Coffee & wine bars - too cultured for the USA?

Zurich is littered with coffee and wine bars.  Most of them are pretty small, quite intimate, with little tables and a couple of lithe young women in tight black jeans and white blouses waiting tables.  When your feet get tired of the coble stones, or going through one of the best collections of European art, you find an inviting looking place, and sit for a spell while sipping a coffee, wine, or beer.  You don't pay when you are served.  The wait staff doesn't bug you about paying or ordering more until you are more or less ready, and sometimes not even then.  Of course, anything this civilized

is quite rare in the USA where somehow such an activity is still considered a sinful waste of time, especially on a Sunday. Yesterday was rainy, and today, a Sunday, was mostly sunny and everyone was out walking because most retail places, other than afore mentioned social bars, were closed. How nice. People came and went; groups, old couples (the Phactors were not out of place), young couples, people with strollers, guys with mostly shaved heads and tattoos, fashionable ladies, a real cross section of the humanity strolling by.  Now why are such places not more common in the USA?  Primarily, it's because such places only exist where urban centers are vibrant and where a significant part of the population walks from place to place. Cities and towns in the USA have to develop active, people places for places like this to be successful. The closest things in smaller cities are campus town areas adjacent to university campuses. Now don't get TPP started on the mass transit system in a place like Zurich. 

Get some culture

To the people the Phactor works with day to day, get some culture means getting a petri dish out of an incubator. But while surrounded by many cultural philistines the Phactor is a patron of the arts, an appreciation developed by minoring in art while majoring in biology. Probably because artists and biologists dress more alike than any other two disciplines, their only strong similarity, no one really noticed this fellow slipping back and forth. If you've never had to move to have more wall space, then you aren't an art collector. Why Ms. Phactor recently had a lighted case built to display the art glass. So every now the science is put on pause to call attention to an artist's work, especially if of a botanical bent. This came to my attention from another science blogger, so a big HT to Bioephemera. Linda Behar constructs photo realistic embroideries that are simply wonderful, and it is no accident the there is a Monet-like quality to some of the images as you will discover while exploring her gallery. Truth be known, several years ago while searching the web for articles about waterlilies (the kind of thing like yesterday's Friday Fabulous Flower, and yes, it's Friday again!) up popped a surprise, an art gallery link, and this resulted in the purchase of a painting of waterlilies. So why not also mention that an artist is a new Phactor Phollower, and you can see her gallery here. Welcome.

Gardening hope

It is a wonderful day, particularly for mid-February, when those first seed catalogues arrive. They provide hope and give you something to look forward to. April is only 2 months away; it seems like you can hold your breath that long, and you begin thinking about the seeds, the flowers, the trees, you want to plant.

The analytical part of my brain knows that those catalogue pictures are promissory notes, and like bad investment schemes, some of them will simply not pay off. And yet, a gardener knows that some good things do come from these small packages. So while grounded by pragmatism, it takes a certain degree of optimism, a certain confidence in the future, a certain ability to envision things that may grow and develop from small beginnings, to plant a seed or stick and be able to envision a bounty of fruit or a tree in flower.

I wish we had more politicians that were gardeners. I'd have a lot more confidence in them if they actually took time to look through a few seed catalogues. But there is something about the type of person that wants to go to law school, play golf in their spare time, and run things that sort of precludes gardening. Golf may actually stunt their plant aesthetics to the point they think a monoculture of grass is attractive. Let's look at their lawns before voting.

For one thing, most politicians want an almost immediate reward or payoff for their investment, be it monetary or some other effort. Gardeners know that it takes planning, and work, and investment, and patient nurturing to get rewards from plants. Gardeners also don't ignore the little things, like a some sprouting weeds, or some little spots on the leaves, or a few spider mites, because these little problems can become big disasters if not attended to. But very few politicians have time to deal with the little problems when they are still little. This is partly because they are not looking very far ahead. Their temporal near-sightedness means they can seldom look beyond the next election, so their solutions are often flawed, doomed in the long-run.

And of course our politicians live in big cities because this is where the power resides. They don't live in smaller places where there is enough land to garden. In cities people are out of touch with the processes of natural life, and rain is an annoyance, not something to be measured in a gauge. I wonder how many of our representatives in DC have ever picked their own tomatoes? Yes, a lot of people with misplaced priorities are running our country, and you wonder how it ever came to be this way.

At the dawn of civilization, was it the hunters, whose lime-light was fading as the game became scarce and gardening became all important, who became the politicians, the community leaders, when it should have been the gardeners all along. But the gardeners really don't like running things and they were busy planting, and weeding, and harvesting, and storing, and planning for next year's crops, and you had to find something for the laid-off hunters to do, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. But now, a few thousand years later, we might be better off if we pressed a few more gardeners into positions of power.

But enough of that. That new violet is hardy in zone 5 and is supposed to do well in the poor soil and shady conditions under trees! Wow! How many of those should I order? Enough to stimulate the economy, of course.