Flowering street lights

You have to absolutely love these flower street lights that "bloom" when you approach. And they look really cool at night too. TPP really wants one of these. Here's the link to read and see more at Bored Panda. So what do you think? Poppy? Mallow? 

That's one very spooky plant!

TPP was thinking about trying to find a really spooky plant for a Halloween post, but it wasn't going well. Then a colleague hit upon a nomination that just can't be beat, so what the heck, here's the link to one truly spooky plant from the In Defense of Plants blog. You can see more of these bizarre flowers here. 

Halloween, yawn.

TPP just doesn't get all the excitement about Halloween. OK, as a kid it's understandable. You get to dress up in costumes, run around the neighborhood, and score some epic amounts of candy. Yes, that gets kids excited, and will keep them that way for awhile. But TPP grew up. Lot's of adult people seem excited about Halloween and it just makes no sense. The best adult thing to get excited about is the Rocky Horror Show being performed at the local theater. That's fun. Maybe they just want an excuse to have a fall party with costumes thrown in for giggles. While walking to the coffee shoppe, this decorated yard caught TPP's eye, and really folks? All this for Halloween? This isn't actually scary, just tacky. Former neighbors used to have a minimalist Halloween display that scared the crap out of kids, especially the spooky music and lighting and a witch at a spinning wheel who turned out to be alive once you got close, along with a couple of other surprises. Kids would cross the street rather than take the risk for a little chunk of candy. Wonder if the tacky house gives away something really good, or maybe they blew their budget on decor and give away pieces of laughee taffee, which is as awful tasting and as good at pulling fillings as you may imagine. The big prize when TPP was a kid was a house high on a hill with about a thousand step sidewalk, but they gave out full-sized candy bars to reward the intrepid climbers. Presently, our neighborhood with its large yards has a low house to distance ratio so trick-or-treaters seek denser neighborhoods to maximize their return on investment. Some optimal foraging there folks. 

Cucurbit creativity

This time of year some really creative pumpkin/squash carving appears, and it's really great to see what talented and imaginative people can do with big old squashes. This one is from the Brooklyn Botanical Garden (HT to the Guardian) for a Día de los Muertos display, a different celebration that just happens to share this bit of calendar time. This is just terrific carving. How many pumpkins and squash were used? 

Friday Fabulous Flower - black cohosh & total flowering events for 2015

The waning days of October finally feel, and look, like fall having transitioned from summer like weather all in 30 days. Enough leaves have now fallen that the lawn is now hidden in many places, and in a couple of weeks we'll eagerly await the magic of leaf elves to clean them all up. TPP used to fight with a monstrous machine, a Billy Goat, to vacuum up leaves 8 cubic feet at a time, but all the lugging of the bags of leaves, not to mention the exertion of yanking on its pull starting motor a few dozen times, just got to be too much. Ah, well, the point here was to extol some spots of fall color, some fall flowering. The last flower standing this year, sort of a hellebore in seasonal reverse, was a black cohosh (or snakeroot) (Actea, formerly Cimicifuga, racemosa), funny family those buttercups. It was one genus when it was planted, now it's another and you would hardly notice any difference at all. This year it easily beat the wolfbane for last place not flowering until 20 October, and if our records are correct, and they always are, the addition of some new species combined with relatively few "did not flower" entries, helped our total number of perennial flowering events in the garden top out at 302, the first time the total was over 300. The Phactors are very pleased, but until the database if brought up to date, and the data entered for 2015, 2014, and 2013, it won't be official.

Is a double bacon cheese burger a death sentence?

The news that bacon has been found to increase your risk of cancer make a double bacon cheese burger a death sentence. Well, it's not the healthiest sandwich on Earth.  Too many calories, which is a health risk.  A slice of "American" orange plastic cheese, which may not be bad for you, but eating it shows such poor judgment that you are probably making a lot of questionable health decisions. Grilled beef is both fatty and the grilling makes some sort of nasty stuff that also increases you risk of cancer. However, lots of things can increase your risk of cancer, the question is by how much? The answer in this case is bacon is not a big risk, unless you're eating piles of bacon, and then the fat will probably get you before the cancer. Bacon is not in the same league with smoking, and for those of us who only eat bacon every now and again, it doesn't figure to be a problem. Speaking of bacon one of the cooking magazines that just arrived had a wonderful sounding stuffed, roasted boneless turkey breast recipe that was completely wrapped in bacon. Sounds great and you'll be OK although the turkey did die, but it still wasn't the bacon. The fact that news organizations jumped all over the bacon-cancer news none of the articles TPP has seen so far offered any analysis of how great the risk was. No expert was interviewed and asked to explain. And that's what's wrong with science reporting these days. All they cared about was a sensationalist title, not providing any useful information. The cooking magazine by ignoring the warning altogether and publishing a bacon heavy recipe was more honest. 

