Friday Fabulous Flower - Palm flowers

It's a gray day in late January, and for other reasons TPP is feeling a bit depressed. However, nothing cheers us up as much as flowers and it is a Friday.  Time for some tropical attitude adjustment!
When walking the forest trails in Costa Rica, every now and again you come across a snowfall, a white, snow covering you path. A palm flowered above you day/night before.  Palm flowers are small and numerous in general, in many palms a large inflorescence of many (hundreds) of flowers comes wrapped in bract. Although technically, subtending the inflorescence, in many palms the bract forms a canopy presumably shielding the flowers from the frequent rains. Palm flowers tend to be white or cream colored and they are usually fragrant with the odor often having musky overtones.  This particular palm, and without his trusty field notebook handy TPP fails to remember exactly which palm this is, fits most of the general palm flower characteristics.  Anyone recognize this palm?
Features of note: While the inside (upper surface) of the bract is smooth, the outside (under surface, up in this view) is extremely spiny and the spines are so sharp the weight of the bract is enough to inflict damage (handle with extreme care).
The primary floral visitors and presumed pollinators are stingless bees (wings folded over their backs); a few flies are also present. Usually after just a day, or a night the, perianths fall to make for the snowfall.
And don't you like the general tropical feel?  The green, the humidity, the foreign country?  Oops, bad thinking crept in a bit there at the end. 
Sorry, citizens of Earth who do not live in the USA. Today our country begins to inflict on everyone else The Donald, our would be dictator.  As for my fellow citizens we have no one to blame but ourselves. 
Now to upload an image and feel better.

Friday Fabulously Foul Flowers

No way TPP could possibly pass up sending this along.  Because humans seem to share a floral aesthetic with birds, bees, and butterflies, there is a mistaken impression that all flowers are attractive visually and pleasant smelling.  Suffice it to say that lots of pollinators have very different likes and things like beetles and flies pollinate lots of plants.  Someone put together this nice little photoessay of rather bad smelling flowers.  Perhaps the most famous of these, the corpse flower, was a subject of a blog sometime back.  Three of these are aroids, and the structures shown are not flowers, but inflorescences (a spike called a spadix) and a bract (called a spathe) that both subtends and wraps around the spadix.  The individual flowers are small and unattractive, and often unisexual and spatially separated.  TPP made the mistake of allowing one of these aroids to flower in his house, in February, and it smelled like a very dead cow.  Someone wasn't so fascinated by this!  The star-flowers (Stapelia) not only smell like carrion, their flowers look like carrion (hairy, fatty and dried blood colored, sort of leathery).  Very nice house plants.  Enjoy!