What Takes Precedence For Americans - The First Amendment or The First Commandment?

"In the Bible, God doesn't grant the freedom of speech.  God doesn't grant the right to bear arms. God doesn't grant the right to assembly.  God doesn't even grant the freedom of religion either.  If you don't worship Him, you're screwed!"

 A little notice in the paper said that Joe Raiolo, an editor at Mad magazine, was talking at the library on "The Joys of Censorship."  There were several years when a preteen kid who used to be me had a subscription to Mad magazine.  And the adult who blogs today always wants to hear what someone says about censorship. 

As the quote above suggests, this was a lively event.  More standup comedian than lecturer, Raiola covered a lot of ground.   He said he wasn't going to use euphemisms -  he would say asshole, not A-hole, fucking, not freeking, and nigger, not the N word.  He spent some time explaining that last one, which he said was the second most controversial word, but he protested that people were not allowed to use it.  It depends on the context.  He deplored an Alabama book publisher who put out a version of Huckleberry Finn that substituted 'slave' for 'nigger' so more schools would use it. On the other hand, rappers are taking back the word and defusing its explosive power. 

He went through a list of Supreme Court decisions on first amendment rights:

• it's ok to sell and watch films depicting criminal torture and killing of animals
• corporations have the same free speech rights as individual humans
• the Westboro Baptist church can picket military funerals with "God Hates Fags" signs
• the most violent and repugnant video games can't be restricted to adults
• it's ok to lie about your military service and medals

In contrast, Raiolo said, it's still illegal for radio and televisions stations to broadcast George Carlin's seven dirty words routine.  

I didn't think to ask whether he thought that if Carlin's case were heard today whether it might get different treatment, since the fines CBS received for showing Janet Jackson's exposed breast were thrown out and the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal.  

He also covered comic book history and the birth of Mad magazine with a look at some of the old covers and article, including their international editions (which can use US copy, but have control over their own content.)

In the Q&A there was a discussion of where Mad magazine draws the line on what it publishes.  Raiola said he could describe it, that comedians try to know where the line is and then push it.  But he gave some examples of things they don't push - like common offensive four letter words and sexuality.

I see on Raiola's website, that people in Wasilla will be able to see Raiola twice on Tuesday.  He'll do something on Mad magazine at 4pm at the library and the censorship talk at 7pm at the Old Mat-Su Cinema.  

[I have some video, but I did ask permission to post it and Raiola wanted to see it first. I tend to respect such requests for performances.  I could argue that his free presentation, at the library, on censorship could be interpreted is fair game for reporting.  But just because one can do something, doesn't mean one should.  And I suspect Mad magazine has pretty good legal expertise and representation on an issue like this.  So I'll wait to post any video.]

___ Is To Alaska What Football Is To Penn State

This is just a little thought experiment.  I’m going to try to keep the analogy simple.  [I didn't succeed.  Life is complicated and so many things are interrelated.  But the basic analogy you can read quickly.]


Fill in the blank:

___ is to Alaska  what football is to  Penn State.

 I'm sure every Alaskan reader would immediately say "thoughtfulness."  No?  How about that black gooey stuff?

When things go wrong, the very least we can do is learn something from them so that when the elements return in a different disguise, we can recognize them.  What then are the key elements of these two stories?

The Penn State

1.  A sacred cow - At Penn State, football served the function of uniting everyone in spirit and (at least people believe) generated a lot of money, which was translated into enhanced programs and lots of jobs on campus for people in the surrounding community.    Certainly the hotels and bars and restaurants benefited from crowds coming to home football games, and buying Penn State paraphernalia. The  university benefited from the television money the highly ranked football team brought in.  
Challenging the sacred cow in any way 1) is disloyal to the Penn State spirit and 2) threatens a lot of people’s income. 
This results in relatively little scrutiny because 1) everyone wants to believe in the goodness of football and 2) those benefiting don’t want to threaten those benefits.  The rule of a sacred cow is that no one should raise embarrassing questions.  So people self-censor, knowing that any criticism will bring on quick retaliation.

2.  Big fish in a  small pond.  Penn State is located in a relatively small city where its and football's influence is much bigger than it would be in a larger city.  A challenge from inside is unlikely.