Standard shift hold-outs

The Phactors have standard transmission cars, one brand new (a Subaru Forester) and one an aging, Toyota sport sedan (cranberry red). You may decide whose is whose. Part of this is familiarity; TPP has always had stick shift vehicles. Part of this is longevity; our cars are driven for many years (a VW vanagon still looked like new after 18 years) so you get used to things as they are. Part is history; stick shifts are great in the wintery weather of our youth. But the signs are clearly there, stick shifts are going to be a thing of the past. But if the Forester lasts long enough, it may not matter, and Mrs. Phactor is talking of an all electric run-around. Of course TPP can still parallel park, on both the passenger and driver's side of the car! Even when taking one of the cars in for service, the younger garage employees cannot drive a standard shift, and they shouldn't be taught on mine! Like parallel parking, TPP thinks of shifting as a skill and therefore considers modern drivers to be unskilled. The F1 carries on the family tradition because learning to drive on our cars provided the skill and experience, and, oh yeah, who has our previous Forester? Unavailability will simply force her to change in a few years, sadly.  Even if automatic transmissions have improved greatly,  they don't use engine breaking near as well as a standard, and they do not seem, based primarily on experience with rental cars, to downshift conveniently when a lower gear would be beneficial, but all electric cars may put an end to those problems as well (especially if they recover power from braking).  Ah well, TPP doesn't have a typewriter any more, and although it doesn't get used often, his turntable still works, and it just came to mind yesterday because of the death Corey Wells (lead singer of Three Dog Night: Joy to the World, Mama told me not to come, Eli's coming, On the road to Shambala) reminded me of some of my vinyl.

Ideology is no way to do science

Ideology is no way to govern, and ideology is no way to do science either. And yet, the GnOPe seems bent on giving it a try. For those of us who know the history of science, ideologically driven science has been tried, and it was an abysmal failure known now as Lysenkoism, named after its chief proponent. It took Russian agricultural science a couple of decades to recover even after it ended. You know you just can't let scientists, real experts, decide what research merits government support via grants because you just don't know if you will like the results or not. Now by all rational accounts, science is a description of objective reality, but that doesn't matter. Reality is apparently what the GnOPe says it is. So the chair of the congressional science committee, Lamar Smith)(TX, but you guessed that already) wants to do away with peer review, he wants his staff to be able to analyze your climate change data (Wow, huh?), and only wants to fund science whose outcomes will support their ideological perspective, which presently focuses on climate change. Can you guess what industries have supported Rep. Smith's career? When ideological science is put together with the dismantling of higher education, you can see where things are headed, a new hotter and darker ages. Well, when you vote for fundamentalist ideology, that's what you get. Good thing TPP is not on their radar or their committee may be investigating his "useless" botanical studies done without a cent of federal money (at least recently).   

Seeking a raccoon equilibrium

Our garage got ransacked. Everything was tossed everywhere, a terrible mess, and it wasn't all that neat to begin with. The culprit sort of signed their work in foot prints across Mrs. Phactor's windshield. Wildlife hanging around is no big deal for the Phactors' estate; it's got cover, food, and water, an urban oasis. Had TPP been more aware of our lodger, the door would have been left open so the intruder could have left the way they arrived. But it was late, after an evening of being well wined and dined so it wasn't until the next morning that the situation became clear. And so began the search for a raccoon equilibrium. The rear door was left open so our garage trasher could leave, but it also leaves open the possibility of another raccoon entering (or returning!). Somewhere there should be an equilibrium where the number of raccoons entering equals the number leaving, but from our perspective the idea is to hope that this equilibrium is such that TPP can close the door at one of those times when the number leaving is greater than the number entering. No idea how this is going so far, but the bird food container, a garbage can, might be an indicator.  If the lid stays on tonight, it should indicate that the raccoon comings and goings are exactly equal for now.

Friday Fabulous Flower - fall color edition

Here's another nice little garden tree used for fall color, a tupelo or black gum (Nyssa sylvatica)(but can't remember the variety), and in this case a dwarf variety.  It stands about 6 feet tall and it's very tough, undemanding. Here the foliage is just beginning to turn and it will continue to change until its a very scarlet red color. It's located behind Mrs. Phactor's perennial garden and positioned for a nice view from a patio.