September 17, 2014 Pears Like Little Buddhas by Rebecca Rupp Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Manor Garden” includes the line “The pears fatten like little buddhas”—which, I always thought, was the perfect simile for placid, fat-bellied, ripening pears. Now, it turns out, it’s no longer a simile. Nowadays we can produce pears that look exactly like fat little buddhas, complete with folded arms, plump tummies, and meditative smiles. The secret is a plastic mold made by China’s Fruit Mould Company, a manufacturing group that also sells supplies for making heart-shaped watermelons, star-shaped cucumbers, apples with gnomish faces, and sultry peaches shaped like human behinds. People have been fiddling with their fruits and vegetables since the dawn of agriculture. At first, our primary aims were size and productivity—that is, bigger, faster-growing food and lots of it. Then we went for looks. In the Americas, well before the arrival of Columbus, prehistoric farmers had developed hundreds of flashy varieties of corn and beans, both in a range of gorgeous and gaudy colors; dozens of varieties of peppers; and a mind-boggling array of tomatoes. Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún, in his General History of the Things of New Spain (1577), includes an awed description of the tomatoes on sale in the Aztec market of Tenochtítlan: …large tomatoes, small tomatoes, leaf tomatoes, thin tomatoes, sweet tomatoes, large serpent tomatoes, nipple-shaped tomatoes, serpent tomatoes…coyote tomatoes, sand tomatoes, those which are yellow, very yellow, quite yellow, red, very red, quite ruddy, ruddy, bright red, reddish, rosy dawn colored. Interest in appearance inevitably led to judgment calls: some fruits and vegetables were deemed better-looking than others. An early candidate on the reject list was the curly cucumber. Cucumbers are particularly prone to this quirky condition, which is officially referred to as a deformity and called “crooking.” Faced with incomplete pollination, poor nutrition, or less-than-ideal growing conditions, the developing cucumber responds by curling up like a pestered pill bug. Cucumber curl has annoyed gardeners at least since the days of the ancient Chinese, who recommended hanging stones from the ends of cucumbers, in hopes that traction would force them to straighten out. The Romans dealt with wayward cucumbers by growing them inside hollow reeds or canes. The Victorians solved the problem with cucumber glasses, cylindrical containers available in sizes up to 24 inches long, in which immature cucumbers were inserted and thereby forced to keep to the straight and narrow. The cucumber glass was invented by engineer George Stephenson (1781-1848), otherwise famous for building the world’s first railroad for steam locomotives, and sometimes known as the “Father of Railways.” He seems to have liked his cucumbers both straight and sliced thin, since he also reputedly invented (or improved upon) the cucumber slicer. The cucumber glass operates much like the Buddha pear mold, in that the immature fruit is tucked into it and fastened in place; then, as the fruit grows, it fills in the mold and takes its shape. A similar technique was introduced about 20 years ago by a Japanese farmer on the island of Shikoku for growing “square” (actually cuboidal) watermelons encased in glass boxes. Corseted in this fashion, the average watermelon takes about 18 days to go from oblong to square. The stackable square melons are a boon to space-strapped Japanese markets; they’re also easier to transport; and consumers like them because they fit nicely in the family refrigerator. The drawback: they’re expensive, costing up to three times the price of non-square melons. Consumers these days—accustomed to uniformity and vegetable pulchritude—don’t like it when their produce looks odd. We tend to spurn forked carrots, lumpy potatoes, Siamese-twin-like beets, too-small apples, and the aforementioned curly cucumbers. In fact, we’re actually protected from such funny-looking food by law. Regulations promulgated by the European Union, for example—noted for its Byzantine pickiness—include mathematical limits for the acceptable cucumber (must be “reasonably well shaped and practically straight (maximum height of the arc: 10 mm per 10 cm of the length of cucumber)”), carrot (“not forked, free from secondary roots”), and apple (nothing under 50 mm (2 inches) in diameter or 70 grams (2.5 ounces) in weight). The result of such retail standardization, on both sides of the Atlantic, is massive food waste. Various studies suggest that up to 40% of fruit and vegetables never make it to consumers’ tables because they’re simply not up to aesthetic snuff. A 2012 paper from the U.S. National Resources Defense Council reports that post-harvest culling eliminates immense quantities of homely, but nutritious and edible, food. One cucumber farmer estimated that less than half of his annual crop actually leaves the farm, though 75% of the rejects are, taste-wise, just fine. A tomato packing company reported that, in tomato season, it discards 22,000 pounds of nutritious, but malformed, tomatoes every 40 minutes. The EU—pressured by protesters—has revoked its restrictions on 26 types of produce, though the rules remain in place for ten others, which collectively constitute 75% of the European fruit and vegetable trade. Among these are such popular edibles as apples, citrus fruits, peaches, pears, peppers, and tomatoes. Photo of a buddha pear on a tree. Some supermarkets have gallantly gone to bat for homely food. France’s Intermarché chain, for example, recently launched an “Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables” campaign, complete with glossy posters variously featuring the Disfigured Eggplant, Ugly Carrot, Ridiculous Potato, Hideous Orange, Grotesque Apple, and Failed Lemon. Their aim is to convince consumers that lopsided and lumpy fruits and veggies are just as scrumptious as their sleek and spiffy counterparts. As an added incentive, the chain sells them at a 30% discount. In view of concerns about increasing food prices and agricultural sustainability, this is no time to be tossing tons of food away. When it comes to eating—let’s face it—pretty isn’t everything. Handsome is as handsome does. This story is part of National Geographic’s special eight-month Future of Food series. References: For some impressive images of 19th-century cucumber straighteners, see Edible Geography’s Clod Crushers and Cucumber Straighters by Nicola Twilley. Gunders, Dana. Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill. National Resources Defense Council Issue Paper, August 2012. The Chinese aren’t the only ones. At Disney’s Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida, horticulturists use molds to grow Mickey-Mouse-shaped pumpkins.

