Serves 4
Scrub potatoes; pare; slice thin. Place layer potatoes in greased baking dish; sprinkle with salt, pepper and flour. Repeat until potatoes are used. Add milk; dot with butter or margarine. Bake in moderate oven (350°) 1 1/2 hours or until potatoes are tender.
Credit: T.Y. Fan
Karam hailed from tribes north in A. continent. Learning of the climes of the New World, he set out, quite intentionally, with the goal of propagation of the lemon tree. He arrived with his lemon trees and lemon seeds in a southern area. He began the slow process of making varieties that were well-suited for new terrain.
Karam lacked a kind of business sense. He planted his lemon trees on public property. As a geometer, he had a highly developed sense of aesthetics, and his placement of trees in public and along hillsides bothered no one. He set up an experimental area and selected for rate of maturation and size in the New World.
After a few years of living in the New World, he was recognized for his cultivation skills. He was hired on different orchards often to cultivate lemon trees and other plants. The owners often got their start on lemons through Karam’s benevolence: his receptivity to answering questions as he tended to the trees, and then a willingness to take seeds or transplants from the public stock and provide his knowledge and experience in an on-boarding process.
The two children, Reti & Iter, the sons of David, another orchard owner, followed Karam’s step, and overtime these children learned much about lemons. One of Karam’s innovation was netting, used to prevent birds from eating the lemons. The children learned how to construct such enclosures.
Between his part-time jobs working on different orchards, he made enough to rent a house with a backyard in which he planted several lemon trees. However changing economic circumstance meant he had to move out after several years. His position was unenviable. Despite his productivity, and his initial brilliant idea, he did not own any lemon trees.
How was this possible? He failed to buy a farm early on. Perhaps he sunk too much into trees. Lemons also were not popular as people were not used to sour, but they had found a market nonetheless.
As a side hustle, Karam became a lemon seller on weekends at the farmers market. He also started to stockpile oil, for what purpose? Karam was upset. He was reported and charged with misdemeanor reckless endangerment. The oil was confiscated.
Karam felt trapped. The New World was a place of rules that were not familiar to him.
Even if his motivations were bad in hoarding oil, to propagate a fire, he could have changed his mind about it and sold the oil at a later date when the weather turned.
Karam had learned a bit of business with his interaction with orchards. But in retrospect he regretted dealing with any of the owners. Karam liked to be the face of lemons as it was in the early days. Even though he had so intimately helped them and set up their operations, they were no longer Karam’s lemons, but lemons from this or that orchard.
In a vision, he saw the orchards up in flames and a red sunset like in the lands of north A.
He felt nostalgia for his home country. The sights and smells. The sun and dry weather. The people mixed lemons with sugar and water to create the local drink, lemonade. Sugar being so expensive in the New World, he hadn’t the opportunity for lemonade, which beat out the local drink of tea, to which Karam added a wedge of lemon. Wait a minute.
He had figured out monetization.
Using his savings, he bought pounds of sugar. The following weekend, he started to sell lemonade at the market. He had a few customers and was generally hopeful.
Reti & Iter, the lemon aficionados, and now teenagers, took a great interest in his business. They observed how he poured sugar & puzzled the foreign name, lemonade.
A week later on the opposite side of the market, Reti & Iter were selling lemonade, “David’s Lemonade”.
Karam sent a letter to David:
Dear David,
Congratulations on your new venture.
I am the originator of the lemon and creator of lemonade.
I will sell my formula for lemonade & trademark.
I think it will be a huge win for everyone involved in the farming community.
Please let me know your response.
Sincerely,
Karam
Karam got a response immediately:
Hi Karam, this is interesting! Give a me a day to work on this; I will reach back soon!
Time passed and Karam wrote again:
David, Wanted to reach out again. Have you considered what an offer might look like? My thoughts are a transfer of IP followed by a two year consulting contract. During this period, I’d be able to consult on any internal projects, provide training, and continue to work on lemons & lemonade. Sincerely, Karam
There was no response.
Karam returned to his old experimental plots. They lay withered, untended. Karam went back to his homeland.
The next year he returned with new lemon trees, but this time he did not rid them of the pest, the yellow beetle. He dug up his old plots and replanted. The plants matured and produced fruit. Lo & behold, Reti & Iter took lemons from the tree and along with them, beetles.
Soon there was a beetle outbreak not only on David’s orchard, but many others.
The story was picked up by the press and Karam was roundly blamed.
Karam no longer works as a cultivator. These days he is more interested in seed banking and gardening. He also runs a newsletter where you can read his side of the story.
To write a good comparative essay that compares two different authors’ works is very difficult.
If two books have similarities, is it really such a good idea to write a comparative essay about them? There are many books to choose from. What benefit is there in comparing those particular books?
The final essay may read like this, “These authors, which I have read, are doing some similar things.” Maybe that is a little useful? A reader that has read one of the books might think, “Well, I suppose if I read this other author, it will have a similar feeling to this book I already read.”
It seems that it makes a bit more sense to compare the work of an author with his other works. In the case that two authors influence each other, that might also make an interesting essay.
There is an essay that compares works by two different authors in a well-defined literary or philosophical movement. A critic might be able to identify the people or works that go together, but a student? In these cases, which deal with well-defined movements, history or influence is important, a basic feature for such essays. Who said it best or first? How did another writer respond to that?
