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P. J. O’Rourke wants Scotland to be free. For the entertainment value.
This coming Thursday the Scots will vote on whether to make Scotland an independent nation. And I hope they do because it will be a disaster.
I don’t say this as a prejudiced Irishman. Even though the thistle-arse sheep-shagger Scots swiped Ulster and sent a herd of Presbyterian proddy dogs and porridge wogs to squat on our land and won the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 by using unfair—indeed, unheard of —- organization, discipline, and tactics on an Irish battlefield. We Micks only hold a grudge about such things for 300 years or so.
Nor is Scottish independence a misery-loves-company moment for us Irish. True, Irish independence has been no bed of shamrocks, what with the Easter Rebellion, the black-and-tans, the civil war, the IRA, and the Celtic Tiger turning out to be a mangy barn cat drowned in the well.
We Irish don’t hate the Scots per se. They’re too much like us Irish, who all hate each other. So we’re just looking for a fine entertainment from across the Irish Sea as Highland Scots have a donnybrook with Lowland Scots, Glaswegians dust up with Edinburghians, and Clan Dewers unsheathes its claymores for battle with Clan Johnny Walker. …
We get a more serious look from Tom Wilson in Contentions.
At first the Scottish referendum was regarded as a bit of a joke. It was being called, if anything, to put the matter to bed. Yet in recent days the first polls have emerged suggesting that the number of Scots preparing to vote for secession may have just surpassed those wishing to remain in the union. This has caused a sudden sense of panic in Westminster. Some have already called on Prime Minister David Cameron to resign, or at least call an election, should Scotland vote to exit the United Kingdom. Even Henry Kissinger has weighed in and voiced his opposition to Britain “getting any smaller.” But the truth is that, very suddenly, the UK looks dangerously close to splitting in two.
David Cameron insists that he is a staunch defender of the union. Yet, as many have pointed out, losing Scotland wouldn’t be all bad for someone of Cameron’s outlook. For one thing, no Scotland could well mean no more Labor governments for the foreseeable future. All of the close elections won by Labor would have gone to the Conservatives had the Scottish vote been discounted. Then there’s the fact that, when it comes to public services, Scotland takes out far more from the national budget than it contributes. Lastly, while Scotland is more pro-European than England, should Scotland leave, it is hard to imagine the remnants of the United Kingdom having the appetite for going it alone and leaving the EU as well, something which Cameron also opposes. …
Nate Silver at the 538 Blog suggests Roger Goodell is paid well beyond his value to the NFL.
… The modest rate of franchise value growth under Goodell has come from a very high baseline — and perhaps some decline in the rate of growth was inevitable given how prodigiously they grew under Tagliabue. In absolute dollar terms — not percentages — NFL franchise values have risen by a collective $10.9 billion since 2006, compared with $11 billion for baseball, $7.5 billion for the NBA and $6.6 billion for the NHL. The NFL is still a hugely profitable business, and even poorly run franchises tend to make money because of the league’s aggressive revenue sharing and relatively favorable contractual agreements with players. According to Forbes, only the Detroit Lions lost money in 2013, and the league’s 32 franchises earned a collective $1.7 billion in operating income.
At the same time, the NFL did such a good job of expanding its reach and protecting its brand under Tagliabue and Pete Rozelle that even a mediocre commissioner could be in a position to look good. Compared to his predecessors and his counterparts in other leagues, Goodell’s value to the NFL’s bottom line hasn’t been quite so clear.
Apple season is upon us so we have a few posts on them. A writer for The Atlantic has nothing good to say for the Red Delicious. In order to save space we will use only the pull quote here. Follow the link if you want the rest.
At the supermarket near his home in central Virginia, Tom Burford likes to loiter by the display of Red Delicious. He waits until he spots a store manager. Then he picks up one of the glossy apples and, with a flourish, scrapes his fingernail into the wax: T-O-M.
“We can’t sell that now,” the manager protests.
To which Burford replies, in his soft Piedmont drawl: “That’s my point.”
Burford, who is 79 years old, is disinclined to apple destruction. His ancestors scattered apple seeds in the Blue Ridge foothills as far back as 1713, and he grew up with more than 100 types of trees in his backyard orchard. He is the author of Apples of North America, an encyclopedia of heirloom varieties, and travels the country lecturing on horticulture and nursery design. But his preservationist tendencies stop short of the Red Delicious and what he calls the “ramming down the throats of American consumers this disgusting, red, beautiful fruit.”
His words contain the paradox of the Red Delicious: alluring yet undesirable, the most produced and arguably the least popular apple in the United States. It lurks in desolation. Bumped around the bottom of lunch bags as schoolchildren rummage for chips or shrink-wrapped Rice Krispies treats. Waiting by the last bruised banana in a roadside gas station, the only produce for miles. Left untouched on hospital trays, forlorn in the fruit bowl at hotel breakfast buffets, bereft in nests of gift-basket raffia.
