Maggie's Farm

Even people who hate vegetables find pickled vegetables to be a treat. You can pickle anything - onions, summer squash, cauliflower, peas, beans, peppers, beets, carrots, turnips, cabbage, peaches - you name it.  People will eat it before it is fully pickled because it tastes good. Here's Perpetual Pickles for you with gardens.

Vegetables (like fruit) are nutritionally borderline-useless, but they can be made to be tasty. Thus far this summer I have produced many half-pints and a couple of quart jars of hot pepper jelly, and about 12 quarts of dilly beans. Waiting for my peaches to ripen to make Peach Chutney. I did not grow cucumbers this year. I forget why.

Here's quick and easy Crisp Pickled Vegetables

Here's Canning and Pickling. It's a labor of love and makes no damn sense at all.

A pal has been traveling across the US with family in an antique camper. He reports that they had possibly the best dinner they have ever had in the US at The Windsor Hotel in Del Norte, Colorado. Not likely that you would be passing through there, though.

Here's a book:  Blue Highways: A Journey into America by William Least Heat Moon. Fun book.

Psalm 51:1-12

51:1 Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.

51:2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.

51:3 For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.

51:4 Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment.

51:5 Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.

51:6 You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.

51:7 Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

51:8 Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.

51:9 Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities.

51:10 Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.

51:11 Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me.

51:12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.

Photo of the new American rural landscape

Texas man shoots armadillo, gets hit in face by bullet ricochet

Man shoots drone trespassing over his property and is arrested

That dude could easily be me. I would do that.

Why My Kitchen Floor is Always Disgusting

How And When To Harvest Potatoes

Five Facts About Chiropractic That Might Make You Reconsider Getting Your Back Cracked

UC Irvine Applications Offer Six Options for Gender

I am royalty born in a commoner's body, and society is discriminating against me

Who knew that jumping out of planes was safer than getting out of bed?

Interview With a Drug War Casualty

Marion Zimmer Bradley: “Children are brainwashed into believing they don’t want sex.”

The Colossal Hoax Of Organic Agriculture:

USDA reported in 2012 that 43 percent of the 571 samples of “organic” produce that were tested contained prohibited pesticide residues, and that “the findings suggest that some of the samples in violation were mislabeled conventional products, while others were organic products that hadn’t been adequately protected from prohibited pesticides.”

Laughing Over Dead Babies? Media Bored

Rock musicians vowed to smash capitalism and to “imagine no possessions.” What’s the problem here?

What "Everyday American" Would Pay $600 For This Haircut?

Shove it, Jeb!

"...  after fifty years of structuring everything in Europe to prevent German hegemony, is it really a big surprise that Germany isn’t well set up to act as a hegemon?"

Planned Parenthood’s Mammogram Lie

At this point, municipalities across the country need to seriously consider refraining from applying for Community Development Block Grants and other grant programs sponsored by HUD.

In Michigan, Bad News for Unions with Hands in Workers’ Pockets - State supreme court upholds right-to-work for public employees.

Asymmetrical politics: Republicans act like an unruly mob, Democrats like a regimented army

Immigration As Obama's Vehicle For 'Fundamentally Transforming' America

Obama Throws The Base A Bone, Will Offer Federal Student Aid To Prisoners

Carly’s Up, Hill’s Down

Clinton touts 'passionate commitment to helping people'

Central Planning Emerges As a Classic Error In Clinton’s Strategy

"Hillary has accomplished nothing substantial in her life. She’s been pushed along, coasting on her husband’s coattails..."

She’s just a classic, corporate exec or bureaucrat type who would prefer to be at her desk behind closed doors, imposing her power schemes on the proletariat.

I'm sure she calls us plebes, not proles. I know her type.

Hillary Clinton's camp fears a new 'bimbo eruption' will put the kibosh on candidacy - especially from Gennifer Flowers who claimed Bill liked to be blindfolded and tied up with silk scarves and called his wife 'Hilla the Hun'

Hillary Clinton has never won a competitive election.

Hillary’s Friends in High Places - Everyone—from her aides to the State and Justice departments—is bending over backward to protect her.

Theodore Dalrymple - David Cameron’s Muslim Muddle

WHEN “MIGRANTS” BECOME SUFFICIENTLY NUMEROUS AND VIOLENTLY INSISTENT, THEY’RE CALLED “INVADERS

Undermining the US military - Along with budget reduction, the armed forces must endure social engineering

What Obama doesn’t want us to know on Gitmo closure

The Ayatollah's Plan for Israel and Palestine

Blaming Israel First

Rutgers Prof Deepa Kumar Criticized for ISIS Tweet; Complains of 'Death Threats'

The State of African Security

Pale Fire (from his 1962 novel Pale Fire)

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky,
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!

The remainder of the 4-Canto poem below the fold, with some interesting links about it at the end