Welcome to day 16 of 31 Days of Apocalypse, Now, a month of posts about apocalypse, revelation, uncovering what’s been hidden. Each post will look at these ideas from its own vantage point, which may not obviously connect with the others, and which may only peripherally seem related. I won’t attempt to tie the posts together. They’ll all be listed here, as they are posted.

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Not a lot of time to write today, because of things I was uncovering and burying.

Most importantly, I planted the garlic. In two spots, as tradition dictates, the vegetable garden and the kitchen garden.  I buried them 1-2″ deep in soil and then further covered them with some fine straw mulch that I inherited when my friend Candis moved away 3 years ago. There’s enough left in the bag for at least another year of garlic mulching.

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I also “harvested” the two squashes (??) that grew from seeds buried in the compost bin, unbeknownst to me.

I think it’s sweet dumpling squash, based on this Epicurious photo below, maybe hybridised with something orange? Possibly something I got in last winter’s CSA share?

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I went to my last class on the year 1968, and we uncovered lots of news that didn’t get as much attention as it would have had there not been a war, protests, demonstrations, civil rights actions, political conventions, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy that year. And had there not been intentional cover-ups of much of it. For instance:

>> the crash of an American B52 bomber in Greenland, with 4 hydrogen bombs on board, spilling huge amounts of radioactive plutonium on the ice, necessitating a clean-up involving over 500 people, a large proportion of whom developed cancer later (disputed by some scientists, whose research is in turn disputed by others); and also, one of the bombs might not have broken up but instead crashed through the ice and remains in the ocean to this day

>> the hijacking of the spyship U.S.S. Pueblo by North Korea in international waters (it’s a tourist attraction there to this day), with the crew of more than 80 taken hostage, beaten, and tortured for 11 months, and with the Soviet Union acquiring the American decoding machine, which they used (along with spy John Walker’s codes) during the cold war to keep tabs on American military assets; the media followed the hostage situation for a while but soon it dropped from public view as other major events overtook the news cycle, which is why the hostages’ wives started the “Remember the Pueblo” movement.

>> the Nigerian civil war (aka Biafran War), which ran from July 1967 until surrender of the persecuted successionist Igbo people in January 1970, during which several hundred thousand Igbo were starved to death by Nigeria with Britain’s complicity (they had oil interests in Nigeria)

>> 6,000 sheep dying in Utah, the day after “a high-speed jet had sprayed 320 gallons of nerve gas VX across the Dugway [Proving Grounds] in a weapons test. The odorless, tasteless chemical is so deadly that less than 10 milligrams is enough to kill a human by asphyxiation, via paralysis of the respiratory muscles.” The Army never admitted culpability but the nerve gas toxins showed up in the sheeps’ blood and livers

>> British MP Enoch Powell’s “River of Blood” speech suggesting indirectly that in 15-20 years, “the black man will have the whip hand over the white man,” rallying sentiment against (black) immigrants, and attacking a bill to make racial discrimination illegal

>> the first Merrick Garlanding, the bottling up by filibuster of the nomination of Abe Fortas for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, by Republicans and southern Dixiecrats; Robert Griffin (R-MI) strategised that Johnson was a lameduck president, and with Bobby Kennedy dead Nixon would likely become president and would be sure to nominate someone conservatives preferred if Congress could just stonewall Fortas’s nomination, which they did. Northerners didn’t like Fortas’s role in voting for the Miranda Rights and his laxity in censorship of what they deemed porn (the film I Am Curious Yellow, e.g.,), and southerners didn’t like his votes for civil rights.

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And after all of that I looked out the family room window and thought I was having a hallucination. A flock of wild turkeys, who hadn’t visited us for a couple of years, was actually parading through the yard, unearthing in the grass as they strutted. The cat was also mesmerised.

I had a little trouble getting clear shots through the window, so I checked the motion camera to see how it did, and lo & behold, they had visited us around 10 this morning, too.

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contrary to popular

belief elephants don’t actually bury

their dead lacking the necessary

shovels & opposable thumbs rather

they are known to throw leaves

& dirt upon the deceased & this

is a kind of language — from “Bury” by sam sax

What did you uncover or bury today?