




Hi, I would like to apply for a Garden Plot. However, I will be in NY this Saturday for a very important conference. How can I apply for a Garden Plot without being physically present? I'm originally from Colorado and have a natural green thumb.Can you tend a garden plot without being physically present? Very important conferences and "natural green thumbs" aside, we do value physical presence in this business.
Hello there, how can I rent a garden in 2012? How about the renting fee and schedule? Thanks!"How do I rent a plot?" I have to admit, it gets my hackles up every time. But honestly, sometimes I wish we did rent 'em out.


Sorry to have missed it.“It was a loud crowd and there were fights breaking out in pockets,” [UMass spokesman Ed] Blaguszewski said.
Marissa Faldasz, a junior whose dorm room looks out over where students gathered, said they were chanting “U.S.A., U.S.A.,” and throwing beer cans and toilet paper rolls.
“As soon as the game ended, a bunch of students came running from all across the campus,” she said.
Video she took from her fourth-floor room showed smoke and flashes and students yelling, then much of the crowd running away as police on horseback approached. Police officers wrestled at least one student to the ground. She said there was a similar incident after Osama bin Laden was killed last year.


Although the Raven is designed to look rather foreboding, all of its sharp looking elements are people-friendly. The claws are turned inward and the feathers are left blunt and are curved back. Meanwhile, the beak is also blunt and is turned down.Like Poe, sort of. I mean, face-down. In a gutter. Ah, happy endings!
It’s hard to be gay in 1912. It’s illegal. If anyone finds out, you go to prison. So for me, him being gay means you slightly stay your hand. He’s not just horrible. To get any kind of emotional life going, he’s got to take his life in his hands every time. That seems to me to be a sympathetic thing.It's really rather, um, not. Actually. But if I'm reading Fellowes right, The evil gay footman is a product of his society, and can therefore be forgiven. Carry on.
The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.Which is why the Dowager Countess is the gayest character of the lot. Her elitism and attitude of umbrage are in every way more representative of High Gay sensibility than the cliche of the conniving, evil, blackmailing gay (a cliche that conniving, evil, blackmailing pols like Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich would certainly approve of) that Thomas the footman represents.

37Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.This is clearly meant to be consolation to his loyal fans for losing against the Pats. Tebow obviously knew he was going down. Or should have. Like my friend Ellen said today, "Jesus is a Jew. He doesn't work on Saturdays." (In fact Jewish Law explicitly forbids scoring on Shabbat.)38For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
39Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
"This preference extends to cute as well as ugly or dangerous animals and appears to be independent of the emotional contents of the pictures. Remarkably, we find this response behavior only in the right and not in the left amygdala."Had Charles Darwin or Konrad Lorenz, that giant of Comparative Ethology (animal behaviorism, essentially) been around at the dawn of the youtube age, I can imagine their satisfaction....[T]his striking hemispheric asymmetry helps strengthen previous findings supporting the idea that, early on in vertebrate evolution, the right hemisphere became specialized in dealing with unexpected and biologically relevant stimuli, or with changes in the environment. "In terms of brain evolution, the amygdala is a very old structure, and throughout our biological history, animals—which could represent either predators or prey—were a highly relevant class of stimuli."
We snarl and raise our upper lip in fierce anger—to expose our nonexistent fighting canine tooth. Our gesture of disgust repeats the facial actions associated with the highly adaptive act of vomiting in necessary circumstances.Evolutionary Biologist Stephen Jay Gould has a fascinating short essay — "A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse" — that brilliantly explores the theme behind so many of today's internet memes. Riffing on Lorenz's observations in Ganzheit und Teil in der tierischen und menschlichen Gemeinschaft, that features of juvenility trigger "innate releasing mechanisms" for affection and nurturing in adult humans, Gould shows how Mickey's morphological evolution over time, a "reverse ontogenetic pathway" from "the ratty character of Steamboat Willie" to "the cute and inoffensive host to a magic kingdom", reflects precisely the unconscious human predispositions toward animals Lorenz posited.
Dear Margo: My younger sister died after a long illness. Her husband was a total menacing control freak before, during and after the illness. There is a bit of a family dispute going on about what to do about him. Is there anything wrong with cutting him out of the family completely at this point? — HesitantlyNice. It's a good sign when those seeking advice from you get straight to the douchebaggery, no beating around the bush.
Dear Hes: No. If the guy was an irritant while your sister was alive, I assume you all put up with him for her sake. Now there is no reason to do that. I would just ease on down the road and reject any overtures — which may, in fact, not be forthcoming. — Margo, sensiblySensibly, indeed. And succinctly. Breezily oblivious to the complexities of human emotions and relations. Always useful when giving advice about grieving in-laws on the fly. As unquestioningly dismissive of inconvenient truths like there's two sides to every story as a toadying subordinate in search of a promotion.
Dear Margo: How can you tell whether someone is bipolar or just plain angry?Ooh, this oughta be good.
I’ve been with my husband for nine years, married for five. I currently work full time, go to school part time and am away from home 13 to 15 hours a day Monday through Thursday. On weekends, I spend time with our kids, do homework and light housework. The issue is my husband.OK, so lets recap:
During the week, he is the housecleaner, which he claims not to mind because I am the main moneymaker. Because I only have a year left in school, I shouldn’t have this schedule much longer. He, too, is in school and works part time.
One of our issues: When friends invite us out during the week to celebrate a birthday or a new job and I’m able to get a sitter, he gets upset and lectures me about not doing housework, not working harder at our relationship and just wanting to party with friends. Another issue is that he thinks I don’t find him attractive anymore because we don’t have sex like we did when we met. (I was 19, without a care in the world, and we’d get physical about five times a day.) Over the years, it’s dwindled to once or twice a week.
Without going to a counselor — which he doesn’t believe in — I am wondering whether this is a mental issue or an abusive one that can be dealt with on a rational level. Am I naive for staying and thinking that once our money and schedule stresses go away he will be better about not saying hurtful things? — Dealing with Who Knows What?
Dear Deal: I am no diagnostician, but this does not sound like bipolarity to me. It sounds like anger mixed with insecurity, resentment and immaturity. In addition, your being the major breadwinner is probably interfering with his machismo. Show me one woman with kids, a full-time job and part-time school attendance who is getting it on five times a day, and I’ll give you a nickel.Now, that's advice you can use.
Your reluctant househusband needs to shape up and grow up. I suspect you are assigning magical properties to having more money and easier schedules. Those things don’t make people nicer; they just provide more money and easier schedules. I would have it out with him and tell him that his treatment of you is causing second thoughts about the future. If there’s an improvement, fine. If not, decide whether this is how you want to live. — Margo, decisively
A man who dares to waste one hour of life has not discovered the value of life.Now that's advice.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind ?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne?
And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp !
and surely I’ll be mine !
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
We twa hae run about the braes,
and pu’d the gowans fine ;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit,
sin auld lang syne.
We twa hae paidl’d i' the burn,
frae morning sun till dine ;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
sin auld lang syne.
And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere !
and gie's a hand o’ thine !
And we’ll tak a right gude-willy waught,
for auld lang syne.

Trivers calls deceit a ‘deep feature’ of life, even a necessity, given genes’ brutal struggle to prevail. Anglerfish lure prey by dangling ‘bait’ in front of their jaws, edible butterflies deter predators by adopting the coloring of poisonous species. Possums play possum, cowbirds and cuckoos avoid the hassle of raising offspring by laying their eggs in other birds’ nests. Even viruses and bacteria employ subterfuge to sneak past a host’s immune systems. The complexity of organisms, Trivers suggests, stems at least in part from a primordial arms race between deceit and deceit-detection.And isn't that what we saw happening here? The humor in this whole cautionary tale (which is what it should be for institutions like Harvard) comes from the fact that Wheeler's lies were ridiculous to begin with and only got more monumentally ridiculous with time, and Harvard (and later Stanford) still bought them wholesale — hook, line and sinker. The kid was this close to getting away with it!