Timelies all!

We have been Cleaning All The Things in preparation for my parents' arrival tomorrow.(It's the usual Northern migration)

I was going to make gluten-free brownies and they are crumbly.

Do you make them from scratch (not a mix), or a mix? The Betty Crocker GF brownies hang together really damn well. I made them last weekend with M&Ms on top, and they were devoured quickly by mostly non-GF people. Pretty tasty.

Side note: if you find a red flower in the wild, it's probably pollinated by birds. Most insects, including bees, can't distinguish red. (That may also be a reason that some trees have red or purple leaves in Spring - it helps protect the young, tender leaves from insect predation. They can go green and start photosynthesising once they've matured and are less delectable.)

Oh! Oh! Oh! I knew that! Except for the fact I had totally forgotten it until you brought it up...

An important point from the article: different species of plant use different vectors for pollination. It's the plants that favour wind-borne pollination that cause allergies, as it's their pollen that winds up in the air (of course). By definition, these are not the plants that bees are visiting, and so the allergy-causing pollen won't wind up in anyone's honey.

See also, why those Benadryl ads with the blooming flowers make me cranky.

(But keep buying the local honey anyway. It won't cure your allergies, but it does support local small farmers! And it's delicious!)

They gave people local honey, manufactured honey, and honey flavored syrup and there wasn't any notable difference in allergy symptoms amongst the three.

Okay. On to the hookworms it is!

eta: And local honey, for the placebo effect and to compensate for the trauma of the hookworms.

(But keep buying the local honey anyway. It won't cure your allergies, but it does support local small farmers! And it's delicious!)

Indeed. I'm still ignoring the hookworms.

So, what's Mel Gibson's deal?

Has he always been this anti-semitic? I think he actually might be the most anti-semitic person I have ever heard of in modern times outside of the Klan. His vicious epithets I haven't heard before.

So are you telling me that when he was in Lethal Weapon, he was this big of an asshole?

Because I find him irredeemable, odious, and vile. I didn't like him much before the latest revelations came out, but now I am putting him in the category of Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, and John Derbyshire

Mel Gibson has been saying antisemitic stuff for a while, but I don't think it really made the news much until the time he was arrested for drunk driving. There were some comments before that, but nothing that was so obviously out-of-line that it got a ton of attention -- mostly just vague sort of half-answers when he was asked about his father, who's a member of some Catholic group that believes that Vatican II was a Jewish plot to bring down the Catholic church, or something.

Our friend K, who worked with him (and is Jewish BTW), said he was always nice and respectful and warm. But that was a decade ago and he might have gotten more unhinged since then.

Oh Allyson, that guy's anti Beastie's stance has no credibility at all. They've been recognized as one of the most influential groups in rock and rap for decades now. Hence, the hall of fame.

Just on Paul's Boutique alone they could've coasted in.

Here's their writeup at Allmusic which is pretty close to a critical consensus:

As the first white rap group of any importance, the Beastie Boys received the scorn of critics and strident hip-hop musicians, both of whom accused them of cultural pirating, especially since they began as a hardcore punk group in 1981. But the Beasties weren't pirating -- instead, they treated rap as part of a post-punk musical underground, where the D.I.Y. aesthetics of hip-hop and punk weren't that far apart. Of course, the exaggerated b-boy and frat-boy parodies of their unexpected hit debut album, Licensed to Ill, didn't help their cause. For much of the mid-'80s, the Beastie Boys were considered macho clowns, and while they dismissed that theory with the ambitious, Dust Brothers-produced second album, Paul's Boutique, it was ignored by both the public and the press at the time.

In retrospect, Paul's Boutique was one of the first albums to predict the genre-bending, self-referential pop kaleidoscope of '90s pop. The Beasties refined their eclectic approach with 1992's Check Your Head, where they played their own instruments. Check Your Head brought the Beasties back to the top of the charts, and within a few years, they were considered one of the most influential and ambitious groups of the '90s, cultivating a musical community not only through their music, but with their record label, Grand Royal, and their magazine of the same name.