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Use Brainfuse JobNow for expert coaching and self-study tools for a wide range of career needs. You can access live, on-demand assistance from expert Job Coaches for assistance with interview preparation, resume creation or job searching. Brainfuse offers tests for Adult Learners in math, reading and writing as well as the Canadian Citizenship test.
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Access Brainfuse HelpNow for expert academic tutoring and self-study tools. Students can use live, on-demand academic help and skill building lessons from expert tutors. With HelpNow, tutors and students communicate in real time in the online classroom by typing, drawing and marking up lessons and web content. The Brainfuse full-service test center offers practice tests for students of all ages and levels in math, reading and writing as well as college preparatory tests.
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Start an interactive, teacher-led, online class through Gale Courses. There are hundreds of courses starting every month on dozens of topics. All Gale courses are 24 hours long and take 6 weeks to complete. If you pass a final exam you are issued a Certificate of Completion. Take as many as you want. All courses are free to library members.
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Free driver education program. Includes Ontario-specific information to help prepare for the written part of the G1 driving exam:
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Little Pim is a fun and easy way for children to learn new languages. This is a product from Mango Languages that allows you to teach young children over 360 words and phrases from 12 different languages. This program is designed to teach children from birth to age 6. No foreign language background needed.
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STEM Village is a fun educational tool where grade school students can develop skills in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Learning content is based on the Ontario curriculum. Together, families can create individual learning plans, track progress, and even set custom rewards based on their own preferences. STEM Village makes learning STEM subjects fun and accessible.
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You can use PressReader to access over 1,000 newspapers and magazines from 100 countries. Full page images for current and archived magazine editions as well as today's papers are available. PressReader works on a desktop or mobile device. The PressReader app is available for Apple and Android devices. Watch this video to see how to start using PressReader.
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Download free music with Freegal, a free music service with over ten million songs and thousands of music videos for all ages from around the world. Find songs by artist name, album title or song title. Find music for kids in the genre "Children's Music". You get five downloads each week - songs count as one download, videos count as two downloads. Update: this service has been upgraded from 3 hours of streaming per day to 24 hours of streaming per day, at no additional cost. This is a temporary upgrade that will stay in effect until September 30, 2020. Every download is yours to keep, they never expire. Stream or download on your computer or mobile device.
Search across all of EBSCOhost's databases to access magazines, journals, books, news and media. This will allow you to search multiple databases, such as the EBSCO Audiobooks and Canadian Reference Centre.
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Search the eArchive collection of the Ontario Legislative Library and access thousands of Ontario government documents.
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Convenient and easily understandable health and medical information is located within the Consumer Health Complete database.
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Visitez Santé en français pour parcourir des articles au niveau consommateur couvrant diverses maladies, conditions et traitements.
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Investigate your family history with the popular genealogy resource Ancestry Library Edition. This resource is available in the library only.
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Kanopy has over 30,000 films for library members to stream, with approximately 300-500 new films added each month. Canadian films, both classic and contemporary, are highlighted. Kanopy also has over 15,000 documentaries on a wide range of topics, and over 5,000 videos in global studies and languages, from English As A Second Language (ESL) to Indigenous Studies. For children, Kanopy Kids showcases both educational and entertainment movies and TV series.
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Kids and teens can find book and author recommendations using Novelist K-8 Plus. Find the right fiction or non-fiction book for your reading level and interests. It includes reading lists and reading suggestions. Older readers can look to Novelist Plus.
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Something About the Author has great information about the lives and works of authors of books for children and teens.
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Explora Primary Schools has information for elementary students on animals, arts and music, biographies, geography, language arts, math, science and health, social studies and more. Browse by subject, or search by topic to find reputable articles from magazines, news articles, books, biographies, encyclopedias and more. Explora Primary Schools is a useful tool for elementary students, as well as teachers and parents. Access Explora on your computer or mobile device.
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PebbleGo has information for young students on animals and science. The easy-to-navigate menus are easy for kids from kindergarten to grade three to find short articles, audio and video clips, as well as games and activities. Additional resources are available for teachers and parents. Access PebbleGo on your computer or mobile device.
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Britannica Image Quest includes over three million images cleared for educational and non-commercial use. You will find photos, illustrations and clip art, which you can store and organize. Available on your computer or mobile device.
Universalis Jr.
Cherchez-vous des informations pour un projet de recherche? Accédez à Universalis Junior dans la bibliothèque, ou accédez à Universalis Junior hors de la bibliothèque.
Are you looking for information for a research project? Access Universalis Junior in the library, or access Universalis Junior outside of the library.
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This database contains full text articles covering general reference, business, health, education, general science, multicultural issues and much more. It also has full text reference books, primary source documents, as well as an Image Collection of photos, maps & flags.
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Q: pass answers to popen.subprocess Is there a way to easily pass answers to a executable in python ?
I have a shell install script (third party), it is asking for some parameter before doing install. I'd like to provide that parameter from my python script.
Is something possible ?
like
    subprocess.popen(myscript,["answer1","answer2"])

A: There is a great Python module that does exactly this, called pexpect
Here's an example of using it to run scp interactively (from the pexpect docs):
child = pexpect.spawn('scp foo myname@host.example.com:.')
child.expect ('Password:') # wait for 'Password:' to show up
child.sendline (mypassword)

A:
Is something possible ? like subprocess.popen(myscript,["answer1","answer2"])

Yes. If you know all the answers then you could use Popen.communicate() to pass the answers:
#!/usr/bin/env python
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE

process = Popen(myscript, stdin=PIPE, universal_newlines=True)
process.communicate("\n".join(["answer1", "answer2"]))

It may fail in some cases and you could use pexpect module (as @Robin Davis suggested), to workaround possible block-buffering issues or issues when input/output is outside of standard streams. See Q: Why not just use a pipe (popen())?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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> News > Ugandan Government To Be Held Accountable For Maternal Deaths In Landmark Constitutional Petition 16
Kamuli girl who walked 12km for ARVs deadGMO foods should be labelled
Ugandan Government To Be Held Accountable For Maternal Deaths In Landmark Constitutional Petition 16
14th April 2012 14/04/12
After a frustrating year of slow progress, a landmark lawsuit that seeks to hold the Ugandan government accountable for the high number of preventable maternal deaths in the country may finally see a resolution, RH Reality Check reports.
In August 2009, 40-year-old Sylvia Nalubowa died in labor in a hospital in Mityana, Uganda, after medical workers asked for bribes and then failed to treat her when the mother of seven refused, the Guardian reports.
Her death incited protests in the African country that sees 16 women die each day in childbirth.
Activists and community members took to the streets to challenge the rampant corruption, lack of trained staff and skimpy health budget that have plagued Uganda in recent years and which, activists say, has resulted in the unnecessary deaths of women like Nalubowa, Independent Online reports.
Then in December 2010, Jennifer Anguko, a popular elected official, bled to death in the maternity ward of a major public hospital in Arua when her uterus ruptured after 15 hours of obstructed labor.
According to the New York Times, Anguko was bleeding for 12 hours in the hospital before she was finally seen by a doctor. By the time she went into surgery an hour later, it was too late and the mother of three died on the operating table.
Last March, Ugandan human rights groups led by the Center for Health, Human Rights and Development joined the families of Nalubowa and Anguko to file a petition against the government of Uganda.
The landmark petition argues that by not providing essential medical commodities and health services to pregnant women, the Ugandan government has violated the constitutional rights of Ugandans — including the right to health, the right to life and the rights of women.
"Maternal health [in Uganda] has been overlooked," Primah Kwagala, a lawyer for the Centre for Health, Human Rights and Development told RH Reality Check. "People do not know that they have a right to good health service provision. They think it is a privilege."
According to a 2010 Ugandan Health Ministry report, a majority of clinics and hospitals in the country reported regularly running out of essential medicines, while only a third of facilities delivering babies are equipped with basics like scissors and disinfectant. Many hospitals also do not get regular electricity and light, the Guardian reports.
Though the petition initially garnered plenty of global media attention and was gaining ground thanks to the support of international activists, an objection raised during the petition's hearing slowed proceedings down, Key Correspondents reports.
Finally, after months of stagnation, a letter was released to the petitioners last week by Deputy Chief Justice Alice Mpagi Bahigeine, RH Reality Check reports.
"The delay in delivering the ruling is very much regretted," Bahigeine wrote. "However, it has been brought to the attention of the Hon. Justice responsible and everything possible to ensure speedy disposal of the matter."
The world is now watching to see if the Ugandan government will take responsibility for the unnecessary deaths of thousands of mothers that die every year.
source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/13/ugandan-government-to-be-_n_1422302.html
Tags: Maternal Health

