Lavender or purple will likely be the color of the next CM we put in our yard. I prefer purple, mainly because it should give a more appealing contrast to the blue of the vitex we envision planting next to it. I can understand the interest in pruning to maintain a certain "fill" of foliage and bloom in a certain space. What I don't understand is how that awful, whacked look can be tolerated, even for a moment, while awaiting the return of the next season's growth in that desired look. Not meaning to sound all self-righteous here...it's just my gardening style, to use plants that are suited for the space available to them, instead of filling a space with a plant that has to be pruned to hideous (my opinion) to keep the plant within bounds, even if the view of the whacked look is only temporary. If I put, say, a CM variety with a mature size of 15 feet in a 5-foot space, that would just be too much work for me to keep the plant in bounds every year. I would want a plant with a mature size that fills the 5-foot space. I'm not a crape myrtle expert. But experience and intuition tell me (correctly I believe) a couple of things about the "radical annual pruning" of CMs (just my alternative term for the "murder"): (1) It weakens the plants overall; (2) It possibly deprives the plants and visiting wildlife of mutually beneficial, balanced and natural interaction, and (3) While enabling more concentrated bloom and dense top-growth, it raises risk of losing what might be preferred (a more appealing resultant appearance, that is) to storms or pests because of the naturally weaker new growth. My memory is always "dumping," but I believe I remember seeing some summer storm damage to CMs that were whacked the year before. So all the CMs had for foliage and bloom were the short, weak new branches all clustered together. Maybe I just saw some photos of that damage. Anyway, the damage made them look as if they had never leafed-out and bloomed at all, because all the new growth was torn and bent down, if not torn completely off. Those images, more than any others, swayed me away forever from the "murder" manner of pruning.

my experiences and history of my hometown, oak ridge, tn, the town was built in total secrecy in 1942 for the sole purpose of building an atomic bomb with which to end ww2. the workers were hired not knowing what they were making, why they were making it, and asked to trust those who told them what to do. there were 3 plants, y-12, k-25, and x-10. the largest, k-25, continues to be dismantled but is a slow process due to asbestos and nuclear contaminants. another is closed and another converted to a national laboratory. the workers never spoke about their jobs to each other or anyone else. the main street in town had many billboards promoting patriotism and pride in what they were doing, even if they didn't know what that was! interestingly, there were many female employees. at it's height, there were nearly 100,000 workers and the median age was 27. many didn't have college educations and they came from all over the country. lots were single and met and married co-workers and lived here the rest of their lives. as mentioned before, my family moved there in 1946 when i was 6 months old. we lived in one of the trailers at first then moved to a "tdu" (temporary dwelling unit" which was a 2 bedroom duplex. from then until my mom died in 2009, the family home was one of three of this type. there were 7-8 types of houses and you were assigned to yours depending on the importance of your job. i think rent in ours was originally maybe $20/month. my dad was the projectionist for the movie theater so not high up on the totum pole! the houses were never meant to last long and had interior walls that were the thickness of sheetrock. outer walls weren't much thicker. no insulation, coal stoves, and built up on stilts, if needed, to adapt to the contour of the land. one of our houses was built up high enough so that we could play under it and stand up. i spent hours sweeping dirt while playing house.........lol. my husband's father was in the accounting dept. at one of the plants and they had a better grade house than we did. to this day, people refer to what type house they used to live in....."A". "B". "C", "D", TDU, cemesto or flat top. even back then there were social stigmas based on your house and neighborhood since all houses in any given neighborhood were all one type. after the war ended the houses were sold to the occupants. in the case of duplexes, which we lived in, the side with seniority of time in residence was given the first option to buy the whole building for about $4,000 - $5,000. we were forced to find another house to move to and rent one side from an owner who didn't plan to convert it into one large house. we lived in one end of 4 different places, having to move when the owner who usually lived in the other side, decided to convert. i was 12 when we moved to what turned out to be the last time. my mother continued to rent until her death in 2009. i can remember rent being about $40 when i was a teenager and she was paying $325/mo when she died! this house was unchanged since the early 1940's other than paint, removal of the coal stove, and replaced bathroom sink and showerstall. hard as i tried, i couldn't blast her out of that place! the schools were segregated until the mid 50's. yes, i grew up in the front of the bus and never had any contact with a black person until late junior high or early high school. until the change was made, they had to be bussed to knoxville which was about 30 miles away. their neighborhood was physically segregated also and sat on the outskirts of town. each neighborhood had it's own elementary school...9 in all. the schools were all named after trees, or nature related - linden, willowbrook, cedar hill, woodland, etc. there were 2 junior highs and one high school. my graduating class of 1963 had over 400 students. the schools were top-notch and the high school was consistently in the top 100 in the us. this was due to having so many scientists living here and working on "the bomb" and needing quality education in order to keep them there. there were community programs that were implemented for the same reasons. my favorite was the summertime playground activities. each elementary school had "coaches", usually one male and female in their early 20's who planned and executed the activities - arts and crafts, costume contests, softball leagues with end of the season tournaments and a huge parade at the end of summer. i hung out there ever day, all day long. at some point in my youth, the city gave away blueprints that were made of some strange substance. they were layered and if you washed them multiple times they turned into a muslin type fabric that my mom made curtains out of! crazy...... another thing that might not have been unique to my town but we had a "rolling store" that was a converted bus that contained groceries and candy. it traveled through the neighborhoods on a regular schedule. there was also a library bus, the bookmobile, that came once a week so we could have access to library books without having to take the bus to the main library. i remember having air-raid drills quite often in elementary school. the town was surrounded ny barbwire fences and there was no air traffic allowed over the town. we had to cover our heads and duck under the desk during the drill. the sirens were sounded all throughout the town. i remember playing outside in open fields and finding huge clumps of grass that we would jump into the middle of and claim to be our spot if an air raid signal sounded while we were playing outside. in high school i was a cheerleader and we had to travel to neighboring cities for games. our opponents were seriously leery of us believing we were "radioactive". to this day, anyone who knows of the history of oak ridge is apt to comment on whether i glow in the dark having grown up there! there were small grocery stores in each neighborhood and a larger one in the center of town. we drove to the country each weekend for chickens, caught and butchered on the spot, and eggs. the town was built in a unique way. going east and west was the main road from one end to the other for about 9 miles, gate to gate. the main offshoots from "the turnpike" were names of states. they went at right angles for as far as possible and were alphabetically named after states. not every state was used and in later years there were new roads put in that broke the pattern. all of the lanes and circles branching off of, say, tennessee avenue, were named something with a "t", and so on for every state named street. it made it fairly easy to find where someone lived even if you just had to drive up and down tennessee looking for townsend.....you'd find it before too long. i left home in 1964, when i got married, and mc donalds had only been in town a couple of years. we had a u-shaped mall with jc penneys and sears and locally owned drive-in restaurants. eventually more retail opened but any major shopping had to be done in knoxville. in the 70's and 80's the main emphasis tended to be for the town to concentrate on medical facilities. the population is now tending to be elderly and very little retail.....just doctors and restaurants. the schools are still great and the high school athletics are still strong. we were state football champions in 1958 and that has been repeated a couple of times since. it was normal when we lived it but the older i got, the more unique and special my youth and experiences growing up here became. i guess i thought everyone would have learned in history class about the important part this little town in tennessee played in ending ww2. but then, wars aren't popular and maybe it's easier to not remember that time in the history of the us. this is a 10 minute video produced by a man who wants to get support for his screenplay. i don't understand the 9/11 connection and his fictiional parts he wants to include but it is an interesting look at the past. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQO7pOfBdxY i just found this site that has some interesting information and a short film, if you can get it to work. http://www.secretcitythemovie.com/

