Down Here on the Farm
Grain prices have gone down the last two days, but it’s probably because of profit-taking. Long-term, things are gonna get worse, by which I mean, prices will escalate with the consumer getting the ultimate shaft.
I don’t farm corn, have never worked for anyone who does; and beyond childhood episodes of helping the old folks in the garden with their sweet corn, I’ve never messed with the stuff.
But I do know a little about soybeans.
When you’ve lost an early crop (like corn) to damage or flood, and it’s too late to replant (as it is now) the same crop, then you plant soybeans. This is just SOP.
The only issue is, this year, there already has been a shortage of seed. Now with corn acres being diverted to soybeans, and existing soybean fields needing replanted, the problem is worse. The comments on this thread speak of the problem:
[O]n the beans Monsanto needs to step up to the plate and say ok for one year we are going to let you plant bin run beans. I have been talking to to seed dealers and there were just enough for the first time let alone a major replant like we have this time.
Right. Not to mention that seed quality this year is for shit, with quite reduced germination rates due to (I’m told) an unusually thin seed coat. Anyway, Monsanto, the Great Satan of Agriculture, ain’t about to give any relief. A lot of these Iowa and Illinois guys are just screwed.
Bottom line: I think the corn crop this year will be terrible. And though the books will reflect more acres planted in soybeans, that crop too will be relatively crappy. Even the rice here in Arkansas is late, with some of the ugliest stands I’ve ever seen. All of which means, compounded with all the fund dollars flooding the markets, that prices will keep going up. Not that farmers will realize as much of this profit as you might believe. For instance, the other day when wheat closed at $8.89, I got paid a whopping $6.37 a bushel for my share of thirty paltry acres of soft red winter. This huge differential is officially called the “basis,” but around here it’s called “how much you get fucked.”
OT, but this is a good laugh:
http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/06/20/other-videos-with-barack/
Just when you think Agent Flowbee can’t get any more ridiculous…
The crops have been something else this year in AR. All of that rain makes for bumper crops – unless the rain drowns everything. I’m afraid that’s what’s happened. I’ve heard that some places in the northern part of the state are starting to make a recovery, but it’s a hard road to start over.
HTML,
My sympathies on the difficulties of farming, especially in the current economic climate. ‘Round where I live in Michigan a bong load of local farmers have been abusing their fields with corn for the past three or four years. (There’s a reason farmers rotate their crops, or at least they used to in this region.) This year they’re crying about rising fuel costs and the major fertilizer bills the constant running of corn makes necessary to keep the land productive.
P.S. they keep planting corn because there’s an ethanol plant that pays good prices, as long as you’re willing to go into a contract with them.
Keep diggin’, Larry!
Happy to help, Flowbee.
PS- Where’s the whitey tape? Still waiting.
PPS- I love how this clown keeps acting like the GOP is just a-lappin’ up having Obama as an opponent. Yeah, dipshit, I’m sure they just loooove the situation they’re in.
Anyone remember Frank Norris’s “A Deal in Wheat”?
Heh. Indeed.
Has anyone mentioned this excellent role model for getting God & the Bible back in our schools which will of course solve all our problems?
Now that’s a Great American Patriot Conservative.
So what’s a bin run bean and how does Monsanto have any say over what farmers do with seeds that they own?
Dave Daubenmire defended him? Spaghetti puller Dave Daubenmire?!?
Epic.
So what’s a bin run bean and how does Monsanto have any say over what farmers do with seeds that they own?
Others will have better things to say, but Monsanto has patented their seeds based on genetic modification. You can’t just use the seed that’s produced again, you pay a licensing fee. If you’re on the farm next door your crops may be contaminated with the stuff and you wind up paying the licensing fee anyway.
The irony in the canola link above is that canola would not exist without taxpayer-supported government research.
I LOL’ed IRL.
Got dead threaded, but if you want to see more on Little Jeffey Emanuel check my last two comments on post below.
Well, aside from maiming a student, he’s teaching the values of the parents, and you know, the burn marks faded away eventually, more or less, so no harm done there. Just a little extra enthusiasm, certainly no worse than the tattoos and the nose rings and the mo-hawk hair-cuts all the children are wearing to-day.
Seriously, shit like this makes me want to go to some ginormous megalochurch with a bullhorn and just start yelling “A PHOSPHOLIPID BILAYER IS A CRITICAL COMPONENT OF ALL BIOLOGICAL MEMBRANES INCLUDING CELL MEMBRANES. IT IS SEMIPERMEABLE, ALLOWING SMALL UNCHARGED SOLUTES TO PASS FREELY. OTHER MATERIALS CAN PASS THROUGH PROTEIN CHANNELS UNDER CERTAIN CONDITIONS. THE DIFFUSION OF WATER ACROSS A SEMIPERMEABLE MEMBRANE IS CALLED OSMOSIS” because their science class is teaching them that Jesus rode around on a dinosaur before they all died in the Great Flood.
WTF?
It’s reassuring to hear that the values of the parents in the Mount Vernon school district do not include child mutilation.
“With the exception of the cross-burning episode…”
Best opening to a sentence ever.
Returning to the topic of the post, HTML is clearly a fertilizer sipping heartland elitist who has total contempt for the hardworking creative professionals of our Nation’s beautiful coastal urban areas.
Monsanto have any say over what farmers do with seeds that they own?
I believe it has to do with patents.
Oops, RB done coverd patents. I need a drink.
For background on the Great Satan that is Monsanto, here is an excellent primer.
Wow. If that were in my school, and my kids, the story would have gone on to detail the extremely humiliating ass-kicking the students’ parents would have delivered to that teacher right in front of the class, and the very public and nonstop campaign to have him fired and his credentials to teach revoked permanently. And his ass tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail.
My mother was, and still is, teaching in the school district where the original Coach Dave episode occurred, what with him praying with the football players and what have you.
Central Ohio…hell, Ohio in general, is a bit scary when you get out of the city. I grew up probably 30 minutes outside of Columbus city proper and I may has well have grown up in the rural South with some of the stuff that went on around there.
I concur with my colleague, Mr Toad.
When there was no corn, we ate sand.
But no one has asked the most important question: how will this affect the price of Cheetos?
SPROING!
I thought corn was manufactured in huge corn factories and rice came from Chinese restaurants.
Anyway, didn’t all these heartland farmers vote for GWB? I’ll put them on my list of things to be concerned about, right after the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis their president has killed.
how will this affect the price of Cheetos?
Is there some farm-produced ingredient in those?
I went to Catholic school as a child and we always prayed before each basketball game. But we sucked so badly that even with god’s help we still lost every game. Maybe we should have tried burning crosses on each other.
