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Screw U: The Next Bubble May Be Higher Education
Top mismanagement needs its goons. Without them they are vulnerable.— August 13, 2012 5 p.m.
Eye gnat infestations in south Escondido – end of local organic food farming?
How can they have a "program" in ecology without botany?— August 13, 2012 4:57 p.m.
League of California Cities Touts Openness but Shuns Disclosure Requirements
Well, I'll be GOL-danged! THANK you for straightening me out. However, a quick search turns up some uncertainty and different interpretations. For example, at http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=… This brief essay also sounds credible: The meaning of the word nunnery in Hamlet is one of those things that everyone seems to remember thinking about in a high-school class, but no one can quite recall the details of. Let's get the obvious out of the way first: the word nunnery means 'a convent', and has since the thirteenth century. The next question is, "Has the word nunnery ever referred to a brothel?" The answer is yes. The hard part is the next question: "In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act III Scene i, when Hamlet tells Ophelia 'Get thee to a nunnery', is he talking about a convent, or a brothel?" The evidence for nunnery in the sense 'brothel' during this period is not large. The existing citations--from Nashe, Fletcher, and others--generally show that the word was used in a highly contextual manner, when the whole frame assumed a series of puns and double entendres. The word is not used in neutral situations where one "knows" the meaning, which is not otherwise mentioned. So the assertion that the meaning 'brothel' would have been "obvious" or "crystal clear" to an audience at the time is at best dubious. In Hamlet, the "nunnery" exchange happens just after the "To be or not to be" speech. In the space of thirty lines, Hamlet tells Ophelia five times to go to a nunnery, in slightly different forms. While it is a matter of interpretation, an honest reading strongly suggests that Hamlet is using the literal sense here. He speaks against having children ("Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners" [some critics feel that this should be punctuated as "Why, wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners," with the "Why" an interjection, not an interrogative]), tells her to distrust men ("We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us"), tells her not to marry and disparages the institution of marriage ("I say we will have no moe [more] marriage"). It makes perfect sense, under the circumstances, for Hamlet to be telling Ophelia to go to a convent and remove herself from the fleshly world. To assume that Hamlet is really referring to a brothel would go completely against the character of everything he is saying. It is possible that the 'brothel' sense could be meant to give an additional twist of underlying irony. But I think that 'convent' is the meaning intended in this passage. This belief is the generally accepted one among Shakespeare scholars. Thanks, Don, for providing me this entree into this errand.— August 12, 2012 10:11 p.m.
Screw U: The Next Bubble May Be Higher Education
Senator Yarborough once told me, "Son, when you want a man's cooperation, it's best not to threaten him." So while I agree in principle, I believe that middlemismanagement must be pruned first; topmismanagement has more power to evade and destroy any direct attempt at threatening their perks and prerogatives.— August 12, 2012 9:59 p.m.
Eye gnat infestations in south Escondido – end of local organic food farming?
Yes, but managing soil depletion is much more complex than crop rotation, which is long on fraud and short on substance. I am talking about mixing crops, minimizing cultivation, and mimicking other ecosystem processes as a means toward limiting exploitation and much of the resource inputs, including work and money. This is all counterintuitive, of course, but wild and free vegetation (actually ecosystems, which go far beyond vegetation) systems are far more efficient and productive than cultivated ones. Cultivation (from the Latin *cultus*, the root of culture (ain't irony grand?), destroys ecosystems (which have limits, but require zero external inputs), and replaces them with highly dependent "systems" that only provide the illusion of increased productivity due to things like fertilizer and water taken from other systems in a grand scheme of robbing Peter to pay Paul and never having any intention of paying Paul back. Cultivation kills organisms which produce fertilizers (so to speak) and/or convert unavailable nutrients to available ones. By minimizing cultivation, the benefits of some ecosystem functions can be retained and used to produce high-quality food at lower cost and investment without hurting profit margins. This is what needs to be developed. Doesn't SDSU have an ecology department anymore?— August 12, 2012 9:53 p.m.
League of California Cities Touts Openness but Shuns Disclosure Requirements
O, Hamlet, wherefore art thou, when we needest thou the most? Or am I mixed up?— August 11, 2012 11:31 p.m.
Screw U: The Next Bubble May Be Higher Education
Cut middlemismangement.— August 11, 2012 11:27 p.m.
Eye gnat infestations in south Escondido – end of local organic food farming?
Actually, there is a lot of room for improvement in how we saps handle the nutrition/energy cycle. Had we managed the great herds that included bison in the 19th century, we would have plenty of healthy protein instead of empty calories from wheat surrounding South American beef (where similar ecological travesties have been committed), and it would all have been comparatively free and non-toxic--you know, SUSTAINABLE. First came laziness, then came burdensome work, when all we had to do is to stay in Eden. For example if Bee Wise wuz wiser, the would worry less about weeds and grow mixed crops rather than continuously cultivated row crops. Hedgerows of mixed fruit and nut trees and bushes would provide habitat for the mix of species that would do most of the work, without much of the drudgery and expense of maximizing yield.— August 11, 2012 11:25 p.m.
Eye gnat infestations in south Escondido – end of local organic food farming?
When we bought our first house in 1974, our tomatoes were white with white flies. I sprayed. The white flies got worse and additional pests moved in. I stopped spraying. After a year or two, the white flies all but disappeared, our place was loaded with birds (bush tits swarmed all over our citrus, so the scale insects disappeared), and all kinds of predator arthropods started showing up. I let the weeds grow in with the food plants giving gophers and ground squirrels something else to eat and making habitat for insect predators. The more diverse your back-yard ecosystem the lower the boom/bust fluctuations in all populations. Owls and hawks feed on the rodents. Relax. It works. Plenty for you, plenty for them.— August 11, 2012 2:51 p.m.
League of California Cities Touts Openness but Shuns Disclosure Requirements
Well, yes, a fool and his money are soon parted, but intelligence is measured by how long we persist in pursuing the pea. Social mores once governed an individual's sense of honor, now the culture has tipped that old-fashioned principle on its head, and at the last "function" of the local power-brokers I attended, a funeral for the young son of one of them, I heard almost nothing but bragging about how cases had been "won" that struck me as grand screwings. Nothing about the poor kid who had died. All of this is about to bite us all in the ass (to put it mildly), but you can be sure that the guilty will be the last to suffer and suffer the least--until the bell tolls for the entire, as George Bernard Shaw (or was it Wilde?) put it, "Goddamed human race." When predator kills off most of its prey, the predator suffers the consequences of failing to live frugally, and is thus forced into poverty, misery, and even extinction, himself.— August 11, 2012 8:51 a.m.