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Don’t panic. Keep reading. All is well.
Hermaphroditic Nut Bushes
I first wrote about my hazels a year and a half ago, during their late-winter blooming.
I missed them that year, but the months have rolled around (as they tend to do), and it’s once again hazel harvest season.
My wife got me a shirt some years ago that says:
I Have Reason to Believe
the Squirrels are Mocking Me
Here at the end of July, in between my summer teaching and my fall teaching, the squirrels (and maybe their chipmunk cousins) have once again beaten me to the nuts on the biggest, oldest hazel. It makes perfect sense that the largest bush has the most energy to pour into nut production, and that they should therefore mature a little faster, but I just didn’t think about it. I was also out of town for multiple weeks (more on that soon).
The better news on that nutty front is that both of the smaller bushes are also producing, and here I was paying attention at the right time. This is what they look like.
They will need to dry for a while, and I’m debating on the best way to do that. Oregon State’s extension office says no more than 110 degrees, with plenty of air flow. That sounds like the attic, where there’s a fan. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Tomatoes Everywhere
We normally have a Sungold cherry plant or two, which always do well, and sometimes a Roma, which doesn’t always do well. This year we have two Sungolds and two other cherry tomato plants, and we’re already giving them away.
For these I use an electric dryer with its own fan, once everyone I know is sick of them. It has four racks that stack on top of one another, and a full batch might take 48-72 hours, depending on how big they are. They’ll continue to produce until November unless there’s an unseasonal frost.
Elderberries
These are just about done for the year. Nobody wants them, except for the birds, so the ones I can’t eat fresh I give a quick rinse in chlorinated tap water and freeze them. I like them in cereal or with plain yogurt, or in a banana smoothie, with or without other sweeter fruits.
First Announcement
I’ve joined up with a group that is building an online school. Not for credit (though possibly for micro-credits; we’re negotiating on that point, and many others).
There’s a lot to think about, in terms of how it will run — how it will be different from what’s on offer at the standard buffet of classroom boredom and debt — and lots of “failed” progressive experiments, from Hobo College in Chicago during the Depression (which I first heard about on Richard Linklater’s wonderful Up to Speed) to the better known Black Mountain College here in North Carolina.
From the Digital Library of Illinois History Journals’s archive:
Coffee was the life blood of the college and doughnuts were the stuff upon which it existed. So when coffee and rolls were missing recently at a session of the public speaking class, the doom of the college was sealed.
That’s a really snarky way to put it, but honestly, it’s still true. The way to get students to any special event on campus is to provide food. Most often it’s the same cheap shelf-stable stuff students would buy for themselves, but occasionally a prepared fruit-and-cheese plate or, if the public is expected (meaning adults, alumni, or donors), then a hot steam-table buffet. I love those little crispy spanokopita triangle things . . .
In other mean-but-kinda-true news from long ago (2011), check out this quiz.
Second Announcement (burying the lede a bit)
After almost two and a half years, this week I’ll be taking this Substack paid. The VSI podcast will remain free, as it was produced through a grant from the NSF, and some of the existing written content will as well. I’ll reduce the frequency of free posts, but not to zero. We’ll have to see how it goes.
I have a couple of reasons for this.
I hope that a paywall will discourage the AI companies from hoovering my stuff up into their giant content training funnels. Or if they do, at least they’ll have to pay me something for it. I have little confidence that the recent open letter by big-name authors will have much effect, or that any benefits will trickle down to no-names like me.
I interact with minors on a pretty regular basis (in fact my next three posts will probably be about the various classes / camps I did this summer). I’ve been pretty careful so far in my posts here, and will continue to be so in free public ones. But for those who want the extra engagement (and are over 18), I plan on lifting the veil more. Not like Larry from Stolen Youth on Hulu, or even How to Become a Cult Leader on Netflix; I’m aiming for more of an anti-guru vibe, like Alan Watts.
There will obviously be more details on this as I work through them. I spent last week switching credit unions to get a business account that would work with Substack’s payment processor Stripe. Now I just need to figure out how to make the over-18 thing work with Substack, and we’ll be ready to go.
For now, I have Pledges turned on as a toe-in-the-water kind of thing. Pledges automatically turn into subscriptions once the paywall goes up.
What can you expect in the new, improved, award-wanking newsletter?
More fiction, including personal reprints of all my published pieces. I never argue with paying editors, but I don’t always agree with them. So regardless of what’s out there, these will be my current living-document versions.
More nonfiction, both new and used / updated. You all know how fast link rot sets in. Maybe eventually I’ll be able to afford a maintenance intern.
More drawings, both mine and those of more talented artists, wherever I can find them. I met a bunch at HeroesCon a few weeks ago. If you all pay me, I will pay them, simple as that.
Dumb jokes.
Other stuff. I’m open to suggestions. How about comedy criticism? Like literary criticism, but for stand-up? Could that be a thing? Check out the 8-minute clip of Dan Schreiber on Radio 4. Or podcast recommendations? The story about the paleontologist who named her son ‘Odin’ because she and her husband agreed that ‘Dino’ was a little too geeky (whereas ‘Odin’ was just geeky enough?) has sold me on We Can Be Weirdos.
Finally, a Tension
Sometimes I like to read very different books at the same time, to see what they say to each other in my head. Not like this NYT review of two very similar books, Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning is Here and Peter Turchin’s End Times, which just weight different causal factors for similar cyclic models of history (and which I’ll return to) — no, I mean like Maia Toll’s extremely earnest memoir Letting Magic In and Dan Schreiber’s satirical survey of weirdness The Theory of Everything Else.
Why? They were within reach of one another on the B&N’s New Nonfiction shelf.