Rafters, Part 1

Here's where we're stalled, with two thirds of the rafters up, roof tin stacked neatly to the side. We're waiting on more rafters from the sawmill.

Lycopersicomancy

Lycopersicomancy: Divination through tomatoes. It stands to reason that someone who tries to read messages in Tater Bug markings and mouse scratchings would stop and look at this tomato and wonder what it means.

This year, I tried an old-time tomato variety called "Cherokee Purple." We've been very pleased with the tomatoes, which are dark red with green shoulders. The only thing is, most of the plants produce double, triple, and I-don't-know-how-many fused tomatoes, growing in strange spirals.

A local character is supposed to have remarked, at the sight of something strange, "It's a sign. I don't know what it means, but it's a sign." That's the way I feel about these tomatoes. On one hand, perhaps they have predicted correctly a good tomato yield--blight-free, insect resistant plants and firm, juicy, dark-fleshed tomatoes--delicious fresh and excellent in sauces. On the other hand, they might foretell the End Times.

Whatever the message, I had to make up the term Lycopersicomancy. The Romans had no tomatoes, not for salads, sauces, or augury. It wasn't until long after Latin dropped out of daily use that Europeans named these American fruits lycopersicum, which means "wolf peach." When I checked spelling on the scientific name at the USDA Plants Database, I was surprised to discover that we're back to Linnaeus's name, Solanum lycopersicum L. Botany Photo of the Day explains (with taxonomic references):

The scientific name for the tomato in general use for over two hundred years was Lycopersicon esculentum. However, molecular studies in the past fifteen or so years have helped to shift the name back to the one originally assigned by Linnaeus, Solanum lycopersicon.

Something Overhead

The walls are up, both exterior and interior, and the ceiling beams are in place as well. It's easier now for me to visualize it as a house, with rooms and windows to look out. Quite exciting!

Good Clean Fun

With the walls going up, we realized we needed to run out and buy a bathtub, since tub-shower combinations are too big to go through doors. I really liked the packaging slogan!

Walls Going Up

The walls are going up. It's beginning to look a little bit like a house!

White Pine Subfloor

The subfloor is white pine. Such pretty white wood--it seems a shame to cover it up. Fortunately, I'll be able to go down to the cellar and look up at a section of it.

Floor Joists

There's been visible progress on the house. At last, something is happening above ground level.

Galluses and Coincidences

I learned a new word the other day in conversation: "galluses." A couple of questions later, I knew we were talking about suspenders for holding up one's britches, particularly when wearing a tool belt.

Here's the Wikipedia entry for Suspenders:

Suspenders or Galluses, known as Braces in British English, are elastic fabric straps worn over the shoulders to hold up trousers. The entire strap of braces may be elasticated, or only at attachment ends, with the most of the straps being of woven cloth with either a X-Back or Y-back crosspatch and leather end tabs. Braces typically attach to trousers with clips or, less commonly nowadays, with buttons. In British English the term suspenders or suspender belt refers to a garter belt, used to hold up stockings.

So here's another potentially embarrassing American English/British English confusion to add to "vests" and "knickers." An American gentleman, such as Larry King, looks dignified when he wears suspenders on his television show, while in Britian, a gentleman in suspenders is more likely to occur in a Benny Hill skit. But I digress.

Not three days after I learned the meaning of "galluses," I came across this passage in Collected Stories of William Faulkner:

There are other men among us now whose families are in want; men who, perhaps, would not work anyway, but who now, since the last few years, cannot find work. These all attain and hold to a certain respectability by acting as agents for the manufacturers of minor articles like soap and men's toilet accessories and kitchen objects, being seen constantly about the square and the streets carrying small black sample cases....

...."He's a man yet. Don't let hit fool you none because he claims he ain't strong enough to work. Maybe hit's because he ain't never wore his strength down toting around one of them little black satchels full of pink galluses and shaving soap...."

