert, the brilliant music journalist whose "Who the Hell Is...?" series was the best thing about Q magazine back when Q was the music mag.

OCCASIONAL PHOTOS No. 206

And Louise holds a handful of ants...

OCCASIONAL PICTURES NO. 231

This Ace Records compilation, released last year, escaped my notice until internet randomness brought it to my attention this morning:

Most of you will know at least some of these, and they include that great version of 'From A Buick 6' by Gary US Bonds (which, as it happens, I included in a Dylan compilation album issued decades ago now); but I'd like to mention a lesser-known track on How Many Roads  -  and that is 'I Shall Be Released' by Freddie Scott. I've not heard it and it might not be all that good, but Freddie Scott is always worth looking out for. His slow, ineffably soulful 1960s version of the normally fast-paced 'I Got A Woman' by Ray Charles was one of those singles I played to myself compulsively in adolescence. It still sounds tremendous. He also made a cover of Van the Man's 'Brown-Eyed Girl' and after a 15-year silence made one last album in 2001. He died in 2007. There's a good brief biography of him by Jason Ankeny here.