“Our broccoli will not look like the widgety California broccoli ’til cooler fall weather arrives,” Kimberely Rector advises Chicago subscribers to the Angelic Organics community-supported farm in Boone County, in Farm News (August 5). “Unless you have gardened yourself, unless you have become used to the vagaries of weather, become used to the variations in vegetable appearances, you may judge our broccoli harshly, asking ‘What kind of broccoli is this?’ Ours is a perfectly valid manifestation of broccoli, but one to which the supermarket shopper is unaccustomed….We practice celebrating cultural diversity, the unique gift that each of us brings to a community…but we usually want all our tomatoes to look the same.”
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In the reign of Richard II. Mayor Daley won every contested roll call vote in the city council during his 1991-’95 term of office, with an average 59 percent support– higher than any mayor since Michael Bilandic, according to a report by Karen Nagel and Victor Crown in Illinois Politics (July/August). Six black aldermen voted with Daley most of the time, even though he received less than 30 percent of the mayoral vote in their wards. They were Carrie Austin (34th), Lorraine Dixon (8th), Percy Giles (37th), Arenda Troutman (20th), Sam Burrell (29th), and Jesse Miller (24th, since defeated). On the other side, two white lakefront independents, Joseph Moore (49th) and Helen Shiller (46th), were Daley’s staunchest opponents, despite the fact that their wards gave the mayor landslide margins in his re-election bid.
Headlines of the future: U.S. Products Boycotted by Chinese on Human-Rights Grounds. From a May 9 speech by U.S. senator Phil Gramm, published by the Heritage Foundation: “Every year since I’ve been in Congress Jesse Helms, my dear friend, has offered an amendment to ban Chinese goods produced by prison labor. And every year I wonder why we can’t make our own prisoners work.”
Ratio of Australia’s entire gross national product to the U.S. defense budget, according to the Hyde Park-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (September/October): 1:1.