MH17 crash: Dutch experts say numerous objects hit plane

Dutch experts say Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 broke up in mid-air after being hit by "objects" that "pierced the plane at high velocity" in July.

The new report also said there was "no evidence of technical or human error".

Correspondents say this matches claims that MH17 was hit by missile shrapnel.

Investigators relied on cockpit data, air traffic control and images, as the crash site in eastern Ukraine remains too dangerous to access amid fighting between government troops and rebels.

The plane was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it crashed in rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine.

All 298 people on board, most of them from the Netherlands, died when the plane came down, amid reports it was shot down by pro-Russian rebels.

The crash site was in rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine, making the investigation even more difficult
Analysis: Richard Westcott, Transport correspondent
This report doesn't say flight MH17 was knocked from the sky by a missile. But it pretty much rules out anything else.

There were no emergencies on board, no mechanical problems, the pilots didn't make any mistakes.

Instead, it talks about the plane being punctured by "high-velocity objects", which is consistent with how the BUK missile system works (that's the system many suspect was responsible). They don't actually hit the target, they explode nearby and pepper it with shrapnel for maximum damage.

But all of this doesn't answer the critical question. Who fired the missile?

Both sides in this conflict use the same weapon. To find out who made this terrible mistake, they need to determine where on the ground the missile was actually launched from. And one expert told me that they should eventually be able to work that out with a combination of radar data and evidence from the scene.

There is one very sobering fact also highlighted in this report. Three other, very large commercial airliners flew over the same area at around the same time.

Investigators say the cockpit voice recorder "gave no indication that there was anything abnormal" on board

The Dutch team analysed photographs of the wreckage that showed a number of pieces with multiple holes
They said the plane "broke up in the air probably as the result of structural damage caused by a large number of high-velocity objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside."

The cockpit voice recorder revealed no signs of any technical faults or an emergency situation, the experts said.

The investigators have not visited the crash site because of fighting in the area but they said photographic evidence of the wreckage suggests the plane split into pieces during "an in-flight break up".

Maintenance history showed the aircraft was airworthy and had no known technical problems when it took off from Amsterdam, the report added.

Experts said it was manned by "a qualified and experienced crew" and that engines were running normally at 293 knots at 33,000ft (cruise altitude).