OK.
I’m an architect in the Midwest, and how much I’ve gotten fucked this year is that I’m closing my practice. It’s just not worth it anymore.
In Bush’s America, it’s millions for huge corporations in handouts and no-bid contracts, but real working businessman get shafted by a stalling economy.
I once lit our high school star wide receiver on fire.
Does that mean I’m going to heaven?
mikey
Oh, and I have really been enjoying the sweet corn this year.
Tip:
Throw a chopped Serrano pepper in the water and steam the corn.
Gives it a nice subtle tang…
mikey
I once lit our high school star wide receiver on fire.
I’ll add one of these to the recipe file in tribute.
Man, there must be some P-Funk in the air: via Alicublog, Spike Lee suggests that Obama will make DC a “real chocolate city”; right-wing blogosphere spontaneously micturates in their underthings.
“I think the corn crop this year will be terrible.”
There’s no thinking about it, that’s a stone cold fact. In Iowa, the most fertile land lies along the watersheds–which is all pretty much underwater. Any corn that did get planted is gone and it remains to see if it will dry out enough to get into the fields to even get a soybean crop in.
The BigAg factory farms will be fine (read: bailed-out) of course, but I have to think the flood may well finally kill off the remaining family farms for good.
Anyway, didn’t all these heartland farmers vote for GWB? I’ll put them on my list of things to be concerned about, right after the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis their president has killed.
Unfortunately, Tom, the rest of us aren’t in possession of those cool Star Trek synthesizers that instantly whip up whatever tasty dish we crave out of stardust, so when the basic food components are in short supply we all pay more for food. And those of us who can’t afford to pay more go hungry. Then the farmers who can’t afford to keep growing BFCs are forced to sell their acreage to megacorporations like Monsanto, and you know Blackwatercrops Inc. is not going to cut the rest of us non-heartlanders a break on our grocery bills either. I might agree that the idiots who voted for Dubya deserve to be screwed, blued, and tattooed (I ARE A MORAN, right across the low foreheads, so’s the rest of us will know to shun them) but where the fuck did you get the idea that HTML Mencken voted for the C-Plus Augustus, oh You of The Sterling Priorities? And what about the numerical majority of the rest of us who *didn’t* vote for GWB — do we only deserve sympathy after we’ve got hundreds of thousands of corpses for you to weigh?
It’s true, it’s true! I heard one of them say “We got Newark, we got Gary, someone told me we got L.A., and we’re working on Atlanta. But you’re the capital, CC.” And by “CC” he meant DC! But instead of District of Columbia it’s going to be Chocolate City! And Barack Obama’s campaign manager’s sister’s roommate in college had a poster of — FOR REAL — the Capitol Building, the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial ALL MADE OUT OF CHOCOLATE, and I think if you looked at it under a black(!) light you could see them melting a little.
I just heard they got New York.
Additionally, if only anecdotally, word on the North 40 here is that none of the area farmers will qualify for crop loss claims because new crops need to be planted by June 15th. (Someone can correct me – I don’t have any experience with crop insurance.)
My locale wasn’t hit as hard as parts down south, but we had enough rain and standing water to brutalize the few acres that were making any progress. I read somewhere that they’re estimating 1.5 million corn acres and 2.2 million soybean acres lost, in Iowa alone.
We be fucked. And not in that pleasant “Oh, Jennifer Tilly, you know just what I like” kind of way.
Sounds a lot liek that “collective punishment” dickery that authoritarians and certain religious folks are so fond of when it isn’t happening to them, actually. Plus I have a hard time imagining that President Kerry would have done things differently in that regard based on his apparent opposition to GM-labeling laws.
Two charts for y’all. First, the July 2008 Corn futures contract. It’s not the same thing as the spot price versus time, but a reasonable approximation. I made some money off of this. Second, the July 2008 Soybeans futures contract. This is where I lost money. My broker had the same narrative as HTML Mencken, and suggested that soybeans would fall in price as farmers switched from corn out of necessity.
As you can see, it went up instead; I have no idea why. Obviously, it’s not fun to lose money, but more than that, I just find it kind of unsettling.
Also, some of the rise has been due to Iowa flooding (I guess), but the price was holding steady well before that.
whatever tasty dish we crave out of stardust
To be pedantic, most everything on earth is in fact Stardust.
With the exception of the cross-burning episode…
Just so I got this straight in my own head. Disfiguring middle school kids with hot metal crosses is okay (ostensibly, since they haven’t fired his crazy ass yet, for a list of infractions), but showing middle school kids a magic trick with a toothpick taped to your thumb is SATAN!!!!111!!
Is that about right?
How Monsatan ever managed to get a patent on seeds is beyond my comprehension. So they want to bugger around playing God with the genes of various crops, fine…it’s not as if most of us want to eat the results of that shit, but what right do they have to control who gets what and how much? SCREW THAT. This is something that should be determined by the people (government), not some greedy corporation hell bent on poisoning us all.
Btw, can you US folks send a U-Haul to pick up the trash? I do believe he belongs to you.
Mt. Vernon, in addition to being a cornified burg, is also one of the more churchified towns in Ohio, and that’s sayin’ somethin’.
One of the major employers in town is the Nazarenes. They’re some pretty hard-shell Xtians.
I believe the official malfunctioning town motto is Repent Sinner! Praise Jesus! Repent Sinner! Praise Jesus! Repent Sinner! Praise Jesus! Repent Sinner! Praise Jesus! Repent Sinner! Praise Jesus! Repent Sinner! Praise Jesus! Repent Sinner! Praise Jesus! Repent Sinner! Praise Jesus! Repent Sinner! Praise Jesus! Repent Sinner! Praise Jesus! Repent Sinner! Praise Jesus! Repent Sinner! Praise Jesus!
Re: Monsanto – Don’t forget that these pig fuckers passed a law in Iraq requiring Iraqi farmers to use their crop seed and discard any leftover seed ever year.
Oh, my mistake. The Iraqi gov’t passed that law, with no prodding from Monsanto, because they’re deeply concerned about the Iraqi farmers and realized the benefit of purchasing new Monsanto seed every fucking year.
Next slide, please. Here we see the benefits of Monsanto’s brilliantly engineered water, or “Water”, as it’s trademarked. Monsanto has broken through the physio-chemical barriers that have confounded man over these 6,000 years and combined “Hydrogen” (a Monsanto development from 8 BC) and “Oxygen” (a Monsanto/Dow development from 1906 which Monsanto purchased in 1907) to create a liquid that’s both healthy and in high demand across the globe.
Now, we’ll open the floor to questions. Yes, go ahead.
