Saturday, August 15, 2009 - Red Rock, East Chatham NY
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The Midnight Striper, August 15, 2009
I spent last night in the Walmart parking lot in Pittsfield MA. About midnight I awoke to the sound of a small engine accelerating and decelerating. Strange. I look out and here's a guy on a beat up old articulated garden tractor with a striping machine hanging out front with a couple headlights carefully aimed just ahead of it. He's out there striping the parking lot. Fast. He'd slow a bit - stripe a line - then accelerate across to the next line, brake sharply and stripe the next line. Back and forth across the lot. He was done in no time flat and put nary a stripe on my rig. Cool.
BTW, that's a Crane & Co papermill steaming in the background - I wonder if that's where Crane makes currency paper.
Night camp
On my property off Less Traveled Road - The Home Place, Red Rock, East Chatham NY
- I used to camp in a few locations on what little I had left of the family farm
- In the driveway by the house
- Across the road where the barn once stood
- On the 20 acre piece off Less Traveled Road
- Now, with the kind support of the friends who now own the place, I camp across the road where the barn once stood.
- Verizon cell phone service - Terrible, barely usable with an amplifier
- Verizon EVDO service - Terrible, barely usable with an amplifier
- Find other references to Home Place
- List the nights I've camped here
- Check the weather here
Teosinte and the Improbability of Maize
The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can't reproduce itself, because its kernals are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different - for one thing, it "ears" are smaller than baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.