Mid-week odds & ends

Rose, Pete - Always liked the guy as a scrappy player for the Reds. Hard to believe he'd throw a game just to make a few bucks betting, but when you break the rules and then lie about it, you've given them enough rope to really hang you. 
June rain - TPP has recorded 7.25 inches of rain this month when the area usually averages around 4.25 inches for the whole month. It's raining now and heavy rains are predicted over night. Never seen the soil so wet for so long in the summer. Weeds pull pretty easy, but all this rain makes them grow like crazy and totally weeded beds now need weeding again.
Lilies - June is lily month in our gardens. Mrs. Phactor likes her lilies, daylilies, oriental lilies, tiger lilies, all types. So some colorful masses of color are gracing the gardens, now if life just allowed us to sit on the patio a bit more and enjoy the show.
Sarah Palin - You know your irrelevance factor is climbing fast because our country's favorite incoherent commentator did not have her Phlox News contract renewed. Now she's really yesterday's news. Makes her quest for cash a lot tougher.
Confederate flag - TPP's Mother was a southerner from Mississippi. But she had the poor white perspective on race where you both lived the same way, sometimes right across the dirt road from each other, so played with their kids, and you understood that the differences were those of opportunity and money. And she got out via marriage. She'd cheer for the Arkansas Razorbacks or Mississippi women in beauty contests, but that was as much support for the "south" as she had. She did love gardenias.
Father's Day - The F1 remembered her Dad and brought many little gifts: rambutan, papaya, pepino, a blue cheese, a raclette cheese, some fancy coffee, a tamarind concentrate, and sour patch kid candies. How thoughtful! Rambutan in USA markets is fairly new, but tropical fruit that has to travel a long way is often not tip top produce. The leathery rind of rambutans and lychees should be red and pliable. Because they are often picked too green they may not have the best flavor. Some of these were pretty good, about 5.5 on the 10 point fresh tropical scale; they others were past ediblity. Made a great papaya salad with coconut, lime juice, cilantro, and hot sauce. Some of these orange-fleshed papayas are surprisingly good, maybe reaching an 7.5 to 8 flavor-wise, if you know how to pick them.
Currants - Picked several quarts of red currants from our 3 young bushes. This is enough for a year's supply of currant jelly. But today the aging back is complaining about work this low.
Japanese beetles - They have hatched, but no telling how big the population will be. Hoped the wet weather in combination with milky spore fungus would keep them in check. But bought some more netting from favorite fabric shop to cover new apple trees anyways.

Oh, no, she's back!

Conservatives' fascination with Sarah Palindrone is a puzzling phenomenon. TPP has never heard the woman say anything interesting, clear, or remotely profound. Her chatter consists of political sound bites strung together, as if anything intellectually deeper than a TV commercial is beyond her mental grasp.  Her sentences are a word-salad of phrases that literally make her a Palindrone, (someone who sounds just as dumb forward as backward), a term TPP coined just for her. Her recent plea to impeach the President is no exception. Let's see. Sarah said, "His [Obama’s] unsecured border crisis is the last straw that makes the battered wife say, 'no mas.'" Now that's a pretty amazingly dumb sentence, so the bar is set pretty high (or is it low?).  Let's try it backwards: No mas, says the battered wife, that is the last straw, his [Obama’s] unsecured border crisis.  That is pretty amazing because in some weird way it makes more sense backwards than forwards!  Oh! The only way that could happen is that her brain is in backwards! Perhaps people could take up a collection, have it reversed, and dumber could become just dumb, although she probably will forever be confused about the left and the right (hands). Maybe then she wouldn't have for attention so hard to vie.     

Now that was a political speech to remember. Not!

The most dangerous, unforgivable thing John McCain ever did was to pick Sarah Palindrone as his VP running mate; the idea that she was that close to so much power is truly scary. And now the USA seems stuck with her as a celebu-pol because she hasn't disappeared as TPP thought she would. One can only wonder how bad things might have been with such a puppet being controlled by some sort of shadow government. Without question it would have been worse than with W who let evil but very smart Darth Cheney decide way too many things. Fortunately Sarah's been reduced to a political sideshow, but she apparently still really knows how to give a speech, especially at CPAC.  "It was as singularly embarrassing a public address as any allegedly sentient primate ever has delivered...a disgrace to politics, to rhetoric, to the English language, and to seventh-grade slam books everywhere,"  according to columnist Charles Pierce.  Wow! He concludes, "She is the living representation of the infantilization of American politics, a poisonous Grimm Sister telling toxic fairy tales to audiences drunk on fear, and hate and nonsense. She respects no standards but her own. She is in perpetual tantrum, railing against her betters, which is practically everyone, and volunteering for the job of avatar to the country's reckless vandal of a political Id. It was the address of a malignant child delivered to an audience of malignant children." Wow, again! For some reason Charles was being easy on her. What do other nations think when a person like Sarah gets so much attention in the USA? Oh, yeah, the USA also invented "reality" TV and game shows.  They should wonder, and worry, about the least common denominator in the USA.  TPP does.  Where Pierce really nails it though is that the conservative politics that has so enamored so many people of late is based on fear and hate, and an alternate reality of history, facts, and science.