Althouse: At the Pokeweed Café...

September 20, 2020

At the Pokeweed Café...

... you can poke through whatever thoughts have invaded your brain.

45 comments:

Andrew said...: I confess I haven't been taking this virus seriously enough. For 200 million people in this country to die because of Trump's mishandling of the pandemic is inexcusable. I'm perplexed that I don't know a single person who has perished. But I trust that Biden knows of what he speaks.; 9/20/20, 7:52 PM
Mid-Life Lawyer said...: I pulled some Pokeweed as a child and brought it home. My mother cooked it for us. It wasn't something we sought out although we frequently had mustard or turnip greens. Most likely I heard about it from the song and she said she would cook it if I brought her some. I didn't like it too much I guess as I've never had it again.; 9/20/20, 7:52 PM
Ann Althouse said...: "All parts of the plant can be toxic and pose risks to human and mammalian health. Toxins are found in highest concentration in the rootstock, then leaves and stems, then the ripe fruit. The plant generally gets more toxic with maturity, with the exception of the berries, which are dangerous even while green. Children may be attracted by clusters of berries... Children are most frequently poisoned by eating raw berries. Infants are especially sensitive and have died from eating only a few raw berries. Adults have been poisoned, sometimes fatally, by eating improperly prepared leaves and shoots, especially if part of the root is harvested with the shoot, and by mistaking the root for an edible tuber.... Since the juice of pokeweed can be absorbed through the skin, contact of plant parts with bare skin should be avoided.... Birds are apparently immune to this poison. The plant is not palatable to animals and is avoided unless little else is available or it is present in contaminated hay, but horses, sheep and cattle have been poisoned by eating fresh leaves or green fodder and pigs have been poisoned by eating the roots. If death occurs, it is usually due to respiratory paralysis. Pokeweed poisoning was common in eastern North America during the 19th century, especially from the use of tinctures as antirheumatic preparations and from ingestion of berries and roots that were mistaken for parsnip, Jerusalem artichoke, or horseradish.[16]" Wikipedia.; 9/20/20, 7:56 PM
YoungHegelian said...: Ah, pokeberries! How many hours of my southern boyhood were spent messing with pokeberries! You really can't get rid of the stain, by the way. It's like Original Sin that way.

Reminds me of this song.; 9/20/20, 8:00 PM
Michael McNeil said...: Carried forward from last night's thread….

The Silures and the Ordovicies were tribes of Welshmen who opposed the Roman conquest of Britannia in 40 AD.

Close but not quite. There were no “Welshmen” at the time. All there were — from the Firth-Firth isthmus stretching across the center of what's now Scotland, all the way south to Land's End, the Isle of Wight, and Dover — were (tribes of) Britons, speaking dialects of ancient “Britannic” (ancestor of modern Welsh and Breton).

Two of those tribes of Britons conquered by the Romans were the Silures and Ordovices noted above (who did give the Romans some considerable trouble in their subduing) — but whose former states, like the rest of what became the Roman province of Britannia following its mid-1st century A.D. Conquest, afterwards got transformed into autonomous, self-governing city-states (the fundamental unit of the Roman Empire: known as [plural] civitates, [sing.] civitas) for the benefit of the tribal peoples of Britain.

Recall that Britain (south of the Roman Wall) thereafter remained “Roman” for the entire 2nd, 3rd, and 4th centuries — longer than the modern British daughter state, the United States of America has so far existed in toto.

Here's a map showing the civitates of Roman Britain. The city-states of the Silures and Ordovices (including their capitals plus the broad hinterland each administered) lay in the west of Britain, in what's now Wales.

Looking at the Silurian civitas more particularly, one might observe that it incorporated two principal Roman civic institutions: first being the Silures' tribal capital, known to the Romans as Venta Silurum — today as (the ruins of the walled city of) Caerwent.

The other installation (not under Silurian civitas jurisdiction) was one (of three) Roman Army legionary fortress(es in Britain — situated in a broad arc facing the southern British highland zones) — that is, the (southeastern Welsh) ruined fortress-city known to the Romans as Isca, today called Caerleon (Welsh: city of the legion).

(There were many lesser forts in Roman Britain manned by “auxiliary” forces; Isca contrariwise was a fortress of the legions [Legio II Augusta, in this case]: composed of Roman citizens, crack troops.)