Devil's Darning Needles

I've been trying to identify this growth on a wild clematis, but without success. The orange scabby things remind me of the hawthorn fruits hijacked by a rust fungus, but the typical rusts that infest clematis are leaf-spots and small growths on leaves.

In my Web search, I did come across a new (to me) common name for Clematis virginiana L. from the USDA Plants Database: "Devil's Darning Needle." In my world, a Devil's Darning Needle is a dragonfly, and I seem to remember being told they would come and sew shut the lips of little children who asked too many questions. I'm not sure what Clematis virginiana L. is expected to sew up. I believe it is more commonly known as Virgin's Bower, and I cannot speculate on the origin of that name.

Fly Season

The apple tree by our house is a popular deer destination this time of year, and this poor fellow is a regular visitor. It's very stressful to be fly-bitten like this, and he stamps and twitches, jumps and runs in futile attempts to escape the torment. It's hard to enjoy your dinner like this.

Rust On Our Hawthorns

Our hawthorn trees always have a heavy "parasite load." This year, I've been noticing strange, deformed fruits alongside the "normal" haws, and these eventually pop out in spiny growths which spew forth brilliant orange spores.

These rust fungi are both common and of horticultural interest, so I was able to identify the fruiting bodies as "Cedar-Quince Rust Fungus." Bizarre, are they not? My customary list of links follows.

• Cedar-quince rust (Gymnosporangium clavipes) kills hawthorn fruit and twigs. Cedar-quince rust affects quince (Chaenomeles), serviceberry (Amelanchier), hawthorn (Crataegus), mountain ash (Sorbus) as well as many other plants in the rose family and can cause a great amount of damage to the fruits, twigs and thorns of susceptible plants. The rust fungus requires two different tree species to complete its lifecycle. On the primary host, juniper or red cedar, the fungus infects leaves and soft shoots, becomes perennial in the living bark and causes swellings that girdle twigs and small branches. During damp weather in April and May, orange spore masses emerge from infected, swollen juniper twigs and may be splashed or blown to hawthorn, one of the alternate hosts. On the hawthorn, this fungus causes distortion of fruit, twigs, and buds. Fruits become shrunken and often die; twigs become enlarged and woody. Pinkish-orange tubes, about the size of a pencil lead, protrude from affected fruits and twigs and shed orange spores that are splashed or blown back to the juniper, completing the life cycle of this rust fungus.
• UMass Cedar-Quince Rust pdf has similiar information to the resource above, but better photographs.
• Cornell's Cedar-Apple Rust Fact Sheet has some information on cedar-quince rust, good photos, and a dandy life cycle diagram.

Say What?

iNode: The weblog of Digital Programs and Systems at George Mason University Libraries tipped me off to the existence of an intriguing command-line program on the Mac. It's called Say and it takes a text file as input, and outputs an .aiff file, (a Mac sound file). I tried it out with a Project Gutenberg text file I happened to have lying around. In a few minutes, I had a synthesized voice reading Joseph Conrad to me. It was surprisingly natural reading, with very few odd pronunciations. iNode blogger Wally Grotophorst was clever enough to use "say" to get through some required "reading" materials while he drove to a conference. While I probably wouldn't "read" a book this way for fun, my eyesight ain't what it used to be, and it's nice to know there are future options by which I could have "audio books" of any odd and obscure text I can get on my computer.

Lumber Arrives!

I intended to document progress on the new house from start to finish, in painful detail, but until now, all the progress happened when I was away from home. However, lumber (very nice, locally grown and sawn lumber) has arrived, and the house progresses above ground. It may not look like much yet, but I'm excited.

Go Down Moses

I've built up a considerable collection of Faulkner posts, but here is another. I really enjoyed Go Down, Moses, and have finished it since my own personal bear adventure. I have to agree with Sherry Chandler's comment on that post: Go Down Moses is my favorite Faulkner. From the hunter mysticism of "The Bear" through all of the awful history of the Beauchamp family, this is Faulkner ringing his very best changes and using his full range of literary skill. Contrary to what most people think, Faulkner could write effectively in many different styles.

