"[Wendy] Duffy’s son, Marcus, died at the age of 23 after choking on a tomato that became lodged in his windpipe while he was sleeping."

"Nine months later, she tried to kill herself by overdosing and had to be put on a ventilator for two weeks. Ultimately, she said, no amount of medication or therapy can make her whole again and that she 'can’t wait' to die. She’s already chosen what she will wear on her deathbed and told the Daily Mail that Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’ 'Die With A Smile' will be playing as she passes on.... [Duffy said] she paid Pegasos, a Swiss assisted-dying nonprofit organization, $13,500 to euthanize herself under its care... This time, she said she wants it to be 'neater.' 'I could step off a motorway bridge or a tower block but that would leave anyone finding me dealing with that for the rest of their lives,' she said."

From "Physically healthy mom to end life by euthanasia at Swiss clinic after death of her son" (NY Post).

Did you think it was possible to fall asleep while eating and choke to death? Sit up, pay attention, or don't eat. You could kill yourself and kill your mother.

I have 6 TikToks for you tonight and no idea which one you'll like best. So let me know.

1. Random boy doesn't seem to know what freckles are.

2. The Italian husband makes caprese salad.

3. Do you think your happiness depends on finding that special someone?

4. Why not paint your car Tiffany blue?

5. Time to practice hippie dancing.

6. The Canadian guy was warned: Don't let New York City change you.

"Here in the Netherlands, where there is little land and a lot [o]f rain, hydroponic farming is almost all there is."

"Frankly, the vegetables and fruits such as strawberries have almost no flavor. Tomatoes taste like red sponges. It’s efficient but that’s it. Many of us live for the summer to travel to France, Spain or Italy where fruits and vegetables are grown in the ground and have real flavor."

From the comments section on this NYT article: "No Soil. No Growing Seasons. Just Add Water and Technology/A new breed of hydroponic farm, huge and high-tech, is popping up in indoor spaces all over America, drawing celebrity investors and critics."

With the "Pomodoro technique," you divide whatever you're doing into "intervals of 25 minutes, with five-minute breaks in between — 25 minutes on, five minutes off, over and over again."

"A pomodoro, once started, must not be interrupted, otherwise it has to be abandoned. But in this stringency, there is relief: You are not allowed to extend a pomodoro, either. After a set of four 25-minute intervals are completed, you’re supposed to take a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes before continuing.... We waste hours keeping on going when our concentration’s long gone, caught in drowsy, drawn-out moments staring glumly at a screen, and not only when we’re supposed to be doing our jobs. Leisure time has also taken on a timeless, hypnotic quality lately. Everything our culture produces feels at once never-ending and meaningless — or perhaps meaningless because it’s never-ending. Movies explode into cinematic universes; series are designed to be binge-watched; every video, song or podcast tips over and auto-plays another; social media scrolls toward infinity and the news never stops broadcasting. An everlasting present expands around us in all directions, and it’s easy to get lost in there — all the more reason to set some boundaries. Now that my breaks are short and fleeting, I think more carefully about what I’d like to do with them, and I’ve found it’s quite different from the unimaginative temptations I would otherwise default to (flopping on the sofa, scrolling on my phone, becoming annoyed). Instead I’ll make a sandwich, do a quick French lesson, reply to a few texts, have a shower, go to the laundromat; and such humdrum activities, now that they’re restricted, have become sources of great pleasure."

From "This Time-Management Trick Changed My Whole Relationship With Time" by Dean Kissick (NYT).

"Pomodoro" is just the Italian word for tomato. The technique was invented by a guy who used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. These are quite common. Here — you can buy one on Amazon. Perhaps that would make the technique feel more real, more tangible. Oh, now I want a tangerine timer.

And here's the inventer's book, "The Pomodoro Technique." I bought that. I'm interested in breaking my concentration and getting little things jauntily done.

And I like the way it interlaced with something I heard David Mamet say in his Master Class "Dramatic Writing." It was something like: It's hard-wired in the human being to fall into a minor lull every 7 minutes and a major lull at every third interval of 7 — basically every 20 minutes — so it's best to think of 7-minute-long scenes and 20 minute acts.

I have a vague memory from my college years of calling out "7 minute lull!" when a conversation fell into what was about to be an uncomfortable silence. That was based on some sort of scientific study we'd heard about that said conversations have a rhythmic cycle with a lull every 7 minutes. Was it 7? I'm not sure. Does anyone else remember calling out "X minute lull" back around 1970?

Ah! I did some research. It is "7 minute lull" and George Carlin has something to say about it:

"A Super Bowl message from President Trump includes the phrase 'to proudly stand for the National Anthem.'"

A Super Bowl message from President Trump includes the phrase “to proudly stand for the National Anthem” pic.twitter.com/L9XVkwgfcb

— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) February 4, 2018

I noticed that via "Several Eagles Players Are Already Refusing to Celebrate Super Bowl Win With Trump" in New York Magazine, where I also saw this in the sidebar (from last May): "It’s Gisele Bündchen’s Fault Tom Brady Doesn’t Eat Nightshades."

That means he doesn't eat tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, and peppers (bell and chili). What an awful limitation! But he does have a very beautiful wife....

Starting the week with pure energy. #greenjuice 🍃🍏🍃 Começando a semana com energia pura. #sucoverde

A post shared by Gisele Bündchen (@gisele) on Oct 20, 2014 at 5:01am PDT

"My stations win by taking females out. Sometimes that’s enough to go from the number three station to the number one station in a market."

