Bonsai Zen: the Kowhai

January 13, 2007 at 12:14 pm · Filed under Bonsai

A few months back, Mom bought me a Bonsai kit from the MO Botanical Garden, and I started it last night. The kit includes the necessary tools to grow a New Zealand Kowhai: fertilizer, seeds, mini pot, plastic tubs. I’ve been putting it off because I want them to hopefully germinate around Spring.

Step One was to soak the seeds for 20 minutes and place them in the fridge for 4-6 weeks. Check! Though, I read the directions almost 10 different times to make sure I fully understood and was carrying them out appropriately.

The seeds came pre-planted in the soil, which is lame. I have no idea how many are in there or whether they got soaked. I’m a little concerned that they got soaked at all because the soil was packed really tight. Alternatively, the directions remind you not to give the seeds too much water, because then they could rot.

I’m going to keep them in the fridge for the full 6 weeks. I want the greatest chance of having every seed to sprout. This will give me the chance to possibly loose one and have others to fall back on. Til then, I just have to make sure that they have a little bit of water. Step Two will be to move them to a warm dark area.

Wikipedia says the Kowhai is a small woody legume tree. There are eight species. The ‘Sophora prostrata’ is sometimes called the “Little Baby” and is most typically uses as a Bonsai. The Kowhai is the national flower of New Zealand and is the Maori word for yellow.

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Cerebral Bombs

January 12, 2007 at 9:24 am · Filed under Books

I’m getting a lot of interesting theories from Born to Buy, and I’m not even that far into it.

Cultivation theory finds that heavy television watchers have their views of the real world shaped by what they see on the screen. For example, they overestimate the extent of crime in the real world because crime is so common in television shows. They are far more fearful of strangers because there’s so much stranger crime on TV. Other research has found that people who watch more television have pronounced biases in their perceptions of how wealthy Americans are, because television disproportionately shows wealthy and upper-middle-class lifestyles.

In statistical analysis I conducted, I discovered that heavier television viewing leads to higher spending and lower saving, presumably through the enhancement of consumer desires.

Early research found that television commercials inflate children’s perceptions of products and that television viewing time is positively correlated with requests. Robinson conducted a six-month classroom intervention to reduce television viewing among third and fourth graders in San Jose, CA. The children whose television viewing time declined made 70 percent fewer toy requests than those in the control group, whose media habits were unchanged.

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Consumerism and Goat Starers

January 10, 2007 at 3:22 pm · Filed under Books

2 new books from the library:

Born To Buy - Juliet B. Schor (Clear should probably stay away from this one. Her head just might explode.)

Drawing on a significant body of research, including interviews with everyone from advertising executives to the kids themselves, Schor exposes what she believes to be a huge cesspool of materialism, consumerism and commercialization that could be, and perhaps already is, leading to a generation of kids with no concept of what is important and truly necessary in life. By offering up her own ideas of what can be done by parents, educators, advertisers and others to lessen these problems, Schor goes beyond uncovering the problem and into the realm of concrete solutions.

The Men Who Stare at Goats - Jon Ronson

This exploration of the U.S. military’s flirtation with the supernatural is at once funny and tragic. It reads like fiction, with plenty of dialogue and descriptive detail, but as Ronson’s investigation into the government’s peculiar past doings creeps into the present-and into Iraq-it will raise goose bumps. As Ronson reveals, a secret wing of the U.S. military called First Earth Battalion was created in 1979 with the purpose of creating “Warrior Monks,” soldiers capable of walking through walls, becoming invisible, reading minds and even killing a goat simply by staring at it.

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Just Some Little Things

January 8, 2007 at 2:55 pm · Filed under Lifestyle

Yesterday, my iPod Nano froze again, but luckily I remembered a story on how to reset it. When you hold down the play/pause button, you can turn off the iPod. But when you hold down the menu and center button, you can reset it. This overrides the system freeze and sure beats waiting for the battery to die, like I had been doing.

Another neat trick is getting into the iPod diagnostics. Reset the iPod with the menu trick, but move your finger from the menu button to the left/rewind button. The iPod will boot into the diagnostics. You cant change much, but if your iPod were to break, this is how the technicians would check what’s wrong. On a side note, I wish I could dim the backlight. When I listen to music at night, the screen is really bright.

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I’ve now used my new Norelco 8150 XL razor twice. The first shave took me about 15 minutes. I had some short whiskers and it took forever to hack them off. When I finished, my face was crawling. It’s supposed to take 3 weeks for your skin to adjust to the razor. No break outs or burns, but it just crawled.

I suppose the razor works best when you use it day to day to cut the ‘nubs’ of hair. So today, it took about 5 minutes to shave. The three heads feel like a warm massage on the face.

To clean the head, you’re supposed to run warm water over it. Eventhough, Norelco says so, I’m not convinced this is the most effective method. These are tiny spinning pieces of metal that you’re supposed to “clean” with running water. Then, you have to wait for the water to fully dry before you can use it again. I think it’d be better to just use the brush and sweep the hairs out. I doubt they’ve perfected a technology to prevent water damage or rusting even on the tiniest scale. Or at least, they haven’t or care to do it with conventional razor blades.

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Lastly, you may have noticed my blog and website was down for a day or so. The place where I host it had a hard drive failure and nothing was accessible. However, if you’re reading this then it means that everything is back to normal.

I should mention that I’m contemplating changing hosts. In the process, I might register a new domain name. I’d like to move my blog and personal projects to something different. I have a name in mind. (Though, it looks like some chewy has already taken kimbarnett.com. There is also a cricketer with my identity. Double chewy.) With the new site, I could move yours, Ceej and Clear’s, blogs off of blogspot and onto my server. I use Wordpress as my blogging software and love it. It’s more robust and customizable. If you want your own domain, too, I could do that.

I’m not making any switches right away, so you can mull over it.

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Unseasonably Unseasonable

January 5, 2007 at 9:42 am · Filed under Lifestyle

To be blunt, I’m quite upset with the lack of winter, here. The news reporters make a point to say how unseasonably warm it is. The Chicago weather has typically been 15° warmer than it should be. They said that in Washington DC, flowers are already in bloom because they think it’s spring. And it darn well could be. All we’ve had is rain shower after shower. I want snow. Foot after foot after snow!

In an attempt to piss off winter. I’m going to launch the Winter Crusade. That’s right, and I’m throwing the first punch. I’m pulling out the shorts and the t-shirts. I had been growing my hair out in a fickle attempt to keep my head warm, but no more. I’m going back to shaving my head. Why should I grow my hair out? I should be tanning it with all this warm sun. I’m replacing the Pooh Bear snowflake image with the dragonfly. Winter, if you want it back, you need to prove me that you’ve earned that snowflake. Heck, I might even unbox the air conditioner. It’s damn near hot. The line has been drawn, winter. Do you have the cajones to cross it or are you gonna keep running your mouth?

EDIT: Damn you, El Nino!

Meteorologists say the warm spell is due to a combination of factors: El Nino, a cyclical warming trend now under way in the Pacific Ocean, can lead to milder weather, particularly in the Northeast; and the jet stream, the high-altitude air current that works like a barricade to hold back warm Southern air, is running much farther north than usual over the East Coast.

~ MSNBC

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