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Film Review: The Beguiled (2017)
A little girl weaves in and out of the shadows of trees in Virginia, digging her fingers into the earth and picking mushrooms, before stumbling across a bloodied Union soldier. It sets the mood — dark, visceral and gritty (especially by costume drama standards) — for Sofia Coppola's remake of the 1971 movie.
Deserter John McBurney (Colin Farrell) finds himself transported from the horrors of battle to the perhaps even more brutal world of a girls' school, where two teachers (Nicole Kidman and Kirsten Dunst) and five students (including Elle Fanning) live in intense isolation, waiting for news of the outside world, breath baited in fear (and, in some cases, anticipation) at the thought that Union soldiers may attack, rob from them and rape them.
The film does a beautiful job of bringing us into these women's world. They stitch, cook, garden with visible effort, compared to the lacklustre embroidery efforts we're used to seeing in film adaptations of nineteenth-century works. The school's slaves have fled. There are no men. We almost feel the effort as the girls pump water or lift the hoe.
The lighting is also incredible. The candles aren't just period props but appear to be the only source of light, giving the film the appearance of a Gothic painting, with girls, dressed in white, flitting through the shadows. The camerawork puts us in the position of a voyeur, peeping into the house and spying from behind tree branches.
Where then does the movie go so wrong?
Despite a talented cast and the gorgeous production, the movie feels vapid. Characters are underdeveloped, motivations unclear, and the dynamics between the women, which have real promise in the early scenes after McBurney's arrival, go undeveloped. The story has little more depth than the film's overly revealing trailer and, consequently, there's no emotional payoff to match the atmosphere.
Dunst and Farrell in particular struggle to make something of their characters' few lines of feeble backstory and we're left with so many questions that it's hard to see this world as three-dimensional at all. It's more compelling as a series of beautiful tableaux, the viewer's imagination creating what the filmmakers could not.
What did you think of the 2017 The Beguiled? Let me know — here, on Facebook, on Google+ or by tweeting @SVictorianist.
Labels: America, American, Film, Gothic, Review
Traces of Angria and Gondal


Prelight: The wrapper has a pleasant aroma of fermented tobacco, soil, wood, and some cocoa notes. While, the foot has notes of wood, red pepper, and bread. Bread and granulated white sugar notes are dominant on the cold draw with a little cedar and pepper on the finish.
Beginning: Right off the bat, the Primitivo is very tasty with a creamy, semi-sweet bread note. This cigar is very smooth, with a creamy mouth-feel, and a nice finish. There is a smokey sweetness, that's like a smoke finished, granulated white sugar. It's not overly sweet or overly spicy, just a perfect balance. The burn is dead on, with a tight ash and an easy going medium strength and body.
Middle: The second third of the Primitivo continues in a similar fashion. The main note is that white sugar flavor, which I can best describe as that of eating a sugar cube. Don't pretend like you've never done that… There is a dull sweetness, a light smokiness, and a creamy finish. The burn is still razor sharp with a tight ash that holds on for around half an inch. The strength and body are still an easy medium.
End: The final third starts out similar to the preceding two thirds, with that white sugar flavor, but it does start to change up a little. The smokiness picks up and a slight black pepper note shows up. It isn't strong and is mainly on the finish, but it is there now. The Primitivo ends smoothly and nicely. And smokes easily to a nub. It remains a medium strength and body cigar at best, from start to finish, and burns without fail.


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Twitch Stream Story: Growlchaser
October 11, 2017 ~ Blaine Arcade
Prompt: A swords-woman wields an Eidolon-enchanted sword. The sword holds an array of powers.
Enish, daughter of the irrelevant Sir Nash, knew she was doomed to the same sort of history that plagued her family tree back to its roots. Observers, every last one of them. They'd never starred in portraits or tapestries, always relegated to the sidelines of the scene, their faces so tiny and simply in the paint or fabric that they looked deformed by awe or stupidity.
For five birthdays in a row, when she blew out the candles on the sweets her mother brought her, she wished to avoid that fate. Of course, her wishes were useless as well. Fate was a river, always favoring those in its flow versus those on its banks. Wishes could only be carried on its currents. Hers fell below the table and died, licked up by their dog like simple crumbs.
It was a year after she left home, while serving as assistant to a group of researching scholars, that she stumbled across an opportunity. Her fate could never be brilliant, but she could be a companion to brilliance rather than an onlooker. She merely moved equipment for the scholars and spoke with the locals, as the educated didn't speak the low-speech of farmers and tradesmen. They were tasked by the king, while only in the beginning stages of his madness, to scour the land in search of pliant magics to better their lands.
She was ordered to report anything she saw that fit that desciption. When she snuck a glance in an abandoned barn and saw the brilliant flash of what had to be magical steel, she found a way around the rule. She reported it to her superior, but she did so across a field and in low-speech.
"Hiye Seer!" she shouted and waited for his head to turn. "Inthe he Bern, whett wiss Illuk forne?"
"What?" he shouted back. "Speak the king's, stupid girl." Her job was done. He'd been given the information. Enish slowly approached the blade with her hands out. The only sound was her footfalls in the hay. She stopped, inches from the sword as it hung on the wall. Its brilliance now had detail. No wonder she had seen it in the dim barn, for its reflection was not sunlight. It was the drop of white intelligence in a pupil. A spirit within the sword, waiting for a chance to act again.
"My name is Enish," she whispered to the magic blade. "Do you want off this wall?" The eye reflected in the steel blinked. "Twice more for yes." Two blinks. "You must promise to lead me to adventure." Two blinks. "And not leave me behind." Two more. Enish grabbed the hilt, freeing it from whatever enchantment had kept it in obscurity. A roar emanated from the blade. Oh. This was no warrior's spirit, but a beast's. A dragon? A griffin? A sea serpent? She had no idea. If she'd studied a little more king's speech, had gotten to the legends, she would've learned the name of the creature: Eidolon. She would've learned what power she held, and that it was the kind of thing that ripped tapestries and nested in them rather than play starring roles in their tales.
The Eidolon could be contained in its sharp prison, but not its power. It flew out of the barn's window, dragging Enish along with it. It ignored her terrified cries as it launched itself into the forest, in search of prey.
Enish did her best to regulate her breathing. It was most of her job as the being holding up the Eidolon sword. She just had to convince it to stay near the ground and move just slowly enough that she could run with it. Her legs pumped as her cheeks puffed in and out. She knew better than telling it to slow down. It would just ignore her.
Two years it had kept its promise. Her palm never left its hilt, even when she wanted it to. There had been a fine young gentleman interested in their deeds some months ago, but his advances were ruined by the sword constantly butting in and dragging her away. There was always something else to slay, more blood to drink.
They were in the midst of the Orange Forest, so named because its leaves had seen too much of the old world. They never went green, doing nothing but shivering when Spring blew through them as if it was Winter. Enish had overheard the tip and offered their services. There was a beast coming out of those woods in the dead of night, shooting its fangs into livestock and ripping our their hearts. Whatever it was, it left the rest of the unfortunate cow or pig behind.
Enish and the Eidolon blade could take care of it, for a price. The gold coins the locals offered her jangled in her pocket as the blade dragged her through the orange trees and their leaf litter. When her legs couldn't take the effort any longer, she simply straightened them and let it drag her. Streams of leaves shot on each side of her boots as she flew, like the snow spray after a dog sled. They would just have to risk somebody seeing them.
At the moment, most of their employers thought she did the work when it came to ridding villages of giant vampiric dusk bats or the rotting grave salamanders. Enish couldn't even control her name as they moved from village to village. She wanted to be called Lady Enish, and her blade to be called Idol, but they had given her a different name after her tendency to end conversations suddenly and fly in the direction of the nearest threat. She was simply called Growlchaser: greatest exterminator in the land.
The Eidolon blade stopped suddenly, whipping its charge painfully by the wrist. Enish hissed, but then quieted. She felt it too. The monster was near. She had no clue as to its identity, and if the Eidolon knew it wasn't sharing. It hovered there, held by her only in name, waiting.
A single orange leaf fell, but it was obliterated, turned to powder, before it could fall past Enish's heart. Something had pierced it with incredible speed: the speed of an Eidolon. She recognized its aura, the prickle it put in the air, and thought she would get to see the true form of the beast. Her sword reacted, but for the first time ever, it wasn't quite fast enough.
Something struck its hilt, squeezed between her palm and its material. Enish cried out as her top layer of skin was cut away. She fell into a pile of leaves, her palm taking a few seconds to actually start bleeding. She stared dumbly, amazed to have her hand back. Her mind couldn't linger, as she was forced to roll out of the way of the fight raging over her head.
Her blade was forced to pierce the ground, as was the opponent it clashed with. A spear! Not the creature in its flesh and blood, but another weapon trapping another of the same kind. She saw its eye reflected in its sharpened head. Its length was decorated in gold as opposed to the utilitarian steel of her companion, but it fought with a viciousness that ignored the snobbish quality of its filigree.
The weapons pulled out and clashed again, the sound ringing out through the trees. Enish got to her feet, pressed her skinned palm against her tunic, and tried to stay out of the way. Over and over again the blades collided, emboldened by the other's dedication to blood lust. Soon they forgot the nature of their prisons and unleashed the full power of Eidolon beast spirits.
They breathed fire from the edge of their blades, the flames swelling back and forth, so precise that not a single leaf was caught even as many fell around them. The fight was dragged deeper into the forest. Enish followed in morbid fascination. She didn't even know if she wanted her blade back. Without it, her life as Growlchaser would turn into a whimper and vanish.
The clashing weapons disappeared over a boulder, and Enish climbed after them, leaving bloody hand prints. Before she could reach the top, the sounds of their battle stopped, replaced by long metallic notes, like a guillotine singing a lullaby. Was her blade's viciousness gone? She vaulted over the rock to find out, and ended up rolling into the middle of a stony bowl.
There were weapons everywhere, all animated and moving. Slowly, elegantly, they scraped themselves across the smoothed funnel of stone. Each had a reflected Eidolon of its own. A nest of sorts. A place of sharpening. She could feel their meditation, as they further transformed their prisons into their bodies.
Her own had passed the spear's test, and was thus allowed to sharpen with the rest. It pretended she wasn't there, like they'd never been bonded, and went to work honing its steel.
"I want to be Growlchaser," she whispered. They ignored her, their sharpening louder than any sound she could produce. Maybe they weren't the only ones. She could sharpen her soul as well, cut the tapestries that had so long ignored her line. A blade passed by, singing and staring into the distance. Enish placed her bloody hand against the rock, pulled it across the unbelievably smooth surface, and felt…
Author's Note: This flash fiction story was written based on a prompt provided by Rhaine_Novel during a livestream. I hereby transfer all story rights to them, with the caveat that it remain posted on this blog. If you would like your own story, stop by twitch.tv/blainearcade during one of my streams and I'll write it for you live!
Posted in twitch stream stories	blaine arcadecustomfantasyfictionflash fictionfreemagicpromptpromptsshort storystreamstreamerstreamingtwitchtwitch.tv
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Santino beat Jinder Mahal in the dark match prior to Survivor Series. WWE noted on Twitter the match was dominated by Zack Ryder chants. "It's @JinderMahal and @MilanMiracle facing off at #SurvivorSeries but all you can hear are the "We Want @ZackRyder" chants," WWE's Insider tweeted.


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Q: Error after updating angular 7 to angular 10 - AspNetBoilerplate I've downloaded aspnetboilerplate angular template and upgraded the dependencies in my project according to it.
After resolving compile time errors, I got a runtime error showing in the console window of the browser (screenshot attached)
ERROR TypeError: abp.ajax is not a function
    at Function.push.Kc6q.AppPreBootstrap.getApplicationConfig (AppPreBootstrap.ts:44)
    at Function.push.Kc6q.AppPreBootstrap.run (AppPreBootstrap.ts:34)
    at root.module.ts:35
    at new ZoneAwarePromise (zone.js:913)
    at Array.<anonymous> (root.module.ts:30)
    at ApplicationInitStatus.runInitializers (core.js:26795)
    at core.js:28060
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A: My mistake, I forgot to add the following line in angular.json

    "scripts":[
    ...
    "./node_modules/abp-web-resources/Abp/Framework/scripts/libs/abp.jquery.min.js"
    ]


text:
Into the third funding phase with a boost for growth
Central German research centre iDiv to receive additional millions
Grant and Award Announcement
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig
image: In the iDiv Ecotron, researchers manipulate biodiversity and study the consequences for many ecosystem functions. view more
Credit: Stefan Bernhardt
The German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig has succeeded in its application for further funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG). On Tuesday, the Joint Committee of the DFG approved support for iDiv in the third funding phase with around 11.5 million euros annually. This represents an increase of 26 percent over the second funding phase. Even after DFG funding ends, probably in 2024, backing for iDiv as a multipolar university centre for biodiversity research with Central German roots and global purview is to be continued by its host institutions and federal states, along with the support of other funders such as the state of Germany.
The German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig has been researching global biodiversity change since its establishment in 2012. Close to 300 people now work at the DFG research centre, many in the new building at the Alte Messe in Leipzig, completed in 2020. In addition, the more than 100 member groups of this scientific network conduct research at locations and facilities in Halle, Jena and Leipzig. According to the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), up to one million species are threatened with extinction. iDiv aims to assess this global crisis, research its consequences and show ways in which we can sustainably manage biodiversity. The tools of the biodiversity researchers range from satellites to smartphone apps, and from DNA sequencers and high-performance computers to construction cranes. In just the nine-year period since iDiv was founded, research platforms such as the Leipzig Canopy Crane, the iDiv Ecotron, and virtual data platforms have also been set up and networked with one another, mainly in Central Germany. This distinctive infrastructure supports the uniqueness of the centre: the integration of various disciplines and expertise to answer urgent societal questions. The research centre has, at the same time, earned an outstanding international reputation. This prominence is based on, among other things, sDiv; the iDiv Synthesis Centre for Biodiversity Sciences. So far, over 1000 scientists from 60 countries have travelled to Leipzig for a wide range of projects in order to answer scientific questions in new ways. Also contributing to the reputation of the research centre is its graduate school, with almost 80 doctoral researchers. This will be expanded to include a programme for postdoctoral researchers in the new funding phase. In March, international reviewers, on behalf of the DFG, recognised the high quality of iDiv's work and made a recommendation for further funding. This was acknowledged by the DFG Joint Committee, with iDiv's requested funding amount subsequently being made available without any reduction. With this, the DFG research centre is able to take advantage of a further boost in growth and moves with increased strength into the crucial third funding phase. Basic funding from the DFG will end in 2024 and a new funding model will come into operation. The Ministers of Science of the states of Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia and Saxony have already set the course for this with the policy statement they signed in July 2019.
The institutions contributing as partners to the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) are and will remain Leipzig University, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, in cooperation with the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ). In addition, several Leibniz and Max Planck Institutes are involved as cooperation partners.
Everyone involved in iDiv was delighted with the DFG's decision. Here are a few of the reactions:
Prof Dr Christian Wirth:
iDiv Speaker, Research group head at Leipzig University, Fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry
"The DFG's decision is an overwhelming vote of confidence. We'll use the funds to further intensify our efforts. Our planet is becoming increasingly depleted, and species are irretrievably lost day after day, so we're working under time pressure on strategies that will enable us to protect and sustainably manage biodiversity. We're grateful that we have the full support of the DFG and that of our partners in the three Central German states for this important task."
Prof Dr Tiffany M Knight:
iDiv Speaker, Research group head at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ)
"The feedback we received from the reviewers acknowledges our efforts during the past years. We have created an environment where researchers with different expertise can interact and inspire each other. I enjoy not only having a great consortium of colleagues from the region, but also the ability to synthesize biodiversity knowledge with colleagues from all around the world. I am grateful that the DFG enables us to continue our work in the years to come."
Prof Dr Walter Rosenthal:
Chair of the iDiv Board of Trustees, President of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena
"The German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) has turned Halle, Jena and Leipzig into shining spots on the map of research into globally crucial issues of the future. The three universities, the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) and other non-university partners are combining their expertise with great commitment in order to understand biodiversity in all its facets and thus combat the dramatic loss of biodiversity. An international panel of experts has once again confirmed the network's internationally highly recognised cutting-edge research, which is the basis of the funding. The universities of Halle, Jena and Leipzig and the UFZ, which form the core of iDiv, have already decided, like the federal states, to ensure the continuation of the national centre of excellence for biodiversity after the end of the DFG funding beyond 2024."
Prof Dr Armin Willingmann:
Minister for Economic Affairs, Science and Digitalisation for the state of Saxony-Anhalt
"Continued funding by the DFG is proof of the high quality of research at iDiv. The centre also has a strong impact on its participating universities and partner institutions. An interdisciplinary network for biodiversity research has grown at the University of Halle, and a corresponding master's programme will start there from the winter semester of 2021. Biodiversity research is increasingly becoming a scientific discipline in its own right. This is linked to an important message: Anyone who wants to solve Earth's environmental problems can do more than demonstrate 'for future' on Fridays; they can also study in Halle, Jena or Leipzig with world-leading scientists to help shape our future. To make this offer even more attractive, the state of Saxony-Anhalt is supporting the corresponding focus and profile development at the University of Halle during the third funding period with an additional total of four million euros."
Wolfgang Tiefensee:
Thuringian State Minister of Economy, Science and Digital Society
"Even in the midst of the pandemic, we must not forget that there are other major challenges that we also have to address with intensive research. Species extinction is one such challenge. We are very proud that the cross-state research centre iDiv has developed so well and that, after a rigorous review, the DFG is also providing funding for a third period. Thuringia is committed to securing the structures which have been established for after this final DFG funding period ends. The Thuringian share for this has already been included in the state budget."
Sebastian Gemkow:
Saxon State Minister of Science, Culture and Tourism
"The global change in biodiversity presents huge challenges to society, not only regionally but also worldwide. Since 2012, iDiv has developed into an internationally visible beacon of biodiversity research, whose scientists are working on solutions to these urgent problems. As the reviewers also highlighted as exemplary, I see iDiv's success as confirmation that important contributions to the existential issue of achieving biodiversity can be made with successful prioritisation of focus, a strong consortium - of the three universities and non-university partners - and intelligent research policy interaction. The state of Saxony has invested a lot of money in the construction of the new research building and the research greenhouse at iDiv's central location in Leipzig. The clear vote of the reviewers and today's decision by the DFG to continue funding iDiv for a final phase as a DFG research centre, which I'm very happy about, are both confirmation and motivation for us to ensure iDiv's permanency and to support its development."
Volker Hahn
volker.hahn@idiv.de
Office: 49-341-973-3154
/Social sciences/Political science/Government/Public policy/Science policy/Research management/Research funding
/Social sciences/Economics/Economics research
/Research methods/Environmental methods
iDiv researchers behind bicycle


For Jackson Reed and Liam Cyber it starts off as another session at the gym, but there is a catch to there workouts….they enjoy other more intimate workouts as well. After lifting in squatting their dicks need some attention too.
See more at Noir Male.


Part I explains the processes for specifying a Scenario. It introduces the Scenario that will serve as the illustration in the remainder of this Article—a comparison of the liability of directors for the exercise of poor judgment in a Delaware corporation with the corresponding liability in a United Kingdom public limited company. Part II explains and illustrates the necessity of selecting specific entity types for comparison. Part III describes and illustrates the method for resolving the Scenario in both jurisdictions. Part IV explains and illustrates the novel process for close comparison—the extraction, juxtaposition, and comparison of decisional rules from the country reports. Part V presents and illustrates the method for evaluation of the differences exposed through close comparison. Part VI distinguishes the reporting of comparisons from the making of comparisons. The Article concludes that the proposed method serves a broad range of needs and, as a result, has the potential to increase the use of comparison as a way of gaining insight into legal systems. Throughout this Article, illustrative text is indented and in a sans serif font in order to distinguish it from supportive materials and my commentary.
Lynn M. LoPucki, A Rule-Based Method for Comparing Corporate Laws, 94 Notre Dame L. Rev. 263 (2018).


This was taken on the same day as my brick city post but I didn't have the chance to upload them. The one thing I hate most about busy days is not being able to shoot some new #ootd's for the blog but it's also nice to look back at old ones like this one and have a little reminiscing session. I'm also very into mirrored sunnies. I call them my judging sunglasses since no one can see my eyes. I don't actually use them to judge people, but they work great for when you're really not in the mood to make any eye contact with strangers. Works like a charm.


text:
Tot Qualters (March 28, 1894 – March 27, 1974) was an American actress, dancer, and singer in musical theatre.

Early life
Marguerite (or Margaret) Qualters was born in 1894, in Detroit, the daughter of Jack Qualters and Anna Qualters. She and her four sisters went into stage careers after their father died. Tot's sister Cassie Qualters joined the Ziegfeld Follies with her. Their brother Joe Qualters was a cabaret singer in Detroit.

Career
Tot Qualters was on stage in Detroit from her early teens.  Qualters' New York debut came in 1912, in Ziegfeld's A Winsome Widow at the Moulin Rouge Theater. Other stage appearances included Chin Chin (1914), Stop! Look! Listen! (1915-1916), Ziegfeld Follies of 1916, Miss 1917, Midnight Rounders (1920), The Passing Show of 1921, Make It Snappy (1922, with Eddie Cantor) and Whoopee! (1928, also with Eddie Cantor). "Tot Qualters sports a figure as cute as her name," observed The Dial'''s theatre reviewer in 1921. The Boston Daily Globe'' described her specialty as "loose-jointed eccentric dancing" in 1922.

She also appeared in the film Reaching for the Moon (1930), with Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Bebe Daniels.

Personal life
Walter Winchell mentioned seeing Tot Qualters in 1968, as a fixture at Max's Stage Deli. Tot Qualters died in 1974, the day before her 80th birthday, in New York City.

References

External links
 Tot Qualters' listing at IBDB.

American actresses
American female dancers
1894 births
1974 deaths
20th-century American dancers
20th-century American women

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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You will be very much hands-on in the laboratory and able to produce data accurately and efficiently to finalise the development of proprietary technology.


