Quote of the day:

If a person feels he can’t communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it.
—Tom Lehrer

When I stopped in at Iovine Brothers at the Reading Terminal Market the other day, there was a woman who was going through all the packs of scallions, picking them up one by one and discarding them, saying, “Terrible. These are awful.”

When she saw me behind her, she turned and asked, “Have you ever seen such miserable scallions?” And she went back to culling through them.

Finally she moved on to presumably greener vegetables, and I tried to find a pack of scallions that she hadn’t put her grubby mitts on. I have certainly seen better scallions, but these didn’t look all that bad to me.

I haven’t been growing anything in my postage stamp back yard this year, and one of the benefits has been that, because I’m not going in and out of the back door all the time, I don’t have a lot of flying pests in the house, particularly those really annoying tiny little gnats.

But a couple weeks ago I realized I really like fresh rosemary and by happenstance, there was a vendor on 9th Street that was still selling rosemary plants, so I bought one and planted it out back.

It will probably take at least four to six weeks before it grows big enough to harvest any sprigs of rosemary from it, but in the meantime I can content myself that the bloody gnats are back.

And finally for those who want still more Tom Lehrer, here is the entire concert he gave in Copenhagen in, I think, 1967, complete with Danish subtitles. I watched it last evening and it put me into a very good mood.