3.  An aging hero with long incumbency- Joe Paterno's 45 year career made him the longest serving head coach in US college football.  Born in 1926, Paterno became Penn State’s assistant football coach in 1950, and the head coach in 1966.  Dan Rorabaugh at US News wrote a line that appears repeatedly online:  “Joe Paterno is Penn State.” Paterno did a lot of good.  In addition to winning, Paterno's team regularly had high graduation rates.  In 2011 his dynasty ended when it was disclosed that he knew that his trusted, long-term assistant coach and friend, had been sexually molesting young boys in Penn State related programs for many years.   Paterno died shortly after that. 


4.  A  spoiler:  A good friend of the hero who turns out to have some serious problems - For whatever reasons, personal loyalty, protecting the sanctity of PSU football, disbelief, Paterno turned a blind eye to Jerry Sandusky's crimes.  More than a blind eye, according to the Freeh Report.  The hero, it turns out, knew and blocked attempts to do something about it.



The Alaskan Story

1.  The Alaska sacred cow has to be oil.  And probably to an even greater extent than football at Penn State.   Close to 90% of the state revenue comes from oil.  Every community has projects that were built on oil money.  Every citizen is eligible for a permanent fund check. 

2.  Oil is a whale in a small pond up in Alaska. 

3.  An aging hero with long incumbency -   There is no hero as closely linked to oil as Paterno was linked to football.  The Alaskan most similar to Paterno was Senator Ted Stevens.  Senator Lisa Murkowski said at Stevens’ memorial "Ted was Alaska – he just was Alaska.”  He was born in 1923 and was appointed to the US Senate in 1968. Seeing any patterns?

When he left, he was the longest serving Republican in Senate history. In 2008 a good friend and political ally from the oil industry testified against  Stevens in court.  Stevens was convicted and lost his reelection bid months later. (The charges were later vacated by Obama’s incoming Attorney General because of prosecutorial misconduct.)  Stevens died in a plane crash two years later.

4.  A spoiler:  A good friend of the hero who turns out to have some serious problems.  Bill Allen, a high school dropout  who became a powerful political king-maker as the head of his billion dollar oil support company VECO, became a witness for the Department of Justice against a number of Alaskan politicians including Ted Stevens.  Aside for political corruption on behalf of the oil industry, Allen is alleged to have had an affair with an underage young woman. 



In the Penn State case, the Pennsylvania Attorney General's office came into the small Pennsylvania town where the University is located to prosecute Jerry Sandusky.  Penn State University accepted Joe Paterno's early retirement.  A University commissioned report by former FBI Director Louis Freeh harshly condemned a number of Penn State officials.  Paterno and three other key officials "are portrayed as manipulating administrative channels to protect Sandusky, the football program and their own reputations."  [If Alaska is a model, Pennsylvanians should watch for the rehabilitation of Joe Paterno in the not too distant future.]

In Alaska, the FBI began a covert operation which video taped Bill Allen's hotel suite in Juneau as he entertained legislators and made deals with them trying to prevent tax changes that were not approved of by the oil companies.  Allen cooperated with the Justice Department and was a witness in a number of court cases where state legislators were convicted of various corruption charges.  He also was the key witness in the Stevens trial in DC, where Stevens was convicted as well.  Stevens lost his reelection bid shortly after, narrowly.   However, Obama's attorney general vacated Stevens' conviction because of prosecutorial misconduct.


In the meantime, a former oil company lobbyist is now the governor of Alaska.  And few see any problem with this. Can you imagine the outcry if the former lobbyist for Green Peace or Wilderness Society were governor?  Although the oil companies have been tarnished, their interests are still in power and they are spending money to maintain their sacred status,  aided in the upcoming election by the Citizens United decision. 

Oil plays an important role in the world.  Oil has brought Alaska wealth and benefits we could not have had otherwise.  But any faction that gains so much power and influence in any society or institution, begins eventually to feel entitled and gets harder and harder to keep accountable. 

The stifling of sacred cow challengers shows up in lots of places. 

• Why weren’t people asking more questions about the home loan industry?  Or listening to those who did?  
• Why didn’t parents believe their kids who said the priest molested them, of if the kids remained silent, why didn’t they question the kids’ different behavior?  
• Why has it taken so long for the military to address the many psychological problems of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan?  Or take seriously the complaints of sexual harassment and assault by women in the military?  
• Why do we continue to spend billions on the so called War on Drugs when it clearly is so ineffective? 

All of these issues involve sacred cows that people want to believe in and people resist those who challenge those beliefs.  They all involve people who benefited from silencing and marginalizing those who challenged the system.  All of them have wealthy interests funding misinformation campaigns to convince the public and the decision makers that there is no problem. 

