Tag Archives: Featured

The Baboon Congress

A Seedy Guy

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Header photo courtesy of Seed Savers Exchange

Today’s post comes from Jim Tjepkema

Robert Lobitz passed away before I got a chance to meet him in person.  I knew about him from seeing his seed listings in the Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook and from exchanging seeds with him by mail.   He didn’t come to any of meetings of seed savers that I attended and apparently stayed close to his home near Paynesville, MN.

As a member of SSE, Robert exchanged seeds with other SSE members.  He also obtained samples of seeds from Federal seed collections which he grew in variety trials to learn about their characteristics.  In one of those trials he discovered a pea that had yellow pods and shared seed from that pea with other seed savers.  Several seed companies are now offering this pea for sale under the name, Golden Sweet, which is the name given to it by Robert.

Red Swan snap bean, developed by Robert, is also available in commercial seed catalogs.  This bean is a product of Robert’s work on creating new bean varieties.   Snap beans and some other beans are self-pollinating.  However, bees will sometimes carry pollen from one variety to another by getting into the bean flowers before they have self-pollinated.   Robert looked for beans produced from flowers cross-pollinated by bees and saved these seeds to serve as starting points for his work on developing new varieties.

All of Robert’s work with seeds was done in his own gardens as a hobby.   Peas and beans were not the only vegetable seeds that he collected and studied.  He also collected many kinds of potatoes and soybeans.   Among the members of SSE he stood out as one the best seed savers sharing hundreds of kinds of rare seeds from his collection with other seed savers.

For me, Robert was an outstanding example of how a person who is not a paid professional can make significant contributions in a field where most of the workers are highly trained specialists.

In what area are you a significantly talented amateur?

Music, Songs

Top Billing

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Today is the birthday of Wayne King, otherwise known as “America’s Waltz King”.   I hadn’t realized until reading it that our nation has been blessed with Waltz Royalty.  Unfortunately for Wayne, American waltzing takes place in a very tiny kingdom.

King’s band is known for a number of old tunes, including this one.

King himself is the pride of Savanna, Illinois, a river town crammed so tightly into the northwestern corner of the state there was no room for an H at the end of its name.  Savanna’s wikipedia page gives Wayne King top billing on its list of noteworthy residents.

  1. “America’s Waltz King” Wayne King
  2. Professional wrestler Tommy Treichel
  3.  Billy Zoom (Tyson Kindell) founding member of the punk band X
  4. Major League Baseball player Pete Lister
  5. Former NASA astronaut Dale Gardner.

Of course we all have our specific areas of interest and personal preferences that we bring to the creation of any pecking order.  Which is why I’m baffled that the astronaut is last on the list.   Don’t get me wrong, waltzing is lovely and professional wrestling is fun, but Gardner wrestled satellites while weightless, and weightless is how the best waltzers look when they’re doing it right, so I figure he should get extra points for combining skills.

Who should get top billing as the most noteworthy resident of your town? 

 

 

 

The Future, Travel

Hitching Post, 2016

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Yes, things have changed a bit since the day when all the parking they needed at the General Store was someplace to tie up the horses after a long day’s ride.

But maybe we’re headed back down that trail a piece.

Spotted on Silver Lake Road – a motorized scooter abandoned in a snowbank,  connected by cable to an MTC bus stop sign.

IMG_1319

I have a hunch, but what do you think is going on here?

The Baboon Congress

hello out there

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today’s post comes from tim

the ripples are cosmic as they ripple around

the sound of those sound waves they start to rebound

bouncing and curving like einstein thought

the echos are echoey and they echo a lot

the sicentists found sound wave from those famous black holes

three billy goats gruff cant get by sonar trolls

its been there all along but we just discovered

what einstein said while his thoughts briefly hovered

its not markedly changing that now we all know

that while we are here playing in the cold winter snow

that in a universe 47,000 light years away

they make sound that reverberate almost every day

its a bit reminiscent of the time tested conundrum

when a trees fall in the forest do we need to witness and hear some

or is it enough to know the universe works

with ghosts of the past making noise as they lurk

scientists proved beyond the shadow of doubt

that the cosmic audiologist is at last ushered out

and we can all listen now to distant sound waves

and the path that it follows and the groundwork it lays

for the realization that we are not alone

even when light  years and light years from home

we can all take solace and i think that its neat

that a sound cross the universe is like a heartbeat.

