So as many of my loyal readers know, I am a Technology Coordinator of a local school district.  Order of business for this week, the NECC.  This is something we are beginning to make  yearly trip.  This year the conference is being held in Washington D.C. and it has been a very interesting trip to date.  The temperatures are absolutely amazing.  About 78 in the morning, highs in the 85-88 range or so.  MUCH more temperate than at home right now.  The city is much like any other large cities I have been.  I am always split when I come to these places.  You see there is a side of me that bucks against the agrarian desires of my heart.  I have maintained a love-hate relationship with these things.  I love coffee shops with free WiFi.  I love the early mornings of walking down a city street before the people start coming out and journeying to the nearest coffee shop, sitting down at 5:00 in the morning, sipping coffee and writing my thoughts down on my blog.  The peace and serenity before the world wakes up.  After about 5 days of this though, I am eager to get back to familiar things.  But, before I make this into a philosophical dive metaphysical dimension I have a few pictures.

Ok, before I get your salivaries working overtime, let me explain.  I finished this ‘meal’ in about 12 bites.  This sucker costs $12.  Five ounces of meat, and a small ice-cream scoop of potatoes.  This makes this meal about $1 per bite.  I am something of a portly guy, and while this was absolutely delcious I left hungry.  Be careful where you eat in D.C. portions at some restaurants are extremely tiny.  I’m used to southern plates filled to the edge with great food, this just will not do.  Today we will be looking for some more ’southern appropriate’ places.

And here are some clouds from the flight, nothing really original here, but it was pretty anyway.  Waking up at 2:00am a two-hour drive to Little Rock.  Flying  isn’t what it used to be that is for sure.  This is my first time on a plane since the 9/11 incident, and going through security during orange alert was something to be experienced.  Funny thing, I used to be something of a ‘world-traveler’ and here I am finding the travel experience strange, foreign and alien.  I get off the plane now and I stare around wide-eyed, as if I had never been in the air and visited foreign places.  Instinct kicked in though and I was able to make my way to our destination.  Chad (my co-worker) and I found the trip overall uneventful, which is pretty much par for the course simply because we slept through most if not ALL of it.  By the time we reached D.C. we were pretty much wiped out.  However Chad found his second wind while we walked to the convention center from our hotel to register for the conference.  We took a lot of pictures, I know we looked the model of ‘tourists’ but I really don’t care.  The city is MUCH prettier than San Antonio.  Sorry S.A., I love you dearly but D.C. beats you.  The streets here are wide open, roomy and spacious, whereas other cities look like they crammed the buildings so close together there is barely enough room for a two-lane street and two sidewalks.  D.C. is wide, and most streets are three lanes wide easily, with very roomy sidewalks, and space to pass people while you are walking.

It is a little early to tell if I love D.C. or not, but things are looking good.  One thing I have been a bit disappointed in, is that I don’t have that ‘This is HISTORY’ feeling.  It just seems like another city to me.  Perhaps that will change as the week progresses.We rode the Metro.  I love these things.  LOVE THEM!  Me and my friend Carl rode them all the time while I was in Chicago and I found that they were a cheap and easy way to get around.  These things are awesome, and if you ever get a chance to visit a large city I HIGHLY recommend making use of this form of public transportation.  I am not a big fan of public bus systems, but these are really quite amazing.  They are usually clean, and they are extremely fast.  Be careful at the way-station though, these suckers don’t slow down at all, and they will flat kill you if you are in the way.

I JUST HAD to do the tourist thing.  The Cato Institute is one of my statistically driven finance idols.  If you have not been reading any of the Cato Institue blogs and their videos, etc, then you are really missing out.  I am an information addict as many of you already know and I can NEVER get enough Cato.  There is more brilliance and intelligence in this one single building than in any other place in the world, the most amazing thing is that they are NOT globalists looking for an elite solution.  Cato rocks and maybe I’ll find a way to get inside during this upcoming week.  I have tons of pictures, but will be posting them to flickr or something.  Until later, have fun everyone, I am getting ready to start Day 2 of my trip.  And ‘Good Lords Day’ to all my agrarian readers.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

You know I would normally avoid a topic like this, but I just couldn’t stand it any longer.  It’s amazing to me that the world is on the brink of chaos, war and complete financial ruin.  America itself is in the throws of destruction ultimately.  A run-away rogue president is passing illegal legislation by the basketful, and people have lost more money in their retirement plans in the last six months than in their entire lives.

Iran is in complete chaos, at the very mouth of civil war and revolution.  People are dying on the street and the Iranian police are beating people.  I turn over to Fox news to see what is going on in the world and what do I see?  non-stop coverage of a child molester.  Let me get this right, a child molester dies and the American people are completely memorized.  Our nation really HAS become a degenerate whore.  How completely dis-heartening to see a boy-fondeler so idolized.  I hope I am not the only one who is somewhat relieved that the pervert is finally gone.  No more jury’s to buy off, no more parents to bribe, no more, no more.  What a disgusting pile of human effluence.  I can’t say I will shed a single tear.

