FALL LEAVES

I just finished my fall leaf routine.  No, not raking and bagging.  That's for suckers who either are pathetic creatures of habit, desperately in need of exercise or are woefully uninformed.

Raking a bagging strains muscles and strains the local landfill.  Those bags of leaves become large clumps of leaves that take forever to decompose.  The smart way is to mulch them and leave them on your lawn.  This  feeds the lawn with valuable nitrogen and other nutrients and provides important weed control next spring.

I recommend this article to you.

Mulching leaves into lawns better than raking them

By Dean Fosdick - The Associated Press

November 18, 2004

New Market, Va. — Mike Goatley is the kind of guy couch potatoes appreciate most on football-rich fall afternoons. The Virginia Tech extension turf specialist preaches the gospel of "leave them alone" lawn leaf management.
There's nothing wrong with blowing, vacuuming or raking downed leaves -- especially if you're trying to spot errant golf balls or keep your grass from being matted down over winter. Disposal is the problem.
"One of the biggest things we're trying to get away from is putting these things in bags and dumping them in a landfill," Goatley says. "At the same time, you're improving the organic matter in your soil." The technique has been used for years, he says. But "there's quite a bit of data out there now (from Purdue, Michigan State and Cornell universities) indicating this is the way to manage those leaves." In other words, crank up your mulching-capable lawn mower first when the leaves start piling up in autumn.
A Purdue University report details the responses of a perennial ryegrass lawn to the addition of as much as two tons of maple leaves per acre per application. Mowing the leaves into fine pieces and filtering them through the turf doesn't degrade lawn color or quality, introduce diseases or weeds, the report says. Over time, the shredded leaves decompose, enriching the topmost soil layers. Mower mulching also saves time and money that would be unnecessarily spent on bagging and dumping. Composting leaves directly into the turf doesn't mean you should stop fertilizing, however.
"I don't think leaf recycling is a substitute for a sound fertilizing program," Goatley says. "Mother Nature has already removed a lot of nitrogen from those leaves. The microbes needed to further break them down also need some nitrogen.


You can read the entire article at: http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2004/nov/18/mulching_leaves_into/?print

Now, aren't you glad you checked in today?

CAN ANY OF US TRUST THE MEDIA?

I suppose at one time or another we have all complained that the media never presents any good news.  We fail to realize (or refuse to acknowledge) that WE are the reason for that.  We are the problem.  We don’t really care to learn that 147 eighth graders went to school today and behaved themselves.  We do, however, really want to hear about the fight at the middle school in which two kids got hurt, with one having to go to the hospital.  In other words, we want the newscasters on the six o’clock news to tell us about the bad things that happened today. That's human nature and both the print and broadcast news media know it.

So they oblige us.  Bad news sells newspapers.  Bad news sells television time.  Bad news, the more bloodier, more graphic the better.  It shows up well on our HDTV screen and gets our attention.  And our attention is what gets advertisers.

It should not surprise us that in his October 12, 2009 interview with Jamie Gangel on NBC's Today Show, Rush Limbaugh confirmed that his show is mainly about making money: "I'm doing my show for ratings. I want the largest audience I can get because that's how I can charge the highest advertising rates, which means what else do I want? Money."  You can be sure the same is true for Glenn Beck or any other independent print or TV commentator, regardless of whether he or she has a liberal or conservative leaning.  Controversy sells just like bad news sells.

Does it make any sense then to switch from one news outlet to another?  Probably not.  Although, by switching you do get to choose the type of biased reporting (translated that means: not getting news you don’t want to hear) you receive.  I guess in a way that its the same as screening out the bad news and only getting, what for you is, the good news.  One-sided news is still biased news, whether liberal or conservative.

Blatantly biased reporting aside, our free press, the fourth estate is crumbling and badly in need of an overhaul.  The house is still there but the insides have been gutted.  For another view, Samuel Clairborne makes the argument that we no longer have a free press in this country.

He says in his blog piece titled, Don’t Piss In My Pocket And Tell Me It’s Raining,  “But the average American looks to the mainstream media for their information, and the mainstream media is no longer free. It is bought and paid for by the same corporations that have bought our congress through lobbying – those that comprise the military/industrial/penal/pharmacological/oil and gas/agribusiness complex. 