As genes for beauty were favored over those for taste, the skins grew tough and bitter around mushy, sugar-soaked flesh.
For at least 70 years, the Red Delicious has dominated apple production in the United States. But since the turn of the 21st century, as the market has filled with competitors—the Gala, the Fuji, the Honeycrisp—its lead has been narrowing. …
We cut the above short because we wanted to save space for the following from The New Yorker on apple breeding.
… since apples and humans go way back—Thoreau begins his essay “Wild Apples” by noting, “It is remarkable how closely the history of the Apple-tree is connected with that of man”—a little backstory is necessary.
Malus pumila, of the family Rosaceae and the tribe Pyreae, was domesticated some four thousand years ago, in the fruit forests of what is now southeastern Kazakhstan, near the city of Almaty. Frank Browning, the author of “Apples,” reports seeing apple trees growing up through cracks in the pavement there. The wild horses of the nearby steppe liked to eat apples, and could cover long distances, carrying the seeds in their guts. Apples travelled westward along trade routes, and show up in Persia around the time of Alexander the Great, and in Europe not long after; the Romans cultivated them widely. (The apple in the Garden of Eden was most likely a pomegranate, or possibly an orange.) The species came to the New World with the first European settlers, in the form of seeds, and the pioneers, as they pushed westward, took apples with them.
By the time of the Civil War, there were many kinds of apples growing across the United States, but most of them didn’t taste very good, and as a rule people didn’t eat them. Cider was cheaper to make than beer, and many settlers believed fermented drinks were safer than water. Everyone drank hard cider. President John Adams drank a tankard before breakfast. Babies drank it before going to bed. At the end of the nineteenth century, when Carry Nation took up her axe in the service of the temperance movement, she likely employed it on apple trees as well as saloons. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the apple had a serious public-relations problem. …
… David Bedford, its inventor, is a wiry, bushy-browed, sixty-year-old horticulturist, who speaks with a residual drawl from his early years in North Carolina, where his father was a preacher and his mother waan amateur biologist. As a child, he loved all kinds of fruit except apples. “I can still remember that Red Delicious apple—that sweet but overripe smell and that mealy soft texture,” he told me. “Kids trade their snacks, but no one would trade for a Red Delicious.”
Bedford attended WheatonCollege in Illinois, where, as a biology major, he became interested in plant breeding, and where he tasted a really good apple for the first time. Another student had brought a bushel back from Michigan. “I said, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is what I’ve been missing.’ It was the beginning of my awakening.” Upon graduation, he worked for three years in a nursery in Rapid City, South Dakota, and then went back to school for a master’s degree in horticulture at ColoradoStateUniversity. In 1979, he took a job at the University of Minnesota’s horticultural station, which maintains one of only three large-scale apple-breeding programs in the country. …
… With all these new trees coming on each year, you won’t have space unless you thin out the duds.” He sprayed another tree trunk with the mark of death. “But it is kind of nerve-racking, because you want to give the tree a chance to do its best. No one wants to be known as the guy who killed the next Honeycrisp.”
Bedford was very nearly that guy. In 1982, the year he took over the breeding program, he was looking through the trees that his predecessor in the job wanted removed. One was MN 1711, a variety that had achieved élite status and been cloned, but had not done well for several years. The mother tree had been damaged by a particularly cold winter the year before, and the four clones had been marked for termination. In studying the data, however, Bedford noticed that the mother tree had been planted in one of the lowest, wettest parts of the orchard. “So I thought, We’ll give that apple one more year,” he said. That apple turned out to be Honeycrisp. Released in 1991, thirty-one years after the original cross was made, it has become the apple of Bedford’s dreams—the humble Minnesota apple that made it onto the national, and then the international, stage. It brought a new kind of texture to apples: flesh that was crunchy but not hard or dense. “That changed the whole game,” Fred Wilklow, the owner of Wilklow Orchards, told me one Saturday this fall when I dropped in at the greenmarket in Borough Hall, Brooklyn, to buy some of his apples. As we were talking, another customer overheard the word “Honeycrisp.”
“Oh, my God, Honeycrisp—they are the best!” she said.
“See what I mean?” Farmer Fred said.
“What’s amazing about Honeycrisp,” Brian Nicholson, the president of Red Jacket Orchards, in New York’s Finger Lakes region, told me recently, “is that it brings in people who don’t even like apples that much—people who prefer peaches or berries or whatever. So it just expands the apple’s share of the fruit basket, and that helps all growers.” The patent, which expired in 2008, combined with sales rights abroad, earned the University of Minnesota more than ten million dollars in royalties, making it the third-most-valuable invention ever produced there, after Ziagen, a drug used to treat H.I.V., and a vaccine that prevents P.R.R.S., a reproductive and respiratory virus in pigs. In 2006, the Association of University Technology Managers named Honeycrisp one of twenty-five innovations that changed the world, along with Google and the V-chip….