Bella blooms

Here's a story for the botanically inclined. One of the world's largest flowers, this one grown domestically but the specimen originally from Sumatra, Indonesia, is about to bloom. Apparently it's very rare to have a Titan arum bloom in cultivation, though many botanical gardens try. You can even watch "Bella" on webcam, if so inclined.

She is scheduled to bloom tomorrow. The webpage's FAQ says that upon blooming, the plant emits a strong, foul odor like an animal carcass, dung or rancid cheese, which in the wild supposedly brings carrion and dung beetles and sweat bees from miles around to help pollinate it. The "flower" is actually an "inflorescence" of hundreds of tiny flowers. Cool stuff.

Props to fark.com for the link.

Update on Saturday night:

Bella is on the move. I can't say this is the prettiest flower I've seen. :)



Sunday afternoon (wonder if she's stinky yet):

Gas thieves

It's one way to beat high gas prices- help yourself from your neighbor's tank.

I work next to a large charity that attracts all sorts of characters, and we share their parking lot. Several days this week have noticed my gas tank door open after work. One day, the gas cap itself was unscrewed, which is not something that could happen by itself. Judging from the gas gauge, I wouldn't have noticed any gas missing- if they got some, it was a small amount. However, I read in this article that there has been a rash of gas thefts outside BART stations and typically the thieves do steal small amounts. Maybe this is how they get away with it- a quick fly-by rather than a long siphoning session. Or, being that it's a newer car, they might not have been able to beat the anti-siphoning measures.

In any case it's ironic and sad that people coming to a charity take it upon themselves to appropriate this sort of "charity," too.

Theoretically, my gas tank door shouldn't be able to be pried open from the outside, but that theory is obviously down the drain. Any advice or commiseration?

Pigweed & baking soda

Doesn't sound like much of a recipe, does it?

I've long been intrigued by food history, especially peasant food. This week's CSA newsletter has a great essay on pigweed, which sounds more edible in its Spanish appellation, quelites. Human beings have always been resourceful about finding sources of nutrition. Native Americans used both the leaves and the seeds of this plant. In our day of mass-produced and processed McFood, we pass by "weeds" as inedible and wouldn't know how to cook them if we had to.

As I wrote last week about the virtues of recovering the buried secrets of old cities, keeping them from passing out of memory, I fear the secrets of folk housekeeping and cooking are also being lost. I have been learning about "green cleaning" from a few books lately, Green This by Deirde Imus and Better Basics for the Home by Annie Berthold-Bond. In the past I have seen "green" with a bit of a suspicious eye, thinking it as just one more designer lifestyle in our modern marketplace of lifestyles. The latter book, especially, highlights that greening represents a return to how our grandmothers did things before we became convinced that the latest Woolite or Swiffer product was needed to keep our homes clean. The recipes in that book are a small treasure trove of nearly-forgotten folk wisdom. (Full disclosure: I love my Swiffer dry mop, which picks up hair better than anything and thus means I don't have to wet-mop the bathroom nearly as much. Although after I get through my box of disposable cloths, I plan to use washable microfiber cloths on it, which makes it a greener tool.)

With the small steps I've been taking to simplify and green my cleaning, I have been entirely converted. I stared in amazement at my bathroom mirror, cleaned almost effortlessly to a high sparkle with a homemade cleaner (white vinegar, water, a dribble of Trader Joe's eco-friendly dishwashing liquid, and some essential oils for scent) and a microfiber chamois cloth. I fought less with streaks than I used to do with that neon blue stuff. In another triumph, I was amazed at how easily a stubborn patch of mildew came off after I soaked it with a tissue that had some tea tree oil on it, and the next day scrubbed with a toothbrush and a paste of lemon juice and salt. Baking soda, too, has wonderful and myriad applications. A friend uses a shaker bottle of baking soda as her staple cleaner. She uses baking soda and cornstarch 1:1 as a deodorant, something I also plan to try, since I read more and more dire things about the aluminum salts in antiperspirant.