“Far from being an objective, inquisitive force, our media have become cheerleaders for much that is rotten in America – because their paymasters profit from our inhumane health insurance system, our centralized energy production and distribution monopolies, our leadership as the world’s number one weapons dealer, and our imperial rape of both human and natural wealth the world over.”

I encourage you to check out his entire piece at: http://samuelclaiborne.blogspot.com/.


Whether you agree with him or not, you will find his comments thought provoking.  His comments underscore the fact that our numerous news outlets are hard pressed to come up with enough objectively gathered and reported news to fill all the hours they are obligated to fill.  Hence, they go for the easy stories and play them over and over again.  They eschew what used to be considered good news reporting -- get the facts, check the facts, corroborate the facts, report the facts -- in favor of being first to break a story.  The important thing is be first and be sensational.  The facts can come later.

Can you really trust your favorite news outlet?  Can you trust any news source that advertises that it is the anti-news to the other guys?  Our fourth estate is apparently up for sale to the highest bidder.  Can we trust any of the media anymore?  I don't think so, but I'd like to hear from you.

WHY NOT GIVE THE MONEY TO CHARITY?

According to what I read, the Obama administration has asked Congress to allocate $250 for some 57 million Social Security recipients who, this year, will not receive a cost-of-living allocation (COLA) in their monthly Social Security check.  There is no COLA this year because the cost of living decreased this past year.

I have several problems with that.  The first problem being that many of us retirees DO NOT need the $250.  Yes, our income is fixed.  (During any given year most people's income is fixed.)  But since the cost of living decreased, the value of our fixed income actually increased.  Not by a lot, I agree, but we should not be experiencing financial hardship.

The second problem I have with the $250 "government bailout" is that while we are all happy to get our COLA when prices increase, we seem less than happy to accept no increase when they decrease.  In fact, shouldn't we graciously accept a decrease when prices go down?  Are we just greedy or what?  Are we like the labor unions that want a piece of the action when the company shows a profit but don't want to talk about give backs when the company hits some lean years?

We seniors are supposed to be the wiser for our years of experience.  Shouldn't we then be wise enough to have put a little aside for those possible years when there would be no cost-of-living increase?  No decrease, understand, just no increase.

Now before you jump down my throat for being insensitive to those senior citizens out there who are just barely getting by on their Social Security and, maybe, a small pension check from some previous employer, let me say that I am well aware of their existence -- and their difficult financial circumstances.  I know some of these people, but I ask that you reread the second paragraph above in which I said that "many of us retirees do not need the $250."  Just the same, some people absolutely need the extra money, any extra money.

I feel obligated, however, to add that anyone paying attention has known for over 50 years that one cannot live very well on Social Security alone.  If you go into retirement having only your Social Security check to live on, you are going to live in a world of financial hurt.  An extra $250 will certainly help you, but it will only postpone for a while the return of your desperate financial condition.

So, if Congress approves this senior citizen bailout (bailouts are popular this year, you know) and we all receive our $250, what should we do?  We can spend it.  That would help the local economy.  We can sock it in the bank.  That would help bank profits and, presumably, those struggling bank CEO’s who had to take 50-90 percent pay and/or bonus cut.  (Some, I understand may see their pay cut from $38 million a year to $19 million.)  Or, we can donate the money to charity.

Why not?  You don’t need it and lots of others do.

The Salvation Army food bank is running out of food and the Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons are not yet upon us.  The regional food bank in eastern New York is running out of food.  These places, to name just two, are being hit hard by the number of people out of work and out of money to buy food.  Children are going hungry!  Are you?

Just think of the reaction across the nation, if not the world, if, say, 40 million of us who don’t really need that $250 donated it to our local food pantry, the Salvation Army, City Mission or some other local program that will directly benefit local families in need.  If we did that, we could turn this government program into something worthwhile, something that will directly benefit people in our community who need the help.

Yes, you may have to pay taxes on the $250, unless you have enough in the way of charitable deductions to affect your tax payment next April.  But think of the people you are helping who wish they had enough money on which to pay taxes next spring.

Let’s show the world that senior citizens are not a bunch of me-first, greedy old geezers.  We already get discounts at most restaurants, some department stores (on selected days) and nearly all theaters.  We have earned the right to these discounts.  We’ve paid our dues, for sure.  But many of us do not need this government handout!  Donate your $250 to the local charity of your choice and stand ready to be interviewed on the six o’clock news.  You will surely be recognized as a citizen of note.