What were the capitals of the tribal city-states of Roman Britannia (such as that of the Silures: Venta Silurum) like? Here's a map showing the city plan of the relatively nearby capital of the Atrebates civitas — the town known to the Romans as Calleva Atrebatum — to the British of today as (ancient) Silchester. Silchester's city-plan (in white) is shown superimposed atop a Google Maps image of what the site looks like today.

One might note that the “Inn” appearing in the south near the city wall of ancient Silchester was apparently a facility of the Roman imperial post. Northwest of the center of town one can see where a modern archaeological excavation has been ongoing.; 9/20/20, 8:02 PM
Never-Biden Never-Putin said...: cool.

Reminds me of this flower. Images tagged "flower-that-looks-like-an-elephant-head"

keep scrolling.; 9/20/20, 8:18 PM
rhhardin said...: You can get night sounds to sleep by from railfan live, on youtube.

La Plata, MO is good for crickets, out in the middle of nowhere, except for occasional hundred car freight trains streaking through.

Ft. Madison, IA is good for edge-of-city sounds, and slow freight trains, occasional traffic.; 9/20/20, 8:19 PM
Yancey Ward said...: My spreadsheets:

US COVID-19 Data
Individual States COVID-19 Data

Short summary- every state is in the process of forced testing of college students (pointless in my opinion, but the Karens disagree), almost all of whom will be exposed to the virus, and of the ones exposed, essentially none of them will die from a disease this year or next year. If you scan the news reports from the various states, it is probable that 75% of the new cases are university and college students at this point in time. Expect to see the numbers of deaths continue on their downward trend regardless of what the new cases numbers do over the next month.

One other item that I can't address in the spreadsheets, but is clearly true across the country. The actual number of people dying each day from COVID or combinations of COVID with influenza and/or pneumonia is actually much less than the numbers reported. If you do a dive into the CDC data, you find that about 70% of the daily deaths are deaths that occurred 3 weeks ago or longer. Nearly every state's department of health are doing what is called death certificate matching. What this means is that anyone who died between February and now, regardless of actual cause, who is also on the list of people with a positive COVID test, are declared COVID-19 deaths. They weren't caught at the time of death because they either didn't die in a hospital facility, or died of some other pretty obvious cause like a car accident, gunshot wounds, suicide, old age, or cancer. It is COVID death inflation, and it will go on for a while longer.; 9/20/20, 8:20 PM
Yancey Ward said...: I will bet that George Floyd is on Minnesota's list of COVID-19 fatalities.; 9/20/20, 8:24 PM
Never-Biden Never-Putin said...: Leftwing Nazi Antifa Nazis (did I say Nazis yet?) Nazi - smash up a car with a terrified dog inside.; 9/20/20, 8:25 PM
Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...: from Nate ̶S̶i̶l̶v̶e̶r̶ Bronze

Senate’s Rural Skew Makes It Very Hard For Democrats To Win The Supreme Court

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-senates-rural-skew-makes-it-very-hard-for-democrats-to-win-the-supreme-court/; 9/20/20, 8:27 PM
Mr. O. Possum said...: Polk Salad Annie...

Down in Louisiana, where the alligators grow so mean
Lived a girl, that I swear to the world
Made the alligators look tame
Polk salad Annie, gators got your granny
Everybody said it was a shame
Because her momma was a workin' on the chain gang
A mean vicious woman; 9/20/20, 8:33 PM
narciso said...: http://carolineglick.com/a-tale-of-two-white-house-signing-ceremonies/; 9/20/20, 8:40 PM
William said...: Has anyone prepared a spreadsheet that gives us an idea of how many deaths there were last year versus this year? That might give us a more realistic assessment of how many fatalities, direct and indirect, this illness has caused......Some European countries have done better than others, but I don't think that can be looked at as a function of their political orientation It does seem that the media is far more eager to publicize the misadventures of England as opposed to those of France, but I might just be reading my own biases into this. ....Brazil and Mexico are both having problems. Each country is led by someone at different ends of the political spectrum, but Brazil's problems are definitely reported as a result of their leader's deficits and not so much with Mexico.; 9/20/20, 8:45 PM
Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...: Putin communicates to Trump telepathically, per Peter Stzroker

