One good thing about living in Michigan is that you get first dibs on a pretty amazing variety of apples every fall. Now it won't officially be fall for another ten days or so but football has started, leaves have begun to turn color, and apple orchards are starting to toot their horns about what they have to offer. Probably in a few weeks when the temperature has fallen to what I consider real fall weather and more of the harvest has become available I will go to an apple orchard near me. I am sure the ones listed in this story are nice.
But in Michigan it's hard to drive twenty minutes without running into an apple orchard somewhere. Maybe next year I will try some a bit farther afield. Of course apple orchards offer more than apples. They have cakes, pies, candy, syrup, donuts, fritters, and all sorts of other goodies that are derived in part or in whole from apples.
Area orchards and cider mills have opened for the season, offering treats such as apple cider, donuts, pies and fresh apples.
The Michigan Apple harvest 2019 crop estimate is 25.25 million bushels (1.06 billion pounds), according to the USApple Outlook meeting held recently in Chicago.
This year's crop estimate is in line with the average harvest, which is about 25.2 million bushels per year.
I have always enjoyed playing chess. I wish I were better at it. One person who is better at it than I and likely to improve more in the future is Charisse Woods, a ninth grader at Detroit's Cass Technical High School.
Woods is leaving for Mumbai, India to compete in the World Youth Chess Championship. In other words..she's a really good chess player. She will be the only chess player from Michigan representing Team USA.
Charisse Woods is getting ready to head to Mumbai, India to compete in the World Youth Chess Championship. The ninth-grader at Cass Technical High School first learned to play chess when she was just 7 years old. She says she loves how the game keeps you thinking.
"There's like trillions of different positions," Woods said. "The game is so dynamic. It changes so often. I love the challenge, getting to travel and meeting new people."
The obvious joke is that lawyers screw you over one way or another. At least with this attorney you'll hopefully leave the experience with a smile on your face.
DES MOINES, Iowa —
A Des Moines attorney is unveiling her life as a part-time prostitute.The mom, wife, attorney and prostitute, Katherine Sears, hopes that by shining a light on her lifestyle, she can help decriminalize prostitution. “I like sex,” Sears said. “Sex is fun and I can get paid for it.”
She began working as a prostitute three years ago, at the age of 27. Sears travels to Nevada, where prostitution is legal, and works in a brothel.
“You can make a job out of this? That’s fantastic,” Sears said. “Why would I not do this?” By speaking about her experience, Sears hopes to educate people on a taboo topic.
“I think a lot of people are upset about prostitution without understanding what it is they are being upset about,” she said. “Which is really frustrating because it’s hard to talk somebody out of something when they are just entrenched in, ‘No, this is what’s right.’”
Ma
directed by Tate Taylor
This is a horror film. But maybe that description might give you the wrong idea. It's as much a thriller film as horror. There are relatively few jump cuts used. Those that do show up are few in number until the film's final third in which there is some reversion to the mean in well known and overused effects. There is nothing supernatural, no magic box that appears in the mail, no one that looks exactly like a family ancestor who's been deceased for two centuries, no inheritance of a heretofore unknown family mansion, no seductive slender woman (or man) who only is seen at night. None of that is to be found in this movie.
This movie was in part created because the primary female lead, Oscar winning actress Octavia Spencer, wanted to do something outside of the typical maid or mammy asexual roles which she normally plays. This film was definitely different from her normal roles, I'll say that for it. How successful it was? Well I though it could have been better, especially in the way the ending was built.
This film asks us if people are born monsters and if the scars of past harms ever truly heal. Some people hold grudges longer than others. That's just human nature. Nothing will change that. Some religious traditions call upon us to forgive those who trespass against us. Others reject forgiveness and seek retribution. A lot of pop culture and pop spirituality states that seeking revenge, holding grudges and refusing to forgive all harm the holder of the grudges far more than the original aggressor.