I'VE LOST CONTROL

I have lost control ... of my garden that is.  I still have a garden in the sense that there is a plot of ground back behind the garage that is tilled and planted with my perennials: rhubarb, horseradish and green onions for next spring.  There also are the remains of this year's tomato and pepper plants.  Frost the last couple of nights took care of them.

POLITICS AND RELIGION -- BUT MOSTLY POLITICS

You might think from the title that this is going to be tirade about the religious right and how they have inserted their religious dogma into political thought and, for reasons unfathomable by me, largely taken control of the Republican Party.  Not so.

I am not saying none of that is true; that would be wrong.  And like my media hero, Rush Limbaugh, I never lie.  (How do you know that?  Because, like him, I told you so.)  No, what the "not so" statement above refers to is how we arrive at our political and religious beliefs -- and the consequences of that.

ANOTHER EMAIL ALERT TEST POSTING

By Farhad Manjoo
Posted Friday, July 24, 2009, at 7:05 AM ET

---

It's tempting to blame the victim. In May, a twentysomething French hacker broke into several Twitter employees' e-mail accounts and stole a trove of meeting notes, strategy documents, and other confidential scribbles. The hacker eventually gave the stash to TechCrunch, which has since published notes from meetings in which Twitter execs discussed their very lofty goals. (The company wants to be the first Web service to reach 1 billion users.) How'd the hacker get all this stuff? Like a lot of tech startups, Twitter runs without paper—much of the company's discussions take place in e-mail and over shared Google documents. All of these corporate secrets are kept secure with a very thin wall of protection: the employees' passwords, which the intruder managed to guess because some people at Twitter used the same passwords for many different sites. In other words, Twitter had it coming. The trouble is, so do the rest of us.

STILL TESTING MY EMAIL ALERT PROGRAM

This is very funny!

I GOT THIS NEW DEODORANT TODAY. THE INSTRUCTIONS SAID REMOVE CAP AND PUSH UP BOTTOM. I CAN BARELY WALK, BUT WHENEVER I FART, THE ROOM SMELLS AWESOME!

AN INTERESTING ARTICLE

Here is an interesting article that everyone should read, especially some radical conservatives who, I fear, live in an alternative universe.  Unfortunately, they are exactly the ones who will not read it, and if they do, they will  not understand it.  They're not too bright, you know.

Chuckwagon Journal

Tom Teepen: Alternate reality confronts Obama and his yes-we-canners

By Tom Teepen

Posted: September 18, 2009 - 2:00 AM

In CrazyWorld, Barack Obama is a foreigner who has unconstitutionally usurped the presidency of the United States.

In Actual America, Hawaii-born Obama was elected president by his fellow citizens.

And so it goes on both sides of the mystic curtain.

In CrazyWorld, that recent Tea Party rally in Washington drew 2 million people and the failure of the ever-despised mainstream media to admit as much was one more example of their perfidiousness. An aerial photo, eagerly circulated on the political right, indeed did show a monster crowd, surely a million and more.

In Actual America, the photo turned out to be of the 1997 Promise Keepers rally. Old hands at guesstimating crowd sizes figure the Tea Party turnout at about 75,000. Most media skipped the numbers game, put the crowd in the "tens of thousands" and characterized it as "impressive" or words to that effect, hardly a negation.

In CrazyWorld, the federal government is being insidiously infused with "czars" and in the academies of right-wing arcana, the movement's scholars argue over whether there are just 32 or maybe as many as 140-plus, a parody of medieval monks bickering over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

In Actual America, the president has assigned various appointees to oversee a number of projects or programs — nuclear nonproliferation, the bank bailout, faith-based activities and so on. All modern presidents have done much the same. The appointees have standard-issue bureaucratic titles. "Czar" is the invention of fairway barkers at the right-wing carnival like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.

In CrazyWorld, Obama is surrendering to terrorism.

In Actual America, he has sent 21,000 additional troops into Afghanistan, home turf of terrorism and wellspring of 9/11, and seems likely to send more. He has increased the military budget.

In CrazyWorld, Obama is bankrupting taxpayers and the nation.

