Something very appealing is happening outside in the sky with the sun (or the megawatty moon). The sky has turned on after days on the dimmer. A pinky hue is falling on one, two, three, four, five, six chimney pots I have hitherto never noticed.  (and one satellite dish).

Oh sweet Spring — is that you? Are you knocking?!

After epic voyages into the seed catalogue and salivation on passing the packets, it now looks likely that my poor scrap of a garden will be beset with only tomatoes, zuccinni, parsely, cilantro and potatoes because there simply won’t be the time to be out there talking and tending to the babies.

So much for the greenhouse woman! Not a pot filled and it nearly April. For shame, for shame, a disgrace.

This would be my fourth or is it fifth year — here I was hoping for great strides. Still I am looking forward to the flowerman’s garden. I often see him on the road and call out to him. And there’s the other gardens around mine, especially Marie. And the chef and Philip who gave me arugula, not to mention Doris and the sunken terracotta wine coolers.

A horoscope for April 24th 1935 in the Vancouver Sun recorded the best hours if your birthday was tomorrow April 25th and the danger periods. The danger period? It commenced very specifically at 8.15pm.

Mrs Steeves

“He has come out in the open at last and shown himself for the fascist leader that he is ”

Mrs Steeves, MLA for North Vancouver, April 24th 1935 on Mayor G G McGeer’s reading of the riot act.

It is Fred Booker hour here on the couch and through the paper bound version of a wireless I heard the following ….

“A baleful clamour rang beneath the chemical haze of the single industry-town.”

4 hours of microfiche trawling, dodgy attempt at scanning, followed by a dip into an essay from a new collection called Rethinking the Human.

A talk.

Next, next, next slide, next, next, next slide, continue, next, next, continue, next, next, next slide, next, next ….

(name that tune?)

Now recite it militaristically and at twice the speed.

(Name that tune encore?)

School report cards increasingly remind me of real estate appraisals in their contractual language and measurement. No leak, nor tweak, nor inconvenience, the categorizations of both insist.

And yet how people flock and click to watch TED Talks. Let it be know the TED talkers are often mighty uneven and celebrated for it.

From a BBC News report:

“Increasing by two years every decade, they show no signs of flattening out. Average lifespan around the world is already double what it was 200 years ago.”

“…The reason behind the steady rise in life expectancy is “the decline in the death rate of the elderly”, says Professor Tom Kirkwood from the Institute of Ageing and Health at Newcastle University.

He has a theory that our bodies are evolving to maintain and repair themselves better and our genes are investing in this process to put off the damage which will eventually lead to death…”

UNLESS

This all sounds v optimistic typed out like this, but at the bottom it needs the word UNLESS followed by some extrapolation on the matter of those who continue to die young. Are all bodies evolving equally? Is anyone evolving into the above mentioned with a less than superb gene pool helping them gallop apace. Discuss.

“The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won’t work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, “cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.”

From  Cosmonaut Crashed into Earth ‘Crying in Rage’

NPR Sciency blog. Krulwich Wonders in reference to…

Starman, by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony