Earnest talk about flowers

The trees are in bloom at last--have been since the weekend. monshu and I first noticed the magnolias (or "tulip trees" as he calls them in his benighted Californian fashion) and the occasional cherry or plum. The Bradford pears were budding over the weekend and the ones on my street are now coming into bloom.

I'm a bit confused. My memory is that the pears were the last (and the briefest) blossomers last year, but the hawthorns and crabapples haven't even gotten started yet. Meanwhile, I've seen next-to-no Judas trees, whereas I always think of them as pioneers, right up there with the forsythia. Next spring, I think I'll make a point of keeping a flower log to see whether the sequence varies or if my memory is just foggier than ever.

The forsythia at work is exploding. The walk toward the Lake is particularly nice: Rounding the building, you come across a large field of jonquills in front of a trio of magnolias and, just beyond, a slope covered in forsythia. On my street, even the scraggly struggling rhodaleas are blooming and the larger shrubs are looking quite impressive.

Tough decision

Any conversation with my hillbilly co-worker is bound to involve some good stories, but the best always come from a family visit. There was the sordid tale of his brother hitting a possum to get it to play dead, carrying it around the pool hall and leaving it on the table to wake up, and ultimately getting questioned by the police for shooting it in the middle of the road. But my favourite bit was from his granddaddy's funeral on Good Friday:

"He was saying, 'If Otis were alive today, there's one thing he would want to say to y'all, 'Choose Jesus! Choose Jesus, choose Jesus.'' I was like, if pappaw were alive today, he'd be sayin' 'Choose Old Milwaukee!'"

You've come a long way, Baba!

So can someone explain to me why Turkey was successful where France, Italy, and Greece have been been failing miserably and Germany is making at best mediocre progress? And while the French government worked to prevent the Italians from buying out a utility company and has vociferously opposed a takeover that doesn't even involve a French company, the goddamn National Bank of Greece buys a Turkish bank outright and there's not even a whimper of protest? Am I the only one who finds it ironic that an Islamist party is displaying more liberal economic credentials than mainstream European conservative administrations?

If that's the effect joining the EU has on your economic policy, perhaps the Turks would be better off staying out of it.

Reheated Turkey

So I promised snowy_owlet to share some of my thoughts on the novel I'm currently (actively) reading, Barry Unsworth's Rage of the Vulture. I've already posted in aadroma's journal to bitch about his bad Turkish. (In a nutshell: He can't be bothered with consistent anglicisation, diacritics of any sort, vowel harmony, or other niceties.) If only my criticisms stopped there!

( Just in case you want to read it someday... )