Random Days, Random Thoughts

• There is a very important article at Counterpunch today. Read it! Highlights:

My own [Stan's] anecdotal evidence, without using worm castings but using simply composting mulch on organic compost over non-compacted soil, is that in 12 square surface-feet, one can grow three species of food, with six plants each... producing okra, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, peas, bush beans, etc. Mixing them, and adding a couple of marigolds and aromatics (like mint or parilla) seems to keep the little critters from taking more than their share. Last summer I had one cucumber vine that produced around 50 mature cucumbers, totalling well over 20 pounds of food, for around three months. By rotating seasonals, it is easily conceivable to take a 12 square-foot plot in a temperate zone and raise 100 pounds of food a year... being very conservative. Neither Syngenta, nor Cargill, nor Archer-Daniels-Midland want you to know this.

They want to sell you mass-produced food, for money... which you have to work for. Let us not forget that Enclosure (forcing people off the land, or separating them from their land) was the method used to compel people into the monetized industrial economy in the first place. A 12-foot garden bed is three-feet by four-feet. How many of these can you build on a half an acre? The key is always in the design.

• The young children at work have decided to befriend me, for reasons I cannot fathom. Lately they have been asking me from time to time where Shelby is. Today -- not for the first time -- I informed him that he had died. Again. Eaten, it seems, by evil goats. Result: A delightfully graphic picture of Shelby being eaten by an Evil Goat is now hanging up over his desk.

• Has anyone else noticed this: There is a house in the middle of Roseburg with chickens in the yard. I mean the middle of Roseburg, downtown; and I mean a whole fucking swarm (or mess or flock or whatever a group of chickens is called) of gigantic chickens almost as big as the turkeys that run around the college just hanging out in this yard.
  

• It makes me wish there were hundreds and hundreds of chickens just wandering about town, allowed to eat what they want. They're a good bit sightlier than pigeons, and if there were so many of them I would never feel bad killing and eating them.
  

• In fact if you did that, and banned all the cars, and increased taxes and used them for the bus, and got an Amtrak station, and forced people to use their useless lawns to grow food, and maybe let some other animals wander about too, and instead of planting ornamental shade trees planted apples, walnuts, etc as shade trees, and confiscated all the private property, and required of each citizen a contribution of -- say -- 40 hours of public community service/week, which could include everything from tending the trees to teaching to building a house to patrolling the streets, in exchange for which each had the right to partake freely of the communal food supply, housing, medicines, schools, & all this was regulated by a governing body consisting of the whole citizenry of: a given house; a given street; a given neighborhood; a given quarter; the entire town,
  

• Well if all that was true then this would be a pretty darn good place to live.