Apple Day is an annual celebration held on October 21, each year. More recently Apple Day has evolved 
into a weekend event, usually taking place on the Saturday and Sunday closest to Oct. 21st. Celebrated mainly in the United Kingdom with cookery demonstrations, games, apple identification, juice and cider, gardening advice, games and of course many hundreds of apple varieties.
Which is your favorite apple? Mine is Fuji, at its best it is sweet and crisp. My uncle brought half a bushel of apples from Nebraska a couple of weeks ago — my Mother and daughter both made apple butter, I cooked the ones we didn’t eat raw. Ummmm, ummmmm.
Now if only we could expect an apple a day to keep the doctor away!
fnord
PrairiePopulistsAndProgressives.net 
My favorite apple is a Granny Smith – they are great.
For eating, nothing beats a Fuji in my opinion. 6c70, having been in Maine, tells me I don’t know what good apples are, although she agrees with iggy about apples available here.
Instead of counting on that favorite apple keeping the doctor away, here’s another “option.”
Shhhhhhhh. Be bewy bewy quiet. I’m hunting mountain lions today.
The mountain lion sighted in Trego county was a half mile from my employer’s farm. They’ve been having dogs mysteriously disappear for over a year now.
Hmmm……
Summer wants to know if I’ll leave the 20ga for her today! She’d prefer a rifle but we dont have one.
I thought of you last night when I caught the news that I rarely catch. I think I must catch it when there’s something I need to catch.
“catch” is the word of the day. 🙂
I told her no. You need thumbs to shoot!
PrairiePond, If you’re around I am wondering if you have ever seen a mountain lion in your neck of the woods — now that wildlife officials say, “Yes, that is a picture of a mountain lion in Kansas.” As I read the article in this morning’s paper they agree that mountain lion was in Kansas, but not that any live here. In fact, they state a mountain lion’s range is probably 50 or more miles and Kansas doesn’t have the cover and water they would require for a home.
I thought since you live in the area one has been ‘officially’ spotted you may have had a glimpse of one through the years.
Well, if I had read or even hurried up and finished my post, I would have found you right here!
I know they are the experts, but I have seen a mountain lion in Kansas before. I was somewhere between Wichita and Paola along I-35. There have been footprints in our county before and they have said that they weren’t mountain lion prints, but I don’t believe them. Naturalists in Kansas are in denial about mountain lions. Their reasoning makes sense, but the eyes don’t lie.
My favorite apple is the caramel apple and any variety of apple tastes great with all that gooey caramel on it. (ha,ha)
In my childhood, the caramel apple had always been the one item in the store that made me know the autumn season had finally arrived. Nowadays – we can find caramel apples most year round – or at least the tub of caramel to dip our apples. These kids of today have no idea of how it was in my childhood – certain things were available only at certain times.
As for just an apple for eating raw – I like the Fuji but I like the Golden Delicious probably best. My grand-daughter thinks Grandma is silly for buying those yellow apples.
Remember how long it took just to unwrap the caramels?
It was an eternity – wasn’t it? But we had the most fun making those caramel apples – didn’t we?
I’ll have to second that, lilac.
I don’t know one apple from another. I know I like the really, really crisp and juicy ones. Seems I never grab the right ones.
About 10 years ago, we were driving along a dark country road between Cherryvale and Winfield, it was late at night and I was the driver as my husband was sleeping in the passenger seat. As I was coming up to a curve in the road, something had caught my headlights and it was reflecting back at me. When I looked closer, I saw what I thought looked like a mountain lion. I still remember the magnificent looking face. It looked very calm and was not running. I was thinking this animal was more scared of me than I was of him – but I wasn’t getting out of the car to find out!
I’m not sure if it was a mountain lion or not that I saw that night, but I have not forgotten one detail of that sighting. I told a few friends when I got home and some believed me and others just laughed at me.
My grandmother would always make caramel apples and popcorn balls for her neighborhood trick or treaters.
That woman had a line at her door every year until she was too frail to make them. It was so neat because she had generations of the same families coming to her house for Halloween. She often said she felt like a second Mom for half of the neighborhood because she either fed them or scolded them when they were up to no good.
Fuji also. I like good crunchy ice cold apples . . . yum.
Anybody catch Frontline last night? Berksley Born is now my favorite hero. What an awesome woman, and to stick with her convictions in the face of the golden boys, Greenspan, etc., is amazing. That few give her the recognition she deserves, now that her wanting to regulate the OTC derivatives has proven to be the correct path, shows just how little women are given any credit in Washington. They should erect a statue to her.
Hell, Obama should throw the current clump of losers out and put her in their place. Something might actually get done.