Radio communications between the pilot and Ukrainian air traffic control confirm that no emergency call was made.

Criminal investigation
While it is not the final report into the crash, the findings are significant because they are the first official account of what happened, says the BBC's Anna Holligan in the Netherlands.

The report does not attribute blame or liability for the crash but a separate criminal investigation is being conducted by prosecutors in The Hague, she adds.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak welcomed the report, saying it "leads to the strong suspicion that a surface-to-air missile brought MH17 down".

Meanwhile, the rebel leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, Aleksandr Zakharchenko, insisted the separatists did not have the capability to shoot down the plane.

"I can say one thing only: we simply do not have the kind of hardware that could have downed a commercial Boeing, including that Malaysian plane," he told the Russian Interfax news agency.

Ukraine's government and several Western leaders say there is strong evidence that pro-Russian separatists shot down the plane with an anti-aircraft system known as Buk.

Russia has consistently denied allegations that it had supplied any missiles or weapons to the rebels.

The Russian government denies delivering arms to the separatists
The search for evidence has been hampered by heavy fighting in the region, and Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai called on both sides to grant investigators full access.

"The crash site is a criminal investigation area and it is imperative that we protect the integrity of the crash site and allow the investigation to proceed," he said.

More than 2,600 people have been killed and thousands more wounded since violence between rebels and Ukrainian government forces erupted in April.

The Dutch Safety Board is leading an international probe to try to piece together evidence on what happened to flight MH17.

Experts from the UK, Germany, Australia, Malaysia, the US, Ukraine and Russia are collaborating on the case.

The board says it expects the final report to be published within a year.

Key findings of report
Likely that damage resulted in loss of structural integrity of aircraft, leading to break-up in the air
Forward parts of plane found near Petropavlivka closest to last flight data broadcast
Cockpit window contained numerous small puncture holes suggesting small objects entered from above level of cockpit floor
Damage to forward section indicates plane penetrated by large number of high-velocity objects from outside
No evidence found of manipulation of flight and data recorders
No indication of technical or operational issues with plane or crew
Malaysia plane crash: What we know

Were you or was someone you know affected by the crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17? What is your reaction to the interim report into the causes? You can email your thoughts to Haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk

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10 Theories About Who Really Wrote The Bible
LARRY JIMENEZ SEPTEMBER 8, 2014

An ordinary Christian and a biblical scholar look at the Bible in tremendously different ways. The average churchgoer knows nothing of the textual problems beneath the familiar words. Bible scholars, however, consider the book a human artifact like any other. They have made it their life’s work to decode and deconstruct it from that perspective. From studying the texts themselves, Bible scholars have come up with many theories on who actually wrote the scriptures. These theories provide serious challenges to traditional assumptions on Bible authorship.

10Moses Did Not Write The Pentateuch
Jews and Christians widely believe that Moses wrote the first five books in the Bible. Beginning with some medieval rabbis, however, doubts about this claim have been raised. As an obvious starting point, Moses could not have written Deuteronomy 34:5–10, which speaks about his death. But this glaring inconsistency is just the beginning. The books contain anachronisms that Moses could not have written. Genesis 36, for example, lists Edomite kings who lived long after Moses died. The Philistines are mentioned in Genesis, yet they did not arrive in Canaan until 1200 B.C., after the time of Moses. Genesis 12:6 implies that the author was writing after the Canaanites had been driven out of the region, something that didn’t happen until the time of Moses’s successor Joshua. Similarly, a clue in Genesis 36:31 suggests that the text was written when Israel was already a monarchy. Genesis 24 mentions domesticated camels, but camels were not domesticated until much later. The caravan trade in Genesis 37:25 only flourished in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. An early explanation for these textual anomalies was that Moses wrote the core of the Pentateuch, but later editors, such as Ezra, made additions. But in 1670, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza first proposed that Moses did not pen any of these books at all. It was common practice in the ancient Near East to attribute a work to an ancestral hero, or even a god, to legitimize its message and contents. That is probably what happened here.