"It all unspools without anyone's ever having to say a word."; 9/20/20, 8:56 PM
stephen cooper said...: Andrew at 7:52 - citation please.; 9/20/20, 8:56 PM
Michael K said...: The firefighter that died fighting the "Gender Reveal" fire, is now listed as a Covid 19 death, I am told.; 9/20/20, 9:07 PM
narciso said...: No good deed

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/09/20/report-omaha-bar-owner-who-fatally-shot-protester-indicted-commits-suicide/; 9/20/20, 9:12 PM
rehajm said...: RBG in 2016: "Cooler heads will prevail, I hope sooner rather than later. The President is elected for 4 years not 3 years, so the powers that he has in year three continue into year four, & maybe some members of the Senate will wake up & appreciate that that's how it should be."; 9/20/20, 9:24 PM
Mid-Life Lawyer said...: It seems like we knew the berries were poisonous. I don't know if they did something special to the leaves but Mother learned how to cook it from her mother. They were very, very poor and my mother was one of twelve children. I think they figured out how to prepare about anything in the depression days.; 9/20/20, 9:30 PM
Quaestor said...: When Quaestor pokes through the thoughts that invade his brain, they don't leave a violet stain.; 9/20/20, 9:33 PM
Mark said...: A single rider -- Tadej Pogacar -- takes the yellow, white and polka dot jerseys in the Tour de France.; 9/20/20, 9:50 PM
Quaestor said...: Michael McNeil writes: (There were many lesser forts in Roman Britain manned by “auxiliary” forces; Isca contrariwise was a fortress of the legions [Legio II Augusta, in this case]: composed of Roman citizens, crack troops.)

Oh, Michael, Michael... your history is excellent, but your Latin pronunciation is terwibble. The men of Legio II were cwack twoops.; 9/20/20, 10:02 PM
Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...: "Logs for every flight made by Jeffrey Epstein’s aircraft over 21 years have been subpoenaed, “sparking panic” among his rich and famous pals."

was "John Roberts" ...that John Roberts?

Could Turncoat Johnny find himself expunged?; 9/20/20, 10:19 PM
gilbar said...: stephen cooper said...
Andrew at 7:52 - citation please.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-says-200-million-die-from-covid
this is Old News
stephan? are you Willfully ignorant? or just REALLY stupid?; 9/20/20, 10:44 PM
Stephen St. Onge said...: "Has anyone prepared a spreadsheet that gives us an idea of how many deaths there were last year versus this year?"

Websearch "excess deaths" to find this. There's a graph from the CDC at https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm#techNotes. Their data says the excess deaths spiked in May, and have now essentially stopped.; 9/20/20, 10:50 PM
pacwest said...: Yesterday I volunteered for the vaccine trials for Covid-19. The vaccine is one that was created in Russia. I received my first shot yesterday at 4:00 pm, and I wanted to let you know that it’s completely safe, with иo side effects whatsoeveя, and that I feelshκι χoρoshό я чувствую себя немного странно и я думаю, что вытащил ослиные уtr.; 9/20/20, 11:04 PM
walter said...: So...timeline for George Floyd/Chauvin proceedings?; 9/20/20, 11:16 PM
I Have Misplaced My Pants said...: Everyone should be reading Matt Taibbi. He’s a gift from the gods.; 9/20/20, 11:39 PM
Gracelea said...: We allow ONE pokeweed to grow each year- it is currently about 8 feet fall, with a 12 foot canopy. The main 'trunk' is probably 5 inches in diameter- amazing how big they can get in just 6 months or so. It's beautiful against western light, with bright pink veins and stems, and the deep purple berries in long dangling clusters. However, I have to pull up hundreds of seedlings every season-there's a reason it's called poke WEED.; 9/20/20, 11:43 PM
Pianoman said...: My beloved Rams are 2-0, but I'm staying away from the NFL until they give up their SJW crusade.

I'm not interested in being lectured to by professional athletes. If I want to hear about morals or living a better life, I'll talk to my pastor. I watch sports because it's fun to see athletic skill. Not because of the lecturing.

Lebron James can cram all the BJM preening up his ass.; 9/21/20, 12:08 AM
ngtrains said...: follow up to Mark:
Pogacar won the overall, the king of the Mountain and the young rider trophies.
Amazing - it was his first Tour de France, and he turns 22 on Monday.
No one has won all the trophies in a single Tour before.

the tour is usually in July, but the pandemic pushed it back. and when it began, no one even knew if they could complete it. they managed to do so.; 9/21/20, 12:34 AM
FullMoon said...: BleachBit-and-Hammers said...