Heh Fnord. No, I’ve never spotted a mountain lion, but there have been other sightings and even a horse killed by what had to be a mountain lion. That was a few years ago, but in the same neighborhood where this one was photographed.
Wildlife officials are really invested in saying none live in Kansas, but I think they must in northwest Trego county. Too many reported sightings, even if they couldnt be proven. The horse thing, the carcass was destroyed in a manner that suggested mountain lion or TIGER, and fer shur, we have no TIGERS in Trego County. Wildlife officials stood on their head to say it wasnt so, but everyone around here knew it was.
I have seen bobcats, though, and had a mother and two cubs that lived under a bridge just a couple of miles north of me. I saw them playing a half mile up the road from my house. They were really cute, the whole fam damily!
I was driving home early one morning after taking the hubby to work. About 2 miles from home, something walked across the road in front of me. It was just after dawn, so the light wasn’t good, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what animal had disappeared into the wheat or milo or whatever was growing in the field. (I know the difference. I just forget what season it was.)
I kept thinking about it off an on. Hours later, I smacked my forehead. Bigpointy ears and a stub of a tail. Bobcat! We were a little over a mile south of the Ninnescah, so it shouldn’t have been that tough for me. I’d seen tracks before while watching the kids and hubby fish.
Now the armadillo is something else again.
I went over to take a peek into the WE blog (I did not post, but was tempted to) and it seems like Kris Kobach (R) had to have his fundraiser, featuring Michelle Malkin, moved off the WSU campus due to the law of no political fundraising is to be done at state facilities.
I saw where the Republicans were ranting on the Opinion Line about how these liberal WSU professors were trying to silent free speech by making poor Ms. Malkin relocate off the WSU campus. Of course they were playing the victim card again – just like their beloved leader Rush.
What is it with Republicans that they cannot tell the whole story? Being made to relocate because of a person’s speech is one thing but when it is a known fundraiser and that is known to be forbidden – then that puts the entire story into a different context – doesn’t it?
But, I must confess, I did post 2 things on the Opinion Line today. I’m sure each and every Conservative had their fun – but I don’t know because I don’t go back to read their huffin, puffin and bluffin posts. One of my posts was setting the record straight about that Michelle Malkin speech being relocated off WSU.
Oh well, I am doing better – I even read through Okie grannie’s posts and wanted to respond but told myself ‘no, no – she’s not worth it’.
I read some comments there and left quickly. Samo-samo. Even just a different day doesn’t apply there anymore. It’s ground hogs day there 7/24 x 365.
Kris Kobach bears watching, that’s for sure. Seems to me he has had some trouble with campaign funds in the past.
It’s funny how the cons will go on about their free speech being denied, but when a war protest gets moved three blocks away from where the president will be, or when protesters at the G20 summit were made to gather blocks away (and then beaten, tear-gassed and arrested), that is not abuse. And you are absolutely right that they refuse to admit that fundraisers are not subject to free speech protection.
Waste of time to argue with that.
If you got time, watch the frontline episode here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/
That was a great show. Now I know why Tim Geitner and Larry Summers are such lousy picks for administration jobs.
Thanks for the link Jammer. I have been watching the video in bits and pieces today.
The foundational problems were a long time in coming together, but what is being done about them now? Not much it seems.
Where is FDR when you need him? In the “Forgotten Man”, FDR was painted as a rich man who hated other rich men. Now, we’re content to let the SAME foxes guard the henhouse who got us into this mess in first (or second) place. Way past time for some asses to be kicked, IMHO.
Unbelievable. And, very, very disheartening.
But it turned out, a cancer was growing. It was the completely unregulated derivatives market — a giant, multi-trillion dollar ponzi-scheme. Brooksley Born attempted to alert Congress to the pending disaster but was met with violent opposition by Greenspan, Rubin, Summers, and most of Congress. Not only was she not allowed to regulate the markets, her power to do so was taken away. And the market was further deregulated with the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 and the
Less than 10 years later, our economy completely collapsed.
But the really sickening thing about this story is, some of the people who caused the collapse of our economy are major players in the Obama administration. Lawrence Summers is now the director of the White House’s National Economic Council for Obama. Timothy Geithner, a disciple of Robert Rubin, is now the head of the Treasury Department.
Robert Rubin became Director and Senior Counselor of Citigroup during which time he earned more than 126 million dollars for his eight years of “service.” Citigroup has received 45 billion dollars from the TARP bailout money.
Sounds like Obama is just the engineer on the samo-samo train as far as our financial economy is concerned. Seems like the only ones who benefitted from the bailout are the very same bankers that caused the crisis.