This is nothing new in human history.  Ruling classes have brainwashed their subjects from the beginning.  Americans think they are different, yet large numbers of our populaltion succumb to empty slogans, and to appeals to their fears and insecurities. 

I think about Egyptians and Libyans and Russians and Syrians who see through their government’s lies and risk their lives to change things.  Americans are willing to sacrifice the lives and mental health of the relatively few Americans who serve in the military, but what are they personally willing to sacrifice? 

It turns out that not staying alert has cost people their homes, their savings, and their jobs.  It wasn't a voluntary sacrifice.  Rather,  enough people voted for those false slogans and put people into power whose faith in unbridled capitalism allowed bankers and traders to make fortunes on what turned out to be giant swindles.

We get another turn at bat in November.   The propagandists are already spinning their lies and spreading hate and fear to convince voters to forget the size of the catastrophe that Obama inherited and instead blame him for the fallout of the Bush2 administration. 

----------
While I was looking for a link to support a point I'd made, I found that Cliff Groh had already made the Paterno-Stevens comparison in November 2011.

Hotel Booking Scam

I got this email today. Fortunately, I know I did not book a hotel for August 4-6 and I'm reasonably sure that opening the file will not reveal any information I want, but rather would be an attempt to mischief.

Subject:  Reservation Confirmation [1342976], Thu, 2 Aug 2012 09:47:18 +0800
From:  "Booking.com" <customer.service@my.booking.com>
Date:  Wed, August 1, 2012 5:47 pm
Priority:  Normal
Options: 
View Full Header |  View Printable Version  | Download this as a file  | View Message details | Report as SpamHotel Confirmation:   7395329

Date:   Thu, 2 Aug 2012 09:47:18 +0800
---
Herewith you receive the electronic reservation for your hotel. Please refer to attached file for full details.
Arrival: Saturday, August 04, 2012
Departure: Monday, August 06, 2012
Number of rooms: 1

Sincerely, Customer Service Team
Booking.com  http://www.XXXX
Your Reference ID is: 3225161

The Booking.com reservation service is free of charge. We do not charge you any booking fees or administration fees, and in many cases rooms offer free cancellation.-Booking.com guarantees the best hotel rates in both cities and regional destinations - ranging from small family hotels to luxury hotels.


Attachments:

What are some of the telltale signs of a scam?  This one is deceptively simple, but . . .

The email doesn't list a recipient, there's no  "To"

• My name is not mentioned in the reservation
• No hotel is mentioned in the reservation, though there is a legitimate website called My Booking, but there is an extra 'dot' in the email address listed
• I have to open a file - a well known way to infect computers with whatever evil the spammer/hacker is sending

I'm sure there are other signs I'm missing*.  But  . . .


How many people will unthinkingly click on the attachment in attempt to clear up the confusion?
How many people have hotel reservations for August 4 who will open this?
If the world were a fair and equitable place, would there still be people who would need to disrupt other people's lives with stuff like this?


*There are lots of sites that offer advice on how to deal with email hoaxes and scams.  I even found one that let's you paste the email into window and they'll check if it's a known scam.  But you have to give them an email address.  I passed on that.

Here are a couple sites.  It's useful to check them now and then as a reminder, plus these things evolve and get more sophisticated.

Microsoft Office tips
Kansas State University - Email Threats
(Three years old, but still interesting)  Wired - Identify a Phishing Scam

[UPDATE: August 7:  MX Lab reported on July 31 that the linked zip file contained a trojan:

The attached ZIP file has the name Booking_Confirmation_073120123972991.zip and contains the 37 kB large file Booking_Confirmation_07312012.exe.
The trojan is known as W32/Falab.J2.gen!Eldorado, Trojan-Spy.Agent, Downloader.Dromedan or TROJ_KRYPTIK.NC.
At the time of writing, only 9 of the 41 AV engines did detect the trojan at Virus Total.
Virus Total permalink and SHA256: 78cca5db33888091d98854835d6ca80b77568d5f106a9d7739e7a3efa02df659.

Hmmm, I should have found that before I posted.]

Mary Louise Rasmuson Dies Monday at 101

I didn't know Mary Louise Rasmuson, but anyone who lives in Anchorage is directly impacted by the Rasmuson name.  My office at the university was in Rasmuson Hall.  The Anchorage Museum has Rasmuson in its name.  Of the 'old' Anchorage wealthy families, the Rasmuson family is the one that has established a major foundation that funds a large variety of people and causes.  The first time I knowingly was in the same room with Mary Louise Rasmuson was May 5 of this year when she was awarded a Meritorious Service Award from the University of Alaska Anchorage.  Here is my sketchy, from across the room, video tape of her response to receiving the award.




