"Fracture pruning" (coronet cuts) explained

Last summer a favorite tree in the woods behind my house "broke" (left photo).  It was not an optimally configured tree because it was positioned at the edge of the woods and therefore "leaned out" to maximize its sun exposure, and the limbs on the south side were more heavily leafed.  The fracture occurred near the location of a woodpecker hole and could have been related to that or to some intrinsic rot.  I cleaned up the crown that fell to the ground, then debated what to do with the trunk.  

The black cherry (Prunus serotina) is one of the food plants for Tiger Swallowtails, and I was pleased to see that before its demise, this tree had generated a seedling near its base, which was blooming last spring (and where it will be log powers easier to find Tiger Swallowtail caterpillars than up in the inaccessible canopy.

But what to do with the fragmented residuum?  I did nothing last summer or fall because the broken trunk was a magnet for woodpeckers, who had enhanced access to various beetle larvae.  The visuals from the dining area window and back deck were irrelevant because it's a natural development, so no need to "clean it up" in that regard.  Then this past week I saw this photo (cropped for emphasis) and question:

"My town has done some cleaning up in a nearby forest but a few trees were cut like this. What is the purpose of cutting them like this?  The lowest ones were at about 2-3 meters above the ground."

The answer was in the marijuanaenthusiasts [tree-lovers] subreddit thread: "It's called a coronet cut. It's supposed to mimic a natural break and encourages natural decay to create wildlife habitats."  A couple more clicks took me to Dr. Stump:

When limb failure occurs naturally, these new features create a micro habitat for microorganisms and successive species- wood louse, earwigs, etc. These in turn, support birds and bats’ and other organisms with food and shelter.

Coronet cuts are designed to promote decay and therefore benefit microorganisms that live off the decaying wood. Whilst good for the local ecology, generally, this isn’t good for the tree. It prevents the branch sealing the wound and preventing pathogens from entering...  we tend to only employ fracture pruning on trees earmarked for monolith, veteranisation or severe decline. This allows colonisation of the tree by the local fauna to encourage improved biodiversity of the area – a feeding ground and bat/bird hotel.

If the tree is over a road/ bus stop, play area or near a dwelling, we may look to remove the tree for safety reasons. However, in parkland with low footfall, woodland or reserve, where risks to public health are much lower, this technique is a valuable tool in creating habitat for the wildlife.

I haven't figured out the "monolith" part (probably some reader will know) ("veteranisation" here) (and "coronet" probably because it's a "little crown") but my problem is solved.  The fractured black cherry stays upright.  

You learn something every day.

A tip of the blogging cap to reader Alexander, who realized that "veteranisation" is an active process of creating veteran-like trees.

Birch bark biting

"Birchbark biting (Ojibwe: Mazinibaganjigan, plural: mazinibaganjiganan) is an Indigenous artform made by Anishinaabeg, including Ojibwe people, Potawatomi, and Odawa, as well as Cree and other Algonquian peoples of the Subarctic and Great Lakes regions of Canada and the United States. Artists bite on small pieces of folded birch bark to form intricate designs.

In the 17th century, Jesuits sent samples of this artform to Europe, where it had been previously unknown. The practice remained common in Saskatchewan into the 1950s.

Many of the designs that are used contain symbolic and religious significance to the Ojibwe and other tribes. Though the practice almost died out, an estimated dozen practitioners are active in Canada and the United States, some of whom display the craft in contexts outside of their original intentions to show evidence of this ancient practice. Birchbark bitings can be used in storytelling, as patterns for quillwork and beadwork, as well as finished pieces of art. The holes created by biting are sometimes filled with coloured threads to create woven designs."

Here are some examples of birchbark biting:

Res ipsa loquitur

From the website of the U.S. Department of Defense comes this pronouncement that official recognition of any group of people ("putting one group ahead of another") erodes camaraderie.

I find it somewhat ironic that I'm posting this the day before the entire government shuts down in order to honor presidents.

John Milton, wordsmith

I had always assumed that Shakespeare* had added the most words to our modern English vocabulary. An essay in the Guardian today suggests that honor should be bestowed on John Milton:

According to Gavin Alexander, lecturer in English at Cambridge university and fellow of Milton's alma mater, Christ's College, who has trawled the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for evidence, Milton is responsible for introducing some 630 words to the English language, making him the country's greatest neologist, ahead of Ben Jonson with 558, John Donne with 342 and Shakespeare with 229. Without the great poet there would be no liturgical, debauchery, besottedly, unhealthily, padlock, dismissive, terrific, embellishing, fragrance, didactic or love-lorn. And certainly no complacency...

Milton's coinages can be loosely divided into five categories. A new meaning for an existing word - he was the first to use space to mean "outer space"; a new form of an existing word, by making a noun from a verb or a verb from an adjective, such as stunning and literalism; negative forms, such as unprincipled, unaccountable and irresponsible - he was especially fond of these, with 135 entries beginning with un-; new compounds, such as arch-fiend and self-delusion; and completely new words, such as pandemonium and sensuous.

More at the link.   *Edward DeVere, 17th Earl of Oxford

Reposted from 2009 to provide more information on pandemonium, because I recently read this paragraph in the Booker-prize-winning novel Orbital:

"They watched yesterday the lunar rocket go cleanly into the night.  They saw the fireball create a corona that lifted like a sudden sun, the ripping of the rocket boosters, a tower of smoke.  Then the rocket forcing itself from the pandemonium of its launch and sailing up in effortless peace."

Milton would have loved that usage of the word to incorporate both noise and flames.  Our modern usage seems to focus entirely on chaotic sounds, as evidenced by its incorporation into rock bands and albums.  But for Milton, pandemonium was the literal capital of Hell, as depicted in this painting by John Martin:

"The name stems from the Greek pan (παν), meaning 'all' or 'every', and daimónion (δαιμόνιον), a diminutive form meaning 'little spirit', 'little angel', or, as Christians interpreted it, 'little daemon', and later, 'demon'. Pandæmonium thus roughly translates as "All Demons"—but can also be interpreted as Pandemoneios (Παν-δαιμον-ειον), or 'all-demon-place'.

John Milton invented the name in Paradise Lost (1667), as "A solemn Council forthwith to be held at Pandæmonium, the high Capitol, of Satan and his Peers" [Book I, Lines 754-756], which was built by the fallen angels at the suggestion of Mammon. It was designed by the architect Mulciber, who had been the designer of palaces in Heaven before his fall. (In Roman times, Mulciber was another name for the Roman god Vulcan.) Book II begins with the debate among the "Stygian Council" in the council-chamber of Pandæmonium. The demons built it in about an hour, but it far surpassed all human palaces or dwellings; it was probably quite small, however, as its spacious hall is described as being very crowded with the thronging swarm of demons, who were taller than any human man, until at a signal they were shrunk from their titanic size to less than "smallest dwarfs". It was also reputed to be made of solid gold."

Text from Wikipedia.

About those pennies... (updated)

Pennies are in the news today because Donald Trump has ordered that their production be terminated immediately.  That's fine, and is something I have advocated back in 2011 and predicted would happen "soon" back in 2012, when Canada eliminated their pennies.

Just to clarify the details regarding the cost and savings:

"Mint operations are funded through the Mint Public Enterprise Fund (PEF), 31 U.S.C. § 5136. The Mint generates revenue through the sale of circulating coins to the Federal Reserve Banks (FRB), numismatic products to the public, and bullion coins to authorized purchasers. All circulating and numismatic operating expenses, along with capital investments incurred for the Mint’s operations and programs, are paid out of the PEF. By law, all funds in the PEF are available without fiscal year limitation. Revenues determined to be in excess of the amount required by the PEF are transferred to the United States Treasury General Fund."

The mint makes money (both literally and figuratively).  Any current losses from producing pennies are overshadowed by profits from paper dollars, commemorative coins, proof sets, etc.

The embedded image is of a penny on the planet Mars.

Reposted to add some new information from Bloomberg:

Portland Mint, sells old pennies in bulk — 40,000 pounds (18,100 kilograms) at a time — to investors angling to profit on the copper that makes up 95% of the coins minted before 1983. A cache of one-cent pieces from Portland Mint with a face value of roughly $60,000 sells for about $120,000.

The wager is that those older pennies contain copper that would be worth about $180,000 at current prices. One snag: It’s illegal to melt a mass of Lincoln cents to harvest the metal. But penny hoarders gained fresh hope that their bets will one day pay off when President Donald Trump said this week that he ordered the Treasury secretary to stop minting the coins...

“Collectors and investors speculate the value of copper will go up,” said Ted Ancher, director of numismatics at Apmex, a precious metals dealer in Oklahoma City that has been selling copper pennies for years. “That is the primary reason they buy copper cents.”

Customers favor “the ’82 and earlier stuff,” said Dennis Steinmetz, founder of Steinmetz Coins & Currency in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The company offers 5,000 pennies – with a $50 face value – for $79.

