paulsdatter is trish

A poem about how much I hate putting on make-up

She perfects her bruises with

frosted plum

night plum

stone violet

and makes spiders legs of her lashes

Prop 37: A Word From our Peter G

Thoughtful words from my good friend Peter Giuliano. In California, we have a lot of things on the ballot to deal with. This Prop 37 has found wide support from most of my friends and family. Still, we have suffered under some pretty badly written laws in the past. Here Peter says we can agree to agree - which is encouraging even if this law won’t fix it all…

A last thought about prop 37 for my Californian friends: I value the dialogue I’ve had about this issue, online and off. The research I did on this subject taught me things about GMOs, about Monsanto, about our food system, about the way we do law in California, and the way we enforce law. My opinion that 37 is a bad law is unchanged, and I think we should all vote against it, but I have been inspired by the passion with which people WANT to do something positive about our food system. There has been more discussion among my friends and family about this proposition than any other, and that means something to me: people really care.

And so, here’s what I really want to say: no matter whether 37 fails or passes, we can’t stop working towards a more sustainable food system. We need more research, more understanding about plant genetics and their implications, more awareness about what climate change and global water scarcity do to agriculture, and a better approach to agrochemicals and industrial farming. The debate we began around 37 can be a start to a real movement, whether the law itself passes or fails. So let’s keep it up, shall we? - Peter Giuliano

UNIFORM-SCAA Cupping Form

Along with any extremely detailed tool -such as the official SCAA cupping form- we naturally get a lot more questions…and sometimes we get different solutions or interpretations about how to use the tool. Maybe this can and should be expected. Sometimes people decide this is damn good sure proof that the tool sucks. But I don’t believe that. I think the dialectical discussion is well worth the time and energy. It is for me, anyway. If you don’t like it, you can easily tune out and just use the tools you like, and I have NO problem with that.

So that said, let’s get into a little thing that recently came up about the UNIFORMITY spots on the SCAA form.

Q: If ALL the cups in the set are defective, doesn’t that mean it’s uniform?

A: Nope. If all cups are defective, there is a slim chance, if any, that the defect is uniform in all cups. You might have ferment in all cups, but are you trying to tell me that all the beans were consistently and uniformly fermenty? I’m saying it’s highly unlikely, so if you’re just going to the literal mandate to find “sameness” in uniformity, I’m saying nope.

But besides that, that is not the purpose of the uniformity category- and this gets into my (and some other cuppers’) interpretation of the form. If all cups are wrong, then they are out. If you find four cups wrong, they are out and only one is “uniform”.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.