“Is Monsanto gnarly or totally tubular?”
Monsanto got patents on the seeds by applying for patents, basically. I mean they aren’t just regular seeds from regular plants; a lot of research went into inserting that transgene and all the testing and whatnot. One problem with those patents, though, is that they assert claims to promoter and enhancer elements of the cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV) genome, both of which are widely used in ag-biotech research. So this group PUBPAT, the Public Patent Foundation, called prior art on them, and so the patents might be changed or (not likely) revoked entirely. That’s good news, I figure, because Monsanto have been real dicks about their seeds.
It should be noted, though, that so far it looks like roundup-ready plants don’t poison us, at least not directly. Roundup (glyphosate) is supposedly a lot less toxic to humans than earlier herbicides and allows for less tilling (and thus less erosion). However, it is super toxic to fish and to the algae that fish feed on, so on balance it could be tremendously bad. There’s some believable research that the Roundup formulation can cause reproductive harm to the people working with it, which is another thing that sucks about it.
There’s also been speculation that the CaMV promoter could interact with human viruses, particularly Hepatitis B, and could somehow cause cancer, but that seems to be pretty much crap (a single non-peer-reviewed opinion piece that gets forwarded to bejesus and back). Plus the actual virus is present in non-GMO cabbages, cauliflower, broccoli and the like anyway.
As for the farmers saving seeds for replanting, well, on the one hand that’s how farming has worked for thousands of years, but on the other hand when you buy the seeds you sign a licensing agreement not to do that. When someone does a thing that they agreed not to do and then they get caught and have to pay a fine, it’s hard for me to have a lot of sympathy for them, even if they are farmers and they have to pay rich assholes. The guys whose fields got contaminated by their neighbors, now, they really get the shaft both ways.
Really, though, what I wonder is how many farmers will become bankrupt and sterile before they decide that going organic isn’t simply a snooty elitist thing?
Thanks for the post, HTML.
Ripley,
Will the Monsanto “Higher Cost, Lower Yield” feed corn seed be more plentiful next year?
stryx said,
June 21, 2008 at 0:49
Mt. Vernon, in addition to being a cornified burg, is also one of the more churchified towns in Ohio, and that’s sayin’ somethin’.
There’s a giant billboard sign on the highway west into Dayton (or was it Cincinnati?) that says “HELL IS REAL”.
A bit ironical, if you think about it in a non-Xtian way.
Doctorb, my problem with monsanto etc. is the effects on genetic diversity.
It’s the same as my problem with GE, Murdoch, and a few other corporatists taking over all the media (although that is far less organic, the effects are clearly also pernicious).
Indiana, I thought. Sort of like a really, really shitty “Welcome to Indiana” sign.
Genetic diversity loss due to monoculture is a tremendous problem, but it’s not primarily due to genetically-modified crops. It’s its own thing.
Why this is Ohio, nor am I out of it.
I definitely saw that billboard on the way from Columbus to one of the two Ohio cities in question, but it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to learn they’ve put the same thing up in Indiana.
Jeebus loves murka, torture, tax cuts for the rich, bombing brown people, and capital punishment.
He hates abortion, poor people, and Democrats.
I HATE WHITE PEOPLE….
mikey
Wish WordPress wasn’t Jonah-level stupid about rendering URLs; maybe you guys should see if there’s some way of disabling the “smart quotes” rendering, as that seems to be the problem.
Anyway, I’ve been seeing a headline lately to the effect of “Midwest Flood Victims Feel Misled By Feds”; you can read the article at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080619/ap_on_re_us/midwest_floods_no_insurance
And somehow, all I can do is wonder how many of them had nodded in agreement with/compulsively forwarded some variant of this: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=32454
Thanks for the post – very enlightening. I grew up around corn farmers in the 70’s and 80’s and watched as they all had to sell off land and struggle to keep their land.
I seem to recall the application of Ready Roundup in some southern Indiana has caused an outbreak of an adapted form of skunkweed – which is resists all herbicides, and is now becoming rampant.
Let’s not kid ourselves, though: the Democrats have been co-screwers of the family farmer for over 30 years now.
People like to bitch about the bloated farm bill and farm subsidies; the issue is not that subsidies are bad per se, but that the entire system has been set up to drive the small producer out of business. IIRC, a farm has to have a certain production level before it qualifies for a subsidy in the first place, and then, the higher subsidies go to those who produce more – and not on an acre-by-acre yield but on total production. You don’t have to be an Einstein to figure out that the big agribusiness concern farming 30,000 acres is going to have higher production than the relatively small producer farming 1,000. As a result, the big agribusiness gets a higher per bushel subsidy than the little guy, who is already at a competitive disadvantage because 1) he already pays more for seed, fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide because he’s not buying in the bulk quantity that the big agribusiness is buying and 2) he’s not “integrated” into the commodity/processing chain the way the big agribusiness is (since the really big guys often own the land, produce their own seed, own their own grain elevators and processing plants) and is at the mercy of whatever (always lower) value the big agri concern he sells his crops to are willing to assign to his produce. The net result of US farm policy has been to drive family farmers into bankruptcy, and along with them, the farming communities and small towns the family farmers once supported. Take a drive through the upper Midwest sometime, and notice how few farm houses are actually occupied anymore. That’s because big agri owns the land where the houses sit and their laborers typically “commute” out to the land to work. Then ask yourself how much concern either the agribusiness or the laborers have for the health of that land, compared to the family that once lived on it, interacted with it daily, and relied upon it for life.
5 companies or less owning all the land that produces our food and the facilities that process it? Yeah, that’s a really great idea. And one that we’re all paying to make a reality.
Ripley,
Will the Monsanto “Higher Cost, Lower Yield” feed corn seed be more plentiful next year?
Well, if current “leadership” has anything to say about it, yes. Y’see, profit is more important than food (if you weren’t a lying liberal liar who hates America, you’d know this), so the best thing for us, as Americans, to do right now is lie back and enjoy it. I don’t want to go out on a limb here, but I think it’s safe to call it a Wonder Crop.
Genetic diversity loss due to monoculture is a tremendous problem, but it’s not primarily due to genetically-modified crops. It’s its own thing.
There’s a farm in the area that’s growing (well, was growing until 2 weeks ago) heritage crops. There’s also a seed vault in Norway, iirc, that’s preserving non-modified seeds just in case. Not arguing with Doctorb, just pointing to some folks trying to do something good.
Hence the impending banana apocalypse.
I live in Vermont, a major dairy farming state. Farmers get almost NOTHING of the massive profits that the milk processors make. Milk might be $4 per gallon, but farmers only get $11 for every 60 pounds of milk they make! And that price has NOT gone up in a long time.
