Twitter

These days I post mostly on Twitter, so it's quiet here for now. I will say that Twitter does not lend itself to long discussions, however.

The balcony this week

The tomatoes have exploded. There is no other word for it. Now drinking a gallon of water a day, they create a cupful of suckers every day that need to be snipped or plucked off to put plant energy into food production and not leaves. Next time it'll be just one plant in a 14-gallon tote. Or I'll just go with more cucumbers, which have been producing roughly 4 cucumbers every two weeks. At that rate, four cucumber plants would suffice (extra for redundancy) to supply cucumbers for the spring, making me for the first time truly self-sufficient in one product at least.

It's a jungle out there

The cucumbers are growing nicely up the twine trellis. The fruit in the lower right, a bit dark, doubles every day. I'll probably harvest it in a week.

Growin' to the sky

 Maybe there should be a small cage around the edges so that toads and lizards can be put in to live in and among the plants. How about a fountain, eh? A pond? I'm already planning to suspend vinyl fence posts from the railing to expand the growing space, in an ebb-and-flow system. We'll see how that goes. There definitely will be another system to grow Ichiban eggplants soon too. If they take up too much space the mint's going to have to be suspended from the railing as well. Future plans include terracing pots or a stepped hydroponic system down the stairs, cuz I need more space (!). Onward.

Cucumber

Fresh from a coworker. It's an Asian variety called "Green Dragon". Nothing like store-bought cucumbers - the skin is soft and not bitter. It will go into tzatziki tomorrow.

Musical Palindromes (and more)

In the minuet in Haydn’s Symphony No. 47, the orchestra plays the same passage forward, then backward.





The enigmatic Canon 1 and 2 from J. S. Bach's Musical Offering (1747). The manuscript depicts a single musical sequence that is to be played front to back and back to front.

An example of a crab canon (from Wikipedia):



There is also a palindrome in Hindemith's Ludus Tonalis: the Postludium is an retrograde inversion of the Praeludium.

A page from the original edition. Drawings are by Hindemith himself, for his wife.
More here: http://www.hindemith.info/en/life-work/biography/1939-1945/werk/composing-in-wartime/

Memory is an interesting concept

As you can see below, I obviously forgot posting the same thing, nearly word for word, on Monday. So here's some prime loquats instead: