Pale Blue Dot

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Seen from 6.4 billion kilometres away, Earth is a dot obscured in a beam of scattered sunlight.


"Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
-Dr. Carl Sagan [November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996]

chickpea thing.

I didn't have much in the way of ingredients last night, except some chickpeas and a bowl of leftover yogurt/cucumber sauce from my falafel adventure. So, I decided to take some of the basic spices that went into the falafel recipe and try an experiment. This is how the experiment goes:

1 medium yellow onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tsp cumin
1 tsp coriander
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup parsley, minced (although I was lazy and just chopped)
vegetable oil
leftover yogurt/cucumber sauce

Cook onion and garlic in oil until onion is translucent. Stir in beans and cook for a couple minutes. Stir in cumin, coriander, and salt. Cook for a few more minutes and then add parsley. Throw everything on a plate and drizzle yogurt sauce on top with some extra fresh bits of parsley. It's yummy!

I made falafel.

In Northampton, the city in which I last resided, there was a Moroccan cafe called "Amanouz." They made the most amazing food for ridiculously cheap prices. They also made falafel for ridiculously cheap prices, er, price... singular. Anyway, I was missing their falafel tonight, and also feeling bored, and also feeling hungry. These three things, when combined, resulted in the subject of the photo you see near this text.


Also, here is where I got the recipe:

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Seans-Falafel-and-Cucumber-Sauce/Detail.aspx

Bob Dylan's "Visions of Johanna" excerpt.

In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman's bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the "D" train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight
Ask himself if it's him or them that's really insane
Louise, she's all right, she's just near
She's delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna's not here
The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place

Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He's sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall
How can I explain?
Oh, it's so hard to get on
And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn

(neither the image, nor the lyrics are mine)

good eatin'

The spider has spun her web
beneath the light on the front porch
and I think to myself
that's a good place for a spiderweb.

Autumn, it's here.

I was going to write on politics tonight, but I'm too tired to deal with the topic right now. Nothing much is new over my way. The weather is getting cooler, as most of you are surely already aware. This makes the more difficult, more taxing jobs on the farm easier to handle. It has the downside, however, of making the Tuesday and Friday morning harvests, which start promptly at 7AM, nearly unbearable. When I came into work the other day the temperature was about 38 degrees Fahrenheit and there was patchy frost on the ground. When you have to work with wet plants (basil and other herbs in this case) for more than an hour straight, you experience all kinds of pain in your extremities - particularly in your digits. More on that another time.

On the bright side, the fireworks of fall have begun. Hooray for colorful leaves! Hooray for rustling corn stalks! Hooray for crunchy dried plant matter!

completed circles.

I'm a little tipsy, and certainly very tired, so this will be brief and probably, grammatically speaking, sub-par (even for me). The other day I was driving home from work and I spotted what looked like 30,000 blackbirds swirling over a field by the side of the road. I stopped immediately, jumped out of my car, and started snapping as many photos as I could get my little shitty camera to take. Upon returning to my car I noticed that I had left my headlights on. I tried to start the car. My car stubbornly replied: "whiiirrr, whiiiiirr, whiiiiiiiiiiiiiir." No dice.

I popped my hood, retrieved my jumper cables from my trunk and, despondently took a seat on my front bumper. Almost immediately, a truck pulled up, out of which came a man looking to be in his fifties with a salt and pepper beard and glasses, bearing some kind of identification tag around his neck (indicating that he was, more than likely, on his way home from work). He walked around the front end of his truck, intending to open his hood, and asked me if I knew who he was. I said that I did not, but that he looked familiar to me. He then told me that about 4 years ago he had been walking by what he thought was probably the front of my apartment in Shepherdstown (he was right), and that I had given him a sweet bean paste treat of Asian origin that I apparently had extras of and that he was there (in front of my car) to return the favor.

He then gave me a jump and told me to pass on the good deed and continued on his journey home.

How cool is that?

Does anyone read this?

Does anyone read my blog?

Aster

Something I keep meaning to mention is that the Asters are in bloom around the farm. I haven't been able to identify the exact variety, but it looks an awful lot like the New York Aster. Anyway, they are happy flowers that signal the arrival of autumn. That's all I have to say about that. I'm really going to bed now.

End of Sowing.