I've found a few more interesting Faulkner discussions since I last posted a list.

• Internet Public Library's Literary Criticism Collection for Faulkner. This resource is the work of The Internet Public Library. The IPL was founded by a class at the University of Michigan's School of Information, and Michigan SI students almost exclusively generated its content and managed the Ask a Question reference service. On January 1, 2007, the IPL moved to Drexel University's College of Information Science and Technology. Now, a consortium of colleges and universities with programs in information science is developing and maintaining the IPL.
• Google Book Search has a significant portion of A Reader's Guide to William Faulkner: The Short Stories by Edmond Loris Volpe (2004) readable on line--enough for me to find it much more interesting than most of the "help me cheat on my homework" analyses that make up most of the Faulkner links I've visited. I'm currently working through the Collected Stories of William Faulkner.

Rain Lizards

Rain lizards--after a good rain, they come walking out of the woods this time of year. I see them most often squashed in the road, so I was pleased to photograph a couple of living individuals. They were less pleased to be photographed, I think. This one, in particular, seemed to scowl at me, and adamantly inclined his head away from the camera. When I turned him loose, he stomped off into the woods in that odd high-stepping gait they have.

This is the Red Eft, the terrestrial phase of the Red-Spotted Newt. This animal always reminds me of my college linguistics class--so that I think of linguistics every time I see a newt, which was once "an ewt," as in "ewts and efts." The "n" migrated from the article to the noun in the case of the newt, but remained where it had begun in the eft. Why didn't it become a neft? An eft is just as difficult to articulate as an ewt.... It's a melancholy subject for me, because, as I mentioned before, I most often encounter my efts as road kill. Perhaps if I took up the local name and called them rain lizards, I'd remember linguistics as a happier topic.

Milkweed Dreams

I've mentioned before my lifelong fascination with milkweeds, and how I find the fleshy flowers incongruous and disturbing. At a distance or up close, they seem alien, dream-like. How does something that looks like this turn into a pod of silky parachuting milkweed ladies?

Painless Linux Solutions to Problems I've Been Dodging

Yippy, Skippy! I fixed my Flash plugin problem on my "too new" Linux box! I was moping around, whining that "I don't wanna learn to build a 32-bit chroot and put Iceweasel inside it! I don't wanna!" when I ran across a couple of pointers to Unofficial nspluginwrapper & ia32-libs-gtk packages for Etch. The lovely folks at DIP Consultants put out a nspluginwrapper for Debian Etch AMD64, and included detailed directions for installing it all at the command line. There was no thought, no comprehension required on my part (although I have some glimmer of understanding about what happened), and it worked, right off the bat!

So now, I can watch cute kitty videos on YouTube on my Linux box. Life's good, eh? But every silver lining has a dark cloud. I had thought the sluggish loading of Web pages was due to Iceweasel's futile search for the Flash plugin, but such is not the case. Iceweasel still took 15 to 20 seconds to look up and load Web pages.

I searched for solutions to the problem, and found several Debian forum discussions on topic. One set of solutions involved the /etc/resolv.conf file; they offered a good DNS address, and when I put this in my /etc/resolv.conf my browser speed picked up nicely; however, as soon as I rebooted the computer, the "NetworkManager" rewrote the file with the bum nameservers (which are actually my router's address).

One approach to the problem would be to learn about DHCP, how DNS addresses are assigned, and generally learn about networks, NFS, and technical details of my service provider's settings. Fortunately, I found a way to postpone improving my knowledge: Browsing very slow in iceweasel/firefox/konqueror/etc from boards.ie

in firefox type about:config into the address bar, and set 'network.dns.disableIPv6' to true. I'd imagine this will probably sort it out.