“As you may know you may not currently melt these,” Steinmetz’s website says. “However if the government authorizes melting you will be way ahead.”

More at the link.

Monarch dieoff caused by pesticides

The major risk to Monarchs is from habitat/food plant loss, but a recent article at the Xerces Society website emphasizes the dangers of pesticides.

On January 25, 2024, volunteers stumbled upon a devastating scene: scores of dead and dying monarch butterflies scattered across the lawn of a private property adjacent to the Pacific Grove Monarch Sanctuary overwintering grove in California. While volunteers periodically encounter both live and the occasional dead monarch on the ground near the grove, several details about this incident struck them as unusual. 

Most notably, the dying butterflies were spasming, a symptom commonly observed in response to pesticide poisoning. The number of butterflies involved was also alarming, as approximately 200 out of the nearly 2,000 monarch butterflies overwintering in the sanctuary at the time were affected. While some of the monarchs were scattered across the lawn, the majority were grouped in several piles parallel to the edge of a nearby building. These grouped butterflies showed no signs of predation or rodent caching, suggesting that something else was responsible for their unusual positioning...

The analysis by USGS revealed that the monarchs had been exposed to a variety of pesticides including multiple insecticides, fungicides, and herbicides. On average, each butterfly contained residues of 7 different pesticides in their bodies. Three extremely toxic pyrethroid insecticides were each found at or near lethal levels in the tested butterflies...

Given the timing, location, and profile of pesticides detected, it is likely that the monarch’s deaths were caused by an unreported or untraceable pesticide application by a local resident or business.

The article concludes with some recommendations, including these:

Do not apply pesticides to open flowers or when monarchs and other pollinators are active.   

Keep in mind that organic pesticides are not necessarily safe for monarchs and other pollinators. For example, the organic pesticide, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), is highly toxic to monarchs and other butterflies. 

Remember that pesticides applied to impervious surfaces (such as driveways, walkways, patios, and building exteriors) can wash into vegetated areas and contaminate plants and soil.  

Be aware that pesticides used to control “household” pests such as termites, ants, cockroaches, and spiders can also be deadly to pollinators and other beneficial insects.

Last summer crews of workers went through our neighborhood, offering to spray homes and yards for "pests." I watched as they used long-handled sprayers to treat walls ten feet off the ground, to kill ???what. 

How to trim a palm tree

Social media is full of brief reels of tree-trimming accidents, which are offered as humorous fare.  Arborists face obvious risks from falls and power tools, but I had not appreciated the fact that improperly pruning a palm tree can be lethal to the worker.  In this video an arborist explains that if the dead fronds are pruned from underneath, 700 pounds of fronds can collapse onto the body of the worker roped to the tree trunk, resulting in asphyxiation.  A related video is here.  Via the arborists subreddit.

A word bracket puzzle

In each bracket, find a word that can logically follow the top word in the pairing, and also precede the bottom word in the pairing (solved example at the bottom).

A diversion for a wintry February day.  Answers at the puzzles subreddit source, or perhaps in some readers' comments.

Owlets can vocalize while still inside their egg

 

"Great horned owls find their voice while they are still doubled over in the dark of their moon-shaped egg. Having punctured the small air cell inside the egg’s membrane with their budding beak, the proto-owlets inflate their lungs and start chittering." 

A perfect addition to the large (2000+ entry) things you wouldn't know subcategory because not only did I now know it, but it's something I wouldn't have imagined.  I had understood that the developing chick can hear the parent's calls while still inside the egg, but wouldn't have expected it possible for them to vocalize there.  More information at The Atlantic.

Reposted from last month to add a photo of an owl (snowy, not great horned), which was one of the images in The Atlantic's annual compilation of SuperbOwl photos.

"I say it's spinach!"

Recently The New Yorker published a series of their cartoons from the 1930s.   The one embedded above struck a chord in my memory even though I'm not old enough to have lived then, so I must have encountered the line in some old book or movie.  When I researched it, I was delighted to discover that Wikipedia has an entire entry on this cartoon.

I say it's spinach (sometimes given in full as "I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it" or further abbreviated to just "spinach") is a 20th-century American idiom with the approximate meaning of "nonsense" or "rubbish". It is usually spoken or written as an anapodoton, with only the first part of the complete phrase ("I say it's spinach") given to imply the second part, which is what is actually meant: "I say the hell with it."

