Sculpin

Some headline writer at the Seattle Times must love ridiculous, tricky headlines involving animals. A couple of years ago it was “TV show auditions fish for talent at Pike Pike Market“. (Yes, Seattle is the home of talented fish.) Today it’s “Cattle battle in Seattle court“. That’d be quite a spectacle.

I harvested the first head of garlic yesterday, and a beautiful pink-striped thing it is. No idea what variety it is — call it random supermarket softneck garlic.

Did I mention that the hollyhocks are incredibly unhappy and getting chewed on like crazy? I don’t think I’ll grow them again.

The house next door has sold, but so far we’ve seen no new neighbors. While there’s nobody next door, I’ve been chopping at things whose removal might conceivably freak out a hypothetical high-strung over-territorial neighbor. There are some sword ferns just on our side of the property line that I’d wanted to get rid of since 2003, for various good reasons, but I kept them around because I knew the elderly woman next door was so fond of them and so disturbed by their possible loss. (Really, what kind of a person plants a sword fern almost on top of a rose bush? Somebody did this four times on our property.) And I sawed off some limbs of the neighboring property’s ugly little flowering cherry-like bush; they were resting on our shed and probably shortening the life of its roof.

No reasonable person would be freaked out by this, but sheesh, there are some unreasonable people in the world.

Incidentally, three of those rose bushes were planted not just under the sword ferns but under a couple of trees. (Again, what the heck?) I think two of them are probably “Dr Huey” rootstock, but one of them looks like it might be the grafted rose. Those are some tough roses. My plan is to transplant them this winter and replant the area with Ribes sanguineum sanguineum, flowering red currant.

On the corner of 15th Ave NE and NE 80th Street, here in Seattle, is a mostly ordinary-looking land use sign announcing that a bunch of Nextel antennas will be going up soon.

The last line of the announcement is, “All other mind manipulators to be demolished.”

Eh?

If that’s a culture-jamming addition, it’s smoothly done and unusually subtle. Tomorrow I hope to go back and get a photo of this thing.

Update: I dragged Josh up to see the thing, and he took a couple of pictures.

This photo shows more of the sign, including contact information. I’ll be making some phone calls next week, because I have questions. Or will I? Maybe I don’t want to narc on the prankster. On the other hand, I hate to think of this reinforcing somebody’s psychotic delusions.

The DPD site has a copy of the notice that doesn’t include anything about mind manipulators.