This did, indeed, sort it out, allowing me to postpone education and self-improvement for another day. Here's a bit of knowledge about network.dns.disableIPv6, so that I can truthfully say I've learned a little something today:

IPv6 was designed in part to solve the problem IPv4 will soon be facing: the exhaustion of all possible IP addresses. Mozilla implemented IPv6 support in early 2000, but that support did not receive widespread testing until recently as IPv6-capable OSs and network software/equipment became more common. One particular bug that has appeared exists not in Mozilla, but in IPv6-capable DNS servers: an IPv4 address may be returned when an IPv6 address is requested. It is possible for Mozilla to recover from this misinformation, but a significant delay is introduced.

Basswood Flowers

The basswood tree has has been in full bloom this week. I wonder if Coleridge's lime tree smelled this sweet?

Getting the Gimp on the Mac

I haven't been settling in smoothly with my new computers. I haven't yet got a flash-plug-in running on my 64-bit Linux box, nor have I set up an NFS network between my Mac and Linux boxes. I haven't had much success running my favorite Unix programs on the Mac yet, either. (I run Carbon version 1.6.0 of Emacs.) I downloaded two different versions of GIMP from the Apple web site, and neither would launch; meanwhile I got OpenOffice to limp along enough to print some files, but not enough to use.

When I saw an article in Macworld's August 2008 issue (you get a free year's subscription when you buy a Mac) called "Secrets--Geekfactor: OSX's Other GUI: Run Unix apps from the comfort of X11's graphical interface," I read it with some interest. It includes a source for a different version of GIMP: Wilber Loves Apple.

What follows is the step-by-step narrative of installation, something I find useful to keep because it preserves the mistakes and mishaps, which recur all too often, and are never found in "real" documentation.

• I go to Wilber Loves Apple--we bring GIMP to the Mac. It warns me that I need to first install the latest version of X11, Quartz 2.2, and it sends me to "XQuartz X11 2.2.3 : Released: 2008.06.17 This release contains Xquartz-1.3.0-apple21."
• So I download the latest X11 .pkg file, and click on it, which launches an Installer window. Click, click, click...in it goes.
• Ever hopeful, I wonder if this will make OpenOffice launch better. No, it doesn't. Now, OpenOffice won't launch at all. So, let's check OpenOffice downlaods page, OpenOffice.org 2.4.1 for Mac OSX Intel. Hmmm. I have 2.3, so let's update to the latest one. Start downloading. (Big package, takes a long time, even with broadband.) Well, this doesn't work either. I check the Open Office Community Forum and find that there's a native Aqua version of OpenOffice in beta.
• I got to OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta 2 and grab the MacOSXIntel Aqua download.
• OK, I install this, and it works! So, I'm a little better off than when I started (Open Office opens more smoothly, and more of its functions work than before.)
• Now, hours later, back to the GIMP....I go to Wilber Loves Apple--we bring GIMP to the Mac. I download the MacOS 10.5 (Leopard) Intel GIMP....
• Note: there are some tips from the end of the Gimp Install page that are important, and easily overlooked: There's one small operation we can now perform to make it easier to use (note that this is not necessary). Doing this will save you many unnecessary double-clicks during editing by not requiring you to activate GIMP windows before you can click on them. While Gimp and X11 are closed, open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal, and paste the following command in it and press enter: If you installed the XQuartz packages :

  defaults write org.x.X11 wm_click_through -bool true

• Hey, it launches! It opens files, closes them, and doesn't crash! I blew a lovely summer morning on this--it'd better come in handy!

James Weaver: Campaign Trail Blazer

When TV political commentators make historical comparisons with current events, it seems to me they seldom venture back before the Reagan administration. (I know some of them are at least as old as I am, and I remember Dwight Eisenhower, albeit vaguely. The vice-president had a little dog named Checkers....) This is too shallow a dip into the history lesson well. I'm thinking Teapot Dome comparisons would be valuable, as would railroad monopolies, miners' wars, the International Workers of the World, etc. I was heartened to hear John McCain define himself as a conservative in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt. At least we're breaking out of the anomalous bubble of the last 30 years.

That's why I was pleased to see this article: Egad! He Moved His Feet When He Ran: James Weaver, the First To 'Run' in a Presidential Race by Robert B. Mitchell, Washington Post, July 5, 2008, adapted from "Skirmisher: The Life, Times, and Political Career of James B. Weaver," to be published this fall by Edinborough Press. While the emphasis is on Weaver's innovation in presidential campaigns, I was pleased to see mentioned some hard times that put modern day troubles in perspective, including the Panic of 1893, the violence of the Pullman strike and the legions of unemployed who marched on Washington under the banner of Coxey's Army....

In the early hours of July 5, 1892, before an enthusiastic convention of radical farmers and their allies in Omaha, a 59-year-old Civil War veteran from Iowa made a solemn pledge that helped give birth to the modern presidential campaign.

Gen. James B. Weaver...had just won the nomination of the People's Party. Looking out over the assembled Populist delegates, Weaver predictably declared his fealty to the party's platform in the campaign ahead against Republican President Benjamin Harrison and the Democratic nominee, former president Grover Cleveland.....Weaver vowed to campaign on his own behalf for the White House. "I wish to make you here and now a promise that if God spares me and gives me strength, I shall visit every state in the Union and carry the banner of the people into the enemy's camp," he declared to the convention.

Such a promise hardly seems unique today, but in the 1800s it challenged prevailing political custom....presidential candidates of the period usually avoided soliciting votes in person because -- in a textbook example of 19th-century hypocrisy -- they were not supposed to appear too eager to hold the highest office in the land.

....Weaver's pledge in Omaha injected an element of drama into what was shaping up as a tedious rerun of the campaign of 1888. With Harrison paired against Cleveland, yet another election fought over the dreary terrain of tariffs, the tired Civil War symbolism of "waving the bloody shirt" and states' rights appeared inevitable. The cynicism engendered by the prospect of another contest between Cleveland and Harrison was so pervasive, one observer joked, "either party would have been glad to defeat the other if it could do so without electing its own candidate."

....Energetic, articulate (though given to occasional flights of florid rhetoric) and combative, the blue-eyed, mustachioed Weaver had spent the better part of the previous two decades campaigning for the economic and political reforms advocated by agrarian radicals. Before the Civil War, Weaver addressed anti-slavery rallies across southern Iowa in support of the Republican Party. A lifetime of stump speeches and schoolhouse debates provided ideal preparation for the presidential campaign ahead.

In the West, where miners strongly supported the Populists' commitment to expand use of silver in the money supply, the People's Party campaign generated enormous excitement. Appearing with Populist firebrand Mary E. Lease, and accompanied by his wife, Clarissa, Weaver drew wildly enthusiastic crowds in Denver and Pueblo. He spoke to a large and friendly audience in Los Angeles. Bands and celebratory cannon fire greeted the Populists as they toured the small towns of Nevada.

In an unusual and quite possibly painful fundraising stunt, Lease invited the crowd in Denver to hurl coins at her. The invitation prompted laughter, applause and "a rain of silver dollars," according to a Washington Post account.

....Weaver and Lease campaigned in Lincoln, Neb., where Rep. William Jennings Bryan was running for reelection and had endorsed Weaver instead of Cleveland. Nebraska voters returned their young congressman to Washington, but by a narrow margin of 140 votes. In the end, Cleveland returned to the White House, but his second term -- marred by the Panic of 1893, the violence of the Pullman strike and the legions of unemployed who marched on Washington under the banner of Coxey's Army -- was hardly triumphant.

As for Weaver, his Populist campaign proved stunningly successful; for the first time since 1860, a third party won electoral votes. He carried Kansas, Colorado, Nevada and Idaho and won additional electoral votes in Oregon and North Dakota. Despite the intensely negative campaign against him by Southern Democrats, he received 36 percent of the vote in Alabama and 23 percent in Texas. Overall, it was a vast improvement over the dismal third-party showings of the 1880s.