9The Documentary Hypothesis
Photo credit: Willy Horsch
In the 19th century, scholars began to discover more inconsistencies and anomalies in the Bible, and its compositional history appeared more complex than anyone had previously thought. In 1886, the German historian Julius Wellhausen proposed that the Hexateuch (the Pentateuch plus Joshua) was a composite of four distinct documents by different authors. These documents were labeled J (Jahwist), E (Elohist), D (Deuteronomist), and P (Priestly), and each has its own theology and agenda. This theory explains overlapping or repetitive stories (“doublets”) such as the two accounts of Creation and the two accounts of the Flood—Genesis 7:17 describes a 40-day flood, while Genesis 8:3 describes one lasting 150 days. It is believed that later editors stitched together the multiple sources into one narrative, sometimes intertwining two versions of a single story and neglecting to iron out the seams, as can be seen in the Flood narrative. The J source calls God “Yahveh,” or “Jahveh” in German, hence the designation “J.” It pictures God in anthropomorphic terms, appearing to people like Abraham face-to-face. E calls the deity “Elohim,” who shows Himself indirectly, as in dreams. D is the source for Deuteronomy as well as the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. It defines God as having no form that anyone can see at all. P is cultic in its character and is obsessed with genealogies and lists.More recently, the idea of four separate, complete, and coherent documents has come under question, but the composite character of the Pentateuch remains the commonly accepted view.

8Deuteronomy Originated As Royal Propaganda
Deuteronomy means “Second Law.” It is theorized that the book was produced during the time of King Josiah in the seventh century to promulgate new laws strengthening the priesthood and creating a more exclusive religion for Judah. The new set of laws reinterprets the old law given at Sinai in light of new political and social realities. Its language presupposes an audience living in established cities and towns with a central Temple. The legislation for a central sanctuary supersedes the earlier law in Exodus 20:24, suggesting that Deuteronomy was written long after Israel’s sojourn in the wilderness.In 1805, W.M.L. De Wette theorized that the “Book of the Law” discovered in the Temple in Josiah’s reign was in fact Deuteronomy. Proponents of this view think that the document was deliberately planted to be conveniently discovered. The commands in Deuteronomy are identical to the reforms implemented by Josiah, and so the book may have been written by royal propagandists to give divine sanction to the king’s actions.There is also evidence that Deuteronomy is a composite work, written in different time periods. The book found in the Temple was the main part. Individual passages, however, suggest that the Babylonian Exile of the sixth century B.C. had already happened. These passages may have been added at a later date.

7Daniel Is ‘Prophecy-After-The-Fact’The Book of Daniel is often paired with the Book of Revelation as providing the road map of future end-time events. Many alleged prophecies in Daniel were fulfilled, but is that because Daniel was a divinely inspired seer? Critical scholars see a more mundane explanation. Daniel might actually be a Jew from the Hellenistic period, not a person from the Babylonian court. His so-called prophecies were made ex eventu, or after the fact, so that he could pass himself off as a genuine seer. The book itself betrays more than one author. Chapters 1–6 were written in Aramaic, while chapters 7–12 are in Hebrew. Daniel makes many historical errors when talking about the Babylonian period, the time in which he supposedly lived. For example, he claims that Belshazzar was the son of Nebuchadnezzar, but the Nabonidus Cylinder found in Ur names Nabonidus as Belshazzar’s actual father. Also, Belshazzar was a crown prince but never a king, contrary to Daniel’s claim. In Daniel 5:30, Daniel writes that a certain Darius the Mede conquered Babylon. It was actually Cyrus the Great, a Persian and not a Mede, who overthrew Babylon. On the other hand, Daniel writes about events of the Hellenistic era with extreme accuracy. Chapter 11, presented as prophecy, is on the mark in every detail. This leads to the conclusion that Daniel was witness to these events but not to those of the Babylonian period, on which he is vague and unfamiliar. Scholars thus place the writings of Daniel at around 167–164 B.C., during the persecution of the Jews by Syrian tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes. The book was meant as inspirational fiction to encourage the Jews in their time of trial. Daniel did take a shot at making a real prophecy, predicting the death of Antiochus in the Holy Land. This genuine prophecy turned out to be wrong. Antiochus actually died in Persia in 164 B.C.

