sastyk | February 28, 2010I really should be working on the book, but just a couple more:
The amazing Louis Jordan performing "There Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens" - fabulous!
I admit, I have a lasting fondness going back to high school (hey, I'm a kid of the 80s, what can I say) for John Mellencamp, and he certainly has worked his ass off to raise comprehension of the farm problem in America - and he's been singing it at FarmAid concerts for decades. I have to include "Rain on the Scarecrow" which makes as much sense now as when I was a kid - maybe that's why I don't even mind his 80s hair:
There are only 4…
sastyk | February 28, 2010There are a few snow showers still falling around here, so that means it has been snowing here continuously since Tuesday morning. We have a little less than 4 feet of snow on the ground. Which makes it hard for me to remember that spring is nearly here - in fact it has been warm through the whole storm, which makes everything heavier and wetter, but is a sign of hope (soon we'll be rid of this white stuff and get floods and six inch mud...woohoo.)
In the face of this, I need some inspiring music for spring. One of my favorite goof-off games is the combining of good music on related themes…
sastyk | February 28, 2010I knew I could count on my fellow Science Blogger Dr. Klemetti for a good take on the physical reality of the Chilean Earthquake, so I checked in this morning, only to see him, quite property, take the MSM to task for inane rhetoric, notably an MSNBC headline that reads "Is Nature Out of Control?"
Klemetti rightly observes that this is bad science. He points out:
Earthquakes happen, and they happen in a random distribution (more or less), meaning sometimes we get more, sometimes less. Spend any time looking at the USGS earthquake feed and you'll see sometimes we have lots of M3+ earthquakes…
sastyk | February 26, 2010Three feet and counting so far. The prediction for the "upper elevations" (that would be us) is that we could get another 1-2 feet before tomorrow night. So while I am lost in meditation of the stunning beauty that surrounds me and trying to locate my woodpile, our car and the dog, all of whom are largely encompassed and hidden by snow, I leave you with some alternate reading.
First of all, in the "deeply sorrowful things" category, Leila, who posted at ye olde blogge as "Bedouina" and "Leila" died this fall. I hadn't realized it - and I feel terrible that I did not realize. The last…
sastyk | February 25, 2010Just a reminder that if you are in the relevant parts of New England, I'm going to be doing a couple of presentations there. First, a week from Saturday, on March 6, I'll be at the NOFA NH annual Winter Conference in Concord New Hampshire all day. I'm both giving the keynote talk about food security and making a place at the table, and also giving a workshop for teens, older kids and their parents about making sustainable living a family affair. There are more than 40 workshops, including some amazing ones. Dave Jacke, Michael Phillips, David Yarrow and a host of other wonderful people…
sastyk | February 25, 2010In a recent previous post "Do You Have to Grow Food" I pointed out that the impact of urban gardening is vastly greater, in the aggregate, than most people believe. We tend to think that little gardens here and there make no difference, but in fact, they add up rapidly. Consider the impact of US Victory Gardens in WWII, for example - in 1944, US Victory gardens, which averaged only about 350 square feet, grew fully half the produce for the US. That is, home gardeners grew as much produce as all the vegetable farms in the US at the time. While it may seem, intuitively that small gardens…
sastyk | February 25, 2010Mother Jones notes that in private interviews, Glenn Beck, fiery loon of the right, privately seems to believe in anthropogenic climate change.
Last week he mocked climate scientists for being "alarmists" who believe that "we're all going to die in a fiery flood." Not long ago he touted the global warming chapter of his An Inconvenient Book as "kryptonite against your Gore-worshipping psycho friends." And in May 2007 he hosted an hour-long television special, Exposed: The Climate of Fear, featuring an all-star lineup of climate change denialists and promising the "other side of the climate…
sastyk | February 24, 2010Note: 1 1/2 feet of snow so far and still falling - we may get more than three by the end (the words "in the higher elevations" are generally the ones you want to listen to when forecasts are made for my area). Power so far, but not expecting it to last. Smaller dog must boing around in snow to keep from being fully submerged. Snowballs are being made. We're getting ready for the arrival of our new buck, Ring Bearer (no, I didn't name him) and for a quantity of baby chicks and ducklings. And it is time to start tomatoes, because despite what it looks like, there will be green stuff out…
sastyk | February 24, 2010Not as off-topic for this blog as it might seem, I thought this (which I found through Gene Expression, one of my new favorite reads) essay on the merits of evolutionary psychology to be a very good and clear way of expressing my doubts on the subject.
He writes:
Daniel Dennett has advanced the opinion that the evolutionary purpose of the cuteness response in humans is to make us respond positively to babies. This does seem plausible. Babies are pretty cute, after all. It's a tempting explanation.
Here is one of the cutest baby pictures I found on a Google search.
And this is a bunny.…
sastyk | February 23, 2010Well, there's sledding, and snowmen, and drinking cocoa. There are board games and lessons (we already homeschool the younger three) and sitting around snuggling. There's room cleaning and barn chores and shoveling. There's music to practice and baking to do and new skills to learn.