(Broccoli was a relative novelty at that time, just then being widely introduced by Italian immigrant growers to the tables of East Coast cities)

"The spinach joke" quickly became one of the New Yorker cartoon captions to enter the vernacular (later examples include Peter Arno's "Back to the drawing board!" and Peter Steiner's "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog"), becoming a bon mot of the 1930s, with continued, though diminishing, use into the early 21st century.

Irving Berlin's song "I Say It's Spinach (And the Hell with It)", which appeared in the 1932 musical Face the Music, used the full phrase: "Long as I'm yours, long as you're mine/Long as there's love and a moon to shine/I say it's spinach and the hell with it/The hell with it, that's all!" [YouTube here]

In Britain in the 19th century, "spinach" also meant "nonsense". This is presumably a coincidence, with an entirely different origin. Dickens uses the phrase "gammon and spinach" in this sense with Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield (published in 1849) saying "What a world of gammon and spinnage it is though, ain't it!" ("spinnage" being a now-obsolete variant of "spinach")

What a shame such a useful anapodoton has fallen out of favor.  TYWKIWDBI hereby proposes that the phrase be revived and re-entered into the common vernacular.  There are lots of times when one would like to say "bullshit"  or "hell with it," but circumstances render the expletives inappropriate.  So when you vehemently disagree with your boss, your grandmother, your clergy etc, just say "Spinach!"  If they ask what that means, you can truthfully say "It's an old term meaning 'nonsense'" without revealing the second part of the phrase.  

Word for the day: anapodoton

"An anapodoton (from Ancient Greek ἀναπόδοτον anapódoton: "that which lacks an apodosis, that is, the consequential clause in a conditional sentence), plural anapodota, is a rhetorical device related to the anacoluthon; both involve a thought being interrupted or discontinued before it is fully expressed. It is a figure of speech or discourse that is an incomplete sentence, consisting of a subject or complement without the requisite object. The stand-alone subordinate clause suggests or implies a subject (a main clause), but this is not actually provided.

As an intentional rhetorical device, it is generally used for set phrases, where the full form is understood, and would thus be tedious to spell out, as in "When in Rome [do as the Romans]."

Though grammatically incorrect, anapodoton is a commonplace feature of everyday informal speech. It, therefore, appears frequently in dramatic writing and in fiction in the form of direct speech or the representation of stream of consciousness.

Examples:

"If you think I'm going to sit here and take your insults..."

(implied: "then you are mistaken")

"When life gives you lemons..."

(implied: "you make lemonade")

"If they came to hear me beg..."

(implied: "then they will be disappointed")

"When the going gets tough..."

(implied: "the tough get going")

"If you can’t stand the heat..."

(implied: "get out of the kitchen")

"Birds of a feather..."

(implied: "flock together")

Apologies to Wikipedia for excerpting virtually the entire article (thus not truly "excerpting"...)

First edition of Harry Potter sells for £21,000

The report I saw at Bloomberg indicated that this copy had originally been a library copy:

The book was described by auctioneers as being a "good example of an extremely scarce first edition first issue" with light wear and tear.  It was one of the 300 library editions as it has a library stamp on its title page and signs of a previous library slip card... Upon its release, publishers produced only a small number of copies because of uncertainty about whether or not the book would prove popular.

I was concerned that perhaps the book had been stolen from a library, but the BBC report indicates that the sale was by a reputable auction firm, so presumably the provenance/ownership had been verified.  But I remember reading in the past about valuable maps being razored out of library books (thus escaping detectors at doors).  John Farrier, if you are still visiting, is theft from libraries a cause for concern nowadays?  Or perhaps other librarians can comment.

Embedded image cropped for size from the original at the BBC.

Pure joy

 

Five-year-old Pernille plays in a field with 14 German Shepherds from kennel Finika in Norway.  A mental health break from The Dish.

Reposted from 2013 because we need more moments of joy, even if only to watch. 

Rebuses

"It was a favourite form of heraldic expression used in the Middle Ages to denote surnames. For example, in its basic form, three salmon (fish) are used to denote the surname "Salmon". A more sophisticated example was the rebus of Bishop Walter Lyhart (d. 1472) of Norwich, consisting of a stag (or hart) lying down in a conventional representation of water. The composition alludes to the name, profession or personal characteristics of the bearer, and speaks to the beholder Non verbis, sed rebus, which Latin expression signifies "not by words but by things" (res, rei (f), a thing, object, matter; rebus being ablative plural)."

Found at the Rebus subreddit, where there are lots more rebuses to tackle.

Trump supports the ethnic cleansing of Palestine

As reported by The Guardian on Tuesday and Wednesday:

Donald Trump has vowed that the US will “take over” war-ravaged Gaza and “own it”, effectively endorsing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, in an announcement shocking even by the standards of his norm-shattering presidency...

