Touchstones

I’ve been revisiting some of my touchstone works recently.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

I don’t know what sort of things other people use in the way of touchstones. Perhaps a place, a relic, a piece of the true cross—I don’t care. I don’t judge. 

 

For me, there are some musical works, novels, and stories and some films. These are things that I will read/view again over time. For example, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are works that I revisit every few years. 

 

The most recent touchstone novel I read was Gertrude Friedbert’s The Revolving Boy. I talked about that work here some years ago.

 

There are some films that serve me as touchstones as well. Charade is one. Some Like It Hot is another. The 1963 one with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. 

 

Some of this is, perhaps, comfort. These works are touchstones largely because I encountered them at particular times in my life. Therefore, pretty much by definition, they are reflecting an earlier time. 

 

But another reasons I that every time I experience one of them, I see something different. Sometimes it’s as small as noticing an element I had just passed over in previous viewings. There’s a brief encounter in a scene in Charade where a man is repairing a door and says to Cary Grant that next time he should use the doorknob. My attention was usually focused on Grant and Hepburn but one time I realized he was repairing the hole left by Scobie’s (played by George Kennedy) artificial hand. I’m not going into all the bits of the film. I’ll make a blog post about it someday.

 

Other times, it is a profound reconsideration of one of the characters. I talked about this here, where I discussed the relationship between Jerry/Daphne (Jack Lemmon) and Osgood (Joe E. Brown) and the film as an exploration of the different kinds of love.

 

Although, some have suggested I overthink things.

 

The interesting thing to me about touchstones is not about the works themselves. It is completely about how I perceive them and how that perception changes over time. Touchstones are those works that continually deliver something of value every time I look at them. 

 

Let’s be clear, many works are forgettable. Few works stand up to multiple experiences. And fewer still stand the test of time. So for a work to hold up over decades indicates it strikes something deeply in me. Consequently, every time I see something new it reflects an unexpected facet of myself. 

 

It makes me wonder about how children want to repeat an experience over and over. 

 

When my son was young, he very much wanted to watch “Big Scary Beast,” The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. A giant dinosaur destroying Manhattan that serves as the model for every kaiju created afterward? Me, too. 

 

But did he see the same film every time? Or was it different for him every time? Was it the repetition that was comforting or the material?

 

My Mom had a rule about books in our house. I could read anything I could reach. Since I climbed like a chimp, there was little unavailable to me. This allowed me to read From Here to Eternity at about age eight and left me with a unique idea of military life, music, and prostitution that remains to this day. But, it remains a touchstone novel and sometimes I see its echo in my work.

 

In point of fact, much of my work has connection to these touchstones. Not solely, to be sure. But enough that I can see it. Jackie’s Boy connects to both Huckleberry Finn and Kim. God’s Country reflects pieces of From Here to Eternity. Not directly and not completely. But I’d be lying if I said I couldn’t see the relationships.

 

When I look at the work of other authors, composers, and film makers I wonder what their touchstones were. Beethoven wrote works explicitly on themes from Handel and Mozart—were they his touchstones? He studied composition with Haydn and certainly his early work reflected that. Then, he moved away from it. Did he ever revisit that? Did he in the privacy of his studio play Haydn for inspiration or just comfort? I have no idea.

 

We tend to overvalue originality and undervalue heritage here in America. Few—if any—things we create are completely our own. I am either cursed or blessed with what I call annotation, in that I can see echoes of past works in present works. This is not a criticism. It’s good that Hammett’s Red Harvest influenced Kurosawa’s Yojimbo that triggered A Fistful of Dollars coming back to Bruce Willis in Last Man Standing.

 

That said, when people do adapt my touchstones into other media, (I’m looking at you, Huck) they’re often hard to watch. Not because I might disagree on an interpretation but because they depart from the original material entirely. An example of this is Cannery Row with Nick Nolte and Debra Winger, adapted from Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. Let’s just say that there is no baseball subplot in Steinbeck’s novels.

 

But that might cover another blog post.

 

And here is an article showing how China is doing better at moving away from coal than the US. All due to Orange Voldamort. And it’s nice to know Ghislaine Maxwell, purveyor of pedophilia, has a puppy, courtesy of this administration.

