Adam and Steve and the tree of knowledge.

I've never really thought about this until recently. Its about god and stuff and more specifically the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  More specifically Genesis and the whole forbidden tree of the garden of Eden (Genesis Beginning bits).

More specifically what is it and does it have to even be edible.

A quick skim of Genesis seems that god made everything to be both vegan and every vegetation wise, to be edible in some way, rather than to be useful such as for timber or medicine and that. 

There is a pretty good video I found from Darkmatter 2525  on the subject, but more likely a TMM video debunking original sin. Basically original sin seems to be Scrumping but with a snake egging you on to do it. Not something typically that gets you thrown out of heaven, normally a clip round the ear from a parent and maybe grounding if found out.

Also what if the tree of overall good and evil and life and death, wasn't an edible species but one of those trees that self seed everywhere such as an Ash tree or for tropical folks the Tree of Heaven.

Mostly it came from an idea I had walking around and thinking back to those old Darkmatter shorts, and thinking what if it was a species inedible to us or if anything else can eat from the tree of knowledge, in our stead.  Basic ecology would have it that, if the fruit was good to eat as Genesis says then really everything should have made a beeline for it to eat it. 

Look at rainforest figs when they are in season, they are a main draw to everything fruit eating, parrots, monkeys and other fruit eating animals and insects.  And seeing as everything was vegan then if the bible is right, then surely the tree of the fruits of the king of caractacus, instead of being forbidden to us, unless we were quick would have been stripped and spread around Eden as many small seedlings through pooping animals.

Some might say it has special requirements, and I can gather certain stuff does such as Proteaceae requiring bush / veldt fire to germinate, but those aren't edible to us and tend to be cones and the like.

So either god made it so we should have our own downfall. or if he really didn't want us to eat it, he should have made it a Maple (which kinda implies gods Canadian.)

At Long Last... Lamb!

Remember how I found a tape all about Lamb and how to cook it, a few years ago. Also that  they taped over a portion of it to record Watchdog.

If you don't this post will jog your memory.

I managed to hook our tape deck up to a audio grabber we got from TV Quick and have managed to capture the whole thing. I shall be putting the audio bits on Youtube so look out for them there. If you are curious about lamb or Woman's Own magazine then I've added all the audio as one big wav file to Archive.org here.

In other news it seems my CD Drive is on its way out as its captured my Andreas Gehm CD. A weird promo of Black Pukee. Hopefully restarting windows will sort it. If not I'll look into getting an external CD Drive.

Edit now this is weird rebooting Windows let me gain control of the drive itself, and it seems fine but the overall disc isn't. The disc itself is a promo and doesn't play in anything I own. I can read it fine and it comes up with the overall time but does not play.

The only other disc I have like this is a promo mix from Death In Vegas which also is a cunt to play on anything. Hopefully I find something to drag this off with.

Round up.

We haven't had one of these in awhile so here goes.

Coro Coro Comic update.

Been looking into the few manga that are suitably bizarre to warrant this blog.  No, not the Bomberman  4 Koma. but Himitsu Keisatsu Holmes (aka Secret Agent Holmes)a sort of kid detective that investigates murders and such, and harukanaru Koshien Kakero! Ozora, a baseball manga who's hero seems to be a reporter and such.  Thought it was about a deaf school team that he was leading, but that turned out to be by a different author.  Be cool if  it was though.

BTW, when has it been acceptable that kids can be a hard boiled detective and poke around in corpses and such. See also Detective Conan and the like, there are quite a few murder mystery manga for kids that really to my western eyes, pull no punches.

Succulent News.

Had a brief look for Trichodiademia a shrubby mesemb species, that has a few cactus like spines at the end of its leaves, and we stumbled across Howstuffworks.com. Needless to say they need the talk about what is succulent and what is cactus. Although they seem to be fine on some stuff, lets put it this way not everything with spines is a cactus.  Especially not Asparagus Ferns which despite some pretty thick roots. It's not a fern either as it has flowers and seeds too, which you can see on that wiki link.

Finally a big shout out to Cambridge University Botanic Garden for flowering their Agave, after 57 years. It'll flower and die, but not without it doing this if you're lucky.

Not Cambridge but Cyprus, but you get the idea.

That's also a pretty good article explaining Agaves to the non cactus / succulent growers out there. So once again good luck and hope you finally find out what you have there.

Edit It's flowered now and is apparently narrowed down to Agave Vivipara but are waiting till it sets seed or does what the picture above is doing and throws out offsets.  Further info here, and yes it's still an excellent article of information on Agave.

House on the Cliff.

Here is an anomaly for all you Hardy boys fans. Not including the 100 or so books that came out after Armada folded, what two books didn't they pick up and release from the original print run, here in the UK?

The answer is, the Hidden Harbour mystery and the House on the Cliff, which is today's topic.

I've recently read through a reprint from Applewood books, picked up cheap from Ebay, of the original story, and I've dug out the hard-back I got from a boot sale at Southwold years back.

Americans of a certain age will be familiar with the iconic blue covers. the reprints came in, but to me, it was only later stories like The Apeman's secret and Cave In came in hard-back. Also as I knew number 2 was the Arctic Patrol Mystery here, I knew I had to get this.

Reading it then from a British perspective, with the NHS and such, it made no sense to have a smuggling plot dealing in rare drugs and such from a hidden base deep in the cliff under an abandoned house.  Even if they came from India, which was unlikely, it still made no sense to me.

Then we did some research online on what it was, which led to us grabbing the original text. And wow it was originally Opium, from China, along with silk too. Which makes a heck of a lot more sense.

The actual text doesn't really change much between the two stories, the titular abandoned house changes name from Polucca to Politt, and a lot of the violence is toned down which makes for a weaker ending in my eyes.

I'm also pretty sure the original riffs on a Yellow Peril plot line with its Chinese based plot and smuggling contact pushing dope to middle America. Its lessened in the remake with its generic rare drugs spin. Also in the remake, Frank Hardy loses his N Word pass, as his Nigger in the woodpile remark is of course excised completely.

As a bonus there was a sort of remake by Benjamin Hoff called the House on the Point, which I've not read, but is from the same guy who did the Tao Of Pooh and other train wrecks which doesn't bode well. In fact it's reminded me of this which was one of my favourite sites back when I first got internet. A collection of bad NES games and that Spartacus cartoon from SKY TV where the end credits never seemed to end.

Any way in short if you can read the original text and I might pop it up here when I get round to it, do so, its a much better read.