text:
Earth Eats Home
Sylvia and Friends
Broadcast Status
The Store Is The Garden: Reflections On Growing Enough
By Kayte Young
Listen in Popup
(Earth Eats theme music, composed by Erin Tobey and performed by Erin and Matt Tobey)
KAYTE YOUNG: From WFIU in Bloomington Indiana, I'm Kayte Young and this is Earth Eats.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: There's a feeling to it that's kind of satisfying that way. It doesn't feel like so much that we could survive on it as we're able to provide some of our sort of staple foods.
KAYTE YOUNG: On today's show we visit a farm east of Bloomington to speak with Denise and Sean Breeden Ost about growing food, preserving food, and eating food. We check out their dried bean threshing techniques and reflect on the notion of self-sufficiency in the midst of a pandemic. That's coming up after the news, so stay with us.
(Music)
Earth Eats is produced from the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington Indiana. We wish to acknowledge and honor the indigenous communities native to this region and recognize that Indiana University is built on indigenous homelands and resources. We recognize the Miami, Delaware, Potawatomi, and Seanee people as past, present, and future caretakers of this land.
Let's go to Renee Reed for Earth Eats news. Hi Renee.
RENEE REED: Hi Kayte. President elect Joe Biden has chosen a familiar face as secretary of Agriculture. Biden's choice, former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack previously served as Agriculture Secretary under the Obama administration. Aaron Lehman, the President of the Iowa's Farmer's Union says Vilsack has a long history of working with farmers and ranchers in the state. He says he hopes Vilsack tackles increasing consolidation.
AARON LEHMAN: This bottleneck limits our options for what we purchase as inputs and where we can sell our products and market. And so dealing with this level of concentration will be extremely important.
RENEE REED: As head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Vilsack will oversee not only farmers but nutrition programs such as school lunches and food stamps. Vilsack was already the longest serving secretary of Agriculture since 1969.
An effort to prevent farmer suicides is likely to reach a vote on the senate floor this week. Iowa republican senator Chuck Grassley says it would bring training and other resources to Farm Service Agency workers in county offices. He says they would learn to recognize signs that someone might need help, but they would not become health advisors.
SENATOR CHUCK GRASSLEY: But the idea is to get people to family members or to ministers of a faith or doctors or mental health people to help intervene to save people's lives.
RENEE REED: During the farm crisis of the 1980's the devastation of losing farms and being overcome by debt lead to some farmers taking their own lives. In more recent years an uptick in rural suicides that coincided with lower crop prices brought renewed attention to the issue. Thanks to Amy Mayer and Seth Bodine of Harvest Public Media for those reports. For Earth Eats News I'm Renee Reed. (Earth Eats news theme)
(Gentle piano chords)
KAYTE YOUNG: Picture beans growing on a plant. They're in a pod, a long green somewhat skinny pod. Now picture them dried. The pod has turned a pale beige color, it's papery. And the bean inside has hardened and dried. Now the beans are ready to thresh. In a greenhouse attached to a barn, at Sean and Denise Breeden-Ost's farm, wooden tables are lined with white sheets and piled with dried bean plants, ready to be threshed. Working together, they each gather two corners of one of the sheets and pull a mess of dried bean plants out of the greenhouse and onto the gravel driveway. They cover the dried plants with a second sheet and then they walk on them. (Sound of beans crunching underfoot) They aren't particularly gentle about it. Apparently the beans are pretty tough. The point is to loosen the dried beans from their pods. They stop periodically to check on the progress and refold the sheet, and then they walk on them some more.
DBS: Fold it over on itself and then do some more. (Beans continuing to crunch underfoot) When we harvest them there's a timing... there's a real trick of timing that you're kind of splitting the difference between them being... you want them to be dry enough that they won't mold before they get crispy and dry. But you also want them to be not so dry that they shatter out of the pods when you're picking them in the fields. So... that takes some guess work every year. I'm taking the chaff, the vines, you know the broken-up vines and pods and everything and lifting them off of the beans that are down on the sheet, kind of shaking out any loose beans that are hiding in there. So we end up with just beans and little lightweight stuff left on the sheet, like the small pieces. And then we're gonna winnow that with a fan.
And this is all basically made up. This isn't like the way that you do this, this just the way that it seems to work for us. A lot of people thresh their beans by hitting them with sticks, or like the traditional flail, which is a tool that you use to thresh things. It's like two sticks with a chain holding them together so you can get more force with your swing because you've got that momentum on the moving piece. But for me walking on things is just like easier than waving my arms around. When people used to thresh grain they would have a really tight floor, somewhere in their barn or their house. And they would have a threshold at the door that keeps the grain from spilling out. So they'd throw it all in there and they'd thresh it and fail at it until it all came out, and then they... it would all be held in that floor. But we didn't want to do it in our house and we're not really, we don't really want this much dust even in the barn so. We use sheets for a lot of things, old sheets are something that we kind of inherited some of with this house. There were you know sheets that didn't fit any of our beds, so sheets had been a good farm tool. They're good to harvest the beans into and carry them, they're just kind of our tarps.
KAYTE YOUNG [NARRATING]: Once they're satisfied that most of the beans are out of the pod, it's time for winnowing.
(Machine whirring)
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: I think the thing I find really satisfying about this particular job is that it's like you're using your body weight and gravity and wind. It's just so like the most basic technology.
KAYTE YOUNG: Yeah. What are these called again?
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: This is called Tailer Dwarf Horticultural, it's sort of like a pinto cranberry kind of bean. Striped and we usually cook these into when I was a kid we just called beans and cornbread. Beans cooked with onions and celery and peppers and things and then served with cornbread is kind of the classic way I like this kind of bean. But we grew a lot this year so we might find lots of new ways.
KAYTE YOUNG: Eventually they transfer the beans to a wide metal bowl and place it close to the fan to winnow the final particles away.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Might be as far as I would take them and then I'll just pick through them by hand, you know sort through them by hand before we have them in our jars to cook. So what I usually do then is I'll spread these out like on a cookie sheet and just move the good ones to the side and move the other stuff to the other side.
KAYTE YOUNG: It's recommended to do that with store bought beans to look for stones and stuff.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: I wish I'd done it. Recently we bought some black beans and found a rock. I mean the size of a black bean, I bit down on it, thought I broke my jaw.
KAYTE YOUNG: Denise remembered a poem that she found in Motter Geoffery's World Vegetarian Cookbook. It's something she things about when she's sorting beans that makes her feel connected to women around the world.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST:
A lentil, a lentil, a lentil, a stone.
A green one, a black one, a green one, a black. A stone.
A lentil, a lentil, a stone, a lentil, a lentil, a word.
Suddenly a word. A lentil.
A lentil, a word, a word next to another word. A sentence.
A word, a word, a word, a nonsense speech.
Then an old song.
Then an old dream.
A life, another life, a hard life. A lentil. A life.
An easy life. A hard life, Why easy? Why hard?
Lives next to each other. A life. A word. A lentil.
A green one, a black one, a green one, a black one, pain.
A green song, a green lentil, a black one, a stone.
A lentil, a stone, a stone, a lentil.
KAYTE YOUNG: Cleaning lentils was written by the Istanbul based Armenian poet Zahrad. The poem was read by Denise Breeden-Ost. After a short break we'll sit down with Sean and Denise Breeden-Ost to talk about growing staple foods and we'll wonder about what kind of apocalypse you might be preparing for. Stay with us.
(Piano chords)
Kayte Young here, this is Earth Eats. Regular Earth Eats listeners might remember my audio essay from earlier this year in the spring about pandemic gardening trends. I was curious about the notion about first time gardeners planning to survive the year on food from their veggie patch. Then later in the summer I learned that a couple of growers with many years of experience had planted a decent amount of beans for drying and corn for cornmeal. And I thought, "Well they might be growing enough food to survive on." These particular farmers also grow and put up a lot of fresh produce from their growing, you know canning, freezing, drying, curing. So perhaps they could be eating their garden's bounty all year long. And then I started to think about the more complicated notion of self-sufficiency. I knew that these growers were thoughtful people, so I sat down for a conversation with Denise and Sean Breeden-Ost. They were the ones you just heard threshing beans and reading poetry. We talked about growing enough food, growing too much food, the pleasures of working with plants, and the tendency to personalize your apocalypse fantasies to suit your skillset.
Denise and Sean live on a hilly and somewhat forested patch of land east of Bloomington, about a 20-minute drive from downtown. Sean grew up on the property. He and Denise and until recently, their son, who just left for college, live up on a hill, and Sean's brother lives down in the valley. While the woods can be dense, there are plenty of large clearing for growing food. Sean has been a market farmer for decades; Denise is a writer, but she is also played an active role in the farm over the years. They no longer grow food for market but the growing of food has not stopped.
[INTERVIEWING] What kinds of food do you grow?
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: A lot of greens.
DBO & SBO [TOGETHER]: Tomatoes
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Peppers.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Potatoes
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Sweet potatoes
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Corn
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Summer and winter squash, turnips and rutabagas
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Beans
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Onions, garlic
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Okra, hot peppers
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Blueberries
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Cucumbers
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: We grow a lot of peaches, but the squirrels eat those greens, so we don't actually eat those. But we do grow them.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: We do have a lot of asparagus.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Yeah
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Shiitake mushrooms
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: That might be a pretty good summery...
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Basil
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Basil (laughs)
KAYTE YOUNG: How do you determine what to grow?
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Well it's based on what we like really.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: We kind of sit down with the seed catalogs in January and talk about what we want to grow and it's pretty consistent. I mean it's the foods that we like to eat and that we know we can grow here. And then you know we try something new every once in a while. We've given up on somethings that don't do well here or that we're just not very good at.