Today, Mary told me that by Wednesday we will be done with planting and transplanting all of our fall crops. This is a relief because planting and transplanting takes us (the farm workers) away from other things which need to be done, namely, weeding and harvesting. She said we just might celebrate with martinis or some other such alcoholic drink. Hooray for that.

Ugh. I can't write anymore. I'm so tired right now. I don't want to go to sleep as it's only 9PM, but I've been fighting the urge to pass out since about 6PM and I don't think I can fight off morpheus any longer.

More soon.

Hay bales.

I am really quite tired and ready to go to bed, but I want to get out a quick post about what I did on the farm today. Normally I wake up around 6:30, feed the cats, make myself a peanut butter sandwich (breakfast cereal just doesn't provide enough energy for the morning stretch to lunchtime), and jet off to work, which starts around 7AM. Then it's a clusterfuck of harvesting and weeding and whatever else needs to be done until noon or so, when I head home for a 2 or 3 hour break. I think I may have talked about this in a previous post. The reason I mention my schedule shall momentarily become apparent.

At about 11AM today, a plump, sun-worn, and slow-talking farmer showed up at the garden (the garden is what we call the part of the farm in which vegetable crops are raised) and explained to me that he had 2 wagons of hay for us and that he needed one of those wagons back by 2PM. In other words, we (Mary, the farm manager, and myself) had to kick our asses into high-gear and go and unload the hay bales. Normally, Austin and some other workers would be on the farm with us to help, but Austin had called in sick, and our other workers have pretty much left for the season, so it fell on Mary and I to deal with the hay. I knew right away that this new information from the old-timey farmer meant that my lunch would come late or not at all.

Mary and I rushed down the hill to the central area of the farm where we began unloading and stacking a wagon full of hay bales into a corner of the barn. I should mention two things here. First, this is the first time we have ever had to deal with hay bales as it's just not a normal, or at least regular part of working with the vegetable side of the farm. The second thing I want to note is how much of a strain on your muscles (back muscles in particular) it is to work with with hay bales. Another farm worker, Ryan, who normally works with the chickens and such showed up to help us, but it was still quite the laborious task to unload several dozen of these stringed clumps of dead plant matter. The trailers are about 12 feet long, (maybe 15?) and about 8 feet high. Use this to try and figure out how many bales we are talking about.

We unloaded the first wagon, then loaded all of the old and rotting hay bales from the barn back into the same wagon. The unloading part was hard, but the loading part was harder, for most of the old bales had rotted twine and so when you tried to pick the up, they just fell apart into a fluffy (and sometimes wet) mess on the barn floor. I'm sorry this isn't more interesting to write about, but I just wanted to get out my experience before I passed out.

Anyway, I actually got to use a pitchfork for one of it's intended purposes today: to stab and gather hay into clumps and then toss those same clumps into this wagon. It might sound easy to you, because you would imagine that hay is light and easy to move around, and this is partially true to some degree, but over time, the movement of picking up the hay and tossing it 7 feet into the air and over your shoulder, over, and over, and over again, becomes VERY tiring. My muscles ached after the first five minutes and we did this for 2 hours straight.

I'll finish writing out the rest of my thoughts about this tomorrow or Saturday.

Farm Photographs.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hatmatter/sets/72157607316967251/


Unedited. And, I still have to go through and delete doubles and shitty photos.

Nothing to report.

I have nothing to report. Wait, that's not entirely accurate. Actually I have a lot of things I could write about. It's just that I can't bring myself to write about them at the moment. Here's a summary in keyword format of my thoughts recently. This will have to suffice for now.

Lorna in Japan.

Diablo II is really kind of lame.

Visions of Johanna in Egypt are fucking relentless.

I'm 30 and doing what with my life?

My hair, it goes, to where, I not knows.

Kimya Dawson is vapid.

Today I liked air-conditioning.

Natalia got married!

Kitties remain my standby.

The Tempest is nothing like it's title would have you believe. Boo to you Shakespeare.

Opera? Firefox? Sigh.

My kitchen smells.

Flame-weeder.

I work on a farm. On our farm, we get to walk around with flame-throwers and burn things. I love my farm. 

Beardless.

I gave in and shaved it. Trying to sleep with a beard is like trying to sleep with your bare face on a pile of itchy hay. I literally was losing sleep. 

Beard.

I'm growing a beard (see figure 1). That's all I have the energy to write about today.

BBC Shakespeare Collection.