The new Vermont Milk Company, which makes the best yogurt I have ever tasted, is paying a minimum of $15.
So I pity the poor farmers the get screwed by the middle-men which basically steal from the farmer and then from us.
Thanks for the post – very enlightening. I grew up around corn farmers in the 70’s and 80’s and watched as they all had to sell off land and struggle to keep their land.
The average acreage of farms in my area has doubled in the last two decades. Oddly enough, the number of farms has dropped almost by half. (see also: Jennifer’s post, above)
See also, Chapter 5 of the Grapes of Wrath.
a farm has to have a certain production level before it qualifies for a subsidy in the first place, and then, the higher subsidies go to those who produce more
I was under the impression that ome of the current subsidies were based upon farmable land and not actual production, and that, in fact, there were former rice farms in TX which had become residential properties and were still receiving subsidies.
I’ve tried to make heads/tails out of farm policy for years, but it always baffles me. The argument seems to be that we need less regulation and faster approval of pesticides and GM seeds to increase yield, and then we need to subsidize agriculture because the market prices are too low due to high yields. . .
A public school teacher preached his Christian beliefs …and used a device to burn the image of a cross on students’ arms
Hey, it was just an exorcism, okay? And the kid was chewing gum and talked without raising his hand so he was totally asking for it.
(I’m just personally relieved it occurred somewhere other than in the glorious border state of Tennessee. Not that I would have wanted it to happen anywhere. Fucking godbags.)
mikey: Pour about half a cup of milk into that corn while it’s boiling. Brings out the sweet.
Waitaminute.
Food? We ARE talking about food, right?
Food comes from grocery stores. If they’d just tear out those stoopid old farms that just use up ridiculous amounts of space and build some more grocery stores, the problem would be solved.
I don’t get all the confusion….
mikey
Spike Lee suggests that Obama will make DC a “real chocolate city”
You mean he’s going to make it more than 60% black?
There’s also a seed vault in Norway, iirc, that’s preserving non-modified seeds just in case.
Indeed: http://www.seedvault.no/
I for one would welcome our new Norwegian overlords, if only my red hair didn’t indicate just how “generous” former Norwegians, aka Vikings, had been to my Galway ancestors. Actually, my mother-in-law was born in Nordfjord, so I should find out if Oslo has a version of the Law of Return.
Also, I’m wondering if there’s still time to augment our annual summer crop of trough-planted heirloom tomatoes with, I dunno, maybe a few hills of
pratiespotatoes. Srlsy, anyone who’s got as much “land” as a balcony or a strip of asphalt that gets at least 5 or 6 hours of sun — tomatoes are an opportunistic annual, which means that you can grow a healthy productive plant of almost *any* variety in a 12-inch pot of dirt with a stake to tie the vine onto. The real limitation is giving your potted tomato enough water, which in August on asphalt may mean watering it in the morning, when you get home from work, and again last thing at night.I can’t keep house plants alive, but we still eat home-grown tomatoes from mid-July until almost Thanksgiving every year. (And when I say “we” I include the dogs, because last year Zevon learned to climb into the planters and pick his own cherry tomatoes, and I’m sure he’ll pass the trick to the new Puppybastrd. So now there are 17 plants neatly troughed & staked outside the dogrun, and 4 pots of “leftovers” inside.)
I was under the impression that ome of the current subsidies were based upon farmable land and not actual production, and that, in fact, there were former rice farms in TX which had become residential properties and were still receiving subsidies.
steve – you may be right about this. It’s been 6 or 7 years since I did any work on farm policy and I was trying to remember the asinine way in which it was determined that big corporate agribusiness farms should get huge subsidies while the small farmers should get nothing. In fact we may both be right – federal farm policy is a byzantine maze of corporate boondoggles written by and for big agri. The typical farm bill is comprised of 1500 pages or more – and that’s just the bills that are passed every several years, not the totality of federal farm policy.
Anne Laurie: I’ve never had much luck with pot-bound ‘maters. Seems like the yield is always scant and the fruit is puny. I used to try the Big Boys before I gave up. Had much better results with a backyard garden, but the dang dawgs and crows and whatnot usually did it in. Plus I’m allergic to weeding after work, when it’s still about 90 degrees in the shade.
I’m just always thankful down here in the Southland when summer rolls around and the farmers’ markets spring up every couple of miles. Grainger County tomatoes, Silver Queen corn on teh cob, and peaches (imported from Georgia) that make me want to weep.
It should be noted, though, that so far it looks like roundup-ready plants don’t poison us, at least not directly. Roundup (glyphosate) is supposedly a lot less toxic to humans than earlier herbicides and allows for less tilling (and thus less erosion). However, it is super toxic to fish and to the algae that fish feed on, so on balance it could be tremendously bad. There’s some believable research that the Roundup formulation can cause reproductive harm to the people working with it, which is another thing that sucks about it.
I read somewhere a few years ago that there are several types of Roundup. The type sold in Australia is supposedly more environmentally friendly than the type sold here. Wherever I saw the article (it was on Yahoo, I think) it was in reference to American Roundup’s toxicity to fauna, specifically to bullfrogs. And it jibed with what I have seen and heard anecdotally. I’m sure many will laugh, but a popular thing for teenage boys to do around here in spring is to drink beer and gig frogs. I did it in my time; and though I don’t really care for frog legs, someone can always be found who does. Well, about the time Roundup Ready beans got popular is about the time that the bullfrog numbers plummeted. But at also the same time my county undertook a drainage project that re-dug many of the ditches that were primo frog habitats (frogs prefer gently sloping ditch banks and shallow water). So who can say if the frog numbers declined because of habitat destruction or Roundup or both, but as for me, I’m more suspicious of the chemical. (OTOH, again anecdotally, spring frogs seem as bountiful as ever.)
OTOH, again anecdotally, spring frogs seem as bountiful as ever.
Apart from mikey setting alight part of the a priori hateable class, this is the good news of the day.
To be honest, I’ve only set fire to three amateur athletes in my entire life.
Two of them had it coming.
One was a straight – up misunderstanding.
But y’know, if yer gonna play with fire, somebody’s gonna get burned.
Sad, but true.
Ouch….
mikey
But I do know a little about soybeans…
I’m thinking this is a line I’d like very much to be able to say.
I know about a lot of esoteric shit.
But I wouldn’t know a soybean if it bit the end of my dick.
Dammit.
I wanna participate. I need to go on a field trip….
mikey
But I wouldn’t know a soybean if it bit the end of my dick.
I also know very little about soybeans. But I do know they don’t have teeth.
