Friday Fabulous Flower - Friday Fabulous Flower

Obviously the flower being featured is the twin flower (Linnaea borealis), named after Linnaeus himself.  Yes, good old Linnaeus' honorific plant, and he's featured prominently in many things, for example, right there on TPP's desk is a deck of Linnaeus plant family identity cards (from the Chelsea Physic Garden) next to TPP's Darwin lapel button. Not only is Treehugger providing this particular FFF, but it's offering you all an opportunity to share you beauty photos with everyone else.  Enjoy.  

Tom Tomorrow on tomorrow's income inequality

It's been a long, long time since income inequality in the USA has been as great as it is today.  The top 1% are worth as much as the bottom 50% and the difference is growing.  How will this end up?  Hard to say. So it's good to have such excellent prognosticators as Tom Tomorrow who can clearly see where this all is heading. See if any of the talking points sound familiar.

Waiting for signs of spring

Officially the 2013-2014 winter has been a long, cold, and snowy, and today is no exception.  It's a bitterly cold day following another below zero Fahrenheit over night low. Just to make himself feel better TPP checked his garden flowering log data.  His witch-hazel has bloomed between Feb 18 and March 3d over the past 4 years. This Sunday another multiple inch snowfall is predicted, so it looks like a late spring for certain. The brief partial melt has begun to reveal the extent of the bunny damage, and it's quite shocking. Every bit of pine foliage within their reach has been nibbled away!  Never before have they nibbled on my pines!  A dwarf spreading Scotch pine has really been denuded and we can hope it recovers from such a severe and haphazard pruning. And even worse, TPP needs flowering to commence for his taxonomy class.

Not feeling any safer here in Lincolnland

The fire-arms prohibited signs like this one were put on our academic building sometime during the past few days, but TPP is not feeling any safer.

Nonetheless, with quite a few restrictions, like no firearms at football tailgate parties (duh!), concealed firearms are now allowed on public university campuses because Lincolnland finally caved in to the SCOTUS rulings that certified citizens' right to bear arms without the necessity of well-regulated militias because apparently conservative judges cannot conjugate sentences.  Consider what typically occurs on campuses even before such signs became necessary.  First you take 20,000 to 40,000 eighteen to twenty-somethings and put them altogether with little or no adult supervision. OK that's actually all it takes. Most of them don't know how to drink alcohol in a mature manner even when they're old enough to be legal. Let's add up the other variables: a lot of raging hormones, some immaturity, peer pressure, various tribal affinities, and bad or impaired judgment.  During any particular period of say 2 days, stupid, crazy, regrettable stuff will happen just because, but mostly they live and maybe learn.  Now add concealed firearms to this equation and solve. What possibly could go wrong?  The campus environment doesn't need another variable that makes it so bloody easy for even a behavioral moron to kill someone, but they will. You can already hear the NRA chuckling over their antics. "Oh, those crazy college kids; always shooting each other." "Remember when we were in college and it was never anything worse than a fist-fight?" "Boy, do kids today have it easy."

Friday fabulous flower - a repeat, but better

While tropical plants are generally day-neutral in terms of flowering, something about the short days (actually it's the long nights) stimulates a lot of our glasshouse tropical plants to flower.  It makes visiting the glasshouse in February and March a lot of fun. One of our stranger plants is a semi-viney member of the screwpine family, the genus Freycinetia multiflora, a plant that has been featured as a FFF before, but the flowering this time is even better, bigger clusters, brighter color. The flower like structures are actually three ranks of bracts that surround 3 inflorescences hidden within. The glasshouse used to have a real Pandanus, but it got way, way too big and had to be cut up and removed in pieces.

American taliban in action

One of the USA's general problems is its smugness in thinking that WE are better than everyone else.  OK, the USA has things to be proud of, but WE ain't perfect either. Recent events have displayed this most succinctly. Various commentators have been chiding the Russians for their anti-gay policies, as if the USA was so superior, and at the same time AZ was passing a "we're legalizing religious bigotry bill". This perversion of the concept of religious freedom demonstrates something that TPP has said before, although maybe not here, if you give the USA's religious right political power, they'd quickly show the Taliban new tricks. Wonder if the ayatollah Brewer will sign this into law or not?  Then there's news of a corporal punishment bill in some other backward state charging forward into the past. So, to the rest of the world, sorry, some of us are very embarrassed by our fellow citizens and what passes for rationale political action, which is partly from people who actually "think" like this, and the rest of the GnOPe who would make a bargain with any devil for political purposes.  

A thaw reveals bad bun-buns

Officially this is the snowiest (already), and perhaps the coldest winter on record for this area, and it's only Feb 19th.  Of course this week's thaw could kill the coldest winter record, but the thaw is much appreciated if only for the contrast. Unfortunately, the melting snow has revealed that a bun-bun managed to get around/through a fencing barrier and girdled a small ornamental hemlock, as if TPP didn't have enough difficulty with this species of tree anyways. As the melt continues, it's certain that more feeding damage will be discovered.  Oh well, nothing to do but start shopping for a replacement.

Unnatural news about cancer cures

It was only a matter of time. Apparently news feeds popping up on Facebook have been referencing lots of "natural cures" the sort of thing regular reported at web sites like Natural News.  So now a correspondent writes to ask if there is any truth to the report than eating whole lemons is a cure for or can prevent cancer.  Nothing scares people as much as cancer, and too many of us have seen people grasp for any and all purported cures either because they don't trust real medicine or they feel they have nothing to lose.  So here's one of the Natural News articles about the lemon-cancer connection.  Wow, do you see that they've got all those sciency citations, so this information must be the real stuff and these people right on top of things.  And sadly that is not the case.  Here's an article about this that's says pretty much what TPP is going to say.  Over the years TPP has had his students investigate a number of these "natural cures" claims because they frequently involve plants and it's always the same story.  The actual science is either grossly misinterpreted, mostly greatly exaggerated, or just totally misleading about what the actual study was or did or found.   TPP is puzzled about the people behind these natural news articles.  Are they simply not smart enough to understand what they are doing, or are they deliberately misleading people for fun and profit?  If indeed science had discovered something as amazingly simple as eating lemons whole can cure or prevent cancer, don't you really think someone reputable would be saying so?  Oh, they aren't doing this because there's some huge conspiracy to keep people from knowing such things.  Yea, right.  A good skeptical attitude helps you steer clean of such bogus claims, that and the actual ability to read a scientific article. When something is too good to be true, mostly likely it isn't. Too bad because mojitos are a real good drink. And gin and tonic helps prevent malaria, oh, wait, there is an element of truth to that one!  The image above must have lemons in it somewhere and the image is in the public domain compliments of the USDA Agricultural Research Service.

A Dick to dislike - very muchly!

Wow, Andrew Sullivan really nails Dick Cheney.  My dislike of Cheney is deep and profound; he moved into my number one spot of worst political leaders of the USA years ago. So this piece really summarizes why; he has no ethical dilemmas at all. And regarding the rest of us, Cheney responds like a Col. Jessup (A few good men) "You can't handle the truth."

Yes, we have no margaritas

Everyone who knows the Phactors knows that at the end of the day, the Phactors like to sit on their patio, and look at their gardens and enjoy their margaritas.  So what's wrong with this picture?  This is anti-margarita weather for certain!  Nothing about this makes you want a margarita!  And it just keeps piling up. Ah, well, it only makes the margaritas taste better in season.