KAYTE YOUNG: Like what's an example of that?
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Well pole beans. We love pole beans but putting up the trellis, and we had a bean mosaic ?? years ago and we pretty much decided to stop with the pole beans and just go with the bush beans.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Mosaic virus. It killed it. And if you have bush beans and something happens to them you can just replant, you can till them and if the bean beetles or the disease or something gets bad and plant another row. But with pole beans you're kind of invested for the whole season and so we went with the bush beans. We can't grow very good spinach up here and Sean's village down in the valley grows great spinach, so we just don't bother (laughs). We've never had great luck with beets, but I think that was mostly just neglect, I'm not sure. So there's a few things that just haven't thrived. Our sweet potatoes we've experimented with over the years and some of them didn't do well here and some did, and so it's more of a variety choice. Tomatoes for years, we had a two-week tomato season because of disease pressure, and we finally found a couple of varieties that we can grow and they, we had a full tomato season this year. It was so exciting, it was like, "Wow there's still tomatoes out there" So we're a lot of it is choosing the varieties that like it here.
KAYTE YOUNG: And so when you're growing are you also thinking about, or when you're picking your seeds or deciding what to grow, are you also thinking about food preservation?
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Yeah. We definitely grow to put up. I mean that's part of at least with a lot of our crops that's part of what we're doing. And I have, I have records of how much food we've put up in the past for the past, I don't know, 10 years or so that I've been doing that. And so I can look back and say "Okay last year I put up this much and we did or didn't eat it all, and how did that go. And so this year I want this much instead." And so we've kinda tweaked the amounts over time for what seems to work for us. It made a huge difference because I was starting pretty much, I mean food preserving. I had an aunt who did a lot of it but it's not something that my parents did, and not something I learned to do when I was at home. So I said, so as an adult I was learning how to do that. And so I did. I took a lot of notes, here's what I put up, here's how I did it, and here's how it turned out, and here's when we ran out of it. And it let me gradually, it let me feel like I was learning rather than just starting again every year.
KAYTE YOUNG: Yeah also I can see where you know having an understanding of did we use this? Like we froze all of this broccoli, but we didn't like how it tasted so we never used it. And then it got freezer burn and then you know sat there in the freezer all year.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: That's one of them.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: And I hate wasting food and so yeah it was really important to me to not. And it's not just wasting food cause... I mean if we don't put up all of our tomatoes and some of them rot, we just throw them in the compost and then they go back to the soil and whatever. But if I've put in hours and hours of labor and propane and glass jars and lids and all of that, it feels like a bigger waste. So yeah I'm pretty, I pretty much, I want to make sure that we eat everything I put up as much as possible so. Yeah I do write it down.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: And things like potatoes we know how many pounds we'll eat before they sprout. And so when we harvest we see how much we have and then we keep what we're gonna use and then we give the rest away.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: We usually keep more than what we use, and then right before they're about to sprout we call up our friends and say, "Can you eat a bunch of potatoes in the next two weeks?" And they're like "Sure!"
(DBO & KY Laugh) and share them around.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: But we're getting better at it.
KAYTE YOUNG: Do you have an idea about you wanna eat mostly the produce that you grow yourselves throughout the year or is it just kind of seeing what you can do, or I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about the values or goals that you have that are associated with that.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: I think over time we just kinda learned to like the stuff that we grow. And we don't really desire other things that we can't grow like things that are out of season. And we're happy with collards we don't have to have lettuce if we don't have it. So it's not really that our goal is to provide all of our food, we just know how much we need to grow, and we grow what we know we can, and we enjoy what we grow.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: My friend Stacey said one time that something like if you want to produce your own food, it's better to start instead of growing everything you want to eat, you start with eating everything you can grow. And so we're not real recipe users. I mean we use recipes for inspiration, but we really start with the food we have which helps a lot. Because if you look at a recipe every recipe is gonna call for like a scallion or something, and scallions are not something we have in January. But I mean we buy produce, we buy avocados. We buy a little bit of fruit and odds and ends, and after we run out of potatoes we'll buy some potatoes. I buy okra at the farmer's market every year because I'm not very good at keeping okra picked, and so we grow it, but it doesn't really work. And I only want one batch of it anyway, so I just buy that. But there was a while when Glenn was little there were probably five years or more where we grew and preserved all the produce we ate except for a little bit of fruit. I'm not sure why it was definitely, like that was in my mind was that was what I wanted to do. And some of it may have just been finding out if it was possible, finding out if I could. But yeah we pretty much ate only the vegetables that we grew for quite a few years. And then Glenn got older and he was like "I want a salad" and so (laughs) we go got flexible.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Or "I want mangos, I'm sick of blueberries."
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: So part of it was it changed as our family changed.
KAYTE YOUNG: And then there are things like olive oil and maybe flour and stuff that you're not gonna be growing so you're gonna be purchasing those things.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Sugar, salt, flour, oils.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Lots of different beans and grains and nuts and seeds. We buy a lot of food. But we don't buy a lot of fresh produce. Most of our fresh produce is something that we have and much of our off-season produce is something that we grew.
KAYTE YOUNG: So what kinds of things do you put up when you do food preservation. What are some examples?
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Frozen peppers, dried peppers, paprika, tomato juice, relish, jam, and dried beans and corn. Frozen green beans.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Frozen greens.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Frozen greens, frozen pesto. We just made candied ginger for the first time that was kind of cool.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: From market gingers, fresh.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: From local, that was cool.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: It was very good.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Potatoes, and winter squash and sweet potatoes which you don't' have to do anything to.
KAYTE YOUNG: You just have to give them the right conditions to not rot.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Right (laughs). What else do we put up? It seems like... I don't have my notebook out. Lots of frozen blueberries.
KAYTE YOUNG: You grow enough blueberries that you can put them up for a whole winter.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Oh yeah, we put up... in 2019 we put up like 40 gallons frozen. And so I'm... we eat those in pancakes and things, but I'll also make blueberry jams sort of continuously through the whole year and that's our, that's the jam that we like. And so we eat it for breakfast everyday (laughs)
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: And our famous blueberry smoothie.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Yeah the blueberry smoothie
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Sunflower seeds, and blueberries, and a little bit of honey, some water. It's breakfast.
KAYTE YOUNG: I mean you said something earlier Sean about kind of adjusting your tastes and your desires to what you have. And accepting like you said Glenn was like, "I'm tired of blueberries."
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Yeah, I think that's evolved over the years. I guess I've always liked garden produce.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: I've learned to like quite a few things over the years. Sean is never been a picky eater, but I was, you know I didn't really love brassica family greens and arugula grossed me out, and I hated cilantro and I didn't like melons and I didn't like cucumbers. And I gradually over the years I've actually come to like some of those, which in some cases it was really exciting because I always wanted to like melons I just didn't. And in others it was like arugula, still if I didn't have arugula ever again I wouldn't cry but if it happens to be the green we have, and I want some greens to go in something I'll use it and be happy with it. So there's, I don't know, I'm a little more flexible than I was. We did I mean, we had some conversations when Glenn was 14 or 15 about like, "Why do we have these juicy tomatoes that make a mess when I eat them on my sandwich? We should go to the store and buy a proper sandwich tomato that..."
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: That's dry and crunchy. (Sean & Denise laugh)
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: That doesn't turn into slop. So it was interesting to actually hear him working through that and coming up with his own opinions because it never would occur to me to buy a different kind of tomatoes. Like well we've got these tomatoes, but I can see how, it's possible to have some other way of working with produce. But we've gotten used to this. This is kinda what we do.
KAYTE YOUNG: Yeah I've always been resistant to a CSA because I was afraid I'd waste the food. That I would just like the idea of it, but I wouldn't actually eat it because it's just not the way I cook. But if I was a farmer I think I would adjust the way I cook.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: You probably would have to.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Well and you can adapt recipes to what you have too.
KAYTE YOUNG: True to a certain extent (laughs) again that's where the flexibility comes in.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: I think it's a mental barrier.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: I think that's what we do, is we just adapt it. And we're like "collards are just as good as spinach." So...
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: And sometimes we buy a package of frozen spinach.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Sometimes we do.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Because spinach and feta pastry thingies sound really good and I wanna make some for my son and he likes spinach better and so I just buy some. When I was a kid my mom, I mean I learned to cook from my mom as a teenager. And she is somebody who... she goes to the store to replenish her supply of the things she always has on hand, and then she makes the food that she makes with that food. And it's really good food and it varies quite a bit, and it does include garden stuff. But I didn't grow up buying vegetables at the store, like zucchinis or peppers or things like that. We bought potatoes and onions and carrots at the store. And it wasn't like we couldn't buy anything else, but it was just like there was a standard range of stuff that we always had on hand and that's how I learned to cook. And I think that helps me be adaptable.
