Garden Progress; The Smooth Chin of Infidelity

My wildflower meadow project is not shaping up too impressively. The started plants that I put in still look healthy, and some have already produced nice blooms. Unfortunately, crabgrass is running rampant over much of the garden, in some places overshadowing our started plants. I can see few if any sprouts that look like anything other than crabgrass, dandelions, and other weeds that usually spring up on open ground. I'm still hoping for a miracle. If it doesn't come, I'm going to try again next year, hopefully getting things in the ground earlier.

On the other hand, our basil is doing splendidly, tomatoes are right on schedule, and our pumpkin vines are thriving. If even half the blossoms on those mature into pumpkins, come Halloween we're going to have enough to run from one end of our porch to the other.

Juan Cole's blog entry for today contains a link to a Reuters item reporting a truly bizarre twist to the violence in Iraq. In Baghdad Tuesday, militants shot three barbers dead for committing the un-Islamic act of shaving men clean. Apparently there have been about a dozen such incidents in Baghdad during the last year. Hard to believe this isn't fiction, something out of an absurdist drama or Thomas Pynchon novel. According to Cole, Muslim fundmentalists believe men must wear beards in honor of Mohammed, who also wore one. All well and good as a tribute, I guess, but if the practice becomes a religious duty enforcible by death, it would seem to fly in the face of Islam's adamant rejection of idolatry, perhaps embodyng the sin of shirk . At least that's one infidel's take. My knowledge of Islam is not great, but I have a suspicion that most Muslims do not see Mohammed's appearance as the most important example of his to follow.