Replicas
directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff
Replicas is a example of how even a movie that has A-list stars is still subject to story limits. Top stars paired with a great story usually means a great movie. Top stars paired with a mediocre story often means a mediocre movie. And top stars weighed down with a sh***y story usually means a sh***y movie, for example, Replicas.
It's a mystery that the head producer and studio executives didn't watch this completed movie, pull a sap or baseball bat out of their desk drawer, yell "Come here, come here!" and chase the director and writers of this tripe around the office and through the building, trying to belt them upside the head.
If I gave someone $30 million dollars and they turned in this crap I would do them bodily harm. I would presume they were deliberately trying to get me fired. If I were the studio head, owner or distributor and learned that an executive spent $30 million of company money on this movie I'd fire them before they left on Friday. I'd call competitors to ensure, as the hoary phrase goes, that the offending person would never work in this town again.
Some say there are only a limited number of stories. I don't know. I do know that there are some common themes which inspire or lurk behind many films or books. We need romantic/physical/sexual love. We want material success. We fear the unknown. We want to live and avoid illness and death. We want to protect our loved ones-whether they're young and naive or old and frail. Those themes are what the viewer is set up to expect will be explored in Replicas. Unfortunately they were ignored or ineptly handled.
More people live in the Pakistani city of Karachi than live in the entire states of Michigan and Wisconsin combined. I would not care to reside in a place with so many people and so little space or privacy.
I would like it even less if through poverty and poor decision making I lived in a place with poor sewage systems and the resulting infestation of flies and disease. I am amazed that Pakistan has allowed the conditions in its largest city to become this horrible. It was evidently more important to the powers that be in Pakistan to have nuclear weapons and flex muscles at their arch rival and neighbor, India, than to build clean safe cities for their citizens. And one could say the same about conditions in some Indian cities.
That's a shame. One of the most important responsibilities of a state, society and culture is to provide clean drinking water, safe food, protections from disease and vermin and a sense of cleanliness. Without that you don't have anything as far as I am concerned.
KARACHI, Pakistan — First came the floods, as weeks of monsoon rains deluged neighborhoods across Karachi, sending sewage and trash through Pakistan’s largest city. Then came the long power outages, in some cases for 60 hours and counting.
And then it got worse: Karachi is now plagued by swarms of flies. The bugs seem to be everywhere in every neighborhood, bazaar and shop, sparing no one. They’re a bullying force on sidewalks, flying in and out of stores and cars and homes, and settling onto every available surface, from vegetables to people.
Goodbye Homeboy
by Steve Mariotti with Debra Devi
I am always intrigued to find that a person talented in one field is also just as skilled in another. The musician Debra Devi's new book demonstrates that Devi should be just as well known as an author as a musician. I also had a strong sense of six degrees of separation reading this book as the other author and primary subject, Steve Mariotti, is a Michigan native and University of Michigan graduate.
This book is a memoir of a white teacher who helped mostly Black and Latino impoverished students better themselves and improve their lives. Some people will immediately dismiss it on those grounds alone. That would be a mistake, I think. The story is real. This memoir is a good example of how one person can make a difference. It makes the argument that teachers need higher salaries and better social/workplace support.
As mentioned Mariotti is from Michigan and in his younger days (I have no idea of his politics now) was evidently something of a libertarian. The book features amusing stories about Mariotti's meetings--really more run-ins-- with Objectivist philosopher, author and Libertarian inspiration Ayn Rand. For my money Rand was a horrible person both on a personal level and a philosophical one. In her later days she wasn't that different from a cult leader. When Mariotti shared his ideas or activism with Rand, Rand insulted him and dismissed him from her presence. Rand went out of her way to write nasty letters to Mariotti calling him a loser and ordering him to never darken her door again.
I found this darkly amusing only because at the time of Mariotti's interaction with her, Rand was at an advanced age and was certainly not, to put it mildly, any sort of beauty. Rand was a narcissist who apparently found it important to use precious time to attempt to crush a young man's ego. Some people.