And there are books. We're in a particularly good period of reading chapter books - Asher at four is ready and interested in sustained narratives, which means that all four kids are old enough for lengthy read alouds. And everyone has a chapter book - or often two, one with Mom and one with Dad - going at any…
sastyk | February 23, 2010In January, the same month that unemployment "fell" to 9.7% (by which we mean we only lost a few hundred thousand jobs, and we hadn't yet done the inevitable upward revision), we learn that about 20% of Americans were underemployed or unemployed and finding it hard to make ends meet. This compared to the BLS numbers at U6 at 18%, which have been widely criticized, but are still being used. This means that the Labor Departments reliance on the birth-death model in recession. is yet again called into question.
BTW, several commenters correctly pointed out that I made an error in my original…
sastyk | February 23, 2010Some of you will remember that I was whining a few weeks ago that I had snow envy - that I was jealous of the snow folks in the mid-Atlantic were getting, while we Northeasterners, who have come to expect snow, go nothing. Even on the day when there was snow in 49 out of 50 states, my neighborhood didn't get a single flake.
Well, I should have realized that hubris is always properly rewarded - we're expecting to get 26 inches of snow, a couple of ice, some rain, some sleet, wind gusts up to 60mph and etcetera and etcetera over the next four or five days.
My kids are ecstatic - sledding!…
sastyk | February 23, 2010Some of you may have noticed that ye olde blogge, www.sharonastyk.com has been down for a while due to a nasty virus. Well thanks to a reader, Josh, who did a buttload of work out of the kindness of his heart, we're back in business! Woo hoo!
I've finally also figured out how to divvy up the posts between ye olde blogge and here, which will be important when Gleanings Farm (our farm) takes up more of my time, as it will after the book marathon is over.
Sharon
sastyk | February 23, 2010Note: If you asked my sisters, both of whom are deeply stylish, elegant and aware of fashion, who you should call before you called me to discuss issues of style, they would probably come up with about a billion names. And that's because they love me. Anyone else could come up with 3 billion. And yet my phone has been ringing off the hook and my email box is full of interview requests because this is fashion week. Why is anyone calling me, a woman who like the late, great Molly Ivins embodies clothes that make a statement - the statement "woman who wears clothes so she won't be nekkid?"…
sastyk | February 22, 2010Note: It is customary at the Jewish holiday of Purim to give money to charity, and also to give out Mishloach Manot, or gifts of food to friends and family. This week, besides being just a bit more than a month before my book deadline, is the grand baking festival of hamantaschen. Hamantaschen are filled cookies, shaped like the legendary three cornered hat of the bad dude, Haman. We're making about 200 of these, plus unbelievable amounts of spiced almonds and gingerbread, so posting may be light. Also, it is traditional at Purim to get drunk - Purim is a holiday of wild exuberance,…
sastyk | February 21, 2010Because of the enormous impact of agriculture on climate change, pick up any book about "green" solutions and you'll find the suggestions that you grow a vegetable garden. Bang into the "we can't go on as we are" end of the environmental movement (mine), and you'll see the general assumption that growing food is part of any process of adaptation to lower resource use.
This often then morphs into the assumption that all of us should be able to grow all of our food, or a vast majority of it - that sustainability means the country life for everyone. You might think that because I do produce a…
sastyk | February 21, 2010From Alternet, a good piece on what it really means to be one of the six million Americans with no income at all save food stamps:
In March 2009, in the midst of the worst job crisis in at least a generation, Eva opened the last welfare check she will ever receive. She is one of a growing number of people in the United States who can't find work in this recession but don't qualify for government cash assistance, no matter how poor they are or how bad the economy gets.
Without the help of welfare, Eva doesn't have enough money left at the end of each month to feed her daughters full meals.…
sastyk | February 19, 2010Crunchy Chicken , goddess of environmentalism and yours truly have something really, really cool to announce. Actually, no, it is really, really hot - sizzling in fact. Unfortunately, we can't tell you what it is until next week, except that it involves seriously awesome science and extreme hotness.
What we can tell you is that we are planning to donate the profits from our next enterprise to an enviromental charity, but we're having some trouble picking our favorite. So I thought I'd ask you - what environmental charity do you like best? We're taking suggestions!
Cheers,
Sharon
sastyk | February 19, 2010Many of us in the Global North probably have a mental image attached to the word "farmer." Here's a pretty good approximation of most of our impressions of what constitutes "the average farmer."
Most of us probably don't realize that the "average farmer" on a world scale looks rather different. Here's an approximate of what the average farmer looks like:
Or maybe she looks more like this:
Women feed the world, and I mean that quite literally. Worldwide, according to the UN FAO, more than 50% of all the food grown worldwide is produced by women, who constitute close to 60% of the world'…
sastyk | February 18, 2010In keeping with the reminder I got that I should back up a little bit, and present my ideas more coherently for those who haven't encountered them before, I thought I would add a post about why someone might want to start seeds, and how to do it, to supplement the posts on winter sowing and the sowing of perennials from seeds.
New gardeners generally start out by buying their seedling, and depending on where you are getting them, this can be a problem. The destructive wave of Late Blight that hit the tomato crop across the eastern half of the US was derived from seedlings purchased at big-…