Love makes the world go around. Not really, it's much more complicated than that.

Equal Temperaments. Doesn't that sound nice, compatible, and easy on the nerves? It sounds somewhat like evil temperaments.

Equal temperaments is a musical term used to describe a system of tuning and a frequency ratio. It is comparable to a mirror site, although, as in the case of reflections, the mirror image is not identical to the image that we call real, but grading on the curve, it's close enough. It depends, of course, from which side of the looking glass you are viewing the situation.

Are clones identical? Most probably not. They are genetically identical, which is not the same as identical in appearance. Multiple clones would probably look like very closely related family members.

That brings to mind doppelgangers and evil twins.

A doppelganger or double-goer looks exactly like the real person and is thought to be very evil, a portent of death and danger, and usually haunts the real person. Theoretically, if you see your doppelganger, it means you will die soon. At least that is what the doppelganger seems to want you to think. Since the doppelganger is rottenly evil, he loves scaring you and smells your fear, as it were or maybe really so. This gives him or her a psychological advantage, just as if you were competing for a job with someone who was seven feet tall, since height is considered a psychological advantage. Occasionally, a doppelganger thinks he looks like you, while you think the resemblance is not even close. That is when the death portent comes into extreme conflict.

An evil twin is the bad guy, while you are the good guy. It's a black hat versus white hat issue in cowboy terms or an antagonist versus a protagonist issue in literary terms.

That brings up a good premise for a discussion panel, talk show interviews, podcasts and whatnot. It would make for a lively discussion, with both twins competing for the title of Good Twin. People often think of themselves as the good guy, but what is your evil twin thinking?

An evil twin can be quite frightening in the case of spoofing sites and wireless networks.

In cases of twins in utero, one twin often dies before or shortly after birth. I'm sure the living twin would often characterize himself, if given a choice, as The Good Twin,
although not always if you think Goth, vampires, the undead, etc.

The old expression is that opposites attract. This is true. It is also true that similarities attract.

In the study of biology, there are some nice illustrations suggesting receptor sites. In a way, they are like mirror sites, attracted to each other because they are exact opposites. They fit together something like Legos or a jigsaw puzzle. A chemical or molecule must supply the correct fit to attain binding status, otherwise it looks like a Lego construction by a two-year-old. The site must receive compliments in just the right places. Some synaptic receptor sites are ion channels, such as acetylcholine.

Attraction doesn't always mean romance. It is possible to attract flies and mosquitoes, invariably considered pests. The attraction concerns certain chemicals contained in rotten flesh and sugar, or for mosquitoes, blood. Fruit flies are attracted to rotten fruit. Houseflies are attracted to anything that's rotten. You may have heard the expression There are no flies on him. Again, in a way, rotten fruit is like a receptor site. The flies fit right into the purpose of disposing of the fruit. I say this only to illustrate that life and romance often seem contradictory to what you might consider the best probable outcome.

In my small efforts to make and leave the earth a slightly better place, I have planted apricot, peach, persimmon, apple, and pear trees.

I have not planted any plums.

The Latin word for plum is pruna, which changed in Germanic languages to pluma. It's easy to see the connection of prunes to plums.

The Spanish word for pen is pluma. The reason that sounds like plumes or feathers might be because pens were once made from quill feathers.

At that time, most fancy pillows were stuffed with feathers. If you are saying, "What else could they have used to stuff pillows?" the answer is straw.

An early literary reference to plums is probably Little Jack Horner who put in his thumb and pulled a plum out of his Christmas pie. I don't think there is a recipe connection to plum pudding in Jack's pie, since the definition of plum at the time could mean mean various other fruits. The nursery rhyme was first published in a chapbook designed to be read as a way to spend the winter evenings. You are probably familiar with Mother Goose which is similar.

There are many varieties of plum, but the prettiest is the Green Gage plum. The Green Gage derives its name from the English Gage family. The Green Gage plum has other names in countries other than Britain. "They are also called la bonne reine (French for "the good Queen") in France."

The Green Gage is to plums as Seckel is to pears, that is, they are sweet and considered a dessert fruit.

Some of the best pear dessert recipes are simple ones.

Snow Geese

The War on Drugs. The War on Poverty. The War on Terror. The War on Crime. The War On Obesity. The Battle of the Sexes. The War on... all bad stuff.

By using the word war so many times, I risk being profiled as a warmonger, but I am just trying to illustrate how many un-won wars have been going on in my lifetime.

War requires so much time and energy that there is no time left for love.

War talk may seem specific at first, but if you start asking about the details, the ideas becomes fuzzier. War talk seems designed to appeal to the emotions rather than the intellect. Just know that, yes, we need to jump in the tank and fire off a few rounds and volley and show rage and fume and kill those bastards and send them into oblivion. That's what war is all about, right?

Do you recognize these words "We are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia"? It is from the book Nineteen Eighty-Four.

I don't mean to be critical. I'm not an expert on war, but sometimes a little common sense would go a long way. When you wage war, you make a war plan, right? You size up the situation, gather your collected intelligence, and carefully determine your course of action, much like building a house. To win a war, you have to have a winning strategy or else you just slaughter a lot of people and destroy a lot of things that are expensive and/or impossible to replace.

