Past Blogs

My husband loves his blues. That’s the nickname he has given his favorite fruit, blueberries. Blueberry season is in full swing, and I wouldn’t be surprised if both of us turned blue any day now. We both have been consuming blueberries in record quantities.

One year I asked my guy what he wanted to do on his birthday which fortuitously coincides with blueberry time.

“Let’s drive to southern Michigan (aka blueberry epicenter) and buy a case of blueberries,” was his reply. I love living with a man whose idea of a splendid birthday present is 3,300 blueberries and a road trip to get them.

Extravagant heath claims on the benefits of eating blueberries are rampant. Suffice it to say that blueberries are good for you. Our only motive for eating them is their delicious sweet/tart taste.

Blueberries are native to North America alone. So it would appear that the phrase, “as American as apple pie” should be modified to “as American as blueberry pie.” Apples originated in central Asia.

The big, plump blueberries we eat for breakfast are the highbush variety. Lowbush blueberries are small, wild blueberries, and Maine is the leading producer. Cranberries and huckleberries are blueberry cousins.

Blueberries are the number two berry crop in America. Only strawberries surpass them in sales. This bit of trivia makes a good image:

“If all the blueberries grown in North America in one year were spread out in a single layer, they would cover a four lane highway from New York to Chicago.”

Now that would be a road trip.

“I’m as corny as Kansas in August”, is a famous lyric from the musical South Pacific. We are corny now as well. At the moment I am looking out my kitchen window at acres of corn marching in tidy rows.

That corn wouldn’t exist naturally in the wild; it’s a human invention. About 9,000 years ago, native people in Mexico took a wild grass called teosinte which had hard little kernels and figured out how to breed it into what is now the world’s number one food crop. Corn, more correctly called maize, provides nutrition for about twenty percent of the world’s population.

In its various forms, field, popcorn, sweet and seed, corn is America’s largest crop. Forty percent of the world’s corn is grown in America, more than in any other country. And eighty-seven percent of that corn is grown using only natural rainfall.

President Dwight Eisenhower retired to a working farm and said, “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from a cornfield.”

As a child, I thought every field of corn I saw was sweet corn just waiting to be brought to our farmers’ market. My mother soon set me somewhat straight saying, “That’s only for cows.” She also told me why we ate it immediately after bringing it home…..the sugar quickly turns to starch and the flavor is lost.

My husband, who grew up in a farm family, taught me how to buy sweet corn. Shortly after we were married, I proudly came home with corn sporting large, deep yellow kernels. Next time, he gently told me, look for small kernels and a creamy yellow color.

It is now the apex of summer and the sweet corn is in. So get out the big kettle, melt the butter and put a big stack of paper napkins on the table. A sweet corn dinner is the ultimate, messy grease feast. Add a leaf lettuce salad to assuage guilt.

Calvin and Hobbes fans are exuberant. Calvin’s brilliant creator, Bill Watterson, has come out of retirement to draw three strips for the cartoon, Pearls before Swine. His new art will be sold as a benefit for charity.

The emergence of Mr. Watterson has ignited a spate of Calvin postings on the internet. Unfortunately, some of the quotes displayed are knock offs in the style of Calvin and Hobbes. I can imagine the expression on Calvin’s face at this outrage.

Fans of the original comic need not worry; the Calvin and Hobbes archive is immense and glorious. Bill Watterson penned his boy and tiger for 3,160 strips from 1985 to 1995.

Born in Washington, D.C., Bill Watterson moved to Chagrin Falls, Ohio, when he was six and still lives in the area. His love of cartooning came early and was inspired by Charles Schultz (Peanuts) and Walt Kelly (Pogo).

Upon graduating from college, Mr. Watterson was hired as the editorial cartoonist for the Cincinnati Post. Fired after less than a year, he returned to his first love, the comic strip. Five years of rejection followed, but Calvin and Hobbes was finally bought and syndicated. Calvin is the imaginative, hyperactive six year old while Hobbes, his toy tiger, is wry and philosophical.

Because of the immense popularity of the strip, Universal Press Syndicate wanted to churn out lucrative Calvin and Hobbes Merchandise. Watterson refused saying, “My strip is about private realities, the magic of imagination and the specialness of certain friendships. Who would believe in the innocence of a little kid and his tiger if they cashed in on their popularity to sell overpriced knickknacks that nobody needs?”

Today, fourteen years after that last memorable toboggan slide was published, Calvin and Hobbes remains fresh and relevant…..”like Shakespeare” my husband says.

To wit:

Calvin: “Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists somewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”

Calvin: “In my opinion, we don’t devote nearly enough scientific research to finding a cure for jerks.”

We went to the farm store the other day to buy a can of spray paint and came home with a magnolia tree. We are not given to impulsive purchases. I think it was the fault of the dinosaurs.

I’ve been doing dinosaur research lately for a children’s program. The kids will be drawing dinosaurs in their habitats, and I needed to know more about the plants that flourished during the Mesozoic era. I’m already familiar with some of the plants. Our yard and beach have thousands of horsetails, and we have a patch of ferns that are as high as my waist.

The Gymnosperms, the first plants to have seeds, dominated much of the era. They are often called naked seeds as they develop on the surface of the reproductive structure, a pine cone or short stalks. So if you have a conifer or a gingko tree in your back yard, you may fantasize that dinosaurs would feel right at home. Unless you live in the tropics, you won’t have another Gymnosperm in your yard, a cycad. They look like enormous pineapples with a bunch of ferns stuck on the top.

Toward the end of the Mesozoic, the Angiosperms appeared. These are flowering plants with their seeds enclosed in a fruit. They proceeded to take over the world.

My surprise came when I discovered that magnolias were among the earliest flowering plants. I have always thought of them as the plant equivalent of delicate southern bells. But no, botanically they are real survivors and coexisted with the dinos.

Magnolias are one of the oldest plants in existence, but they were named in the 18th century. In 1793, botanist Charles Plumier wrote about a flowering tree on the island of Martinique. He named it after Pierre Magnol, a 17th century French botanist.

Since our new magnolia has such impressive family longevity, I hope it will survive. If not, we have a one year guarantee.

“Anything I need to know?” I asked my husband as he finished the newspaper. I knew I wasn’t going to get to it, and he is a good editor.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “there’s a wonderful piece of news.”

My mind raced to people getting along somewhere in the world or President Obama getting a break from the racists that besiege him.

“The International Space Station is getting a new astronaut in January, a woman from Italy.”

Now my brain immediately thought of Sophia Loren. My husband has a thing for that gorgeous woman. But since she is older than me and not a pilot or scientist, I couldn’t imagine she was the reason for his excitement about the news item.

“Guess what the astronaut is bringing with her?” he asked. I couldn’t think of any obvious thing.

“A cat?” I tried.

“No,” he said.

I tried again. “All of Sophia Loren’s movies?”

“No, the astronaut is Italian, so, of course, she is bringing an espresso machine.”

I should have been able to figure that out. My husband is also my very own personal barista and I’m the recipient of great coffee drinks every day. When things would get difficult with his computer programming job, he would come home and say that perhaps he wanted to be an espresso machine repairman. Good coffee looms large in his life.

Apparently the disgusting instant coffee on the space station has been loathed by astronauts of all nationalities, especially the Italians. So the venerable Italian coffee company, Lavazza, teamed up with an engineering firm to create a designed-for-space espresso machine. Their creation is called ISSpresso, ISS standing for International Space Station.

I must agree with my guy that this is an upbeat news item. Good coffee, good friends and other simple pleasures are always good news whether you’re at the space station or on terra firma.