My second continuously most popular post (at least this summer) is the one about the Killer Tomato Worms. Lots of tomato gardeners seem to be having trouble with them this summer. As usual, I was ahead of my time; I fought those damn things last summer, and I lost the fight. (I don’t have a garden this summer.)
I’ve been getting several posts a week from people trying to find out how to get rid of them. I was never able to because I just wasn’t going to sit there, examine each tomato leaf, and literally pick off the little green-blooded buggers.
Interestingly enough, none of the commentors (there are 37 as of tonight) mentioned the bizarreness of the picture I put up of the worm. I guess no one noticed that horn and the big lips are superimposed on a picture of the hornworm. Their heads don’t really look like that.
On the Net, you can’t always believe what you see.
But you can share what you know about any effective way (besides squishing them) that you can get rid of those nasty tomato hornworms. Apparently, they’re on the verge of taking over the world. Or at least the world’s tomato plants.

There are just too many good lines in Jim Culleny’s No Utopia post on Just Jesus.
Go there and read the whole thing. It says it all.
And then go and read a great essay by a minister about “George Bush and the Rise of Christian Fascism.” that I discovered more than a couple of years and posted about. It deserves to be rediscovered.

bumper to bumper cars inch along this one main road through town. it’s a town for the young, skin tight, bellies out, low slung skirts rustling up gutter dust a half-mile from open sunflower fields and piles of old corn that’s still sweet. i can’t wait to be settled in, spices in racks, pc table glued together, toes curling into soft rug in blues and greens, the cat napping in a spot of sun.
this place was not ready for us and we were not ready for this place.
what’s your hurry says Momma Mountain. patience first. passion later. you know how slowly mountains move.
bumper to bumper cars crawl along the main street. the young bellies move lazily along the sidewalks, lean on stoop rails, laugh slow secrets. no hurry. everything can wait.
except time.

It’s bizarre living back in a “family” type situation, with a male, a female, and someone who is drifting toward a second childhood. I’m glad that I learned over the years how to stand up to males who are used to controlling everything around them. I no longer have the total power over my life that I used to have, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to give up any of what I have left without a fight.
We had a literal power failure for a few hours this evening, just as it was getting dark. That seems to happen frequently in this part of the mountains. We three sat outside in lawn chairs until it got dark, eating ice cream and hoping the bear didn’t decide to stop by.
When the power came back on, my mom and I watched a movie: The Upside of Anger, which ended with one of the young characters thinking: “the upside of anger is the person we become.”
At various times in my life, my anger propelled me out of where I was stuck and gave me the energy to reinvent myself. Anger is a powerful motivator.
The upside of anger is the person we become.
Yes, indeed.

Not as bad as lions and tigers, but we do have a bear that tore down our bird feeder and mangled our large garbage bin last night.
Such is one of the many differences between living on the third floor of a steel and cement building two blocks off the busiest street in a small city and digging in in the middle of the woods.
We wage a constant war against the insect kingdoms. The bear we leave alone and hope he/she finds better pickings somewhere else. Apparently DEC sees no reason to hunt him/her down; he/she hasn’t hurt anyone, yet.
And so we coexist.

Who’s your Daddy?