Since my "conversion," I am more attuned to the wiles of advertising put out by cleaning product companies. These commercials insist you need to drench every inch of your home with antibacterial or your children will wilt with disease. An ad for antibacterial floor cleaner shows a baby happily crawling across a white tile floor, presumably just treated with the floor cleaner. Meanwhile, some of the most common substances used in antibacterial products are toxic in themselves. And ironically, antibacterial zeal may actually harm childrens' immunity to disease, besides increasing the amount of fumes and dyes in our already chemical-drenched homes and aerosol components into the atmosphere. I have come to see that the advertisers have really done a number on women since World War II, when a lot of modern cleaning products began to be developed. Our sense of what is clean and healthy is the smell of ammonia or chlorine, the pearly white of bleached paper. This advertising is so effective, it overrides what our intuitive sense would tell us if we were listening. If you get lightheaded and nauseous from cleaning your house, as I used to on big cleaning days, is that not telling you something?

One advantage to the modern lifestyle is that, as with reading about quelites on a CSA blog, it can put us in touch with the folk wisdom from other grandmothers besides our own. As I've talked these things over with a Mexican co-worker, I've discovered that some Mexicans still use some of the methods in Berthold-Bond's book; for instance, preferring boiled lye soap shavings to modern laundry detergents, the latter deemed inferior. Meanwhile I doubt Great-Great-Great-Grandma in Ireland had access to tea tree oil, although she likely had some other way to deal with mold. Humans are resourceful, as I said. It was their challenge to deal with limited resources, as it still is in less developed countries. It is our challenge to apply resourcefulness in resisting some of the abundance with which our culture presents us.

Add a shot of cinnamon

Cinnamon coffee is my favorite, but is not easy to come by. So in a pinch or at the office, I shake some ground cinnamon into my coffee almost every day. The grittiness is a little unpleasant but you get used to it.

I turned this habit of taste into a more regular habit when I came across some news about the health benefits of cinnamon. Here's another article that details this. Cinnamon is anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial, stimulates brain function, and helps regulate blood sugar. Researchers found that it accomplished the latter even in rats fed a high-fructose diet. In case you don't read labels, a lot of bottled, canned and boxed food these days, even savory food, is loaded with high-fructose corn syrup. You almost can't get away from it even if you try. So we need all the help in metabolizing it that we can get.

Here's a plug for a shot of cinnamon in your coffee, warm milk, or on your toast or bagel. It's not a bad way to take your medicine!

Just call me hopalong

Actually, hopping would be a bit too energetic an image for how I'm moving. But I am moving, and recovering well. My doctor says I'm doing better than some athletes she treats- we think this is because of prayers.

I'm back to work now, not terribly comfortably so, but it does seem good to get back into some normal routine. I'm still in a full leg brace for another week or so, which leads to a lot of stares and some comments. I'm gaining a great deal of sympathy for people who deal with handicaps on a more permanent basis. Now that I'm off crutches, Pavel says that means I'm "handi-capable."

But enough of the vagaries of my medical condition. While being cloistered up at home for two weeks, I was often too drowsy to read so ended up watching some TV. Besides following the Mike Nifong/Duke lacrosse hearing on CourtTV, I can mention two series on the History Channel that I've been watching with interest. One is Cities Underground, which looks below the surface of such cities as Berlin, New York, Istanbul, Paris and Edinburgh, Scotland, for bunkers, aqueducts, catacombs, subway and train tunnels, etc. Since taking an interest in urban planning while I lived in NYC, "the unseen city" is a subject that I've come to find fascinating. Every city- at least every old city- has an incredible wealth of secrets that are always at risk of being forgotten. This series finds the people who ferret these out and revel in them, and picks their brains for some highlights.