emagineer - This is from the blog Cote de Texas that I provided a link to in my post. Since it's been all about "Something's Gotta Give" I thought that Nancy Meyers' follow up movie "The Holiday" needed a closer look. Just as the star of Something's Gotta Give was the Hamptons house itself, the star of the "The Holiday" wasn't really Cameron Diaz or Kate Winslet, but their two homes, one in Los Angeles and one in the English Countryside, respectively. And in another connection between the two movies, the production team was led Jon Hutman - but Beth Rubino, so wonderful on the set of SGG, was absent for The Holiday. And just as with Something's Gotta Give, Nancy Meyers' personal interior designer has photos of "The Holiday" houses on his web site, but he is not mentioned in the film credits. The Holiday, coming so soon after Something's Gotta Give received a lot of prepublicity hype concerning its premise: two women swap houses for the Christmas vacation and both find love. For lovers of the SGG house, a new Nancy Meyers movie about TWO houses was almost too good to be true ! Jim

Steve, you believe that government oppresses the weak, and in doing so have bought into a narrative proposed by people who want to weaken citizens' trust in their government. In any kind of civilized society, a good part of the role of government is to protect the weak against the strong (forty hour work week, safety on the streets, assistance after natural disasters like hurricanes). You're abdicating that protection, which is exactly what organizations like the NRA want. They want a terrified citizenry who don't unite to protect themselves. Government is that unity; the democratic process is how individually unpowerful people make themselves powerful, and heard. You can cower in your house with a gun in hands, waiting for the bad guys of the hour to arrive, while the wealthy and violent take over the State. Or you can band together with all the other little people and help make a society that's safe not only for the strong, whether the strength comes from money or from guns, but for the weak: people without money, children, the aged, the sick, people overwhelmed by disasaters, natural or manmade. I've never owned a gun, and I don't intend ever to own one. Of course, now I live in Italy where people are relatively sane about weapons. But I wouldn't own one in the United States if I still lived there. I'm not temperamentally suited to possess a gun, and if I did injure or kill someone, unjustified or even, probably, justified, I'd never forgive myself. Better to be shot myself, and I do mean that. Actually I just read that people who have a gun in their homes in the U.S. have a statistically better chance of getting killed than those who don't, so not owning a gun is still the best safety bet. I'm putting my money on a civilized society, one in which it's safe for an elderly person with a walker to shuffle alone down the street, in which children can play on a playground without an armed guard to protect them, in which a middle-aged unathletic creaky woman--me--can go about my days without worrying about snipers or drive-by shooters, and without my needing someone strong, smart, and armed accompanying me in order for me to be safe. Otherwise, living in the United States is going to start being like living in Kabul. No, thanks.