Between 1978 and 1985 the BBC produced the complete works of William Shakespeare for television broadcast. Every single one of his thirty-seven plays were included, except Edward III, the authorship of which was still in question at the time (per wikipedia). The plays had different directors and actors, and consequently, some productions were better than others.

I have lately gained access to this BBC collection and have been slowly going through them one by one. Over the weekend (yesterday to be exact) I watched Julius Caesar. Having not previously read the play, nor seen any production of it, I knew not what to expect. I must say, both the play and the players were oustanding. In particular, the performance of Richard Pasco, who played Brutus, was captivating. When Pasco was not onstage (onscreen?), I longed for him to return. Every line he delivered was delivered perfectly. His performance, was, well, superb. I'm telling ya', they got some good actors together for this one. As well they should, for the source material is exceptional. I've come across some plays of Shakespeare that I felt weren't up to par for the bard (The Tempest, A Winter's Tale, Titus Andronicus), but this play did not belong in that lot. I don't know quite how I should go about reviewing the play. I'm not a critic. I thought it was excellent, and worth reading, and seeing again. 

Play Rehearsal

There won't be any fancy dinner photographs tonight as I have play rehearsal. We (The Rude Mechanicals) are putting on a production of Shakespeare's The Tempest this fall. I play Trinculo, a jester. The Rude Mechanicals are a small ragtag bunch of Shepherd University students and local ne'er-do-wells (yours truly) who enact the plays of Shakespeare (in the fall) and medieval plays of some sort (in the spring). 

I was going to write a bit more, but I was called away to the stage to practice my lines. Go figure. I'll try to write more tomorrow. For now, it's sleep time.

Heirloom day.

I'll have you know that I am fated by the gods to never have a good night's sleep. Several times during the day yesterday, the lights in my room and in the adjacent bathroom flickered at random. The power grid in Shepherdstown is not reliable at all, and the power goes out frequently here, so I concluded that the problem with my lights was related to the power company and not wiring in my house. I started getting suspicious when the lights and everything else in my room would suddenly turn off and then not turn back on again. Normally everything comes back on after a couple seconds, but not this time. Grumbling to myself, I wandered over to the breaker box in the kitchen and tried to figure out if anything had been tripped. Nothing. Everything looked okay. Hmmm. I flipped the main breaker off and then back on again and the lights and other electronic devices in my room hummed back to life. Curious, yes, but not entirely out of the ordinary. 

Before I actually got to bed, this whole scenario happened once more. After the second time I looked around to make sure none of the gizmos in my room were plugged in only part-way or had power cords with chewed or frayed sections. Nope. 

So, after writing my blog, I went to bed. This is where the fun starts. I had only a window fan running and my alarm clock. Pop! Beyoow! Off goes everything. I curse my way back over to the breaker box and perform the on/off operation. I go back to bed. 10 minutes later... Pop! Beyoow! Again to the breaker box. You can see where this is going, right?

Anyway, I told my landlord about this morning and suggested that there might be a short somewhere in the wiring. After describing the problem to him he said "I've never heard of anything like that happening." Wait, WHAT?! I don't even have the patience at the moment to describe the rest of the conversation. 

All this talk of the power going out and me not getting a lot of sleep is boring. Let's get on with the good stuff. So, I brought my camera with me to the farm today so that I might finally learn the names of all the varieties of heirloom tomatoes that we grow. I took a couple shots which I will upload tomorrow or the following day. For now, I want to post some photos of the insanely-delicious pasta sauce I just made with four big and juicy heirloom tomatoes. 

Here's the recipe, btw:

4 big Heirloom tomatoes, chopped

1/2 head of garlic chopped

handful of fresh italian basil, chopped (I used sweet basil)

olive oil

sea salt

freshly ground peppercorns

Heat up a large saucepan on low/medium, and drizzle enough olive oil to coat the bottom of the pan. Throw in your chopped up tomatoes, skin, seeds*, and all in the pan and bring to a low boil while stirring occasionally.

Meanwhile, heat up a frying pan and throw in some olive oil and then toss the garlic on for a minute or two - just until the garlic is golden or light brown. Then immediately dump the garlic and the oil into the saucepan with the tomatoes. 

Cook for 20 or 30 minutes and then just as you are about to take the sauce off the burner, toss in the chopped up basil. Cover and let sit for a couple minutes. Stir before serving.

Add salt and pepper to taste.