 

Arts and Crafts IX: The Need for Wood

I like woodworking. I like being able to turn wood into something nice.

 

Still, I don’t like buying wood. Especially exotic wood—though I’m not above working with a good piece of paduak or purpleheart. And I have really enjoyed working with bloodwood. American hardwoods like walnut or ash are also fun.

 

But every day I see trees—really beautiful hardwoods—cut down to make subdivisions of McMansions. Whenever I can, I try to snag as much wood as I can—or think I can—use.

 

However, I don’t have a saw mill and turning an off-center log on my lathe rotating at ten times a second is just scary. I have a band saw but it’s not really up to the task.

Some years ago my old Delta gave up the ghost. That is, the pulleys of the Reeves drive broke. A Reeves drive is one implementation of what is called a continuously variable transmission. It consists of two pulleys made of intersecting cones. (See the link above.) Pulleys trade speed for power. A little pulley rotating quickly that turns a larger pulley means the larger pulley is turning slower but with greater torque. A big pulley rotating slowly turning a smaller pulley more quickly has less torque but runs faster. The Reeves drive allows selecting this with a simple lever.

 

But the Delta pulleys were of inferior quality. First, the one turning the spindle (which turns the wood) broke but I found a replacement. Then the motor pulley broke and no replacement was available. Delta hasn’t made lathes for some time. (That was then. A new search has suggested replacements might be more plentiful. Oh, well.) I replaced the lathe but the old Delta just hung around the shop. I don’t like throwing things away. It’s a waste.

 

Finally, I hit on an idea. I’d rip out the pulleys entirely and replace the spindle pulley with the biggest one I could find and replace the motor pulley with the smallest one I could find. I calculated this would get me as slow as five rotations/second—still not great but vastly better than ten. The Delta would then be used as just making blanks from logs. I could use all that wood I’d been accumulating.

 

I did that and it worked. But now I had a dilemma. 

 

Over the years, I’ve been trying to expand my shop into the left bay of the garage. And this lathe just wouldn’t fit—at least, it wouldn’t fit and leave me space to work with it. But, I thought, wait a minute. I could just take the lathe out of the garage and do the turning outside. Since I planned this to be a seasonal effort, that would work. 

 

But that meant the lathe had to be mobile. Wood lathes are very heavy. Mobility was not in their repertoire. 

 

I came up with the idea of putting it on wheels. This was a good idea but had a significant flaw. I’d put the Delta back on its cast iron stand. The stand’s legs were at a significant angle. The wheels wouldn’t fit.

 

I tried to make a wooden insert—and broke a chop saw and nearly my finger in the process. That wasn’t going to work. 

 

My friend Eric suggested I pour the insert into a mold. I resolved that was what I would do.

 

I built a set of four boxes for each of the legs.

 

 

Then, I filled them with concrete and attached a lever arm wheel assembly.

 

 

I now had a lathe that I could move easily.

 

 

Now, I could turn the raw wood (seen above) into product.

 

 

 

But, where am I going to put all this brand new wood? Uh oh. Is another project in the offing?

 

Also, Orange Voldamort is going to restart nuclear testing. Antarctica is starting to look like Greenland. OV didn’t create the situation. He is just making things much, much worse. And, of course, the East Wing is gone, as the Brain Caterpillar goes from destroying metaphorical institutions to actual physical ones.

 

State of the Farm: October, 2025

I like my life. I like what we do in the garden and the orchard. But the house gets dirty coming in and out with chestnuts, pawpaws, and the like. But I’ve always heard the best things in life are dirty.

 

We are nearing the end of harvest and it’s time to take stock.

 

It’s been a… strange year. Some things came out wonderfully. Some things didn’t for understood reasons. Some things didn’t for less understood reasons.

 

Let’s start with the main vegetable garden.

 

We tried several varieties of tomatoes—which, unfortunately, I don’t have all handy. The big winner was a red paste tomato that produced fruit shaped like a butternut squash. It made the best tomato sauce. I’ll put up the name of the variety if I can find it. We’re saving seeds from that. We had a Purple Boy tomato and a set of cherries. The Purple Boy didn’t produce. It seemed more resistant to fungus than some others but it didn’t taste that good. The cherries were adequate.