I’ve always held to the belief that we human beings create our gods in our own images. (Talk about narcissism!! But that’s another post.) Sometimes we tinker a little with images from other cultures — change their color, name, toga, etc — so that we can claim them as our own.
And then, of course, each #1 god or goddess is matched to a story of how he/she designed and created the universe. Comparing creation myths is a fascinating excercise — one on which I embarked with the eighth grade English class I taught back in the seventies as part of our study of Greek mythology. The exercise upset my students greatly as it began to dawn on them that an old man with a white beard creating the universe in seven days is no more or less logical than Sky Woman landing on the back of a giant turtle etc. But, of course, Joseph Campbell already covered all of that, and right on public television, too.
But Lord Volderbush (sorry, I’m reading Harry Potter)has gathered his monied minions in the guise of The Discovery Institute and they are on the march to redesign the universe to fit their particular mythology.
Jodi Wilgoren’s piece in today’s Times has this to say about the Institute’s role in promoting “intelligent design”:
Financed by some of the same Christian conservatives who helped Mr. Bush win the White House, the organization’s intellectual core is a scattered group of scholars who for nearly a decade have explored the unorthodox explanation of life’s origins known as intelligent design.
Together, they have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin’s defenders firmly on the defensive.
Like a well-tooled electoral campaign, the Discovery Institute has a carefully crafted, poll-tested message, lively Web logs – and millions of dollars from foundations run by prominent conservatives like Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, Philip F. Anschutz and Richard Mellon Scaife. The institute opened an office in Washington last fall and in January hired the same Beltway public relations firm that promoted the Contract With America in 1994.
“We are in the very initial stages of a scientific revolution,” said the center’s director, Stephen C. Meyer, 47, a historian and philosopher of science recruited by Discovery after he protested a professor’s being punished for criticizing Darwin in class. “We want to have an effect on the dominant view of our culture.”
For the institute’s president, Bruce K. Chapman, a Rockefeller Republican turned Reagan conservative, intelligent design appealed to his contrarian, futuristic sensibilities – and attracted wealthy, religious philanthropists like the Ahmansons at a time when his organization was surviving on a shoestring. More student of politics than science geek, Mr. Chapman embraced the evolution controversy as the institute’s signature issue precisely because of its unpopularity in the establishment.
[snip]
As much philosophical worldview as scientific hypothesis, intelligent design challenges Darwin’s theory of natural selection by arguing that some organisms are too complex to be explained by evolution alone, pointing to the possibility of supernatural influences. While mutual acceptance of evolution and the existence of God appeals instinctively to a faithful public, intelligent design is shunned as heresy in mainstream universities and science societies as untestable in laboratories.
Chapman says he wants “intelligent design” and evolution to be debated and compared in the classroom. Actually, what would be more accurate and academically sound is if the various creation myths were examined and compared first — including the Judeo-Christian version. And also the tendencies of each culture to create their gods in their own image. And also the human psychological need to feel there is some sense, some purpose to life — a need so strong that we create stories that explain it all in comforting terms. And also the fact that we humans are not so far evolved yet that we can live without rules. Religious-based myths offer models of behavior and try to instill fear of eternal punishment as a way of keeping wayward humans in line.
So, if students can first examine all of those psychological factors that make many of us need to believe in “intelligent design” and then examine why and how scientists have come to assert our “evolutionary” history, then the debate might have some value.
The bottom line is that pitting faith against fact is a great way to keep a country in turmoil. Faith requires a leap away from fact. For most of everyday life, it’s possible to keep a foot on each landing. But when it comes to a stand on how we got here and why we are here, you either believe the myths (as either actual or metaphorical) or accept the facts as they have been evidenced..
Lord Volderbush and his power-broking cronies are leading us into a time and place that will be even darker than our scariest fantasies if they are allowed to proceed.
Harry Potter! Where are you when we need you!

They’re coming to take me away, ha-haaa.
They’re coming to take me away, ho ho, he he, ha ha,
To the funny farm, where life is beautiful all the time
And I’ll be happy to see those nice young
Men in their clean white coats and
They’re coming to take me away, ha-haaa!
I did it. I peed in my pants in a fit of hysteria — laughing and crying at the same time and not able to stop any of it from happening.
In the middle of the frustrations of trying to put together some “assembly required” furniture (keep in mind that I was one of those kids who flunked the spacial-relations part of IQ tests), I got a UPS delivery of five baskets that I ordered to use as organizers on the top shelves of my wire “assembly required” closets.
Each basket came in its own terribly oversized 3 foot by 3 foot box. Each box contained one basket and about 10 yards of wide brown paper packing. So, there I was, nuts and bolts and little pegs and tubes of wood glue scattered all over, with these huge five boxes piled up waiting to be opened.
As I was heading out to the garage with my arms full of a paper lawn-leaf bag filled to overflowing with brown paper and five cardboard boxes cut down for recycling, I walked out the wrong door and found myself in the opposite direction toward which I was heading.
It wasn’t that funny, but the Sisyphus nature of my life these days just got to me.
I went back into the hallway, sat on the steps and started to laugh – big expulsions of air. And cry — big constrictions of chest. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop the pee, either.
I wonder how long it will be before they come to take me away. Ho ho, hee hee, ha ha.