 

 

The Baboon Congress

hats

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today’s post comes from tim.

hats are my love 

i have even given it the true test and i still am a hat guy. i made it a business.

i buy and sell hats on ebay

when i was a kid i liked hats. then i grew up to be an adolescent and i liked hats still but i was lucky to grow up in hippy days so me and arlo guthrie got to wear hats together, then hair dryers came into vogue and hat hair was not cool. i had big hair and was wearing suits with creases on the pant legs and crisp white shirts and then as styles changed and casual fridays became casual lifestyle in general, my bald spot turned into a baloney ring as all my hair went away. my hair length went einstein to mr clean over this time frame and hats came back. about 15 years ago i started buying stuff on ebay and the end result was that i fell back in love with hats and i started in on a mission to become the hat guy and today i am the hat guy. i am primarily a fedora guy. a fedora is the humphrey bogart kind of hat, but there are variations in fedoras,  pork pies is the jazz mans hat ala charlie parker, snap brim is the tom landry rob petrie kind of hat, homburg is the winston churchill, class act kind of hat, straw optima is charlie chan

then there are specialty hats… bowler from laurel and hardy and charlie chaplin,

boater from maurice chevalier or gene kelly, caps like a british racing guy, smokey the bear has a campaign hat just like teddy roosevelt, and then we go to western, lbj’s cattleman’s crease, hopalong cassidy and his gus style, roy rogers and the marlboro man offering that cowboys classic look…

today i see a movie and the hats are just there for most people. i am distracted by them. i go to a play at the guthrie or the musical at the different venues around town and i see hats that are not the right hats. they are close but this play took place in the fifties and the brim size on a hat in the 50’s was 2 ½ inch to 2 ⅝ inch and they are wearing a 2 ‘ that didn’t come into fashion until the 60’s. or why would a classy guy like that wear a cheesy hat to go with the nice suit?  

i love the westerns where the hats are a dead giveaway as to the true identity of the character. every now and again they have a hat that doesn’t fit at all but usually the hat tells all.

do you have any in depth knowledge that goes unnoticed by the rest of the world?

Family, The Baboon Congress

Scholar’s Mountain

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Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.

Some time ago I submitted a post about a large piece of carved Chinese jade in my possession that my maternal great grandfather hauled from Hamburg, Germany to New York to Minnesota in 1914. I thought it was an incense burner, and couldn’t figure out why it was so important that the family brought it with them when they immigrated to the United States.

My son did a little research this fall and discovered that it isn’t exclusively an incense burner. It is called a Scholar’s Mountain, Scholar’s Rock, or Spirit Stone (Gongshi), and it was used to encourage wisdom and deep thoughts as it was gazed upon. The holes, some natural and some that were carved in it, are for calligraphy or paint brush handles, and the round basin is either for incense or for water for rinsing the brushes. Who’d have thought?

Most were naturally occurring rocks carved and perforated by water, sometimes embellished with carvings, sometimes placed in gardens as points for contemplation or else brought inside. They were chosen on how well they emulated the natural world of landscape, especally mountains and elevations.  Ours is 10 inches by 7 inches. It is carved with a stag, a bat, a bear, two ravens, and a honey comb or coral shape. Now that I know this, the shape and design and purpose make sense. I wonder what scholars or deep thinkers might have used this for inspiration.

I used to worry what would happen to this after I am no longer here, and now that son has taken an interest and we know what it is, I think it will continue on its journey with him.  He is a scholar and a deep thinker, after all.

Describe a sight or an object that encourages you to think deep thoughts.

 

 

The Baboon Congress

Paintings From The Past

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Today’s post comes from Cynthia in Mahtowa

I don’t often talk about my paintings or my painting that stopped years ago.  Recently, however, I mentioned on the blog of selling a couple waterRed Roostercolors to Robert and Ruth Bly.

Barbara in Robbinsdale and Plain Jane asked to see photos of them and suggested writing and posting photos here. So, here goes.

I painted often in the late seventies and early eighties, then stopped when my marriage ended and I had to get a day job full time. My time being with and inspired by my animals diminished, while other activities, needs, demands took its place.

I first painted in oils. Then in the early eighties I met a woman Minute Goat plus1whose watercolors I admired, so I began taking lessons with her, then spent time painting with her, building a friendship and learning techniques from her.

Now that I am retired, will I return to drawing and painting? I think about it, but hesitate…fear, perhaps, that the skill is diminished or has atrophied with time? Yet to be answered.

 

What have you created … and kept?

 

History, The Baboon Congress

I Don’t Snow About That

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Today’s post comes from Clyde of Mankato

The photo shows my sister Cleo at age 13 and and me at age 10.

Standard clothing and standard work for farm children in the mid 1950’s. I cannot imagine my ten-year-old and thirteen-year-old Minnesota grandchildren working like this, nor do I want to. But I do not regret this labor in my childhood. My father did not assign us this task lightly. He no doubt was off doing even harder work at the same time. My sister, I suspect, came out of her own free will to help me. We were close that way. My sister was not afraid of exercise. She became a physical education teacher. The work she and I did mattered; it contributed to the welfare of the family.