About the CSA thing, one thing that made me think of, was when we had a CSA, we ran a CSA. Sometimes people wouldn't pick up a share, and we would bring it home and put the produce in the fridge. And sometimes the produce went bad. So I just want to say to people who are CSA customers it's not, you're not a terrible sinner, or maybe I'm a terrible sinner too. But it was actually harder to use up a box of CSA produce because it had already been harvested and when you have it in your garden, you can decide, "Well I'm not using those onions today and they'll keep for 3 weeks. They sit there in the ground; they'll just get bigger." And so I think there's more, it's actually a little more flexible when the stuff is out in the garden on plants and you pick it when you need it. So in some ways we do go to the store when we decide what we're making, we just... the store is the garden.
KAYTE YOUNG: I'm speaking with Denise and Sean Breeden-Ost about growing food, preserving food, and eating food. After a short break we'll talk about what it takes to grow your own dry goods like beans and grains. And about prepping for the apocalypse, or not. I'm Kayte Young, this is Earth Eats, stay with us.
Kayte Young here, this is Earth Eats. I had a chance to visit with Sean and Denise during the corn harvest season. They walked me through the steps of getting dry seed corn from the field to the table. The variety of corn they raise grows incredibly high. It towers over our heads.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: We go in there and we start yanking them down.
(Sound of corn being pulled from stalks)
KAYTE YOUNG: So you're yanking the ears not the stalk.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Yeah, so as you can see there's a height issue here.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Grab the ?? and peel them back. Peel them back. Snap it off, make sure it's a sound ear.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: This is ?? corn. It's a white heirloom corn. I was pretty suspicious about white corn at first because I really like my corn bread to be yellow, but this stuff tastes amazing.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Yeah so what we'll do is we'll shuck it and then we'll stack them loosely in crates and take them inside and let them dry for a good month or two before we grind it. And we still have lots of corn left from last year and the year before. I have 524-foot rows, and then another 100 ft row. It is more than we usually grow. I was worried about what we were gonna do with all the corn, but the squirrels kinda solved that problem for us so. I think we'll end up with about 8 bushels or so, it's enough to eat, share. And lots of polenta, corn bread. It's a tremendous number of calories that are on each plant, and it's well adapted to our environment.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: These last three vision on my novel when I was writing about shucking corn, and I was trying to describe the breaking off of the bottom part of it, I actually called my mom and then called my granny to find out is there a name for that part you break off. Like do they have a name for that. And they're like "No, it's just the part you break off." It's like well that's not very elegant. So I think ended up calling it the stem which is what it is, but I felt like there should be a name for that gesture of breaking the bottom and all the shucks off of the corn. It's such a calming thing people have to do. I guess they didn't feel like they had to talk about it.
KAYTE YOUNG: The next step was shelling.
(Sound of hard pieces dropping into a metal bowl)
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: I used to do this when I was a kid. We used to go into the neighbor's corn field, it was feed corn, and pick corn and shell it off and use it for corn fights.
KAYTE YOUNG: What's involved in a corn fight?
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: You have a bunch of corn that's shelled off the ear and stored in margarine tubs or something and you have forts built out of things and you rush out at each other and fling handfuls of corn at each other.
KAYTE YOUNG: Okay so there's no device that, it's just your hands, flinging them.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Yeah it's just throwing corn at each other (laughs)
KAYTE YOUNG: And then they bring it inside to grind it. They have a grain mill attachment for their champion juicer. It's one of those classic juicers with a heavy-duty motor.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: And I grind it twice because you have to crack it first.
(Heavy machine whirrs)
KAYTE YOUNG: After a second pass through the grinder they set the corn meal through a mesh shiv, and it's ready to use for polenta or grits or cornbread. For this coarsely ground cornmeal Denise uses a hot water cornbread recipe, which you can find at EarthEats.org. We tried it this week and I highly recommend it. When I first heard that Sean and Denise were growing their own beans and grains I wanted to hear more about their motivations. Sean said he tried ? corn for the first time a few years ago. He remembered a variety that his grandfather had given them when he was a kid. He looked for something similar and gave it a try.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: I just wanted to try it, so we put out a plot probably 30feet wide by 40 feet. And it grew just amazingly well.
KAYTE YOUNG [NARRATING]: Once they had the corn there was the problem of grinding it.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: We did some in our blender and figured out that was gonna be the death of our blender. But then we acquired an attachment for the juicer that we have and boy it was amazing. Much sweeter, more corn flavor then store-bought cornmeal and so then I was hooked. And we tried a different corn the next year. And this year we planted about three times what we've ever planted before.
KAYTE YOUNG [INTERVIEWING]: So this was the first time you'd grown your own grain?
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Yeah. Yeah and we've been growing dry beans since at least 2010, maybe a little before that.
KAYTE YOUNG: And did you grow more of those this year as well?
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: We didn't plant more but they thrived better.
KAYTE YOUNG: And so do you think of the corn and beans differently? And I'm asking because I do. I see it as like Oh, that's moving towards self-sufficiency because if you can grow your own protein, and you're not raising animals, it just makes me think of a more self-sufficient model that you could survive on that or something. (laughs)
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: There's a feeling to it that's kind of satisfying that way. It doesn't feel like so much we could survive on it as we're able to provide some of our sort of staple foods. Which I mean the potatoes and the sweet potatoes are staples if anything is. But it breaks down a barrier in my mind between sort of dry goods and produce. And mix it so that actually there's not a line there that says you can't cross it as a home gardener. I just always assumed, I mean assumed that to grow your own corn you had to have, like for cornmeal, you had to have acres and acres of corn. It just seemed like it'd be this huge endeavor, and it's not. I was really surprised by how much cornmeal there is from an ear of corn. And the beans I think warned us, I didn't have as much of a sense of that being different because when I was a kid my aunt grow horticulture beans. And my grandparents had grown beans as well.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: And I think a good part of it is it's like the tomatoes and peppers we just prefer the taste of these beans and this cornmeal over what we can buy.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: We do buy a lot of grains and beans, you know, because we want to have red split lentils, and we want to have black eyed peas, and we want green split peas and lentils and...
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: And black beans
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: And brown rice and you know lots of things that we appreciate the variety of. So we're not at all trying to replace all of that, but it's kind of nice to know that we can grow that stuff too.
KAYTE YOUNG: And when you've grown the corn has it lasted you through the year?
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Oh yeah
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Yeah, more than through the year.
KAYTE YOUNG: And then this year you grew more than you needed.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: We did. (chuckles)
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Yeah, that was Sean's decision-making process (laughs). It's not mathematical.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: I've always been one to plant way more than we need because I love giving away stuff. And I just like how generous the land is with its abundance. And this year the squirrels go more corn than we did. We shared quite a bit.
KAYTE YOUNG: They had a rough year.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: They did.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: They did.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: They didn't have any nuts, and so they got fat on corn this year.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Yeah Sean'll be standing there by the kitchen sink and look out the window and he's like "They're just running up the stalks! They're just running up the stalks eating the corn!" I mean it's just...
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: There'd be like five squirrels out there, like kernels flying everywhere. And then the birds come in.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: But still we got more than we can possibly eat.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Well..
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Well we've got more than we will eat.
KAYTE YOUNG: And if you can store it from year to year, do you feel like it's stable enough that it's fine. The two-year rule of corn is fine?
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Yeah, oh yeah. We're still eating the older corn. It's really, it keeps really well. We keep it whole on the ear partly because it keeps better that way. And then when it's... when we want some, we shell it off the ear into a bowl and pour it through the grinder, grind it through twice and then shift it and then usually I make enough for maybe a quart and a half of cornmeal at a time. And I'll only use a cup to 2 cups when I'm making cornbread and so I put the rest in the freezer and use that as we want to. So that it gets ground close to when it's used.