In a comparative essay, there is often an artificial triangle, between the works and some theory. Theory is a tool that connects the works, to show in each story a shared concept.
In another fashion, one author’s writing is used to analyze the other and vis-a-versa. Subtextually, writers make points to justify what is happening in a story. Between two similar stories, these points can be used to illustrate what is happening in the other story. Of course not exactly, but this is how the paper works: there is a “Big Theme” that is shared by both stories and two “little themes” one for each story. Their explanations will never be the same, and so the differences will mount until the “little themes” oppose each other.
A poorly written comparative essay convulutes the meaning of both works. More often than not, comparing and contrasting two stories is a mental exercise, and may not generate anything meaningful.
How many cycles are there that contain O?
Note: This is a diagram of my neighborhood.
If you buy an object for x dollars, then in order for it to be worth it, plan on using it for at least x/$10 hours.
For example, say a game costs $60, then you should play it for at least 6 hours over its lifetime.
The same is true for subscriptions. If a subscription is $10/month, then you should use it at least 1 hour/month.
The ten dollar figure is chosen because that is roughly equal to minimum wage.
Of course, you can buy something and then use it a great amount because you really like it. The ratio of enjoyment to cost is then very large. This is fine. Yet, as a general rule, the budgeting principle holds. One thing though: this rule only applies as long as one has disposable income.
| Due soon | Not due soon | |
| Important | 1 | 2 |
| Not important | 3 | 4 |
9/19/08
J was a student. He had a terrible bully. He feared going to school.
One day, sitting outside under a tree eating his lunch, he heard a commotion coming from the school cafeteria.
He moved his way through the crowd and saw his bully on the ground swollen and red with labored breath. A nurse administered adrenaline and saved the bully’s life. Later, it was determined that the bully had a severe peanut allergy; information that made an impression on J.
That year, with his bully in the hospital, J made four friends.
One summer, J and his friends decided to all get jobs on farms, except one friend that moved to the city. Another friend worked on a peanut farm. Incidentally, the daughter of the farmer there became J’s girlfriend.
The four farm hands & the girl went to visit friend five in the city. They ate at a burger place which was swell. Five said, “I’m attending school to become a trucker. Maybe I can visit you all on my trips when I’m done,” which is when J had the idea.
“Let’s start a burger joint out where we live, then you can come visit us.
“We’ll use our connections & take all the ingredients fresh from the farms. And we’ll give away peanuts as an appetizer.” J’s girlfriend hugged his arm.
“Fine by us,” his friends said.
M lived in a log cabin. “Crash!” A tree fell through the roof. The winter was hard.
He had a small toy of a horse, made of wood, which he used to calm himself. He put it down for a second and a beaver stole it away.
As his father did repairs, he heard the gnawing echoes.
He moved to the city. One day, as it rained, he spied a girl in a yellow raincoat. Thinking of what to say, he approached her. But as the gouts of rain fell between them, a beaver dashed out of the rain. “Ach!” she screamed and ran away.
He entered the salt business which is how he made his fortune and opened an arboretum.
The mission of an arboretum is to conserve trees; as such beavers are unwelcome visitors. They are caught & released far afield.
There are three components of memory games: position of card, card, and study period. The study period refers to the presentation of information and the time allocated to players. For example, we can present all the information to be memorized at once or partially.
Take the game Memory where there are duplicates of cards in a grid; you flip up cards two at a time, memorize them, and replace them. Naturally, players learn the positions of cards overtime and are able to select them and remove them from the game. Compare this to a game where all the cards are revealed at once: a player has a chance to memorize all the cards, then the cards are flipped over and then he identifies pairs.
When playing Memory, often one remembers a card that has been revealed but not the position. Or oppositely one can remember the positions and sequences of cards that were flipped over, seeing the grid as a grid of where cards have been flipped over. Suppose, you can only remember which cards have been revealed but not their place, then a strategy is: when the sequence of cards in memory has a duplicate, to choose a card that has been flipped over, hoping that you choose the duplicate. In competitive Memory, a strategy if you do not remember the cards is to continue flipping over new cards. Now if a future player tries to reveal the duplicate and fails, then he has eliminated a possibility and perhaps has helped jog your memory as to where the duplicate truly is. The gestalt of card positions is a highly memorable feature.
Another game that is more about card positions than the cards themselves is often played on a computer with a simple grid where grid squares can be turned light or dark. In this case, the gestalt of card positions is the basis for the game. In a short frame of time, a few seconds, a player will see all the positions and then on a separate grid will try to duplicate all the positions. How someone is able to memorize all the positions so quickly is a bit of a mystery. The brighter lights sear a pattern into the visual system. If there are not too many squares, then a person can code the pattern like, “4 connected in an L starting on this square, etc.” quickly in their head.
Another separate part of the memory game is the cards themselves. The cards for example might have a sequence of numbers on them or other relations between them like color or pattern; picture, imagery. We could play a different version of Memory where we are asked by a third party to recover certain cards that may or may not have been revealed instead of just duplicates as a hypothetical example. Another possibility might be to present the information to study in different ways than all or one at a time. All cards of a type might be revealed. This lacks a kind of elegance compared with Memory as a third party is needed to give these presentations.