Friday, July 15, 2011

A number

3642928 (steady slowdown until equinox sept)

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Solving a problem

A japanese gardener of noble descent (that is, a samurai gardener, a rarity back in the late 19th century) sweated in the summer heat as the little ice age has ended in his garden. Even the recent war had gone badly for his clan (a possible reason for him to start gardening), so he felt extra heated for the climate change. The only war memento he had obtained was a historical book of european origin, complete with images of the knightly life during the medieaval warm period (the ending of which, had been explained to him, was a main reason for the continued european search for nice, not too warm, not too cold, pastures around the world). One image showed a knight sitting in the shade of a vine pergola, with a caption saying "After the loss at Agincourt the surviving knights retreated to their own lands". The samurai in question was abnormally interested in the foreign ways of life due to his great-great-great auntie having married to a portuguese civilized captain, and thought the image was very soothing. So, because the clan leader had banned all the foreign food (and plant) imports, the samurai decided to begin to solve the problem of not having proper climbing vines by using native plants that could cover the pergola his carpenter had made to his specifications. The first attempts failed miserably, but after reading the "Great paper of the Monk, "Experiments on Plant Hybridization","left by a spanish priest at the library of the province capital for 'he had other interests', he started to slice various peas in half and recombining these to 'new sorts of peas' and seeing if he could grow a proper vine. Needless to say, he succeeded and thus a new species of Pueraria-complex was born, later to be known as samurai-weed (Salishan language:Kudzu) in the American Northwest.