And in all of this, someone, somewhere who had a life of purpose and meaning, died and no one gave a damn.  Contrary to the belief of Uri Geller, Michael Jackson is definitely NOT in heaven, nor is he in a better place.  I normally do not get this crass on my blog, but the whole thing is utterly disgusting.  I can only hope that the news won’t spend the whole week on this stupidity, and while my disgust with Fox News has been growing, this day they hit an all time low.  The death of Michael Jackson wasn’t a tragedy it was inevitable, I’m surprised he lasted this long.  Proof of the existence of ‘common grace’ I guess.

So long Michael, I’m glad you’re gone.
(The views expressed on ‘WildCraft’ are opinion and not necessarily a legal fact.)

"Work hard, study long and get your degree and you will make a lot of money." or "You will be successful if you go to college." The movies re-iterate this piece of the ‘American dream’, and school marms fill our heads with this sentiment. But more times than not it doesn’t turn out quite like we imagine, despite the fact we work and study hard.  So what went wrong?  For one we need to examine the overall drop-out rate of higher education. Suffice it to say it is high. More than 80% of enrolling freshmen drop out before reaching their senior year.  While that statistic may be debateable we can at least all agree that it is high, and most will agree it’s higher than 50%.  Statistics go on to prove that most graduates earn a lot less than what is deemed as middle class. This is becuase education does not equal wealth, all it means is that you have an education.  It isn’t necessarily that the education is bad, but what it does mean is that the educations goal is NOT to fill your wallet, but rather to fill you’re head. What you fill it with is up to you, unfortuneatly what fills the heads of most graduates is complete and utter garbage. Even those that go on to make decent livings with their education have a problem with thinking. That is because most graduates don’t learn to think, they just got some very expensive training.

Most who go on to make good livings and earn more than 100k per year is not because they are smart, but rather the contacts they made paid off, in short, they were just good salesmen, not good students, and a ‘good student’ isn’t one who just simply makes all A’s I’ve been to college and it isn’t all  that hard scoring high on ‘cram-and-puke’ exams.  The point of  all this is that if a person is going to college to make ‘the big bucks’ they are going for the wrong reason.  In addition, I am not finding that many graduates can use their brains for anything more than a door-stop.

In all my experience there is nothing in the college/university system that makes one smarter or more intelligent or even more learned. However there is one standard that proves itself time and time again. There is one type of individual that tends to be a notch higher than most all others in intellect and in the ability to understand and comprehend the written language.   However, instead of just telling you what the ’smart’ people all tend to have in common, I would rather hear from you and who you think these people are.  Good luck.

There are very few websites that bring me back to the origins of why I ever created this blog to begin with.  Many might be surprised that the foundations of this blog are not necessarily rooted in my political ideology, my religious leanings nor my agrarian pursuits.  Superior quality, minimal cost was the idea.  In addition, food was a driving force of the blog, and how else to get superior quality in your cooking elements than to grow them yourself.  Some time ago I wrote a somewhat didactic posting on the difference between pepper and chiles.  Chiles I love, but even I sometimes use the two words interchangeably, I grimace constantly as I realize the fop ah.  But despite the hard-line stance on pepper and chile this site has some amazing information on chile origins.  “The Nibble” is a great site absolutely FULL of amazing food ideas, and one of the most comprehensive pepper glossaries I have ever seen.  I was happy to find my Pasilla Bajio in the list there as one of the original, and historical chile’s.  In fact I hadn’t known this before but all those different ‘Anaheim’ chiles have the Pasilla as it’s father.

What led me to the site was some research I was doing on a chile I had heard about on ‘Food Network’.   The Nora Chile is from Spain and is often referred to as ‘Paprika’ which I really did not know.  Which is really quite odd because Paprika is known as originating in Hungary.  Here is where the mystery starts to unravel a bit.  Paprika is a generalized ’spice’ or ’seasoning’ Chile that originates in Hungary, however in modern times ‘Paprika’ has kind of morphed into any reddish powdered seasoning involving a chile.  Now to be sure there is a specific ‘Paprika’ chile called Capsicum annuum of the order Polemoniales. 

What is really curious to me that I need to do much more research on is Hungarian food.  I do not normally think of Hungary as being a country of spice or chiles.  To be sure Paprika is a very mild chile but still I must explore Hungarian cuisine and the number of varieties of Hungarian Paprika.

As many of you have probably read in earlier posts my struggle with producing a great onion, I must say that while I am a bit closer to my goal, my onions did not turn out fantastic, but they are good.  In my quest, I have discovered garlic and shallots for the garden as well, and these ‘Alliums’ are challenging me as well.  My garlic turned out ‘ok’ but I found that my soil had compacted around them making them form much smaller cloves than I was hoping.  In addition, I discovered that many garlics bought from nurseries have a non-detrimental virus that can affect size, so it is very important to get garlic that can be guranteed virus-free to maintain maximum yields.  Shallots however are the most intriguing to me of all the allium species and I am getting ready to embark on that great project.

So far as I know ‘French Grey’ are the ultimate in all shallots for cooking and sauces.  As I discover more in my research I will post here along with my gardening experiences.