Said country music consultant Keith Hill, who has advised stations to play fewer songs by female artists. Criticized for discriminating against women, Hill wields metaphor and irony:

Metaphor: "They’re just not the lettuce in our salad. The lettuce is Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton, Keith Urban and artists like that. The tomatoes of our salad are the females."

Irony: "In a deep irony, it’s the demand of female listeners who aren’t thinking about it. They’re just responding to that flow of song after song, and if that mix has more females in it, they turn off quicker."

ADDED: Country songs are meant to stir you on an emotional level. I prefer a male voice. It's a sexual orientation! If that's sex discrimination, it's not the bad kind of discrimination.

"Despite the difficult conditions, the children of workers are able to keep their happiness at top level."

Half of a caption for one of the pictures in "2014 National Geographic Photo Contest, Part II."

The other half is: "Kinik, the district of Manisa in Turkey, is a well known place for dried tomatoes."

"'If I don't like somebody's name... I won't like them very much,' he explains unabashedly."

"My name, Audrey, for example, tastes strongly of tinned tomatoes. 'If I actually had to speak with you every day, I'd try and shorten [your name] somehow,' Wannerton tells me."

The center of America, Obama wrote, is "a place where decency and endurance and the pioneer spirit were joined at the hip with conformity and suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty."

I'm just dipping back into "Dreams from My Father," looking for something — looking to see if the young Obama, the child Obama, ever played the Hasbro game "Battleship," which somehow sprang to his mind last night at the debate as he was talking about the military. That phrase has nothing to do with battles or toys, but it leaped out at me for its similarity to his old "bitter clingers" remark:

"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them... And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Here's the larger context for the quote in the post headline:

At the Heirloom Café...

... we're getting locavoracious.

Meade makes coffee.

That's the Aeropress coffee device that I've recommended many times, but what's going on with the cast-iron tomato pot, which is quite heavy, but, he assures me, balanced? He's making it "automatic." That is, instead of pushing the plunger slowly by hand, the steady weight of the pot does the work.

Here's the Aeropress at Amazon, if you want one. As for the tomato pot, I don't think they make them anymore, but I found a pumpkin one that's the same brand. There's a tiny tomato one.

"I have to admit that while my politics generally tend to the liberal option, on this one issue of chipmunks, I can see the NRA point of view."

"Part of me wants these suckers to die."

Says Mayor Citizen Dave. Also: "I love tomatoes enough to rethink my concerns about global climate change."

Self-interest. It's baked in. 

Why are store tomatoes so bad?

Maybe it's the redness.

The unexpected culprit is a gene mutation that occurred by chance and that was discovered by tomato breeders. It was deliberately bred into almost all tomatoes because it conferred an advantage: It made them a uniform luscious scarlet when ripe.

Now, in a paper published in the journal Science, researchers report that the very gene that was inactivated by that mutation plays an important role in producing the sugar and aromas that are the essence of a fragrant, flavorful tomato.

Dibbing Sun Gold Tomato Seeds.

Here's the Rolling Stones song I bring up as Meade dibs.

At the Tomato Spider Café...

... you can lurk here until dawn.

At the Heirloom Café...

... your flaws get counted as beautiful.

"Invent some better scenario... where the stolen food somehow ends up in the stomachs of people who need it."

That's advice for urban gardeners who keep losing vegetables to thieves. This resembles my general attitude toward gardening. Whatever's happening, think about it until you discover a perspective from which to view it in a positive light. But then my approach to gardening was always to let anything happen and then theorize it into rightness. That is, I did no work.

For gardeners who actually put effort into it, reframing your attitude seems pretty unsatisfying. My advice to people who nurture tomatoes and various vegetables: Buy that stuff at the store and grow something people don't steal. Or does that make me like that supposedly contemptible policeman who advised women to deal with the problem of rape by wearing modest clothing?

The best cheeseburger in NYC is at the Corner Bistro.

This interests me for 2 reasons:

1. In the late 1970s, we lived in the apartment building across the street from the Corner Bistro. From my window on the third floor of what is still called "The Rembrandt," I watched people going in and out of the good old Corner Bistro. It had good cheeseburgers.

2. Why doesn't the best cheeseburger in NYC have a good tomato on it? From 1,000 miles away, I can see that the Corner Bistro puts one of those things on its burger that I'd get my hands messed up pulling out. I don't even use the word "tomato" for that.

IN THE COMMENTS: Richard Lawrence Cohen, the other half of the "we" referred to in point #1, says:

The burgers were thick with high-quality beef, but slow-grilled, which didn't thrill me, and if you ordered rare you wouldn't get it rare. But the atmosphere was homegrown urban hip, with knife-gouged wooden tables, and customers who were longtime Villagers perpetually anxious about their media deals and their love lives. A holdover from the Dylan Thomas era (he'd drunk his last set of eighteen whiskies in another burger bar, a couple of blocks away), and great eavesdropping. The silent, bland owner, short and wide with balding red hair and what might conceivably have been interpreted as a fractional smile, was a reassuring enigma, lovingly rolling down his awning and sweeping the front sidewalk every morning. And then there was the psychotic psychiatrist who lived and worked next door.

Tomatoes and carrots.

At the Farmers Market today.

How do you manage the day's last spurt of energy?

"The way I do it, there are still 56 minutes left to watch two episodes of The Brady Bunch on TV Land and I [have] enough energy to go downstairs and make a ham and swiss with horseradish, tomato and lettuce on artisian bread during the first commercial break. If I watch The Brady Bunch first, and Marsha's in it a lot, then we're down to two minutes."