It’s time for a woman like Brooksley Borns to get in there and clean house – but I’m sure the good ole’ boys wouldn’t like that.
That is why I was so disgusted after the election as he started to name the cabinet. And those of us who protested were called whiners and extremists by other members of the Democratic party. But, c’mon, what were THEY thinking?
If they did not know about Summers, Geitner and Rubin, WHY didn’t they? I found out about this by searching the internet and reading. Anyone could do that. And anyone that did would know at least some of what you just saw in that PBS show. And that should have been enough to have them questioning the picks.
I SO wanted to belive that Obama would bring real change. But actions speak louder than words.
scary long article well worth the time
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_generic.jsp?channel=awst&id=news/wichita101909.xml&headline=Downturn%20Raises%20Questions%20About%20Wichita%27s%20Future
snip
Oct 16, 2009
Joseph C. Anselmo and William Garvey/Wichita
Could Wichita become the next Detroit?
A little more than a year ago, comparisons of the self-proclaimed “Air Capital of the World” with such a potent symbol of industrial decline were far from the minds of most business and civic leaders in Wichita. Demand was at an all-time high for the business jets, turboprops and Boeing 737 fuselages being churned out of factories in this city of 364,000, the largest in Kansas. As companies scrambled to fill openings, engineering students at Wichita State University were virtually guaranteed well-paying jobs when they graduated. “Wichita’s aircraft industry has hit an all-time hot streak, selling out production on some models for years to come,” the Wichita Eagle, the region’s daily newspaper, wrote in June 2008.
Even when the global credit crisis hit three months later, there were still hopes the industry would be shielded by record backlogs and global orders that had made it less reliant on the U.S. economy. As the National Business Aviation Assn. (NBAA) convention opened in Orlando, Fla., in October 2008, aircraft manufacturers were telling their suppliers to expect no cuts in production rates. A Honeywell forecaster opined that the credit crisis’s impact on the industry would be “a short-term blip.”
Then it all came crashing down, with a suddenness and severity that no executives had foreseen, even in their worst-case models. Unable to secure financing, huge numbers of buyers deferred delivery or abandoned their deposits and walked away. Meanwhile, new orders slowed to a trickle as a global recession intensified and politicians in Washington, including President Barack Obama, attacked the use of private jets as a symbol of corporate excess (see p. 58).
In less than a year, Wichita’s three business jet producers—Cessna, Hawker Beechcraft and Bombardier’s Learjet—have shed about 12,000 jobs, or nearly 30% of the local aerospace workforce, and watched billions of dollars of backlog vanish. Only Spirit AeroSystems—an aerostructures manufacturer that relies on production of large passenger jets built by Boeing—has been able to avoid layoffs.
“It is as bad as I’ve ever seen it for that industry, and I’ve been doing this for 34 years,” says Tom Buffenbarger, president of the International Assn. of Machinists (IAM). “In September 2008 we had 9,000 openings in Wichita for machinists, aircraft-certified welders, avionics electricians and aircraft sheet metal people. And today we have 11,000 [union member] layoffs. That’s a shift of 20,000 jobs right there.”
To be fair to Obama, what he said was that if a company is taking bailout money from the taxpayers, then that company should not be buying a new corporate jet.
And with that statement I agree with him.
If a company wants to spend their own money on a new corporate jet every year – more power to them. But if they are coming to taxpayers with their hat in their hands wanting bailed out due to to their own corporate mishandling – then their old corporate jet will have to suffice – IMHO.
Or perhaps the CEO and other top-level managment people need to forego their multi-million dollars bonuses and then the company could buy that new corporate jet after all?
It’s all a matter of priorities – isn’t it?
The article is not so much a criticism of Obama, its a comparison to what has happen in Detroit with it’s heavy dependence on the automobile manufacturing business. Could the same thing happen to Wichita?
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1882089_1850973,00.html
I think we need a temporary period of massive protectionism in this country. We need to start making the things that we need again and buying inside the country to keep the money and jobs here. It would be great if there were a small business rennaisance in this country, supported by the government. Instead, the government funds those companies that are “too big to fail” and those companies screw the taxpayer at their first opportunity.
Real change comes from the bottom up, not the top down. Just my opinion.
Arrrrggg . . . I get so pissed at what passes for government today. The only entity too big to fail IS the government. All others are products of a capitalistic system, and failure is part of that system. But when the foxes are running the chicken coop, what else can we expect?
Talk about the selling out of the American people. And when both parties are in Wall Streets pockets, there is no difference in who runs what.
86-year-old WWII vet on marriage equality: “The woman at my polling place asked me do I believe in equality for gay and lesbian people. I was pretty surprised to be asked a question like that. It made no sense to me. Finally I asked her: what do you think I fought for in Omaha Beach?”