 

We had problem after problem with the beans. Some I’ve mentioned before: severe rodent damage. But the rodents left the bush beans alone. We had two varieties, a purple and a normal and neither produced much. I much prefer pole beans—if I can get them past the rodents. We had a single bean plant that survived and it gave up a half pound of dried beans. If I had had a hundred…

 

Zucchinis came in. We had some nice melons for a bit then some died and another just… disappeared. I mean there was nothing left. We tried golden berries again this year and they were quite nice but I’m not sure what to do with them. There’s a bowl of them on the table and while I like them in small bits, a hundred or so is a bit much.

 

Carrots did well as did celery. The squash did really, really well for some varieties and not so well for others. The cushaw did very well but only produced one squash. The spaghetti squash and butternuts did very well. We had a good crop of lettuce and there’s a patch of kale waiting for me to harvest.

 

We planted four varieties of radishes: normal red, Daikon, a French red, and a German giant. The reds did great as did the Daikons. The French reds look good but we haven’t harvested them. The German giant only germinated one plant. We ate the reds in the early summer. I dried the Daikons: 10 pounds of radishes -> 1 pound of dried material for soups. Or just chewing on. They taste pretty good.

 

Over in the raised beds, the new strawberry patch did well as did the basil, potatoes, and sweet potatoes. The tubers are still out there waiting to be brought in. We had a volunteer tomato that is still producing. We don’t know the variety but it looks something like a beefsteak.

 

We planted the same sweet potatoes in the main garden and in one of the raised bed. The main garden produced zip but the raised bed did quite well. There were a number raised bed plants that did better than their counterparts in the main garden. Wendy is convinced that it’s the depth of soil. The raised beds are about three feet deep but the garden is on ledge. She wants to terrace the main garden. Hm. 

 

I don’t know what our yield is going to be for the tubers but I’m expecting 30-50 pounds total. I may be disappointed. We will see.

 

Moving on to the grapes. We got zip. I’m having a problem with grape black rot. This winter I’m going to spray them within an inch or their life and we will see.

 

Not much in the way of apples, either. We got rid of the trees that had the biggest reservoir of cedar apple rust but I still haven’t controlled it in the remaining trees. Basically, we’re down to two producing trees and they’re not producing much. 

 

The pears did well. We harvest probably 10-15 pounds of them. We would have harvested more but we left for WorldCon right when they were coming in. When we got back, we had lost a fair amount. Next year WorldCon is in Los Angeles a couple of weeks later so we’re talking about it. 

 

We had a good harvest from the quinces this year—the first year of real harvest we’ve ever had. On the order of ten pounds. Quinces are strange. They aren’t really edible off the tree. They come off like a brick and if you take a bite your mouth puckers like they were unripe persimmons. But, if you slice them then and layer them into a jar with sugar, a miracle happens. First, a water that seems nearly the same volume as the fruit appears. Then, after a couple of days you take them out and dry them into the nicest dried fruit you can imagine. They’re not even that sweet—most of the sugar ends up in the water. But the astringency turns into just a little tang. 

 

The big winner this year were the pawpaws. We have five trees and they’ve produced a few. Last year we got a dozen. Well, the trees decided they were ready. We have harvested close to a hundred pounds of pawpaws. The picture above was just a small part of the harvest. There are still fifteen or so pawpaws on the tree as of last night. Each pawpaw is between a half and a pound. We’ve started extracting the pulp and freezing.

 

We got an okay harvest from the persimmon but that’s mostly my fault. Right now, the area under the tree is my wood pile and that makes getting to the dropped fruit difficult. 

 

There are a lot of conflicting reports on whether one can cook with pawpaw pulp. There’s definitely a toxin in the skin and the seeds. We’ve been harvesting them when they fall and show they are ripe. This may be the defining characteristic. A semi-ripe pawpaw still tastes very good. Friends of ours made some cookies and it was tasty. I get a mild laxative effect from pawpaws but given that two fruit is about a pound of pulp, is that so surprising? Imagine eating a pound of peaches.

 

Finally, we just finished the chestnut harvest. We’re processing about thirty pounds of chestnuts. I bought some pure gluten so I want to try making real bread with 100% chestnut flour. We will see.

