Too busy May and a Cinco de Mayo remembrance

It's Cinco de Mayo, and already the month is shot, and for a retired botanist, TPP is too busy.  The kitchen garden is coming along and lettuce is ready to eat.  Field work is a shambles of weather related disasters.  The rest of our gardens are in pretty good shape, mostly because Mrs. P has a bit more time to work around the estate. As TPP writes this she's digging out one of several large bush clematis, C. heracleifolia.  Who wants a hunk?  A yellow landscape rose waits to take its place. An overly aggressive, under performing fragrant sumac got the ax, so to speak, just a few days ago, and TPP survived a late pruning job on the knock-out roses. Late April and early May have been coldish and very wet, so your actions are limited.  Quite a few people have been by to wander our gardens, when weather permitted. Two late Magnolias remain to flower, the rarest one, an Ashe magnolia, will have just one flower, and it's only a meter tall in it's 2nd season. Hopefully it will appear in this spot soon (a coming attraction). 
Missed May the forth be with you completely. Couldn't get the Kentucky Colonel mint for tomorrow's mint julips and had to settle for mojito mint; counter girl could not under stand the context and importance. And so, behind in everything including blogging.
Here's a brief remembrance: Lastly, but not leastly, May 5th is etched in TPP's memory as the day in-armed anti-war protesters were fired upon by the National Guard at Kent State killing 4 students and wounding several others. So will T-rump tweet about that?  It happened 50 years ago, and that seems impossible, until TPP checks the birthdays.  Students across the nation went out on strike to protest the killings ending the semester and academic year early, and you could not help but be involved.  Our campus still had weeks until the end of the semester, and with graduation and graduate school in the offing, TPP has  to cross picket lines to attend a couple of classes run by holdout professors, it was a tense, difficult time and culminated with an evolution exam that took nine hours to write, a real learning experience when almost no one else had exams at all.  

Poor taste marketing

TPP is late to this issue; so what?  In one sense Urban Outfitters marketing a bloodied Kent State University sweatshirt almost deserved no comment, so utterly tasteless is this idea. Who in bloody hell would order one?  If you actually remember the event at Kent State that spurred this product then you are over 60, and if you think such a shirt if clever, then you never gunna grow up. It does occur to TPP that all discussion about militarization of the police, Kent State is what happens when you let the military take care of something that should have been a police problem. Innocent people get shot. This was the event that produced the anti-war national student strikes across the country that disrupted TPP's senior year. Nothing like having to cross picket lines to take organic evolution to make you think about what was important. People too young for the Vietnam War era wouldn't get the "message" Urban Outfitters was selling, so what demographic were they aiming (sorry) at? The whole thing boggles the mind. In protest the administration building was occupied immediately; ended up playing cards with the undergraduate dean, which seemed pretty non-violent. So this still just leaves one big question: what kind of person of what age actually thought this was a pretty good idea? TPP's boycott of Urban Outfitters will continue, as will his boycott of HoJo's. So don't risk his fiscal wrath.