Here's the description for her UAA award.

Here's today's Anchorage Daily News article on Rasmuson.

Running with Eagles and Salmon

A 3.5 mile run from my house and back yesterday afternoon had me communing with three bald eagles (the other two were too far to catch on the camera)

A few minutes later, going over a Campbell Creek bridge there were salmon coming home to spawn. It's the red/orangish splotch in the lower middle of the photo. This is an untouched photo - no games in photoshop. Just the way the light was reflecting on the water.

Today it's raining again.

Hot? Take A Video Break At Ptarmigan Creek, Alaska

Last Tuesday we hiked up along Ptarmigan Creek to Ptarmigan Lake.   It was as beautiful as ever.  We saw some patches of blue in the sky.  The temperature was in the high 60's or low 70's.


Above is the lake at the end of the hike up.  (Actually the trail goes to the other end of the lake, but we stopped here.)

Here's some video of the creek at a point where the water rushes over some rocks.



 Here's another view of the creek.

The beginning of the trail has been made a bit too civilized for me.  









But it soon was back to the old trail.   

Although this is Ptarmigan Creek, we saw no ptarmigan.  But we did see a couple of spruce grouse hens with chicks.

We heard the flutter of wings as the chicks with this hen flew up to the tree.  Then the mother led us along the trail away from the chicks in the tree.  She'd stop to make sure I was following her, then she'd rush further down the path until she suddenly flew up into a tree.

The chicks.

At one point there was a cut off and this sign on a nearby tree.  Yes, the trail is Ptarmigan Creek Trail, but since the creek is below and you have to climb up to get to the lake, it's understandable that people might think this was the point.  It's good that someone added to the sign.   

Here the trail has  split from the creek and goes up along the side of the mountain and the trail gets even iffier here and there.  Here you can see brush crowding the trail with one of the peaks around the lake ahead coming into view. 

 

The trail was a bit overgrown.  We made a lot of noise to alert any nearby bears as we pushed through the cow parsnip to open the trail.  I don't know if any bears heard us, but we didn't see them.

There were lots of blue berries to eat along the way.

Polisse

We saw this wrenching French film tonight.  It follows a team of police in the Child Protection Unit as they deal with pedophiles, messed up kids, and their own difficult relationships in and out of the office.   I was exhausted at the end of the film and slightly disturbed.  It was powerful and I didn't think I could write much.  Maybe just a giant exclamation point.

I looked on line to get some background and found a Guardian review that pretty much blew it off:

There can hardly be an odder or more uncomfortable film this week than Maïwenn's Polisse, a drama with interesting moments, but also some false notes and a wildly bizarre ending.

 Whoa, this won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2011.  I found another review.  This from  New York Times reviewer, A.O. Scott,  who loved it.  Maybe a little too uncritically.  As a film, it was good cinema.  As an accurate depiction of the Child Protection Unit in Paris?  I can't judge. It's supposed to be based on real cases.

Here's a video clip of what I understood to be a Muslim police officer grilling an Iman who is sending his underage daughter back to the home country to be married.  He doesn't take her seriously as she gets ever more angry, finally pulling out a Quran and demanding he show her where it says women shouldn't work, or that young daughters should be given away.


This is rough and powerful stuff and the officers have trouble dealing with it themselves. A lot of the movie is highly confrontational.

10,000 Hours - Gladwell's Outliers Part 1

One of the American truisms is that anyone can succeed if they work hard.  But the ones who make it to the top of the top both work hard and have a particular genius for their field.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, challenges this notion.  He doesn’t dispute the hard work part, but most ‘geniuses’ are, for him, just people who have put 10,000 hours into their craft, and then landed at the right place in the right time.

I heard about this book when it first came out in 2008, because the media covered an early chapter of the book which focused on Canadian hockey players.  The key to succeeding in hockey, it turned out, was not simply being the best hockey player, but rather being born in January, February, March, or April.  This is not because of astrology writes Gladwell,

“It’s simply that in Canada the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey is January 1.  A boy who turns ten on January 2, then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn’t turn ten until the end of the year - and at that age, in preadolescence, a twelve-month gap in age represents and enormous difference in physical maturity.” (p. 33 - note that I found a large print book at the library so the pages are off from a regular print volume.)

