Movie: Googly-Eyed Cactus -- Another Explanation

I never see "Saturday Night Live" anymore, because it's on late, and I generally have to be up at 5:30 AM in order to make it in to work on-time (there's this whole thing where I post to the blog and drink five cups of coffee or so), and I get very emotionally weird when my sleep schedule gets messed up.¹ And it's not usually funny enough to warrant taping a whole episode.² Anyway.

So imagine my surprise when Andrew from Zooillogix e-mailed me with a clip from last Saturday's episode. I guess somehow he knew it would be perfect for PATSP. With no further ado, and a hat-tip to Andrew:

(UPDATE: Make that two hat tips to Andrew. The YouTube version was taken down, but if you're willing to sit through an ad first, NBC has it on their website. See below.)

For 1000 bonus points, and the trip to Cancun: what plant is incorrectly identified as a cactus in this sketch? (Answer: ³)

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¹ Sort of irritable/depressed, but not about anything in particular. Also occasionally catastrophically sad. It's weird and illogical and I know it's weird and illogical, even while it's going on, but when the entire world is frustrating or depressing, it really doesn't help to know that the frustration and depression aren't "real." In fact, knowing that the frustration and depression aren't real is actually just one more thing to be frustrated and depressed about. Those in the audience who have been clinically depressed before will know what I mean, though they may be surprised that I can trigger a brief depressive episode just by switching to or from Daylight Savings Time. So anyway. The whole point was, my schedule is fairly rigid, but it's mostly not by choice: my brain holds the rest of the body hostage. Which is kind of like how my respiratory system made my nervous system quit smoking, by developing asthma to the point where I just had to stop. I live in constant dread of the day when my digestive system wants something, 'cause you know that rebellion is going to be no fun at all.
² (I miss Tina Fey. And yes, I know she has another show. I watched a few times and didn't think it was all that funny. Plus I'm kinda ambivalent about Alec Baldwin. Am I missing anything? Should I give it another chance? I'm definitely going to try to make it to the Tina Fey / Amy Pohler movie, Baby Mama, when it comes out. I know SNL movies are rarely funny, but I figure this one should be better than most, because any movie with two female leads is going to have to try a lot harder, movie-industry sexism being what it is.)
³ Euphorbia trigona.

Movie

Nothing about this ad is true. We are not encouraged to throw the plants through the air. We don't have any hoses that are capable of delivering such precise bursts of water. Also our aim is not that good. Traffic flow is rarely, if ever, that smooth. Flowers don't grow that fast. Flowers don't wilt that fast. Paying by check card is not faster than paying by check (and cash, contrary to some of the other ads in this series, is considerably faster than either).

That last point, that cash is faster, and checks are at least not slower, bugs me every single time one of these ads comes on. Speaking as a cashier of some experience, what mostly slows down lines are the customers who are completely oblivious to the idea that they're going to have to pay until they hear a total. Have whatever you're paying with ready to go while the stuff is getting rung up. Start filling out the check, start swiping the credit card, start counting out the approximate amount of cash. Don't force the cashier to ask for a method of payment. It makes them crazy.

Movie!

I ran across this via Boing Boing, and knew pretty much immediately that I had another post ready to go.

What we have here is a time-lapse video, not of a Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) catching a bug, because everybody has seen that, but of a Venus flytrap just, you know, growing. Like they do. Often.



If you can read German, you can read about how the camera was engineered, and if you can't read German, you can still see a picture of the camera set-up here. The picture is plenty impressive on its own.