A less familiar but nonetheless intriguing series is called Ice Road Truckers. It looks at the lives and work of men in Canada's Northern Territories, specifically those who make supply runs across a network of ice roads for 60 days out of the year. I admit the appeal dimmed a bit when I learned that it's all for the sake of diamond mines, and the series only gives brief and tantalizing glimpses of native life in the region, but still it's a good hour of TV. One thing I enjoy is that while the area and its challenges present entirely new information to me, the blue-collar perspective and humor of the truckers is all too familiar and appreciated.

Leg up

My quietness of late is due to the fact that I'm recovering from knee surgery (ACL reconstruction). I'm spending my days propped up on pillows being nursed by my wonderful husband, and when I can stay awake, reading Early Medieval Philosophy: A Short Introduction by John Marenbon or listening to CD's of the very entertaining novel The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips. One of the benefits is not being chained all day to a computer monitor, so this will likely be my last blog for a while. God bless!

Ghost Stories

At my bedside the past several months have been two books, Ghost Stories by Roald Dahl and Myths of the Norsemen. Dahl's book is a collection he edited, not a collection of his own works, though his skill with the short story is put to good use here. Many of them are proper ghost stories set in an Irish or English country house; one fine tale, written by a Norwegian, is about a terror of the sea.

The Norse and Germanic myths also very often have the quality of a ghost tale. There is the story of the Wild Huntsman, Odin, god of the wind. He was said to ride the winds of a midwinter storm, gathering to him the souls of the dead. The sound of his hounds' baying was considered a presage of pestilence or war, though if one dealt piously with the hunt (known in England as the Herlathing), there might be rewards.

Such tales are perhaps not the most conventional of bedtime reading, but I consider them a fit accompaniment to the twilight of wake-sleep. Isn't it traditional to tell a ghost story after dark? I am sure that the myths were often told after dinner as the fire flickered down. I like them because twilight is a time of imagination, and my mind goes to rest more easily with the image of a huntsman crossing the night sky than with thoughts of checkbook balances and shopping lists.

As a Christian, these stories are a reminder to me both of what our ancestors knew, and of the deeper truths they came to receive. It is difficult in our scientific age to understand how such tales were heard by those who lived in a world where electricity did not crowd out the night stars and where silence could be both deep and long. When do we even know a single moment of true silence, let alone a whole terrifying, glorious night of it? Some of those who heard and repeated these tales may have truly believed that there was a great figure in the sky on an eight-foot horse; I doubt it was the general belief. That did not matter. "Can you reproduce it in a laboratory?" was not a concern of theirs. A howling January storm coming across the night sky was a wild hunt, and it still is, were we only as attuned to the spiritual realities of the created world as those in earlier ages. The shaking of the earth by Yahweh's finger or under the burden of its own decay is even more terrible, yet we know the Lord of Creation's holy name, and know the story of His Son who brought light into the world. I am naturally grateful that in time we heard the fulfillment of the lessons taught by creation and by human imagination, which were not untrue, just incomplete.

In the most recent issue of Touchstone, several authors reflect on what it means for us that a lion tears at live flesh or a micro-organism skillfully brings down a much more complex being, and wonder why we are so fascinated by such things. Denyse O'Leary describes the foundering of Intelligent Design arguments that do not take into consideration chaos, suffering and loss as well as purpose and glory. She writes, "...Stephen Jay Gould was merely being tendentious when he dismissed our deep-seated fears of monsters as commercial hype. As a paleontologist, he well knew that, before humans ever walked the earth, there were terrible beasts on land and sea- far more so than today. But his evolutionary-psychologist opponents are even more off the track. Any human who is gifted with the mere capacity to imagine fears the serpent's sudden fang and the ghost's spectral finger. That's simply what imagination is; it bodies forth the shape of things unknown. Imagination, not some complex surival calculus, is our true inheritance from our ancestors."

When pagan Europeans first embraced Christianity, we did not release our myths. We changed them subtly, adapting them to a Christian understanding of man and nature. Some of these Christian re-tellings are more horrible than the originals. Odin's ride, for instance, morphed into the Pied Piper of Hamelin (rats being a figure for the souls of the dead) and into an even more dreadful specter, Bishop Hatto.

In our own day, we allow popular culture to supply our thrills and chills. I have heard it argued that the horror film is a quintessentially Christian genre, as with other speculative fiction (see link at left to the Sci-Fi Catholic). You have to search long and hard for a good horror film, however. I plan to continue remembering the old myths, collecting books of folk tales and fairy tales, and I'm not sorry I trusted Roald Dahl to sift through modern ghost stories for a few gems. We can long for the fulfillment of heaven, where all is light. But as long as we have real fears, giving them names is, as it always was, a way to tame the night.

Weekend notes

We get a lot of greens and salad in our CSA box, so this means I spend an hour or two a week ruffling my fingers over green things soaking in water. No amount of engineering could come up with a product as useful as water. Dirt sinks to the bottom of the container as the greens soak. Bits of grass or decayed leaves or the occasional stow-away insect float away from the vegetables as though bidden to do so, staying in the container when I lift the vegetables out. The water forms a kind of mirror which allows me to see and sort out bad leaves.

I marvel about this every time.

Last evening after dinner I went out to my little balcony garden and did some trimming and watering. One of the virtues of growing plants is that they are allowed to surprise you. They're living things and will only allow themselves to be manipulated so much. They do unexpected and unexplainable things. In one pot I have two fuschia plants. One of them has consistently bloomed like a riot. The other one for no reason I can explain dropped every single flower one day, though remaining green and healthy. Same pot, two personalities. The flowerless one is now full of pink buds again, which however have been remarkably stubborn about opening up. Last night I noticed that fuschia has little berries on it that look like tiny pearl grapes, this too a surprise.

How anyone can be a scientist and an atheist astounds me.

I've been reminded lately that it was not always this way. Last week I went to the library and noticed the books-on-CD section. Since my favorite radio station was recently turned into a country (!) station and the dial is appallingly empty of a good substitute, I decided to browse and ended up taking home a lecture series, The History of Science by Dr. Lawrence Principe of Johns Hopkins University. It's excellent- see link here. One of the things he covers is how different ancient notions of science were from the modern, more restricted definition. The word scientist is a modern invention and was scorned for decades after its coinage. Prior to this, those who did science were known as "natural philosophers," and many of the greats considered their work subject to or a part of metaphysics. What a sensible notion! They did not eschew their debt to philosophy and theology or try to pretend to be above them.

I seem to be drawing Aristotle and Plato to me lately like a magnet, and growing in admiration for them, their forbears and students, as I do so. How impoverished a world is modern science in comparison, so focused on quantifying and putting things into little technological packages, and meanwhile how grand the scientists' notion of themselves in the secular world, and how much faith our culture places in them. By now many of us realize that technology will not save us. That doesn't stop the peddlers from trying to push the idea on us, taking science as a religion and thus stretching it out of sensible proportions. I'll take the Greeks, thank you- even the pagan ones.

Speaking of which, I will soon get back to posting Bradshaw Aristotle East and West notes. They're sitting on my laptop waiting to be uploaded.

***

Now a plug for one of my links, the Simply in Season cookbooks put together by Mennonite laypeople and missionaries. I received one as a wedding present and find it's great for figuring out what to do with your CSA vegetables. Here's a recipe I've made a few times that we like:

Spinach Squares

Combine 3 eggs, 1 cup milk, 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour (I substitute regular wheat flour and it seems fine), 1 tsp baking powder. Add in 1/2 lb washed, drained, and chopped fresh spinach or sorrel and 3 cups shredded cheese. I also put some s&p and some chopped scallions or chives in. Put into a greased square pan and bake at 350 degrees for 35-40 minutes (the recipe calls for 30-35 but I find it's sometimes underdone).