KAYTE YOUNG: I guess I want to go back to my other question about the idea of self-sufficiency or survival. You know I feel like it's come up a lot this year, pretty much as soon as the pandemic hit, and grocery stores had less on the shelves than normal. And people were at home more than normal, some not all, but some. That all of the sudden I started hearing at least in the media circles that I'm attention to which granted is limited and food focused. There was just a lot of talk about, "We gotta grow our own food!" And "I'm planting a raised bed this year because it's time to sustain ourselves." And having grown some food myself for the past you know 15 years I was like... okay, do you have any idea what you're talking about? Just because one it's not that easy, even if you do know what you're doing. And two, I just feel very suspicious of that kind of thinking, of like we have a lot of canned goods stored in our basement that we've put away. And sometimes when people see it they're like "Oh, I'm coming to your house if there's a crisis or something." And I'm like, "Okay, fine." Because that's what's gonna happen is it's all gonna be shared and be gone in like two days because what are you gonna do if you got everything you need? Like how are you gonna defend that, or what, I don't know. That's just a lot of things that come up for me and I wanted to know if you guys had thought through any of those kinds of things when you start to think about self-sufficiency or survival or prepping or any of those terms.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Every year we go into the wintertime, and like well, if it snows so much that we're snowed in for 3 months we won't starve. You know cause we got a hundred squash on the shelf above the cabinets or something. It's like we might turn orange. So yeah we have that we have that feeling. It's just not a... it's not the primary motivation. It's one of the byproducts I think. A lot of it's curiosity. It's like I wonder if we could grow beans. I wonder if we could grow corn. Sean planted rice this year. And it was like I wonder if we could grow rice? I'm gonna try it. And you know we had a little bit of rice, and maybe we'll grow a little bit more rice in the future and so it's more like... it adds to a bank of knowledge or to its sense of knowing and understanding and learning, that's kind of an end in itself. And it's a relationship in itself with this place and the land and the plants. And then the sort of thing about like someday when everything falls apart we're gonna need this knowledge, it's like well yeah, that's quite possible that we might need that knowledge for that sort of reason. But it's not the motivation. It's an aftereffect. That sense of competence in the world, it feels good more than it is rational I think. What I've noticed is that most people they pick which thing they want to not be able to get anymore after the apocalypse. For me I can, I'll be sitting around daydreaming apocalypse of something that I've done, and think well, I know how to live without electricity. I know how to build a composting toilet so for me I can imagine being very satisfied and smug in a postapocalyptic future in which we don't have electricity and everybody else is in hysterics because they don't have a TV, and I'm fine. But that's nonsense. For one thing here we are in the middle of a pandemic and we had this sort of crisis in our society and what I ended up needing to do was not how to live without electricity but how to meet with people on zoom, which I was much less well prepared for. So in those sort of larger world beyond food, I think we kind of pick and choose our fantasies of collapse to be something that works well for our particular quirks. And I'm not real comfortable with that kind of self servingness. It seems like in a fantasy life self-serving this would be okay, but I get caught up on the logic. But also it really seems to always come down to this idea of the nuclear family as self-sufficient. That we will provide everything we need, and I just think that is always a lie. I do not think a nuclear family can provide everything it needs, not in a way that I wanna live. You need community and you need it for human relationships. But you also just that's just the way the world works. It's there's not a little bubble around us that we can just live in. I don't know I was trying to think of what is it that we need that we couldn't do ourselves, well we need a stable climate. We cannot grow food to eat no matter how good we are at it, if the weather goes haywire. And we can't possibly create a stable climate by ourselves. So you know even on that level it's just impossible to insulate yourself from the effects of things. And then there's the question of what do we do if we're sitting here eating our sweet potato pie and cornbread and our neighbors are starving, are we gonna feel happy? I wouldn't feel happy.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: We would invite them to dinner.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Yeah. And then everybody would be at our house for dinner and then our food would go pretty fast and then we'd all have to figure out what we're gonna do next.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: Squirrels.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: Yeah there are a lot of squirrels and they are really well fed. They're fed on grain peaches and blueberries and corn.
SEAN BREEDEN-OST: I think for me the self-sufficiency it's more important to trust in community and knowing that things will be available. They maybe in short supply but as long as we're sharing things I think everybody will have hopefully what they need.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: The growing of the food also creates more, it creates our entertainment and our exercise, and our education and our time spent together. There's all this. If all we got out of it was food I can't even imagine that. I don't even know what that'd be like. But there's so much else that we gain from doing that in the world of being in relation to the rest of life. And then also in relationship with each other. And one thing Sean was saying earlier we were having a conversation about the self-sufficiency thing, is the idea that if the real kind of self-sufficiency or self reliance that would be smart to be doing, like the place that this is pointing when people are saying "Oh no we have to grow gardens now." What actually makes sense is for communities to start talking together about how they can be more able to support themselves without if California produce is not available for a year or for three years. Or if something else happens, how would we take care of one another in that situation. How could we make it possible as a community for farmland in this area to be used growing food for people instead of being used for growing commodity crops to feed livestock which is what most of it is in now. There's a lot of farmland here, we could be growing food to feed people here but because of the food economy that's not financially sustainable for farmers. And so as an area you can look at things like how do we work on food security together or how do we do more of that stuff that we need in general together. But that's really different from doing it as a nuclear family.
KAYTE YOUNG: And I think that part of the conversations that I was hearing was "We need to, let's start growing food and community gardens." And even so it felt naive and missing something. You said the thing about it makes sense to trust in community and that takes a lot of work too. The community isn't there, it has to be built and maintained and that's kind of what I woke up to. Is that's what we don't have.
DENISE BREEDEN-OST: I'm just thinking about and the naivety piece, and yeah it is kind of naive for somebody to say, who's never gardened before to say, "I'm putting in a garden right now so that I can grow my food this year because there's a pandemic." They're definitely going to learn a lot. And I think actually being naive may kind of a prerequisite for starting to do some of these things. We're not that good, at least I don't feel like we are in this culture at deciding to do something that we think is really hard and probably won't work. And so we have to have this optimistic. I mean Sean is a temperamentally very optimistic person and he's the one who can farm. When we've been farming, when we did farming for market, it was much easier for him because every spring he goes out and he's like "Wow! Look at all the great food we're gonna grow." And I go out and say, "Oh my god what's gonna go wrong this year?" and I wouldn't start the thing. And yet because he starts the thing, I get to participate in it and learn from it and find out that actually a lot of good food does happen, and a lot of things do go wrong. And so I think that naive flinging into it can lead to a good places and can if people kind of stick with it when it all falls apart and try again and learn something.
(Upbeat guitar music)
KAYTE YOUNG: I've been speaking with Denise Breeden-Ost and Sean Breeden-Ost about growing food, processing staple foods, and what the idea of self-sufficiency means to them especially in the middle of a pandemic. Check out EarthEats.org for some photos of their corn and bean harvest, and you'll also find Denise's hot water cornbread recipe. Check it out at EarthEats.org. That's it for our show this week, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. Take care.
RENEE REED: The Earth Eats team includes Eobon Binder, Chad Bouchard, Mark Chilla, Abraham Hill, Josephine McRobbie, the IU Food Institute, Harvest Public Media and me, Renee Reed.
KAYTE YOUNG: Special thanks this week to Denise Breeden-Ost and Sean Breeden-Ost.
RENEE REED: Our theme music is composed by Erin Tobey and performed by Erin and Matt Tobey. Additional music on the show comes to us from the artist at Universal Productions Music. Earth Eats is produced and edited by Kayte Young and our executive producer is John Bailey.
Sean and Denise Breeden-Ost gather the corners of a sheet filled with dried bean plants in order to take them outside to thresh. (Kayte Young/WFIU)
"There's a feeling to it that's kind of satisfying in that way. It doesn't feel so much like we could survive on it, as we're able to provide some of our staple foods."
On today's show we visit a farm East of Bloomington Indiana, to speak with Denise and Sean Breeden-Ost about growing food, preserving food and eating food. We check out their dry bean threshing techniques and reflect on the notion of self-sufficiency in the midst of a pandemic.
Denise and Sean cover the dry bean plants with a second sheet and then walk on it to loosen the dry beans from the pods. (Kayte Young/WFIU)
Regular Earth Eats listeners might remember my audio essay from earlier this year, in the Spring, about pandemic gardening trends. I was curious about the notion of first time-gardeners planning to survive the year on food from their veggie patch.
Later in the summer I learned that a couple of growers, with many years of experience, had planted a decent amount of beans for drying and corn for cornmeal. I thought to myself, "well, they might be growing enough food to survive on!"
These particular farmers also grow and put-up a lot of fresh produce from their garden--you know, canning, freezing, drying, curing. So, perhaps they could be eating their garden's bounty all year long.
And then I started to think more about the complicated notion of self-sufficiency. I knew that these growers were thoughtful people, so I sat down for a conversation with Denise and Sean Breeden-Ost.
Sean Breeden-Ost reaches overhead to grab an ear of Hickory Cane seed corn from a tall stalk in the field.(Kayte Young/WFIU)
I also had the chance to visit their farm during the corn harvest season. They walked me through the steps of getting dry seed corn from the field to the table.
They also demonstrated their dry bean threshing methods, which Denise says are "made up." Denise mentions her novel, and how she consulted with her mom and her granny on the term for the part of the corn ear that you break off once the husks are pulled back. Her novel, Making It All Right is full of lovely descriptions of growing food, harvesting and processing food and so many more details of rural life in Indiana in the 1940s. She was recently featured on WFIU's The Poet's Weave.
Sean and Denise Breeden-Ost shuck the corn out in the field before stacking it loosely in crates and bringing it indoors to finish drying.(Kayte Young/WFIU)
Once the corn is dry, it is shelled off the cob by hand. (Kayte Young/WFIU)
They use a grain mill attachement for their Champion Juicer to grind the corn into cornmeal. They pass it through once to crack it, then a second time to grind it. After sifting it through a mesh sieve, the cornmeal is ready to be made into polenta, grits or cornbread. (Kayte Young/WFIU)
To process their dry beans, they use an electric fan and gravity to winnow the chaff away from the bean. Wearing facemasks is useful, even when we aren't in the midst of a pandemic. The dust can cause irritation.(Kayte Young/WFIU)
These beans are called Taylor Dwarf Horticultural. They are similar to an October variety, and can be used the way you might use a pinto bean. (Kayte Young/WFIU)
Music on this Episode
The Earth Eats theme music is composed by Erin Tobey and performed by Erin and Matt Tobey.
Additional music on this episode from Dosh and the artists at Universal Production Music.
Stories On This Episode
Denise's Hot Water Cornbread
This cornbread is best made with coarsely ground cornmeal, like the kind Denise Breeden-Ost processes from their own seed corn.
About Earth Eats
Earth Eats is a weekly podcast, public radio program and blog bringing you the freshest news and recipes inspired by local food and sustainable agriculture Learn More »
Kayte Young is the producer of Earth Eats, and an announcer and producer at WFIU Public Radio. Learn more »
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