That is, unless the Great Satan has genetically engineered them to grow teeth…
The Des Moines Register reports “Flood damage to Iowa’s crops stands at between $2.5 billion and $3 billion so far, according to estimates compiled by the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship”.
A reader comments: “no need to feel sorry for me with the $9-10 corn and $20+ soybeans that is coming. It looks like I should make close to a $1 million profit even with a 20% yield loss on my 12 farms. Will laugh at you all the way to the bank. Lots of money to be made in these type of weather events.”
Ah, the beauty of the free market.
He goes on: “Hog manue is great corn fertilizer, let my know if you need some. Put 3500 gallons per acre on this year or 4.2 million gallons total for my corn acres. Still have some left and no place to put it.”
4.2 million fucking gallons of liquidfied pig shit. And that’s just a small fraction of what is put into the ground and groundwater.
Too bad I have a slight bacon addiction.
I have soybeans in my salads.
Mikey, the Jerry Lawler of Sadlynauts.
Really, though, what I wonder is how many farmers will become bankrupt and sterile before they decide that going organic isn’t simply a snooty elitist thing?
Dude, it’s not that simple for grain. The whole infrastructure is set up for industrial farming, the market, the equipment you have to use, everything.
And hey, the consumer, at least with rice, could do a little more to help.
You know what the biggest weed problem is in rice production? “Red” rice, a species that is actually better for you than regular rice. It’s the kind of rice you spend 3 dollars on for a little packet of. As Jules said in another context, it’s “that gourmet shit.”. But when a few grains get mixed in with white rice, buyers freak out. When the rice farmer hauls his grain to the dryer, and the sample house finds more than x amount (not very many) grains of red rice in the sample of white/long grain rice in that lot, the discount exacted is huge. Half-price at times. Supposedly because consumers complain of a ginger-looking grain or two in their otherwise perfectly uniform bag of white rice. So the incentive is to eradicate red rice. Except that’s very hard to do in a rice field since the plants are so similar. The “solution” is Clearfield, which is a mutant (at least it’s not a GMO, thank god). Would you rather not eat Clearfield? Fine, then tell the rice mills that you don’t mind red rice in your white rice.
Resistance to GMOs by consumers has done a lot of good. And I’ve heard through the grapevine that there’s a class action lawsuit pending against the Dow chemical for a cross-polination mishap that completely ruined the genepool of Chenier rice. Maybe what consumers can’t manage, the lawyers can.
As for Roundup, well, in ten years it won’t be an issue. Monsanto has predictably been so greedy that they’ve pretty much Roundup-Readied every popular plant. Overuse engenders resistence, and already mare’s tail and a few other weeds as resistant to glyphosate. Pigweed is starting to get resistant and when that resistance spreads to enough territory, it’s over (pigweed is awful awful shit and the main reason why most ppl went to Roundup soybeans around here).
So there’s actually a little history here.
There was this violent, angry bastard. Let’s call him Dad.
He had this expression. He’d say he didn’t understand the question, and he wouldn’t know the item in question if it bit the end of his dick. Now, the dude wasn’t stupid, he was mean. And when he said he wouldn’t know “x” if it bit the end of his dick, he KNEW it didn’t have teeth.
Same dude that punched me out on a number of occasions. Punched my mom out on others.
See, two weird fucking things. I KNOW he knew that soybeans didn’t have teeth.
But somehow, weirdly, I mimic his framing. We are all lessened by this little conversation.
And now I want to break somebody’s jaw.
See how this (doesn’t) work(s)….
mikey
Umm. Huh?
Never heard of this dood, but I’m not feeling the love, frankly….
mikey
Ooops, maybe I better explain the Jerry Lawler reference.
It’s a compliment. One of Lawler’s better dirty tricks was to throw a fireball in another wrestler’s face. He fucking roasted Terry Funk, and I laughed my 7 or 8 year old ass off when he burned Killer Karl Krupp’s goatee completely off. Great stuff.
I burned 30 acres of straw yesterday evening. Farming’s a job that has its moments for firebugs like me. I kept singing “Fields of Fire” as I was throwing matches. Then I’d think of the Trashcan Man in The Stand.
Ah. More down the lines of “fun”.
Perhaps you should add some paragraphs to the Lawler Wiki Entry.
Just thinking out loud here.
Rock on, HTML…
mikey
That rape charge was bullshit, Mikey.
Memphis Wrestling was great performance art (which is why Andy Kauffman was drawn to it). Lawler was its star. He’s still slightly funny on WWE, but back in the day, he was awesome.
As a kid I saw Lawler, Austin Idol (who was like Ric Flair, but better) and Handsome Jimmy Valiant (a biker dude who has barbed wire tattooed across his forehead) destroy the Interns and some other heel managed by Jimmy Hart live at the Coliseum. One of the best shows I’ve ever seen. And I watched all the Kauffman shit live on WMC on Saturday mornings as it happened. Awesome stuff. The sad shit McMahon produces now pales in comparison.
Here’s an interesting thing.
You might have heard me make reference to a russian girl, one with long legs and a brilliant smile. One by which I am hopelessly smitten.
It’s an interesting historical fact that she was Andy Kaufman’s girlfriend back in the old, old days. Back when west hollywood meant more than heroin and bisexuality…
mikey
But somehow, weirdly, I mimic his framing. We are all lessened by this little conversation.
And now I want to break somebody’s jaw.
Speaking of toxins, and heritage. Mikey, I bin there, and the good part is, once you understand where the “framing” came from, you have a place to stand outside of the tangle of razorwire and sumpwater. And with a place to stand, I can start working on doing something more artistic, or at least less public-nuisance-y, with the supplies at hand…
Mz Nicky, I’m sure my pot-maters qualify as both “scant” and “puny”. But our household is just two adults, and a couple dozen plants provide me with a summer’s worth of cheap entertainment plus all the tomatoes we can eat & enough to share with the next-door neighbor in August. Mostly I wanted to point out to the elitist non-heartland urbanists among us that, despite the older hipsters’ tales, tomatoes are an extremely accessible form of “farming.”
This year, after splurging a small inheritance last year on a heinous round of re-landshaping our 75×80 plot, the Spousal Unit decided “we” should upgrade from a random batch of plastic pots full of $2-bag topsoil to a row of reservoir planters filled with certified organic fertilized potting mix and matching ladders. Since it is his money, I have not protested (mocked, though). So far the $3 seedlings do indeed look more ornamental, possibly even lusher than in previous Junes, although an astonishingly clement spring probably has more to do with the actual rate of plant growth. We’ll see…
Too bad I have a slight bacon addiction.
did you see where the huge corporate hog confinement facility was flooded? Most of the poor hogs were drowned but some got free and swam like hell for dry land. Unfortunately, they started climbing out on the levees, where they were shot by local law enforcement. A confinement hog is a big animal, and they were damaging the levees.
