Trivia that matter
I get around town primarily by bicycle. Since the city planners have made it nearly impossible to travel any distance greater than a half-mile in Wichita without using arterial roads, I often ride on sidewalks. This can present difficulties. Here’s what I encounter when I go the the grocery story:
Badly-placed banners.
I don’t really want that spider to be the first thing a visitor here sees, so here’s something else I saw this morning.
… but I’d rather deal with mice.
Blogging is low priority right now. I’ll be back eventually. Until then, here are a few links.
Mouretsu Pirates is the only current show I’m following. (I’ll eventually watch Sakamichi no Apollon, and I might finish Tsuritama, but it will be a while before I get to either. The soundtrack for the former is worth tracking down.) One advantage space pirates have over their earthbound predecessors: the cuisine is better.
Everyone who ever writes a review needs to pay attention to Steven Greydanus’s thoughts on spoilers. Once Kirika and Mireille are done with the perpetrators of comment spam, I’ll ask them to pay a visit to the bloggers who announced a certain event in the eleventh episode of Katanagatari, sometimes in the titles of their posts as they appeared at Anime Nano.
Eve Tushnet writes about three of my favorite writers: Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes is my favorite of his books, too); John Bellairs (who wrote about shufflies); and, Diana Wynne Jones. (Memo to web designers: Black type on a white background is easy to read. Light grey type on a white background isn’t.)
I don’t do politics here beyond the occasional sarcastic aside. Ace touches on one reason why. Elizabeth Scalia writes about another, related reason.
Winter wear for the physicists among you: emission spectra scarves. (Via Fillyjonk.)
John C. Wright, proponent of Space Princess Science Fiction, reprints his research on the Catwoman Equation.
Although Yellowstone is a superdupervolcano, it doesn’t really pose an immediate, immense threat. There might be enough oomph left for one more VEI8 eruption, but there will be plenty of warning and probably thousands of years before that happens. If you own land in Wyoming, you don’t need to be in a hurry to unload it. The vicinity of Mt. Ranier is far more dangerous. It wouldn’t take a large eruption to generate lahars that would reach Puget Sound. However, the most nightmarish city to live, from a vulcanologist’s point of view, is Naples in Italy. Vesuvius is its best-known neighbor, but it’s only one of three. Update: Let’s not forget Auckland, built on a volcanic field and liable to experience a Parícutin-type episode at any time.
Here are the true lyrics to “O Fortuna.”
(Via Darwin Catholic.)
I’m generally in favor of girls with guns, but this batch could use a few lessons in gun-handling.
The Brickmuppet hasn’t scheduled a trip to Tokyo, has he?
A snapshot from today’s “Ballet in the Park” production of Peter and the Wolf.
It’s been a noisy evening, and there’s probably more to come. This is a snapshot from my front porch a few minutes ago.
*****
I loaned my good camera to a colleague whose Nikon is out for repair. Yesterday evening I went to the botanical garden to see if I could get some good close-ups with my cheap go-everywhere toy. Most of the pictures were blurry, but a couple were tolerably sharp, such as the one above.
Dracula ophioceps, to be precise, an odd visitor from Colombia.
I visited an orchid show yesterday morning. The lighting was terrible and I didn’t have the tripod with me, so I had to make do with the camera’s built-in flash. I did get a few okay pictures.
The most common rose in cultivation, currently furnishing a purplish-red accent in many Wichita gardens, is not a hybrid tea, floribunda or shrub rose, but a hybrid of Rosa wichuriana called “Dr. Huey.” It’s widely used as a rootstock for bud grafting. If suckers aren’t regularly removed, or if the grafted portion weakens or dies, Dr. Huey will take over. The flower in the above picture is about two inches in diameter.
It’s a pleasant day today. The sun even came out for a while. It will probably require a few days for the damages from yesterday to be fully assessed, but my neighborhood looks fine.
Although we get some of the most violent weather in the world here in the plains thanks to North America’s topography, I don’t really worry all that much about tornadoes. During stormy weather, there are constant updates on the radio and radar on my computer monitor, and most homes have basements. Dangerous though they are, tornadoes are much less a threat in Kansas than they are in Bangladesh, where the deadliest twister on record struck not all that long ago.
What I do worry about are gangs with guns. I live in an older neighborhood that borders some very different worlds. Go a few blocks south, and you are surrounded by expensive river-front homes. Go a few blocks east, and you’ll hear norteño. A few weeks ago, the place nearby where a scholarly friend of mine used to live was the scene of a gang shooting.
There was an unusual car parked nearby when I got home from Easter dinner.
This is what the interior of St. Mary Cathedral in Wichita looked like last summer.
Here’s what it looks like now:
I found a small collection of carnivorous plants tucked away inconspicuously in the greenhouse at the botanical garden this morning, including the sundew above. The picture is about twice life-size; right-click on it and open it in a new window to see it much larger.
It finally stopped raining here, and I was able to visit the botanical garden today. Here are a few of the pictures I took.
For most of the summer, non-migratory Canadian geese controlled the north bank of the river on my way to work. Now it’s occupied by a corps of ducks. Is there something going on I should know about?
Also in my camera: public enemy #3.
Another approach to weeding:
*****
There has been some loose talk recently about monkeys typing Shakespeare. This gives me an excuse to mention a couple of favorite short stories. Russell Maloney’s “Inflexible Logic” is the second-best tale on the topic. The best is R.A. Lafferty‘s “Been a Long, Long Time,” which unfortunately is not available online. I did find another Lafferty story, though, which might illustrate why I have a shelf of his books.
Photoshop usually does a good job of stitching panoramas together. Occasionally, though, it gets confused, as in this view from the choir loft in Wichita’s St. Mary Cathedral.
