It was fun listening to Melvyn Bragg trying to get to grips with the ineffable mysteries of bird migration. The facts don't seem to have changed much since I taught the subject, decades ago,¹ although there are now many more of them. And almost all of those facts are clearly enough to make even Lord Bragg's mind boggle, as we heard throughout the show. But I kept waiting for one of the guests to make one key point.

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Michael Chabon is one of a couple of living authors whose words -- any words -- I fall upon with glee. Right now I'm working my way slowly through Manhood for Amateurs. Slowly both because these essays are so good that I don't want them to end and because they do also blend into one another, the most recently finished tending to obscure earlier ones.

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I've moaned publicly and to anyone who'll listen about how much I hate the way Instagram now shows me photos from the people I follow. Hating's not enough, though. You have to do something about it.

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Overlooking the Tiber, on the Trastevere side of the river, is a beautiful villa and garden that perfectly unite the artist and the agricultural biodiversity nut. And so it was, last Saturday, that The Main Squeeze and I found ourselves at the Villa Farnesina,¹ gazing in wonder at the frescoes that decorate the rooms. Of course we had both been there before, often. This time was different because of an exhibit -- I Colori della Prosperità: Frutti del Vecchio e Nuovo Mondo -- rendered in English as Colours of Prosperity Fruits from the Old and New World.

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My compadre Luigi linked, with scarcely a comment, to a plant breeding paper by Kevin Folta, scourge of biotech deniers everywhere.

Stripped down, what Folta and his co-author, Harry J Klee, propose is that plant breeders "can now turn to the consumer for guidance in defining critical desires,...

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