Now I understand this in theory, but in practice? I saw this animal – and pigs are smart, smart animals – who had climbed onto a levee to save himself from death. Miraculously freed from the confinement, then freed from the water, and then . . . shot dead. I cried for about an hour. I was actually hiccuping and gagging. I will never eat pork again, unless it’s totally organic and free range. There’s only so much my conscience can take.
The small farmer is gone. This idea so many people who live on the east coast in particular have of what “farming” is in a corn state like Iowa is nothing like the reality. The few family farmers hanging on mostly have town jobs, or at least the wife will work in town. There are no family hog farms or chicken farms except for the ones that sell organic produce at farmer’s markets and so forth. It’s all been taken over by the real pigs, the money pigs, although it’s an insult to pigs to call them that.
HTML, on the Roundup issue, my biology professor, who is in fact an environmental biologist who had to give it up and start teaching because environmental biology is so horrendously depressing, told a fellow student who was asking what to use to poison an enormous patch of poison ivy that Roundup was actually the least environmentally damaging of all of the poisons on the market. (Not that she thought it was like rosewater and glycerin or anything, still nasty stuff, but what ya gonna do?) Now this was the type one uses on emergent poison ivy, and not crop herbicide, so I can’t speak to whether or not Roundup is better across the board.
I was gonna ad, PZ Myers had that arm cross-burning incident story up on Pharyngula a while back. Horrid story.
Migraine, can’t spell or write grammatically. Drugs and bed now.
Thanks, Anne Laurie.
I get more peace and center from your urban Irish wisdom than anything I find in group every thursday.
Thinkin you might have some kindofa future.
Hoping, anyway…
mikey
I just read through every comment in this thread (so far), and the only thing that I can pretend to know anything about is growing tomatoes, which I like to do almost as much as eating the results.
I can’t even imagine the heartbreak and effort associated with growing food plants for a living, though torching fields every now and then, for good reasons, of course, sounds like something I could get into.
And while my own old man’s been dead and buried for almost 32 years, and was sometimes ornery and bitter for his own reasons, I didn’t have to dodge his fists, or anything even remotely like that.
So, I’m just mostly having around and listening to the rest o’ youse tonight.
garhg!
“hanging” around, not “having” around.
And I’m liking it.
And I watched all the Kauffman shit live on WMC on Saturday mornings as it happened.
I saw that, too, but from the vantage point of WTVA out of Tupelo. Saw Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes rassle for something like 45 minutes at a gym outside of New Albany, too. Watched “Bullet” Bob Armstrong destroy some poor bastard who’s name’s lost to memory, time and weed at the Lavender Coliseum in Columbus. Saw Arn and Ole Anderson ride all holy hell over, hell…I wanna say the Freebirds, and I also saw the Midnight Express (“Beautiful” Bobby Eaton and “Sweet” Stan Lane, mind) whup the Fantastiks all over the Itawamba Community College gym, too. I saw three of the Von Erichs at different times, and somewhere in the pile of crap my mother saves is an autographed picture of Dirty Dutch Mantell, suitable for framing.
You know who else can kiss my stump-jumper ass? Vince Russo. McMahon is just a greedy scumsucker, but Russo destroyed professional rasslin’.
Now, about farming. Way back in the olden days after getting his ass shot off somewhere in Virginia, my great-grandfather walked all the way back from a prison camp in Pennsylvania to Enon Hollow wherein he married his former captain’s widow. This captain own a big ol’ farm and for whatever reason, he left it to the horse-stealin’, drunken sonofabitch that was ol’ Ans Bean. Personally, I think the reason he made it through the entire Civil War is because the old bastard was too mean to kill.
Anyhow, bastard begat bastard, and one day in the late ’30s, my great-gradfather Lifford looked over his three sons and tried to figure out which one was the least worthless, and thus, worthy of taking over the family farm, which due to Ans’ drunken running was less than half the size he came into. Uncle Oye had already slipped up North to spend life in the factory, and Uncle Stanley was in the Army, so it fell to my grandfather. So, Paw Bean went to Maxy’s Pool Hall, found Poppaw, sobered his skinny ass up temporarily and gave him the reigns. Why, I’ll never know, because up till then Poppaw spent most of his life trying to run away from the farm, while Paw Bean went and drug his ass back, after thoroughly stomping it to teach him a lesson, of course.
But, when given control, Poppaw squared his shoulders and ran that farm slap into the ground. He kept ahold of things just long enough to give four of his five children* 20-80 acres a piece**, and then spent the rest of his life drinking bad moonshine and Old Charter. ‘Cause Poppaw fucking hated farming, and I’m glad, too, ’cause I hate that shit myself. My dad’s people were military white trash, and the Marines fucked him after ‘Nam over so badly, I managed to avoid that silly shit, too.
* Like every sufficiently hick family I know, one of my uncles is what they used to call “blessed,” which means he’s now a 65-year-old man with the mentality of a spoiled 8 year old. Polio fever and lack of medical care for crackers pre-TVA will do that. Ahh, poor white trash and their euphamisms.
** Poppaw wasn’t entirely stupid, and gave the bulk to Momma and my oldest uncle, who were the most sensible of the four. Believe you me, that’s still a stickler for the rest.
Kinda like shooting Wilbur, eh Candy?
I’ve been in pens with pigs, so I know they are as smart as they are viscious and mean. Except for the smart part, they’re the Republicans of the animal world.
Thus, I can justify previously mentioned addiction.
Hope the drugs work and the head gets better.
Roundup kills purt’ much everything except 1) crops genetically altered to be immune to it, and 2) the resistant weeds to which HTML referred. By the way, you can probably add johnsongrass to that list; found it in Crittenden County last year. There is also a shortage of imazethapyr, the herbicide used on Clearfield rice; a lot more of it got planted this year than they expected, and they’re worried the red rice will outcross and get immune to it. There is only one glyphosate, but there are different formulations of Roundup; they add stuff to it so it won’t burn the crop leaves and what. They’ve got a “Flex” cotton now so you can spray late in the season, and Monsanto tried to sell farmers on the concept they had to get special Roundup to treat it, but I don’t think they bought it. There was a glyphosate shortage this year, too. Farmers have gotten heavily dependent on it because one pass and poof, all your competing weeds at the start of the year are gone, and your crops grow big and strong.
According to what I’ve read, farm subsidies appeared during the Depression to save farmers. Ironic what it has turned into.