This video made me cry. It gives one hope. Thank God for this man; talk about a hero!
A defense of inequality and trickle down in one statement. That’s a political winner. By the way, there’s little evidence for either claim. Trickle down doesn’t work, and recent increases in inequality have not led to higher economic growth than we had before.
Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) — A Goldman Sachs International adviser defended compensation in the finance industry as his company plans a near-record year for pay, saying the spending will help boost the economy.
“We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,” Brian Griffiths, who was a special adviser to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, said yesterday at a panel discussion at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The panel’s discussion topic was, “What is the place of morality in the marketplace?”
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., based in New York, set aside $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009, up 46 percent from a year earlier and enough to pay each worker $527,192 for the period. The amount set aside this year is just shy of the all-time high $16.9 billion allocated in the first three quarters of 2007. Goldman Sachs spokesman Michael DuVally in New York declined to comment.
Banks in the U.K. and U.S. have been pressured by lawmakers to contain compensation after bailouts of financial firms by national governments. Goldman Sachs repaid $10 billion plus dividends to the U.S. government this year, and resumed allocating billions of dollars for year-end bonuses after slashing compensation last year when the firm reported its first quarterly loss.
Griffiths, 67, called on bankers to boost their charitable giving to help improve the financial industry’s reputation following a worldwide crisis.
——–
A defense of inequality and trickle down in one statement. That’s a political winner. By the way, there’s little evidence for either claim. Trickle down doesn’t work, and recent increases in inequality have not led to higher economic growth than we had before.
Hat tip Mark Thoma
Econmists View
opps I screwed that up
But . . . but . . . they’re too big to fail . . .
I just heard on the news that Obama is coming down hard on the 7 biggest bailout recipients to slash their top 25 highest paid people’s salaries by an average of 90%. I can’t remember all of the companies at this moment. AIG, Chrysler, Citigroup were the top 3 that I remember off hand.
Can’t you just hear the squealing that is going to come out of the GOP’s pig pen on this one?
But I wonder how high Obama’s poll ratings will go among the majority of average Americans who are struggling to get by in this economy?
BTW – wasn’t the ‘trickle down theory’ tried by Reagan in the 80’s and wasn’t that decade known as the ‘greed years’? Seems that everytime someone tries to trickle down, the middle class and poor gets kicked even further down that ladder.
I have always wanted to have a tee-shirt made up with the following saying:
In the flows and eddies of trickle down economics I am painfully aware
that someone placed a dam up stream from me!
It’s looking more likely President Obama will be a one-term president. Americans have no patience, pay very little attention, and Republicans are extremely good at soundbites.
But, then again, what difference does it really make? They’re all in it for the money and power. What is best for the country or her citizens isn’t within their realm of thinking. They are so removed from reality to understand, and they don’t care.
Okay, boys and girls, a new book is coming out the same day as Sarah’s book. It’s called “Going Rouge”, and was written by The Nation. And, yes, it really is coming out the same day.
One may peruse a page of the book Here:
http://www.goingrouge.net/?page_id=26
Oh, that is so cool! So, will she sue?
Depends on what color you use on the pig 🙂
My new favorite apple:
http://www.apple.com/imac/
My iMac is three years old — ancient!
Take heart. Health reform by December. A new direction in Afghanistan. Withdrawal from Iraq. Rebounding economy…
I want to take heart, I really want solutions, and I’m depressed that there seem to be none. Thanks for the encouragement.
Let’s go cause some trouble:
http://www.teapartyexpress.org/tour-shedule-2/wichita-ks/
They’d just count us so they could claim their crowd numbered in the bazillions — or at least a hundred or something…
How would you propose causing trouble?
The talk of Mountain Lions reminded me of a joke:
One day two Mountain Lions were talking about how hard it was getting in Colorado.
They had not eaten in days and one said he was going to another State to hunt.
A month later the second Mountain Lion got a message from the one who left.
“Man I am here in Texas and the hunting is great! These Texans are easy to catch.”.
So the second Lion went to Texas and started hunting.
So the two Mountain Lions met up and the first was shocked at how skinny the second was.
My God havn’t you been eating?
Yeah I have been eating a Texan everyday, but there just an’t much to them!
How have you been hunting them? the first asked.
Well I wait on top of a large rock and when a Texan rides by on their horse.
I let out a loud roar and then jump down and knock them off their horse.
The first said, well there is the problem.
When you let out a loud roar you are scaring the shit out of them.
And when you jump on them, it knocks all the hot air out of them.
Once a Texans is no longer full of shit and hot air, there is nothing left to them!