What's In A Name

[Nerd alert! Kern is going to talk about something that is only tangentially shrub related, and deals more with names and his personal method of classification. So unless you're prone to insomnia, feel free to skip this s**t, and come back when he's made some new drinking vinegar. Pardon me while I take some No-Doz to get through editing this rousing block of text.-Ed.]

Ironically, for a man who loves learning as much as I do, I really had a lot of disdain for school. I was lazy, unfocused, and generally just blowing it all the way around. In retrospect, I think much of my poor performance was due to an aimlessness I couldn't explain. It wasn't until my academic career was nearly cratering that I really figured out what I wanted to do, and that was to become a librarian. The point of this is not an attempt to spin some sort of Horatio Alger yarn about the redemptive power of picking a career path; it is simply a rather obtuse way of explaining my attempts at identifying the shrubs on the blog.

Contrary to the feelings of some librarians, one of my favorite parts of the job is classification. Where some people see drudgery in the organization and corralling of materials, I see magic. Identification of materials are paramount, and I don't see why the same shouldn't be true outside of the library.

Over the years, it seems that "pharmaceutical dealers of marijuana" have adopted this same philosophy by coming up with catchy nicknames for their products(e.g. "Maui Wowee, Purple Kush, etc.) which seems to be a rather brilliant method of classification. Without long, drawn out descriptions about every aspect of its characteristics, a potential buyer knows exactly what they're getting. While I have no interest in the product, I love the concept, and have decided to adapt it to my shrub making.

Typing out every single item in a shrub when I want to refer to it later is not only tedious, it doesn't sound very dynamic or catchy either. Therefore, from this point forward, I will be giving all the shrubs nicknames that somehow reflect the ingredients they are made from.

Enjoy the new naming scheme and I should be back very soon to resolve the cliffhanger ending of the last post. [Spoiler Alert-It involves raspberries and balsamic vinegar. Worst. Cliffhanger. Ever.-Ed.]