Friday Fabulous Flower - teeny orchid

Friday again?  Were did the week go? Here's a great fabulous flower that TPP just happened to notice in the greenhouse the other day. But it's easy to miss even though it is one of the few really orange flowers in our collection. This is an orchid, and contrary to what most people think, most orchid flowers are fairly small, if not tiny, although the smallest orchid flower is a ridiculous 2 mm tall. In comparison this orchid, Pleurothallis guanacastensis, is a whopping three times bigger at 6-7 mm tall. When you see flowers like this, obviously providing a visual display, you do wonder what type of little critter is attracted to them and pollinates them? Whatever it is you can see the little space they fit into between the labellum (lower center petal) and the column above housing the stigma and pollinia, a space which is all of 1-1.5 mm. In the tropics such little puzzles abound, organisms about which we know next to nothing. It's been named, it lives in lowland tropical forests as an epiphyte in Costa Rica. And that's about it. 
And congratulations to my Tico friends for their big "football" win over the USA. 

Trees killed over football

An Alabama fan upset over Auburn's win in a football game admited poisoning two 130 year old live oaks that Auburn fans like to TP whenever their team wins. What kind of deranged maniac takes revenge on trees over the outcome of college sports? They're trees; they don't know and don't care about what happened. But they're not just trees, they're 130 year old trees, and you can't just replace them. That'll take at least 100 years. This colassal jerk should be punished by never being allowed to see, listen to, or read about sports since clearly he is a menace when he does. This is one of those times when maybe the Phactor could live with throwing him to a mob of Auburn fans, after they been tailgating all day. In the spirit of plant myth busters, and letting the punishment fit the crime, maybe this fellow could be staked out over a bed of fast growing bamboo to see if the shoots really can skewer him? What else might we try?
35 years ago Christopher Stone argued that trees and other natural objects should have standing, a legal right to exist. While supposedly about football, this is actually a crime against nature. Trees of this age and stature definitely have a right to exist, and this applies to idiots who want to destroy some big tree so as to build a Walgreens or 7-11 or what not. One of the great curmudgeons among my colleagues, now deceased, refused to shop in a big box store, or any of its clones elsewhere, because it was built upon what had been a horse pasture that he liked. They have no respect, he said. And that's the point here; you have to respect big old trees. So you don't just kill them if they happen to be a bit inconvenient, like the shingle oak in the center of our driveway that you literally had to drive around to get into one side of our garage.

Stupor bowl prediction

The big problem is that this particular football game is over-hyped and therefore bound to disappoint, and as it comes at the end of a long season after a bit of a delay, quite often teams and players do not deliver peak performances. As neither a Steeler or Packer fan, the Phactor has no favorite in this contest. The reason for this is that both of these are real football teams. Football is a game that has its roots in the bad winter weather rust-belt of the upper midwest and northeast. So deciding which team to root for was simple: look at their industry and weather. Cheering for San Diego or Miami? You must be kidding! Now you see the problem: Green Bay - Pittsburgh; it's a tossup really. Cheese heads are cooler than Terrible Towels, but that's thin. Only in Green Bay would friends invite you out to dinner and then take you to a bowling alley for a perch fry. Maybe you do have to favor the Packers. Afterall what else could possibly shorten the winters and lift spirits in Green Bay? Well, there's bowling, and ice fishing for the perch to eat at the bowling alley. So being able to talk about one damned fine stupor bowl game for decades seems only fair.