While "researching" this post, I learned that it's commonly done in Turkey and Iraq. Our garden rhubarb came from China. The leaves are poisonous. There are lots of types of rhubarbs, most inedible.

Rhubarb is the most reliable edible perennial that you can have in your northern garden. Just throw some manure on them every Spring, and you're done. The only problem I have had with them (my last patch) was that the plants kept going to flower and seed without producing new stems. I guess I should have cut off the flowering stems sooner.

How to make a rhubarb patch.

A few fine Rhubarb recipes (don't talk to me about Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie which is an insult to both Strawberry and Rhubarb).

Rhubarb Crisp

Rhubarb Tart

Rhubarb Custard Pie

For almost a decade we grew to love this person.  The quirks, the foibles, the eccentricities.  It all made this person that much more human.  That much more endearing.  That much more dear.

I don't have a TV, so I watched the final episode a few days later after someone has posted a hi-def version to Usenet.  After my NCIS post a week ago, and before I watched the last show, Maggie's reader JC Loophole had this to say in the comments:

Just watched the season finale of NCIS and let me say if what I saw in the very last seconds holds true and that character is indeed gone, as much as I love the show, I will then also hate NCIS with the heat of a thousand suns for what they did.

Too true.  But that he didn't reveal the name of the departed, or even the gender, was a seriously classy move.  Kudos, good man.

While I hated watching the show a few days later, knowing that one of our heroes might perish, I have to admit I was forewarned:

Terrorism shakes the foundations of the Navy and NCIS to such an extent that Gibbs and the team face surprises that will devastate them.

Admittedly, that's not your usual 'suspenseful' blurb from tv.com.

And it wasn't.

Vermont bans fracking, but there is no oil or gas in Vermont, nor do they understand what fracking is

Funny, they don't ban fracked fuels from other states

My Son Looks Like a Girl. So What? (h/t Althouse)

Fat, Broke, and Single?

Regulating the Innovation Out of Charter Schools

Media Works To Suppress Obama 'Born in Kenya' Bio

"we rich Westerners are already beyond the practical limits that humans should ever aspire to achieve in terms of health, wealth – and even of education."

Why the Obama Campaign Is Blowing the Election

Ain’t no politics like identity politics ’cause identity politics don’t stop

Diversity training makes things worse (h/t Insty)

Media Pretends Mormonism Will Hurt Romney; Study Says Opposite

Clive Crook: Why I Think Obama Is Losing:

Obama's big problem, I think, is that he is no longer the president he said he would be. Above all, he's stopped trying to be that president.

U.S. Metros Are Ground Zero for Majority-Minority Populations

According to Adecco, nearly a third of parents are helping their kids find work, and nearly one in ten are taking them to job interviews.

Re-linked: Acknowledging The Arrival Of Peak Government

Via NYM:

Treating college as the new high school hasn’t benefited students who waste four years of their lives and pick up staggering debts which make it harder for them to buy homes and start families, but it has benefited the liberal arts infrastructure, which, despite the liberal spin, is just as good at handing out useless degrees with no career path as any for-profit college. And it has benefited the Democratic Party, which rightly sees college campuses as recruitment grounds and liberal-voter-training seminars. ...

Re-linked: Deterring Bullies: The “Karate Kid” Program

Is Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, a 1978 case rejecting academic racial quotas, the smoking gun behind Obama’s Kenyan identity?

The Audacity of Faith

Deficit likely higher than Jerry Brown's estimate

Did Elizabeth Warren Plagiarize Her 'Pow Wow Chow' Recipes?

Linda Chavez on her DNA geneology

Howie Carr: If moccasin were on the other foot...

‘Barack Obama: A Composite Kenyan’

Factory fishing, aided by helos, has crushed the population of Bunker. An excellent and thorough review of the politics of the plankton-eating Menhaden which, like the Herring, is the preeminent fish of the lower end of the Atlantic food chain:

A Fish Story - How an angler and two government bureaucrats may have saved the Atlantic Ocean.

Related: Save the Most Important Fish in the Sea

Now, you have the chance to get in depth with Kimball’s learning and lessons in his new book The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia.  Order at this link.

Kimball entices you with a few short excerpts:

Why does relativism, which begins with a beckoning promise of liberation from “oppressive” moral constraints, so often end in the embrace of immoral constraints that are politically obnoxious? Part of the answer lies in the hypertrophy or perversion of relativism’s conceptual enablers— terms like “pluralism,” “diversity,” “tolerance,” “openness,” and the like. They all name classic liberal virtues, but it turns out that their beneficence depends on their place in a constellation of fixed values. Absent that hierarchy, they rapidly degenerate into epithets in the armory of political suasion. They retain the aura, the emotional charge, of positive values. But in reality they act as moral solvents, as what Gairdner calls “value-dispersing terms that serve as an official warning to accept all behaviours of others without judgment and, most important, to keep all moral opinions private.” In this sense, the rise of relativism encourages an ideology of non-judgmentalism only as a prelude to ever more strident discriminations.