However, one of my many back issues is a disorder in my upper back which is associated with doing heavy lifting at a young age. Perhaps it is related; perhaps it is not. I promise that was heavy snow, having been pushed there by the county plow. We lived at the end of a road.

I am a bit confused about the issue of children working. I did not make my children do much work, but none of the supposed effects of not requiring children to work is evident in my mid-forties offspring. Quite the opposite in fact.

What’s your history and attitude on child labor?

The Baboon Congress

My Secret Life, part 1

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Today’s post comes from Bill in Mpls

It’s not what you think. I don’t know what you’re thinking, but it’s not that.

When I was in high school, 15 or 16 years old and living in the suburbs, I would sometimes get on the city bus and go downtown by myself. Once there, I would visit art galleries. There was a gallery on Hennepin, up a narrow staircase to the second floor, called the Bottega Gallery. It was run by a guy named Tom Sewell and it had a reputation as avant-garde. In fact, when Marcel Duchamp was in town for his show at the Walker, curator Martin Friedman brought Duchamp to the Bottega Gallery. I didn’t know anything about the avant-garde or about abstract art of any kind, but I was drawn to the Bottega Gallery and returned whenever I came downtown. At that time, Hennepin Avenue was pretty scruffy. To my suburban sensibilities it had a tang of dangerous bohemianism and adventure.

After visiting the Bottega Gallery, I would walk down to the Walker Art Center to look around. This was the old Walker, with a grand staircase leading up to an open gallery looking out on a center atrium. It was the only Walker I’ve ever really loved. After the Walker, I would make a stop at the Kilbride-Bradley Gallery. As I recall it, K-B Gallery was part gallery, part art supply store. Bob Kilbride published a newsletter/“zine” called The Potboiler, which was always entertaining and free for the taking..

When I say I didn’t know anything about abstract art, I mean I had no basis for knowing anything. Art appreciation and art history were not taught in my high school. Art was not part of my home life. I doubt that either of my parents ever visited a gallery or art museum in their lifetimes. That wasn’t in their world. My impulse to seek out art galleries feels a little like a rogue mutation of the family genetics. Nothing foreshadowed it, but there it was.

Looking down from the altitude of more than half a decade, I have enough distance to see my teen-aged self dispassionately and wonder where the motivation for those ventures came from. It certainly wasn’t peer pressure– none of my friends or schoolmates knew about my excursions. I never talked about it. I always went alone.

My secret life was innocent enough, but private. It makes me wonder how unusual that is. Did everyone have a secret life like mine? Did anyone?

Did you? Tell.

The Baboon Congress

Hark, Hark the Dogs Doth Bark

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Today’s post is by Renee in North Dakota

The Saturday after New Year’s Day, our churlish next door neighbor stormed over to our house and told my husband that we had to keep our dog quiet. Did we know how many times she had barked that day? Husband just said “Ok”. and shut the door.  We were pretty puzzled about this, since she really hadn’t barked at all that day.

Our dog is 14 years old. She is a terrier. Terriers bark. We have tried our hardest to minimize her vocalizations over the years. We don’t let her out in the yard unsupervised, and she does her business on the deck in the back. Our neighbor has complained about her for years, and it seems that nothing we do is good enough.

There are plenty of other dogs in the neighborhood that we hear barking, but he seems to be obsessed with our little Maggie. He spends a lot of time in his family room, the closest room in his house to our deck, which is the only place she barks. He has even installed white noise machines.  There was a dog in the garage of the house on the other side of neighbor’s house that barked continuously for 5 hours the day he came over to complain.  We think that he assumed the noise was coming from our dog.

Now, to put Maggie’s barking into perspective, her barking never lasts more than 10 seconds  at any one time before we bring her in, and she doesn’t bark in the house. After this last visit from neighbor, we started collecting data on the times she went out, whether she barked, and the duration of her utterances, if any. We stand by the patio door until she is finished with her  business so that we can leap out and quell any barking that might occur.  Her barking, which wasn’t much to begin with, has been reduced even further.  Now we have actual data to use in the event neighbor complains to the police. The longest string of barks she has produced outside since we started data collection is 5 woofs long and lasted less than 5 seconds. She barks less than 3 percent of the times she goes outside. Ooh, I love being a behavioral scientist!

Our dog is getting frail and I think this is her last winter. I have a secret plan for when she passes that would be satisfying to implement, particularly if she dies before next Christmas. I plan to tell the neighbor that she has died. I want to lull him into a false sense of relief, and then I want to start broadcasting from our deck this musical selection that husband found on the internet.

One of my friends tells me that someone has to be the bigger person here. I suppose she is right. There is an entire album of Barking Dogs’ Christmas music, though! It is pretty tempting to do, especially since neighbor hasn’t thanked us for the nearly silent neighborhood in which he now lives.   Of course, he never thanks us for anything. Sigh.

 

When have you used data to win an argument?