The best of those kids get chosen to play in games two or even three times more often than their younger teammates and get better coaching.  And at the end of three years, with all that extra playtime and attention, they actually are better. 

A footnote explains this is a great example of a self-fulfilling prophecy:

 " . . .a situation where ‘a false definition, in the beginning  . .  evokes a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true.’  Canadians start with a false definition of who the best nine-  and ten-year-old hockey players are.  They’re just picking the oldest every year.  But the way they treat those ‘all-stars’ ends up making their original false judgment look correct.  As [sociologist Robert] Merton puts it: ‘This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error.  For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.'” (pp. 34-35)

 I'd heard this example discussed, thought it interesting, but was skeptical about the book because I'd formed a negative opinion (possibly erroneously) about Gladwell from an earlier book, The Tipping Point.  It seemed to make one good point repeatedly.  

But my book club is reading Outliers now, and so I've been giving Gladwell another look. 

So, the secret to success in Canadian hockey is ten thousand hours devoted to improving one's skills which certain boys are more likely to get because they were born in January, February, March, or April.  Again, those boys that don't work hard, aren't going to make it.  But equally talented boys who work just as hard, will be passed over because when they first qualify, they are competing with kids up to a year older than themselves.

He goes on to look at other 'geniuses' who had to get their ten thousand hours in so that they were ahead of the pack.  He writes about Bill Joy who Gladwell says is called the Edison of the Internet and about Bill Gates. He acknowledges both as exceptionally smart and hard working, but also ties their success to having had early access to computers - Joy at the University of Michigan which

 "had one of the most advanced computer science programs in the world. . .Joy came to the University of Michigan the year the Computer Center opened.  He was sixteen  he was tall and very thin, with a mop of unruly hair. . . late in his freshman year, he stumbled across the Computer Center - and he was hooked."(p. 50)

What was critical was that he was at a computer center that had time-sharing.

". . .when the programming bug hit him in his freshman year, he found himself - by the happiest of accidents - in one of the few places in the world where a seventeen-year-old could program all he wanted.
"Do you know what the difference is between the computing cards and time-sharing?"  Joy says.  "It's the difference between playing chess by mail and speed chess."  Programming wasn't an exercise in frustration any more.  It was fun."  (p. 65)

[I'd note when I took a FORTRAN class in the mid-70s at USC, we used cards.  You had to punch each card.  Then take them to be put in the machine.  Then wait for the printout to come.  That could take an hour or more.  Then if you had one card punched wrong, it wouldn't work and you had to find the bad card and redo it. So it could take over an hour to find out you missed a comma and another hour to run it again to make sure you caught the error, instead of getting instant feedback and and being able to type in the correction immediately and get instant feedback on your next try.] 

He got a job with a computer science professor and went on to Berkeley.

"There, he buried himself even deeper in the world of computer software.  During the oral exams for his PhD, he made up a particularly complicated algorithm on the fly that, as one of his many admirers has written, 'so stunned his examiners [that] one of them later compared the experience to 'Jesus confounding his elders' . . . Working in collaboration with a small group of programmers, Joy took on the task of rewriting UNIX, which was a software system developed by AT&T for mainframe computers.  Joy's version was very good.  It was so good, in fact, that it became - and remains - the operating system on which literally millions of computers around the world run."(p. 51)

 What was important for Joy was that he arrived at Michigan when they switched from computer cards to time sharing, one of the first universities to do that.  Gates had a similar stroke of luck.  The parents at his private school, Lakeside, arranged to buy a computer for a computer club.

It was an "amazing thing," of course, because this was 1968.  Most colleges didn't have computer clubs in the 1960s.  Even more remarkable was the kind of computer Lakeside bought.  The school didn't have its students learn programming by the laborious computer-card system, like virtually everyone else was doing in the 1960's.  Instead, Lakeside installed what was called an ASR-33 Teletype, which was a time-sharing terminal with a direct link to a mainframe computer in downtown Seattle. . .  Bill Joy got an extraordinary, early opportunity to learn programming on a time-share system as a freshman in college, in 1971.  Bill Gates got to do real-time programming as an eight grader in 1968. (p. 74)

 Gladwell goes on to argue that Joy and Gates, both unquestionably gifted, were able to achieve what they did, because they had very early access to fast and unlimited computer programming before most people.  They got their 10,000 hours in before anyone else.

So he's got hockey players and computer geeks getting ahead because of access that gets them their10,000 hours.  He cites a study of elite musicians.

