[Treebeard]

How to Make a Good Compost Heap

Select a corner of the plot that's as remote as possible from your and your neighbor's view, as a compost pile is not a decorative spot. Now simply start piling on, day by day, leaves from your property, waste grass after mowing, vegetable (not meat) garbage, and waste vegetable matter such as foliage. Its desirable to keep the pile fairly flat on top, as the materials accumulate. This way, rain--which is an important element in helping decay--soaks into the pile more uniformly instead of running off. Every time you've added about six inches to your compostheap, it's desirable to water down with a good liquid plant food, to help bacterial decomposition. This isn't essential, but it's helpful in having a better compost for your garden. Come spring, about six months later, you should have a well-rotted compost heap. Apply it to the soil, several inches deep, then turn under through the soil, mixing it thoroughly through the earth. Use it also as mulch, a use described elsewhere in this book.

Miracle Gardening, Samm Sinclair Baker, 1958

[Treebeard]

Beard blamed the great influence of these doctrines for the failure of American historians to teach the reality of America. The Catholics and the Marxists were able to win young people by criticizing the selfish materialism of the United States. But, Beard asserted, acquisitiveness, the cash nexus, is not American; it is the result of English ideology. America, the real America, is the Jeffersonian concern for human cooperation, for the selfless ethic of true civilization. Working also to alienate the young people from the Jeffersonian covenant was the doctrine of internationalism propounded by men like "Louis Finkelstein under the title of 'American Ideals and the Survival of Western Civilization' in the Contemporary Jewish Record of June 1941". It is no wonder, Beard wrote, that in the 1920s so many young intellectuals became cynical and pessimistic about their nation when it was defined for them in terms of alien ideologies.

The End of American History: Democracy, Capitalism and the Metaphor of Two Worlds in Anglo-American Historical Writing, 1880-1980, David W. Noble, 1985

[Bubbles]

The New Tsar, the rise and reign of Vladimir Putin. By Steven Lee Myers.

On September1, 1960, Vladimir began attending school No. 193, located a short walk away on the same street he lived. He was nearly 8, Maria having kept him in kindergarten, perhaps out of an over abundance of caution. He lacked the social adeptness he might have developed had he grown up around more children.

In school, he was an indifferent student, petulant and impulsive, probably a little bit spoiled. Vera Gurevich called him a whirligig because he would walk into class and spin in circles. He was highly disruptive in and out of class, more inclined to hang out with boys she considered a bad influence, including two older brothers named Kovshov. He was caught in school carrying a knife, and was once rebuked for delinquency by a neighbourhood party committee, which threatened to send him to an orphanage.

[Verity]

The New Tsar, the rise and reign of Vladimir Putin. By Steven Lee Myers.

On September1, 1960, Vladimir began attending school No. 193, located a short walk away on the same street he lived. He was nearly 8, Maria having kept him in kindergarten, perhaps out of an over abundance of caution. He lacked the social adeptness he might have developed had he grown up around more children.

In school, he was an indifferent student, petulant and impulsive, probably a little bit spoiled. Vera Gurevich called him a whirligig because he would walk into class and spin in circles. He was highly disruptive in and out of class, more inclined to hang out with boys she considered a bad influence, including two older brothers named Kovshov. He was caught in school carrying a knife, and was once rebuked for delinquency by a neighbourhood party committee, which threatened to send him to an orphanage.

That is really scary. Sounds like he had a family (mother anyway) and home,
and he was still threatened like that? Horrors of communism, and the kind of
thing the Dems would be all in favor of!

[Fritzy Ritz]

The bureaucrat is the wooden man, that bloodless error of the gods, neither decisive nor indecisive, an echo with no voice, a transmitter of orders, not ideas. He considers any doubt heresy, any contradiction treason, confuses unity with unanimity, and sees the people as an eternal child to be led by the ear.

It is highly improbable that the bureaucrat will put his life on the line. It is absolutely impossible that he will put his job on the line.

Eduardo Galleano, Century of the Wind, 1988 p. 181

[Treebeard]

The New Tsar, the rise and reign of Vladimir Putin. By Steven Lee Myers.

On September1, 1960, Vladimir began attending school No. 193, located a short walk away on the same street he lived. He was nearly 8, Maria having kept him in kindergarten, perhaps out of an over abundance of caution. He lacked the social adeptness he might have developed had he grown up around more children.

In school, he was an indifferent student, petulant and impulsive, probably a little bit spoiled. Vera Gurevich called him a whirligig because he would walk into class and spin in circles. He was highly disruptive in and out of class, more inclined to hang out with boys she considered a bad influence, including two older brothers named Kovshov. He was caught in school carrying a knife, and was once rebuked for delinquency by a neighbourhood party committee, which threatened to send him to an orphanage.

That is really scary. Sounds like he had a family (mother anyway) and home,
and he was still threatened like that? Horrors of communism, and the kind of
thing the Dems would be all in favor of!

Wait a second. It says he was rebuked for deinquency after being caught carrying a knife in school. The exact same thing would happen here. The threat of sending to an orphanage in that time was no different than today when our society threatens to send children to foster homes. By the way, that book is an anti-Putin hit piece. It was published to make Americans fear and loathe him. Description includes: "Putin has ushered in a new authoritarianism--unyielding in its brutal repression of dissent and newly assertive politically and militarily in regions like Crimea and the Middle East. The New Tsar is a staggering achievement, a deeply researched and essential biography of one of the most important and destabilizing world leaders in recent history, a man whose merciless rule has become inextricably bound to Russia's forseeable future." - also, consider the glaring inconsistency in the excerpt posted here. At once, Vladimir is in a rough home, has to carry a knife to school, yet he's also somehow "spoiled". This type of characterization is irresponsible and unprofessional.