 

That’s it for now.

 

Although, here is an article on how Trump’s war on renewables is a huge gift to China. And how Orange Caterpillar gave 20 billion and a whole lot of perks to Argentine and Argentine then made a deal to sell soybeans to China. About have of the soybeans grown by American farmers have been destined to China until the tariffs. And a more general article on the Orange Assault on farmers.

 

The Channeled Scablands

Worldcon was, this year, in Seattle. We like to mix recreational and professional activities and, since Wendy and I are both rock and geology nuts, we decided to do something we’ve been talking about for years: visiting the Channeled Scablands. 

 

The scablands are an interesting combination in Eastern Washington and Oregon. To understand this, you have to go back about 14-27 million years ago. Then, a series of flood basalt eruptions roared up to become the Columbia River Flood Basalt Group (CRFBG.) These were big eruptions over the entire Columbia River area—thick to 1.8 kilometers (5900 feet) and covering a good chunk of both states. (Note the picture above with the added building for perspective.)  Some have attributed the eruptions to the same hotspot under Yellowstone. But that’s still debated.

 

One of the things that’s interesting is that this was relatively small and contained as flood basalts go. Both the Siberian Traps and the Deccan Traps were much, much larger. The Siberian Traps have been implicated in the Permian Extinction, aka, “The Great Dying”, where most species kicked the bucket. The Siberian Traps were implicated in the Cretaceous Extinction until the meteor hypothesis was more or less verified. Even now, there’s some evidence that the meteor might have reactivated the Deccan Traps, giving the world a sort of horrible one-two punch. 

 

The CRFBG didn’t affect the world as much as it’s two larger brothers, but it goes to show that these were big events. Even the smaller of them is enough to ruin your day for a few million years.

 

But the basalt cliffs in the picture above had many millions of years of getting covered with soil and sediment. It was largely buried until very recently.

 

Fast forward until only twenty thousand years ago when the Last Glacial Maximum—the last gasp of the Ice Age—happened. A set of ice sheets, kilometers thick, formed from the northeast corner of Washington all the way over Idaho and up into Canada. Glaciers melt back and advance with the seasons. Between 13,000 and 15,000 years ago, in the latter days of the Ice Age, these glaciers melted into Glacial Lake Missoula. Think of it as a Lake Michigan in Idaho’s back yard. These were all held back by an ice dam at a choke point of the Clarke River. Which gave all at once. 

 

The water tore down anywhere it found an avenue. It ripped over Dry Falls—I’ve heard it described as all of the waterfalls in the world times ten, but it’s a scale I can’t put my mind on. That said, that picture is just a little piece of it.

 

 

Some places, boulders got caught in place and spun in the current, causing potholes. 

 

 

Other places, it scoured out ripples from the stone. Or, in other places, it made gigantic sand ripples. Or dropped big, building sized boulders it had carried along. When it reached a choke point, and the water slowed down, it dropped sediment. This is why the Willamette Valey and valleys of Washington are so fertile. You can thank the Missoula Floods for your Washington apples.

 

This didn’t happen once. It didn’t happen twice. It happened in excess of a hundred times, at last count, from the ranger at Dry Falls park.

 

We spent several days in the area, looking at this stuff. Nothing like a good collection of geological features to make you feel small.

 

And, just to be clear that our executive thinks you’re too small to matter, here is a link on the current war on science. Or how He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named wants to control your universities. Or how Orange Voldemort isn’t interested in your dying in a heatwave.

 

 

Attribution

My son just graduated and was pinned as an RN. We are, of course, extremely proud.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

He worked very hard to do this in a nursing intensive program. He did not have a strong background in the sciences—his degree was in psychology. But he took many prep courses. Aced them. Aced his RN courses. Aced his clinicals. Now, he is an RN. He has other goals before him but we can dwell on this accomplishment for a while.

 

The above description is interesting. We must acknowledge the role of the teachers, mentors, and professors that worked with him along the way, we still say he did this. We, as parents, must also acknowledge that we paid for this—or, at least, loaned him the money. There were some scholarships available for his future goals but the programs were cut. Thank you, Mister President. But we always attribute the effort to him: he did this.

 

This is appropriate, I think, as the greatest effort and engagement belonged to him.

