"But the problem with thinking of Mars as a fallback planet (besides the lack of oxygen and air pressure and food and liquid water) is that it overlooks the obvious."

"Wherever we go, we�ll take ourselves with us. Either we�re capable of dealing with the challenges posed by our own intelligence or we�re not. Perhaps the reason we haven�t met any alien beings is that those which survive aren�t the type to go zipping around the galaxy. Maybe they�ve stayed quietly at home, tending their own gardens."

From "Project Exodus/What�s behind the dream of colonizing Mars?" by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker (which I believe is available even to nonsubscribers).

I'm reading that because I read The New Yorker, but by coincidence, I'd just been rereading old Dan Quayle quotes. (Because yesterday, it became necessary to remind you: "What a waste it is to lose one's mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful, how true that is.") And I loved this one:

"Mars is essentially in the same orbit . . . Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."

Remember the Mars canals?



Almost as entrancing at The Man in the Moon:



But to get back to the garden � and to The New Yorker � here's a March 2007 piece by Adam Gopnik titled "Voltaire's Garden":

Voltaire goes on to detail the hideous theatrics of the Inquisition: the yellow robes, the burnings and flogging set to Church music, the whole choreography of Christian cruelty. The point of �Candide� is that the rapes and disembowelments, the enslavement and the beatings are not part of some larger plan, not a fact of the fatality of life and the universe, but fiendish tortures thought up by fanatics....

By �garden� Voltaire meant... the better place we build by love. The force of that last great injunction, �We must cultivate our garden,� is that our responsibility is local, and concentrated on immediate action... The horror that Voltaire wanted crushed, cruelty in the name of God and civilization, was a specific and contingent thing... The villains are the villains: Jesuits and Inquisitors and English judges and Muslim clerics and fanatics of all kinds. If they went away, life would be much better. He knew that the flood would get your garden no matter what you did; but you could at least try to keep the priests and the policemen off the grass. It wasn�t enough, but it was something.

At the Tiny Greenhouse Caf�...

... start small.

At the Garden Walk Caf�...

... you can go down any path that suits your whim.

Misunderstood word of the day: Yardy.

I was reading a Guardian article titled "Can Oregon's tiny houses be part of the solution to homelessness?"

The 30 dwellings at Opportunity Village[, in Eugene, are] made of prefab donated materials, cost �around $3,300 a unit.� The savings come from the fact that they are basically detached bedrooms, with no utilities or running water....

[And] Dignity Village, two hours� drive north, on the outskirts of Portland... began in 2001 as a �tent city�, and a protest against the city�s harassment of homeless people... From 2003, the tents were replaced with tiny homes. Since then, the village has successfully offered housing on the communalist model that Opportunity Village is patterned on.

A commenter named RoughSleeper:

They look like sheds on allotments. In which case, can we have chickens and grow our own food? Will there be some kind of community policing to stop a yardy culture growing?

Chickens and growing your own food? I assumed "yardies" were something like "foodies" and filed away the new slang to use the next time Meade fantasizes about putting a chicken tractor and greenhouse in our backyard.

But that's not what RoughSleeper was talking about. Urban Dictionary says � I'll quote the more polite definition � "Yardy is another word for a Jamaican, specifically one from a difficult socio-economic area. The term stems from the slang name given to occupants of government yards in Trenchtown, a neighborhood in West Kingston, Jamaica. Trenchtown was originally built as a housing project following devastation caused by Hurricane Charlie. Each development was built around a central courtyard with communal cooking facilities. Due to the poverty endemic in the neighborhood, crime and gang violence became rife, leading the occupants of Trenchtown to be in part stigmatized by the term 'Yardie.'"

At the Smart Pot Caf�...

... you can grow anything you want.

(And if you want to buy a Smart Pot like the one Meade is planting, you can buy them at Amazon, here. And please, if you want to buy anything at Amazon, consider planting some love on theAlthouse blog by going in here. Meade and I will thank you over bowls of Sungold tomatoes.)

"I find the use of bowling balls as lawn art to be undeniably quirky. For me, that starts with the premise that bowling itself is whimsical..."

"... an antithesis for the social isolation of our era.... Left without a single alley today, we [the people of Berkeley, California] compensate with bowling balls as lawn decoration. Sometimes it is a single ball, sometimes a cluster. Sometimes black, sometimes bright colors. Sometimes overwhelmed by weeds, sometimes proudly landscaped."

Hmm... I've seen that in Madison. Blogged in a 2009 post titled "What if hippies had money... and good taste?" My photo: