On Sat, 15 Nov 2003 17:14:15 GMT, Bob Johannessen
wrote:

All,

I generally am a lurker on email groups and Usenet newsgroups but I
decided it's time to add my 2 cents regarding certain discussions being
held in both arenas. I do not know either person, just what I have read
via the Internet, so I think I can be considered relatively impartial.

Hermine often adds content of interest to everyone who cares about bamboo.


Well, bamboo is VERY INTERSESTING! and has been since my childhood.
Which might seem strange since i grew up in a rear 3rd floor brooklyn
apartment, some 3 blocks from the Atantic ocean.
the first bamboo i saw, was a long piece around which a RUG came
rolled. we stored this on the fire escape for a very great while,
because there was no place to put it in the house. My father was a
deep sea fishermen, out of Sheeepshead Bay, into th Atlantic, and had
these INCREDIBLE fishing poles, made of split bamboo. this looks
nothing like raw bamboo, in section it is made up of something like
precisely cut hexagonal pie slices, the gues for the fishing line were
made of nickel silver, lined with agate rings, and held in place by
BRILLIANT coloured silk windings, the whole thing then spar varnished
like glass. hard to describe why it has to be bamboo,, but it has a
certain flex, and "action" which makes it unique, and only relatively
recently was it displaced by fiber glass. i think for some kinds of
fly fishing it is held to be unsurpassed. Hoagy Carmichael Jr, son of
the MAN, makes split bamboo fishing rods, he was mentioned in the
National Geographic bamboo article some 15 years ago.

And my uncle, who joined up in the military in WW2 by faking his age
by a year or so, brought back from all over asia, THINGS made of
bamboo which were given to me when i got older, since nobody wanted to
throw them out, and amazingly nobody else in the family wanted them.
necklaces of intricate beads made of smoked, hard bamboo, fans,
pierced carved, no paper, just bamboo sections.

As soon as i had a real outdoor garden, when i was about thirty, i
started growing bamboo.
at that time there was a guy in California, Ron Fadem, who offered
FIFTEEN kinds of bamboo by mail order. FIFTEEN! i could hardly believe
my good luck!
So i have been interested in bamboo for my entire life, really.

hermine