My own experience with farming was a child, when I stayed with relatives who would talk about the old days. I was suitably horrified by the tales of animal cruelty, child cruelty, brain smothering boredom, and endless brute labor.
My parent’s generation left the farms and did not look back. I do not doubt there exist lovely farms with whitewashed fences, happy grazing cows, and cheerful, applecheeked children. Doubtless, these offspring will stay on the farm.
you can probably add johnsongrass to that list
Blargh. That stuff is a pain in the ass. Awful stuff, and it’ll cut you to ribbons of course if you move quickly through it, but it’s not as bad (at least to me) as pigweed. When I grew conventional beans on my 30, I used to hook weeds (a weedhook is a hand tool). The pigweed could reach 7 feet tall and every damn one was loaded with seed or pollen or both. Their stalks would be so thick that I’d have to tug and tug with the weedhook to finally slice through the plant and kill it, and all that shaking would loosen the pollen, not to mention the falling dead weed would inevitably contact my skin. I’d walk out of the field in hives and dripping with snot.
One year, my cousin made me pipewick a bean field ate up with pigweed. I used a JD 4020, which is a cabless tractor. (A pipewick is a tube [pipe] containing chemical with a rope on one side. It’s fixed to the front of a tractor at a perpendicular angle so that the saturated rope on the side of the pipe physically grazes the taller weeds as the tractor moves through the field, killing them.) Please please, man, don’t ask me to do this. But of course he did. I made it about halfway through the field before my eyes swelled shut. I had a sneezing fit that lasted 4 hours (until I ate enough benadryl to kill an elephant). The pigweeds’ pollen was so thick it turned the green tractor yellow. I fucking hate pigweeds.
Weird anecdote: I’ve always heard that the roots of johnsongrass have a high concentration of cyanide. Anyone know if that’s true or not?
I have no sympathy for farmers using GM patented crops. If nobody ever saw the inevitable outcome of being dependent on patented seed, then they must have voted for W.
WereBear – I have no doubt that life on many farms was Hobbesian (nasty, brutish, and short) but I spent part of every summer growing up on my grandfather’s farm in Iowa (he raised corn, soybeans, hogs, and sheep) and it was for the most part idyllic – this would have been in the late 60s through the 70s – with the exception that I learned early on not to drink the well water. I would get sick around the end of the first week every year; mom always said, “the water here is GOOD, it’s full of minerals!” Well, after I stopped drinking it I stopped getting sick, and it turns out that the water was not only full of minerals but also farm chemicals and animal waste runoff, to which the people who drank it every day had built up a tolerance. 10 or 15 years ago they ran “city water” lines out to all the farms because all the wells were contaminated; 9 years ago my cousin who had lived out on the farm adjacent to my grandfather’s died of kidney cancer at age 38 which I’m convinced was caused by a lifetime of drinking contaminated wellwater (his twin cousin who moved into town after high school is still hale and hearty). Aside from that, though, life on the farm was good for them – sure the labor was hard though nothing like in my mother’s childhood when grandpa was still farming with draft horses, and boredom was really not an issue – there was too much work to be done to have time to get bored. My grandmother had a huge garden and they raised their own meat, so the food was generally of a much better quality than what most of us eat now. Of course my memories are from after the rise of mechanized farming; when they moved to the farm in 1938 there was no electricity, though the Sears kit house on the place built in 1917 had been wired for it. Also no indoor bathroom, though again the house was built with one – but since it was on the second floor and there was no electricity to pump water up to it, it remained unused until they got electricity in 1947. Also no real heat on the second floor; the coal burner in the basement heated the first floor, and there was a grate in the ceiling that allowed some heat to rise into the second story. Life in those days would have certainly been very hard – no electricity, little heat, outdoor privies, bathing in a big galvinized tub in the basement, no refrigeration, etc. I still remember grandma using the old wringer-type washing machine with four tubs and the wringer that you could rotate around as you moved the clothes from one tub to the next – the genesis, I believe, of the saying “don’t get your tit in a wringer” – which if you ever saw one of those things in operation you would understand was all too possible. Ouch. But for all of that, they were much healthier than most folks these days; both lived into their 80s in good health and seemed generally happy with their lives.
Yes.
Nader – check out the link I posted way upthread – it’s not just the farmers who elected to use GM seed who have been victimized by Monsanto.
Jennifer – saw where you were asking about my email address on the other thread. Yes, I’m “Retardo”. I mailed you to the address you use on comment threads, but maybe it got sent to your spam folder.
Thanx, HTML – it just went to my other email address, the one I don’t check every day. I’ll check it now.
HTMLM – my wife drove through AR during the big flood some months back, and brought back some staggering pictures of fences and road signs a foot or so above water.
Michael Pollan talks a bit about how Industrial Ag sets the terms for all farmers. But that’s a ticket to hell, and the US is so badly positioned to adapt.
Like every sufficiently hick family I know, one of my uncles is what they used to call “blessed,” which means he’s now a 65-year-old man with the mentality of a spoiled 8 year old. Polio fever and lack of medical care for crackers pre-TVA will do that. Ahh, poor white trash and their euphamisms.
Well, there’s things money can’t fix either. Remember JFK’s sister Rosemary, the sorry human “reason” behind Eunice Shriver’s support of the Special Olympics? My own personal experience is urban, not rural, but there seems to be something in the “Scots Irish heritage”, such as it is… some weird combination of genes and misguided parenting, such as will happen when your family story is so peculiar that it’s simpler to marry cousins than to try and explain stuff to outsiders. As HSThompson once put it, “You keep breeding fast but crazy to crazy but fast, and you end up with *very* fast and *very* crazy.” Or, in Kennedy terms, with a
littersib group containing one genuine human Phenomenon, someone gifted with Glamour in the original Celtic sense of that word, plus one hopelessly “blessed” Epic Fail, and a range between those two of variously gifted-or-not-so-much sibs with a fatal prediliction for chemical mood alterants.AL – Kennedys aren’t Scots-Irish, but Irish Irish, though I’m sure it’s all the same genetically if you go far back enough into the bog.
I dunno if the phenomenon has anything to do with ethnicity or culture. Certainly the Romans had their share of families like the Kennedys — or the stereotypical Southern Gothic clan. And the royal families of Europe (almost totally German in origin) are as famous for their uneven qualities as for their inbreeding. Maybe cousin-fucking is the problem. Or not. I tend to think it’s a human nature problem, and everyone is more or less susceptible.
