A weed is a plant out of place

Karin got one of her largest paychecks of the year and went “hog wild” – literally – buying such a huge hunk of “clearance” pork that I had to lug it through the house for her.

Said she: “I’ll ask Scott” – her new stepfather – “to smoke it for us.”

Nothing doing. Karin’s mom & Scott moved into a new house this weekend. They no longer have access to their smoker.

I’m all for putting the pork into various slow cookers and then shredding it and eating it with homemade “Alabama” sauce.

(See, I am become a middle-aged man who talks about his meats.)

By the end of the week, we should have the picnic table that I ordered through Facebook Marketplace. I’ve been fond of picnic tables since I was in high school. I and my dorm-mates used to enjoy suppers out of doors.

Karin & I tend to pursue our respective “home improvement” ideas independently of one another. Her ambition for the back yard, tonight, was to pull out weeds that no one sees. This was complicated by her confusion as to what is and what isn’t a weed. I told her about a passage in Jim Thompson that I read not long ago, in which Lou Ford’s defense lawyer tells him a definition that comes “right out of the agronomy books”:
“A weed is a plant out of place.” I find a hollyhock in my cornfield, and it’s a weed. I find it in my yard, and it’s a flower. … You’re in my garden, Mr. Ford.
I’ve been revisiting the nineties’ contextualist epistemologists, whom I briefly studied many years ago, in order to read the aughts’ “pragmatic encroachment” epistemologists (whose work I was downright oblivious to at the time). Keith DeRose, in a recent collection of old and new essays, is apologetic because his “Solving the Skeptical Problem” is such a long paper. David Lewis ends his famous paper, “Elusive Knowledge,” by saying that although he could have written it longer, and nearer to the truth, that wouldn’t have been in anyone’s interest. His paper displays a certain amount of formalism thrown about informally, together with casual references to guys named Fred and Donald in the vicinity of San Francisco, in service of a view with Chestertonian paradoxicality. An insider’s paper: important, but surely a pain to teach. A paper with weed-like qualities in just about any home garden.