 

But it’s also interesting how often we don’t state that personal attribution. 

 

My background is science—that should not surprise either of my two readers. In science, when you read a paper the scientists themselves always have the byline. Often, the supporting institution is listed, such as Harvard, etc. Sometimes there is an explicit financial attribution. If there isn’t, it’s not hard to find the supporting grants. But the specific attribution of the work is to the scientists themselves.

 

However, when we talk about the government, many times it’s as a whole thing. The government did this. As if the government was one monolithic organization. If it’s not the government, it might be a department or bureau. It’s rarely an individual.

 

Even when we are critical of a specific person in the government, it’s often blurred: the administration, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Transportation. We do the same with corporations: Exxon did this. Apple did that. Microsoft is completely responsible. The way we talk about organizations protects—or obscures, depending on your point of view—those responsible. 

 

I’ve been reading Who is Government? edited by Michael Lewis. The book intends to find examples of people doing their jobs within the context of government responsibility. The people who are government—those very same people who have been vilified in recent months. (Vilified, I might add, by those I would term crooks and liars. But that’s another post.) 

 

My point is institutions are composed of people. Roger Boisjoly was one of the engineers that said launching the Challenger after freezing temperatures was a dangerous idea. In much of the documentation of that disaster, he and others were overruled ”by NASA.” Not a particular engineer, manager, or set thereof but by the organization. On the other side, one of the stories in Who is Government? is about Christopher Mark, who developed the methodology that prevented coal mining cave ins. Michael Lewis only found him by going through the Service to America medals, an award within the civil service and with little visibility to the outside world. The only evidence of Mark’s achievement is contained in the handbook of the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Until Michael Lewis’ article and book.

 

(In an aside on The Late Show when Lewis was publicizing his book, he let drop the department that Christopher Mark had run had been laid off as part of the DOGE cuts. Thank you Mister President.)

 

We need to know the individuals involved in our institutions, for good and ill. We know James Black reported it to the “company executives” back in 1977. And that after that “Exxon” decided to engage in climate change denial. Who made that decision? It’s not clear—not because it’s not known. Just because if you want to know you have to wade through the lawsuit transcripts to find out. And, in August, Exxon had requested the Supreme Court to review the Colorado court decision to allow the lawsuit to move forward. Hm. Wonder how they’ll decide?

 

There is at least one shining silver lining to what is going on in our political theater these days. We can see the players involved. We might not know who made the decision for Exxon’s climate denial but we damn sure know who on the court will vote for the lawsuit to go forward. We might not know who the scientists were that developed the mRNA COVID vaccine but we know who first made sure it was funded (Trump, Warp Speed) and who will now withhold it from the American people. (RFK, Jr. and Trump.) We might not know who the developers of the climate models that are so helpful in predicting climate and weather but we know who it is that is denying their funding.

 

As we’re gasping in the dirty air, don’t like the foul-tasting water, and can’t breathe anyway because it’s just too damned hot, we can take comfort that we know who put a stop to us trying to fix it.

 

Seattle WorldCon: What is Domestication?

Back in the middle of August, Wendy and I attended WorldCon 2025 in Seattle. I was on three panels. This one was What is Domestication?

Here is a PDF of my notes. I was unable to directly include the outline format from word. 

WhatIsDomestication?

Before I forget, here is an article how RFK, Jr. is firing the head of the CDC for completely fictitious reasons. And here is an article on the nightmare replacement RFK, Jr. is proposing.

State of the Farm, July 2025

This is coming out late since I’m writing it in July. We’re going to WorldCon and so I wanted to get this in the pipeline before we left.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

Things have been… interesting for the last month. We’ve had a significant problem with vermin. Wendy has caught several chipmunks, voles, and three rats. There may also be a gopher involved. Part of this is global warming—the rat problem in cities has been linked to temperature. I have no reason not to think it’s affecting us, as well. I also think that other rodents may well have the same response to warming as the rats. Not to mention that with milder winters, we have less winterkill. 

 

We lost nearly all the climbing beans but—for reasons that passeth understanding—they left the bush beans. I replanted a bunch of bush beans but today I think they may have taken them as well. Of course, it may not be rodents. It could be cut worms. The manure we bought in the spring (for much more money than it was worth) was full of cut worms and low on nutrition. 