6The Gospels Are Not Eyewitness Accounts
The four canonical gospels in the New Testament are anonymous. The names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not attached to them until the second century. Whoever the original evangelists were, they never claimed they were reporting actual events they themselves saw. The gospels function more like religious advertisements than biographies of Jesus in that they are theologically motivated. Each presents a particular interpretation of Jesus in which Jesus serves as a spokesperson for an evangelist’s theological position. In Matthew, the most Jewish of the Gospels, we hear Jesus proclaim the continuing validity of the Torah. In the gentile-oriented John, Jesus Himself breaks the Sabbath. Mark presents a Jesus who is in agony and distress before His death; the Johannine Jesus, by contrast, is calm and in total control.Some scholars have proposed that the Gospels were written as midrash, a Jewish interpretative technique that reworks old scriptural narratives into new forms—a “remake,” as Hollywood would style it. Thus, Jesus’s 40-day sojourn in the desert parallels Moses’s 40 years of exile in Midian. When Jesus comes out of the desert announcing the Kingdom of God, that was taken from Moses returning from exile and proclaiming Israel’s coming liberation from slavery. The call of the Twelve Disciples was inspired by Elijah’s call of Elisha. And so on it goes—the gospels were constructed from bits and pieces of old stories but with new cast members and a new stage.

5Matthew And Luke Plagiarized Mark
 The majority of New Testament scholars agree that Mark’s gospel was written first out of all four gospels. It is short, was written in poor Greek, and contains geographical and other errors. Rather than being independent accounts of the life of Jesus, the gospels of Matthew and Luke can be shown to have borrowed heavily from Mark, in some instances even copying him almost verbatim. Matthew uses about 607 of Mark’s 661 verses; Luke incorporates 360. To their credit, Matthew and Luke improved on Mark’s original text. They corrected grammar, style, accuracy, and theology. For example, Mark 5:1 erroneously calls the eastern edge of the Sea of Galilee the country of the Gerasenes, which is actually more than 50 kilometers (30 mi) away. Matthew 8:28 substitutes the more plausible Gadara, a spa only 12 kilometers (8 mi) from the lake. In Mark 7:19, Jesus “declares all foods clean,” something the Torah-observant Matthew apparently disagreed with, since he didn’t copy the statement in his parallel account. Mark wrongly attributes a quote from Malachi to Isaiah; Matthew 3:3 corrects this mistake. Mark’s more primitive Christology allows Jesus to be called “Lord” only once, and not by a Jew. In the more developed Christology of Matthew, “Lord” is used 19 times, and in Luke, it’s used 16 times.

4The Lost Gospel Q
Matthew and Luke share common material not found in Mark. Scholars suspect they had a document, now lost, as their source for these sayings, which they call “Q” (from the German Quelle, or source). We can reconstruct Q by noting the commonalities between Matthew and Luke. Q must have included such biblical gems as the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer. Verbal agreements between Matthew and Luke suggest the non-Markan material must have been taken from a written, not oral, source. Matthew and Luke could not have copied from each other because each has stories that contradict the other (e.g., the Birth Narrative and the Resurrection).Q is largely a collection of sayings, not a narrative. Matthew and Luke put the sayings in a narrative context, and they used different styles. For example, Matthew incorporated the Beatitudes into Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, while Luke chose to break up the same sermon and scatter it throughout his story.The recovery of Q led researchers to a strange conclusion. Since Q does not contain any Passion story, whoever first wrote the document must have regarded Jesus as a teacher of wisdom and nothing more. Jesus’s death held no salvific significance for that writer.