Conflict and criticism make coexistence just about impossible.
I think of this today not in terms of my little picture (well, actually it holds true of my little picture as well), but rather one of the bigger ones with which raging writer Chris Locke is always dealing and where I popped in this morning to be confronted by this quote, with which I wholeheartedly agree.

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil;
but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.
Steven Weinberg ~ A Designer Universe?
Locke, whose book-in-progress Mystic Bourgeoisie is a rant about — well, just about everything that seems silly to him about how America slipped the surly bonds of earth & came to believe in signs & portents that would make the middle ages blush — is a writer who takes great energy to read. I don’t have great energy lately, but I do go in and read snippets because he always stirs my own thinking. I should be unpacking more boxes and putting together more of the cheap press-board pieces of furniture that function well to my purposes but make me crazy while putting them together. But, thanks to the anti-mystical mental meanderings of that probloglific Chief Blogging Officer, here I am instead.
The article to which Chris Locke links in relation to the above quote is just about the best/most readable explanation I’ve come across describing the conflict between science and religion. Weinberg ends his piece with the following:
In an e-mail message from the American Association for the Advancement of Science I learned that the aim of this conference is to have a constructive dialogue between science and religion. I am all in favor of a dialogue between science and religion, but not a constructive dialogue. One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.
As humans, it seems to me, we are entities of infinite opposities. We are both rational and irrational, logical and illogical, pragmatists and dreamers, warriors and peacemakes, destroyers and creators. We have lives of the body and lives of the spirit. And all of the those dualities always seem to be in conflict, with themselves and with each other.
In my own life, I struggle daily to find a way to enable my opposing tendencies to coexist constructively. That’s often where metaphor and psychotherapy and poetry help. Me. I’m saying they help me.
In various “bigger pictures,” it’s not so easy, not easy at all. And in the the largest global context, when the similar forces of nationalism and religion join their conversion efforts on various fronts (and, of course, I have in mind today’s America as well as Israel and Palestine and Iraq), coexistence is futile.
I believe that there is a place for spirituality in our lives, but it helps us most when it’s kept personal. Once it gets organized into a religion, well, the opening quote to this post says it all.
Science looks for answers. The spirit makes up its own.
Science searches for proveable facts. The spirit thrives on metaphor.
I often wonder if the difficulty with achieving coexistence of any kind has something to do with passion. Passion energizes us, gives us purpose and promise. It is so with the investigations of scientists and so with the journeys of the spirit. What you get as results in both cases can be truly awe-inspiring.
On the other hand, I think of the passion of national and religious proseltyzers/zealots/missionaries and the conflicts they generate.
We seem to very much need a place to put our passions. How do we coexist and engage our passions?
Maybe that’s our real challenge as human beings — not to struggle to rule the world as organized nations or religions, but rather to struggle to understand ourselves and each other from the perspective of our own personal dualities and the way we realize our passions.
I like Locke’s writing because it’s passionate. I’m bothered by his thinking because he seems, too often, to either compartmentalize or dismiss what he can’t seem to make coexist with his passion.
Yet, that’s often what makes his stuff a teeth-clenching rollercoaster read.
And just to annoy him a little more, I have to point out that my continously most popular posts — the ones to which I keep getting the most comments — are the ones where I mention my spurts of seeing the numbers 11:11 — here (100 comments on that one), and here (21 comments on that one).
One comment left today linked to this site, where, coincidentally (or maybe synchronistically), hummingbirds are mentioned.
There sure is a lot of strange stuff out there with which to try and coexist.