The students who would end up the best in their class began to practice more than everyone else:  six hours a week by age nine, eight hours a week by age twelve, sixteen hours a week by age fourteen, and up and up, until by the age of twenty they were practicing - that i purposefully and single-mindedly playing their instruments with the intent to get better - well over thirty hours a week.  In fact, by the age of twenty, the elite performers had each totaled ten thousand hours of practice.  By contrast, the merely good students had totaled eight thousand hours, and the future music teachers had totaled just over four thousand hours. . . 

The striking think about Ericsson's study is that he and his colleagues couldn't find any "naturals," musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did.  Nor could they find any "grinds," people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn't have what it takes to break the top ranks.  Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the think that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works.  That's it.  And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else.  They work much, much harder. (pp. 55-56)

 He talks about the Beattles' apprenticing in Hamburg strip clubs where they worked non-stop, and in so doing, got their 10,000 hours.

What Gladwell is saying here is that hard work and talent aren't all you need.  Luck plays a big role.  You need access to your 10,000 hours - whether it's by being born in the right months to get enough playing time on your hockey team, or having access to a time-share computer before anyone else, or obsessing at your music lessons, or playing in clubs in Hamburg.  

I'll end this post here.  As the book continues, Gladwell looks at other situations where timing and cultural background and other factors make the difference between people who have talent and work hard and succeed and those who don't.

There's something about the way Gladwell puts all this together that seems a little too neat.  Has he gathered the data that supports his argument and left out other data that might raise doubts?  I don't know.  But in any case, it raises questions about how we know what we know, a topic dear to my heart, and central to this blog.  I'm optimistically calling this part 1. 

UPDATE:  Here are the other two posts on Outliers.

• Why Are Some People Successful and Others Not?
• Does Culture of Honor Explain Southern Murder Style - More From Outliers

Primulas, Peonies, Poppies, Penguins, Pothead and More

Poppy

The Anchorage Garden Club Tour is always fun.  I see hidden neighborhoods and get to discover plants that might work in my own yard.  I can enjoy the beauty of others' gardens with no sense of guilt or envy.  The time they put in the garden I spend cultivating the blog.  So here are a few glimpses of what we saw in south Anchorage today.  (We just didn't make it to the cluster of Turnagain gardens.)

The person said it was a Shirley Poppy and it may well be.  I remembered the ones I had differently and the ones I found on line looked like the ones I remembered.  Whatever it is, it's beautiful. 

You can learn more about the primula vialii and the primrose drumstick - denticulata.

I've been a sucker for giant peonies ever since L and her mom took us to see them in full bloom at the park in downtown Beijing.  Here's another view.

One of the gardens backed out over the coastal plain.  They've terraced the yard and it's growing a winter's worth of potatoes and other edibles. 

Rich, dark blue delphiniums used to be in every Anchorage garden, but over the years as people experimented with more and more imported flowers to see which could make it through our winters, I don't see as many as I used to.  

I liked this tank which catches rainwater.  It has a net over the opening where the storm drain empties to catch leaves and other debris and a faucet near the bottom to fill up the watering cans. 

This black and white beauty is, according to the label, a fava bean flower. 


One of the houses seemed more like a demonstration ad for a landscaping company.  Each of the plants had neatly installed labels.  Unfortunately one label was totally wrong, which someone pointed out to the owner who'd been told once already by someone else.  It was labeled a very common garden plant, but the plant in there was an invasive, if beautiful, campanula.  I know because I've fought a losing battle against them and their white radish like tubers. 

Here's a typical of the 17 negative comments on Dave's Garden where these are for sale:

O.M.G. I've never encountered anything like this. The comments that refer to it as the "cancer of the garden", "aliens", and nightmares are all dead on. I've dealt with invasives with success in the past, using organic methods, even, but this beast cannot be bested. Pull one plant, and two will grow in its place- literally.
And, yes, how is it that a vendor actually has this plant for sale here? Yikes. Don't buy it, don't take it for free, build a moat.

The last garden had a lot of tshochkes in it including the pothead figure on the bench.

And when I got home I felt pretty good to be greeted by these newly opening lilies in our front yard.  I their own way they are as beautiful as any flower we saw on the tour.

Damned if You Do, Damned If You Don't

From the New York Times email teaser of article:

In the opening ceremony of the Olympics, Britain offered a display of humor and humbleness that can only stem from a deep-rooted sense of superiority.

 The whole article seems to be an attempt to mimic the style of the ceremony.
[UPDATE:  I realized it makes the whole opening ceremony sound a bit Monty Python, but he never mentions them.]