 

Today, also, it looks like something tore into one of the sweet potato hills. Yay.

 

The main garden is flat. But the raised garden is doing fairly well. When I got the sweet potato sets, I split them: three in the raised bed and three in the main garden. Not only did they do better in the raised bed, they (and other things) were relatively safe from the ground dwelling pests. Not squirrels. Nothing stops squirrels. 

 

But we’re getting zucchini. There are melons on the vine. Some of the bush beans are surviving. Many of the carrots are doing well. And the daikon radishes look great. 

 

The squash have largely taken off. (Finally!) 

 

In the raised beds, we went through a very nice strawberry harvest back in June. The potatoes (and sweet potatoes) look good. We’re trying some long carrots in one of the beds but this was one of the first we tried. We did not bury the bottom in six inches of gravel. Sure enough, some moles may have taken out a few. We’ll see how that goes. 

 

One of the quinces succumbed to what appears to be black knot. We have a set of quinces that are where we used to have espaliered plums. The plums got black knot, starting from the south and going north. We tried for years to control it but then it spread to some peaches so the plums had to go. The worst infected was the southernmost prune plum. We planted quinces, thinking, well, these aren’t stone fruit. But we got something that sure looks like black knot. 

 

We were assured that this was cedar quince rust—which would not have been surprising. We do have a cedar tree nearby and we’ve seen cedar apple rust. But it marched south to north like Lee’s advancing army. 

 

We cut off the affected limbs and sprayed. The prune plum spot quince looked good for a couple of months and then bang! All over. So we took it out. The others still look rot-free. The quince in the prune plum spot most severely affected. Hm. Coincidence? I. Think. Not!

 

The new peaches produced peaches this year. Small and sweet. But still very young. The pears are producing like mad. The apples… well, we removed several this year because they were losing to the cedar apple rust. The remaining trees are producing but not well. We might have to do something drastic this winter.

 

That’s it for now regarding the garden.

 

Now, about the news today. One of my two readers asked me why I’ve been including bad news from the new administration. It’s a fair question and deserves a fair answer.

 

I want to start by talking about what norms are. Norms are traditions, practices, and behaviors that are an example of the overlying culture. They are agreements we’ve made that are intended to operate without challenge. 

 

Sometimes, those norms are derived from legal cases. The idea of being able to speak one’s mind or take a point of view differing from the administration without legal challenge is a good example. It was a norm that a person coming into this country legally had a right to their opinions, whether or not those opinions agreed with the administration. It was a norm that due process was the right of anyone residing in the United States. That the law would be administered as it was written and adjudicated. Norms are those behaviors we take for granted—being able to say something bad about politicians without repercussions. That both sides would take advantage of this—one news service or another. Each had the same right to speech.

 

While norms can (and sometimes should) be challenged, it should be a thoughtful process. Segregation was a norm that we disposed of—or tried to, anyway. Disrupting norms means disrupting the behavior people have relied on.

 

I, for example, thought the norm that preserved clean water and air was a good thing. Or that politicians should not enrich themselves at the expense of tax payers. Or that our leadership in science was a good thing. Or that the single most effective mechanism of preventing disease in the history of mankind—vaccines—should be continued and expanded. Or that preventing the unnecessary death of thousands of Americans by making sure there was good, strong information rather than succumbing to charlatans and con men was something to pursue. 

 

I’ve been alive, paying taxes, and voting for mumble-mumble years. In that time, I thought we had been building towards a fair, just, equitable, clean world. We were not succeeding for everyone—that was obvious. But we were succeeding at many things. We needed to succeed at more things. For everyone. 

 

The current administration appears to be in the business destroying all that. Making rich richer. Making air and water dirtier. Making children hungrier. Torturing more prisoners. Vilifying anyone that disagrees with them. Applying all that indiscriminately to both their supporters and their detractors. They don’t care. They just want the money.

 

In my small way, I want to point this out. The Emperor not only has no clothes, he is trying to demolish anyone that speaks up. 

 

So, here’s a Korean scientist with a green card working on a vaccine for Lyme disease that’s been detained after returning from his brother’s wedding.