In Actual America, he proposed and Congress enacted a tax cut good for up to $400 per person for 95 percent of taxpayers and a $2,500 tax credit to offset college tuition costs. The Treasury calculates it will save 5 million families a total of about $9 billion.

The record deficit that he's presiding over is overwhelmingly a projection of previously committed entitlements (Social Security, Medicare and so on), of leftover Bush debt and of revenue losses from the recession, which recovery will largely make up.

In CrazyWorld, Obama — when he's not a fascist — is a communist, recently morphed from Marxist to Stalinist, pursuing an alien agenda.

In Actual America, Obama is a moderate-to-liberal Democrat carrying through on the platform he openly espoused to win election just 10 months ago.

In CrazyWorld, the fact that the House health care reform bill is 1,018 pages long somehow shows its hopelessness.

In Actual America, the format for congressional bills is about a third or more white space — 25 double-spaced lines per page, about six or seven words per line. President Bush's 1997 budget bill was 1,482 pages. So?

You know, we would be able to hear one another a lot better here on Earth if it weren't for all the static coming from outer space.

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. E-mail: teepencolumn@earthlink.net.

TRAVELING BY CAR ACROSS THE U.S.

OK, so my "out of commission for a few days" turned out to be almost four weeks.  Sorry about that.

We did spend several weeks traveling from Colorado to Las Vegas, NV to Phoenix, AZ to Walkersville, MD, and that kept me from adding to my blog.  Aside from the time spent traveling, I failed to take into account how much time I would spend tending to other matters upon my return home: unloading the car, putting things away, yard work, garden work, getting caught up on local news from the neighbors, and so on.

Everything we had carefully packed in the car when we left the ranch in Colorado had to be unloaded and we had to put all of it away somewhere in the house.  Garbage couldn’t be picked up until I called the waste disposal people and let them know we were back in town; the same with newspaper delivery.  We had to stop by the post office to get our accumulated mail that the postman had been saving since we asked him to stop forwarding it and to ask that our regular mail delivery start again.  There was no food in the house, so grocery shopping was high on the list of things to do first.  And so it went.  Everywhere we turned we came up with another "do me first" job.

The lad I had hired to do the lawn had not kept up with the mowing because of the multiple rains they had in our area this summer, so the grass was way too long.  When I finally got to it (the first dry day) I had to stop repeatedly to empty the grass catcher.  A job that usually took 45 minutes or so took over an hour and a half! 

On to the garden.  Some of the weeds there had developed stems over one inch thick -- and an attitude.  It takes a brave man to tackle weeds that big.  They are tough and stubborn – and resist being pulled from the ground with, literally, every fiber of their being.  (I should apologize for the pun but, actually, I’m rather proud of it.)

But that’s enough about my home chores.  The title of this piece is about car travel and I want to tell you about our travels … by car.

Car travel for many of us conjures up those days from our youth when we sat strapped in the back seat of the family car and whined – because that was the only thing that would get out parents’ attention – “Are we there yet?”  Our parents played silly games with us to keep our minds off our leg cramps and numb butts, or our endless need to pee.  The games worked for a while, but we really wanted to get out of the car and move around.  Car travel was not our favorite mode of travel.

Planes and trains are nice.  Planes get you there faster.  On trains, at least, you can move around a little.  But cars?  Too slow.

Well if you have vertigo, as I have, or claustrophobia, as my wife does, plane travel is out of the question.  Besides, we have learned to relax and enjoy the countryside we are traveling through.  Car travel allows us to do that.

All that being said, we find that car travel offers additional things that other forms of transportation do not.  We could stop when and where we wanted, for one thing.  When we saw a road sign, country market or anything else that caught out attention, we could pull over and investigate it.  We stopped in Kansas, for instance, when we saw one of those brown government information signs that said “Pawnee Village.”  We looked at each other, nodded our heads and made a quick decision to check it out.  Eight miles down the road, we came to a museum constructed where archeologists had unearthed a Pawnee village.  The museum building was over just one of the villages large, domed shelters.  Since we were the only ones there, we got a special one-man tour from the interpreter-guide on duty.

Alas, I am out of time and space.  More on some of the special aspects of our drive across country in the next blog.  I try to keep these personal accounts brief so you don't get bored (well, too bored) reading them.