“The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative,” the president told a joint press conference with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, at the White House on Tuesday evening. “It’s right now a demolition site. This is just a demolition site. Virtually every building is down.”..

Arguing that Palestinians could live out their lives in “peace and harmony” elsewhere, Trump continued: “The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site.

“If it’s necessary, we’ll do that, we’re going to take over that piece, we’re going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it’ll be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of.”

“If we could find the right piece of land, or numerous pieces of land, and build them some really nice places with plenty of money in the area, that’s for sure. I think that would be a lot better than going back to Gaza,” he said.  When asked where such places might be, he suggested they could be in Jordan, Egypt or “other places. You could have more than two."

“You’d have people living in a place that could be very beautiful, and safe and nice. Gaza’s been a disaster for decades.”  Asked about the reaction of Palestinian and other Arab leaders to his proposal, Trump said: “I don’t know how they could want to stay.”

 “Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land,” he said.

Trump confirmed he was withdrawing the US from the United Nations human rights council and prohibiting future funding for the main UN agency serving Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Pressed on who would live in a redeveloped Gaza, Trump said it could become a home to “the world’s people”, adding: “I don’t want to be cute, I don’t want to be a wise guy – but the Riviera of the Middle East … This could be something that could be so valuable, this could be so magnificent.”

Many of Trump’s allies support these settler projects, either politically or financially. The former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian who has denied that Palestinians even exist as a people, travelled to Israel during Trump’s first term to physically lay a brick in a settlement in the West Bank.

Last year, Kushner, a former property dealer married to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, praised the “very valuable” potential of Gaza’s “waterfront property” and suggested Israel should remove civilians while it “cleans up” the strip.

The proposal is couched in the terms of real-estate development and "job creation," but lets call it what is is: ethnic cleansing (examples from history). More specifically, Trump's proposal is an extension of the Nakba instituted by Zionist leaders in 1948 when Palestine was a post-war mandate of the United Kingdon.  The process proceeded incrementally in subsequent decades, then was accelerated by the Netanyahu government, and now is being legitimized and accelerated by the Trump administration.

There was an excellent op-ed on this in The Guardian on Thursday:

“They make a desert and call it peace,” said Tacitus, paraphrasing Calgacus.

Israel, meanwhile, has made a graveyard of Gaza, and Donald Trump is calling it a real estate opportunity... While waxing lyrical about his planned crimes against humanity, Trump said “we’re talking about probably 1.7 million, maybe 1.8 million” people in Gaza who would need to be moved...

And, yes, the fact that the president is being so blunt, so open, about what he wants to do is shocking. But the idea that the US and Israel might want to get rid of all the Palestinians in the strip should hardly come as a shock to anyone. This, after all, is in effect what Israel’s politicians and pundits, along with Israel’s supporters, have been saying all along: they want to make Gaza unliveable and get all the Palestinians out.

In October 2023, for example, Ma Gen Giora Eiland, who is highly influential, wrote in an Israeli paper: “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in.” In another article, Eiland wrote: “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”...

In simple terms, however, Reynolds thinks that Trump is clearly calling for a crime against humanity. Whether it is best to call that ethnic cleansing or forced displacement is somewhat more complicated. But, again, what Trump wants to do clearly violates international law and would be a crime against humanity.

Will Trump actually get what he wants? Who knows. But the fact that Trump is even voicing these plans, and many lawmakers are nodding along, speaks volumes about just how much Palestinians have been dehumanized.

I made an additional contribution to the World Central Kitchen today, specifying that my funds should be directed toward the Chefs for Gaza program.

"WCK is operating three Field Kitchens in Deir al-Balah, Khan Younis, and Al-Mawasi, alongside a network of 80+ Palestinian-led community kitchens delivering meals to refugee camps, hospitals, and schools-turned-shelters.

We have secured an agreement with the Jordanian government for five daily aid trucks, with plans to scale up. Since October, WCK has transported more than 2,600 truckloads of food into Gaza from Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Italy, and Turkey.

We are also grateful to share that a high-capacity mobile bakery, generously donated to WCK by King Abdullah II of Jordan and supported by the Jordanian royal family and Armed Forces, is now producing 3,000 pitas per hour—a vital source of nourishment and comfort for displaced families."

For those interested in reading more about Palestine, the best book I know of is Israeli historian Ilan Pappe's, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2007), available from your library.

I'll leave comments open for a while.  Please be civil.