3Simon Magus And St. Paul Were The Same Person
While some of this article’s theories have been accepted by mainstream critical scholars, others venture into more speculative scenarios. One of these concerns Simon Magus. Church fathers condemned him as the originator of Gnostic heresy, with its hostility to the God of the Jews and the Torah. So it may come as a shock that Paul, the foremost Christian apostle and author of much of our New Testament, might actually be the same person as Simon. It is difficult to obtain a consistent train of thought from Paul’s epistles. The writings are rambling and disjointed with conflicting theologies. Did Paul uphold the Law or didn’t he? Did he allow women to participate in church or didn’t he? Did he seek approval for his gospel from men or didn’t he? Scholars such as Herman Detering and Robert Price propose the radical view that the Pauline letters have been interpolated into and reworked by later scribes to erase or tone down its Gnostic concepts. This made it more palatable to the infant proto-orthodox Roman Church. The unadulterated original letters, it is suggested, must be the work of Simon Magus or one of his followers. Parallels exist between Simon and Paul. Simon was notorious for his encounter with the apostle Peter. In Galatians 2:11–14, Paul and Peter are at odds with each other. Simon was called the “Father of Heresies”; Paul was called the “Apostle of the Heretics.” Simon claimed to be someone great, saying “the small shall become great.” The Latin name “Paul” means “small.” The Jewish historian Josephus tells of a magician who may have been Simon whom he calls “Atomus” or “indivisible,” i.e., “small.”If the identification of Paul with Simon is correct, a large part of the New Testament was founded on the works of an arch-heretic.

2The Pastoral Epistles Are Forgeries
Photo credit: Pvasiliadis/Wikimedia
The letters to Timothy and Titus differ from the writing style and theological focus of the genuine epistles of Paul. This suggests that the Pastorals were actually the work of a forger trying to ride on the coattails of Paul’s authority. Most scholars, not wanting to call the Pastorals “forgeries,” label them “pseudepigrapha” instead, which amounts to the same thing. Of the 848 words (excluding proper names) found in the Pastorals, 306 were never used in the rest of the Pauline epistles. The vocabulary of the Pastorals is more like the language of popular Hellenistic philosophy than the language of Paul. The literary style also betrays the forger. While Paul uses dynamic and emotional Greek, the Pastorals are serene and meditative. Finally, the letters focus on issues of more concern to an emerging second-century Catholicism than to a first-century Paul, such as church organization and the preservation of tradition. In writing the Pastorals, the emergent Church transformed Paul from a Gnostic “Apostle of the Heretics” to a defender of proto-orthodoxy. Professor David Trobisch has a suspect in mind for the forgery: Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna. Trobisch says that Polycarp virtually signs his name in II Timothy 4: “The cloak that I left at Troas, with Carpus, when thou comest, bring with thee, and the books, especially the parchments.” The name Carpus, unlike the others in this chapter, never appears in Acts or the earlier letters of Paul. Here, Carpus is said to have Paul’s “cloak”; that is, he had taken on Paul’s mantle. He also had Paul’s writing materials. A later verse mentions a fellow named Crescens, and though he never appears anywhere else in the canonical epistles, a Crescens is mentioned in the Epistle of Polycarp.

1John Did Not Write Revelation
The traditional view that Jesus’s disciple John wrote the Book of Revelation was questioned as early as the third century. Christian writer Dionysus of Alexandria, using the critical methods still employed by modern scholars, spotted the difference between the elegant Greek of John’s gospel and the crudely ungrammatical prose of Revelation. The works could not have been written by the same person.Dionysus noted that the John of Revelation identifies himself in the work, while the John of the gospel does not. He argued that the two men simply shared the same name. Contemporary scholars have added their own insights into the problem. It is now theorized that the real author was a Jew who opposed the Pauline version of Christianity, with its Gentile elements and Torah-free salvation. The author calls a Pauline church in Smyrna a “synagogue of Satan” and a female leader of another in Thyatira “Jezebel.” In short, he was not someone we would call Christian today. In fact, Revelation might have been originally written even before Christianity. References to Jesus Christ would then have been inserted only later to Christianize the document. These are mostly clustered around chapters 1 and 22, with just a scattering elsewhere. Surprisingly, these verses can be removed without disturbing the structure and flow of the surrounding verses, keeping the meaning and sense of the text intact. This suggests that the original Book of Revelation had nothing at all to do with Jesus.

Larry is a former Christian fundamentalist who retains interest in the Bible and the history of early Christianity. He is also an avid chess player. You can check out his book The Chess Workout on Amazon.