Leftwing Nazi Antifa Nazis (did I say Nazis yet?) Nazi - smash up a car with a terrified dog inside.

9/20/20, 8:25 PM

If that pit got out of the car, be some hospitalized protesters. That dog not terrified, he eager to kill.; 9/21/20, 1:21 AM
Marcus Bressler said...: Rick Bragg, the great southern writer, wrote a fascinating book about his grandmother's and mother's cooking ... I had to get a hard copy (I used Audible now) to get the simple recipes. One chapter included polk salad.

THEOLDMAN

Bragg wrote for the NYTimes and is one of the few from that rag I will read.; 9/21/20, 3:36 AM
Unknown said...: HOW MANY BLACK CLERKS DID GINSBERG HAVE?

In 150 clerks

All those decades

How black was Paul Watford?

https://www.unz.com/isteve/just-how-black-was-rbgs-one-black-clerk/; 9/21/20, 4:04 AM
tim in vermont said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 9/21/20, 5:16 AM
tim in vermont said...: Let's start by discussing all the ways that pokeweed can harm and/or kill you. It is worthy of note that no U.S. food organization endorses the consumption of pokeweed regardless of how it is prepared.

That being said, I would like to add that this dish has never harmed anyone I know that was aware of how to properly prepare it, and even the stories I’ve heard of an unwitting guest or relative finding a bowl of the uncooked leaves in a kitchen and mistaking them for spinach or some other edible, raw, green leafy, only ended with a day’s bout of diarrhea.

Sounds great!

We used to try to make dye out of the berries but I think the most we succeeded in was making stains. I am sure our parents didn’t know. My dad was pretty up on what plants you could and could not eat having grown up in a subsistence agriculture kind of setting and he never warned me or told me about those, maybe because they grew in a yard on another block, not ours, but to be honest, the berries never seemed very tempting as a foodstuff, that’s for sure.; 9/21/20, 6:07 AM
Rosa Marie Yoder said...: The guy at Delishably.com has a recipe for poke sallet, after a lengthy article about the plant and how poisonous some say it is. Basically, boil and rinse the leaves three times, then cook in bacon fat. He says that he knows of nobody who has died from eating poke weed. But I'll pass. Even if I had to forage for food, there are alternatives!

Besides, when I lived in Detroit, that stuff invaded my yard because of a neighbor's poor yard maintenance; its growing habits remind me of kudzu.; 9/21/20, 6:09 AM
tim maguire said...: Yancey Ward said...One other item that I can't address in the spreadsheets, but is clearly true across the country. The actual number of people dying each day from COVID or combinations of COVID with influenza and/or pneumonia is actually much less than the numbers reported

Thanks again, Yancey, for the spread sheets. Looking at your 7-day average of deaths, I thought the decline would have been greater than it is currently showing to be. (And I was hoping the run from 190,000 to 200,000 would be more drawn out than it turned out to be so that we would wait until November to get to 210,000, but that seems unlikely now.)

There are a lot of hard questions about how to count the data. Counting deaths with COVID instead of deaths from COVID seems uninformative, but we also count deaths from other illnesses that way so, while it is less precise for calculating COVID deaths, it helps comparisons with the flu, H1N1, etc.

The question of testing and what constitutes a true positive (as opposed to a false positive) is another hard one. Why are we encouraging symptom-free testing if we think that 90% of positive results are misleading because the virus level is too low to create symptoms or infect others? Given the provisional nature of so much of our COVID knowledge, any level of "too low to infect others" is going to be imprecise and an over/under count itself. Also, wouldn't excluding all these "too low to count" viral loads artificially inflate the virulence of the virus just as much as inflating the case count does?; 9/21/20, 6:54 AM
NYC JournoList said...: Does NYC taking this action open it to suits based on view point discrimination, or does the vulgarity get them off on a technicality?

https://nypost.com/2020/09/20/f-k-cuomo-and-de-blasio-mural-painted-on-brooklyn-street/; 9/21/20, 7:59 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: “La Plata, MO is good for crickets, out in the middle of nowhere, except for occasional hundred car freight trains streaking through.”