* heirlooms usually don't have many seeds anyway, and there's now evidence that the seeds are full of flavor and shouldn't really ever be filtered out.

This was actually my first time ever making homemade tomato sauce and I have to say that I kicked total ass. I added a little bit too much salt to my sauce, but other than that, it was mind-blowing. This may seem obvious to most of you, but in case you didn't know, fresh tomato sauce is supposed to be a little watery. It's really okay - you can just soak up the leftover sauce with some garlic bread. :)

Labor day.

I showed up for work this morning at the normal time of 7AM (well, maybe more like 7:04AM). I was having a rough morning because I hadn't gotten much sleep last night. There are new tenants in the adjacent apartment and they threw a big party last night. I normally wouldn't mind this - after-all, today was labor day - but, I, unlike the rest of the country (and Canadians, too, apparently) had to get up at 6:15AM and was therefore in bed by roughly 10PM. I'm actually on track to over-explain the problem. 

Here, let me simplify. 1) my neighbors were loud 2) their loudness kept me up last night 3) I was groggy and bitter going to work this morning. There!

The good news, however, is that when I showed up to work, Julie, the farm owner, came creeping over to the "office" (a small room in a barn where all the workers meet in the morning) to tell us that she was giving us the afternoon off. This was a welcome surprise. Julie's never given us off before, or let us go early for any reason. I'm not angry about that. In fact, it's exactly the way things should work on a farm. As I said to Mary while we were harvesting beans this morning: "Weeds don't stop growing for national holidays."

It's true, they don't. Nor do they stop growing on weekends when most of the farm workers get off (this is just on our farm, on most other farms, the workers usually only get Sunday off). In fact, if anything, they seem to grow more vigorously in our absence. Not that weeding is the only task with which farmers are concerned - there's always something to be done on the farm... always.

Anywho. So we prepared a couple beds for planting this morning and then harvested the summer squash and our different varieties of green beans. Oh, I should probably explain what a bed is. You know when you look at pictures of smaller farms (or if you've ever been around a farm visiting or whatever) you see the long rows that are a few feet wide (often 3 to 5 feet) and, oh, who knows, a hundred or more feet long? Those are beds. Between the beds are walkways where we, the farmers, can move about without trampling the crops with our big, clumsy, be-booted feet (the walkways are usually the same width as the tractor which has tilled the field, and are, in fact, really just the tire tracks in the soil). 

The other thing I want to define is what a "row" is. In each bed, we plant a line of seeds, or seedlings lengthwise from one end to the other. This is a row. Most times we plant several rows of plants in a bed (say, 3 for instance). For example, the rows of beans I picked today were planted on the outsides of a bed for easy picking. In the inner region we planted summer squash. 

I didn't expect to be writing about the farm so much. All I really wanted to do here was get out my experiences of the day. Here goes the summary: I went to work, harvested some vegetables and then at a yummy lunch which was prepared for us workers by Julie, the farm owner. She made us some kind of beet salad and some goat cheese and garlic spread. So delicious. 

After I stuffing my face with that stuff, I drove over to David and Mary Jean's place and made Mary Jean some salsa using fresh tomatoes from the farm. Dear god it was good. No garlic this time though (to where my garlic head has escaped, I know not). 

We munched and talked for a while and then I drove home along Canal road which runs by the C&O Canal down by the Potomac river. I was feeling a little down, and also annoyed... down because I knew that there were Labor Day parties happening around town but I knew of none and had been invited to none... and annoyed because the national park which parallels the river was full of people intent on grilling cow flesh, drinking beer, and getting their nature fix for the year. I don't really mind that they were doing these things - I just wanted to go for a quiet walk to round out the afternoon and was denied access to my sanctuary by a bunch of drunken, SUV driving, Nascar fans.

/bitter moment.

I drove on home, took a nap, woke up, cleaned the house, made some dinner and sat down to write a blog entry for once. So, this is it for now. For anyone who is reading this, please forgive me if I'm boring or hard to read. I haven't written regularly ever, and especially not since last semester. Hopefully I'll be able to keep this up and get my writing skills back in order.

I'm tired.

So as many of you know, I work on an organic farm over in Sharpsburg, Maryland. In truth, it's really not an organic farm - at least not a U.S.D.A. certified one - but I'll get to that later. For now I just want to mention that I have some kind of red bump behind my knee that has...

oh hell. I can't finished this right now. I'm just too tired.

First post ever.

Testing?