And…

[T]he fruits of egalitarianism are ignorance, the habit of intellectual conformity, and the systematic subjection of cultural achievement to political criteria. In the university, this means classes devoted to pop novels, rock videos, and third-rate works chosen simply because their authors are members of the requisite sex, ethnic group, or social minority. It involves an attack on permanent things for the sake of the trendy and ephemeral. It means students who are graduated not having read Milton or Dante or Shakespeare—or, what is in some ways even worse, who have been taught to regard the works of such authors chiefly as hunting grounds for examples of patriarchy, homophobia, imperialism, or some other politically correct vice. It means faculty and students who regard education as an exercise in disillusionment and who look to the past only to corroborate their sense of superiority and self-satisfaction.

And…

First, watch the video.

What's to note is that the slider the guy demonstrates was just thrown together for the interview.  A real skimmer's piece is smaller and almost seamless.

I would also note that this deals with the kind of credit card slider you find at a gas station.  When it comes to banks, the skimmer of choice is the fake keypad; a slick little unit that fits perfectly over the bank's ATM keypad.

It should also be pointed out that there's a difference between a debit card and a credit card.  More on the subject here.

Caveat emptor, baby.

Image

Sex Life Satisfaction

Drink Coffee, Live Longer

Why Hollywood is doomed

Bad Gratitude

Army opens wide review of PTSD-diagnosis system

Greek Lights Out... Literally

Henninger: A Tale of Two Commencements - For Obama, politics is life. For Romney, politics does not define us.

Run for the hills: Yet another study informs us of the imminent end of life as we know it

Charting a Path To Reauthorizing Free Markets and Ending Statism

The Kennedys are what we term "bad people" in Yankeeland

Bad genes. Destroying real people while posing as do-gooders.

The Internet has changed many things, but not the insular habits of mind that keep the world from becoming truly connected.

So what?

Obama just lost my mom's vote

13% state income tax

Government creates the next bubble in higher education

The Death of the Hockey Stick? The iconic symbol of the global warming panic may have taken a hit from which it will never recover.

Candidates Gird For A 'Scorched Earth' Campaign

Gallup: Historical Comparisons Indicate Massive Obama Repudiation in November

Cherokee writer denounces Elizabeth Warren

The Woman Who Blew Up the Arab World

The Truth About the Nakba

"Yes you have," I said. "That's your good insight for the day."

"I've been doing this all my life. Am I crazy?"

"Not at all," I said. "You just discovered one of your underlying assumptions about things. We call them 'unconscious fantasies' - or we call them that until you become aware of them."

One of the rewards of my work is helping people discern their hitherto unattended-to, unexamined, "unconscious" operating principles. When these are held up to the light, it can be disorienting, humbling, and distressing for many to realize that much of their problematic or ineffective behavior has been determined by following a false map, as it were. To mix metaphors even further, to realize that they were standing on unsolid ground.

My very pleasant businesswoman patient came to the realization that one of her dominant operating principles was to keep everybody in her world, everyone she knew, safe from distress, worry, discomfort, disease, and misfortune. Not only did this principle run her ragged, but it often failed. When it failed, she blamed herself for not having done enough. The unconscious fantasy she uncovered might be called a "fantasy of omnipotence."

Everybody operates, to varying degrees, according to unconscious fantasies about themselves, others, and the world in general. Nobody is 100% in reality. Problems can arise depending on how far the hidden assumptions diverge from reality. Reality is the harshest teacher, and never spares the rod.

What are these things made of? Freud discovered/defined them, although writers and students of human nature have always been interested in the irrational consistencies of personality. Freud said that they are constructed from wishes, fears, hopes, dreams, experiences, temperaments, and especially defenses. I think that is true. During maturation, they become organized like pieces of mental software. Like the beating heart and the digesting bowel, they are part of what and who we are while operating outside our awareness.

Unfortunately, we cannot ask people what their deep operative fantasies are, because they are, by definition, unaware of them. That's where Psychoanalytic skills come in, like soul-surgeons, to try to biopsy and, perhaps, extract the problem software. However, our medical rule is primum non nocere so we try not to let the best become the enemy of the good-enough.

Fortunately, the human mind seems to have a relatively limited repertoire of unconscious fantasies, so we experts are expected to be able to identify them, in time. That's a topic for another post, maybe.

Taco USA - How Mexican food became more American than apple pie.

I do like Mexican, on occasion. I like the real stuff, and have a little joint down the road a piece where we can get it cheap. It's near Home Depot, so that's good. They don't speak English, but that's ok with me. They understand "hot."

No Tater Tots.