Isn't it time we started to win our wars or else get off the rhetorical high horse? Isn't it just a little bit embarrassing to wage a war for decades and be in exactly the same place decades later? If you keep doing the same things over and over again and fail, does it make sense to keep doing the same things over and over again?

That is, of course, if your objective is to win the war.

When used, the words The War (on anything) sound so righteous and defensible, but are they really? If you wage war on something, that thing must be bad or why bother?

The frequency of a word used in any language tells how important that word is in the particular culture in which it is used. Eskimos have many words to describe the different kinds of and different uses for snow. The Greek language has many words to describe love. The English language mostly just uses the word war. One of the reasons is that it is a three letter one syllable word. Were it multisyllabic, something would have to change. War would have to end or people would find a monosyllabic word for it. Besides, too many words can look like clutter.

I don't fault the Inuit for their use of snow or the Greeks for their use of love. It's useless to fault a culture for their love of anything, including America's apparent love of war.

The ingenius strategy would be to discern what is intrinsic in human nature and to turn it into an advantage. Doesn't anyone remember the phrase kill'em with kindness? That, of course, doesn't jive with the jump in your armored vehicle, shoot canons, make a lot of noise and generally appeal to the inner caveman squadron of the brain.

How can the intrinsic need for "two minutes hate" be turned to advantage? How can we growl, scratch, scream, make ugly faces, direct bad words at the enemy, and just loosely cast off all the rules of propriety and civilization that family, church, and school have spent so many long years inculcating in us?

There's always love, sex, and peace, but there's no time for that. We are At War and always have been: WWI, WWII, (Please explain to the young that this and www has noting to do with the World Wrestling Federation), the Korean Conflict, The Vietnam War, The Persian Gulf War, The War in Iraq, and the War in Afghanistan, just to hit the highlights.

How about a War on Grime? Is there anyone that you could not convince? Isn't grime a bad, evil, hateful thing, usually? It crosses all cultural and national demographics, and you don't have to be kind. People hate that.

A War on Grime could be an unending war, waged with vehement force. Grime could become the psychological whipping boy. There's plenty of it, always was and always will be. You thrash one grime monster and a new one springs up in its place. That's the nature of microbes.

Finally, a never-ending war that can be won. Imagine the news updates on the number of macrophages set upon the enemy, the number of specific bacteria and virus entities destroyed by our forces.

As the orchards begin to blossom, I am always amazed that beauty can be so renewable.

I am also happily surprised at some of the reading selections on the Internet.

The subject of bees always interested me. Although there is nothing new about bees, there is so much about them that I personally don't know.

Today I was looking at sites with the search term pleasure drone, when after pages of listings for a metal band called Halloween and their song entitled Pleasure Drone, I stumbled upon a Google digital scan of a book about bees called Dzierzon's Rational Bee-Keeping or Theory and Practice of Dr. Dzierzon by Dr. Jan Dzierzon. Incidentally, my parents' wedding anniversary is on Halloween.

The book's table of contents is an education in itself.

The book is 289 pages and is an old fashioned and complete guide to beekeeping, published in the mid-nineteenth century. Like human nature, bee nature has not changed very much. There is a lot of sociobiology in the book.

Long before modern medicine, people recognized that honey had medicinal properties. "When used topically (as, for example, as a wound dressing), hydrogen peroxide is produced by dilution with body fluids."

Honey has a very acidic nature, a pH between 3.2 and 4.5. Because of this, undiluted honey can be used as a topical ointment in cases where medicinal antibiotics have proven ineffective, such as in cases of diabetic ulcer and in easing the damage that is done by colitis.

Wound gels with honey combined with other "Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)" have proven effective.


In emergencies, honey can be used as a topical dressing. Pure honey, poured into a spoon, makes a wonderful cough remedy.

Honey has historic applications in cosmetics also. This is largely for the same reasons it is effective as a medicine.

"The beneficial effect of honey on the skin has an age-old repute. Poppea, the comely wife of Nero, who employed a hundred slaves to attend her beauty, used honey and tepid asses' milk as a face lotion."

Most likely it was the milk that was tepid.

Let's face it, the real joy of honey is its sweetness, however cloying or astringent. It can be clear or murky, sometimes described as smokey, with delicate hints of meadow flowers and savory herbs. It runs slowly and languidly, if at all.

Mellifluous.

The honeycomb, a seeming byproduct, is a marvel in its own right. Beeswax is an unctuous wonder with many uses.

Honeybees are insects that can be herded like sheep or cattle, insects that are somehow lovable despite their stings.

The idea that honeybees might become extinct is absolutely unacceptable. All the space debris and metallic docking stations, all the cigar-shaped rocket ships blasting off for fun-filled adventures in Buck Roger's 21st Century, all the wind-up toys banging clashing cymbals are metaphors needing a salve made of honey.

Those who write about the rapidly diminishing numbers of bee colonies claim to be completely in the dark as to what the problem is. A clear mind and steady hand that actually knows the answer is apparently impossible to find.

That is why I found Dzierzon's Rational Bee-Keeping or Theory and Practice of Dr. Dzierzon by Dr. Jan Dzierzon so dear.

Dr. Dzierzon seems to know every swarming and subtle thing about bees and their keeping, but in his day there were no cell phone towers or H.A.R.P. or evil death rays, excepting the sun, to complicate their keeping.