Over time, I’ve had some interesting challenges converting the use of one object to another purpose. For example, right now I’m attempting to convert tension pole shower caddies (because they are the only inexpensive tension poles I could find anywhere) into fixtures between which I can attach a drapery pole and hang drapes to form a kind of partial room divider. If it works, it’s the perfect solution for my loft space.
As much fun and frustration I have with that kind of “conversion,” I have even more anger and annoyance at the kind of “conversion” that some major religions insist on making their major mission.
I think of this because I saw a car today with a bumper sticker similar to the one below — two car magnet versions of which I just sent for from www.stampandshout.com:

— which fit right in with what my ol’s blog pal Jeneane Sessum has been posting about re cults and such.
Coexist rather than try to convert. Now, there’s a thought.
I’m going to put one of those car magnets on my car. The other on my front door.
three who haven’t lived together in almost 50 years have become even more unalike than they were a half-century ago. one mind lives as though it were five decades ago. the other two, while sibling-similar in being set in their ways, have ways that are set in very different personal realities.
conversion is not an option.
compromise is exhausting.
coexistence is a tough — but necessary — lesson to learn — Little Picture and Big Picture. otherwise it’s constant war.

Sometimes, one is all you get. One chance. One choice.
Last night, for the first time, I saw one meteor streaking across a sky that was just beginning to cloud over. We stood outside in the dark, with my mom leaning against me so that she could look upward without toppling over. But I was the only one who saw it. I did. I really did. I made a wish. One wish on one shooting star.
…………
All day long today, what we believed was a lone female hummingbird (females have a greenish color; males have the ruby throat) glutted herself at the feeder. We wondered how one little creature could be so continuously ravenous. Did she have an eating disorder? And then, as we watched out the window while we ate dinner, suddenly there were three female hummingbirds, all the same size and coloration. They buzzed around each other and the feeder, engaged in whatever hummingdances hummingbirds do. My mother insisted that they were fighting over the food in the feeder — which didn’t seem likely to me, since the feeder has four access holes.
So, to me, they were Three Sisters, three hummingbird sisters dancing their pleasure and thanks for their feast on the other side of our window.
————-
Sometime in the last week or so, I’ve developed a “floater” in my right eye. It hovers around my peripheral vision — a tiny, tiny black and white image that looks an awful like a tiny, tiny hummingbird. Yes, indeed, a hummingbird.

************
Sometimes, you only get one. One son. One daughter. One son-in-law. One grandchild. And sometimes you get a one-in-a-million son-in-law who bakes a blueberry pie with the berries picked by his one little son.

____________
Sometimes, when you only have one, and he is sent off to be killed in a war without reason, without purpose, without WMD, you become so angry, so betrayed, so brave, that you dare to stand up, stand out, speak out, cry out. Shout. SHOUT! Praying all the while that your pain will break through the plague of public denial.
From here:
Cindy challenges Bush to level with her: “You tell me the truth. You tell me that my son died for oil. You tell me that my son died to make your friends rich. You tell me my son died to spread the cancer of Pax Americana, imperialism in the Middle East. You tell me that, you don’t tell me my son died for freedom and democracy.”
When questioned about the war, Bush invokes his mantra of September 11. “Yeah, but were any of those people in Iraq?” Cindy asks. “And the people who flew those planes into the Trade Center, were they from Iraq?”
“I don’t believe [Bush’s] phony excuses for the war,” Cindy told a CBS reporter. “I want him to tell me why my son died.” She said, “If he gave the real answer, people in this country would be outraged – if he told people it was to make his buddies rich, that it was about oil.”
And this, from here:
During my many years as a writer, I’ve interviewed hundreds of people. But talking with Cindy Sheehan this morning was unlike any conversation I’ve ever had. Even though we were talking via cell phone – and had a crummy, staticky connection at that – her authenticity and passion reached through the receiver and both touched my heart and punched me in the gut.
She spoke with a combination of utter determination, unassailable integrity, fearlessness, and the peace of someone who knows that their cause is just. Her commitment was palpable – and infectious. It reminded me an old quote about the great Greek orators: “When Pericles spoke, the people said, ‘How well he speaks.’ But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, ‘Let us march!'”
That’s the feeling I got from this former Catholic youth minister. She of the floppy hat and the six foot frame (though she’s standing even taller than that these days). A woman driven by faith and conviction who used to think that one person couldn’t make a difference and is learning otherwise. Her humanity stands in stark contrast to the inhumanity of those who refuse to admit their mistakes and continue to send our young men and women to die in Iraq.
So, while the usual idiots begin their expected attacks on Sheehan, she responds the way one would expect.
Sometimes one…..

And check out the website of the Gold Star Families for Peace.