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More cake and Christmas treats

 

In the forward to his book TALKING TO THE MOON, John Joseph Mathews' widow describes the book as his Walden. I wouldn't know as every time I tried to read Walden I gave up. Too dense, too deep, too flowery and poetic to read. Perhaps I'll have to try again as this morning I finished Mathews' book about the Osage. At about 5 this morning alone in the family room reading the penultimate chapter, I got it. Mathews had made me struggle for literal weeks on end through enough renewals that I was sure the library was going to say - no more! I struggled both because there were bits of prose that were inspired but also out of a sense of duty. You should know about where you live. A native seed sprouts when the time is right. I've transplanted myself to NE Oklahoma, the Osage, and thus have to dig a hole for my roots. With a little nurturing and time I'll grow beyond that hole.
  I thought it appropriate that I "got it" and finished as a storm was blowing in from the northern plains. My aren't the weathermen dramatic with their language. Sure 75° yesterday, sweating building a stone wall in the front yard, and 20° tonight is worth noting but.... "bomb cyclone!" My Osage and Mr Mathews' each have experienced their storms but are generations and worlds apart. A suburban home in-town is vastly different than observing the coyotes among the bluestem grass and blackjack oaks. His book was an decades long immersion into nature and his surroundings. Perhaps my favorite insight he offered was that the early oil speculators were like kids left alone with a cake. They scraped the frosting off (left a bit of a mess) and never came to realize that the cake itself was perfectly good.  I'll leave it to wiser men to decide if it is Waldenesque (and perhaps those who have also read Walden Pond!). Me I'm just trying to establish my new roots.
  It is most certainly winter. Not just the brisk temperatures today but the calendar says so and yup the 1st seed catalog arrived the other day. My sister Donnell sent me a picture of her newly arrived Burpee catalog and my mailbox was happily filled with Territorial Seeds pages. A cup of tea and what Deb calls my seed porn and she knows she'll get no work out of me today.
  Lots of scheming and dreaming come with winter days and seed catalogs. One scheme I've decided I'm not cut out for is CRISPR - the home version. Yup, Joel Salatin was just last week talking about a, for sale, little chemistry set to perform CRISPR edits. I once said I couldn't wait till regular folks like myself could do a little gene editing. Imagine the tomatoes I could build. Now I'm not so sure.
  The food industry might waste the technology creating Round Up ready soy, corn, and every other poison loving field man could imagine. Me, I'd build for taste and beauty. I mean there is nothing intrinsically evil about gene editing. OK, OK, maybe an affront to God, Devil's work and all that but my theology is a little light, so let's put that aside. An early product of gene editing was Golden Rice a rice with a vitamin added to help prevent blindness. That's good isn't it! There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the technology but new technologies do seem to always go down the road first to man's worst choices. I would offer the question are we better off with internet porn? Will we be better off when 'Open' AI takes that to a new level? On-line gambling, certainly nothing new under the sun will AI make it less addictive? How 'bout addictive food - well that's just silly! Oh wait, I've heard something about that from those crazy MAHA/Kennedy people. But there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the technology! That is once the disrupters and creators make their mess and their billions and move along. Move along to allow those who can recognize that the cake is worth eatin' also. 
  And then you have me! Hey, I'm a libertarian so shoot heroin in your eyeballs if that's what gets you through the day. I am also a libertarian so I choose to govern myself and myself is an idiot when it comes to the scientific method. I regularly dream up some brilliant 'test' in the garden - and not mark where I planted that test. Or my marking of it is two sticks that will be "good enough" to remind me until I have time to make some notes. I've long wanted garden markers that simply said "Oblitus sum". Yep "gonna get me one of those home CRISPR kits and make me some goood tomatoes. Now where did I leave that E Coli?" Yup, I'm an idiot. The monkey Deb saw in Africa that stole the lighter. Who does Sam Altman remind you of and who does he remind himself of?

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