Well, with consanguinuity (or as I call it, cousin-fuckin’) you get to see a lot of recessive genes, some of which are awesome and great, and some of which are complete crap. Before modern dentistry and orthodontics and medicine, though, having kids with a cousin or at least a second cousin was probably your best bet, partly because the teeth size genes and the jaw size genes segregate independently, with the result that outbreeding could give your kids screwed-up teeth that wouldn’t fit in their jaws and would grow wrong and get all abcessy and kill them.
This might be true, but more importantly it’s interesting, which is why I remember it.
Also, Dueling Banjos.
I should find out if Oslo has a version of the Law of Return.
I do believe it does — like Germany and Denmark. But you need the documents to establish your provenance.
I also know very little about soybeans. But I do know they don’t have teeth.
I am more interested to find out how you milk the little fuckers.
I’m sorry to join this thread late but really wanted to get this question out there (apologies as well if already covered)
Not to get all “RedState” and tinfoil hat brigade here, but… Any chance Mons is holding stuff back to drive up demand for genetically modified crops? As in, “we don’t have any standard Soy Beans, but we do have some GMF…”
I spent my 13th summer working on an uncle’s dairy farm in MI, it gives you a great appreciation for what farmers have to deal with.
Jennifer,
Hey. That Monsanto article was interesting. Thanks for that.
Jennifer – I was careful not to paint all farming with a broad brush. I have helped with the four tub washer, and didn’t get anything caught! (Unable to post, wound up going to sleep.)
Corporatism being the opposite of living things, agribusiness might be the worst of both worlds. It certainly acts like it. The common theme of every farm needing at least one adult day job can be laid at their door.
For all yunz that want to get your science nerd/outraged earth dweller jones on, try this website. All across America we are ‘nutrient enriching’ the water flowing to the sea, to the point that the water is so enriched with nutrients that it effectively becomes lethal or at least dead. Two leading causes of enrichment are nitrogen fertilizer and wastewater treatment facilities.
Also, cryptosporidium and pfiesteria.
Poopy: it’s not always a joke.
Floods and hogs reminded me of this photo from the Tabasco flood of November 2007.
You remember that, right?
This is a funny chart about a wonderful, magical animal.
There’s a giant billboard sign on the highway west into Dayton (or was it Cincinnati?) that says “HELL IS REAL”.
Ahead 30 miles, take Exit 7.
I also know very little about soybeans. But I do know they don’t have teeth.
I am more interested to find out how you milk the little fuckers.
Indeed, I hate that. It’s not milk! It’s juice! STFU with the soy milk already!
I know nothing about soybeans, but what I do know is that a) they don’t have teeth and b) they don’t have teats.
In the interest of efficiency, perhaps we should at this point simply make a (very short, it sounds like) list of the things soy beans actually have…
mikey
I dunno if the phenomenon has anything to do with ethnicity or culture. Certainly the Romans had their share of families like the Kennedys — or the stereotypical Southern Gothic clan. And the royal families of Europe (almost totally German in origin) are as famous for their uneven qualities as for their inbreeding. Maybe cousin-fucking is the problem. Or not. I tend to think it’s a human nature problem, and everyone is more or less susceptible.
Probably true, HTML. I think of the “Scots-Irish” socio-genetic tribe as a seething mass of bullshit artists given to threats both verbal and physical. The “Irish” end of the axis tends to more screaming, and the “Scotch” end to more hitting.* How this differs from the stereotypical Italian/Soprano clan is, well, those of us within the matrix can *totally* tell the difference (/snark). Both Celts and Italians agree we’re quite different from the dense, icy, soul-smothering, non-verbal German/Scandinavian brand of toxic clannishness. But you’re right, it’s like the temperamental differences between terriers and schutzhunds — the range across both types is greater than the difference between them.
*Old joke: Why do Scottish dancers hold their hands up over their heads & Irish dancers hold their hands rigidly at their sides? Because the Scots can’t be trusted not to knife each other unless all hands are visibly weapon-free at all times, whereas whenever the Irish raise their hands past shoulder height they’re seized with an irresistable impulse to throw a brick.
the dense, icy, soul-smothering, non-verbal German/Scandinavian brand of toxic clannishness.
I am seething with silent pent-up anger about that gratuitous and baseless attack on my kin.
the dense, icy, soul-smothering, non-verbal German/Scandinavian brand of toxic clannishness.
I would TOTALLY marry that woman…
mikey
Probably true, HTML. I think of the “Scots-Irish” socio-genetic tribe as a seething mass of bullshit artists given to threats both verbal and physical. The “Irish” end of the axis tends to more screaming, and the “Scotch” end to more hitting.* How this differs from the stereotypical Italian/Soprano clan is, well, those of us within the matrix can *totally* tell the difference (/snark). Both Celts and Italians agree we’re quite different from the dense, icy, soul-smothering, non-verbal German/Scandinavian brand of toxic clannishness.
Heh. I concede there are differences. A lot of art, from The Departed to John Horne Burns, references the Irish psychological inability to cope with disaster, as compared to, say, Latins, who have a bounce-back in their soul. Sometimes I think our tribe is the absolute worst at nurturing resentment. But then I think of the Serbs. 😉
…and, to a lesser degree, the Pollocks, much of whose identity, understandably, is defined in fierce opposition to Germans and Russians. When I was engaged to a Polish woman, shacked-up on the East Coast and thinking about changing my life, her sister, at about the same time, married a Lithuanian dude. Now “Lithuanian” would have been fine with the family (after all, the two kingdoms used to be joined), but actually, said the elder ladies in the family, their eyes narrowing in suspicion, he was Russian. Needless to say, it didn’t go over well.
I was accepted, to my surprise. For one, my redneckness was seen as somewhat mitigated by an English father. Two, redneckness per se was not seen as a wholly bad thing, for (this is their words) “Pollocks are pretty much the rednecks of Europe.” Three, when I told my potential mother-in-law that my great-great grandfather was from Koenigsburg [true, but we have no idea what ethnicity he really was — he spoke German and served in Bismarck’s army, but self-identified as “black German”; my guess, considering his almond eyes and dark features, is that he was an ethnic Hungarian], well then I was seen as a long-lost Pollock myself.
I’ve read the Material Safety Data Sheet for Roundup — I used to have it stuck on the bulletin board in my home office; I don’t know if I still do. I know things about MSDSs. I used to manage a collection of them (about 40K) for a Really Really Big Corporation. MSDSs are usually a pretty bland collection of chemical, toxicological and environmental information. That one in particular reads like a masterwork of saying things without saying them and corporate CYA code-speak. Jus’ sayin’.
[…] have no sympathy for farmers using GM patented crops,” says Ralph Nader on the “Sadly, No!” blog. “If nobody ever saw the inevitable outcome of being […]