BNSF trains through here all night. Her ex’s ranch has the trains running through it. The house there used to be owned by the Northern Pacific, and used to turn around train crews. Walls were initially filled with turn of the century newspapers. It would shake at night, when the trains come through. She got used to it, and had a hard time sleeping without the trains when they first went south to AZ for the winter every year. We are a bit further away now, maybe a quarter of a mile. Half the time the trains are slowing as they come into town. I used to have to use the trains coming through every night to cover the sounds of my moving around at night. Not needed as much these days. Not surer why. We have a HEPA filter running right now, for the fires, and it covers a multitude of sins.

The trains through here are always interesting. Up until this year, we got a lot of 737 fuselages through here, in their gray green primer, headed west for final assembly in Seattle. Maybe six in a train, and a couple daytime trains a week. Last summer an armored unit came through heading East, mostly in desert paint. Some woodland paint though. M1 Abrahams, M2 Bradleys, and support elements. Couple coal trains headed west every day. Seems maybe fewer, since much of it was probably headed for China.

I hadn’t really noticed this, but there has been a major disruption in container cars on the west coast. A week or two ago, UP wasn’t providing container cars to west coast ports, which meant that more stuff was traveling, more expensively, by truck. BNSF claimed to be more on top of it. Interestingly, Vancouver is apparently stealing container traffic from Seattle. We don’t actually see that many container trains coming through.

BNSF runs push/pull engines with their trains, 4-6 engines on a typical train. With 4, it will be 3 up front pulling and one behind pushing. For 5, I think they add one to the back, and for 6, another to the front. Etc. This appears to be the American practice, but with different railroads changing the distribution front and back. Plus, I would expect that going through the mountains affects the distribution (definitely the number). European rail lines apparently put engines in the middle of their trains to sometimes. Controlling all those engines, getting them to go identically fast, is an engineering feat. More so, because the front and back sets of engines don’t always go exactly at the same speed. When a train is moving, and you have engines at both ends, there is most often a place on the train where the motive force changes from pulling to pushing. That position on the trains apparently moves, and on trains like those through here is probably constantly moving. The couplings of the cars being pulled will be tight, and those being pushed will be loose. Until the train slowly brakes, where the train brakes back to front, until the slack in the rear couplings is taken up by the braking. It turns out to be very complicated, but is probably done millions of times a day around the world.

Interestingly, we don’t really have crickets at night here. The nights outdoors here are pretty darn quiet.; 9/21/20, 8:31 AM
stevew said...: Thanks Yancey, very interesting as usual.

The focus on new cases and the broad definition of what qualifies as a Covid death says to me that the objective is not to disinterestedly inform and analyze.; 9/21/20, 10:05 AM
walter said...: Alex Berenson
@AlexBerenson
·
1h
If you’d like to know how the US has reach 200,000 reported #sarscov2 deaths, the Milwaukee coroner’s office is a good place to start. It reports the (anonymized) death certificates of #Covid cases. Just a few of the most recent (sorry about the glare):
View thread; 9/21/20, 11:01 AM
ken in tx said...: To me,the main problem with polk sallet is that it takes about an hour to pick enough leaves to get a meal's serving for three or four people. Then you have to trim out the veins and stems where most of the poison is. The three boilings and pouring offs takes a long time. You have to be so poor that you have more time than money to make it worth while. As for the taste, it's not any worse than boiled spinach.; 9/21/20, 8:34 PM
stephen cooper said...: gilbar - it was a joke.

One guy says, Biden said 200 million of us are gonna die before the end of his speech.

EVERYONE KNOWS HE IS SUFFERING FROM DEMENTIA, which is not a joking subject, unless the sufferer wants to do bad things, which Biden does.

HERE IS THE JOKE:

Yes, we all know Biden lied in an evil dementia way about the number of deaths. So I sarcastically say, "Citation please", the way people who do not accept reality often say.

It was a joke, Gilbar.

That being said, if Biden does win, which I hope to God does not happen because I love this country, at least I will have the satisfaction of knowing that it is not my fault at all, but it is a little bit the fault of people who think I am stupid when I am making kind-hearted jokes.

(trust me, if I am REALLY STUPID, then this world is in a very bad place).; 9/21/20, 9:27 PM