Rather, here's a better biography:

First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia's President
by Vladimir Putin, Nataliya Gevorkyan, et al. | May 5, 2000

[Treebeard]

He began, as his custom was in mental prayer, by a deliberate act of self-exclusion from the world of sense. Under the image of sinking beneath a surface he forced himself downwards and inwards, till the peal of the organ, the shuffle of footsteps, the rigidity of the chair-back beneath his wrists--all seemed apart and external, and he was left a single person with a beating heart, an intellect that suggested image after image, and emotions that were too languid to stir themselves. Then he made his second descent, renounced all that he possessed and was, and became conscious that even the body was left behind, and that his mind and heart, awed by the Presence in which they found themselves, clung close and obedient to the will which was their lord and protector. He drew another long breath, or two, as he felt that Presence surge about him; he repeated a few mechanical words, and sank to that peace which follows the relinquishment of thought.

There he rested for a while. Far above him sounded the ecstatic music, the cry of trumpets and the shrilling of the flutes; but they were as insignificant street-noises to one who was falling asleep. He was within the veil of tihngs now, beyond the barriers of sense and reflection, in that secret place to which he had learned the road by endless effort, in that strange region where realities are evident, where perceptions go to and fro with the swiftness of light, where the swaying will catches now this, now that act, moulds it and speeds it; where all is one with God Transcendent, where the meaning of the external world is evident through its inner side, and the Church and its mysteries are seen from within a haze of glory.

[Treebeard]

The fairs of Charlemagne were extremely successful. Italian merchants bearing the rare goods of the east went there to buy raw wool, furs, hides, and other products of northern Europe. The merchants of the north went there to buy the goods of the east to distribute in their own countries. But these fairs were more than what we would call wholesale markets. The great lords of France would send their stewards to the fairs to buy their year's supply of sugar, spices, fine textiles, rich furs, and military equipment. When the English knight, William Marshall, found himself in need of a new war horse, he went to the fair of Lagny to buy it.

Mediaeval Society, Sidney Painter, Cornell University Press, 1951

[Treebeard]

Ben's hands tightened white on the chair. He leaned forward and saw her twist herself onto her back. The sound was near the top of the stairs. Slide. Bump. He sat paralyzed, watching Aunt Elizabeth's eyes open to the sound, to the metallic rattling now, at the end of the corridor. Something was being wheeled toward the door very quickly. Aunt Elizabeth suddenly sat up in her bed, her tongue swelling between her lips. She turned her face to the door.
It was a dream, he wasn't seeing any of this, wasn't hearing those sounds. Not the choking ot the chambered rattling directly outside the door, or the great blow against it that made the door fly open. He wouldn't give in to it, wouldn't look, not even when it was wheeled beside the bed, and the polished lid pulled open brutally by the chauffeur who moved toward Aunt Elizabeth then as she stared lifeless at the white satin lining. He wouldn't look.

Burnt Offerings, Robert Malasco, Delacorte Press, 1973

[Treebeard]

The vagrants sometimes stop of their own accord to try their hand at seasonal, intermittent or shady work. They people urban houses, journeymen's hostels (for the most respectable) and the cours des miracles*, and even encamp in the countryside, away from the villages, on the fringes of the terroirs, putting up flimsy huts, using natural caves, or allowed to live in some tumbledown buildingif they can be of service as labourers, ditchers, hedgers, mole-catchers, basket-makers, knife-grinders, clog-makers, charcoal-burners or rag-pickers. As squatters, or at least 'under cover', they now come under pressure from the fiscal organizations, which try to get them onto the tax-rolls, if only for a few sous.
We catch our last glimpse of the vagrant at this point when his motion is arrrested for good. Whether he dies in a hospital, a barn, by the wayside or fording a stream, he is always entered in the register of his last parish, and the curé performs his usual function of providing a lengthy description of the foreign corpse and giving it Christian burial if any sign of Christianity has been found upon it - a cross, a medallion or a rosary. There is not a parish in France which has not interred some beggar, poor maid or foundling at some time or another, and occasionally in considerable numbers in crisis years.
A careful approximate count of all the vagrants located by means of these laborious methods indicates that they must have been numerous enough to merit release from the novelettish straitjacket which has often confined them.
There are professional beggars and wayfarers. The Gypsies, a people apart, whose supposedly magical powers make them both respected and feared, hawk small items of handicraft and provide entertainment and dangerous services. Troupes with freak-shows and performing bears and others mounting static tableaux differ to only a small degree from the troupes of strolling players in which Molière made his second start. The world of the prostitute, urban by residence but recruited in the countryside among unmarried mothers and disgraced servant-girls, with its own code, hierarchy, districts and language, remains little known. Nearby is the different world of the cours des miracles and of organized, structured mendicancy, fuelled by a whole trade in children. Nobody is safe on the highways and in the forests because of their widespread infestation by powerful robber bands, of which Mandarin was one of the last popular heroes*. With smugglers and dealers in contraband salt (faux-saulniers) they were the raw material of the royalist uprisings of later years. All these professionals are not isolated adventurers but structured social groups whose combined strength could amount to several tens of thousands.

*Originally an area in medieval Paris notorious for its thieves, beggars and vagrants, then any such urban quarter -Tr.
* Louis Mandarin was a notorious brigand of Dauphiné, broken on the wheel at Valence in 1755. -Tr.

The Ancien Régime: French Society, 1600-1750, Pierre Goubert, 1969, English transaltion 1973