Eating Wood

Whether or not cellulose is a good thing for humans to eat, is a difficult question. Several individuals have expressed shock and dismay at suddenly noticing it is in the ingredients list of your favorite foods. and some you don't like too.

I am really on the fence on this one. "K," who started this whole can of worms still has people commenting on the comments of other people's livid remarks. These remarks include ‎"YAY to the world of 'less expensive food, now we can buy bigger cars and more shoes!!" Yes, that is out of context. The original incendiary spark can be found here - Not Food?

And the full blown inflagration centers on the apparent deception to the consumer, who thinks he or she is getting edible food at the grocery store, while lo and behold, it is parts of trees or cornstalks, more likely, that we are actually "eating."

Personally, I am irritated that we can't figure out how to digest the stuff already. At this day and age, we could be responding to references about our ever expanding mid sections with "That's my reticulorumen, don't you have one yet?" We would need our reticulorumens to house a few bacteria we don't already own. I think they could be easily ingested by making some dirt milkshakes.

The same humans who don't want to have a go at eating chopped paper may not have tried the delightful and largely inedible slippery elm porridge. Made from the inner bark of the slippery elm, this porridge has the distinctive flavor of wood shavings. I have eaten it many times, and I didn't put on an ounce.
Have you seen this pop-up ad? One trick of the tiny belly. Eat wood.

I MUST point out that wood is not cellulose. Sure, some of it is but there are many other things to digest in wood, such as lignin. You try digesting lignin sometime.

 My Ganoderma, in its jar house, truly enjoys a wood diet. I treat the youngster to a warm-up in the oven twice a day. Just over 100ºf. Soon, it will be moving again. More space, more wood, more oxygen.

This all reminds me of a joke. What is brown and sticky? A stick.

BEANS Beans beans

The beans are being counted. Petaluma gold rush is a wildcard. It seems it has crossed with anything that bloomed in proximity to it. Maybe something is wrong with its flowers, maybe gremlins climbed around on the vines at night and popped the flowers open before they had a chance to self-pollinate.

One of the gremlins may be named E.M. She lives down our street. E.M. definitely gets into other people's back yards, possibly their gardens as well. She made her way up the B.N. right-of-way and popped the heads off all the sunflowers she could find, then stuffed them in a bag she was shielding herself with. I don't have definitive proof of this, but I COULD see her, and she WAS hovering over spot after spot behind the garden, and she DID have a large cloth bag which appeared to be larger every time she picked it up. I am just enough afraid of her that I did NOT run out back to holler "GO AWAY and put some UNDER garments on before you show up again!"

Today I noticed that the sunflowers were all headless. The sunflowers outside of the garden AND the sunflowers inside the garden.

Random

Who knew there are endless rules for the pinning of insects? I said this was going to be random... Their little legs and antennae must be placed, they can't be positioned in any way except horizontally, they should face left, and flies' heads should be turned. The insect must be five millimeters above the first I.D. slip and ten millimeters above the second I.D. slip. The pin should be on the right side of the thorax. The most useful tidbit is that, by refrigerating your dead insects before pinning them, they lose some of that disgusting crunchiness when the pin is first inserted.
We feared a killing freeze two nights ago, so I picked all the beans, ready or not. They are hanging by their stems, upside down and there are hundreds of them. The winners so far are Arikara and black turtle.

 Followed by brown Norwegian and (yes!) Petaluma gold rush. But with hundreds of pods still to count the final results could be completely different.
We would all probably like to have our own dolipore septa with perforated parenthesomes but unless you are a homobasidiomycete it is just not going to happen. Sorry. Which reminds me. I hate a certain size. It is the size that things are when they are just about too small to get a good look at with a compound microscope. You know, the size that people who already know what these things should look like say "you can see it right next to the (insert word like dolipore) if you look carefully." So you look carefully and all you can see is tiny smudges that look exactly like the smudges on the far side of your range of view. I think that is about two microns. Stupid smudges. 
OK, one last thing. Do you think a reputable chocolate company should charge eight dollars for a box of chocolates when the pieces include varieties such as "spackling paste - toothpaste combo covered in dark chocolate" and "bathroom deodorizer flavored cream filling swirled wirh a milk chocolate nougat outside?" There are a number of companies here in M whose owning parties think if you just keep changing the smells and flavors of the products every two and a half weeks, you are bound to come up with that billion dollar creation no one can get enough of, sooner or later. I am convinced the recipe is simpler and more precise. I think I almost have it. You can buy a copy of the recipe in progress for only three dollars and forty seven cents, because it will have to go the USPS route. And you will have to sign a non-competition agreement. Someone will out and out steal it otherwise.